OM DENNE EPISODE
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
