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No studio again this week. John Toon and Indi Tatla took the microphone round day two of the Digital Accountancy Show at ExCeL and sat down with the vendors on the floor, one at a time, to hear what they are shipping. Dext gets two chairs. Sabby Gill, fresh from Dext Insiders Day, explains how three separate systems (Receipt Bank, Xavier Analytics and Greenback) became one platform, why everything starts with the source data, and why he thinks the system of record now comes second to the experience a business has with its numbers. Asked about the doomsday clock that says accountants are done by 2028, he gives the Y2K answer: nothing happened then either. Paul Lodder picks up the product detail with John: AI Assist, the new AI connectors to ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot, the delayed index and time-spent-per-document insights, and an optimisation score on the way. John asks the VAT question nobody likes answering, and they get into whether the general ledger is becoming a repository rather than a place you work. Stu McEwan at FreeAgent says MTD numbers have doubled what they expected, with 200 to 300 of HMRC’s 700 beta testers running a full year end through FreeAgent, and unrepresented customers getting on with it better than anyone predicted. Tracking groups and management reports are the move upmarket. “Not AI native, but AI in it.” Paul Sparkes from iplicit talks through the all-new UI and a single prompt inside the software, and why iplicit is a restaurant rather than a sweetie shop when it comes to AI and your data. Chris Downing shows Indi Sage Period Review: the Sage ledger consumed by banking partners, Tide first, so a sole trader categorises in their banking app and the accountant reviews, fixes and files from Sage for Accountants with no bank feed to set up. Indi’s question: when did Sage turn into such a speedboat? Tushir Patel at Capium has gone from baby steps to adolescence, with Capium 365 as the data capture layer for sole traders and landlords and a largest client running about 20,000 clients through the system. Henrik Grim at Mimo has spent 18 months all in on Mimo Associate, agents for the financial close that sit on top of whatever ledger a firm already runs. His bet is the shift from doing the work to reviewing it. Asked if accounting ends in 2028, his answer is one word. Jonathan Gaunt from Socket, Release of the Year at the Disruptor Awards, wants deeper handoffs into Senta, FYI and Karbon, runs Socket through Claude himself, and thinks MTD is battleships waiting to sink practices that are not charging for it. Then the microphone changes hands. Kendrick Hair from Fishbowl interviews Ryan Pearcy on the Fishbowl stand about why Ryan’s firm partners with them: 25 years of inventory and manufacturing software rebuilt for the cloud, an agent called Juno on top, and a UK inventory market that had gone quiet until someone turned up to disrupt it. Kendrick’s observation from the US side: UK business owners lean on their accountant in a way American ones don’t. Johann Gorée closes with Engager’s latest releases (multiple addresses synced with TaxCalc, hyperlinks in checklists, dynamic date formats) and a warning about firms feeding client data into the free tier of ChatGPT. A car can do more than 70 miles an hour. That does not make it legal. Chapters 00:00 Intro, day two at the Digital Accountancy Show 02:21 Advancetrack 02:59 Sabby Gill, Dext: the ledger comes second 11:30 Stu McEwan, FreeAgent: MTD is a numbers game 16:42 Paul Sparkes, iplicit: a restaurant, not a sweetie shop 21:53 Paul Lodder, Dext: too much time chasing clients 28:39 Chris Downing, Sage: Period Review and Tide 33:30 Tushir Patel, Capium: the dark horse in purple 38:35 Henrik Grim, Mimo: from doing to reviewing 48:03 Jonathan Gaunt, Socket: MTD is battleships 55:59 Kendrick Hair and Ryan Pearcy, Fishbowl: disrupting, not going anywhere 63:51 Johann Gorée, Engager: AI, responsibly

No studio this week. Indi Tatla and Alastair Barlow took a microphone round the Digital Accountancy Show at ExCeL London and stopped anyone who would talk to them, with Ryan Pearcy waiting at the end on The Loop stand. Yogesh Patel opens with a phrase he had just heard on the main stage: the AI discount. If AI makes the work faster, how does a firm stop the saving going straight to the client as a lower fee? Indi then brings back the idea Dext pushed at its insider day, that the system of record does not have to be where the work happens. Alastair calls it the headless ledger, and Damon Anderson later tells us the AI-native ledger was the big story of the day, name-checking Digits, Light, Campfire, Rillet and DualEntry. He also gives the market a three to five year runway, because real firms have real people, real trust and HMRC to work with. Paul Layte from Ascendant walks through four versions of the firm delivery model, ending with a question nobody was asking two years ago: do we need offshore at all, or can AI agents do this? Andrew Douthwaite from Alliotts, part of the Shaw Gibbs Group, talks about life after a private equity deal and what he would build with a war chest. Daniel Rock from SuiteFiles previews the new connect portals and the agentic chasing on the way, and Trent McLaren from Vinyl explains why the real gain from an AI note taker is the mental load it lifts. Kate Hayward, Xero’s UK Managing Director, and Kendrick Hair from Fishbowl talk through a family-run yoghurt maker that has grown threefold in 18 months on Xero and Fishbowl. Kate brings the number of the day, two in five UK small businesses did not know if they were profitable last month, and news of a Xero and The Loop hackathon in November. Kendrick explains Fishbowl’s new accountant’s ledger. Katie Hawking from TaxAssist comes off a women in accountancy panel with SilverFin and a line worth taking back to the office: be the women we want to walk behind. Ryan closes it out at The Loop stand, giving compliance four years before the way firms deliver it changes completely. Also covered: James Howell and Dan Cockerton on putting on the show and taking it to the US and Barcelona, Phil Hobden on what Sage has been asked about Intacct and MTD, a new firm owner five months into practice, Lisa Marshall flying in from Canada and discovering FreeAgent, and why they walked straight past John Toon. Chapters 00:00 Intro, live from the Digital Accountancy Show 01:33 Employment Hero 02:10 Yogesh Patel on the AI discount 04:50 First time at the show 06:40 Why come to DAS, and skipping John Toon 07:47 James Howell on building the show 10:16 Dext and the headless ledger 12:21 £4m in fees from LinkedIn 15:57 People and agents in one org chart 18:36 Andrew Douthwaite on PE and a war chest 24:31 SuiteFiles and agentic chasing 26:06 What Baker Tilly does differently with AI 30:56 Phil Hobden at Sage 32:56 Five months into a new practice 35:56 Fractional CFO or outsourced finance function 38:06 Dan Cockerton on DAS in the US and Barcelona 42:56 Trent McLaren, Vinyl and the mental load 45:26 Paul Layte: do we need offshore at all? 48:26 Katie Hawking: be the women we want to walk behind 52:16 Damon Anderson and the AI-native ledger 55:09 Joiin 56:16 Xero and Fishbowl: two in five didn’t know 66:40 Lisa Marshall, all the way from Canada 69:35 Ryan Pearcy: plan now or have it thrust upon you 73:25 Outro

Billie McLoughlin, Eriona Bajrakurtaj and John Toon go a little AI heavy this week, with an MCP for AML checks, a decision-making model from TypeSafe and a new AI-native ledger from Briefcase, plus a chat with its co-founder Reuben Steenkamp. Billie welcomes Sage's free Period Review for MTD for Income Tax, and likes that Sage hasn't sold it as AI, but wishes it worked for clients on Xero, QuickBooks and FreeAgent too. Eriona expects to be asking clients the same questions every quarter regardless. John reckons the profession can be too precise, and Eriona shares the HMRC enquiry that came down to one missing £26 receipt. Intuit has cut 17% of its workforce while revenue grew 14% and QuickBooks Online Accounting grew 23%. Eriona asks where that leaves UK accountants now the accountants' council has gone. John questions how much revenue really comes through the accounting channel, and Billie thinks price rises explain a lot of the growth. DNA Payments has partnered with iwoca so merchants can borrow £1,000 to £1m from the DNA app. John asks whether borrowing to cover running costs is ever wise, Eriona talks business rates and 15% interest, and Billie wonders how many small businesses keep their books up to date enough for live-data lending. Eriona welcomes Sodium's FuseSign integration and wants one core system running the work. Billie explains MCP through Firmcheck's launch alongside its FYI and Sodium integrations, and asks whether firms will let AI change AML records. Eriona wonders what happens to software brands nobody logs into, and John worries about being spread too thin. John introduces TypeSafe's Jev, and Eriona asks how you tell a regulator "the AI did that". John then walks through Briefcase Ledger, compares it with Xero, QuickBooks and FreeAgent, and talks to Reuben Steenkamp about the launch at the Digital Accountancy Show. Also covered: Vinyl launches calendar booking, Joiin raises €1.5m of non-dilutive growth capital from Gilion, and Caseware brings Verity agents to Excel and client requests, along with John's Angry Audit Manager. 00:00 Intro 01:12 Fishbowl 02:19 Sage Period Review for MTD 13:11 Intuit cuts 17% while revenue grows 20:42 DNA Payments and iwoca Flexi Loans 26:35 Sodium integrates FuseSign 28:16 Firmcheck launches an MCP 37:52 TypeSafe launches Jev 42:57 Briefcase launches Briefcase Ledger 53:27 Vinyl launches calendar booking 56:48 Joiin raises €1.5m 1:01:10 Caseware Verity agents for audit 1:06:43 Outro

Indi Tatla, John Toon and Ryan Pearcy are back together for another OGs episode, with two lots of Apron news, a big raise in Germany and the full run-down of this year's Disruptor Awards. Xero has renamed Files to Documents and moved it into the Accounting menu, which John Toon calls the least controversial thing Xero has done in weeks. Ryan Pearcy links the change to Making Tax Digital for Income Tax. Indi Tatla then reads through a wave of Glassdoor reviews from Xero staff in Australia and New Zealand, and the panel talks about what they say about the culture, with some sympathy for the UK team. Glen Foster has joined Intuit to lead the mid-market and partner channel in the UK. Indi asks what he needs to get right. John Toon says QuickBooks has always felt like a sales conversation about licences, and Ryan Pearcy says the mid-market needs implementation partners and something closer to community. Apron has launched its QuickBooks Online integration, with supplier payments in 30 currencies and Virgin Points on the side, and Ryan wants to know whether it's truly embedded. Then Apron's new pricing from 1 December, tiered by document volume. Indi Tatla thinks the document limit is the lever bookkeepers will feel, while Ryan Pearcy likes that payments and documents stay unbundled. Limetax has raised €36m to bring German accounting firms onto an AI platform built on top of DATEV. John Toon explains why DATEV's cooperative set-up makes that approach clever, and Ryan Pearcy expects to see more tech companies buying firms in the UK. Also covered: Aqilla wins Best Cloud Service for Non-Profits and Charities at the Cloud Excellence Awards, Adfin launches card on file, and Indi runs through the Disruptor Awards winners, including Socket, Briefcase, Alexis Kingsbury, James Wright, The Modern Firm and Lucy Cohen, with thanks to partners Dext, Advancetrack, Accountex and Alternative Events. 00:00 Intro 03:25 FreeAgent 04:30 Xero renames Files to Documents 06:23 Xero's Glassdoor reviews 10:43 Glen Foster joins Intuit 14:40 Apron launches QuickBooks Online payments 17:53 Apron pricing changes from 1 December 22:12 Aqilla wins Best Cloud Service for Non-Profits 23:54 Limetax raises €36m 28:13 SuiteFiles 29:12 Adfin launches card on file 33:45 Disruptor Awards winners 42:19 Outro

Indi Tatla, John Toon and Ryan Pearcy are on the show together for the first time in months, and this week the AI conversation finally gets a bit more nuanced. Airwallex has launched T:0, an AI accounting platform for US startups that builds the chart of accounts as the business grows and reports burn and runway in real time. John Toon sees apps creeping into each other's patch. Ryan Pearcy thinks everyone's going after everything because it's so easy to build now, and it'll be the Wild West until the ones that work win on word of mouth. Aynsley Damery's Alldone claims a full set of UK limited company accounts in an hour or less, with the numbers calculated from the legislation and AI kept to the wording and mappings. Indi Tatla likes the cold review challenge. John Toon isn't convinced by a demo built on a perfect client, and Ryan Pearcy can't see small firms running two systems. Then John Toon's own OneSixth, which handles VAT margin schemes and partial exemption and posts the journals back to the ledger, is out in beta. AuditBot has launched AccountsBot, which reviews financial statements against a disclosure checklist from HAT Group. John Toon tried building the same thing with ChatGPT and couldn't get it past 80 per cent reliable. Intuit and Perplexity have connected QuickBooks and Mailchimp to Perplexity for US users, and John Toon wonders why they didn't make more of Perplexity's sourcing. Bill Gates picks accountancy as his example of a job AI will replace, which leads to the big question of the episode: if trainees skip the basic prep, how do they learn to check the bot's work? Ryan Pearcy brings in Michael Gould, co-founder of Anaplan, on swapping the spreadsheet nobody dared touch for an AI engine nobody can explain. John Toon doesn't think ticking boxes ever taught anyone much, and makes his case with a car analogy that even Indi Tatla likes. Also covered: a Startup Coalition report on the 11.2 million hours UK businesses spend each year proving who they are, and whether BizPass is digital ID by another name. And Joiin's new forecasting, with full three-way integration and the group consolidation John Toon is most excited about. 00:00 Intro 02:18 Advancetrack 02:56 Airwallex launches T:0 for US startups 07:56 Alldone: a full set of accounts in an hour 14:45 OneSixth: VAT margin schemes and partial exemption 21:09 AuditBot launches AccountsBot for disclosure checklists 23:49 Intuit and QuickBooks connect to Perplexity 27:11 Bill Gates on AI and accountancy: who trains the juniors? 30:00 Michael Gould on AI in finance and the spreadsheet problem 38:55 Startup Coalition: 11.2 million hours proving who you are 47:14 Joiin launches three-way forecasting 54:20 Outro

Ryan Pearcy is back in the chair, joined by Heather Smith and Indi Tatla for a bumper news episode, most of it about Xero and none of it comfortable. It starts with the reel. A paid influencer told her followers she had fed her Xero data into Claude and no longer needed the 800 pounds a month she spent on an accountant, and the community went off. Indi Tatla walks through the responses: Rachel Harris on how tightly brand partnerships are actually controlled, Alex Falcon arguing the profession should level up rather than take it personally, and Damon Anderson on the capability, accountability and trust clocks all running at different speeds. Ryan Pearcy has no sympathy for the influencer, then argues the thing that has really annoyed firms is not the advert. It is auto bank rec, and every vendor promising a business owner they can automate everything, leaving the firm to unpick it at the year end and charge more for the privilege. It was not a one-off week. Aaron Patrick found Syft Analytics reports going out under his practice's name without his approval, since switched off. Xero built accounts and tax filing into the product after Companies House closed the free route in March, then marketed it straight at business owners without telling the firms holding those clients. The panel keeps coming back to Ben Richmond on stage in New Orleans, promising Xero would never sell directly to your clients. Heather Smith brings in a long post from a former Xero employee arguing the board swallowed the Rule of 40 and built an executive incentive structure around it that cost them the customer. That runs into the AGM, where 70 per cent of shareholders voted against the remuneration report following an increase to Sukhinder Singh Cassidy's target pay. Ryan Pearcy thinks the restructure is defensible and the timing is what stings. Indi Tatla asks whether the conversation would be happening at all if the chief executive were a man. Xero gave the show its position directly, and it is read out in full. Elsewhere, Sage launched Salary Payments, so Sage Payroll customers can pay staff from their own bank account with no wallet and no second login, powered by Crezco, who now sit behind Xero, iplicit and Sage alike. Ryan Pearcy wonders what has happened to Modulr. Indi Tatla runs the employment law timetable, with the tribunal window doubling on 1 October, the duty to prevent third party harassment landing on 30 October and the unfair dismissal changes arriving in January 2027, and flags the Employment Hero webinar on it. Also covered: Heather Smith's ask of conference organisers to publish a harassment policy. Accrual acquiring Puzzle's accounting firm business on the same day as everything else, and almost nobody noticing. Private equity buying accounting firms alongside the software it already funds. And how a profession without a podcast is meant to make itself heard by the vendors. Chapters 00:00 Intro 02:45 Employment Hero 03:25 Influencer Gate: the Xero reel that blew up LinkedIn 08:52 Rachel Harris, Alex Falcon and Damon Anderson on being a paid partner 14:29 Why auto bank rec annoys firms more than the advert did 16:39 Heather Smith on who actually counts as an influencer 18:07 Syft Analytics reports sent to clients without approval 19:35 Xero markets accounts and tax filing direct to business owners 21:01 "We will never sell directly to your clients" 24:15 The Rule of 40 post from a former Xero employee 27:10 CEO pay and the 70 per cent shareholder vote 32:10 Xero's official position 35:41 Joiin 36:49 Sage Payroll Salary Payments, powered by Crezco 38:27 Employment law: October, and then January 2027 42:33 Harassment policies at accounting conferences 44:25 Accrual acquires Puzzle 47:06 Private equity moving into accounting firms 49:19 How should the community influence the vendors? 52:14 Disruptor Awards and outro

John Toon is joined by Kendrick Hair of Fishbowl and Leigh Stallard for a news episode about who ends up owning the client. Leigh opens on a LinkedIn post from Joshua at Reva, written after Starling took heat for putting books next to the current account. The more interesting move is embedding the service itself, advisers included, inside the platforms an SME already uses. Uprise is doing exactly that in the US. John's caveat is that nobody has done it at scale yet, although compliance is already being commoditised and Mazuma has been running like a software company with accountants attached for years. Kendrick brings the US lens on firms niching hard into tax as technology moves onto their patch. Fishbowl has bought Repfabric, and Kendrick takes the two questions customers actually ask after an acquisition. Does the brand disappear, and do the connections to competing products get switched off. His answers are no and no. Repfabric brings a decade of commissions, territories and multi-line sales work to sit in front of everything Fishbowl already does once the order lands. Kendrick then picks up Joiin Intelligence, which goes exception hunting rather than writing prose about revenue. Its agents clean the chart of accounts, build eliminations and diagnose a consolidated balance sheet that will not balance. John's angle is where the data physically goes once a firm hands it to a model, and why Joiin running on AWS matters to anyone with GDPR to answer to. He remembers early Jax being slower than clicking the report. Leigh follows with Joiin's new report pack sharing and the wider point underneath it. Firms do not adopt what they cannot picture themselves using, so a release that ships without a workflow attached quietly dies in the inbox. Then the Xero run. Engager, now part of TaxCalc, ships its August features, and John pushes back on listening to the loudest customer instead of leading. Kendrick covers BrightPay's Oscar onboarding assistant, Pay by Bank, and the cloud transition Bright had to pull and rebuild. Leigh takes Xero's developer growth programme for practice apps and John asks what it says about Xero Practice Manager. Back orders and prepayments land in the Xero API, which Kendrick has been waiting for and which Cin7, Katana and Fishbowl are not using yet, and Leigh explains why giving people back orders in core Xero is a dog on a half-submerged pontoon. Also covered: Trent McLaren's map of where there is still room to build in the Xero ecosystem, the test of whether a Xero product manager could describe your product in one sentence, and what it now costs vendors to keep the data flowing since Xero and Intuit both put a price on API access. This episode is brought to you by Fishbowl, inventory and manufacturing software for businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets but are not ready for full ERP. https://www.fishbowlinventory.com 00:00 Intro 02:14 Sponsor: Fishbowl 03:25 Accounting as a feature, and the fight for the client 09:57 Fishbowl buys Repfabric 19:45 Joiin Intelligence goes exception hunting 26:11 Joiin report packs, and why releases die in the inbox 29:38 Reporting people actually act on 33:22 Sponsor: SuiteFiles 34:21 Engager updates, and who you listen to 39:07 BrightPay, Oscar and the cloud move 44:06 Xero opens its growth programme to practice apps 46:46 Back orders and prepayments in the Xero API 53:45 Enough rope: back orders in core Xero 56:34 Where to build in the Xero ecosystem 01:08:19 Outro

Eriona Bajrakurtaj, Alastair Barlow and John Toon go through the accounting tech week, and most of it comes back to the same question: is the thing being announced the thing that actually works? The headline everyone shared was OpenAI buying accounting firms. It has not. OpenAI took an equity position in Thrive Holdings back in December, Thrive owns Current, the roll-up formerly called Crete Professionals Alliance, and OpenAI engineers go into those firms in exchange for more equity and access to the data. Alastair breaks the structure down and lands on how circular it is. What matters more than the deal is the taxonomy forming around it, with roll-ups buying legacy firms, platforms buying and re-tooling them, and AI-native challengers like Amsterdam's Neno starting from nothing. Then the other end of the telescope. An accountant proofread a set of accounts produced in Xero Tax and posted what he found, including the wrong directors on the cover page and an inappropriate section 444 disclosure, in the same week Xerocon Denver was selling agentic workflows. Eriona is an advocate for AI in accounting and still lands on the obvious point, that an assistant saving you twenty minutes is worth nothing if you spend twenty minutes checking its output. John then admits Xero Tax double-counted the corporation tax on his own company, and blames his own chart of accounts rather than the software. On the compliance side, Active have released accounts production, taking a firm from trial balance to a filed set of accounts inside one platform, with Companies House filing built in. John has been tracking it for the best part of a year and reads it as Active going at Silverfin directly. Workiro released Workflows in the same week, which routes every step of a job to the right person with an AI summary at each hand-off, and Eriona asks the fair question of why a practice management system cannot already do that. The episode ends on Sodium and TaxCalc arguing publicly about an encrypted form, and underneath it a bigger question about who owns accounting data. Alastair's answer is the strongest few minutes on the pod. A vendor making it hard to move your clients' data has not built a moat, it has built friction, and the decision to use your own historic client data sits between you and your client. Also covered: OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar's target of a zero-day close, and why John thinks the phrase is too ambiguous to mean anything. Prosaic, an AI-native cash-based ledger out of New Zealand now past fifty firms. The Xero Global App Awards, won globally by Gojee and Ignition, with ApprovalMax taking the UK and SuiteFiles the US practice award. Updates to Xero's Auto Bank Reconciliation and what "confident" is actually doing in that sentence. WorkGuru's rebuilt workflows. And Repodo in Copenhagen raising the largest pre-seed Denmark has recorded to launch an AI-native audit firm. 00:00 Intro 04:42 The zero-day close 14:25 Prosaic rethinks the ledger 26:27 Xero App Awards 2026 37:56 Somebody proofread Xero Tax 44:42 How JAX decides 54:51 Workiro releases Workflows 57:22 Trial balance to Companies House 1:00:54 OpenAI has not bought a firm 1:13:31 Who owns the data 1:23:47 Outro

Indi Tatla is joined by Lara Manton and Billie McLoughlin for a run through the month's accounting tech updates, most of which nobody would call exciting and all of which somebody will end up using. Two from Xero. The bills page gets the same full-page treatment invoices and quotes already had, with contact editing and planned payment dates moving into the bill itself, and Lara makes the point that the people who will feel the change hardest are the ones who use it most. Then the builder story: Xero has released a Lovable connector, so an accountant can describe an app in plain English and have it running on live Xero data. Xero says one in five connections into its ecosystem is now a custom app built outside the App Store. Billie is not convinced, and reckons meaningful builds will come from the 1% of the 1%. Vinyl has moved from recording meetings to preparing for them. Pre-meeting briefs pull context from previous calls, open items in your practice management system and the calendar invite itself, which as Billie points out makes better preparation a data hygiene problem in disguise. Sodium has connected its practice management platform to Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, giving them a line into tasks, billing, AML checks, document requests and client workflows. Indi's read is that Duane Jackson has built this shape before in payroll and in bookkeeping, and that boring businesses are the ones worth watching. The admin round. TaxCalc and Engager keep stitching themselves together, with tax figures dropping into bulk client emails and filed returns ticking themselves off. Otto Capture launches from With Otto at £9 a client, with Emma James running her own practice behind it, and goes to Xero and FreeAgent together rather than Xero alone. Sage is on the roadmap. Billie's line on all of it is how much manual glue accountants create day to day without noticing. Briefcase gets the longest argument. Sales invoicing and aged reports land in Briefcase Ledger, and Working Papers takes the month end out of spreadsheets with an immutable balance sheet snapshot. Billie wants to know where it falls short before she trusts it, and makes the case that the big AI companies are not using AI to do their own accounts. Lara asks whether it matters that this is an accounting app with AI rather than an AI app that does accounting. Also covered: MyDocSafe removing portal chat on purpose, adding a signature dashboard and making form consents compulsory. Chapters 00:00 Intro 02:40 Xero bills refresh 06:36 One in five is custom 12:50 Vinyl pre-meeting briefs 17:50 Sodium talks to the LLMs 23:10 TaxCalc into Engager 27:05 Sponsor: Joiin 28:13 Otto Capture 31:11 MyDocSafe removes chat 34:20 Briefcase Ledger invoicing 35:52 Briefcase and the close 42:20 Outro

Indi Tatla, Lara Manton and Robbie White on a week where almost every story turned out to be about payments. Intuit has taken its QuickBooks connectors in Claude and ChatGPT past read-only, so a business owner can raise and send an invoice from inside a chat window. Robbie calls the direction of travel genuinely exciting, then names the problem with it. The businesses most likely to switch it on are the ones with nobody in the building to catch it when it gets something wrong. Lara puts the consequence into a scene involving an auditor. ApprovalMax has rebuilt its pricing around tiered usage, bundling Capture and Pay into the core product and dropping the multi-client discounts. Lara uses it every day for a client and asks the question a pricing page cannot answer, which is whether firms decide the basic approvals in their other software will do. Telleroo is moving from pushing money out of a client account to also taking it in, holding it, and paying interest on it through Griffin Bank. Indi explains why she is happy for one vendor to make money out of her and not another. It involves bread. Also covered: Intuit's own business credit card, Dext Payments arriving on QuickBooks Online, Allica Bank launching Cashew, Sage and GoCardless adding pay by bank, and a developer who built an app off 589 Xero feature-request votes and found the demand was never there. Thanks to our sponsor Employment Hero - https://employmenthero.com 00:00 Intro 02:58 Intuit launches a business credit card 08:57 QuickBooks lets Claude and ChatGPT send the invoice 17:15 Dext Payments comes to QuickBooks Online 23:33 ApprovalMax bundles everything and puts the price up 29:54 Allica Bank launches Cashew 36:15 Sage and GoCardless add pay by bank 40:26 Telleroo will pay interest on the money sitting in the account 45:33 589 votes and the demand never arrived 50:09 Outro

Almost half of UK firms say they plan to spend up to £100,000 on AI this year. John Toon runs the numbers on what that actually buys and does not believe a word of it. Indi, John Toon and Eriona Bajrakurtaj work through a month where the same question keeps surfacing from different directions. If software can file it, who checked it? In the US, CLA has partnered with Digits to build and train its own model on its client base and workflows, which raises the question UK firms are starting to ask out loud about their own ledger. Sage put the review layer question in a room with a round table on embedded accounting, picking up the campaign Lucy Cohen has been running in public. And FreeAgent has enabled MTD quarterly filing from the mobile app, which is the right call for a mobile-first cohort and removes a piece of friction that was arguably doing a job. Also in this one: Lord Vallance takes the chair of a new AI taskforce while funding comes out of other science, more than 120 millionaires ask to be taxed more, and the small business employment figures show a labour market that no longer looks national. Plus product updates from MIMO and Katana. This episode sponsored by Fishbowl - https://www.fishbowlinventory.com/en-gb   Chapters 00:00 Welcome, and what is in this episode 03:17 CLA is training its own model rather than buying one 10:36 Lucy Cohen and the review layer nobody has built 17:55 What UK firms are actually spending their AI budget on 24:26 A new AI taskforce, and the models we do not own 29:24 More than 120 millionaires ask to be taxed more 37:43 Small business employment and twelve labour markets 42:52 Mimo launches VAT review 45:10 Katana MCP goes live, Amazon FBM arrives natively 46:14 FreeAgent brings MTD filing to mobile 49:08 Wrap

John Toon is joined by Ian Gregory of Advancetrack and Billie McLoughlin to work through July's accounting tech news, and it turns into a run of arguments about what a general ledger is actually for. Billie opens on the batch newly certified for the Xero App Store. Garfield, the UK's first SRA-regulated AI law firm, reads your Xero data, chases overdue invoices and drafts small claims paperwork for amounts up to £10,000. Autohive is a no-code AI agent that works inside Xero itself. That second one sets up her argument for the episode: firms may be about to stop shopping for tools and start shopping for workers, where you pick the task and the most qualified agent surfaces against it. John is not convinced that reduces the number of apps you end up running, and Ian asks the question nobody has answered yet, which is whether we adapt to Xero's workflows or Xero adapts to ours. Then the leadership news. Xero's CTO Rick Carragher leaves after 16 months, weeks after chief people officer Jeff Ryan went after 15, with Madhuri Dhulipala arriving from BlackRock as SVP of Engineering, Payments and AI Transformation and Maninder Sawhney joining from Adobe as chief business officer. Ian reads the payments hire as a signal about where Xero wants to sit in agentic payments, and makes the point that the future of receipts is the future of bookkeeping. Billie's concern is more practical. If the people who promised you a roadmap leave, does the promise leave with them? Then the ledger layer. FreeAgent now connects directly to Joiin for group consolidation, Acumatica has bought Vertrax to get into fuel and energy distribution, and Crunchafi has launched FRS 102 lease accounting for the UK and Ireland. Ian's line on the Vertrax deal is the sharpest of the episode: this is the operational detail a generic ledger does not understand, and a generic AI agent will not magically invent. Which leads to the argument the episode was always heading for. Someone vibe coded their way off premium accounting software over a weekend and wrote it up on AccountingWEB. Billie is not making her own butter just because butter has gone up, and she puts a number on the Saturday it cost him. Ian reckons it goes the way of open source, a niche for the dabblers and nothing mission critical. John has vibe coded a product himself and is still paying outside experts to check it before anyone touches it. Also covered: the Social Prosperity Network's plan to replace six taxes with a single national contribution, and the progress update on HMRC's Transformation Roadmap, where digital engagement is up and so, awkwardly, is the tax gap. This episode is brought to you by FreeAgent and Suitefiles: freeagent.com suitefiles.com   00:00 Intro 02:17 Xero's July app store intake: an AI law firm and no-code agents 08:38 Xero loses its CTO, and what the BlackRock hire signals 12:33 The chief people officer exits too, and a new chief business officer arrives 17:10 FreeAgent users can now connect straight to Joiin 20:55 Acumatica buys Vertrax and moves deeper into fuel distribution 23:27 Crunchafi brings FRS 102 lease accounting to the UK and Ireland 26:28 Someone vibe coded their way off premium accounting software 34:11 Replacing six taxes with a single national contribution 45:21 Outro

Ryan Pearcy is joined by Kevin Fitzgerald and Leigh Stallard for a bumper week of accounting tech news, and a period close nobody can stop talking about. Starling has rolled out expense cards, ringfenced spending spaces and read-only access for bookkeepers and accountants. Kevin sees a bank pulling small business finance workflow into the banking platform, and wonders what comes next, because it does not feel like a bank would do expenses and then stop. Leigh names who just lost their lunch, and why being a bank is one of the few moats left standing. Microsoft has taught Copilot in Excel repeatable skills, so a team can define the steps for a model, a close or a variance analysis once and have it run the same way twice. Leigh reckons Microsoft has given up trying to kill Excel and started building where everyone already is. Ryan is more excited than he expected to be, with one caveat: most firms have not written their workflows down yet. Sage is embedding its accounting technology inside Satago, opening invoice finance to sole traders and micro businesses. Leigh has history here and talks through the revenue-per-customer logic, and why adoption decides whether any of it ever gets seen. Kevin's read is that this is a new financial service rather than a workflow improvement, and the open question is who the customer thinks they are dealing with. Then the close. Puzzle has brought AI Close to accountants with what it calls programmatic accounting, and Pilot has launched Meridian, which it says runs month end from start to finish. Ryan makes the case for AI-native ledgers being the real battleground. Kevin questions whether the standalone players survive it. Leigh has a warning for any firm buying these tools without first telling the team what they will be doing instead. Ryan brings Employment Hero's AI Paradox research, 8,800 business leaders and employees across four markets, which found the most AI-heavy businesses hiring the most people rather than the fewest. That runs into the skills gap underneath it, whether AI skills belong on a job spec at all, and how you would ever vet them. Also covered: Inscope's agentic disclosure checklist and its agent Penny, Socket wiring won proposals straight into Sodium, Content Snare adding FuseSign and Annature signing, and Joiin's Q2 release with AI agents, live Stripe data and drill-down to individual transactions. We also hear from our sponsor, Advancetrack! www.advancetrack.com Chapters 00:00 Intro 04:04 Ad break 04:42 Starling adds expense cards and read-only access for accountants 08:35 Copilot in Excel learns your close, one skill at a time 12:53 Sage embeds its accounting technology inside Satago 17:06 Puzzle brings AI Close to accountants with programmatic policies 20:48 Inscope launches an agentic disclosure checklist 23:35 Pilot launches Meridian and claims it closes the books end to end 26:49 Win the work in Socket, run the client in Sodium 28:38 Employment Hero finds AI-heavy businesses hiring the most people 40:35 Content Snare adds FuseSign and Annature signing 42:41 Joiin's Q2 release brings AI agents and live Stripe data 49:08 Outro

In this episode of Digi-Tools in Accrual World, host Indi is joined by global accounting-tech heavyweights Heather Smith (dialling in from a beautiful corner of the UK Cotswolds) and With Kendrick Hair Chief Evangelist at Fishbowl (live from the US). Together, the team tears down the massive wave of announcements out of Xerocon London and digs into the platform's aggressive structural shift under CEO Sukinder Singh Cassidy. Initially Kendrick Hair and Heather talked about FishBowl, the inventory solution. The sweet spot for Fishbowl is businesses that need real traceability: food, pharmaceutical, chemists, advanced manufacturing, not your retail or tradie style inventory.  2026 shall see Fishbowl focus on their AI first online platform, which includes an Agent called Juno that helps users manage operations, and gain insights into the numbers. We dive deep into Xero Ultra, the brand-new plan aimed at the "messy middle"—scaling businesses with 20-200 employees who need multi-entity reporting and predictive cash flows without the massive price tag of a traditional enterprise ERP move. The team also breaks down Xero’s massive leap into "Accountable Intelligence." With Xero crossing the 5-million customer milestone, we look at JAX (automated document capture replacing decade-old OCR technology), real-time automatic bank reconciliation, and Xero Force—a game-changing, no-code environment for accountants to build custom AI agents using natural language. Finally, we discuss the ripple effects across the ecosystem, from Dext CEO Sabby Gill’s viral LinkedIn post on why they skipped sponsoring the event, to the realities of implementing Silicon Valley-style performance cultures in the accounting tech space. This episode is brought to you by The Loop and sponsored by Employment Hero. Switch to an AI-powered platform that actually takes the pain out of manual HR and payroll admin. Learn more at employmenthero.co.uk. Chapter Markers 00:00 - Welcome & Episode Intro: Global Tech Roundup with Heather and Kendrick 01:45 - Ecosystem Spotlights: Deep-diving into niche cloud tracking and regional jurisdictional differences 03:42 - FIshbowl Inventory Update 06:22 - Sponsor Break: Employment Hero 07:12 - Post-Conference Reflections: The evolution of Xerocon London 08:35 - Xero goes agentic, and hits five million customers doing it 10:10 - The New Toolkit: Breaking down JAX, Smart Document Capture, and Xero Force agents 11:58 - Xero builds a Lite-ERP tier for the businesses it keeps losing 14:15 - The Mid-Market Shift: Managing transaction limits, consolidation, and the "messy middle" subscription gap 18:50 - Corporate Culture & App Relations: Debating Sabby Gill’s Dext announcement and Xero’s internal "trim down" 23:10 - Closing Thoughts & Post-Show Banter

Recorded live from day two of Xerocon London. Xero opened the show with two solid hours of announcements. Xero Force, the Ultra plan, smart data capture, JAX and a big push on the rise of the builder. Most of it is in beta and lands later in the year. So we spent two days in the hall asking the people it lands on what they actually made of it. The centrepiece is our interview with Kate Haywood, MD of Xero UK. We put it to her straight. The accounting and bookkeeping channel arguably is not as important to Xero's revenue as it once was, so does there need to be a bit more honesty about where accountants and bookkeepers sit in the hierarchy? She did not dodge it. "They are fundamentally important to us at Xero, and especially here in the UK." We also pushed her on the ecosystem. When Xero ships data capture, invoice chasing and reporting, it starts competing with the app partners who built on top of it. Kate says Xero is an open ecosystem led by what is right for the customer, and that if you try and build everything you end up building nothing. The vendors are less relaxed about it. Daniel Rock of SuiteFiles reckons "there's a lot of app vendors that will feel very squeezed". David Tuck of Mayday is delighted, because the Ultra plan points straight at his market. Jordan Vickery of Vinyl says nobody is running scared, which was disappointingly uncontroversial of him. Reuben from Briefcase wishes more people were trying to do what they do. The accountants are warier. Plenty of hope in the room, not much validation yet. Stuart Hurst points out that JAX launched two years ago and not a great deal has happened. Sharon, ten Xerocons in, says this one felt different, because Xero has become a bigger and more corporate establishment and it is "lacking a little bit of the human side". David from Youtopia goes further. "I don't think people actually implement anything from these shows." Featuring David Tuck (MayDay), Daniel Rock (SuiteFiles), Vipul Sheth (AdvanceTrack), Jordan Vickery (Vinyl), Reuben (Briefcase), Kate Haywood (Xero UK), Jim, Ravi, Sharon, Stuart Hurst, Will, David (Youtopia) and Sam. Is Xero still building for accountants, or around them? Chapters 00:00  Cold open 00:37  Live from day two. The party, the slide and the design lab 07:06  David Tuck, Mayday. The Ultra plan 08:32  Daniel Rock, SuiteFiles. Who gets squeezed 09:46  Vipul Sheth, AdvanceTrack. The proof is in the pudding 11:10  Jordan Vickery, Vinyl. Is anyone running scared? 12:22  Reuben, Briefcase. AI native, and welcoming the competition 13:28  Kate Haywood, MD of Xero UK. The full interview 47:11  Jim. Hope, but not much validation 48:35  Ravi. JAX, and small steps with AI 49:49  Sharon. Ten Xerocons, and a missing human side 51:24  Stuart Hurst. Best in years, but Dext and Chaser look nervous 52:47  Will. It all looks good. Now show us it working 54:07  David, Youtopia. Nobody implements anything 55:39  Sam. First Xerocon 56:55  Wrap up