On building an intentional lifestyle firm:

I went out building a, you know, very traditional firm. I had an office, I grew my team, and then I kind of realised that that wasn’t what I wanted. And so we got rid of the office, scaled back the team intentionally, and sort of rebuilt the business again, you know, that I wanted to build that served my lifestyle and what I wanted out of it.

— Natalie Lennon, Founder & Director at Two Sides Accounting

The Sydney Accounting & Business Expo 2026 was one of the most energised and well-attended events I have seen in years. AI dominated the conversation, AML reform is reshaping workflows, and innovation across practice management, tax research, onboarding and payments is accelerating fast.

This episode captures conversations directly from the expo floor. You will hear insights from keynote takeaways and interviews with founders, product leaders and firm owners building practical solutions for modern accounting firms.

Key Discussion Points

  • AI Strategy & LLM Insights, including commentary on Claude, ChatGPT, prompting techniques and why leaders must build hands-on AI capability
  • Practice Management solutions on AI-enabled workflows, month-end automation, advisory reporting and co-worker agents
  • AML & Client Onboarding Tools featuring Seamless, Content Snare and Annature responding to Tranche 2 requirements
  • Tax Research Innovation with Law Cyborg and Tax Guru AI focused on verified, citation-backed AI research
  • Firm Evolution & Financial Independence, including Natalie Lennon’s lifestyle firm model and Shaye Thyer’s CFO advisory for female founders

The common theme throughout the expo was clear. We are in another platform shift. Firms that lean into AI experimentation, workflow automation and smarter onboarding processes will create capacity, improve margins and better serve clients.

This episode is a snapshot of where the profession stands right now. Curious, slightly cautious, but moving forward with intention.

Here is who I spoke with:

Kayur Patel – Director, Gen AI & Emerging Tech at PwC
Kayur unpacked AI with clarity and calm authority, encouraging accountants to become hands-on fast followers and treat AI as a trained digital team member rather than a magic solution. I shared his insight in my own words.

Natalie Lennon – Two Sides Accounting
Natalie shared her journey of intentionally redesigning her firm around lifestyle and purpose, reminding us that success in practice is something we can define and rebuild on our own terms.

Mary Delaney – CEO of Karbon
Mary spoke with deep conviction about the future of AI-enabled firms, where humans and intelligent systems work side by side to elevate the work accountants do best.

Manraj Singh Rahi – Product Lead, Law Cyborg
Manraj explained how structured, citation-led AI can support confident tax research, positioning technology as a reliable second set of eyes rather than a risky shortcut.

Samuel David – Founder of Actually Count
Samuel shared a heartfelt journey from persistence in his studies to building a solution that removes BAS friction, showing how lived experience often drives the most practical innovation.

Clayton Woods – Co-founder of Seamless
Clayton highlighted the quiet inefficiencies in onboarding and re-engagement, demonstrating how thoughtful automation can simplify processes accountants have long accepted as clunky.

James Rose – Co-founder of Content Snare
James reflected on solving one of the profession’s most persistent frustrations, turning the back-and-forth of client data collection into a structured, accountable process.

Ben Gill – Executive Director, Lightyear Docs
Ben reframed document creation as an opportunity for deeper client value, encouraging accountants to step into conversations around asset protection and long-term wealth.

Michael Jeffries – CEO of Tax Guru
Michael outlined a future where highly specialised AI agents deliver fast, structured tax insights, backed by curated expertise rather than generic internet scraping.

Shaye Thyer – Finance Coach for Women in Business
Shaye brought a powerful blend of practical financial strategy and lived experience, focusing on helping women build capability, confidence, and genuine financial independence.

Corey Cacic – CEO of Annature
Corey shared how Annature continues to evolve from e-signing into a broader workflow solution, with a strong focus on practical compliance and making everyday processes smoother for firms.

Apps & Tools Mentioned:

Episode resources and links:

AI-Generated Transcript

Heather Smith

Hello. It’s Heather Smith here, and you’re listening to the accounting apps podcast, exploring the accounting and business apps community.

Today, I am bringing you the march 2026 Sydney accounting and business expo on the floor, interviews with lots of attendees, lots of vendors, and lots of insight from that Expo. So if you attended an opportunity to reminisce, and if you didn’t attend an opportunity to hear what was going on at the Expo.

This is part of a series of podcast episodes I’m releasing all around all flavoured with the accounting and business expo. So if you do enjoy this one, make sure you go backwards and forwards and subscribe to the podcast so you do get to hear them all. And let me take the opportunity to remind you also subscribe to the podcast. Jump over. Subscribe to the accounting Apps newsletter at accounting apps.io and you’re welcome to join the accounting apps mastermind group to continue the conversation.

I have a bunch of interviews that I’m about to share with you, but before I do, I didn’t get to actually interview him, but I did want to share some of the insight from Kayur Patel gave a keynote on artificial intelligence, and look, that was all the rage at the conference. Everyone was it was one of the most well attended conferences I have ever been to. It was packed. And it was packed from the moment the doors open through to the very end.

And I gave two sessions in the afternoon on both days, and they were both chockers, chock as I tell you. So that was great to see everyone’s coming out, and maybe they’re coming out, oops, sorry. Hope that didn’t make a lot of noise. I just bumped the microphone. Maybe they’re coming out because we’re in this era of a platform shift. And we went analogue, we went desktop, we went cloud. And what is happening with AI?

Some people are worried, some people are excited. Some people are surfing the wave. Some people are worried they’re drowning, but, but lots of Intel, lots of information to be shared. But let me Kayur Patel is a brilliant speaker. He came over and gave two talks, and let me just share a few things from his talks.

He’s very he’s very easy to listen to, easy to understand, but really has a deep, deep understanding of AI and he is, look, I’ve said this a few times. If you are at the cutting edge of technology, that’s a very expensive place to be, but you can be a fast follower, and so I’m hearing Kayur Patel, who works at PWC. It gives you the opportunity to follow, follow fast.

So the number one thing from the conference was you need to, for the large language models, you need to now be using Claude. The latest version of Claude is far further ahead than the other llms out there, but he did say that. So I’m currently, I’m probably more. I use chat, GPT a lot, and I use perplexity. He did say it’s currently a race, and they’re all getting ahead and then getting behind, and then getting ahead. At the moment is Claude. He thinks eventually it will be copilot, but currently that is not the case. So you can jump in. You can jump in. Check out. Claude, if that’s of interest to you.

He thinks that one of the things, along with talking about the llms using a tool like chat, GPT, Claude, perplexity, copilot can save you one to three hours per day on real work. Okay, and he thinks that most businesses are only using about 10% of the capability there. He thinks it’s really, he said not he thinks he said that it’s really important, important when you use these tools, you personalise them, and you go into the settings and tell them what it’s for, how you speak, what the purpose will be, and just try and give them as much context as possible, as you can. And that’s something you can continue refining. And. Over Over time, and that’s something I talk about quite a lot.

He recommended that you treat AI as a digital intern or employee, so you can’t expect them to know something unless you’ve told them something and and train it in that way. So he encouraged defining tone and style, as I said, and provide things like so if you’re a business, provide a link to the website, provide outlines of your visions and values, and then the KPIs that you’re chasing, give it that local, bespoke context.

He said the they are the reasoning models and excels skills are there now within these solutions. So you can, initially, when they came out, that was a bit challenging, but that can, that is, is getting quite powerful, and I’m hearing a lot of chatter at events, accounting events, but they they’re finding it’s really helping them with financial modelling.

He said, for the leaders in the team, you cannot set an AI strategy without hands on use. You need to be using AI daily, and you need to be building that practical muscle memory. He said, Don’t wait for the perfect data or the silver bullet solution. It can be messy, it can be unstructured, but try it out so AI can work with messy and unstructured data, such as PDFs, but try it out and sort of work and build upon that.

He emphasised that it’s important to train your teams in prompting and that will become second nature to us, but it’s important to train your teams in prompting. And one of the good prompts that I heard from Blake Oliver the other day was that whenever he asks an LLM something at the end, he says, Ask me questions one at a time until you have enough context. Ask me questions one at a time until you have enough context. And I have been using that simple prompt at the end of all of mine, and it has definitely got me on the right track a lot faster.

He talked about knowledge being commoditized, and AI makes sort of this expert level knowledge widely accessible, which is a good thing, which is a scary thing, but I still, I still think that you really need to think about making sure your brain works, making sure your brain has elasticity and can problem solve and can see issues. And you know, like this sounds really weird, but make sure you can still, like, memorise a four line poem, because we really need our brains to work to be able to work alongside the AI, but knowledge, he remarked that simple and repeatable work will become much cheaper, which I do think that we expect that to be. And I do think that, like it does make you wonder whether, as someone who has a university degree and has professional qualification, whether these are necessary, whether you can sort of prove that you can problem solve and then run from there, it is A Interesting, interesting conversation, or sort of Thought Bubble. Yeah.

So that was a few things from Kayur Patel. I just wanted to I did because I didn’t kind of interview him, and I just wanted to throw those in for you to listen to, but you now have an hour, so hope you’re on a long walk or a long drive. And yeah, it could have broken into half. I could have broken into two episodes, but I it can be some somewhat challenging to listen to them all. But I do think that they are enjoyable. Each one has something useful for you in it.

And I start off walking to the expo with Natalie Lennon, an accountant, quite a well known accountant in Australia. We were staying at the same hotel, so we as we strolled, strolled to the expo, we got the microphones going, and we had a conversation. Hope you enjoy it and let me know. You think

So joining me on the accounting apps podcast today is Natalie Lennon, welcome Natalie, thank you for having me. Heather. So we’re currently walking to day two of the accounting and business expo, and so you might hear a bit of background noise and our luggage as we roll through the Sydney neighbourhood, we’re very professional multitasking, absolutely all about efficiency. Now, how did you find OH Natalie, first off, can you share a bit about who you are and the business that you have founded?

Natalie Lennon

Sure. So I’m a fellow chartered accountant, tax agent. Run an accounting firm in Sydney, fully remote accounting firm, female team. We do everything from bookkeeping to tax advisory. 100% zero. We deal primarily with small businesses. We find that’s where we can make, you know, kind of the most, the most difference, and kind of work alongside them as their partner.

I do quite a little bit, quite a little bit, quite a bit for the industry. Also on the zero partner Advisory Council, co host of accountants after hours Podcast. I’m on the CIA ANZ Regional Council. What else I think that’s

Heather Smith

most of it. Haven’t been doing a

Natalie Lennon

lot of tick tock of late. I’ve been a little bit busy doing all the other busy doing all the other things. But yes, absolutely.

Heather Smith

So yesterday, day one of accounting and business expo, you gave a talk.

Natalie Lennon

Did you talk about? So my talk was about being the boss of your own future, which is a little bit woo, woo. I guess for accountants and bookkeepers, you know, we’re quite methodical. We like to, you know, talk about things that we can, you know, kind of have an actual result, or they’re more related to tax and accounting and those types of things. But I think just from, oh, there’s some people doing some Tai Chi, a bit of music in the background.

Heather Smith

Beautiful Tai Chi happening. And that’s just outside the Chinese guy.

Natalie Lennon

Beautiful, hold on. Might just

Heather Smith

pause for second. Oh, don’t worry, it

Natalie Lennon

will be, yeah. So just, I guess, the firm that I’ve built, you know, I went out building a, you know, very traditional firm. I had an office, I grew my team, and then I kind of realised that that wasn’t what I wanted. And so we got rid of the office, scaled back the team intentionally, and sort of rebuilt the business again that you know that I wanted to build that served my lifestyle and what I wanted out of it. So very big advocate for helping other accountants and bookkeepers do the same.

Heather Smith

Oh, fabulous. And I think you’re a real poster child for lifestyle business.

Natalie Lennon

Thank you. Yes, I try to be. I try to be.

Heather Smith

And lifestyle business still can be very intentional, do a lot of great work and lead

Natalie Lennon

a great life, which is interesting because I often tell Paul Meisner, who has has a micro business, that when I first met Paul and I heard about his business, I was kind of like, oh, well, you know, you’re a bit of a nobody. You’ve got this small like when I first started, you got this small thing. What are you doing? I’m going to build this big thing. And now I actually say to him, Paul, I misjudged you when we first met, because now I’ve realised that that’s, that’s what I want to do, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

Heather Smith

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So anything else that you saw on day one that was of interest to you,

Natalie Lennon

a lot of great things. One was AML, which was cut that out. I’m just trying to find the name of it, my track. So they’re doing a really good deal. If you sign up today at the conference, which I guess, by the time this is out, it’s a bit late, but

Heather Smith

you can still go and search for my track. You

Natalie Lennon

can, you can. So there are really good software that’s going to manage the AML. They’re doing a special deal at the moment. It’s free to the end of the year, and then after that. I think it’s quite reasonable. So I was comparing the price, I’m bit puffy now, from carrying my bag up the stairs, comparing the price of some of the other solutions that I’ve looked at for a small firm like mine. I think it was around 130 a month. Yes. So pretty reasonable to manage the whole thing end to end.

Visited the guys at simpl co work papers that looked pretty cool. Yes, what else did we do? Oh, yesterday just feels like a blur, but I definitely did. I definitely did get around to a lot more app partners yesterday, just sort of, you know, especially the little ones, because I feel like a lot of those, we don’t, we don’t kind of see

Heather Smith

yes, yeah, they had a big start up alley, so I’m going to go and wander around startup alley today and filled with hopes and dreams.

Natalie Lennon

Yes, oh, yes. Sorry, Law Cyborg. That’s another one that, as a CAANZ member, you get, I think, a month free. Really impressive. So I’m signing up to that.

Heather Smith

Okay, that’s Matt Williamson. Messaged me and said that he was there today with law site Berkeley. I need to go and say

Natalie Lennon

hello to them. Yeah, very impressive. It’s like a chat. GPT, but for tax legislation, fantastic.

Heather Smith

Justine, there’s a number of those. There’s a number of work papers. Everything’s all work papers, and everything’s. The ALM. You’re known for your strength popularity on Tiktok. What is one thing you’d suggest to an accountant who’s interested in exploring Tiktok, just

Natalie Lennon

start everyone’s everyone’s cringe like you’re you cringe when you first do it. When I speak to a lot of people who are starting, they’re like, how do you do it? Like, I’ve got all these videos in my camera roll. I keep videoing and it’s not perfect, and I don’t post it. I said, that’s the problem. You just got to film it and post it. And the more you do that, the better you will get. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s not about perfection.

Heather Smith

What do you think is the ideal length of time for a Tiktok?

Natalie Lennon

Oh, it’s a tough one, right? Oh, here we go. There’s a DJ playing, viewing all the music. People, people’s attention spans are really short, so kind of 30 seconds.

Heather Smith

Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, Natalie. And I’ll put links to Natalie so you can connect with her on LinkedIn when the podcast is posted, you’re welcome.

Natalie Lennon

Thanks so much for having me. Let’s have a good day.

Heather Smith

Wonderful to have you on the podcast here today, Mary. Now for our listeners, Could you perhaps share a little bit of your background? Because you know, you’re doing amazing things with Karbon. We’re really excited about it. What is sort of a little bio background of who Mary Delaney

Mary Delaney

is, sure I’m four years young in the accounting profession. But my background before that is tech enabled services businesses and helping them transform and scale, which the accounting profession is really going through that scaling and transforming enabling tech to help people do what only humans can do. So that’s the majority of my background. I’ve led or taken over from founders four other times, and I had the opportunity to do that at Karbon and just feel so fortunate.

Heather Smith

Yeah, you have such an amazing career. So I do encourage anyone who is aspirational to go and look at your career on LinkedIn. But let’s move over to Karbon. I think a lot of our listeners will have an understanding that Karbon is a practice management solution, but you are pushing updates really impressively into the market. Could you share a little bit about what’s happened recently that’s in the last year or so that’s excited you that Karbon has released?

Mary Delaney

Sure, absolutely, I think a couple areas we’re really excited about, we’re excited about leading the whole path to humans and agents working together and really empowering accounting professionals to do what only they can do. So everything from we’ve automated the end to end tax workflow on month end close. We acquired aider we were very excited about at the end of the year to work, to automate month end close and then to quickly give an AI enabled advisory reports that you can turn around and make an impact with your clients. So those are a couple areas.

We have a lot coming out in the next couple months. We also activated engagements to payments, so we really are now a full AI enabled operating system right now. What I’m most excited about in the future is the ability to have co worker, or co worker that you can ask any question to, and you can ask it to do things for you, and it will work beside you and get things done while you sleep, while you’re awake, and you’ll see some of that being released in very near future.

Heather Smith

Yes, I’ve been reading about that, and that is very exciting. It is just bringing in efficiency after efficiency and doing it in a really smart way.

Now, some of the most impressive firms are using Karbon, and I know the Karbon awards are coming up, so I’m going to say my good friends mad well for I think are up for a Sustainability Award. So cheering them on, and I think Sarah Lawrence is up a finalist in one of the awards as well. Why is it important for Karbon to run those awards?

Mary Delaney

First of all, I love our customers. In my five decades of working, I’ve never had more of a privilege than working with such a dynamic group than our customers today, and you name some of the some of the best of all. So to me, those awards are key. They follow our core values. So we we built awards that map over to Karbons core values, and our customers really light our way on where we invest in the future. And so the ability to thank and recognise and reward them, and also for the community to know who can they look to for learning in certain areas is really critical, and I think that’s what those awards do.

Heather Smith

I could listen to you all day, Mary, you have such insight, and I love the way you phrase that like my customers, like the way I love the way you talk. Oh, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. I know you’re over here from America. Is that Sandy?

Mary Delaney

I am, you know, Chicago? Yeah.

Heather Smith

I really appreciate that you made the effort to come here. I know it’s so Americans have come afraid of those big, long flights. US Australians are just used to the big long flights we just get on. It’s just another day. But so really appreciative that you make the effort to come here, to engage with the community, to understand the Australian and New Zealand community, and you’re doing great things. I’ve been in the industry a long time, and you You’re what you’ve done with Karbon has just been so impressive. So thank you.

Mary Delaney

Well, thank you. It’s a really special community here. You know, truly, the community has led the way for the world in so many ways. So I love in the energy, and they’re also really fun, and you have such a privilege, and I appreciate all you do for the community. Very much.

Heather Smith

Thank you so much, Mary, awesome joining me on the accounting apps podcast today is manraj, who is with law cyber. Welcome. Tell us. Tell our audience what law cyber does.

Manraj Singh Rahi

Law cyborg is a tax research tool that helps you get client specific commentary from trusted sources like the ATO legislation and case law, so you can get really good insights, verified answers, trusted answers that help you solve your client problems.

Heather Smith

And how long has Law Cyborg been around?

Manraj Singh Rahi

We have been in business for almost three years, and launched in Australia almost a year ago now, and we’ve got 1100 clients so far,

Heather Smith

1100 fantastic. And what is it based on?

Manraj Singh Rahi

So pulling directly from those primary sources that we know as accountants and tax advisors, so ATO guidance, case law and legislation, both state and

Heather Smith

federal, fantastic. And you currently have an offer on for CA ANZ members who may be listening in one free month to sign up with

Manraj Singh Rahi

law cyber, absolutely, part of the cans member benefits programme. So you can sign up and get one month free, try it out, see if it works within your practice, the type of questions you work with and explore further.

Heather Smith

Can you share with us? Maybe a success or a case study of some how someone’s using solutions.

Manraj Singh Rahi

There’s probably so many to choose from. One, I think of is an accountant that we spoke to who now has rolled law cyborg out to their entire team of 10 accountants, and they they use law cyborg as another colleague. So before you ask anyone else a question, you you contact your boss, you report something to a client, you run everything through law cyborg. It saves you a lot of time. It means that you’re not having to ask your colleagues those dumb questions that sometimes you just need a double check on or a confirmation, and you feel like you now know what you’re working on, so you can spend more time working on that really complex, client specific, fun work that we all love to do

Heather Smith

when we hear about AI, we also hear about hallucinations. How is law cyberg ensuring hallucinations aren’t surfacing absolutely

Manraj Singh Rahi

and I think it’s something that you need to ask for every AI tool that you’re using our system, because we’re using that trusted database, and it’s structured in a way that it understands how tax law works. What we do is, when you put your question in, we look for those citations. First, we look for the sources, the source material that’s most relevant to that question, that’s then fed into the AI to generate the answer. So answers are not just being generated with the next word generators, the AI tools so frequently used, but it’s being driven by the citation itself, so your hallucination risk is a lot lower, but we make sure that every sentence, every paragraph in the app includes citation, includes links directly to the paragraph that it is citing from a private ruling from the ATO or a case from the Supreme Court. And that is a way that you make sure that information is right there and you can trust it and verify it yourself. As an expert, do you have

Heather Smith

lawyers working in your firm, and is in your solution? And is there a lawyers doing oversight, sort of, is there a human check in? You might like to take a photo of him. We, we are a bunch of lawyers. So my background

Manraj Singh Rahi

was working. We are a bunch of lawyers. We are a bunch of lawyers. We are a bunch of lawyers, but we’re actually a software company. We have engineers who are the majority of our workforce working to find solutions that make the tool work. But I worked in big law for a while. I did some tax law. Our founder Andrew is X, E, y, tax so we have that understanding of the industry and the people we work with. But the benefit of AI is that we don’t need to do the verification. We’re empowering our advisors and our experts to have the information in front of them, have the sources there, and they can check everything. But we spend a lot of time working with with people who use us and hearing their feedback and improving the system to meet their

Heather Smith

needs all the time. How can people get in contact with you?

Manraj Singh Rahi

Our website is one. Cyborg calm cans, members will have have a link available as well on their their emails from them, we’re happy to run a demo, run trainings, talk to you, and just make sure we find a solution that works, works for you, and that $39 a month, it really is the best solution out there for any

Heather Smith

Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining.

Manraj Singh Rahi

Thank you, Heather. Appreciate it.

Heather Smith

Joining me on the accounting apps podcast today is Samuel David, and he is here at the accounting and business expo with his new solution. Now, Samuel, before we jump into telling us about bass, tell us a bit about yourself and your journey.

Samuel David

Well, I am a chartered accountant. I graduated. Last year. I finally finished the ACCA programme last year after 20 failed attempts and a lot of encouragement from Heather Smith, who I really, really love and I’m so grateful for that was the start. That is that is not really the start of my accounting journey, but about six years ago, I had the opportunity to actually get an amazing job working with the bean ninjas firm in in Queensland, right? And this was it was all thanks to Heather, right? Heather was so kind to introduce me to Tracy, who gave me an amazing start to my career in working with these, with the zero ecosystem, and having the opportunity to work with Australian clients.

So I started working with with Tracy and B ninjas for, for about, about a bit, bit more than a bit, around six months. Then, then be ninjas was sold to business depot, and I continued working with business depot for about two years, and then I transitioned to running a small consulting firm of my own called accountant. And during that process, I special, I learned to specialise in working with E commerce zero based clients that were selling on Shopify and different, different, different e commerce stores that had complex inventory management needs, and they were also doing a lot of shipping from China. So they were using three PL logistic providers, and they were using, there were different, different channels that they were using to get the get their products across, and they needed a good, streamlined way to manage their inventory and manage their costs. So I was actually able to learn how to very effectively help them and to understand the different tools that they needed to use during my time working with bean ninjas and business depot and so in my consulting firm, this is sort of a little bit

Heather Smith

about what I do. Fantastic. Now share with us. Thank you so much for your kind words there. Samuel, it’s very but you did so much great work, and it was really about matching the person with the opportunities there. Now tell us about

Samuel David

bass done. Okay, so, so bass done. We the product is, the name is actually count. So we’d like firm owners to actually be able to count on us, yeah, but sorry. So the premise behind best done is what we do is we pull the data out from zero, and we actually review that data and form working papers. Right? We form the Working Papers, and after forming the Working Papers. We actually help review the Working Papers. After reviewing the Working Papers, we send the firm owners or the managers a list of exceptions right which are the issues specifically surround the best issues surrounding that Xero file, and we also give them solutions that we can execute for them to resolve all of those issues.

So the firm owners or the managers can actually select which issues they want resolved. We resolve those issues for them, finalise the best for them. Get the journals ready to go out the door, send the best packs to them, send the working papers to them, and they’re good to go. Fantastic.

Heather Smith

And so how do our listeners get in contact with you? With is it actually count? Is that the website

Samuel David

name, the website’s name is actually count.com. Fantastic.

Heather Smith

Thanks so much for sharing your time with us today. Thank you so much. Heather, so lovely to talk to you. So lovely as well. Cheers. Oh, I know. I do want to mention one thing jumped on back in there, let the listeners know whereabouts you’re based.

Samuel David

So I’m living in the beautiful country of Malaysia, which I love very, very much. My family is there. I grew up there in a small town called IPO,

Heather Smith

fantastic, and it’s great that from a small town, sort of you can conquer the world with accounting technology.

Samuel David

Very, very grateful to have such an amazing community of people that are genuinely caring and very, very, very kind. Cheers.

Heather Smith

Thanks so much. Samuel, cheers.

I’m here with Clayton from seamless, from Aubrey, and we’re here at the accounting business expo day two, and you are looking pinker than me. It’s awesome. That’s how we like. It. Now, if we put you on the spot, could you sing the I’m just Ken song. It is

Clayton Woods

from the Barbie show. Oh, right, sorry. My daughter’s seen

Heather Smith

it several times. You both doing that? This would be a little bit. I’ll get my blonde hair out next time your platinum Ryan hair. Tell us what seamless does and why people should come and speak to you.

Clayton Woods

Seamless helps accountants and bookkeepers onboard their clients and re engage so we all have to collect jobs and call jobs in, collect the data, confirm clients, details for the front cover, sign an engagement letter every year. Seamless allows you to do that in one process. Now, yes, we do AML, we do ID checks. That’s just part of the process. So when you call in a designated service, then you can do the checks. But just generally speaking, we’ve got to onboard or re engage our clients. We’re to collect the data. This just makes that process seamless and connects to XPM, FII, Dropbox, suite files, all the tools that you know and love.

Heather Smith

So, yeah, you’ve actually got lots of integrations down here on the bottom. I like that. Zapier, Dropbox connected apps. Fantastic. Yeah, excellent. Thank you. We’re here at the accounting business expo. How have you found it? It’s been amazing as always

Speaker 2

connecting up with some amazing accountants. There’s so many always here, and some amazing speakers who had so many good things. I think this year’s just levelled up on last year.

Heather Smith

Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks. Thank you.

James Rose from Content Snare is joining us on the podcast today. James has this fabulous solution, content snare, which is mentioned all the time, it’s a much loved solution by accountants and bookkeepers, and I think you’re from the Gold Coast too, aren’t you close? Brisbane, Brisbane. James, thank you for joining us. Tell us a little bit about your background before we jump into content snare.

James Rose

Well, I was born in no no. So as an engineer, if I go back to my full time job, we started building software in around 2010 content snare is our, I think, our third software business we started, launched in 2016 helping marketing agencies get information from clients about 2021 we found accountants were signing up and went, Wait, what are you guys using this for? Learned how much incredible value they were getting, especially compared to our previous market. Like that was like raving fans so quickly, and that was when we went, you know what? We gotta go heavy into accounting. Fantastic.

Heather Smith

Now, how about you explain to our listeners who don’t know about you, who are not raving about you on all the community channels, what does content? Snare do? It is the easy,

James Rose

secure, simple way to get information from clients. That’s the sort of top line and for accountants and some bookkeepers, that translates into Client Onboarding queries, bank statements, just anything you’re tired of chasing clients for, because we know the way that normally goes is you send them 10 questions, they reply with seven. Three aren’t even the right thing. You go back and forth forever, and it’s just a pain. So that’s the process we fix. We keep on top of clients and give them a really simple way to give you information.

So if

Heather Smith

what frequently happens with me is my tax accountant requires four pieces of information, so me as the client. If I have those two pieces, I can send them in, but then I’m waiting on the third piece and does what does contents there just constantly, just remind me generally, yeah.

James Rose

So, I mean, you’re in control of how many reminders it does send, but yeah, that’s the idea.

Heather Smith

Is the accountant?

James Rose

Correct. Yeah. So you have a set of reminders, and it might go after every five days or three days or, you know, if you’re in a pinch, or you’ve got a really pain in the ass client, you might set up a schedule that sends every day, you know, and you’ve got that flexibility to send different blocks of emails to different people. So yeah, it’ll and they’ll be able to very clearly see that they’re 50% complete. They can see these two items are complete. These two are not. We’re still waiting on those other two. We can’t start your work yet for these reasons, you know, and it’s that accountability on clients is a big one as well, that people love being able to push back and go like, why is your work not started? Well, here’s the request. You can see you’re not finished. Yeah, fantastic.

Heather Smith

So I have a situation with my SMSF, which one of the reports I have to send in? So I’m talking from a client perspective, is always very, very last minute, but that’s completely out of my control, but everything else I can send in. So this kind of, I guess, maybe gets them started on it, knowing that one thing is out of date or one thing is, like, always going to be like, yeah. And from the accountants point of view, are they alerted when everything comes in? Like, there’s a bell ring?

James Rose

Oh. Rain, yeah, I feel like we should have something like that in there. Like, maybe someone could set that up, you know, like using Zapier, you could probably push to, like a physical device. It like, just shoots confetti in the office. Oh, my God, it works. That would be great.

So, yeah, I mean, optionally, but yes, like, you can be told we have, like, different levels of notification. It could be maybe you’ve got five required questions and, like, a couple that aren’t required. You could actually get notified just when all the required questions are completed, if that’s what you care about, or you can say, No, I don’t want to get notified until everything’s done, or even when, just when a client’s even trying and it’s done something at all, you could get a notification on that. So, yeah, we’re pretty flexible on that notification.

Heather Smith

And what is happening in the content snare world recently or in the future that we can talk about?

James Rose

Yeah, I think I laugh, because it’s the big one right now, is trench two, and you can’t avoid it, and I almost don’t like talking about it, but we’re in a reasonable position to be able to add AML screening and ID verification as part of the onboarding process. People are already using content scenario as like a checklist to do all these things that we need you to do as part of onboarding. Give me these documents, answer these questions, do your client agent linking, and now it’s also do your ID verification and your AML screening, so that.

We released that two days ago, and we’re just trying to do as much as we can to support people with tranche to like, we’re not gonna, we’re not planning to be some like, all encompassing AML solution. I think, you know, there’s plenty of other ways to handle that. We just want to help the client specific, client facing bits, make that a lot more streamlined. So that’s that’s a big focus for us right now, because it’s a big focus for the whole industry.

Heather Smith

Yeah, absolutely, it is. It’s one of the hot topics we’re at the accounting and business expo day to how are you? How have you found the expo? It’s been good.

James Rose

Yeah, I feel like I thought we were going to be in a quiet corner, but it’s actually been pretty, fairly busy. Yeah, we’ve had a lot of interest with it. I mean, I think it’s such a big problem for people that they like a lot of real interest every every one we’ve met, we’ve had real conversations with, and almost basically demoed the product to everyone. So it’s been, yeah, it’s been good. I haven’t really left, so I don’t know what’s going on everywhere else in the conference.

Heather Smith

Thank you so much, James for joining us on the podcast. And how can people get in contact with content snare, thanks.

James Rose

I mean, content snare.com, or just Google. Content snare. You can book a demo, start a trial.

Heather Smith

Lots of options there. So content, s, N, A, R, E, content, snare, fantastic. James, awesome.

Joining me today on the accounting apps podcast is Michael and Ben from Lightyear Docs and Tax Guru now welcome. Tell me about your solutions that you’ve got out at the moment. Who wants

Ben Gill

to go first? Okay? From light year docs. We have where accountants go to set up companies, trusts, SMSF, loan agreements. We are provided that you could go to for a fixed price or a subscription model. But we’re all about family wealth protection, where we integrate with providers like Xero, BGL, fusign, but make sure you reach out to us. We’ve got lots of new things coming new legal coming on and new documents for accountants as well.

Heather Smith

But what’s there is in existing is so comprehensive, like I’ve gone through and you’ve shown me so much in there, if you do do that, yeah.

Ben Gill

And I just think accountants are just used to setting up just companies and trust, but there’s 200 documents that you can add value to your clients. And family wealth protection and asset protection is the key. And if you’re setting up the company, talking about succession is the end result for clients as well. So just change the language, see what you’re missing out on, and you can add value to your clients that way.

Heather Smith

Fantastic. Thank you. Ben and Michael, do you want to tell us about tax guru?

Michael Jeffries

Definitely. I’m very excited about this product. So tax guru AI is a proprietary, coded, closed, LLM, so linguistic language model that has a rag attached to it, with which is effective the brain that we’ve curated. So we’ve fed it. We’re using tax accountants, tax lawyers, up to 30 years of with up to 30 years of experience in there. And it’s got multiple models. So we’ve got a general tax guru, then we’ve got specific ones that deal with SMSF, CGT, FBT, international tax, and so on and so on.

Heather Smith

So Ben was saying, you’ve got 17 agents within there. We do. And yeah, and

Michael Jeffries

it provides tax research advice within 30 seconds to a minute that would normally have taken weeks for an accounting firm to provide to their clients, and at a level that is second to none.

Heather Smith

Yeah, and you’ve got legal tax agents, legal tax experts, and. Back, checking, we do,

Michael Jeffries

verifying, validating all the information. So we take user feedback all the time, updating it constantly, because there’s obviously legislative changes, cases, new strategies and everything to come out. So we’re just continually feeding that brain. So it’s not it’s not public scraping internets, which chat, GPT and Claude does. So it’s not hallucinating, it’s not getting incorrect information that’s out on public websites. So we’re actually feeding and curating that brain.

Heather Smith

So theoretically, it’s very likely an accounting firm would use both LYD Docs and Tax-Guru.ai, definitely, 100% yeah. Great stack

that would be very exciting, saving them time and money and giving them that ability to extra serve their clients. So also want to thank you for the conference that you ran at the beginning of the year. Yes, thank you. Fantastic conference. Everyone has been talking about it here, and we look forward to the next one. Thank you very much. Thank you. Heather. So whereabouts should people come and find out about your solutions?

Ben Gill

So go to lightyear docs.com.au, book in a discovery call, or you can create a free account. And you can also go to

Michael Jeffries

tax-guru.ai.

Ben Gill

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Heather Smith

Welcome to the podcast. Shaye Thyer, you’re currently working with Pallas, but many people in the industry have known you for many years. You’ve been the face of digital transformation for many of us and we know and love you share with us what you’re doing now. You founded your own business, which is very exciting. You moved out of a big practice,

Shaye Thyer

so coming up to three years now. So I’m the founder of Pallas, which is a CFO advisory firm for female founders that are looking to make some f$ck U money when we talk. I know that’s quite a jarring kind of by line, but this is about financial independence, so giving women the tools and the frameworks that they need to move their business through past that 100 grand turnover mark, which we know 88% of women get stuck in and really make some money that serves them to give them just that financial stability, financial independence, so that they can have the privilege of choice, choice over wherever they need to be, choice to leave a place they don’t that doesn’t serve them anymore, and just just the choice that we really all deserve, I guess.

Heather Smith

Yeah, female financial independence is so important. It is something that we really need to actually work on, because there’s a lot of avenues or routes stripping us of that actual independence. Yeah. So how does someone what? What does working with you look like?

Shaye Thyer

So I work with clients one on one, but my favourite way to work with clients is inside of our group, inside of our group programme. So we have two one is called the profit lab, and this is really suited to a woman that’s running her own business. She might identify as a freelancer or a consultant. She’s really a solo or solo ish practitioner, and she just wants to take home more money. She wants to maximise her take home pay.

And we work within this group over a period of, you know, six to 12 months. And it’s the ability to access me as a CFO and really guide decision making through those really tricky decision points. It might be, how do I price better? How do I reach the clients I want to? How do I build offers that I’m not burning myself out, but I’m still making plenty of money. So we mix financial coaching, business coaching, definitely some fundamental business wisdom, and wrap all of that around her.

Heather Smith

A lot of it, frequently, is about mindset, and it sounds like because you have them for a period of time, you’re really helping them muscle that their muscle get in the right zone to set them up for success.

Shaye Thyer

Definitely like one of the one of the tricky spots about working exclusively was with women, is there is a whole nother industry that likes to sell women confidence, and likes to sell women mindset, and likes to sell women manifesting stuff which I am not trying to minimise. I think it has its place. However, you can’t manifest good cash flow at the end of the day, capability will give you confidence, and so I love to spend time with women, unpacking some of the socialisation that really doesn’t serve us like women are conditioned to be savers and men are conditioned to be investors, which, when we put that into a business context, brings us some challenges those kind of things.

But this is very, very practical. There’s lots of love and warmth in there as well. Don’t get me wrong, but it is very, very practical. Is. Very much about enabling with capability and tools and support to become autonomous and confident in decision making in business.

Heather Smith

And I imagine if they’re sitting in a unity, they’re also hearing from peers going from through the same similar journey, and it’s reassuring to them absolutely wanting more money can somewhat be an ugly thing.

Shaye Thyer

You’re absolutely right, and there is a stigma around there’s somehow this socialisation that impact and money can’t come together. You’re either a beautiful heart led, values driven impact person, or you’re someone that makes money. And it can’t be both. And I think that is BS. I think you can absolutely have both. And in fact, if you’re not making money, if you’re not feeding yourself, looking after yourself, putting your own oxygen mask on first with your own money, you’re going to really struggle to have that impact that you want to have in the world.

And so that is definitely a thing that comes up a lot, and it is. It’s really this is why I do work in groups, because the isolation of running your own business, a small business as a solo operator, is real. And having a space where women can look across the room and go, Oh, my God, it’s not just me or Oh, I felt really silly, and now I don’t is really, really powerful.

Heather Smith

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I’ve always been a person who has been very comfortable around money and not needing not needing excess money, not needing business past life, but last year, had a legal fight that I needed to have quarter of a million dollars as a base to fight, which I didn’t have. And it really shattered me. And I thought, gosh, if I’d have just been at that next level that could have been sitting in a piggy bank and I could have done something with it. So It upsets me that I wasn’t able to do the right thing for the right people, to help them because I didn’t have that cash there. So I’m listening to you thinking, I need to sign up for this talk.

Shaye Thyer

Well, part of the origin story of palace is my own experience starting from scratch at 30 basically financial square wild, and that was because of a yucky divorce and a yucky financial settlement and all the things. So here’s me, someone, a fellow. Ca, my dad’s a financial advisor, all the financial literacy you could probably get on paper still finding herself in a position of a really, like, really poor financial situation.

So being in the prevention space, if you like, is a real passion of mine. I would love it if we didn’t have to get to our age Heather and go, oh gosh, I wish you know, I would love it if I could help women build their fuck you funds, build that money and have that buffer so that if they do experience things that are outside of, you know, outside of the norm, or they not anticipating them, there isn’t that panic. And they do have the ability to choose they do have the ability to feel a little bit more stable.

Heather Smith

So how do our listeners get in contact with Shay?

Shaye Thyer

So I frequent LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn, sheath, I, S, H, A, y, e, t, h, y, E R, and you can also go and visit our website, if you like. It’s we are palace. Palace is spelled P, A, double, L, A, S, dot, i, o.

Heather Smith

Thank you so much. It has been so interesting hearing all about your journey.

Shaye Thyer

Thanks for having me on Heather.

Heather Smith

So joining me today on the accounting apps podcast is Corey from Annature, Hi Heather. How are you good? Thank you. We are in this beautiful purple hub with neon lights and plants and drinks. This is certainly a spectacular stand here at the UK and this is Expo.

Corey Cacic

We wanted this to be a come and chill out zone, so come grab a drink, sit on our nice lounges and just relax. Selfishly, I might say the idea of lounges was actually driven by me standing on my feet for three days at the zero cons and the other expos. So the lounges were first for me, but it’s created an awesome atmosphere for all the clients coming

Heather Smith

in and realistically. And this is something that I frequently say is sometimes the people in the marketing space are young and outgoing, but frequently the people in the accounting space are quiet, are introverted, and do want a quiet conversation. So I credit you and the team for actually built finding a quiet space to recognise we want those comfortable, quiet

Corey Cacic

conversations Absolutely. And I’ll say us and the marketing team at pinch. They’ve done a phenomenal job in bringing this space to life. But, yeah, it’s it’s been awesome to come and just sit down, relax, have those intimate, nice conversations in a quiet space and just different, get out of the chaos from the expo floor and just chill out. We’ve got these awesome drinks that we. Getting people so have a beverage.

Heather Smith

And so can you share with our listeners who don’t know about amateur, just briefly what amateur does, and then we’ll go into what we should know is has been happening in the amateur world.

Corey Cacic

So amateur, for six years have been predominantly an E signing tool. E signing has been our core product, and that’s what we’ve really dominated the market in. And what market in. And what we’re known, known for, ID has been a big product since 2022 for us. And as of, as of this week, at Abe, we’ve launched our third product, which is amateur payments.

Payments has been designed for the next natural evolution of sending a document, getting it signed. In most cases, signing documents is an agreement to an exchange of goods, goods and services, and $1 figure is generally associated with that. So the ability to send a document and either collect a payment or collect a pre approval for payment at a later date was just a natural evolution. So payments

Heather Smith

is new, exciting feature. You’re certainly keeping the updates rolling out and probably building some solid solutions for the community. What alongside that? Is there anything else we should know has been happening in the amateur world, or is there anything else coming up that you’d like to talk to our listeners about?

Corey Cacic

Yeah, definitely. So everything with AML and CTF, the austrac charge two, it’s been a hot topic for a long time now. We’ve taken a bit of a backseat in the last few months to let let others do the education of it. We did a lot of education four years ago when Id first came out, and it was a slog. So this time with AML coming out, we want to kind of just ride the coattails on everyone else that’s doing the education of it, and then we just swoop in with a product that has been in market for four years.

So AML with Annature has been used by our financial services, financial planners, banks, conveyances, lawyers. So it’s not a new product for us, but it’s new in the accounting ecosystem and industry, and there’ll be some changes that we make specifically for this, insofar as helping you build your IML programmes, train your staff, build out those policies, procedures and checklists. So we’ll we’ll have something to share really, really soon. We just want to give payments, which is what we’ve been working on for the last six months. Give payments the time and the time it deserves to have the spotlight because, you know, working with pinch, it’s been a long time to get this out, and we’re really, really excited for Fantastic, fantastic.

Heather Smith

And how should our listeners get in contact with amateur? Amateur.

Corey Cacic

We’re our website, annateur.com.au, it’s a double A, N, N, A, T, U, R, E. There’s a lot of a lot of spelling, creative spelling with these, with these fancy names. But look, our team is local. We’re we’re available by phone, email, live chat on our website, it’s, it’s one of the things that’s really been key to our success is that we are we’re not a faceless company. There’s a team of almost 10 now, and we’re all available by phone. Love to talk, love to chat. So visit our website and reach out to us on any of the channels that we’re available on.

Heather Smith

Fantastic. Now I will for any of our listeners who have been with us for a long time listening in in past episodes, when I’ve spoken to Corey, we have had a snake with us in the course. How is the snake going?

Corey Cacic

Well, there’s more than just the one snake now. So my my two albinos have actually had a clutch of eggs. So I’ve got 12 new baby danger noodles, I think is what people love to call them now. So yeah, 12 baby new snakes that are almost as time consuming as an actual baby. So I have a 10 month old boy at home, and yeah, the baby snakes actually take up more time than he does in caring for them.

Heather Smith

Oh, goodness, goodness. Now I want to know what caring for them is box you have to feed them. Oh yes,

Corey Cacic

you have to feed them. You have to clean them. You have to give them water. Because they do not understand the difference between where we should poop versus where we should be drinking from. It’s usually the same place. So we’re changing our water every day. But yeah, one of the one of the challenging things with baby snakes is sometimes they don’t like to eat. And when baby snakes don’t eat, it usually ends bad. So in the hobby of owning and raising snakes and breeding snakes, it often involves force feeding, force feeding snakes, which, if you can picture what that looks like. Yeah, it’s a

Heather Smith

Gosh, that’s fascinating. Oh, thank you for sharing that and keeping us, keeping the snake journey alive. And good luck to the babies. I hope they all survive.

Corey Cacic

They’ll all survive. They. May not like eating, but yeah, we do our best to keep

Heather Smith

Oh, you need to send me a photo of the snakes. Thank you so much. Corey, thank you Heather. Thank you so much for listening. Hope you found it useful. Reach out to everyone I spoke to directly if you want to find out more about what they’re doing. My name is Heather Smith. You can find me on social media quite easily, so I encourage you to connect with me. And there’s lots and lots of information in the show notes. Okay, so jump into them if you need to find anything. Thank you so much.

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