S01 E18: Re-introduction – Welcome to the Accounting Flow Podcast

Roman Villard
Shahram, we’re back at it with a Accounting Flow a rebrand, a new mission, new vision. What’s up?

Shahram Zarshenas
Nothing much. I’m excited to be here and to talk about the new brand, the new branding of the podcast, right? Like we’ve had this podcast for a while, had a lot of loyal followers. But we decided to take a little bit of a change. I’m excited to talk about that and what it’s all about today.

Roman Villard
Yeah, so we’ll cover everything from how and why this was rebranded what the purpose is, who this is geared towards, before we jump into that would love to kind of dive in on on you and your background and hear a little bit about how you kind of came to the point to build a company and now start this podcast.

Shahram Zarshenas
Yeah, definitely. So for those of you that don’t know me, my name is Shahram Zarshenas, I’m the co founder of Financial Cents currently the CEO. A little bit about my background, it’s it’s very untraditional, right? Like I was had experience in private equity. I work closely with software companies a lot of build, build, scale and grow their businesses. But after doing that, for a while, and talking to a lot of accounting firms, I saw an opportunity to start Financial Cents to what it is today. So for those of you that don’t know, Financial Cents, it’s just an accounting workflow tool, built specifically for accounting firms, we help them track the status of work, manage their team, and stay organized. So they can get their work done at the end of the day.

And the reason we did that was because it also this kind of is gonna play into the vision on the podcast a little bit. But we talked to a lot of firms, and we asked them, What is the biggest challenge, you guys have been growing your firm, and a lot of the day, it came down to a workflow problem. They didn’t know the status of work, they didn’t have the processes properly documented. So mistakes were made, were quality suffered, or everything was just disorganized. So no one could find the information they needed. You know, it was easy when they were smaller, right? When was just maybe them and one other person. But as they started to get more clients, as they maybe hired a few team members, everything just started to just become disorganized and tough to maintain. And so that’s why we built Financial Cents, right, to help bring all that back together, and create that hub to help firms get their work done. And it’s been exciting. I think, today, you know, we serve well over 1000 accounting firms, we’re solving so many problems for them and helping them build their dream firms.

Roman Villard
And what’s cool about that, as you go back to your mission of why you started to Financial Cents, and that’s 100% connected to the problems that were being faced by firm runners at the time. And so you’re looking at these problems, you’re saying, what are those solutions, and now, starting a podcast to address those in a conversational manner to help firm owners uncover those problems and start to create better workflows to improve their futures?

Shahram Zarshenas
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, every time we did it, we’ve done so many surveys, we’ve talked to so many firms, and the biggest challenge is workflow, like it touches every part of your business, from the client experience to the team experience, even your experience. So I’m excited about this podcast because it’s it’s really going to help make a lot of firms lives easier.

Roman Villard
100%, and I can relate to that on many levels, being a firm runner myself and running Full Send Finance, having worked for other accounting firms, you know, seen a lot of scenarios where workflow, maybe needed a little bit of work and, and other situations where it worked really well. And so to hone in on specific areas of workflows within a firm structure is going to be a lot of fun.

Shahram Zarshenas
Yeah, I’m excited. There’s, there’s so much to talk about, because there’s so there’s so many different workflows in firms, there’s so many different processes, there’s so many different ways to do different processes, right? Every firm is different. So there’s not a one size workflow for every firm like, some you know, you have to you have to be able to listen to a lot of people. And that’s the cool thing about this podcast, right? So like, when we thought about rebranding this podcast, because before it was just general, like learning from firm owners, how to run your practice, right? Getting tips on anything when it comes to running your firm, but we said, again, going back to what is the biggest challenge we we’re seeing firms have workflow. But when we looked at the market, he looked at all the other options out there for podcasts, even like conferences and stuff. There isn’t like a workflow specific media outlet that just talks about workflow for accounting firms. So we wanted to really hone in on that and just go very deep. I feel like I’m saying workflow a lot very well. So firms can pull out a lot of those nuggets of insights and apply it back to their firm from people that are already doing it from people that have been successful at it from the best minds in the accounting industry. So because like if we can focus on it, we can go deeper, because it’s in the little things a lot of the time, so you don’t get that, and the generic fluffy content out there. So it’s exciting to see this develop into this, it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Roman Villard
Yeah. And what’s good is that the conversations here that we’re going to be having are applicable to firms as small as 2, as big as 200 / 2,000. I mean, every firm at every set size and stage that they find themselves that requires a degree of process a degree of workflow. And to your earlier point, those workflows have change over time. So to have these conversations of firm owners who have 2 people or who have 200, or maybe these larger firms up in the thousands, to hear how they’re thinking about how they’re designing workflow is going to be a really powerful tool for firm runners out there who are just starting to try to try to wrangle their internal process to become a more efficient firm.

Shahram Zarshenas
Yeah, it’s so true, like, especially what you said about like workflows change, as your business grows, right? Or your firm, your process has changed, it becomes more complex, your workflows are a living, breathing thing. And what worked at two users may not work at 10 users or 10 team members or, or what worked at 10 clients may not work at 100 clients. And, you know, another big thing is to even if it’s like a smaller, firm, right, and you may not need it right now, it may not be a necessity. We just were talking with a bunch of users recently and firm owners about like, what’s if you could go back in time, and give yourself one piece of advice. When you started your firm, what would it be, and the most liked comment was, I wish I documented my processes to like, tell them themselves, document your processes early, don’t document it, when it’s a problem you need to do before it’s a problem, because it’s a lot harder to do, and change the way you do things when it’s later in the game. So it’s like doing that even if it doesn’t make sense for you right now, having that knowledge on how to do it and getting the insights on how to do it quickly, can be a huge factor in your success later, and the maturity of your firm as you start to grow.

Roman Villard
The other thing too is if you pull those same people on, on the question of what they liked the least in their firms, I bet documenting process is at the very bottom of the list. And so while it is probably one of the most important things, it is one of the things that people really don’t like. So it’s a matter of finding the right tools, finding the right systems to help you bring that bring that in and try to figure out how to make the most of that function in that business. So in talking about the the firm runners, the guests on this show, the experts that we’ll be talking to who are going to be the primary individuals that we’ll be bringing on the show to talk about specific workflows in their firms.

Shahram Zarshenas
Yeah, so I think if you look at it, right, like, we’re gonna have all types of guests, right, we’re gonna have, you know, industry experts, people that are well known in the space people that you probably heard of right that you already follow. Because being in the market for three years, now we’re well connected a lot of people so we can, we can bring in the best and the brightest minds in accounting space. But we also want to bring in the average firm owner, right? The people that are in the trenches, and I think that’s what you’re gonna see doesn’t matter how popular the person is, or if they have a social media following, or whether they’re just an average firm owner, that’s just running their firm day to day, the people we want to bring in, are the people that are in the trenches, the people that are that run an accounting firm, the people that firm owners can relate to, and understand the processes that they’re building, because they’re just like them. Right? So the people that have built the processes themselves and had the success with it, because it’s all about, like, I think a big thing you see with some podcasts nowadays is there’s a lot of fluff, right? It’s like, you’re just talking about high level about a lot of these topics and ideas, but where are the actual one sites, right? And the people that are gonna be able to give the actual insights are the people that are in the trenches that built it themselves, because they can go granular and talk about it versus just they read an article and they’re pitching this high level vision or, or strategy. So we want people to take away those actual insights, and actually walk away each episode with something that they can implement in their firm to improve the workflow processes and scale the practice. So bringing in those firm owners is critical and that’s who we weren’t on this show.

Roman Villard
Yeah, and hearing from those firm owners, it will be a conversation, not just at a point in time of this is your workflow today. This is how you manage it, but also over time, how did it evolve? And how did you evaluate when to make changes to that workflow? What systems did you use? How did you evaluate those systems, and to your point, those really granular decision points that are made in order to build workflow that really works for their firm. And so we’ll get to go through in each episode a bit of history that led to the critical workflow that they’ve set up that we’ll be dialoguing about in that specific episode.

Shahram Zarshenas
Yeah, I love that. Like when we look at, like, the anatomy of the episodes, right, like talking about, you know, not just having them break down their workflows, right, like getting into the nuts and bolts of things, how does the process work? So like, you can really understand it and visualise it and how you could take that if you see value, and implemented in your firm, but talking about the evolution of it, how I got there, because it may have been different when they were of this size. And a firm owner can kind of relate to that, like, Oh, I’m at that size right now. And that’s where I want to be, can kind of hear their story of how it evolved. And then talking about that, because it’s important, like we talked about your processes are always changing as your as your firm changes.

Roman Villard
Yeah, processes are in constant evolution. And then also, I think it’ll be important to cover who are the various stakeholders in any specific process that you’re setting up. And so you’ve got your internal team, you’ve got your clients, you’ve got perhaps different stakeholders that are involved in these different processes. And so we want to really uncover how does a specific process impact your client experience? How does it impact your team? And how do you design something that’s really serving both sides, you know, because you don’t want to have something that’s real, it works really well for your clients that your team hates, and vice versa. So you want to have something really smooth? And we’ll start to to uncover what that really looks like for a lot of firms.

Shahram Zarshenas
Yeah, that’s true that point about like, you need something your team will actually like and enjoy. I see this all the time firms implement some type of process, because it’s, it will make it better, but it’s just, it’s like pulling teeth getting your teeth implemented. And that’s what’s cool is, you’re going to be able to hear on this podcast from people that have successfully not just created workflows, but implemented them and got their team to adopt them and what they did to do that, because it may not just be because the process is, is better, but it’s how they educated their team on that talking about how did you actually implement and train your team on this workflow, right? It’s may not have just been an email saying, hey, look, we have this new process. It’s continued education, maybe a lunch and learn, they’ll have a lot of tips that you can learn, which is really good. I mean, the goal, when I look at this podcast, the goal I see is, after listening into one of our 20 to 30 minute episodes, you can walk away and say I’ve got a I’ve got a game plan, and map of how I can actually take that and implement that in my firm, to solve that problem that we’re having that they saw for themselves.

Roman Villard
Yeah, and I think it’d be really fun for firm runners to go in and say, look at the episode, say, Okay, I need a little bit of insight on spend management, I need insight on the onboarding process on month end, close workflow, things like that, you can start to cherry pick these because independently, they are all tremendously valuable to specific situations within the firm. And so once once you get through a whole series of all of these separate workflows, we can continue to dive in on those topics at different levels to start to uncover greater and different problems. As we have these conversations, it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be a lot of fun.

Shahram Zarshenas
Yeah, I mean, think about it. There’s so many different processes in the firm from, like you said, like the month end, close Client Onboarding, or the client facing processes. But there’s also the internal processes like How about onboarding new staff members? Right? What processes are there for that or processes for all these admin admin processes in your firm, so there’s so many different things that we can talk about. It’s the in, go deep on right month, and close for a smaller firm may be different for a larger firm with 10 staff members versus solo, right? There’s so many different ways we can look at this and dive deep to create good content that accounting firms listening in, can benefit from.

Roman Villard
And so if you’re talking to a firm owner, that’s in the early days, maybe has some degree of process setup. What do you tell them in terms of why is this important for you? Why is content like this so critical for you to absorb in order to build a scalable firm?

Shahram Zarshenas
Well, you know, when you’re solo, right, like you can get away with like, we talked about keeping it all in your head or spreadsheets or sticky notes, right? You don’t feel that problem, but if you want to bid like even as a solo, but as he just you’re quite a bit, it’s like you automate a lot of things, which is great. And you can handle a lot of clients. But if your client base as it continues to grow, you’re still going to run in these problems, even if you have team members, right? Documents are going to be come a little bit harder to find as you grow, like all that client information that you need to get the work done. Yes, more clients, like some clients require special something different than that you don’t on the other clients, you have to be able to remember this different special steps customised on a client by client level, and then you throw start throwing team members in there, it gets even more crazy and complicated, right. So if, if you if you want to actually build whether it’s you, or 10, or 20 team members or 100 team members, if you want to build a firm and grow your firm and scale your firm, you need to digest this content. Because we see this, you hit a ceiling, when if you try to do all the work yourself. We’re only human, there’s only so much time in the day, your firm will be limited by you. Okay, so then you hire people, right? Then you start to hire people, they make mistakes, right? Because they don’t have the information they need. They don’t know that process for this client. It’s different from that client. They can’t find the documents and those mistakes cause rework, which wastes time in your firm kills productivity causes deadlines to fall behind, because you thought John was working on that when you were supposed to be working on that. So which upsets clients clients aren’t happy, new business stops coming in? Because what’s the number one driver for accounting firms referrals? Why do you get referrals from doing a good job, it’s making your clients happy, which slows growth, then you start losing clients, which then revenue starts going away. So like, you start to see like, if you don’t have these processes in place, growth can slow for multiple reasons, because you can’t handle more work because you don’t have the processes in place. Clients are unhappy, stop referring business, and you’re losing clients. So if you’re looking to grow a firm, whether it’s just you or several team members, you need to eventually put processes in place. So that’s why that’s what I would suggest is if that’s you, and you want to learn from the best and the brightest, in the accounting industry, this is going to be a great place for you to pick their minds.

Roman Villard
100%, and it’s also a very open community to every single person that we’re chatting with, and having conversations about workflow. These are very reachable people, you know, just a message away, oftentimes on LinkedIn. And so this isn’t this type of podcast where we host these, these conversations with folks who are just on a different planet, completely unreachable, like, very accessible. And so to be able to start a conversation around best practice in this space is really important. And anybody listening can take it a step further by reaching out to anybody that’s a part of this podcast, because when you think about industry impact community is one of the greatest parts that parts of have greater impact of this industry. And so I think it’s important to note that it’s, it’s a very open and great environment to be able to send a message to reach out to these folks will be having conversations with. You said something a few minutes ago related to automation, and AI. So I think it’s important to note that this isn’t an automation, podcast automation and AI play a critical part in workflow and in process. And those will absolutely be topics covered within each episode about how do you think about maybe the difference between automation AI, and its involvement in accounting firm workflows today?

Shahram Zarshenas
Yeah, why not? Because when I look at workflows, it’s like, what is the process? Right? How do you complete this process, whether it’s like, month in close, or a specific type of tax return for a client? So you need to like, like, if we look at in the simplest form a checklist, right of the steps you got to do to complete it. That’s workflow defining the flow of the work, right. Automation, I think is powerful. But to actually automate processes, you first need to know what the workflow is, you can’t automate something without knowing the steps in like, we tell this like when people are trying to like, we have a webinar we do on like automating your firm. And what’s the first thing you need to do define your processes? Because then once you define your processes, you can see all the steps, where’s the waste? What are the recurring manual, low admin tasks that you’re doing every week, every month? It’s easier to see when you have it written down, right? And then you can Okay, well, how can I automate that right? Okay, let me automate this, okay, this looks like something I cannot, like, opens your eyes to the opportunity of automation. And then so like, I look at automation as like a catalyst for workflow, you have the workflow, and then how automation can make it more are efficient, right? By automating the steps in the workflow. So it’s like, it’s great to layer in. But before you can automate things, you need to first define the process. Because once you define the process, you know what tools you can use, and go out and do the research to find the tools you need to automate.

Roman Villard
And I have a hunch that that will be a large topic of conversation with a lot of guests who have who have designed processes, and then evaluated what types of automations can support that process. And so we’ll get into the weeds on some of those ways that firm owners have started to, to uplevel their their internal processes through new, different creative tools utilising AI and other automation methodologies.

Shahram Zarshenas
Yeah, definitely. There’s, there’s so much to talk about, especially nowadays with the technology. I mean, there’s so many powerful tools out there. And I mean, there’s so many really smart people out there talking about automation, the accounting space, and then it’s like what you said, like, all these people we have on the show, like, some of them will be like an average, you know, just firm owner that’s running the firm every day someone we people that are well known in the space. And like you said, the accounting community, what I love about it is everyone’s open and sharing what works for them, they don’t see themselves as competitors, which they should, right, and you can reach out to them on LinkedIn, or they might have more content already created on the web. So you can find these little places that you didn’t even know existed with a wealth of knowledge on a topic that you’re wanting to learn more about where you can go dive deeper in after our podcast, because now you know, that person exists, and they have all these resources. So it’s, it can point you in the right or even if we don’t have the insight on our podcast, he can point you in the right direction.

Roman Villard
Yeah. And also, I think it’s important to note too, if there are specific subjects or areas that you want to hear about relative to workflow in your firm, let us know, like we want to be open to feedback on what types of subject content matter is really beneficial and connects with you. And so certainly looking for feedback on that front.

Shahram Zarshenas
Yeah, that’s, I think that’s great. Yeah, feel free to reach out anytime. Like, you know, this is for y’all, right? This is for firm owners and Roman’s, a firm owner, I’m not. But like, it’s always great to get different perspectives in what you guys want to hear, because it’s coming to help you get more value at the end of the day.

Roman Villard
100%. And selfishly, I want to have these conversations. So I can learn from the guests that are coming on the podcast, because there’s a lot of really smart people that we’ll be chatting with. As we wrap here, big vision for the podcast, you know, what credit impact you want to create, what type of conversations do you see spring from this, long term?

Shahram Zarshenas
Yeah, so like when we thought of the vision for the podcast, right? It’s, we looked at the market. Like, again, what is the biggest problem workflow? Well, there wasn’t like, one place to go through for anything, everything to learn about workflow. So we said, let’s create a podcast dedicated to that. Let’s go deep. And our goal with that is to help firms get those insights, whether they’re early on in their career, before they face those problems, or they’re later on a majority of their firmware. Like, it’s the know it’s slowing them down. But they just don’t know how to solve it, right? Because you can Google some of this stuff, but it doesn’t go deep. It’s a fluff piece, right? It’s just It doesn’t like really give you like, it says, Yeah, automate client experience with this technology. Well, how do we actually implement it? Right? How do I train my team on? How do I get my clients to use it? Well, there’s little things that go into making that be successful. So our vision is to go deep, you know, no fluff, like straight to the point actual insights. So these firms can take that and then implement it in their firm. And that’s how we say we just want to help firms solve that problem. So it’s not limiting the dreams and goals they have for their firm.

Roman Villard
Love that, love that and firm owners know when they’re stuck, they can feel it. And so to be able to create a resource through accounting flow that can start to take ease those burdens and create a resource, a content bank, where folks can go to and say, Okay, this is my specific pain point that I’m facing, I’m gonna go check out accounting flow for that is going to be so much fun.

Shahram Zarshenas
Yeah, I mean, that’s what I love about it, too. It’s not even like a high level workflow. Workflow. It’s like more high level workflow in general, it’s like, today we’re talking about how this firm like streamline their client onboarding process and, or how they automated this process so you can go and like pinpoint each little one that you want, that resonates with you, and like go deep on it and learn exactly how they did it. How you can do it yourself. It’s, it’s gonna be really critically so cool. I can’t wait like six months from now when we have all this content created, and it’s just like, there’s a library of all these different processes you can implement in your firm.

Roman Villard
And I think you’ll be able to look back and hear the stories from firm owners that are saying, “man, I implemented that process. And it made a complete difference in my firm.” And those will be the types of stories that’ll be really, really fun to read and hear over time. So if people are looking to get ahold of you and or Financial Cents, where do they find you?

Shahram Zarshenas
Yeah, so the best way just go to website financial-cents.com. And you can talk to our team. If you have questions about the product or if you have questions and feedback on the podcast, right? Just sit chat, chat with our team on the website and let us know it’s the best way to do that.

Roman Villard
Perfect. Awesome. Well, looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Shahram Zarshenas
Awesome. Well, Roman, thanks for having me. This is exciting and I really can’t wait to get this kicked off.

Roman Villard
Let’s go.