Digi-Tools In Accrual World

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

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 statements before sign-off. John is not convinced that is where audits actually fail, and reckons any time saved gets sold straight back out as more audit work. Alastair makes the point that sets up the whole episode: vendors are taking more and more of the workflow, but nobody is taking the liability. You do 99.9% of the checks this month, then 99.9% of that next month, and one day you look up and you are barely checking anything.

Then HMRC's timely payments consultation, which would move income tax self assessment towards in-year collection through payroll from April 2029. John thinks the outrage is misplaced, on the grounds that the money was never the client's to spend. Alastair counters that a real working capital squeeze is coming for businesses that have grown used to holding the cash. Vipul settles it with a story about a Range Rover on the drive.

Six banks and UK Finance are working on a voluntary digital verification service, letting customers prove their name, age and address from inside their banking app. It could take a lot of friction out of client onboarding, if the regulators get behind it. It also raises the liability question again, because somebody has to carry the can when the bank has your client's old address.

On e-invoicing, 2029 is looking crowded. MTD, e-invoicing, timely payments and Companies House reform are all landing in the same window, and John wants VAT simplification to come as part of the deal. He also asks the question nobody has answered: when you receive an e-invoice and it is wrong, what actually happens next?

Also covered: Digits deepens its partnerships with Ignition, Karbon and Reach Reporting, which Alastair reads as a signal it wants to work with firms rather than around them. Croner Intelligence goes on general release, built only on Croner's own decades of guidance, which opens up a good argument about what a moat even is now the barrier to building software has collapsed. AccountsIQ and GoCardless launch a native integration. Socket adds Forms. And the ICAEW rounds up AI agents behaving badly, including the coding agent that deleted a car rental firm's entire database and put them out of action for a week.

Chapters

00:00 Intro

03:00 A word from Fishbowl

04:07 Cortea raises £10m to point AI at audit quality

11:26 HMRC wants your clients' tax collected at payday

17:08 Six banks and UK Finance on a digital verification service

21:53 Peppol confirmed as the UK's e-invoicing network from April 2029

25:32 Digits partners with Ignition, Karbon and Reach Reporting

30:00 Croner Intelligence launches

37:46 AccountsIQ and GoCardless launch a native integration

39:30 Socket adds Forms

42:19 ICAEW on AI agents behaving badly

46:14 Outro

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 the start, and the panel gets into why that objective, critical feedback saves founders from building the wrong thing, and what it means for firms wanting to try new tools without going first alone.

Then to the news everyone was waiting for. Xero is raising UK prices again from September. Ignite and Grow go up £2 a month, Comprehensive and Ultimate £5, and the discount for running multiple organisations under one bill is going away. The team debate whether the back-end development finally justifies it, and at what point firms start asking where they go from here.

The one that got heated: Visa and OpenAI opening the door to AI agents making real purchases. Robbie is part petrified, part intrigued, Lara wants to know who carries the can when an agent buys the wrong thing, and Ryan makes the case for agents drafting payments that a human still approves.

Ryan also runs through April, May and June's Xero App Store additions in one go, from Lemon Booking and Juice to AI reporting tools like Aleph and Sterling, plus 445, which came through the Early Adopters Hub.

Also covered: Engager's new relationship types and filed job status, FYI's Automation Import Wizard, Briefcase adding paperwork and bank statement chasing, and Gusto's oddly out-of-lane AI agents for winning clients.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and what's on the agenda

03:13 The Loop acquires the Early Adopters Hub

08:37 Xero raises UK prices again from September

15:30 Xero App Store: April, May and June's new apps

20:38 AI agents can now make purchases (Visa and OpenAI)

25:25 Engager adds relationship types

28:16 FYI launches its Automation Import Wizard

32:30 Briefcase adds paperwork and bank statement chasing

35:50 Gusto's out-of-lane AI agents for firms

39:20 Wrap-up: The Loop Awards and Accountex North