Today our guest is Isaac Perdomo. Isaac is the founder of Opzer, which he will explain, but I’ll do my best to give you a little idea of what Opzer is. It helps an accountant automate processes, procedures, and basically get time back, which is a very passionate thing for me: figuring out how we could be more efficient with what we’re doing in the accounting profession. Isaac, welcome to The Unique CPA.

Oh, I appreciate you having me, Randy.

Yeah, it’s fun. I had actually seen you on social media and saw some things that you were doing out there and then you had reached out to me about our conference, Bridging the Gap Conference, to see if there were any open speaking slots. Unfortunately, this year there wasn’t, but I wanted to, at a minimum, get you on here so that we could talk about what you’re doing because I find it very exciting, anything we can ever do to help firms be better, work less, make more, be more efficient, get that work-life balance back. So why don’t you give us the correct definition of what Opser does, rather than my winging-it definition there.

Yeah, sure, sure thing. So, as Randy said, I am co-founder of Opser.co. We are effectively an automation firm. We help accounting firms streamline their operations. And we do that through process mapping, process optimization, and kind of custom workflow automation and software integration services. So that’s kind of like effectively what we do in, kind of the technical terms, so to speak.

Alright. And so another thing you do, which I talk about a lot in the accounting profession, is niche. I mean, you developed a niche industry that you serve with accountants. Before we even get into it, let’s talk about maybe a case study or something. How did you determine that accounting firms were the best place for you to use your talents?

Yeah, I’m glad you asked that question because that’s something I haven’t been asked in other podcasts. But yeah, for some context, I had an interest in the space. I’ve always been interested in finance from a personal perspective and in money. My dad was an accountant as well, so that kind of played a role too. But being transparent as well from a business perspective, we spent about three or four years serving various industries, you know, local businesses and agencies and e-commerce and all of these other industries in the space. Over time, we sat down and started to analyze who have we made the most revenue from, who are easy to work with. And the accounting firms were kind of like one of the top options at that point. And we decided, hey, why not?

So accounting firms are easy to work with, huh? That’s good to hear.

Actually, I think they are. There are a lot of other industries where I feel like there’s a tendency to micromanage. I think that accountants, given that they have, you know, they’re professionals, they are often having to teach or tout their clients that, you know, they are professionals as well. And they want to do their work without, you know, having someone tell them what to do. I think we’ve had that experience too, where accountant firms, as opposed to all the other industries we work with, allowed us to give us that flexibility of doing what we do best while also being open to collaborating and providing ideas.

Alright, so like I said a few minutes ago, looking at automation, looking at finding ways that firms could be more efficient with their time to get their time back. And I think there was a tagline on your website about helping accountants buy back their time. Let’s talk about that from a standpoint, when you go into a firm, you know, what is the process you go through to help them? Do you find one or two things to automate? When you look at it, do you see there’s like 20 things they can automate? Give us a typical case study of what you do when you’re working with a firm.

Yeah. Many firms come to us with actually ideas already of what they could automate, which is somewhat useful. We have at least a starting point from which to tackle the issue. Other ones, not really, but typically that’s where we have to put our consultant hat on and be able to help them find those opportunities. Typically, when you start to ask the team, hey team, what’s something you’re doing manually? They have a big list of things that they are potentially doing manually. Copy-pasting here from here, data entry, and all of these other things that have the potential to automate. And more often than not, if the client doesn’t really know what they could automate, we just start to dive deep and meet with the team and try to understand the processes at a high level to start to tackle the issue.

If there’s not a specific process that they have in mind, very often we start with just the customer journey, so to speak. So we like to look at, okay, what are you using to capture leads? What are you using to create proposals, to schedule calls with prospects, to get them onboarded? And how can we start to break up those pieces so that you can streamline that client onboarding workflow? That’s a typical and common use case we see, and we like to start there at times because very often the partners are involved in that process of getting clients, and as a result, if we can save one or two hours of partner time, it’s often worth more than five or 10 hours of, you know, maybe other team members in the firm.

From there, we also like to look at some of the back-end, I don’t know if we could call it marketing activities, of, okay, once you finish up a project, do you have ways to collect reviews from clients? Are you kind of like asking for referrals and could we potentially send automatic emails that collect those reviews and referrals for you? Because I think I heard this stat: only one in five firms actually ask for a referral in the first place, while probably most of them get their business through referrals. So we often like to look at those pieces of, okay, if only one in five firms are asking for a referral, could we put a system in place to send an email once you complete a project, let’s say, and at least you’re asking everybody for a referral. And even though it might be less effective than, say, a call or asking in person, you still have that kind of trickle effect that maybe some people reply to.

So that’s on the acquisition side. If we look at the service fulfillment side, typically we like to start there, sort of in the project management. There are often a lot of pieces that could be potentially automated. One being, let’s actually make sure that everything you promise to the client in the proposal, for example, is transferred over to your project management or practice management solution. That’s usually very helpful because oftentimes we have to transfer those manually. Maybe I’ll just start talking about specific tools if people are curious. One we see a lot is like, say, Ignition. Integrating Ignition with maybe your project management solution can be an example of something you could do. And again, number one, can you introduce all of the tasks so you know who, when, and what’s going to get done before you promise to the client? But also, could you look into potentially assigning those tasks automatically? Could you look into potentially having time estimates for those tasks as well automatically so that you could potentially then plan for your capacity? And on and on.

We’re also getting into sort of the other aspects of service fulfillment, automating a couple of bookkeeping tasks here and there, and the tax prep process as well of collecting documents from clients. There are often a lot of automation opportunities there as well. That said, I’ve talked a lot. So I’d be curious to hear, Randy, what are your thoughts at this point? And if you feel that aligns with or that’s giving you some ideas, even for your firm or for other firms here?

Yeah. For sure. So for me, from my standpoint, I think when people are going to be thinking about automation and buying their time back, they already think, well, I have  QuickBooks or I have Xero and I have Lacerte or whatever tax software. And as you said, I have Ignition or whatever, or I have my CRM. Aren’t those doing this all for me already? But what you’re doing is you’re finding ways that those can all then communicate together without us interacting, and simplifying this process from a standpoint that it’s not as reliant on me.

Correct.

I’m still going to get the final outcome, but there’re X amount of steps in between that now I don’t even have to touch anymore, and thereby get my time back. So maybe what we could do is go through a quick example of data collection for tax returns. How would you go about automating that process?

So there are multiple ways to go about it. There are actually some practice management solutions that already have some sort of client request document collection tool built into them, like Karbon and Financial Cents, for example. But sometimes we find if the client is using something different like Asana or ClickUp or other practice management or project management software tools, we might actually have to build that form ourselves. There are multiple digital form solutions. I actually interviewed a lady recently on my YouTube channel that she was actually doing, she went from paper organizers, literally printing physical mail and sending email to clients, to then an in-between, which I would consider an in-between, which is like fillable PDFs where, okay, now you send it via email, you have the fillable PDF that the client fills out and sends over to you. But I think the third iteration she was walking us through, and that we’ve done a couple of projects like that, is building a digital form that you kind of send to clients and then they can fill out in their own time. So that would be an example of how you could potentially automatically collect documents and collect information from clients.

So is there the ability then going the next step from that, is there a way to process the data that they sent you directly into the tax software then, then to skip that step, because now I’m saving, obviously I need to review it and all, but is that possible?

Yes, that’s possible as well. It depends on the tax software. What we found is that some tax software is archaic. So sometimes we face some technical issues trying to integrate with some of them and some of them it’s possible, but with different techniques. I think it would be useful at this point, Randy, to actually talk about the different methods of automations in our eyes—t’s kind of where we specialize—and the hierarchy of automation options you have available. Because I think that’s going to help us answer this question better and potentially future ones. Is that okay?

Perfect. Perfect. You go for it.

Okay. So this gets a little technical, but I’ll try to explain it as clearly as I can and Randy, you’ll tell me if I did a good job. So I want you to imagine a pyramid, okay? It’s a pyramid and we have six different layers in the pyramid, but we have them divided into three sections. So it’s three sections, each section has two levels in the pyramid. From the bottom to the top, the bottom section of automation, it’s what we would call kind of, off-the-shelf solutions. This is what we’ve already talked about. This is apps available in the marketplace that you can buy typically on a subscription or one-off basis. And the two layers that we have available for automating in those apps are either one, native integrations, meaning, the company has already built the integration for you. An example might be, I don’t know, Karbon Integrates with QuickBooks, for example, or there are other examples like that, where there’s innate integration already available. And there are also native automations, which would be the level number two. So, that bottom part is actually where we like to start, and what I would argue is the lowest hanging fruit for accounting firms to work on, because it typically requires the least skill and it’s the easiest to implement. So, that’s the bottom of the pyramid.

Now, I want to go to the top of the pyramid. At the top of the pyramid, we also have two layers, which is scripts, which is effectively coding to an extent, and also RPA, which stands for Robotic Process Automation. And those two layers are much more custom and code heavy, more often than not. And typically RPA, for example, I like to call it also user interface automation, because what you’re trying to automate, it’s actually what you see on the screen. So you’re trying to automate the click, automate the keyboard. That has its pros and cons. The pros are that you can actually increase a lot of the possibilities because now even those tax softwares we talked about that maybe are archaic and don’t have, you know, the integration capabilities, you can still look into automating some of those data entries potentially. With those techniques and those tools. So that’s, I guess, more code heavy, usually requires more maintenance, because if a button in the interface changes, you have to tweak the automation accordingly, right?

So where we spend probably 80 percent of our time, it’s in the middle, which we would call sort of like low-code automation alternatives or solutions where you have more flexibility than what an off-the-shelf app would give you, right? You’re not at the mercy of a company having to come up with integrations because sometimes they tell you they’re going to do it, and for years they don’t, or, you know, maybe never do, but you also don’t have to rely on developers on an ongoing basis because you’re building it with low-code tools that are usually more visual in nature. And that allows the firm to maintain it themselves if they wanted. So I think that’s sort of the middle piece that we focus on, where we have the power and the flexibility of a custom build without the potentially more costly maintenance and development of a custom software development, per se.

So when you’re talking about that, you’re talking like Zapier or something, integrating or, and I’m no expert, but I know you can automate processes through that.

Yes, correct. So in that low-code software section, we have what I would call integration platforms and databases. So integration platforms, as you mentioned, the Zapiers, those the most popular ones. Microsoft has a couple of products that I would also put in that category, like Power Automate, you might have heard of, and typically those tools either have a database function built in, or there are other low-code database tools like Airtable, SmartSuite, among others. Those are the tools that we spend most of our time on, because that’s, I guess, our specialty. We can still do a little bit of kind of like scripting or RPA if needed, but often that’s not necessarily kind of our strong suit or what we suggest. And also on the bottom side, there’s sometimes clients come to us, they don’t know what apps to choose in the first place. And they might want, I guess, our opinion and our thoughts on how capable the tool is of integrating with the rest of their stack.

But again, most of the time, the clients will have more context to select the tool that they want and might not need our help to do the native integration because it’s kind of like a plug-and-play system. So we spend most of our time in that kind of like middle layer of the pyramid, helping them effectively connect apps that maybe don’t integrate natively, or maybe it’s a use case that the app doesn’t actually have, or a feature it doesn’t have that they might actually benefit from.

Got it. And then, you know, one of the biggest things I see just in general, when people think about anything related to technology or integration of software or automation of software is they get this blank look on their face of, oh, how much time am I going to spend on this? Is this even going to be worth it for me? And, so the whole goal, obviously, is to save time through this. And so how do you deal with that question you get, I don’t have time to do this, you know, I can’t spend the next three weeks with you getting this going, and they don’t realize the time saving in the long run. But how do you deal with that or how do you educate them on the fact that, hey, this is going to save you so much time?

Yeah, so I guess we try to sit down with them and explore if it’s actually worth it. Because, hey, maybe there’s a point to say there are things that if you only do them once or you only do them once in a while, then maybe, sure, they might not be worth automating. But what we try to tell them is, hey, let’s look at your processes that you do most frequently, that take you the longest time and that have some degree of urgency so that we can automate those first, because those are the ones that are going to give you the quickest return.

A simple exercise, I mean, it’s just math, right? But it’s like, if you can find one hour, if you can find three processes, that take you one hour a week, every month, you’ll have a full-time person’s worth of time at the end of the year. So effectively, 12 months, three processes, one hour a week, that’s 36 hours a week, and that gives you another employee. So I think that simple math can also make you think, okay, do you think you can find a process that takes you roughly an hour a week? Maybe, probably. So if we find three of those every month, you’ll have a full-time employee on the end of the year. How worth it would that be? Then you can position it against, I guess, a human being, because effectively that’s the ultimate outcome of automation, being able to have more capacity.

Yep. And from an automation standpoint, is AI now playing into this? Are we seeing more integration of AI? Is this going to make automation easier? How’s AI going to integrate with what you do?

Yeah, I mean, automation is a big piece. I think that if you look at that pyramid I mentioned earlier, really AI is involved in all layers, meaning even the apps we use every day, the QuickBooks and the Xeros and the Gustos and the Karbons, they’re coming up with AI features already, and they will continue to do so—that’s at least my prediction. And if you look at Zapier and Make and Airtable, they’re also coming up with AI features to enable you to more quickly and easily build these automations for yourself if you choose to do it yourself. I think that the ultimate goal, I believe, is having the ability to quote-unquote code just by using English. Because I think for the last 40 years we’ve had this gap between how computers communicate and how humans communicate, and I think what AI will do is kind of will bridge that gap, so now effectively every person can be a developer if they know how to speak English, because they can tell the computer what they want.

Nice. I actually do have a computer science degree, but I can’t program, so now I can just talk and program, so there you go, nice.

Yeah, definitely, and there’s actually this concept of like citizen development, that’s kind of like a term that’s used in this space, to suggest that hey, now we are having the ability to, every citizen, develop, in a way, because we’re kind of like lowering the bar that it takes to communicate with the computer and tell it what we want it to do.

Alright, well great, so let’s, before we go to a couple other final things, let’s kind of wrap up this, the whole goal here is,you know, find 1, 2, 3 processes they’re doing or that are taking a few hours here and there, we can eventually get to a point where we’re, we can see the return on investment. We know we’ve saved one person’s time during the year. Why don’t you give us like, your version of the, you know, why people should do this. And I think that’s it right there, but.

My version of why people should do this… Multiple things come to mind. There’s first that, you know, return on investment and that efficiency perspective that we talked about, of course. But something else we also believe is that some of these technology improvements and automations, when done right,  they also improve the experience of the client and the team members involved.  So you’re not only getting efficiencies, but you’re improving the experience of the people around you so that clients are happier and team members are happier and both stay for longer.

And aside from efficiency and experience, I think another key piece that I think automation helps a lot with, it’s having more insights, because very often, If you want to have certain data around, whether it is, you know, project status and be able to plan capacity and potentially data around your current clients and all of that data can be potentially automatically gathered to give you  creating dashboards and things of that nature to be able to make better decisions. So I think that’s kind of the three pillars, I guess, of what automation can deliver. Efficiency on one side, experience for the people involved, and insights for the leadership team.

I like it. I like it a lot. I like the middle part for sure with the experience of the, team. The employees and the customers, the lifetime value of a customer goes up cause they’re happier and the cost of having to replace any employees goes down because people stick around because they’re happier with what they’re doing. So I think that’s a great wrap up on that. Alright, final two things then. Everybody gets these questions. First off, when you and I originally communicated, I was on my way to the Dominican Republic, which is where you live, which is an awesome place. I would recommend anybody going there. We had a great time. So, here’s the question though: not necessarily related to the Dominican Republic, but when you’re not helping firms automate and get the processes and everything in place for them, what do you do for fun? What do you do when you’re not in work mode? 

Usually, I’ll put it simply, whatever my wife wants to do, so I’m going to add a little color to that response. She likes going to beaches a lot, I guess we live in a tropical island, so whenever she has a desire to go to an island, I go with her. She likes to dance a lot as well, so we are, again, tropical, Caribbean, we like to dance a lot, salsa, bachata, merengue, all of those things that I’m not sure if you are even heard of or familiar with, but we love to dance.

I have.

Awesome. And aside from that, I guess I like to, as a way for me to relax, just, you know, I like Watch content online, whether it’s YouTube, I guess it’s my guilty pleasure. Sometimes Netflix, I watch something with my wife, and that’s kind of it.

Alright, those are good answers, those are good things. Whatever you like doing is your thing. So, you won’t be seeing me doing those dances you’re doing, though. I would look awful on the dance floor. And then, if anybody wants to get a hold of you, or see what you’re doing, where’s the best places for them to look?

Yeah, so we are actively on LinkedIn, so if you look for Isaac Perdomo, you’ll find me, and I’m constantly posting there as helpful as content I can make for accounting firms. There’s also our website, Opzer.co, and we have like a option there to request a free analysis for us to look at the processes in the firm and assess whether you can actually automate there or not, or help you uncover those processes that maybe you’re doing manual at the moment. And those would be probably the best place to find me.

Awesome. Well, Isaac, I appreciate you being on the show. It’s been a pleasure to get to know you more and we will continue to talk. Hopefully I’ll run into you somewhere this year, out of the conference or something. 

Awesome. If you’re back to the Dominican at some point, I can promise some salsa classes for you and your wife.

You got it. I will let you know. No plans right now, but you never know. We had a great time. So, thank you.

Have a nice one, Randy. Thanks for having me.