Digi-Tools In Accrual World

Ryan Pearcy is joined by Billie McLoughlin and Kevin Fitzgerald from Employment Hero for a fortnight of app news, from a quieter year for accounting startups to who gets to pull the plug in an app ecosystem. Kevin opens with Y Combinator, which backed seven tools for accountants last year and only one so far this year. His view is that accounting software is one of the stickiest products in the cl...

Indi Tatla, John Toon and Leigh Stallard work through a week where the ledgers kept reaching outwards, into practice tools, the bank and even the phone. FreeAgent has added tofu as a practice integration, pulling line items out of invoices and receipts and learning how each client codes things. John thinks extraction is table stakes now and the firm knowledge is the interesting part. Indi likes Fr...

John Toon, Ryan Pearcy and Heather Smith work through a busy week of accounting tech news: assurance for AI, a run of Xero releases, three MCP launches, Joiin’s Q3 deck and a lot of Briefcase. Heather opens with the AICPA’s new service for assuring AI systems and agents. John likes the opportunity and doubts the practice: the people who build these models say they can’t fully explain them, and the...

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...

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...

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, QuickBo...

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...

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...

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 Har...

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...

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 Profe...

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 tha...

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 a...

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...

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 fo...

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 d...

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...

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...

John Toon is joined by Alastair Barlow and Vipul Sheth of Advancetrack for the accounting tech and fintech news that actually matters. They open on Cortea, the Berlin audit AI startup that has raised over £10m from Dawn Capital, with Larry Bradley, the former global head of audit at KPMG, in as an angel investor. It sells Audit Quality Agents that check reports, disclosure notes and financial stat...

Ryan Pearcy is joined by Lara Manton of LJ Bookkeeping and Robbie from Forbes Mazars for a run through the accounting tech news that actually matters this month, with plenty of disagreement along the way. The big one close to home: The Loop has acquired the Early Adopters Hub, the community that vets new accounting tech and puts it in front of real firms before launch. Ryan has been involved since...

John Toon is joined by guest presenters Billie McLoughlin and Kendrick Hair to work through the month's accounting tech and fintech news, with plenty of disagreement along the way. The headline story is Digits, which published a benchmark claiming its bookkeeping agent hit 97.8% accuracy against 79.1% for outsourced human accountants. Billie is quick to raise an eyebrow at a vendor grading its own...

ohn Toon, Eriona Bajrakurtaj, and Leigh Stallard cover FYI's first AI features, two separate Xero conversations, BrightPay Oscar, Sodium, Record OS and the Maple Review.   FYI has added its first AI features, built around the existing automation layer rather than added on top as a chatbot. Firms that have properly embedded the product will benefit most. It runs on AWS Bedrock, which doesn't retain...

Indi and Ryan are joined by Kevin Fitzgerald covering VAT workflow improvements, AI payroll onboarding, the month-end close race, and a blunt conversation about why most accounting professionals still are not using AI at all. FreeAgent has shipped VAT return improvements timed to the April 2026 MTD rollout for sole traders and landlords. Kevin notes that FreeAgent's position within NatWest Group g...

Ryan Pearcy and Indi Tatla cover a big week in accounting tech, from Starling's contested MTD launch to Intuit cutting 3,000 jobs and Xero's push to own the workflow layer. Starling Bank launched Accounting Essentials in March, a free bookkeeping and MTD submission tool for sole traders and landlords built on its acquisition of Ember. Indi walks through Lucy Cohen's analysis, which found 18% of en...

Indi Tatla, Ryan Pearcy and guest host Alastair Barlow are in the chair this week, with John Toon taking the week off. The episode opens fresh from Accountex, comparing notes on the talks, the vendors and what the arrival of a dedicated FD show on the floor might mean for the direction of the market. The Xero conversation is substantial, and not entirely kind. Alastair, who built his firm on Xero,...