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How can bookkeeping improve customer acquisition and reduce costs through technology-based business model shift, like R&D tax credit services?
Alex Lee
Co-founder & CEO at Truewind
I think there's an opportunity to dramatically flip it on its head, and it's a major focus of ours. Again, we think about the ways that technology—with JavaScript, with APIs, now with AI—the biggest benefit that we have with AI, with APIs, is you can capture all the, call it semi-structured data, and do a bunch of data engineering and data analysis to transform it. But then you're missing out on all this unstructured data, which I think is really the last piece of the puzzle, here. Think about if we can leverage artificial intelligence to capture contracts, invoices in different formats, a short paragraph from the CEO, capturing all that business context, and then translating that information into accounting. Now, first of all, let's consider a two, three person company versus a 100 person company, the 100 person company is more complex. Let's shelve that.
But a two, three person company started thinking, ‘what am I missing? What else is there? That's it. I have it all.’ So why can’t I offer a five dollar or free bookkeeping solution for very small companies with a limited number of transactions, where maybe we don't need to have anyone touching it at all? I think that is very, very achievable with this new piece of technology, and it's something that's very top of mind for us, because if not, then what are we doing here? It's a competitive space. We're all just competing margins down, because financial statements are, put indelicately, a commodity. It's either right or wrong. There's no better financial statement. We can use technology to create a better experience, but so often our users just want the best price. And so with this new piece of tech, whoever is using it right, and I believe we really are, we could have real pricing power in those early days, to be able to capture those companies, where it still doesn't hurt our own pockets. I think we'd be able to flip the go-to-market and business model on its head from where it currently is at.