In this video and podcast, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, review Zoho for Firms in their roundup of AI systems for accounting firms. Watch the video, or listen to the audio podcast below (transcript below):
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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
SPEAKERS
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA, Randy Johnston
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Ryan, welcome to the accounting Technology Lab, sponsored by CPA practice advisor. With your hosts, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, welcome
Randy Johnston 00:10
to the accounting Technology Lab. Brian and I are going to talk to you about the way you can use Zoho in your firm. Of course, Zoho practice has been out for about 18 months at this point, but a big breakthrough for the company was getting a 50 state payroll done. And many of you are looking at your alternatives for QuickBooks Desktop and just debating that we’re going to move to QuickBooks Online, or do we have other alternatives? And one of the alternatives you have is certainly Zoho books and we have been proponents of Zoho invoice for quite some time. The ability for your clients to generate invoices for no charge is really a big benefit to you, the practitioner. So Brian, I know you recently returned from the Zoho analyst days, Zoho days, 2025 if you would. And got to hang with a lot of the analysts. And of course, Zoho itself has been around about 29 years this year. What are the key things that you’d like our listeners to know about Zoho inside CPA firms?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 01:20
Well, first off, if you’re looking for Zoho use inside of mid market and enterprises and your clients, that’s the previous episode of this. So so we’re going to focus in here on client accounting services, on managing your firm with Zoho practice, which is like an ERP system for your accounting firm. We’re going to focus on books their client, bookkeeping and accounting tool and invoice. Now, what we’re not going to have time to get into, but we could talk about, would be like, if you worked with homeowners associations, you could certainly use the Zoho subscriptions tool, or you could use, or you, you know, they’ve got a very capable e commerce tool. They’ve got, they’ve got just all kinds of integrations and all kinds of tools to solve every imaginable problem. And so I can’t get all the way into everything in here, but I’m going to try to give you the high points through here. They do have a strong platform. Again, the invoice product is free. So if you have somebody that is a massage therapist, a hairdresser, a, you know, somebody that worked, anybody that works out of a white panel van that does field service, anybody that works out of a service truck that bills at time of, at time of things, you know, your lawn person, any kind of, any kind of provider like that, can use invoice for the low, low price of free, and they can run as many invoices through it as they want. You can then you then have, for the suite, you have a full, General, full GL books thing with multiple global, global localizations of it. Expense, that’s an expense reporting tool. Commerce, that is an E commerce platform. They have a billing platform that is an invoice presentment and settlement tool. They have an inventory management tool. They have 50 state payroll. And normally, 50 state payroll is where empires go to die. It’s like Afghanistan, okay, but they’ve actually licked 50 state payroll pretty quickly, which I thought was pretty impressive. And part of it, I think, is that they use it for their internal employees. So they’ve built it out to solve their problems. And their problems are pretty rough, check out, and then the practice tool to manage this. Now, the idea here is that this is all integrated, extendable, and again, you can, you can link up to all kinds of external things in here. So the decision a lot of you have to make again is, are you going to do best of breed or best of suite? Are you going to pick a suite of applications where some of them are some of them are great and some of them are good, versus Are you going to pick, are you going to try to go out and pick things that everybody says are the, you know, kind of like the buy IBM, I’m going to pay more, but, but then I’m going to have all kinds of nightmares, because not everything may integrate, because IBM may have acquired them. On the other hand, over here, when I look at the best of suite, the approach that we’ve got is, this is all stuff that was built from the outset by the same development group that was designed to make it all integrate with each other. So the again, the integration nightmares you have in best of breed kind of go away when you when you attack this suite. So
Randy Johnston 04:29
Brian, I just can’t see a hexagon without thinking you like that because it’s got all the honey bee looking hexagons. So you’re just naturally attracted to Zo, who’s best to sweet, right? You
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 04:39
found me out Randy. You know, I learned how to mark Queens this last year with paint pins. And, you know, I can’t help but thinking, you know, maybe I need to shake Nathan down. Nathan Rogerson, one of the product managers at Zoho or Val that you and I worked with for years for a bunch of these logos printed out in little bitty. Cons I can put on the to label the queens in my beehives. You know, who knows, but
Randy Johnston 05:04
I am going to pull out a key point here, friends, if you’d use best of breed, you’re almost certainly going to have to have add ons, and the expense of the add ons will mount up over time. So just like there is SaaS exhaustion with streaming services, we have a lot of businesses that have a lot of subscriptions that aren’t paying them off very well, and I am very cautious now to get people started on best of breed approaches, even though that became very popular, because by the time you do the integrations and you pay for all the tools you need, you often wind up paying more than if you’d have just got a all in one suite approach and maybe just use part of the suite. Or maybe, as you said, good or great, maybe a few of the things that you need to use are just okay. They’re just good. But, you know, good may be good enough, so sorry to interrupt your flow there. Brian,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:07
well, no, but, but best of breed, in my mind, is very much like a is very much like a boat or an airplane. Okay? It’s not the cost to buy it, it’s the cost to operate it and integrate it, okay? And so the beauty of Zoho is that you get both, you get great products, and you get, you get out of box integrations and the ability to integrate with outside things. So so it’s really, really has a lot of strategic advantages. Now, as we look at at this, I want you to see that they’re serious about privacy. And they, they, they deal with global privacy on a pretty granular level. And so I just kind of show this to you here, because everything is designed with privacy first. Okay, we have some vendors in the profession that like to take liberties with with your data and your clients data. And with these folks, they are very, very serious about, about keeping your private data private. Again, as we, as we look at this, it’s set up to solve all kinds of different regimes around the world for taxation and for sales tax and everything else. And so it’s again, they’ve got, they’ve got tools and versions for most major world markets now for payroll, they do have 50 state payroll and so they again and E file federal, state and local tax returns automatically encourage you to check this out. You know, if you have an ERP or an application where you need to get into this, the payroll tool and the books tool will actually do some multi client dashboarding inside of, inside of the Zoho practice application. But they also have, you know, if you’re if you’re looking at their their suite of tools, they have all kinds of things for interacting with clients, like when, when I went to Zoho day, they actually use their Zoho work drive tool to deliver all the materials to all of us, analysts. And so that effectively works like an account, like a portal. But then that also integrates with their CRM tool. That also integrates with their with their practice management tool. It also integrates with their email client and their automation tools and even the phone systems. They have a Zoho voice tool that you can use that I looked it up. There’s actually a phone number available in area code 865, East Tennessee, where I live, that connects to Zoho voice. And so what you’ve really got here is a suite that you can customize using low code, no code, to make it do business the way you want to, and you’re not locked into a specific way of approaching problems. That is, that is prescribed by the practice management software. Okay? Okay. So you can set up Client Onboarding to do it your way. Okay. You can set up client resources and accesses and activity logs, and you can do that your way. You can deliver clients to people, things to people, and so forth. And although I don’t think they do, I don’t think they do the the Kba required for for 8879 they do have electronic signature integrated in here. That is, that is acceptable for everything except the 8879 and so it’s very capable platform. And again, it’s included with the Zoho one suite. Okay. Now looking at this, though books is their accounting tool. The key things to see here is it is customizable. It’s scalable. Is user centric. They take compliance and privacy very seriously. It is affordable and accessible. They have the ability to with Soho inventory and some of the other finance tools. You have the ability to manage branches and warehouses. Yes, here are some of their key integrations. So again, if you don’t want to use Zoho work drive, that’s fine. You can use Google Drive, you can use Microsoft OneDrive. You can even use Evernote. And so notice that they also integrate with a wide range of different e commerce platforms. So even if you’re not in retail, but you do want to integrate with things, you can you can connect with this. You can even send text messages out through this with their tool. They have the sure payroll but they also have the Zoho payroll tool, and they integrate with a wide range of different payment providers and financial institutions and so forth. In here, you do have the ability to do wide range of customization across the tools, and it’s accessible from anything. You can even access it from a watch, not that you want to do journal entries on a watch, but that you could if you wanted to. Okay, for those of you that just can’t get enough time on the on the treadmill. Now you can see also that we have, we have tools, again to ingest, ingest documents, using using mobile apps like we would like we would use with Zoho expense or some of the other items like that. We also have the practice tool that again serves as an ERP and will and actually has client request tracking and insights and task tracking and even time tracking in here to work with, it integrated with the document management system, so you can actually go through and and see dashboards like the one you see here on just about everything. These are some so Randy comments here.
Randy Johnston 11:35
You know, just a an overall one. It took Soho a while to get to where their overall practice management dashboard worked properly. And of course, they’ve been building up all these products for quite a while. And I was just reflecting as you were explaining that Brian, the various practice management products out there, you know, which we’ve done technology labs on most of them. And I’m amazed how many of the practice management products have very straightforward deficiencies. And even though you identified earlier that, you know, Zoho sign, it does have a CPA that’s provided by ideology, but it’s not an IRS approved CPA is, is really the fine line there. So you were, you were right in the way that you’re thinking about that. But notice that I believe that many of the client facing things that you need to do, and many of the workflows and things you need to do with your team can be done all inside this platform. And you know, with the arrival of payroll, you know, it’s like one more step. And I do recognize many of you want to outsource payroll, but here, this system has it all in one and I think it’s an unusual approach that is being successfully used by a number of firms, particularly where they have client accounting services and tax emphasis.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 13:17
Yeah. I mean so many practitioners I talked to will will have new staff people come up to him and say, hey, the 90s called they want their practice management system back, you know. And I think that’s that’s very apropos, because a lot of people are working off of legacy tools that were designed around workflows that involved reports printed out on tractor fed paper on dot matrix printers, you know, and that’s, that’s just a, not a good look. Okay, so as we jump into here now, let’s talk a little bit about Zoho payroll again. The idea is to automate the whole system and to take your payroll, payroll data to the cloud. Zoho has been working on payroll in different jurisdictions for for a long time, they’re actually set up now to do payroll in all 50 states, compliant with federal, state and local, including automated tax filing, dedicated employee service, Self Service portals, customized salary components, and again, online salary payments to employees in in just a few clicks. So they handle I, nines, W fours, W twos, 940 ones, 940, fours. In Canada, they handle all the Canadian forms as well with their Canadian Payroll package. You can see that this is the, this just kind of shows you the some of the items here for the Employee Self Service Portal. And again, you can see the again, the the different things as it’s being presented on a mobile device, which is the way a lot of our employees are going to consume that they also have, they also go through, and can do forecasts, and again, advanced analytics and multi currency. So you can see in here we have. Have, again, we have UAE durgam, which is their current, which is the currency they use in the UAE. And you can see that we’re tracking some of these things in durgum, as opposed to in dollars, but we can track them in all different you know, it’s multi currency, multi localization, all kinds of things in here, when you’re trying to get data out of books or into other tools and get it into tax prep. They have a relationship with tally four that you can use to, again, kind of as a tracking tool, or as a, I guess, to do the book, to tax cleanup and and output, to get it into the tax software very easily. We have the practice management solution we talked about earlier in there, that, again, is designed to to accomplish things, not just from a not just from a Time and Billing and accounting perspective, but also from an operational perspective, with workflows and task tracking and so forth. And
Randy Johnston 15:56
Brian, as you’re showing that and this next slide as well, just thinking about the dashboards that so many firms want to build, and with Zoho, many of those dashboards are more sophisticated than we can get with Power BI by the time you’re in Zoho analytics on them, and if you have accounting integrated on the back end with Zoho books, which many of you are using QuickBooks Online, for example, and you have to go through the gyrations of trying to make your practice management talk to your QuickBooks so you can create a dashboard. All that’s automatic inside the platform. I don’t want to make it sound too over the top, stellar, but it’s good. And you know, it’s early in this process, but the graphic old dashboards that you may be looking for or thinking about building in Power BI, they may already be here
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 16:52
and, and I think that’s the thing, is that and they may be there, and you may not have to do much to create them, or you may even be able to use some of the AI features we talked about a couple of podcasts ago to get it to solve the problems or answer the questions that you have about your data. So it’s a very interesting tool. They’ve actually got a bill presentment tool here where you can go through and analyze, analyze things there. The idea, again, is that it’s got a consumer, consumer grade UI. And the consumer grade is actually good here, because it’s one that is easy to use without having any training. Okay? So you can sit down and just go to work on some of these tools, and your clients are going to be able to to work with them very easily. The idea here is that, again, you can also collaborate digitally. You know, one of the number one things that Randy and I’ve seen from the CPA firm survey that we’ve done for years is that the practitioners all want to interact digitally with clients, and as more millennials and Gen Z folks take take significant leadership roles in these organizations, that demand is just going to escalate on both sides of the equation. And so this lets you link those conversations and interactions with the underlying source documents, underlying records in the data, so that you can really resolve things without any confusion. You can also integrate it with with audio, video and screen sharing, you know, with the again, with Zoho tools in here. And again, they’ve got a wide range of different kinds of applications and integrations and things like this in here. You know, the travel expense management is one of the things that they’re actually working on. And they’ve got a number of other things in books that I’m not allowed to talk about, that they’re that they’re rolling out that are going to make it a much more robust tool, in particular for larger clients in the fairly near future. But as you know, just kind of going through here, we’ve talked about, again, portals and other other things like that in here. But at the end of the day, what I would just suggest to you is that this is a worthy tool for a worthy set of tools for managing your practice, and I think they’re definitely worth a look to be sure, in the Zoho one platform, you’ve actually got robotic process automation, you’ve got low code, no code tools. You’ve got, you’ve got an analytics tool, you’ve got all kinds of things that you, you know, an email client, you have a PDF editor in there, for goodness sakes. I mean, you’ve got everything you could ever imagine in here. And so the, the real trick here is for you to decide what you want and how you want to work with your clients and to again, to use these tools and let the AI and the technology do the work for you, so that your practice runs more smoothly
Randy Johnston 19:50
well. And one final parting thought is Zoho has a CPA program that you can find@zoho.com slash. CPA, and it describes many of the things that Brian and I have been talking about with you in this particular podcast. Talks about the platform, about Zoho practice, and how the partner program works. That’s at zoho.com/cpa so we know it’s always a pleasure spend time with you in the accounting Technology Lab, Brian and I will be back to talk about more important topics for you in the very near future. Good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 20:28 Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.
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