Digits Demo

Keeping sidehustle community. It's Kate. We've got an exciting demo for you today. Um Rob Hamilton from Digits is our guests guest and we will be learning about the Digits uh general ledger, the Digits platform, the Digits accounting software, whatever whatever you want to call it. Um, the purpose of this interview, y'all, is to give an overview of this software so you can make a determination if it could be a tool that you could add to your uh bookkeeping firm. Um, I want to go as far as to say, is it possible that it could be a a general ledger that you could specialize in? Um, I think there is money to be made in um in funky firms um in in in niching in places where people don't normally niche um in uh potentially a digits-only firm. I think that would have an amazing impact on on marketing. So that's kind of why I think these conversation this conversation is interesting. Um, we will be able to uh answer your questions in the chat. And actually the last time I streamed there someone told me that the the the chat wasn't working. So I would if uh someone can give me a comment um with where you're listening from. Um, and I know we're having people just roll in, but I'm going to ask for some comments while we talk. I will be watching them feeding those questions to Rob. Um, he is going to go through some scripted stuff that I haven't seen. Um, but we will um ask those comments in the in the in the chat. I'll feel those. So, ask ask your comments. Um, the last thing is the the call to action is if you if we con if he convinces you, not me, he's him. If he convinces you and you want to get started serving clients on Digits, you're going to need to sign up uh as an accountant partner. And the link for that is digits.combsh. They want to track that the folks who came from this this link. So um digitis.com/bsh is how you would get registered as an accountant partner to then have all the tools that Rob is going to share with us. So we are going to dive right in and how about we just start with a little intro. Rob, tell us tell us about yourself.

>> So happy to be here. Uh this is going to be so much fun. Uh Kate, we've been in touch for I think years at this point um through lots of different iterations of digits. So, it's really excited uh exciting to be the first time kind of like coming and talking to the community. So, super uh jazzed to discuss and answer folks questions and all the above. Just a little bit of background on me. Um, like as mentioned, my name is Rob Hamilton. I lead the partnerships team at Digits. Uh I've probably met some of you here and there at conferences over the last couple years. Um, but broadly, my background is in technology. I spent time at Twitter, Amazon Alexa, Twitch, all the above. But for the last five years, I've been at Digits helping accountants and finance leads automate their accounting. Um, and so yeah, it's I I think at this point I I would think back to my like college Rob if I was telling him like how much time I'd be spending like doing accounting or around accounting or all the above, I would have laughed um because I I would have never thought that that would be my future. But now I spend most of my day uh talking to accountants which has been super super fun and I've like really enjoyed the last 5 years working with all the different communities and everything in the profession. So it's been great.

>> Do they do they track what employee number you were?

>> Uh I don't know that I remember an exact number. Uh the easiest way for me to like think about it was being the first non-engineering hire. So I've I've over time just described myself as like I do business things. sometimes.

>> Yeah.

>> Um, we do have a few more people listening live right now. If anyone can chime in in the comments who's listening, that will confirm for me whether these comments are working. And if not, I'll just ask the questions that I know the community will have, but let us know where you're listening from. Um, so let's learn about digits. Um, the nerd way is saying is like it's a general ledger, right? Like it's double entry accounting behind the scenes. Um, is it is it is it more than a general ledger? Um, is it is it mostly a general ledger or is it mostly something else? Um, just tell us about sort of what it fundamentally does.

>> Yeah, definitely. Um, we like to lovingly call it the autonomous general ledger or the AGL.

>> Um, but a quick refresher on who we are and like how we got here because I think folks probably have a couple different have seen different iterations of digits over the last, you know, seven years. So um we've been around for about seven years and we were built out of our founders pain when he founded a couple of his last companies where especially at Twitter he on the engineering side was like I have Google analytics I have all these tools that let me understand like what buttons people are clicking or where they are on my website and all the above and then everything finance and accounting related you know was 45 days late and in a format that didn't help him as a business owner. or fully understand like what was going on or what decisions he could make. And we all know on this call like there's reasons why like late is probably the wrong term to use, but like uh because there's real reasons why it takes time to close the books. So obviously those are learnings we've had over time, but from a founding vision perspective, we've always been on the path to automate accounting and finance to bring it more real time. And that has been a really long journey. uh it's led us to build our own autonomous general ledger that I just prior referenced and that ledger we launched in March to operators and business owners and then at scaling new heights which is when I reconnected with Kate.

>> Yeah.

>> Uh that I guess wow time flies. That was like more than a couple weeks ago, but uh couple months ago,

>> couple months

>> um we launched our accounting firm features on top of our ledger as well, which really opens up this mentality of being able to really partner with the community in a differentiated way on how to get them to, you know, leverage the latest in AI technology. Um, so with that, just a couple more bullets on kind of like who we are, how we're thinking about things is throughout our whole development period of time. We've actually had uh we've seen incredible efficiency gains where after doing a couple months of closes on digits, firms see a 30% decrease in the close time across their clients. And so the way we've been able to do that is we've actually had a like accountants baked into our product development org and they've done over 2,000 full closes on real businesses on top of the ledger that's really helped us harden our systems over the last five years and you'll find that like hey this button is where I would want it to be as an accountant or these features are like where I or I behave as I would expect them to behave. Um, all that kind of stuff. So, we're uh really excited to now be able to bring that to the community. Um, the other really interesting note we've seen over time about our ledger is that yes, there are efficiency gains and that 30% number is the worst that it's ever going to be because we're constantly assessing like where the time goes and all the above and how we can bring in more efficiency. I'll talk more about that later. But the other benefit you gain from digits is we've actually found that the downstream client absolutely loves digits. And that's a very rare thing especially for the legacy ledgering systems um where they like either hate it with a passion or never want to log in and you don't want them to log in because it just confuses them. Um, but what we found is that clients find that there's a lot more deep interactivity that then they can fall in love with, answer some of their own questions without burdening you with some of those pieces as well. So, um, whether you are in heavy growth mode and are just looking for like efficiency gains so you can keep growing or you're in more of a maintenance mode where you're like, I just want to build the best client experience possible, Digits is a great fit in in both those areas. I have written three questions, but I'm going to stick to our script. I'm gonna skip to I have so many like the word autonomous is sort of making me squirmy. Um, we're going to stick with what we were going to ask. And y'all, if y'all have other questions too, if you've been writing any notes, like I would really like to know what he means by that. Um,

>> let's let's go to this idea of who should use digits though and what makes digits um unique. Um, I started off saying that like I I this is different and but accounting is accounting. So accounting there's no like you better not have built different accounting, right?

>> No no accounting has been around for what like thousands of years at this point. I don't need changing that.

>> I think double entry has been around for like maybe like 500. Accounting like single entry maybe much longer than that but it's old. We don't want you messing with it. But there's something that needs to be unique. Otherwise, we don't change. We we know we click where we click on the tools that we know we had to click. We know we already know how to click on. We don't need the pain of Mr. Cool Twitter uh guy who builds his cool experience. Like I know how to use tools already, right? Um, so what who who needs to be using digits? Who's ready to make who who do who who who has been changing? I mean y'all have been around. So, who do you see coming on to to use the platform? Um, and what makes it unique?

>> Absolutely. I mean, if I'm honest, the people we see coming in and using it are the are the folks who are really leaning in to adopting new technology because the way that we're thinking about this is like you're absolutely right. Like tools have been built. There's apps, you know, that connect to some of the legacy ledger systems that help automate certain things. Um, but really what we found is like what what we are seeing and what both myself and Jeff have articulated on stage at skill and new heights and other accounting conferences is that we actually fundamentally believe that this is a technology shift within the industry. So you could think about it as you know you had probably like the pen and quill era long time ago in phone you know

>> but um from there we kind of like moved into there was like a little bit of software but still folks embedded in companies and then you have cloud accounting which was this like really big technology shift and it really opened up the ability for one to many relationships and changed a lot of things about the accounting profession and like what your job is. There's an argument to be made we can get into at any point in time that I think some of the things that got introduced as like a part of the accounting job maybe are just like cruff or things that like should have never been but we don't need to get into that now but this AI era is going to issue in usher in a new kind of like technology shift and so the folks that we see similar to that cloud accounting shift where

>> it's going to be different and the workflows are going to change and the job of the accountant in is going to get augmented in some way. And so what we've found is that the folks who are leaning in are the folks who are really looking to like understand what that shift is going to be and what the actual impact is going to be. At the end of the day, it's still early on in a lot of these pieces, but um that's who we've um kind of seen coming over and using it. I'll pause before I I can go into like what makes digits unique in that market as well, but I'll pause there before I dive into that piece.

>> Yeah, I um I'm thinking I wonder if sharing sharing digits is going to be what allows you to share what's unique. Um, I don't know if if we is is seeing it the way to like answer that question.

>> It definitely might be. I can layer in just like a little bit of context and then we can probably jump in from there. Um,

>> I'm going to go ahead and share your screen so it's available. Um, but ultimately like this we I do want this to be somewhat of a demo. So we need to uh

>> we need to

>> see it in action. Accountants want to know like yeah show show us like why people would change who if someone like would feel like they are like you described which is I like to lean into technology. I see where the uh industry is going. I'm not scared of it but now I need to know like can I can I use this? Um, yeah. So yeah, take take us behind the scenes and um I think that'd be probably the best way to answer what what does make this unique. If there's anything uh super special about it, be sure to point that out.

>> Definitely. And we can make this super collaborative. So obviously folks in chat or Kate, you feel free to chime in with questions. Um, before I dive into like clicking around in the screen that's being shared, I'll just kind of like talk a little bit more about the uniqueness of what I mean by this AI era where really what makes digits unique is that we've built AI from the ground up from the core of the system. The whole database architecture is called what's called a vector similarity model. But it basically just means the easiest way to think about this is and what but I talked about skill and new heights is you could think of legacy accounting systems as like your 1996 Camry. It'll get you where you need to go. It's reliable. Um, but you have to do all the maintenance and you have to drive it. And when you think about digits it's much more like you know a Whimo where all of the sensors are built into how the car drives. You can't just like bolt them on and be like cool. We like you can't take all those sensors on the Whimo and put them on your 96 Camry and be like now it drives itself. It just fundamentally doesn't work. And it's probably why we've seen some of the early iterations on legacy systems feel clunky because the underlying database architecture doesn't actually enable AI in the right way. And so what you see within digits is that all of these pieces everything flows together. Actions taken in one place affect actions in other places. And we are constantly learning. and I'll show you what that looks like in the demo as well.

>> Okay?

>> cool. So, when we dive into Digits, this is as an accounting firm. So, as Kate mentioned, you go to digits.com/bsh and that'll bring you to kind of like our partner landing page. So, you'll kind of sign up through there and when you get into Digits, you're going to land on this page and this is going to be your accounting firm dashboard. Each of your clients will show up as cards within this view. Um, and so with this, we do have some other things at the top. We have our academy. We haven't fully launched kind of like our training, but that's going to come out. This is I'll prefetch this uh pretty soon. So, keep an eye out from us towards the end of the month where we'll have fun badging and like all the above as it relates to like certifications that you can come get on digits. Um, we have some welcome videos. And the other thing I'm just going to call it, this is what I'm going to use for our demo today. Every accounting firm can launch a demo client with fake data so that they can come experience and play around with digits without adding their own client's data. We've found this works for like trying to understand how things move within the software. But we've also found that it helps when you bake digits into your sales cycle as an accounting firm. You can use this data in that sales cycle when you're demoing the software being like, "Look, client, this is the awesome stuff you're going to get if you come work with me."

>> Fantastic. So from there I'm just going to click into this client. And so this is just a highle landing page. This has been autocurated where both you as the accounting firm and your client when you invite them and log them in uh or they log in they'll see this view. So highle expense analysis, revenue analysis, total cash, all the above. Now this has all been curated. And so if you see that oh they're profitable, they probably don't care about runway. All of this is also fully editable. So you could come remove runway and just drag and drop cash flow in if you wanted to. Oops.

>> Okay.

>> Um, you could also search for specific vendors. And the cleanest way to show this is you can make a home dashboard, but you could also make like let's say my client cares about their travel expense. You make a net new dashboard. And we can bring in let's say Airbnb or we'll bring in airfare or we'll bring in Airbnb as a vendor. You can search for specific vendors. You could search for categories. All the above and you can build out these pieces that give highle overview travel. Where this comes into play really nicely is with like dimensions like departments or locations where you could build out views for specific dimensions, departments or locations all to quickly toggle through how to help a business owner understand their business just on a high level when they initially log in.

>> I'm thinking of like goals too like if there's like a particular like certain type of item you're wanting to sell or if there's a certain expense that you're wanting to cut cut, you know, like and that this is what we're focused on everybody. You put that in there and you see the trends going the way you want. You're you're helping that client see their main goals.

>> Yeah. And there's even ways to bring in uh where was it? Text. Oh, wanted to search for finding it. But you can bring in text boxes and things like that. So if you want to um bring in those types of pieces. Uh oh, there it is. Text box. You could even say that like this is our goal for this. This is what we want to achieve. Um, you can bring in KPIs or even a file drop zone if you're a big statement all that kind of stuff too. So

>> nice if you're customizing a it's almost like a report but it just happens to be a URL like it's like it's just it's just

>> exactly and I'll show you we do still have reports in the product. So we could get to that piece too but at the same time um we want to make this as easy and accessible as possible and you can probably already see the more consumergrade design approach that our downstream clients generally appreciate. um as they dive in. But this is just kind of like the high level dashboard. I will note like you can ch notice how quickly you can navigate through kind of like the different months and different changes and all the above there as well. But as we go, um, we're probably all interested in like, okay, cool. There's some nice dashboarding or whatever,

>> right?

>> What does the ledger actually look? What does the ledger actually look like? And how does this change my, you know, foundational model of things? But what's cool is when you think about like the ledger piece as it ties to the dashboards where the core one of the core fundamental like workflow differences that you'll see within Digits versus a legacy platform is that there's no bank feed in the traditional sense within Digits. So ultimately what you do is you'll come in to connections. These are just autoconnected for our demo purposes but let's say we are gusto ramp mercury stripe and this is the kind of like the banking or money movement tech stack of this company. We do connect over 12,000 banks. We partner with plaid to allow more and more there all the above. Um, but let's say that those are what we've initially brought in. In this case, what we do is we automatically bring in all the transactions and book them. And so all that just gets booked into the ledger, which in effect enables a real time dashboard on the other side if you're looking at the current month. So if you're spending on your credit card, spending on your bank or whatever, it'll bring those in and automatically categorize them. In that world, as you interact with the data that's being categorized, that's what in effect trains the AI on how to handle it. next time. So if you come in and change this,

>> it will remember that automatically and the next time it sees a similar transaction, it will book it in the same way the next time.

>> Okay?

>> And that's across throughout the whole product because everything in digits is editable. So if I was going into this and I see the underlying transaction, I can come in and change the vendor um in here. or this is a transfer so it's probably not the best example but if I'm in like let's find a like a credit card ramp card if I'm like for some reason this doesn't go to airfare this goes to something else then when you change that it'll remember that this vendor specifically goes in that area um

>> but can you like force it instead of like like not just hoping it remembers can you say like I guess like the concept of a bank rule is that something we like or is it more just training.

>> It's just training. There's not a rule in sight because like ultimately the way we're trying to and this is where the automate comes in. I will say that there's a trust element to this which is a trust building exercise too because like you're right, automate can be kind of like a squirmy word or like thing to discuss because

>> like you are building trust with your client. You don't want them to see something that's messy and they think that like you messed it up versus something else. And so that's where this is becomes very much a review function. But what we've seen with tons of testing and we can I can share we have like a white paper and research paper as well that shows um digits comparison against both other LLMs and humans against the same data set and how effective it is. And so ultimately on our end we see roughly 90% of transactions getting booked directly into the ledger correctly. Now that last 10% is where both we have to focus on are these things automatable because some of that is going to be like deferred revenue or like prepaid schedules which absolutely we're actively building on our road map the ability to automate those things and build them directly into the ledger. But the other way that this happens is that you'll have an inbox that it's going to flag things that there's low confidence in.

>> And so it's not a rule, but it is going to be proactive. Like I don't know the answer to this. And so this example is, hey, this could be taxes, but it also could be legal because it's a patent, but I need you to confirm whether or not this is this. In this case, it's legal. So I'm going to hit save. And what it actually does is detects similar transactions in the past at the bottom that I can click into and be like, do you also want to change these to legal because they were something else before?

>> I'm going to hit update

>> and it'll automatically update all those. And the really really cool part about this and we haven't gone into we'll get into like onboarding clients and things like that later is this becomes immensely powerful for cleanup types of use cases where previously you may have had a company come to you and you be like hey here's my shoe box and like all my receipts are like I haven't done my like taxes in four years and you're like well I'm going to have to charge you an immense amount of money to do that because of the time it takes. Well, what we've seen with digits is you can just come in, link their bank accounts and credit cards. We will automatically book everything to our default chart of accounts and flag, let's say, you know, in whatever year a certain number of transactions where they're like, we have low confidence in these. Can you go ask the client these questions, etc., etc. And it enables that experience. And we've seen accountant accounting firms come into us and basically be like, look, I had a four-year cleanup that I did in four hours using digits. It typically would have taken me a week to do this.

>> So,

>> I I have one quick question. Is everything we're seeing right now what a a private digits user would also see? Like if someone just went and bought like, you know, rand random plumber guy. Um, if he bought digits, is he doing this sort of stuff too? Are these this is specifically an accounting tool and view?

>> Yes and no. Um, there are it it basically depends on if they're using it independent of an accountant or if they have an accountant. So like if this is your client, they have limitations in what they can and can't do within the product. Like if they're your client, we won't surface the low confidence transactions to them. We'll only surface them to you, just as an example.

>> But if a business owner or a plumber comes and signs in, their use case is like, cool, you're the one who's reviewing and like supervising the AI, if you will.

>> Um, and so then we would surface them to them. Now, uh, that lowers the barrier to entry for folks, but at the end of the day, like we all know that accountants are still going to be needed to be able to review a bunch of these things. And so, a lot of what we're going to be building over time is connecting like a business owner who's like, "Hey, I need help." We're going to connect you to an accounting firm that's trained in digits and knows how to use it, and they can kind of like take over and like edit things to their extent to that extent from there as well.

>> Okay. Um, what what what else in here?

>> Yeah. And so as we go, that's kind of like one of the core use cases. But as we come into the ledger itself, um, this is where here's all the pieces on the left side that you can go through and click around. Very easy to navigate all the above. You can click through different months and things like that. But just to show you a little bit of how this AI works, you can also add new transactions here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bulk import some transactions that I already have. So let's say they started using a new bank account. So, I'm going to make this a bank account. Or actually, we're going to do make a new area. Let's say they just started using a Brex account. I'll make this a bank account. We're going to drag in a bunch of transactions. Oops, not yet. I'll hit create. And now we're going to drag in a bunch of transactions. So, I'm going to drag these in. And I have a CSV with a bunch of transactions that I'm dragging in. And I'll show you a way we can get these CSVs easily back in the cleanup use case. This is all correct. Um, but we'll try and automatically pull this from the CSV for the upload. And I'm going to hit import. And it says at the bottom we're importing 101 transactions. And these are back in May. So if I click back to May, you can see all these transactions it's bringing in. Um, and right now everything's italicized because the AI is actively working on it.

>> Oh, and in this world, I'm going to give this a couple minutes. We're going to come back to this. But while I do this, I'll go back to that um cleanup use case that we talked about before where you might not have CSVs. You might just have bank statements and you're like, well, how do I extract this to a CSV? Well, we've actually built that directly into our documents vaults and documents repository within digits.

>> Wow.

>> So, in this world, you can just drag and drop a bank statement in here and you can export it to CSV. And so you could bring in all those bank statements, export it to CSV, and then you just go over to the ledger and import it through this transaction list, and it's going to automatically bring everything in and do the cleanup based on the chart of accounts that's in digits,

>> but eventually we're going to want to like connect the bank account, right? So that's correct. Exactly. And that kind of gets to a little bit of an onboarding piece, which is like, hey, I have a current client who's on QuickBooks. what would it look like to basically migrate them over to this ledger and what does that look like and we have a full API connection into QuickBooks. So what that looks like is you come in and you connect QuickBooks and we'll ask you basically what's your cut over date? We'll basic we'll say hello uh when's the last time you closed the books on this client. Let's say it's May or April. You choose that date and then everything from that date moving forward will pull from the real-time bank accounts and the connections that you pull. And the nice thing is when you're coming over from QuickBooks, we'll kind of have some like pre-training if you will um of knowing how you historically have done the books for that client. And so that's more of a determination that you will have to choose for any given client because you might say like, "Hey, I just signed these folks in their QuickBooks as a dumpster fire." So bringing them over, I don't want to train the AI on bad bookkeeping from their last bookkeeper. I'm just going to start fresh. And then you just go get the bank account connections, see how much history it pulls in, and you go get the PDFs to upload via CSV. Um, after that, if you're, you know, wanting to start fresh,

>> right? Right.

>> But you can already see, so I mean, I did, I actually wasn't looking at the clock. I probably should have. It's been what, two, three minutes, Kate?

>> Probably two. Yeah.

>> So now that was a 100 transactions. And you can see that automatically it pulled in the vendors, it pulled in the logos, it pulled in memo lines, and it automatically booked them where the AI thinks it should go. And that was for all 100 of those transactions. And all of this is clickable, changeable, all the above. So let's say that I want to let me change this to like um last 12 months. And again, notice how fast everything is navigating. That's part of our database architecture. It's not getting bogged down on all of this. But if I wanted to filter based on like to double check. Let's do like you do amount or party. Let's do Apple and just be like, "Hey, I just want to make sure after it's done all this if it's like if something needs to go in a fixed asset or not." And so I put all these in computer expense, but let's say we're like, "Hey, I want to put these into the fixed asset schedule." You can just bulk update all of these to fixed assets and put it right there. And when you make the change, it'll automatically move them into the category. And this is something accountants have loved of digits is the ability to bulk make changes because that's generally challenging in some of the legacy softwares to do. And I'm not going to make that change here because I um but ultimately like you can go through and change all of these things. You could also be like, "Hey, this was a $3,000 expense. Oops. I want to verify whether or not this is um a fixed asset." And what you'll see is that everything within digits is fully commentable.

>> Okay? And so what you can do is atmention your client, my client, and ask them like, "Is this a computer? Can you upload their seat?" And you'll see there's an attachment section above that the client will get a ping into their inbox and it'll say, "Hey, Kate needs something from you." They'll see the question that you asked and what your needs are. They'll answer directly within their inbox, just like an email inbox. and they can attach the receipt. That receipt will go directly onto the attachment of this transaction and you'll have the answer to their question of of what ultimately it is.

>> Um,

>> what what kind of inbox like like are they having to log on to digits like daily to get this or how are the notifications coming?

>> It would be through email. Um, so they would get an email. The inbox is mobile friendly. So if they get an email that says like, "Hey Kate has a question for you." Let's say it's about this this calm transaction and it says Kate needs to know this answer or whatever it may be. They can click in and answer directly right in the comment. Um, and then you get that answer. So basically like they get an email, click the button, opens up on their phone. It all works through magic link. So it like confirms that who they are easily and then they answer and move on. they also could just log in and see it and answer that way as well because ultimately what we found is like to really truly adopt these AI technologies you do need to lean in from a client experience perspective as well

>> because ultimately like the deliverable of what has been from accounting firms for a really long time has just been like hey end of month here's your report but even when we focused on reporting a bunch in the past only like 15% of clients actually end up reading the black and white PDFs because they're like I don't understand these but what we found is when and I'll show you digits reports later. It's a part of digits that folks might be a little bit more familiar with. We found that over 70% of downstream clients actually look at and engage with those reports because they're much more interactive and they can answer those those questions. And so if you bake your workflow into like, hey, all of your questions are either going to be on transactions here, they're going to be in your inbox, they're going to be in your reports, it makes their flow more within the ledger so they can kind of like have examples. But we've structured in a way that they're not going to be able to edit things to the extent that you that it would be problematic for you.

>> Right. Right. Right.

>> Yeah. And you can also quickly see an activity log on every transaction or vendor that shows like let's say they did change something, it would show exactly what they changed right here. And you can go like either switch it back or whatever may be too.

>> Got it. Um, for those folks listening live, just give us a thumbs up in the chat or on YouTube if you're listening later. Um, if you have more questions, even listening later, which most people will watch this later, you can ask them in the comments and we'll make sure I'll fetch the answer or get Rob to come answer. Um, Jo can answer stuff in the in the comments right now. Those watching live, um, are y'all feeling like this is adoptable? Um, are you wanting to ask Rob any hard questions? Go for it. I will I will ask the hard questions. Um, I guess one of the things I'm like I don't want a client being pinged every time I ask a question on the transaction. Is there like a bulk ask or

>> Yeah, we are actively working on uh it it should be live in the next like month and a half.

>> Uh I don't want the product team to come after me um on that or someone a month and a half from now watching this video and being like that's not live yet. Uh but like

>> y you'll know that that's a problem. Yeah, your nearer term roadmap. What this turns into is a bulk ask questions even within the ledger. And so if you're within the ledger, you come in here and you're like, let's say you just need to ask questions on all of these like, hey, is this a new bank account you added or whatever it may be, there will be instead of like a move to icon or like matching icon, there'd be a comment icon and you can just bulk ask and then it'll send a bulk email like, "Hey, there's 10 questions for you. Come answer them kind of thing."

>> Okay. Um, but let's say that everything got into the ledger. I've gone through and done some like general checks that everything's in there. All the above. We've seen some of the magic that can happen with like how quickly the AI works and how it matches. I did want to call out like we do have, you know, kind of our own chart of accounts. You can go and edit these. If you come over from QuickBooks, it'll automatically mirror the chart of accounts you have in QuickBooks. um if not if you're starting fresh, we'll give you kind of digits default chart of accounts. But then you can fully edit these, add parents, you know, all the above um within there as well.

>> But let's say that everything is in here and we're ready to move on to the next step. I'm not going to go spend a lot of time in reconciliations right now because it's a in the very short term going to have be a fundamentally different experience. But I just want to I'll call out what the new experience will be and that this exists basically right now. But um broadly what we want reconciliations to be is a much simpler process than what exists now. So right now we would basically show you everything that you need to reconcile. You can start those uh those uh reconciliations directly in here. But what this is going to turn into soon is that let's say you use Mercury as your bank. Digits will automatically pull all of the monthly bank statements into your repository automatically from the bank so that you don't need to go gather them yourself. And then what it'll do is just put them into your reconciliations and automatically do the reconciliation for you. And then all you would need to do is come in and double check if there's a green check mark here or if it's yellow. And it will also proactively flag into your inbox if something is off.

>> Okay.

>> And so that's what reconciliations is ultimately going to we're we're you know it'll be there's still a little bit more time until that's fully in the in the live, but our team is actively working on kind of like that feature and functionality for reconciliation. So, I would love for this group and the folks who watch, I think it's likely going to be released by the time a lot of people are looking at this more asynchronously and so would love obviously feedback from folks uh real time.

>> Well, I I know I I still we probably are going to go to reports is what I'm guessing, but I just in my mind I'm I'm thinking about also how exciting it would be to be an accounting pro like early adopter of this. Um, and

>> it's like there's not going to be a ton of people ringing y'all's bell yet, you know, and so it's like, hey, build this. Hey, this isn't I don't I don't like the way this works.

>> Um,

>> I just know how the world works. And that's just that's just going to be natural. And so the those those of those pe y'all are going to be so grateful and treat so well these early accountant users. um thousand%

>> like and it's it's you just to have your mark on building, you know, your fingerprints kind of on a new a new technology and um knowing how hard they're working and we're the real users like we're the one that's going to help them make this. I mean, Yay had product team embedded in but like there there's a lot of different ways to do this and so I I just think that would be very very neat. So I I guess like this concept of like communication with accountants and the are you the accountant like contact or is there an accountant team that's different than like the user support team?

>> Yeah, we actually have uh a whole system for our for our partner program. Okay. That uh we referenced at the beginning of the call, but if you use the link the digit.com/bsh, it'll bring you to our partner page. And when you sign up for that, you'll actually get to meet directly. will give you the option to have a call with us if you want to meet with the team directly if you have questions but it'll also give you the opportunity to just like hey I don't want to do a call or I just want to sign in and you can go kind of get access to digits but the benefit of doing the call is we kind of have a whole program set up where we are enabling firms with like an entire enablement team of CPAs that you work with and they can they've all done closes on digits like they were a part of that product management or that product or that was helping build and now they're helping helping firms migrate over and get trained up and learn how to use digits. And so we want to obviously have as many firms as possible like understanding all the ins and outs of this, what it means for your firm. And uh we're really like leaning in. So from a feedback perspective, we also like are constantly reviewing the feedback that come from those calls with the product team around stuff that like, hey, this is behaving weird or I would like this to do this instead of that or this button should be in a different place. all that kind of stuff is the types of things where it's like I I would hesitate to say no feedback is too small but like generally that's right because like there is a lot of nuance in accounting and we want to be able to kind of like speak to those things appropriately and fix stuff if it's in an odd place

>> right but I I'll say you know if y'all become worth one gajillion dollars and like like there there will be a time where that ch where that will change where someone's little feedback cannot and and that's just you're you'll be retired I'll be retired I don't know but but Now it's not now. Now it is it is hands-on. It is answers quickly. It is like there y'all y'all are in this stage where like you're kind of counting on us and counting on our success. Um, yeah and

>> and we want to grow together like and like how can we enable I mean what you talked about earlier resonated so deeply which was how do we build like firms that are specialized on digits and that's actually what we've seen with a couple of our early partners. So like we partner closely with uh this Matt Gardner is the uh owner and CEO of Highline and they're a you know more of a digital forward accounting firm and we've partnered very deeply with them to the point that they've now embedded Digits software as a part of their demo with when they're adding new when they're bringing on new clients and in that world their close rate has gone up on those clients just because they've put in like an easier to use software. Yeah,

>> within all of this. And so, yeah,

>> I'll I'll say from my experience, I mean, and like when I'm when I'm doing bookkeeping side hustle stuff, I'm I'm wearing this particular hat of mine. I have a real firm and I made the decision four years ago to niche in Fresh Books, and it has been so exciting. Um, and I I consider myself a non-traditional accountant. I never worked an accounting job. I was a military spouse who

had an MBA, who did corporate finance, had some babies, had some heartbreak with having to quit jobs that I didn't want to quit because of who I chose to marry. And so I was like self-taught. I want to make some money for my family, right? And like I did fine, but it was whenever I decided to niche in a non-traditional GL that like things got really interesting and like my unique skills like I I I understand the debit and credits like okay, fine, whatever. Yeah. like the it's the other stuff that I bring to the table.

Um, you know, I YouTube about it. Um, all like I feel like my social media posts are different than everybody else's. Um, like it's just like it's just so easy and like all my marketing is inbound. And when I think about the type of firm I'm trying to build, I know that y'all would love to have firms that have, you know, 5,000 clients or something, but like >> you can also make a really good living with a handful of clients, y'all. Like a really good living. And absolutely. Um, and so we just need Digits to go get, you know, as long as your sales team is like continuing to sell and I can do funky things to have Digits users find me, find you, find that firm that's niched, there's not going to be a lot of people who are doing this right now. And so it's just like, >> and if you're looking to grow that like what we're calling kind of like an AI native firm in that world by embedding it on kind of like a ledger like this, we would love to lean in with you. No. >> So like how can we help you tell that story to the market and how you differentiate in that way? These are things that like one is product feedback. The other part is like growth partnership, you know, and like how do we work with the community to help folks grow too? >> Do y'all have any like programs like related to that? Like is there are y'all >> that's all kind of like aligned with our partnership program. So, okay, >> at certain like growth vectors, um, and we're still like early stages in a lot of this, but we're already directly partnering through like joint sales materials where it's like we have like nicely formatted PDFs that have like our name and your accounting firm on it and all this kind of stuff so that we can help you kind of like enable the education of your downstream client about what they're going to get when they come in and use digits. Also, PS, their designers are way better than accounting firm homebaked designers. So, like, yes, please. Thank you for helping make a PDF. >> So, like, but all of that, but you're okay. You're calling out all the right things. Like, these are all things that we want to really lean into the community to to help kind of like push forward. So, >> yeah. Yeah. Okay. What are we looking at? Sorry. Back to the demo.

>> No, no, we're good. We're good. This is great. Um, but now we've gone through reconciliations. We've gone through getting everything in the ledger, all the above. All that's been automated. Like we're just logging in for the first time and we're like, I'm going to go do a review because like the AI's kind of like booked a bunch of things and done the reconciliations. Now I'm going into my review >> and I can quickly go poke through and review. Notice how fast all these different versions load. And again, I know I've called this out multiple times, but especially as businesses and your clients scale, legacy software systems don't always handle that scale in the cleanest way. And so um and it sometimes takes a really long time. You not only will it need four clicks to get somewhere, but it also each page page takes seven seconds to load. And so you add that up and it's like well this is a much cleaner way of doing this. And so if I'm going through this review, you can bring in different types of deltas and year-to-date numbers and all the above. You can collapse it if you want to. Um I'm not going to do that. But you can also download um or download financials, sorry, into like a trial balance if you need it for tax purposes or all the above. Just kind of like calling that out if you needed to manipulate it in some other way. But as you come down here, let's say I'm going through and I'm looking at like uh business applications and software like this one up 2,000%. What happened? Um as you hover, we're actually just going to tell you what happened. and it's because uh you had a $3,000 increase with Postman is like the main one. And if you want to verify that, you just click on top vendors and top transactions and you can see which vendor drove those changes. You can also click into any category. And again, notice how fast all this this loads, but you can quickly scroll through and see every transaction. And there's an edit mode if you want to change something or edit it directly from this view. You can. And you can also comment on vendors, on customers, but also on categories. you might see like, hey, ask a question about a specific category or whatever it may be directly within here as well. Um, and so that review is just supercharged because for any given month, we have these insights at the very top where we'll call out to you the high level expense and revenue things. We also enable that review to make sure like maybe you have a clearing account that needs to be cleared constantly and you see that it isn't cleared. Like dive into that and see what's going on in there. All the above. Um, and as a part of this review, you may also want to just like go through and check out like, okay, were there I'm going to make this uh this year just because it makes the storytelling a bit better here. But, um, I'm going to go through and review like for this month, were there any new vendors? Were any vendors that were booked to different categories. So when you click on new vendors, you can quickly start to see like and this is where the AI like the supervision if you will on top of the AI comes in where you can do this on the ledger you could do this in vendors. This is all kind of like up to you on where you want to do your re review. But if I'm looking at my new vendors I think the biggest worry is like hey a new vendor comes in that it's got not going to know about and it needs my expertise. This is where it's still going to try and book it unless it has low confidence. You can come in and see like oh Asana okay it's in business and software that's where it should be Canva it's in business and software that's where it should be but let's say we open digital ocean this might not be business applications and software this might be something different and so if I want to edit that I just click and I change this to whatever I want it to be let's say it's your facilities expense I can change it to facilities and just apply it to those two and it'll automatically change those over to facilities and so this is where that supervision almost comes additionally with like multiple categories whereas like gusto and payroll it probably makes sense that this is booked to multiple categories and so that can be in effect ignored but calm like this probably doesn't make a lot of sense that like one is in memberships and dues and one is in these other pieces and so maybe I just want to quickly change this or I want to change the other ones to memberships and dues and so all of that can quickly kind of be handled in here and done for review. Um, this is still early stages being built out, but this vendors tab also has a category or a taxes section that lets you keep track of. We will automatically use agents on the back end to try and we haven't built this into our demo experience, but we will do our best to prefill if something is a partnership, corporation, sole proprietorship, all the above, and flag if it needs a 1099 or not. Um, this will evolve over time. Right now, it's more of just like a management, but it'll show you, hey, this vendor has over $600 or not. Obviously, like they still, if you paid on a credit card, they still might not need a $1099, but we give you the ability to track those statuses in here. Um, and eventually you'll be able to use like bulk commenting to say like, "Hey, I need W9's for all these vendors. Can you upload them into your digits inbox?" And boom, it's done. >> Right. Right. >> So, that's some exciting stuff.

So, I I'm thinking about that URL. the digits.combsh would be the best place to jump on with someone on your team because probably when I when I think about like I mean I could watch a bunch of YouTube videos myself or I could just say can I have a 30-minute meeting and tell you about my specific company and these are my actual clients not my theoretical clients can we move them which of these should I move first and like get y'all's coaching because right now y'all have >> the people who are ready to help people um so after >> like >> I I'm curious curious about sub other other support that you have for accountants, but maybe actually you're trying to show me like a year-end report. Is that what you're that >> Yeah, I was just going to kind of wrap up. There's also a couple other pieces in bills and invoices I can show off quickly, too. But um >> broadly, like you might have a year-end deliverable where or or even just a monthly deliverable. It doesn't mean it should go away just because digits dashboards exist. But again, up to you on how you want to build your client experience. But you can come in. I I actually don't want to run a yearly report. I want to run it for this month um for September. So, I'm just going to do that and run this and it's going to automatically pull in. You can change the different, you know, top section. You can customize it. You can bring in your firm logo. You can bring in the company logo if you want to. But then what we found here, and this is kind of what I mean by like leaning in to the software from a communications perspective, is what we found is like you added an executive summary, but then you can also say like, hey, I noticed you added a new bank account. I would can you add kind of like add it to digits on your end. So like manage the bank feed. So like add that bank to digits, but also can you upload these bank statements for me because I need to validate some things. And what you can do is in that edit box, you just bring over that file drop zone and all they would need to do is drop the file directly in here and it goes directly into the vault. >> And so you can very easily add these pieces in um or add your own commentary at the top. Um but at the same time you can all of these are editable in the same way the other stuff is, but you can bring in your uh profit and loss. We have a bunch of toggable pieces if you want to bring in a trend line or show a monthly breakdown. Um, I don't want to talk about the speed again, but notice how fast all these things come in and you can create it. Um, month over months, uh, percentage of totals year-over-year. All this is easy to kind of like bop in and out on and off the report depending on the story that you want to tell. And the nice thing here is two things. you might be reviewing this and if you think that this insight that Digits created is interesting and this was actually feedback directly I'll I'll call him out because he's awesome. This was uh feedback that Judah at Fireside Bookkeeping um gave us. This was a long time ago now. But um this add to executive summary button where if you see like a cool insight, you're like, "Oh, my client would care about this." You click add to executive summary and it immediately adds it up to the top and you can move it around in different places and and all the above. That's really genius because when you were hovering over those cards, I thought, I'm not gonna be able to give that card to a client. Uh, but that solved that problem. In my mind, I was thinking the only way to have all these little hovers show like the ones that I want them to see would be like to record myself like talking about it maybe. But this is a solve for that. >> The other way you can do it is use this little comment button. >> And so you can basically say like, "Hey client, pay attention to this." >> Um, and then that'll leave that comment. And when you publish the draft, because every like your client won't see this because it's still a draft. You're in creating it. When you publish it, it'll publish into the client's dashboard and they'll be able to come see it and interact with it. So, you can leave commentary here. You can leave like questions for needs like, hey, I need a bank statement from this or I need this or that. And they can come bring those things in. Um, all the above. But this gives you a deeply interactive deliverable that your client can kind of like dive in, try and answer their own questions. um all the above that like you can all and then the other nice thing is we give you an activity log. This activity log will tell you when or if your client opened the report. So at that point you can call them out and they'll be like, "Oh, I already looked at it. I have no questions." You're like, "No, you didn't." Um and so, uh yeah, just some nice little features there. Just to round things out, I want to be cognizant of time, too. We do have kind of like >> our intent is to basically allow you to bring over any client. And that means that like you might have clients that are using a legacy software's bill pay or invoicing system or whatever may be. Um and so we actually have built-in bill pay in invoicing directly into digits. And so if you have a bill and we'll just like drag in um this bill here and this was actually an invoice that I created through digits invoicing. But we're going to retrieve those details. You click into it. We're using what's called a layout language model to bring these in. So you don't need to like train a template or anything. We've actually already trained on the extraction of all the information including line items. So you can split out line items really easily and quickly. >> Um this then will extract all the information, show you where it's pulling from, including invoice dates and due dates. And you can add approvers. This is only single approvers. So if you need something like multi-approver flows, we do we have a very close relationship with bill.com and we integrate closely with them. And so in that world, you could go use bill.com and then have multi-approver flows as well. But the nice thing about this is when you come in and you're choosing you will extract the remittance information if it's there. You can pay by check bank transfer aes um or let the client choose which is what digits pay is like how they want to be paid. Um and then pretty soon we'll be building in like the ability to pay with a a credit card and things like that into all of this as well. Um but this will m mark if we think something's a duplicate. It'll mark if it's overdue. All the above. But it'll basically move through this conbon board as it gets paid. And the nice thing is all of the accounting will get done on the back end as it moves through the comment all the conbon board. And so when it's added in or it's been approved or waiting for payment, it's going to make the ledger adjustments appropriately so that it all gets kind of like booked in the right way. >> And the same goes for uh invoices as well. um where you can come in. I'll just show kind of like an invoice that's been sent, but you can come in specify the invoices. This gets sent and then they can either pay through digits or they can like pay through whatever means and you can just mark it as paid if they paid somewhere else and it'll match to the bank account where it got paid from. >> Y'all use someone else's Rails for payments like is it Stripe behind the scenes or what? We've built our I mean every every tech company has to use someone else's Rails, but we've partnered very deeply with um an underlying banking partner. >> Okay. Not Stripe, but yeah. >> Okay.

Um, I'm watching the time too and I want to I have we have definitely have a question in the in the chat. So, >> is there any last thing you want to demo? Otherwise, I'm just going to say people need to book a call with your team. Digits.combs bsh is going to be the best way to do that, y'all. So, they know where y'all came from. Any last thing? >> I think that that's the last of the demo. So, we could probably stop the screen share and go back to our our big our big faces.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so my uh I think you kind So, so is digits selling to businesses? Are they selling is like are y'all making a fundamental shift in that you're accountants need to be selling digits for y'all? Now, what's the story there? I think I would answer that in that it genuinely has to be a mix of both, but our core focus is with accounting firms. Um, but the key thing is that we want to help accounting firms, especially those that are leaning into digits, build their business. >> And in order to do that, we want to be able to refer business owners to those accounting firms appropriately. So if we have an accounting or a business owner that comes in and starts using digits on their own and they hit the, you know, the barriers of their knowledge, we want to be able to connect them to the people that we're actively partnering with. And so in that world, we haven't built like a directory yet, but like that's kind of the mechanism that we want to build, a world we want to build towards so that we can lean into the folks that are that they are leaning into digits >> and kind of like help build both sides of that marketplace, if you will.

>> Okay. Um, one other question I had was you use the word autonomous at the beginning and I think autonomous like is like hands off. Um, and in my mind it's like I don't want you going around telling people telling businesses that their bookkeeping is autonomous. I want I want them to need a bookkeeper. And so when you said that word, I just had a moment of pause like is >> is it is this more of this like whole story that I keep hearing about like get your hands out of the books and do the advisory stuff? Um that No, >> it's it's definitely closer to the ladder in this world where the like I guess you would probably otherwise consider it like the compliance work almost. Um those are the areas where automation is going to impact the most >> like we just showed like the automated of like the stuff coming into the bank feed. Now where we are going to continue to um augment how we talk about ourselves is around this like idea of who's supervising the automation if you will. Um and actually I think it was uh was it David might have been David Liry the accounting podcast. says a couple months back they were doing something he said something that's just like resonated that we've like thought about quite a bit on digit side where he's like well let's say it automates 97% I have to do 97% of the work to find the 3% that it didn't do so like it's like what do I do there and so we are very much like thoughtfully thinking about these pieces of how do we enable that like supervision of the work um so that you can like make sure everything gets double checked in the right way that everything's been booked appropriately but no matter what there's time savings here that like you can choose how to use that within your firm. And what we've seen a lot of folks do, we've even seen CFOs who are like, "Cool, I actually want to use digits to like get my bookkeeping 90% of the way there and then I'll do the augmentations and then I can do the advisory on top of that from there." And so we have seen like that be an aspect of what folks do. Our intent is not for automation to be like a scary word. I certainly understand like where there's scrimminess in that. um our mentality is much closer to like how do we enable the accounting firm to take advantage of the automation in the right way and that's ultimately what we want to partner with the industry to be able to do appropriately.

>> All right, I'm cognizant of time so I got one more question and it's a combination of mine and from Bri in the chat. You told us like the ideal accounting firm is someone who leans into technology. My question is is there an ideal business that fits digits? And Bri is specifically asking, she's a construction niche person and so I want to bring that in. I mean, is this >> a challenging niche? There's a lot of need, but there's a lot of complications in there. >> Hope hopefully she's hopefully she's going to make a ton of money and serve a bunch of great businesses. >> Absolutely. I love it. Um, and so you're exactly right, Kate. So like from a from a business perspective it on it like you can do the accounting for any small business uh in the US on digits. So it's not a lack of like is the functionality there can I do journal entries like can I add a stuff all of that core aspect of things exist. The question is is which clients are going to be the most automated and which won't and some of that is going to be dependent on AI or uh API integrations. And so we will have an open API built and launched by the end of this year that are going to enable I think a lot of the stuff you're thinking about Bri like job costing where it's like you're right we don't do job costing directly built into digits right now but I can get feedback from you Bri on which job costing platform you prefer to use and should we go integrate with them via API and then automate kind of like the work within digits from there and so that's the part where it's like there's going to be like home services is probably another good example like we don't integrate with Service Titan right now. So like being able to pull invoices from Service Titan is going to be challenging. Um but we will do that over time. Whereas if you have a client that like uses Gusto, uses Mercury, uses these more like digitally native money movement platforms, they're a great fit. And then the other thing just really quickly I'll note at the end to think about is like one thing I I found and this is like outsider looking in like no judgment. Um is that accountants a lot of times will come to us with like they're like you can automate stuff. here's my most complicated problem. Please automate this. And it's like, well, that's really not how this works. Like, uh, yes, we eventually will be able to automate a bunch of those things, but I would love kind of like the framing for how accountants think about it is like, do you have to do this manual today? Absolutely. There's part some of those workflows that we're going to be able to like augment, especially over time, through your feedback. But the key is to be able to automate a bunch of the things that like feel automated today where it's like yeah I have these rules that I've curated and all this kind of stuff over years but it's like you still have to manage those rules and that kind of sucks. So like how do we augment these workflows in the right way?

>> So >> Rob, I'm going to say thanks. I want to let you go. I'm grateful for the folks who have listened this long. My hope is that some of them have even already bailed and just gone straight to digits.combsh um to get in touch with Rob and his team. That's going to be the best way to to stay in touch with Rob y'all is through that accountant partner platform. Um and we're excited to see what Digits has. Um I'm a believer I I I think there's going to be a lot of people who can make a great living in a in Digits uh Digits firm. Um that might sound like a bit a bit of a leap. So you can also just kind of give it a shot, y'all. Like you don't have to marry it. Just um just take your take ask the accountant advisors. Who's my like here are my 10 thing people I'm considering moving. Who's who are the three that you think I should move? Like get their advice. Lean onto them and that'd be a great way to just kind of keep dipping your toe in. If you're not ready to jump all the way in, but I think there's going to be some excitement for those of you who are willing to jump all the way in. Um it'll be it'll be there'll be some risk involved. There'll be some thrill involved. There'll be some dependent depending upon digits in a major way, but it sounds like they're ready to put put themselves in >> position. We have a ton of people on our end who are excited and ready to chat with you, learn more, and help you uh >> help you come on board. >> You clear you clearly sound like that. So, we're going to wrap up, y'all. We'll be back for another live stream. Make sure you're subscribed to the channel. Adios for now, everyone. Thank you, everyone. Nice to meet you. Bye.