How Accounting Firms Can Use AI To Save Time, Increase Profits & Become Better Advisors

The Abundant Accountant Podcast: Sales & Business Growth for Accounting, Tax, and Bookkeeping Firm Owners

The episode explores how accounting and bookkeeping firm owners can leverage niche AI tools like Veltrix to transition from manual compliance

Key takeaways

• Veltrix operates as a 'read-only' co-pilot, pulling information via API from QuickBooks or Xero without permanently storing sensitive financial data in its own system.
• AI can significantly reduce the time spent on client onboarding by providing instant business health checks within minutes of connecting financial sources.
• The episode references an MIT study suggesting that AI serves to either substitute for labor or increase the value of human expertise.
• Niche-specific AI tools offer a competitive advantage over general models like ChatGPT by providing pre-engineered prompts tailored to accounting workflows.
• Successful AI implementation requires two prerequisites: high-quality digitalized data and the ability to ask well-structured, contextual questions.

Main topics

• AI for Accounting Firms
• Business Health Checks
• Data Security in AI

Notable quotes

The real opportunity isn't replacing the work that accountants do, but it's reducing the time spent gathering information.

Conclusion

Adopting specialized AI tools is an inevitable evolution that allows a

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:10) Welcome to the Abundant Accountant Podcast, the show for accounting, tax, and bookkeeping firm owners. Are you ready to build a firm that gives you the freedom, confidence, and consistent revenue without burnout or undercharging? If you've ever felt stuck discounting your fees, chasing clients, or giving away too much advice for free, you're in the right place. Here, we talk about sales mastery, charging premium prices, creating boundaries that stick and learning how to convert high value clients with confidence and ease. Each episode, you will hear real success stories, sales strategies, and guest experts who will help you work less, earn more, and finally create the firm and life you deserve. Speaker 1 (1:01) Welcome to the Abundant Accountant Podcast. Today, we have a very special guest. Our special guest co-founded Veltrex to make business intelligence something every owner can actually use. For firm owners who lack awareness of their data or their clients' data, Veltrex is a business co-pilot AI that helps you make strategic decisions. Unlike Claude or ChatGPT, They're a dedicated small business solution that actually proactively detects your business's problems or even your client's business's problems and guides you to solutions on how to fix them and how to capitalize on your own opportunities in just minutes. Our special guest studied business at the University of San Diego, has got a BBA and an MBA, and brings global ethics first view on how companies should be built and run. But before we welcome him to the show, I'm sure you help clients manage their finances, books, taxes, etc. But when it comes to your own cash flow, your pricing, or your profits, you feel stuck or even ashamed. You don't have to face this by yourself. Most firm owners have never learned how to sell, how to position their value, or how to have confident money conversations. And it holds you back. Here at The Abundant Accountant, I help you feel empowered. confident, and not awkward on any sales calls. You'll learn how to convert premium clients, raise your prices, and finally take home the pay you actually deserve. So if you're ready to stop avoiding the financial side of your own firm, head on over to TheAbundantCall.com and book your free strategy session today with me and Speaker 2 (2:42) my team. Speaker 1 (2:43) Every new client tells you their business is straightforward. Then the documents arrive. Veltrix helps you understand what you're really dealing with in minutes. Upload financial statements, tax returns, and documents they've already shared, or connect their accounting software and instantly get a complete business health check, helping you uncover key risks, opportunities, and the answers you need across all of your client's financial information. So instead of spending hours getting up to speed, you're ready for your first real working session. Start your free business health check at Veltrix.com. That's V-E-L-T-R-I-X.com. Welcome Manfred to the show. Speaker 2 (3:26) Hi Michelle, thanks for having me. Speaker 1 (3:28) Yeah, it's awesome to have you here on the Abundant Accountant Podcast. I'm super excited to dive into... What we're going to talk about today, because I think it's a hot topic of different AI tools that accounting firm owners, tax firm owners maybe could use, need help with. But before we dive in, I have already done your intro, but I always think it's more powerful to do the intro from the guest. So if you could just share 30 seconds, you know, who you are, what you do, and then we'll dive into today. Speaker 2 (3:57) Awesome. Perfect. So my path into accounting technology has been a bit unconventional. I completed my MBA at the University of San Diego. And if I'm honest, accounting was always one of the fields that I struggled in. But it did give me a strong appreciation for also how difficult it can be to turn financial data into meaningful insights and actionable insights. And so after university, I joined our family business. where I use a lot of different enterprise solutions for data and analysis. And I realized that a lot of these big companies have access to a lot of data for their decision making, but small and medium-sized businesses really don't have that. Speaker 1 (4:41) And Speaker 2 (4:42) so that's what inspired Veltrix, our company. Our mission is pretty simple, to help every business better understand its financials through business health checks. And as we work more closely with accountants, we realize something even more exciting, that the real opportunity isn't replacing the work that accountants do, but it's reducing the time spent gathering information so they can focus on faster and deeper understanding of the needs of the business they're working with and helping clients make better decisions. And so that's really where our focus today is. I'd say MAGA, make accounting great again. Speaker 1 (5:19) That's a different kind of MAGA that most people are talking about. But we won't go into a political conversation here. So no, I love that. And I think what you're doing there at Veltrix is really a powerful and important necessity that many firm owners should have a glance at, take a peek at, and see how much time they can actually save. So I guess I'm curious because... you know, you created an AI company and, you know, just so everyone knows where they can go. Do you want to give them the website? Speaker 2 (5:53) Yeah. The website is Veltrix.com. That's V-E-L-T-R-I-X.com. Speaker 1 (5:59) Perfect. Okay. So when they go there, you know, what can a firm owner really expect? Because I think business owners are already using AI, right? For financial questions, like I'll go on. chat or at Claude and ask a question, but what role should firm owners and accounting, tax, bookkeeping firm owners, how would they play a role in that with their clients? Speaker 2 (6:23) Yeah. I mean, so I think one of the pressures that's really pushing into the market is that businesses are using and employees are using AI more and more. And it kind of puts pressure on accountants because you run the risk of a business owner almost trying to play accountant himself. And so with a firm like ours, because you asked how they get started and so on, we tried to make the process as easy as possible for businesses or accountants or vice versa, working together to pretty much connect all their different financial sources. So it might be QuickBooks, it could be Xero, any of these financial tools, or also certain POS systems. And so for accountants, if they connect these tools, it gives them a really pretty much easy way of onboarding a new business to quickly see, okay, what are the pressure points? But also for continuous work, to always be kind of on top of what are certain work that can be automated. What are some pressure points for firms? What's going on in their business? But to understand more than just their financials, to really help them push into an advisory role as well. to know which products are working, which products aren't working, you know? Speaker 1 (7:36) Okay. And what about like the risk and security on something like that? I'm sure many firm owners and myself are always wondering that, you know, so how does that work with what you do, you know, if a firm owner goes and does the business health check and they link up their QuickBooks for all their clients, let's say they have, you know, 30 or 40 bookkeeping clients. Speaker 2 (7:59) You know, that's the question we get. quite a lot. I Speaker 1 (8:02) bet. Speaker 2 (8:03) You know, without going into too many details, you know. Yeah, no Speaker 1 (8:07) detailed details, but like just high level because I think risk is a huge factor. Just and maybe you can talk about the difference of when a firm owner, you know, might sign up with like you or do a bit free business health check. Yeah, it's free. But how is that different than having Claude do the business health check? Speaker 2 (8:26) Yeah. So, I mean, there's different types of AIs. you know, how it has worked. I mean, for us, they're clear definitions. We are a co-pilot. So we do not store the data. So if you connect your QuickBooks or Xero, the data lives in QuickBooks or Xero. If you ask a question, you know, our system goes in there working with their, you know, from their side, their API without being too technical and pulls like the information out of there. Speaker 1 (8:50) So Speaker 2 (8:51) data is never stored in our system. It's stored at QuickBooks or Xero. We do have the ability to upload some files to our system. you know, to substitute or to add to the data that's coming from QuickBooks in Xero. And these are stored in our system. You know, we take precautions to keep them very secure. But most of the data is never stored in our system. Speaker 1 (9:13) The Speaker 2 (9:14) only thing, you know, if you ask a question and the answer, yes, the answer will be in our system for you to read it. But, you know, you can always go in and delete those. Speaker 1 (9:22) Very interesting. Yeah, the whole AI thing is very new for so many, not only myself, but for firm owners when there's, you know, so many tools at their disposal. Speaker 2 (9:33) Even for us, you know, I mean, AI is so fast evolving. Every month there's something new coming out, you know, so even for us, for me, you know, being an on-tech, not as technical as our development team, you know, it's exciting because there's always new kind of stuff coming out. But you have to be careful. I mean, I don't know if you heard those reports recently about ChatGPT or Entropix Cloud hacking various systems. It's crazy. What Speaker 1 (9:58) would you say a firm owner should look out with the most if they are going to use ChatGPT or Cloud or some other open AI? Maybe you could even talk about the difference between what you do and... you know, Veltrix versus some open platform? Speaker 2 (10:19) You know, there are without going again, it's hard not to go into details here. But there are, so to speak, like read only systems like ours that purely only read. And then there are these things, you know, also with a cloud and depending what system you use, and that could theoretically, you know, make changes to your systems. But but, you know, at this point, AI has become, I would say, very, very secure. Speaker 2 (10:46) And I'd be lying, I'd be honestly saying one system is more secure than ours or ours is more secure than chatGBTs at this point, because they have put a strong emphasis on this. And it also depends which models you use, because if you use paid models, they don't really learn from your data as much. So I know with ours, all I can say is that it's read-only. we leave the data at QuickBooks. We leave it at Xero, wherever it is. And we pretty much just read it when you ask a question. Or when, you know, if you do a health check, then we go through data and we ask like, you know, different questions to pretty much just say it all to you. But again, we don't store it. It's stored there. Speaker 1 (11:24) No, it's so interesting. Like, I mean, I had no idea about that. And I think there's many firm owners listening that also, you know, we use these tools, but don't really think about. implications it might have. But I understand if