S02 E06: How Finance Automation Can Transform Your Firm

Roman Villard
Alright, we’re back with another episode of Accounting Flow, this time with Jesse and Tom from FinOptimal. They’re going to talk to us a little bit about finance automation. What’s up, fellas?

Tom Zehentner
Yo, thanks for having us.

Roman Villard
I’m stoked to have this conversation because, from my understanding, you guys offer services but have also been building some pretty cool products. Jesse, can you give us a little bit of history on FinOptimal and how you started? Then we can start working on some products.

Jesse Rubenfeld
Sure, I began doing books. That’s how I started my career. I was at Limewire, and I had to do AP data entry, monthly journal entries, monthly accruals, and presentation of financial statements to the controller and the CFO. I also worked with a lot of programmers. I enjoyed writing code. I wanted to learn to code, so I started automating my job. Carrying that forward through increasingly responsible finance-related roles, controller CFO, I later did the same thing at D. E Shaw, where I started automating financial operations finop. And eventually started thinking to myself I can do this for QuickBooks, I can do this for third party companies. I started taking clients, built a book of business, and eventually thought maybe, you know, perhaps I can scale this up and started doing it full time. So here we are.

Roman Villard
And what year was that, that you started in FinOptimal full-time?

Jesse Rubenfeld
I started full-time in 2021, so I’d been doing it for probably five or six years at that point. In the last year, we’ve decided to productize some of the software that we previously only used for our service clients. We call it The Magic. We’re trying to make The Magic available to other accounting firms.

Tom Zehentner
Other people call it The Magic. And then we took it.

Jesse Rubenfeld
One of our clients called it The Magic.

Tom Zehentner
It’s a pretty cocky thing just to be like, yeah, it’s The Magic.

Jesse Rubenfeld
Yeah, it is. It’s true. It’s true.

Tom Zehentner
Other people said that first.

Jesse Rubenfeld
Well, if the shoe fits, wear it.

Tom Zehentner
And I’ll be honest, Roman, people today don’t know that. And they’ll see a demo and say, this is like magic. And I’m like, look at the subdomain, and it’s the magic.finoptimal.com, and their, like, holy crap.

Roman Villard
Is it? So magic.finoptimal.com? Is that where the products are?

Tom Zehentner
Yeah, a lot of people do app.finoptimal, ours is magic.finoptimal.com. That is where you go to log into the actual platform. And we did that. And now people see demos, and they’re like, wait, what, how did you?

Roman Villard
Magic!

Jesse Rubenfeld
It was our first big client, and the CFO was trying to understand how the software worked, like how the process would be modified. Once we put our software in, we’re still doing the books for that company. You know, eight years later. Yeah, he’s okay, so I entered this data into the spreadsheet, and then the magic will create a bill and beat it. Yeah, that’s right. That’s how it works. From there, he started calling it the magic, and we ran with it.

Roman Villard
And I suspect a lot of clients, you know, it may feel like magic to them. And many of them probably don’t care how the sausage gets made. They care about how the sausage tastes, right? And so you’ve taken this approach to building up your skill set and coding, Jesse, and I suspect you have been coding many of these internal products that are now available in the market.

Jesse Rubenfeld
That’s exactly right. When I went full time, we hired some professional developers, I’m not trained academically as a developer, I don’t have a degree in it. And so, as a self-taught programmer, there are gaps in my knowledge that you need to fill if you’re going to sell a product on a SaaS basis. And front-end development is something that I hadn’t touched at all. And just kind of orchestration, uptime security. We had to develop these capabilities to sell the service as a SaaS if that makes sense to software as a service.

Tom Zehentner
However, Jesse’s ability to combine accounting and engineering, such as Accruer, the Accruer, or code, has been there since 2015. It’s just how to use it; it was like you had to save an Excel file and put something in a particular cell. And then, when you saved it, it would come around. And that was…

Jesse Rubenfeld
The control user interface was very primitive.

Tom Zehentner
With saving on an Excel file, but the idea of how to calculate both the entries, prorate, book a catch-up entry automatically, and do all that has been there, right? It’s like these diamonds just sitting there, and we’re chipping away at all of the debris to make them something that other people can use.

Roman Villard
Yeah, I love it. I’ve got so many questions, and we’re going to dive into some of those products. First, Tom, do you code, too? Are you an accountant? What’s your story?

Jesse Rubenfeld
Like Tom, what do you do here exactly?

Tom Zehentner
I’m a lifelong BSer. I was an auditor, which means you pretend to know stuff and tell people they’re not doing it correctly. And now I’m a product person, which is the same thing. I just went, and I wanted to do that. And it’s not doing it. No, I mean, I’m an accountant.

Jesse Rubenfeld
He’s a product manager. So he’s in charge of Asana. That’s what Tom is.

Tom Zehentner
You don’t even. Come on. It’s a Google Sheet, dude. We’re back to square one.

Jesse Rubenfeld
It’s a Google Sheet.

Tom Zehentner
Where the magic is made, no, I mean, I did, like RPA and UI path-based automation. When I was in public, UltaX and those kinds of tools were never seriously coded in Python. But I was also interested in from a very early age, I was in sixth grade on MySpace, making custom, like HTML layouts. So, I was always interested in it and how it worked. I was also neither classically trained in it nor found a niche in communicating accounting and engineering concepts to those respective parties, rather than having to do any of the work myself, which is pretty sweet.

Roman Villard
Yeah, and that’s what many listeners are considering: How do I create more efficiency? How can we bring on more technology? How do I get more of my life back? But I will say, just in your eloquent intro, that by bringing up MySpace, you alienated an entire population of Gen Z just like that.

I thought there were no Gen Z accountants. I felt that it would be accounting insurance.

Jesse Rubenfeld
Yeah, the CPA requirements. One hundred fifty hours is too much.

Roman Villard
Yeah, do we want to go down that rabbit hole?

Jesse Rubenfeld
No no.

Roman Villard
Or talk about automation? I can go on about that one. Alright, so it’s a super interesting setup here. I want to dive down a couple of paths. But when considering gap accounting and the more complex side of what we do here, I see several platforms and service products available today. And I think they may have put a bad light on what advanced accrual accounting looks like and the complexities that live there. It sounds like with some of the products you’ve built; you focused more on advanced accounting, the skill sets that come at more of the accountant, maybe at controller levels. Can you talk about how you started thinking about items to automate during these processes?

Tom Zehentner
Yeah, first of all, not going to touch that we do something similar, but we use a bleep button. Maybe you guys invest in the bleep button. However, I think that is an interesting concept in general regarding the automation space. Before we talk about that right now, I think a lot of accounts have been told this is automation. And it’s not, it is an Excel sheet in a different colour with a clunkier interface that throws data at a system. And that’s all it does. And then there’s some guy in another country who is paid a fraction of what a US employee is paid, and they’re the ones fixing it all. And then it’s, oh, this is automated. That’s not automation. It’s automation-assisted; let’s be honest, let’s be transparent. Because there’s true automation, there’s automation assisted, and then there’s building something flimsy and having an outsource person fix it when no one’s paying attention. So that being said, I feel like it was on a need-to-automate basis like Accruer came from a nonprofit client who needed to spread something over a certain period with their grant funding. And that’s where it came from. Right. I think it was like, Jesse, you were taking on clients. And everything came from Jesse’s absolute refusal to do anything manually. Anything! Ask him ask him about Accruer. Did you ever do it manually here, Jesse?

Jesse Rubenfeld
I mean, no, I never did. I think the key ingredient here is we started, and we see this as a bit helpful to have service clients so that while we’re building a SaaS company, we have another source of revenue. But more importantly, if our responsibility starts with delivering the books, we do not have to ship a feature. We can discuss the difference between being a service company and a product company and what it means to productize Accruer. We have to close the books. They don’t care if it’s easy for us to book the accruals. They don’t care if it takes us a long time. They care about whether you do the job well. And is it at a price that’s competitive with your competitors? So, the only incentive was to build functionality that would get us the job done. Without mistakes, right? Anybody in the accounting service business knows that mistakes that you make, the deep dives that you have to do, the wild goose chases you have to engage in to troubleshoot a problem usually, that you introduce sometimes that the client introduced, right? It takes more time than ever like it makes a profitable client become something that makes you sigh when you think about them.

Roman Villard
Yeah.

Jesse Rubenfeld
We built tools to avoid having to do those troubleshooting sessions. Over time, this client does it this way: I’m gonna add a lot of dials. So we can do this for clients, but like Burger King, ‘have it your way.’ And then getting into how you productize it, this is where Tom’s contribution here is really important. The Accruer that’s available and that you can buy is a relatively small subset of features.

Roman Villard
Yeah, right.

Jesse Rubenfeld
But the production of Accruer for our services and business is included because you have to be able to set it up. It can’t be like Photoshop, where you need to be a graphic designer; you need to learn a whole new skill, right? It’s got to be easy. So, when selling products and services, there’s a synergy there. But there are different sports.

Roman Villard
Yeah. I want to dive into the product and service side of things because there’s a lot of productization happening within the services sector right now. Just for context and awareness, can you describe Accruer so people can understand what we’re talking about here?

Tom Zehentner
For sure, in Accruer for QuickBooks Online, you put plain English into the description of a transaction. This expense is for the period March 20th through June 19th. Based on that, it will identify that it’s a prepaid expense, calculate and book all the entries, spread it to the penny by Gap, and create the schedule for you. It does the same process for prepaid expenses, deferred revenue, fixed assets, and payroll accruals. And you don’t leave QuickBooks like it’s in your working in QuickBooks, you’re writing plain English, and it’s happening. And it’s empowering people who don’t even know accrual accounting to be able to offer it. Right.

Roman Villard
Yeah. And I think it’s essential to set that context because what you guys do plays a very critical role in the management of GAAP-based financials or accrual-based financials. To your point, it is a feature within the entire workflow for client management every month. You’re not saying we’ve automated the whole client relationship. This feature is critical for service delivery and management moving forward.

Tom Zehentner
Absolutely. Even for our services, we were tech-enabled. We never promised to automate everything. You cannot automate everything, right? And we think it’s really important to recognize where you can and can’t. Because trying to automate something that shouldn’t be automated is going to be worse than automating something that should be automated. You’re going to cause more harm than good going down the wrong path.

Roman Villard
Yeah, and I think that’s a good segue into the product versus service because many of these product-based companies you’ve seen come out over the years have touted automation of effectively what is a fully engaged client service. Historically, services have been predicated upon relationships, knowing your client’s business, goals, and strategy, and then marrying the tactical work and service to those things. Now, what I’ve seen in the market, I’d love to hear your take on this is that product-based companies have seemed to go the opposite direction of you all, in that they’ve created a product, realize that they can’t fully productize accounting services based on the ‘if, then’ statements that they coded, and now they’re starting to bolt on services on top of it to self sustain and drive profitability. What’s your take on the market sentiment there? And what are your thoughts?

Tom Zehentner
I’ll let you take it, Jesse.

Jesse Rubenfeld
That’s a great question. I agree there’s some convergence, you know, there are single product companies, right? They build one piece of it. They’re not claiming to automate the whole account, and I think there’s a lot of power in that focus. You can successfully sell accounting and accounting software as a single product company if you spend all your time getting to know those workflows. But it’s just a different strategy. But what we’re doing here is trying to take advantage. I mean, first of my intersection between accounting and tech, right? It is to be able to short-circuit the product development lifecycle. Initially, it was just all in my head, I understand the work I need to do. And I know I have a vision for how to code it up. And now we’re trying to build a company that embodies that same closed loop, like, we don’t build software that doesn’t get our client’s books done.

We prioritize features based on how much work they save so that we can do better in our service business and have more money to develop our products. So it’s a different mindset; for example, we must automate this work. Whereas when you start from the product angle and introduce a service, I think at some level, hey, we have something of value, it’s hard to learn how to use, or you have to do process changes to integrate it, we’re going to help you. And we do some of that, too. Onboarding services that we provide. At some level, someone who will get leverage out of our products has to do their CAS work a little bit more like us in some ways, right? So, not entirely, but we have to show them how to use Accruer. Having them watch us do it once instead of telling is often worth its weight in gold because people have to think of their process. How would I change my behavior to make this work?

Tom Zehentner
Yeah, I think the services aren’t a lifeline for us. I feel like Roman, you’re saying, hey, we have this product, and monetization is going a little bit slower. So we better diversify. The flip side is that we need the services business. We believe in it because I talked to people who are like, well, we test products for accounting and tech if you ever want us to be your bug catchers. And I’m like, we have an army of bug catchers. They’re sitting behind me. They’re doing the bugs.

Jesse Rubenfeld
Not that we have any bugs.

Tom Zehentner
No bugs; Jessie’s code is perfect. But you know, to us, it’s a strategic angle to make the products better rather than an angle of just giving us additional cash flow. At the same time, we figure out how to sell the software product. Don’t get me wrong, it helps there. But that’s not why we have it.

Roman Villard
And I think it’s an important distinction, too, because everybody running a firm is trying to pinpoint areas within their existing process to which they can bring efficiency. And that could be for margin’s sake; it could be for elevating your team’s time to spend on strategic initiatives. But I’m curious: as our market and firms productize their offering, you’ve seen a big trend. Like these medallion pricing structures, the bronze, the silver, and the gold, you need to operationalize technology well to understand how to fix their value-based price-specific tiers effectively. Tools like Accruer are critical to operationalizing well so that you can focus on pricing effectively and managing your team’s time and capacity. So, it’s crucial to understand how that entire flywheel works.

Tom Zehentner
For sure. I’m curious, like Roman, when you think about it because we have this conversation constantly. Figuring out where to automate is the key. But when I see people choosing, it’s not things that we would necessarily automate. Right? That’s not where our heads go. And we find people, and it’s like, why are you doing this when you could do that, right? Or people gravitate toward automating reporting. And that’s awesome. But if you’re automating the last 10% of the accounting cycle and doing the first 90% manually, is that the best use of your time? Maybe you do a ton of reporting for your clients, which makes it worth it. But how do you get to that part? It’s like someone wants a bunch of cherries, right? And they don’t want to do all the ice cream sundae, right? We’re focused on the boring part, whether we have the correct cream to make the ice cream. So it’s interesting how you think many of these firms pick what to do.

Jesse Rubenfeld
That’s a new one, a cherry ice cream analogy.

Tom Zehentner
But is it just because it feels comfortable? I know what reporting is, so that feels like a good one to do. I’m always curious how people select it because I don’t know if it’s based on the time spent, but this feels convenient and comfortable for me.

Roman Villard
So my thoughts on that is shiny object syndrome. It’s straightforward to look at a reporting package and to see some tangible output that clients can grasp. And they can fawn over this pretty report because that’s a deliverable. So, it’s easy to say I’ll spend x amount of dollars per client on this reporting tool because my client will have a better experience. But with a tool like Accruer, it’s all internal facing. And so it’s harder to spend money on something that the client doesn’t care about. Yet we go back to the workflow and the process of the internal firm, I had a conversation with Cory at Streams, who helps us some automations and Zapier building and stuff like that. It all goes back to process documentation on client services, like how you deliver a service in a very documented process and workflow and then start to triage. Where’s the time spent in that workflow to create efficiency on the back end, and you’ll see drastic improvements to your financials afterward?

Tom Zehentner
100%

Jesse Rubenfeld
I want to comment on that a little bit, Roman. I mean, on documentation specifically. Because a lot of the audience for our services includes accountants, there will be an account director of finance, a CFO, or even an in-house controller or accounting associate who’s between us and the decision maker to use us.

Tom Zehentner
And Jesse, hold on, you’re specifically talking about our CAS practice, right? In this context.

Jesse Rubenfeld
Yes, I am.

Tom Zehentner
Okay, I want to bring clarity to you, not the Accruer. Yeah, cool.

Jesse Rubenfeld
This gets back to the whole productization idea. Yes, you must document a process to train someone else on it to have a sense, be able to describe it, analyze it, and decide if there’s a better way or if there’s not. But I think back to my experience. A D.E. Shaw, one developer, told me that in good code, people talk about putting comments and document strings into your code to explain what it does. That’s a best practice in computer, you know, coding 101. But this developer said the best part, like the best code, doesn’t need documentation because you choose variable names and logic that’s easy to follow. And I think there’s something there when it comes to the productization. Yes, if it’s not apparent, the best product is easy to use, you don’t have to read the manual, and the best process is easy to understand. It’s intuitive; it’s an ideal to strive for. But anything built right, the less intuitive it is, the more documentation you must write.

Roman Villard
I agree. However, I would also say that some sort of process has to be documented in order to identify areas in which you can introduce automation and efficiency. So you can just have a starting point.

Jesse Rubenfeld
100% of course.

Roman Villard
I think that comes back to whether your team records time on tasks within a client relationship. If they’re not, you probably don’t have enough data to understand how to pick apart your workflow to automate it. So, I agree that a documentation overload can feel burdensome and clunky. It’s not always necessary, but it can provide a lot of visibility to those areas in which you can scale more effectively.

Tom Zehentner
100%. You need to brainstorm ideas for everything you think you can automate, and then you have to power-rank them based on the level of effort, right? The potential impact, and then you’re like, these are my good candidates. Let’s work backward. Are they at that point? You already know that they’re error-prone, monotonous, hefty volume. Then you’re 100%? But to Roman’s point, when you’re skilled, sometimes people will come to us and say I need automation for cleanup. What does that mean? You have to go deep. Is it that there’s a bunch of bank reconciliations that have never been done? Is it a bunch of recategorization? What rules do you need to recategorize based on if it’s recategorization? So, you have to think thoroughly about something before trying to automate it. Because otherwise, you’re just going to be shooting in the dark. So, Romans, how do you start thinking about it? And then Jesse, you’re saying this is what to strive for when you automate it. Right?

Jesse Rubenfeld
Yeah, it’s trying to automate it for yourself with Zapier, for example. In other RPAs, the level of documentation and research is much lower than when you’re trying to build a product. By all means, hack away at it, try to get it to work, and then document whatever works. I’m a tinkerer. I’m the guy who will go in and try to write some code and make it work, but it’s very different to say, all right, I built an automation that works well for me. How do I share that? How do I share that with somebody else? Who will figure out how to use it efficiently? Who will see it and say, I want that?

Tom Zehentner
Roman, what do you use to document processes?

Roman Villard
Notion. We use Notion.

Tom Zehentner
Notion?

Roman Villard
We use Notion, yeah.

Tom Zehentner
Do you use any automation tools to like, track it, have you tried any of them?

Roman Villard
In terms of tracking what?

Tom Zehentner
I’ve seen ones like, I’ll watch you work, and then I’ll write down your steps.

No. I’ll talk to chatGPT, and it’ll document everything that I say. I’ll prompt it in certain ways to produce an output, and then I can pore over it in Notion and categorize it in a really specific way.

Fair.

Roman Villard
But at the same time, the intent behind creating the process is to enable scalability because there is a slew of clients that, every month, we know we will be doing the same things. Within that client relationship, there will always be nuances and things that need to be managed outside of that process. But without that, we don’t know how to introduce scalability because, ultimately, the firms are operating at $10, $20, $50 million a year. They are pretty dialed in on the process.

Tom Zehentner
For sure. It’s like anything with documentation is hard because you have to go back and keep updating it. People treat it as a one-time chore. And it’s not it’s, it’s, if you’re only going to do once, it’s going to be a waste.

Roman Villard
And it’s all dependent upon your firm lifecycle. So, right now, we’re in year two of operations. Our processes are changing effectively every three months, and we’re reinventing ourselves. And that is hard. Like Jesse, you talk about tinkering. I’m with you, man; I tinker a lot.

But to some extent, that’s dangerous for scalability. Because the more that I tinker, the more we’ve got to retrain our team, clients, and deliverables. And it gets tricky.

Jesse Rubenfeld
Agree.

Tom Zehentner
As a tinkerer of our product documentation, I have to be honest: we’ve been able to make more straightforward product documentation as we’ve iterated, right? People keep getting stuck on a particular feature. And we go, Well, we were thinking about this wrong. This isn’t how other people think; let’s change it. And I can delete these three pages because now it’ll make sense. Right? So, keeping it clean is tough.

Roman Villard
It is, but let’s snap back to reality quickly because 97% of firms aren’t updating their documentation.

Tom Zehentner
For sure.

Roman Villard
And ultimately, they’re just looking for more efficient ways to deliver a service to improve their margins to help their team, you know, manage load more effectively to reduce burnout, like they’re trying to tactically tie these tools that are available in the market to either a client experience and employee experience. And so that’s how I think most firms are looking at tools in the market. Alright, can I save some time and money? Can I create a better experience? Is that how you guys have seen, you know, your interactions with prospects on the Accruer side?

Tom Zehentner
For sure. It’s funny because some people are looking to improve accuracy. For some people, it’s the amount of times I’ve gone to a client meeting thinking something is done, and it’s not. And then I have egg on my face, or I have to like to dance around it. And now you’re telling me I could change plain English, and that’s a massive win for them. Others are focused on improving their margins, right? Hey, we switched to a subscription-based model and want to lower our costs. Others are dealing with the staffing issue. We have so much business, and I can’t possibly staff it now. And it’s funny because any marketing is about finding the pain point. There are so many different unique pain points in accounting right now. The firms that look the same way on paper have utterly different pain points. And it’s interesting right now. It’s right to figure out what everybody is trying to solve. And some people want to take over the world. Some people like me want to quadruple my firm, and others want to go to the beach and not work on Fridays. And you have to get to know the person you’re dealing with and their goals, right? So, as much as it says, it’s still service.

Roman Villard
I love that because it completely changes the conversation when you tie it to a firm runner’s goal. I talked to a firm owner out of Florida with three staff who will do about $1.2 to $1.5 million in revenue. So his revenue per employee is sky high and very niche to business, but their processes are nailed down. He’s like, I don’t even want to grow like this, which is excellent. I feel healthy. I feel energized, and I have enough time to spend with my kids, and that’s very different than the firm owner who’s like, I want to 3x and the next two years, like, man!

Tom Zehentner
Ambition.

Jesse Rubenfeld
I think that is the variability. The heterogeneity of what people are looking for in services and products is one of the reasons why I like selling both. Before we started selling SaaS, we only sold services, there were still very high touch clients paying a lot of money every month. And then there were very low tech that didn’t want a lot and weren’t willing to spend a lot. I view SaaS products as the lowest touch point you can buy, right? You’re not getting someone to review your books if you purchase a SaaS product. But if you’re a firm and doing that yourself, you don’t need it. One of the drivers of releasing SaaS was clients with very sophisticated in-house team members who said, “Listen, I don’t really want to pay you like, hey, you have to pay us to do your bank rec and your AP data entry and a review. I don’t want to pay you for that. Can I have Booker?” No, we don’t do that. Now we do that, and you can get Booker. So, they want to lower touchpoints to meet the market.

Roman Villard
Yeah, it’s a good point because now many firms are battling lower fees and the commoditization of the service overall at the lowest levels. And I think there’s probably a lot of firm owners listening to this thing like, oh, well, you can’t automate my relationship with my clients. If I bring on more SaaS tools, that relationship will deteriorate. And you have to shift gears; you have to think about it differently. So, have you been faced with that pushback at all? How do you talk about the relationship side of a firm’s running?

Tom Zehentner
Yeah, if anything, it will give you more time to talk to your clients, right? Like, the one thing that we’re doing is eliminating the work that nobody wants to do manually. Like we’re not organizing stuff for you. The automation is working; you no longer book manual journal entries. Think about however much time that is. Now, you can meet with your client more often. You can send them a more thoughtful email; you can dedicate more time to the relationship and the value of the analysis, your month in close email; you can take the 90 minutes usually spent wrestling with the spreadsheet and put it towards actually thinking about their books, and sending them something that matters. So, you can’t automate the client relationship. You use automation to enhance the client relationship. That’s what you’re good at. Spend more time doing it. Spend more time doing it.

Roman Villard
Mic drop.

Tom Zehentner
There you go. Jesse, my mic dropped when we started.

Jesse Rubenfeld
Yeah, that’s true.

Roman Villard
But to your point, like ten times out of 10, I would rather see one hour of billable time go to strategically educating a client on how and why deferred revenue is essential than spending that time booking that entry or those entries, right?

Tom Zehentner
For sure. 100%. Spend less time doing things manually, knowing they will be done correctly; FinOptimal does not have an outsourced team booking your accruals while you’re sleeping. All right, this will work, and you can watch it work. That’s a ticket to the blood bank guarantee.

Roman Villard
That is Tom’s promise.

Tom Zehentner
It’s Tom’s promise.

Jesse Rubenfeld
I mean, Tom is the right person to answer that, because he talks to accounting firms all day, he here what they had, you know, so I mean, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have someone running the product function that’s responsive to what customers which we have a different name internally for customers versus clients. The products are sold to the customers. And you know, what they want is a critical element of what we should be productive, build, make robust, and extend. That’s along the spectrum.

Roman Villard
All right. I’d like to go on for another 30 minutes, two hours, or three hours on this. I’ve got one hard-hitting question, and then I want a little bit more info on how to get a hold of you guys. But the hard-hitting question: Are you a service company or a product company?

Tom Zehentner
Both.

Roman Villard
Cop out.

Jesse Rubenfeld
I would say we’re a service company because Software as a Service is a service. Again, I view that as the lowest-touch point, the little lowest-touch way to engage with FinOptimal. I think the fact that our software is born out of service makes us a service company first. We care about the results, not just about the process, but look, it’s a good question because strategically, I’m sure my board would want me to answer it.

Tom Zehentner
I was going to say it depends on who asks. Yeah, you’re a SaaS company.

Jesse Rubenfeld
Investor.? Yeah. Push comes to shove; I would go with service there.

Tom Zehentner
I agree. I 100% agree with you.

Roman Villard
All right, you heard it here first. For all of those in the market who have seen your name, and I have kind of come to some degree of awareness of who FinOptimal is, FinOptimal is a service company with some pretty banger products. Is that a good description?

Tom Zehentner
It’s a good description. We’ll see next year when SaaS is ten times bigger than services. We might have a new answer for you then.

Roman Villard
Perfect, perfect. Okay, so as we move forward to 2024, where can people find you? And how can they contact you guys?

Tom Zehentner
finoptimal.com check us out. Accruer, Booker, and everything else in the hopper are on there. You can find us on LinkedIn. Jesse posts stuff a lot. And then I comment, making fun of it. So you can find us in the comment section. But yeah, check us out.

Roman Villard
Perfect. Are there any conferences you guys will be out of this year?

Tom Zehentner
Scaling New Heights, we’ll have a booth. I don’t know the number off the top of my head, and then QuickBooks Connect if they let us in. Hopefully, they will hear this and give us a booth this year.

Roman Villard
We’ll see what we can do with QuickBooks Connect. Yeah, but then finoptimal.com and Scaling New Heights. Check out Tom and Jesse. Please give him a connection and follow him on LinkedIn. And if you have any questions, Tom has about 1000 headshots on LinkedIn. You can peruse it and then reach out to him with any questions.

Tom Zehentner
Exactly, if you want to use AI, hit me up.

Perfect

Jesse Rubenfeld
Thanks so much. Enjoy the conversation.

Tom Zehentner
Thanks, Roman.

Jesse Rubenfeld
Yeah, likewise, cheers!