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the disruptors
with liz farr
cannabis accounting is not for the faint of heart, says monique swansen, owner of accounting for green, which provides accounting services to cannabis businesses. first, there’s a big inventory component, so “if you’re an accounting professional that does not want to deal in inventory, cannabis is not your space,” swansen says. cannabis inventory is further complicated by federal law, which disallows tax deductions for anything but the cost of goods sold. this means meticulous tracking of all direct costs to get the maximum possible tax deduction. compliance with state laws also requires “documentation for every single movement of inventory or money,” says swansen. banking is also challenging because “no federal banks will bank cannabis.”
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cannabis business owners tend to know less about running a business than many other types of businesses. “so you really have to start that relationship early and really try to talk with those people and understand those people where they’re at so that you can really help them,” swansen recommends. her personal sweet spot is starting to work with cannabis businesses three to six months before they become operational.
swansen’s other business, automated accounting services, provides basic bookkeeping through cfo services. for those wanting to start offering advisory services, swansen suggests first narrowing down the abstract idea of what advisory means to you. “you have to decide what those services are, how you can provide them, and how you’re going to charge for them,” swansen says. without a clear definition of the services you provide, “you’re doing yourself a disservice because you’ll start to do things that are out of your wheelhouse as a firm,” she warns. “and the result will be that you don’t do them well consistently.”
advisory in her firm can range from regular discussions with the business owners to check on progress toward goals to cash flow projections. “it really depends on who you have on your team, and what they’re good at, and what they can do,” or hiring someone with those skills, swansen says.
according to swansen, hiring and retaining good people means firms must have strong core values. you must be “super clear about who you are and what’s important to the firm and make sure that those values are aligned,” she says. swansen says that retaining those people is a “two-way street. you have to be giving as much as you’re taking.”
swansen, who is passionate about supporting women in accounting, was named one of the top 50 women in accounting for 2024 (sponsored by ignition). her advice for women leaders is to “be authentically who you are. do what makes you feel fulfilled, and don’t try to be all things to all people because it will derail you for sure, and lift others up in whatever way that you can.”
swansen predicts that accounting will be more relationship-based in the future. “accountants will have the opportunity to bring more humanity to accounting and finance, and i personally am looking forward to that,” she says. as tech becomes more able to work independently of human input, “it will certainly give us a lot more time to actually reflect on what’s going on from an accounting and finance perspective with these businesses, and to bring a narrative to it, and to really understand what the business owners that we work with want, and to help them achieve that.”
9 key takeaways
- some state and tribal banks, including some credit unions, will bank cannabis, but federal banks will not.
- for any niche specialization, start your research early. network with like-minded people, even if that’s only on social media. attend industry conferences.
- cost accounting can help clients understand which product lines are more profitable, enabling them to make better decisions. is it better to sell more of the more profitable items or to improve on the less profitable ones?
- hiring in a fully virtual firm may require a more complex process, but fully vetting who a candidate is and what they bring to the table is essential.
- at team meetings, encourage everyone to contribute to ensure they feel part of the team. you must be intentional about making everyone feel they’re included, that they’re important, and that their input is valuable.
- the most transformative thing accountants can do is to stop billing by the hour. this small change allows you to be more creative and do many other valuable things.
- stop taking all clients. have a barrier to entry so you make sure each client is a good fit for your firm.
- think about your firm as a business. if we run our firms like businesses, we have more flexibility in the roles we create within them.
- accounting is experiencing many changes due to evolving technology, client expectations, a shifting economy, and a globalized workforce. those who don’t keep up with these changes will be left behind.
more about monique swansen
monique swansen is the award-winning founder and ceo of automated accounting services, a 2024 woodard top 50 accounting firm and accounting for green. as a strategic financial consultant, she helps clients understand current financials, forecast their future, and achieve their financial objectives. a five-time top 100 insightful accountant proadvisor who served on the intuit accountant council and was named one of the 2024 top 50 women in accounting, monique is also an author at firm of the future, cpa practice advisor, and woodard report. she speaks at industry conferences, helping forward-thinking accounting professionals grow their skills and businesses. learn more at www.linkedin.com/in/monique-swansen-aas
transcript
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liz farr
welcome to accounting disruptor conversations. i’m your host. liz farr from 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间, and here i’m talking to owners of firms who are doing things differently than our parents. accountants. my guest today is monique swansen, ceo and founder of automated accounting services and accounting for green. welcome to the show, monique.
monique swansen
thank you so much. liz, very it actually tickles me to be considered a disrupter of the industry.
liz farr
well, yeah, i’ve known you for quite a few years, and i always knew that you’re doing things just a little differently than the firms that i worked at, so i do consider you a disrupter. now, can you tell listeners a little bit about your two firms?
monique swansen
i certainly can. so i have two firms, both of them are accounting services firms or cas firms, or however you consider firms that don’t do tax. so we provide client accounting services, starting with essential bookkeeping right through cfo services, but we don’t do any income tax. so of course, as part of that, we do a little bit of payroll tax, a little bit of sales tax when needed, and that kind of thing, but no income tax. automated accounting services is 15 this month. so that’s a firm that i’ve been running for 15 years, and it is really where i would say our specialty is, is any kind of cost accounting. so we usually, our ideal client typically has some sort of cost component, whether they’re doing project, costing, job costing some kind of manufacturing, with some cost accounting, i feel like that’s where we can really bring some value to those clients. and the other firm automated accounting. i mean accounting for green is cannabis specific, so we service cannabis clients and their ancillary businesses there. and when i started that firm at the end of 2016, i thought it was a good idea to keep my clients in separate entities to insulate and protect all of us from some of the side effects of working with cannabis operators.
liz farr
i see now, what are some of the specific issues around cannabis accounting?
monique swansen
well, the first one is for the most for most licenses. i mean, there are some delivery licenses and some others that don’t have inventory, but for most of my cannabis operators, there’s a big inventory component. so if you’re an accounting professional that does not want to deal in inventory, cannabis is not your space. and to add insult to injury, there our cultivators are, you are. you know, they’re agricultural as well. and so calculating the cost of inventory for agriculture or for growing plants, is even a little more complicated than just tracking inventory. so i would consider that probably the basis of, no matter what happens with legalization, that’s always going to be, you know, something that differentiates it. and then, of course, because it’s not federally legal, there are a bunch of other components to it that make it difficult. certainly there’s high compliance, so there’s needs to be documentation for every single movement of inventory or money. there is, you know, also limited banking. so for typically, the state of massachusetts, where i am, actually has quite a bit of banking. so it really depends on what state you’re in, but most of the banking that is cannabis specific is either tribe owned, state or credit card. so no federally, no federal banks will bank cannabis. so there’s some state chartered banks that will, that will bank cannabis, some of the indian tribe banks will bank cannabis, and some credit unions will do it. typically, all of those banks have secondary insurance products over fdic that will ensure that money, and there’s a lot of compliance around that banking. so that’s also another hurdle to being in the industry. then you add irc, 280 e, which is where the you know, federal government has said, if you’re going to work in state legal cannabis, we’re not going to allow you to deduct any of your expenses that are not related to direct product cost. so all of our cannabis operators pay taxes or federal taxes, not states. most of the states have changed their tune on this, but on their gross profit. so that’s why it’s really important to be doing that costing correctly when you’re working with manufacturing and cultivating, and make sure that those direct costs are probably properly allocated, so that they are getting the right amount of tax deduction because they are paying federal tax on their gross profit, which makes it tax heavy, so we always worry that they’re making enough profit to actually pay their tax and pay off their investors, because that’s another thing. is the journey to getting legal, you know, to getting your license fully operational, depends on the state and what type of license, but it can be up to three or more years before so there’s a heavy investment period before they actually become operational. so that enough complexity. liz,
liz farr
that is pretty complex. you know, i do remember in my hr block days flipping through a copy of the tax code that was on the shelf and coming upon irs code, that code section that was specific to cost of goods sold for illegal products. and i thought, wow, this is kind of terrible. i mean, i mean, on the one hand, they’re acknowledging that there are people making income in ways that are illegal federally, but they’re not making it very easy by allowing normal business deductions.
monique swansen
yeah, i believe that those restrictions were initially put in place to make it so that they could never last. nobody would ever make money at this. but people have, and it continues to happen. so secondarily, they say, okay, great. well, that’s a lot of tax that we can collect. so that’s one of the barriers, i believe, to legalization overall, is that there will be a lot less tax dollars coming in from legal cannabis sales if legalization actually happens.
liz farr
that’s true that, and we know that the powers that be would prefer to collect taxes from people who are already paying.
monique swansen
that’s true. that is a true statement.
liz farr
yes. now, now you’ve been in the cannabis field for a couple of years. now, what advice do you have for firm owner that wants to get into the cannabis industry?
monique swansen
well, again, going back to like, if you don’t want to work with inventory, this is probably not the niche for you. but i would say that i would start my research early and start attending some industry conferences. and i think this goes this advice, actually, pretty much will cover any niche that you’re thinking about going into. is you need to find out where your people are and what they’re doing. and to do that, you need to get, you know, you need to be where they’re at. so you need to join some networking groups. you need to join. you know, if you’re even if you’re on social, you need to get into some of the groups that are specific to whatever you want a niche in so with cannabis, it’s a slow or at least for me. i can only tell you about my journey is that i really started, i started the firm and the end of 2016 and started marketing directly to that niche. had a separate website, and all of that, it was a much slower burn than my other firm. it is much harder, and some of that is the entrepreneurial journey that they go through before they become operational, because they just don’t have the money, but they do need the expertise earlier on. so it’s there’s a sweet spot to getting to work with somebody three to six months or so, at least, if not before then, but before they become operational. so my overall advice is really start your research early. and, you know, get with like minded people. i’m always happy to talk about the industry. so i, you know, i’m always happy to help people, give them advice, let them know what my journey has been like and but it really does mean getting to know the people, and not always, because there are some bigger players in the cannabis space. people who have, we call them msos, multi state operators, where they own multiple licenses in multiple states, and they have, sort of have a franchise, kind of way that they go around it. but a lot of the people that i work with are those smaller, independent operators, and not all of them are businessmen. do you know, much less so than in other businesses, i would say. so you really have to start that relationship and early and really try to talk with those people and understand those people where they’re at, so that you can really help them.
liz farr
that’s that’s very true. now, my only experience when in cannabis accounting came at the very, very end of my time in public accounting, when a large company came into new mexico and invested in some they were going to build some massive greenhouses, like 200 acres of greenhouses with completely automated operations inside, everything robotic inside. and their vision was that at some point in the future, just like there are nail salon kiosks at the front of a walmart, at some point, there will be cannabis kiosks also at walmart, so that that was their vision.
monique swansen
that’s very interesting, very
liz farr
yeah, yeah, yeah, and that was, that was about nine years ago. so and they’re, they’re still, that company is still plugging away. i know that. so it’s yeah, yeah. now your other firm, automated accounting services, mentions fractional cfo services, which you mentioned when you describe them. now, what suggestions do you have for firm owners who want to offer more advisory services, and we hear this all the time. but how do you start this if you haven’t done this before?
monique swansen
so i think that that is different for every firm. so you have to have somebody working in your firm that can be the one who’s going to provide said advisory services, and then you have to know what they are. so i think it becomes a it’s a very abstract idea that you have to narrow down. so you have to decide what those services are, how you can provide them, and how you’re going to charge for them. so it’s, it’s not like any other service that you’re going to provide, in my opinion. so we don’t do we have decided, and i don’t know how you would do all things for all people, but we’ve decided what services we do offer. and those, you know, just like any other, our services are broken down with this is what we do. and some of them buy a package where the cfo portion is is part of it. and sometimes that’s just, you know, sort of unlimited advisory meetings, so where we’ve decided together, what are the things that we’re working on for your business, and how, how are we going to measure movement on that? and we’re going to have a lot of discussions about what you’re doing. sometimes it’s as little as that. sometimes it’s more like, well, we really need cash flow help. okay? we’re going to do a, you know, a 13 week cash flow forecast with you, and we’re going to go through that and refine that, and then, based on the things that you’re trying to understand your cash flow better for, we’re going to then measure, are you making progress on those things? so i can’t do like, i’m not going to do pitch decks. that’s not something that i’m going to do as part of my services. so i think for everybody, it really depends on what who you have on your team, and what they’re good at, and what they can do, and if you don’t have that person on your team, then i think you need to think, you know you need to look at hiring for that so and then, then you have to figure out is the cost worth? what i’m going to charge, but without having clearly defined services, i think you’re doing yourself a disservice, because you’ll start to do things that are out of your wheelhouse as a firm. and the result will be that you don’t do them well, consistently. in my opinion,
liz farr
that’s that’s really good advice to get clear on the services. and, you know, advisory is so broad that it’s almost meaningless. and i like that you really hone in on cost accounting, because that’s something that that really can be a part of advisory, because too often clients really don’t even know how much it costs to make their stuff or to provide their service. so if they know that, then they can figure out if their pricing is appropriate. so that opens up all sorts of avenues.
monique swansen
it does, if you get more specific, like we can look overall right and say, hey, you must have a pricing problem, because your cost to provide, whatever it is that you’re making, or whatever service you’re providing isn’t covering. you know, you’re not making your margins. but with the cost accounting, we can get a little deeper and figure out what service lines are really profitable, which ones are not as profitable, and decide be able to make good decisions about how to go forward. do i sell more of the thing that i’m profitable at, or do i get better at the thing that i’m less profitable at? and how would i go about getting better at it? right?
liz farr
right, right. now, talent has been scarce for a long time. this is not a recent thing. if you look back in the journal of accountancy archives, you can find articles 25 years back that talk about how hard it is to find people now. what are some of the things that you do to attract and retrain, retain the best people.
monique swansen
talent is a hard thing, and i don’t if there’s not one cure all to solve this problem for sure. no. and to add, you know, we’re a virtual firm, so it makes it even more difficult. well, i should say there’s some benefits to being virtual, but it’s it’s harder to go through the hiring process and to really know who you’re hiring completely virtually in the beginning. so our hiring process is, is probably more complex than we’d like it to be, but we feel that in order to really know who the candidate is and what they’re going to bring to us. it’s required. but the things that we offer, i mean, we’re a pretty small firm, 12 people all together, really now, and you know, so we need everybody to be doing their part. we don’t have people here. they can’t be doing their part. everybody’s got to be, you know, doing what they’re they’re hired to do. so being a virtual firm, we do still have some flexibility in time. so all of our team at this point are full time, so they’re all expected to work a full time schedule, but they have some flexibility about what part of their day. you know that they can be available to clients and and what part of the day they can be available to other team members. so they have some flexibility there. and we try to offer the best benefits that we can and be competitive again, one of the probably perks about being virtual is that we can hire people. so i’m in massachusetts, which the cost of living where i live is pretty high, not, you know, i would say probably top five in the country where i am and but i can hire people in other parts of the country that the cost of living is a little bit less expensive for them. so, you know, they can make a decent living doing what they do for us, but it’s, you know, we’ve tried some offshoring right now. we’re pivoting away from that a little bit. we’ve decided to create some new positioning with some assistance internally. so it’s, it’s definitely difficult. i think that you have to, you have to have really good core values. you have to be clear about what you want as a firm. you have to be clear about what you want from your people, so that you’re doing good hiring in the in the beginning, and then you have to retain them. so in order to do that, you have to, you know, it’s a two way street. you have to be giving as much as you’re taking. i feel,
liz farr
i like that emphasis on giving as well as taking. now, what are, what are some of the ways that you give to your people?
monique swansen
well, like i said, we try to give them the best benefits that we can. we try to be very flexible with their time and give them grace when they need it. we like to we have, you know, team meetings where we have everybody contribute and be part of which we like to make everybody feel part of the team as much as we possibly can. and like i said, in a virtual environment, i feel like that’s a bigger job. there’s a there is you have to be very intentional about it to make everybody feel like they’re inclusive. you know, they’re included, that they’re important, that they have as much they can weigh in just as much as anybody else on things that concern them. so that’s how we approach it. but it is really in the beginning, i think it’s being super clear about who you are and what’s important to the firm and make sure that those values are aligned. i think that’s how you retain team,
liz farr
yes, yes, and not just picking up the warm body who’s done some bookkeeping in the past,
monique swansen
right? well, that term is so loose, that term is so hard. bookkeeping is so hard because it’s so important. and then people who think who pay bills think they’re bookkeepers. so writing a check doesn’t mean that you can do bookkeeping, in my opinion,
liz farr
no, no, it doesn’t. and i, in my time in public accounting, i came across the work of really gifted and just amazing, self educated bookkeepers who were just astoundingly detailed and disciplined and punctual and responsive and others who had apparently just bought a copy of quickbooks and then hung out a shingle, who were kind of dangerous in their lack of knowledge.
monique swansen
it’s true. there’s not a way, there’s a huge disparity and in the work ethic and the work that they produce, and then also, there’s no, you know, we, i mean, obviously we do test we do test them. so people that we on, but, but anybody can, say that their book a bookkeeper, but unless they’ve got a bookkeeping certification, or they’ve got the experience in places where you trust that they would have had to, you know, be effective, it’s hard to tell.
liz farr
yes, it really is. now you said that you’re not really a disrupter, but you were named one of the top 50 women in accounting for 2024 congratulations, so that that shows me right there, that you are on the leading edge of the future. so congratulations. there now. what advice do you? yeah, yeah. now. now, what advice do you have for accountants, and especially women in accounting who want to be better as leaders?
monique swansen
um, so that that award means a lot to me personally, because i’m very passionate about supporting women in the accounting industry and women in business. and, you know, overall, i try to support women in every way that i possibly can and uplift them so that that would be my advice. my advice was, be authentically who you are. do what makes you feel fulfilled, and don’t try to be all things to all people, because it will derail you for sure, and lift others up in whatever way that you can. i i’m very, very, i mean, you know, i’ve been very lucky this year, we the firm was named top 50 cast firms by woodard. i was named as top 100 pro advisor again this year. so, but this one, the top 50 women in accounting, means the most to me, and really it’s because i’m so very, very, very passionate about supporting women, specifically in our industry, but in business across i mean, i even have some quotas for myself to make sure that i’m support, that the new clients that we bring on, that i’m supporting women owned businesses. and yeah, it’s it’s been really important to me throughout the years. i’ve been doing this for a long time. i’m, i’m not a newcomer. so, you know, things have gotten better, but there’s room for improvement overall
liz farr
there. there definitely is, and i’m really glad that that my the days i’m, i’m hoping that the early days of my time in public accounting are at an end when the male founders were felt perfectly comfortable making inappropriate comments to the women on staff in the office in public. so i’m hoping that those days are long past
monique swansen
that and comments, or, i don’t even know if it’s comments, but just making you feel less than in any room at any time, just was, you know, it’s getting better. and my, if i have any thing to say about it, will get better and better, because it’s really important that, i mean, if you look around in in our industry and networking groups, and there’s a lot of women, so we should have a very strong voice. and what happens next?
liz farr
absolutely now we hear a lot about what accountants should do, but often the real transformation comes when accountants stop doing something. so what should accountants stop doing immediately?
monique swansen
they should stop billing by the hour. i could go into other things, but really that’s and you know, that’s the biggest thing i’ve been doing, value slash fixed pricing since 2014 so if i can do it, everybody else can do it as well. i mean, really, remember those 15 minutes you had to justify on those timesheets? liz,
liz farr
oh yes, oh yes, yeah. and i think, i think for me, it was sometimes in six minute increments, or yeah, i just guessed, really honestly, which is what really everybody ultimately does. because even if you have the little timer in your in your menu bar to start timing a task, how many times did i forget to turn it off when the phone rang or to turn it back on when i turned it off,
monique swansen
right? and then, i mean, yeah, it’s just a waste of mind space. we can be way more creative, and we can price the work in a meaningful way without having to do that. so i think that that’s the biggest thing that comes to mind. what do we stop doing? stop billing by the hour. that just opens us up to do a whole bunch of other things. then we can start talking about, what can you what can we do? we there’s lots of things we can do if we stop doing something like billing by the hour,
liz farr
absolutely and you know, and besides the mental space of just trying to keep track of the time, it also puts a ceiling on your possible earnings,
monique swansen
and i think it devalues what you’re doing, you know, i mean, think, i mean you you could be doing a low end task for multiple hours. so you could be doing a high end task for 15 minutes. the high end task is that more valuable?
liz farr
yes, yes. and technology, yeah, yeah. and with technology, something that used to take us two hours to do, and something that you know would take most people two hours to do, you know, billing by the hour becomes meaningless when you introduce automations that get the same thing done in two minutes. so
monique swansen
how do you deal those hours? and you can start to reflect on the results of the work that was just done
liz farr
exactly now you’re way ahead. i. yeah,
monique swansen
what’s meaningful?
liz farr
yes, you have the bandwidth to do something that’s more valuable for the client, instead of that, that manual thing that just took two minutes,
monique swansen
that’s right,
liz farr
yes.
monique swansen
do you have other ideas? what else should we stop doing?
liz farr
um, well, i think that we should stop accepting the status quo for the way that accounting firms have operated. one thing that we should stop doing is having just the the hierarchy of positions in a firm. you know, you come in as staff, and then you get promoted to a senior, and then supervisor, and then manager, and then partner. well, right, what do those job titles mean? and what if you have people in your firm who are really good at one function, you know, maybe they are just amazing at onboarding new clients. do you really want to promote them out of that zone of genius and into something that they don’t like? or can we create a job title in a position that lets them do that and maybe even create a whole area, a whole focus area around onboarding and helping clients with new technology and implementing technology. you know, why can’t we do something like that?
monique swansen
well, the answer is, we can, but we first have to stop thinking of firms as just firms, but as actual businesses. if we’ve run them more like regular businesses, then we have a lot more flexibility, i think, than this standard tree of to partner level, you know. so i think, i think that’s where, that’s probably a block that’s not the answer to the question, you know, but that that that is definitely, i think that firms should be open to thinking of themselves as businesses and not just as firms, and then that opens up a whole bunch of opportunity to have specialization groups, and, like you just said, areas of genius that we could tap into,
liz farr
yes, yeah. and the other thing that treating your firm as a business does for you is that it helps you to think about whether a client is really a good fit for your business, or whether it is time to let go of a relationship that’s no longer serving anyone.
monique swansen
agreed. so there’s another thing we should stop. we should stop taking on all clients. we should definitely have a barrier to entry where we’ve made sure that they’re a fit for our firm. i agree with that.
liz farr
yeah, yeah. i can’t tell you how many times the partners would come to me and say, oh, we just brought on a new client. they’re in this new industry. they are going to be doing oil and gas exploration. yay. and we go, huh, we don’t know anything about gas and oil taxation or accounting. we don’t know anything about this industry. so are we really the best ones for this project?
monique swansen
yeah, and not without a plan. i mean, maybe you want to break into that, and you’ve done that research that i’ve talked about, and you you’ve spent some time with the people who know the things about that industry, but not without a plan. you don’t want you know what i mean, yeah. then, then you’re working from behind the whole time
liz farr
to try, yeah, yeah. that’s very much what i felt like i was doing now. what are the blocks that keep accountants from changing. i mean, you know, you and i, we go to the conferences, we read the newsletters, we follow the people, so we know all the things that accounting firm leaders ought to be doing, but yet we’re still banging our head against the wall. what? what is stopping them from changing?
monique swansen
well, it’s the inability or the unwillingness to adapt, to adapt to evolving technology, client expectations, economic shifts and workforce globalization. i you know, i mean, all of these things are happening. and nobody, not nobody, i shouldn’t say nobody, because you, you and i do know the people who are looking very forward looking and are looking at these things. but there are lots of, you know, there are lots of people in the accounting industry that you know are just going day by day, and are not looking forward to the shifts that are happening, and probably they’re going to get left behind. so i don’t know what the i mean. i guess that’s really what i would say. it’s either the inability or the unwillingness to adapt?
liz farr
yeah, i think some of it is buried in in fear that these adapting to these changes means that suddenly you are no longer operating in your zone of genius, where you have been really good for some time. so i think it’s the fear that now i have to move into some unfamiliar territory.
monique swansen
i can see that, and probably people who have spent, you know, their careers for a long time doing the same things that are now becoming or may become irrelevant, that is a problem. so hopefully, we’re going to attract more people in the industry who want to continually grow and change and adapt. maybe that’s not the personality type that accounting has always, you know, sort of attracted, but i’m hoping it for the future that will attract more folks like that.
liz farr
i think that we’re beginning to be on that path, you know, especially with the smaller firms, and technology has really enabled that, because the barrier to entry has become so much lower than when i was starting out in accounting in the early 2000s when you know you had to buy a bunch of you had to buy a server, and you had to buy a bunch of computers, and the software licenses were incredibly expensive,
monique swansen
and you had to lease all that office space, right? oh, yeah. so that’s also something, you know, that i don’t have to do running a virtual firm, my team is very dispersed in many states, and, you know, we do supply them equipment, but like you said, everything that we access is in the cloud, so we don’t have to, you know, be installing software licenses individually on all machines and have a server that they log into, and all of those, those were really barriers to collaboration in the long run, and were expensive so, and i mean, i can say even in the early 2000s i was on maybe, you know, i don’t consider myself very early adopter, but i, i am, you know, one of the next group of people to adopt. i was looking forward to getting into that cloud technology in 2001 they promised it was coming. i was like, i want it, let’s do this. but it took. it took a lot more years. i think it was another, probably at least 10, probably closer to 15, years before it was really more mainstream. so
liz farr
yes, and until quickbooks online was a little bit more robust, because i remember the early days of qbo, when i would have to log into a client’s qbo file, and it wouldn’t be like desktop. it would be something. else, and i couldn’t do all the things. it was really frustrating.
monique swansen
it was, i’m trying to think of the year that they changed the architecture, which was the first big change. but it’s come a long way. it certainly has come a long way. i had some, a couple of early people that were on quickbooks online when it first came out. and, yeah, it wasn’t a joy. it was really slow, clunky, and but we, we, i think it was around 2014 when we converted most of our desktop clients and tried to work in the cloud almost exclusively. and it afterwards. there’s no way i would have went back not to say that the desktop software doesn’t, isn’t good, doesn’t do a lot of things, but just the time involved in the collaboration and, you know, being logged in, being able to do all the things. i mean, just even now, when i, you know, do a review of a desktop file, just opening it and getting it open. the software is so time consuming, like otherwise, i would just log in and it would be open. so it’s come a long way, and it will continue to come a long way, i think, in the future, but i’m looking forward to technology doing more things?
liz farr
yeah. well, speaking of technology doing more things in the future, where do you see the accounting industry in 10 years?
monique swansen
so i yeah, so this is personal, like my personal take on it, but i believe that the people who are unwilling or unable to adapt are going to, you know, not be able to move forward. so it will, it will be disrupted in what way, i don’t know. obviously, private equity is definitely disrupting the industry as we speak, and we’re, you know, not going to know for a few years what the total effect of that will be, but i believe that we’re going to be more relationship based. i bring. i believe that as technical work starts to be done more and more with ai based software. accountants will have the opportunity to bring more humanity to accounting and finance, and i personally am looking forward to that. so i’m hoping, in 10 years that you know the work that we’re doing and the conversations that we’re having are relationship based conversations and relationship based work that are helping people with their businesses in a slightly different way, because a lot of the technical work is being done by technology. now i believe that technology will always need oversight. i don’t know that i will live long enough to see it, be able to work completely independently, without any oversight. maybe that day happens, but that’s scary to think about, i suppose, but it will certainly give us a lot more time to actually reflect on what’s going on from an accounting and finance perspective with these businesses, and to bring a narrative to it, and to really understand what the business owners that we work with want, and to help them achieve that, whatever that looks like. and so that’s what i’m hoping we see more and more of, and that’s what i believe will happen in the next hopefully in 10 years, but there’s a lot of disruption going on. so, like i said, even just the private equity piece, like, what does that look like in five more years? you know, it could. it could really change the space quite a bit.
liz farr
it could, you know, and i’m curious to see what happens in five to seven years, because their general business model in private equity is to acquire a business, improve it, and then sell it in five to seven years. so it’ll be interesting to see what happens after this first generation of firms that have been acquired by private equity. once that cycle goes to the next phase, what will happen? will they be sold to individuals or to another private equity firm, or what will happen?
monique swansen
question liz, what happens? do we get more do we get a larger quantity of smaller firms? or does. migrate up to what used to be, you know, the big eight, the big six, now the big four. i don’t know who can afford to buy those firms from the private equity groups and who wants them.
liz farr
i i’m not sure that any of the big four would be a great investment?
monique swansen
yeah, i don’t know. it’s an interesting question, because that is the model. so who is the next buyer
liz farr
that i have no idea. i have no idea.
monique swansen
see, see see how much exciting stuff is on the horizon. we get to see how that plays out,
liz farr
yeah, and we get to see it. and who knows, you know? and i, i believe that no one is really thinking quite big enough? yeah, you know, even, even the people i’ve talked to on this podcast where i’ve asked this question of, i’m not sure that many people are really thinking big enough, because it was, it was only 2009 that we had the first iphone, and
monique swansen
if you get really reflective right now, i’m going to say that you know so i was part of a partnership and as a sage reseller prior to automated accounting services 15 years ago. but if the one thing i could say about those last 15 years is that no matter how big i was thinking, i’ve never thought big enough. yes. so i agree with that. i i agree with that for sure, because you want to be reasonable, right in your goals, like, what, what could, what do i think i can actually do, or what change can i actually bring here? but it, you know, with with a big enough idea, the amount of change and what it affects is almost unfathomable.
liz farr
all right? think so. i have talked to people who think that the way the future will be little bots that monitor the data flow in our clients, general ledgers, and when something really strange pops up, then the owner or the accountant will get a message and say, hey, this just happened. is this right? yes or no. so i i think that something like that will be on the horizon. it will make it much more difficult for fraudsters. it will make mistakes due to human data entry, human error much rarer, and it will hopefully, hopefully bring more consistency to the data. but i don’t know,
monique swansen
yeah, that’s even, that’s an interesting concept. so now that you’ve said that, i’m thinking about, i’m thinking, oh, kind of like, when your bank sends you that text, like something different happened on your bank account? is this you that kind of thing, right? you get that text. but i wonder in the beginning, if that there’ll be so many alarms that people start to silence them and not listen to them. because sometimes in early technology, yeah, it’s an all or nothing approach. so it would be, but that ai learning can probably narrow down that, that length of time where so it starts to become effective and meaningful a lot, lot more quickly than otherwise it might have been.
liz farr
so, yeah, yeah. and after all you know, intuit has been monitoring all the data, so who knows what intuit will do with all the data on transactions and businesses.
monique swansen
oh, yeah, they have all the marketing data from mailchimp as
liz farr
well. this is true. so there’s lots
monique swansen
of data to analyze there. for sure.
liz farr
yeah, yeah. well, monique, it has been absolutely phenomenal talking to you. i always enjoy talking to you. i want to thank you so much for coming on my podcast. it’s been long overdue. now, if, yeah, now if listeners want to connect with you, what’s the best way to find you? sure?
monique swansen
so i’m thankful for being here today. it was great to talk with you. liz, we’ve had a number of really good conversations, and this one is has been another one, so it’s always a pleasure. i’m on linkedin, and that’s probably the best social right now to connect with me. i used to be a twitter fan. i’m much less of a twitter fan now, and i’m also in some accounting networking groups. so i’m in the thriveal group with jason blumer, in the woodard group with joe woodard and future firm, ryan never say his last name, right? ryan. lazanis. lazanis, thank you. and also part of the, not the only one round table richard roppa’s group, so i’m in all of those groups. so anybody that’s in any of those groups hit me up there, because i’m there as well, but yeah, of the social platforms right now, linkedin is the place where i am mostly
liz farr
well, fantastic, and congratulations once more on being one of the top 50 women in accounting for this year.
monique swansen
thanks again. i really appreciate that.