Hello. Hello. Welcome. It's hard to join a meeting without the link. Yeah and you have not chosen, the amazing DALI background that I created. You didn't like the hogwash? I can. No, I can actually. Hang on. Wow. Boom. Wow. You look so, this is so much authoritative with it's the calculator. That's what it is. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You've got the calculator and a big ledger but that obviously went out of style a few years ago. Oh, you would think, right. So I go to my dad's audit firm in Mysore. They still have toms of physical ledger books and everything. And then, so I said, at least can you guys use Tally? He says, yeah, from this, we load it into Tally. Wow. So, so that literally is your dad's office right now. That could be. No, no, it is. I should actually send you a picture next time They have those that the background, those books, they have. Those thousands of those additions. It's basically all the case laws which are fought at the income tax department and, you know, more senior roles, they're like more levels. It can go up to the high court and basically all those case laws are like, and I'm like, what do you do with this? Apparently when they. They can write the defense, they can quote the previously read cases. Yeah. Hey, this was in the favor of the SSC, so, I'm like, good luck finding anything. But now everything is digitized and with AI and smart search, they just type, specific keywords and it provides some hundred thousand case loss. So there is hope for change. So the AI is also happening in your dad's office? No, I mean, they use a few of these tools online tools. So, there is a very famous publisher called tax man, tax man. And what tax man does is they've been the ones who've been collating these millions of, case laws over the last 50 years. So they actually realized that they have the entire database, which they can actually codify, make it digital. So it's a subscription to get, AI, input. So he does arbitration and legal cases only in real estate and mining. So he can search for that no, I just thought it was interesting that he had both the ledger, like the one behind you and AI sort of somehow working. Yeah. But that's, that's probably in there in a nutshell for you, right? It's very real. Yeah. So between that and everything else you're about to tell me in the next 20 minutes, I'm very excited to learn about the exciting world of bookkeeping. And, and it's one of the fun aspects, to be honest, of being a PM, which is you get to dive into someone else's world and learn about problems that you weren't even aware of. So, bookkeeping.... what is it, why is it important? So I was just thinking through one aspect when you started talking about this, right? So, I started, I became an accountant effectively as a student from 1997. So, 27 years ago, in grade 11 to now being in accounting it's slowly Not your super cool role or whatever, but what, what has been interesting, and I probably as I go into how I got into bookkeeping, was because I came from a family of accountants, so I didn't know better, frankly fourth generation ca right from my great grandfather, grandfather, dad, and now me. So knew about your father generations before that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my great grandpa and grandpa, when they. Study for the CA, the, there was no Indian CA at, because it was pre independence. So they had to do the CA with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales, ICAW. Wow. So we are all the lowly Indians, Indian CA Institute guys. I see. Yeah. So frankly, I didn't know that there was live outside of accounting and bookkeeping. So now, what is bookkeeping in and of itself is basically at a very simple level, keeping track of your company or your personal financial, you know, accounts your spends, your receipts at a very, very basic level, right? You're trying to track how much money came in, how much money went out, whether it's your own business, your partnership, or you're running a company, I mean, I run a finance for a private company in the SaaS space. So. End of the day, there are specific rules by each country which are called generally accepted accounting practices or GAP. So U. S. GAP is there's India GAP, and there's also some countries in Europe use something called IFRS, which is International Financial Reporting Standards. What these are basically is Building a consistent language across platforms irrespective of which country you manage accounting in and which type of business you're in so that if you say live in Brazil and you want to understand the financials of an India company because you're potentially looking at a buyout. So does it translate into your language, so to say, right? Because you need to understand a financial statement. There's a balance sheet which shows what is your cash positions, how much money do you expect to collect in the coming year, how much are you due to pay, all that good stuff. And then there's a profit and loss statement which effectively says, hey, this is my revenue. reduce that with the various expenses. But the real challenge with bookkeeping is by at a very simplistic level, like I said, it's cash in cash out, but we don't maintain our books of accounts on a cash basis because all of these various accounting pronouncements and rules require you to follow accounting standards, which are on what is called an accrual basis. So. your expected expenses in the next six months is something you'll still have to record in your books of account because it's due to be paid. So you can't just say, Hey, I'm good today. I have like, whatever, say a hundred billion dollars in my bank account. I'm good. It's not the way it works. So that's, what's interesting with bookkeeping. It's about a, of course. Cash is paramount, right? So what we have something when we close books, whether you are an auditor or if you're in the other side as a accountant for the company that's getting audited. The very first thing any auditor does, or what you do as a close is cash in bank, which is a bank reconciliation to make sure that. You accounted for all the cash in and cash out and it ties out your company's various bank account and bank statements. That is paramount because a couple of decades ago when the big Satyam scam happened, the biggest fraud was in being able to successfully fudge bank statements. Once you lose track of cash, everything else is a house of cards. It'll all implode. But assuming cash is good and you know, now at least with things being digital. The processes to verify cash has become better because I mean, I manage 18 countries about 25 bank accounts. So it's not like I'm personally going and tracking it. So we have tools, the reconciliation tools actually are able to do automated bank reconciliations because everything's digital. Your ERP is on the cloud. You can pull down bank statements. We set up rules in the bank portals where the bank. Statements like kind of start out to you if you want it on a daily basis also. So that's a good thing. And so. End of the day, what helps with bookkeeping is one is of course getting the financial health in place, but more importantly, to ensure that the company or the partnership of those, you know, individual small business is running correctly, tracking their spends correctly, following the various rules. So that's what bookkeeping is. Nice. So you touched on a few things there. So it's important because if you did it wrong, you end up with cases like Satyam. Where it can take a company out. So, and that's why this is important. And the few other things you touched on there are, you mentioned ERP. So that took my head to tooling, something I wanted to. Ask you about you talked about process. So that took my head Hey, you know, it's not just you sitting by yourself doing this. There's people involved in this processes involved. And then you mentioned you know, buyouts in 18 countries, and you talked about things at scale. So I thought what we could do, and the reason sitting behind a coffee machine is I thought what we could do is before we get to that scale, Help me appreciate how this problem magnifies if say I would just a barista at one cafe and I thought we could just play out a story like this. So, you know, Starbucks started out in one location and now they're in many, many. So let's, and you can change this example if you want, but let's just say I'm the owner of a cafe. I, the the reason I started this cafe, you know, I have an ulterior motive. It's really to buy this coffee machine, but I don't have the money for it. So I figured I'll just start with like drip coffee, sell 500 of these, get the money, buy that machine, and then shut the business down. So that's the, well, maybe not shut the business, but that's the life. So it was just me doing this. Let's talk through this now. So I've opened the doors. I've got the sign up. The first customer comes in, I sell them this first drip coffee for 3, right? So it's all, let's pretend it's just cash maybe for simplicity. So I got the 3 and maybe we even need to back up. I had to buy the beans, second customer, another 3. Now over the course of the month, let's just say, I don't know, this machine's like 500 bucks. So how many I, let's just say I did 150 of these coffees over the course of the month. I have, I don't know, I've, I, I feel like I need a QuickBooks. I've got maybe a spreadsheet. I've got my bank account. Right. So that's the scenario. So now what happens next? And there's a, I think coffee's a really good example, coffee shop, because one of India's biggest retail chains actually imploded because of fraud Cafe Coffee Day. We lived in there, right? I mean, literally growing up that's where you go for your dates and everything. But they were there literally on the last trip. They are in probably so just to give you a size of scale, they had more than 2, 300 outlets to less than 100 today. So that's how bad things went because of cash fraud and everything. So, so coffee shop is a real, real life, real life. We got to get this right. We got to get this right. It's an interesting point you mentioned, right? So, but I will even take it back many steps from what you just said about, you know, taking back a few steps just to buy the coffee, the coffee machine is a few more steps behind this. A identifying location. So you need to understand demand, like what Starbucks did, start of Wall Street, end of Wall Street, like seven Starbucks between each other, but there's a reason. So identifying location, then the rental, the deposits then picking the right coffee machine, you choose your source in Chikmangalore or Columbia where you're going to get your seeds from through the you know the big retailer or big distributor because you're the retail seller here. So all of that has a cost. So there's a what is called as the basic cost of capital, right? Because without a any, any business first you burn a lot of cash before you turn profitable and become what is called as cash flow positive. Or because you start earning more than what you spend. Of course there's the pricing aspect of how much it's three bucks. You have to ensure that. It's actually about$2 20 to get that coffee ready in that cup and all of that stuff, right? So that you have a profit margin over time which you may have to plow back into business for many years. retail is very, very difficult. And then you have barista, you may have cleaning staff, so maintenance, all that sorts of Yeah, but just to pretax. Yeah, totally. So, but just to interrupt you there. Before we get to even that scale, I wanted to get appreciation for the book. Yeah. Yeah. So exactly. Right. So I just thought you would, one single, so we'll have all of this and then so, so you also, then you are so Passion or passionate about running your business. The last thing you want to do is, you know, actually spend time doing the mundane stuff, which is tracking your cash and your accounting, but it's important, right? Also for two reasons. One is keep aside the fact that there is specific tax rules, accounting law, and all that the end of the day, you want to know how many people came in how many transactions happened. Is the cash in my till correct or is a hundred bucks a day getting us off by the barista when you're not in the store, right? So that's another reason for bookkeeping. And so I think technology has been good with at least tracking these things because largely now with chip and credit card and all that. It's easier to track, goes directly to your bank account. But cash is something which is still a big, big method so these tools and these machines also, they only open up and you type in the correct amount and the correct quantity of the product. So I think step zero of for you to get your accountant to even prepare your. Set of books is achieved there because you just, you know, print out the daily role of, you know, transactions and take that dump and give it and the accountant can, you know, take it forward from there. So, so that's how it starts and to where I said today, technology is where your till can be electronic plus cash and it can calculate you've linked it to Wi Fi, to the cloud, to your accountants portal. So they get a daily dump online. Today, the technology is such that that system itself will create You know, P& L's profit and loss statement at least for that day, to say, hey, this hutch was consumed. There is still kind of a room for fraud or I wouldn't say fraud, although there will also be like a real waste, right? For example there could be spillage when you're by yourself, like rushing through a busy morning coffee bags could tear and. all that damage. So that's a different process that you need to track where start of day, end of day. I've seen this largely you know, alcohol in the bars, in hotels, where they do a measure, they have a dipstick kind of a thing. They measure how much booze at the start of day and end of day. So something like that, even in these cases, right? So I think the combination of that. Is what an accountant can help you do. Yeah. So, yeah, that dipstick measure thing, that's interesting. I had not seen that. I didn't know that. So I want to dumb it down even further. So I think because you're at this large scale, you simplified it. But I want to simplify it like even further, like Eli five levels. So pretend. Going back to that example of the drip coffee, pretend I literally opened up the, my garage shut up at home, no rent, nothing. So we'll take that out of the equation. I'm sitting there with my little filter coffee jar thing. First guy walks up I've got a, I've got a little square POS. It's in front of me. Right. And he's like one coffee. So I'm like, all right. And scans his card. Well, actually we took the, we even took the POS out of this. So I just, I just took three bucks cash and then I gave him his coffee. He went away. And this let's just say happens 10 times in the day, right? So I got 30 bucks today. What happens now? So I, I, I go to the bank, I put it in. So it's in my bank account. So if I log into my bank account, I see 30. Now what are the other you know, I've heard of QuickBooks and zero and all of these. So how do those, where do those, does QuickBooks now pull this in? Why do I need QuickBooks? Number one. And then two, does it automatically ingest? So it can only interest if you first of all take that cash hopefully not lose two bucks on the way or you know, Or buy a Coke on the way, so it doesn't become 24 all of a sudden, what you put in the bank because end of the day so that has to be tracked and once it's in the bank, then what gets churned out of the bank statement, right? Because your transaction statement and then the QuickBooks or the various Like I was talking about Tally in India so it can be any system, right? So then you can do a couple of things. There is something really cool in the last few years. That's called host to host integration, where the bank portal integrates into your accounting system. So there's a daily feed of the transactions, but that's when the cash goes in there. And then of course the system can track it. But also equally important is that you have a method to input into the system, what was your purchase cost of the coffee beans that led to your 30 of you know, I would say revenue, not income because revenue, less expenses or income. So there is that aspect to it. So now if I log into my QuickBooks or Tally. At the end of the day, let's say, so the bank has cash and it's done the host to host thing. What am I seeing now? Will QuickBooks already show me that cash on hand is 30? My call, what would be the other accounting entries and will QuickBooks just show me that? It will. And it can show you at multiple views, right? So like I said, assuming you input the your. provided the input cost details and everything. So it will show you your, what is called is the trading profit and loss. So you're a trader, you sold coffee. This is the cash earned. It will show you the cash in the balance sheet. It will also show you, like I said, if it was 2. 20 to make the three bucks coffee, it also show you the end of day profit of 8 on the 30 sale. Yeah, as long as we put the data, so the only thing with bookkeeping is it's only as good as the inputs. Otherwise it will miscalculate data, simple as that. Got it. So now that makes sense. So I think one thing you keep kind of pointing at, and I think it hits on the importance of this being a good process is the things that can go wrong, right? You've, you've touched on Satyam, you've touched on Cafe Coffee Day. You've talked about me buying a donut for two bucks and you know, so what I'm learning is the importance of this is. So let's say now that was day one. I got my 30 bucks and I do it over 20 days now, 20 days in the month. So I've got 600 bucks. Now I'm ready to buy this machine, this machine, which is like a 600 machine. Now it's also the end of the month. Does bookkeeping typically happen, tying this back to bookkeeping now, does it happen once a month? So bookkeeping is real time. It's happening all the time as you make every transaction, right? Because every time you have that POS, you give a receipt to the customer and give them the coffee and take the cash that should get accounted for. Now, what happens at the month is you kind of. And by the way, you can do it under the week if you want to end of every 10 days to take stock of what happens also. The intention is to put out a set of financial statements so that you know the health of your business. Like you said, if you let's do it for 20 days and it's 600, what you will probably not see in your bank account is 600. Because you're spent out of that for the next batch of coffee beans and everything. Because it's an ongoing business, unless you've already accounted for it. So what you have is a cash flow. Not a cash position, which is so cash inflow was 600, but the end of month cash position could be hundreds and that's fine. I mean, that could also be including the profit. So there is going to be a point of time where your end of month cash and your total. Net income or net profit will like be way off, right? Because you can still be having cash at the end of the month, but running a loss because now you're eating into your setup cost, the capital as we call it. Now, keeping that aside, at the end of the month, what we do is we get all these financial statements ready to probably give you that reality check. Yeah. And in my case, in my small business case, I don't even need, I don't even need you for example, like you're too expensive resource like QuickBooks will just do the bookkeeping for me in this example. Yes, it will churn out a set of financial statements for you. So when do you need an accountant is probably just to kind of collate it once a year when you're filing your, you know, returns for this you know coffee shop which you set up kind of a thing, right? So if there is that. Balance you need to maintain. You don't need a full time accountant all the time, but right. Even small businesses use maybe like a local accountant. Although they can directly do a QuickBooks, which has a convenience. You just don't want to waste time. So you get this accountant. Like I said, you take the entire From the till you take the entire transactions for the day and just dump it on this guy who's who's sitting in a strip mall next to the nail salon and he'll take care of it. Got it. So this was an example where like, I, this is literally the simplest of examples now help. And I think you've done this already a little bit with the failure modes. But let's just say now, you, you, you know, it's not one store anymore. I've got you know, I've got 10 stores. What, what scales as a result of this? So what's the coordination? So why, again, dumb question, but like, just like I did my thing by myself, why couldn't each store does do their things by themselves? Everything just aggregate into this one QuickBooks and you know, I'm, I'm home dry, no? Yeah. So that's exactly the intention. So once you open, say, 25 stores. Each store has to maintain it at an individual level, right? It doesn't matter for store 12 that store 19 is doing what they're doing. What matters is store 12 has to maintain the track of their whatever 500 coffees a day that were sold and how it's tracked and everything. What is the risk at this scale is if you don't have your controls, right? Because I think a couple of the examples I talked about was fraud, but most of the things screw up because of basic stupidity, incompetence, or the fact that They are not, you know, financially honed. Barista is probably not even tracking that this is going to cause a profit for the business, right? Because the barista is a passionate person. Sure, he's creating art, actually, because it's not just about running the, you know, that you don't put coffee beans in the machine and great coffee comes out. It's the art of it. So what really becomes important then is, I mean, you're at that scale. Is to ensure that your process and systems so that the barista doesn't have to. You know, waste their time or their mind space for anything other than their main thing. So it's literally cash in, they check that, put it in the till, move it out. And like I said, the coffee inventory needs to be, coffee bean inventory has to be tracked separately. And also what would happen is then when you have 25 stores, you are buying your inputs, the raw material, coffee beans, et cetera, at bulk. So you're suddenly buying like you know, 100 kilos of coffee a day is the equivalent of what you want. So 3000 kilos of coffee probably in bulk. So tracking it. So you'll suddenly have a head office in the branches tracking on which branches are doing most business. So how much coffee do you send to each place? Because the worst thing you want is at like 1130 in the morning running out of coffee beans. Because what I've observed, especially in retailers, once you're out of stock and the customer gets their fix elsewhere, they may not come back to you unless the other elsewhere place was so bad that they realized it was only because I didn't have a choice. I had to go pick up a coffee there. And if it's like happens twice in a row that's it. You've lost a customer for good. So there's that other side to it. And keeping that aside, coming back to accounting itself. Yeah. So tracking this the spends you bought in bulk, ensuring that that is currently accounted for. Yeah. That is very important. How would I in this example of like 25 now I've done so well, I've got these 25 stores. How do I even realize? So I'm looking at. The QuickBook instances, I guess, for each of these stores. How do I even realize that store 13, like something's going wrong there? The guy bought a, you know, if the barista there, you know, was buying a donut a day. How would one, how would you catch that, for example? Now I have an account because yeah, absolutely. You can have an accountant but the more important thing is the system itself. First of all, you can track all of your spends all of your purchases for tracking the raw material inventory, et cetera, at a store level. So these accounting systems are good enough where. At a subcategory level, and then there's a consolidated level set of accounts that can get created. So what you can then do is do a like for life comparison. And then in a way, in very old Excel formula, right, there's this fund of min and max. You try and target what is your median spend if I, if my average coffee sale price is this. And so suddenly if you find some store where your average cost is way over the And we're keeping aside rental electricity and all that good stuff, right? Just on coffee production sale, something is off. That's when you start questioning, OK, something's going wrong. Is it that they're having more inefficient processes? Are they kind of having more spillages, leakages? Are they or it could be something as simple as it's a slow area. So they're doing more discounts. So your price per coffee could have got dropped. So that should reflect in that. So that's a, that's not invalid or improper. It's a strategic thing because you're looking at the entire business and saying, Hey, for my overall business to grow, I still need to have a store there because you can treat it indirectly as a marketing spend. Instead of putting an advertisement banner, you're just setting up a full coffee shop. And these are real life examples. I have seen one of the big brands in India, which is Reliance, right? So when Reliance got into retail, their initial plan was they'll spend INR 5 crores, right? Which is whatever 50 million INR for marketing spend. Then the brand leader came and said, look, you can use it to open a store and that'll give you equally, equally good amount of footfall. And out of curiosity, people come. So that's. That's the thing, right? So you do this comparative analysis and by you, I mean the system can do it and churn it out for you. If you're having a smart accountant, he can or she can, you know, build out those queries. So a lot of it is once you figure out how your business is running or what you're expecting your business to run by, right? It's a coffee shop. What's your business? What's your profit? What's my average cost? These are the things. So you build out those rules. Back in the day, we needed these. Techies who knew SQL and things like that to even create those queries. But nowadays a business analyst an accountant can actually build those queries in the system. And so that will turn out early warning signs can also be built where if in that month it's trending bad all already by week two and a half. On the 14th day of the month, you'll get a report saying branch 14 seems to be off the charts for some reason. And then you'll obviously have to go look into it, look into it, investigate why. Talk to me a little bit about the, how is, how has my tooling changed? So when I was just one store, I had my bank account. I went to positive cash, showed it to me in my QuickBooks. Is that still my accounting stack now that I have 25 stores or do I have a few more things to help me? Yeah, so what will happen is one is you obviously want to track each brand separately, right? So one of the things that's always recommended is for each store to open, set up a different bank account. Okay. So that very basic, simple stuff. So you don't struggle the end of the month to kind of reconcile your cash in and out with 35 bank account transactions 30 branch transactions in one account. So one of the recommended things is keep a separate Bank account. And the other benefit is once you, let's say, decide that it could be for a good reason that you decide you shut down a branch or you get like twice the space in the same area. You realize the football is good. So you want to pick up a bigger space. So you'll shut down the smaller branch and things like that. You want to silo them as much as possible. Yeah. So, so that your unit level economics, so that's something as you kind of scale up bigger. Start talking to a potentially a private equity investor who wants to look at your business. One thing you'll always keep hearing is unit level economics, right? Because that is the kind of definition of the health of your business, actually. If they are comfortable that, and what I observed also, because my spouse is in. P, right? So is they actually randomly walk into branches because they invest in a lot of retail work. They'll try to buy a coffee, talk to that server and things like that to get a sense. So the unit level economics is critical to ensure the health of your business because it's that every single dollar, every coffee, every extra shot of espresso in your latte needs to get built correctly and every good, all that good stuff. But yeah, keeping it siloed is important. Then The other additional toolings, et cetera, is to make sure that you're set up. So it's not just the accounting books, right? So you, you have enough good products. So that's good. QuickBooks, Atalio, whatever you want to, you have in the market, right? Zendesk, they have a good tool and everything accounting system. It's the compliance, right? Really? Zendesk has a good They have one, they have a, some kind of an accounting ERP or they run one with a partnership with, I think they have a few preferred partners, right? So, so the nice thing is, as a small business owner you have tons of very good quality, but reasonable accounting options, accounting system options and especially with things now in the cloud, you don't have, earlier there was this, on-prem calls, you had to set up a server and all that noise. Yeah. So all of that. Keeping that aside, so that's all much cheaper, now affordable. Compliance though is a big, big factor whether it is how you have your sales tax tracked, because a lot of the US states have sales tax, some don't. All that noise has to be dealt with, unfortunately. So tracking that at a level where these systems will actually identify the component of the sales tax in your billing to the customer. So that's the good part. But then to ensure that you file your sales tax returns, which is not once a year, but in many states it's quarterly. Some states it could be monthly. All that noise is important to handle because you could get shut down as a business for one branch, not following up there. process in their state in that sounds to be like, say the example of tax seems rule based in some sense, right? Like say Texas has no state tax, but California has a state tax. I could potentially just code that into where my dally or QuickBooks, let's say, and it, right. And it would automatically it will take care of the whole thing. I had to ensure that You follow the rules which is super critical and then file the returns, file your taxes, the compliance noise. So that's another reality of bookkeeping. And also because once you expanded that big 35 or 25 branches, there's so much stuff. How are you tracking labor law and compliance of that? Some states may mandate that they're part of the union. So it's not everyday problem, but if things go bad, then how are you thinking about it? So some things to consider. So how am I, how is my finance team looking different in this 25 store scenario versus when it was just me? Do I even have a finance team yet? Could I just. Not necessary. Exactly right. So you definitely need to have it at least at the minimum outsource. So there needs to be somebody who's looking at it. You don't need to have a full fledged in house team. The, so the question is, when do you build it in house versus outsource? Right. And that kind of was the story of my life, a large part of the work that I do. Today, because I'm not the junior accountant typing in the journal entry to identify the intangible value of my 45th store kind of a thing is actually like in my current you know, organization, and I joined, we were a team member accounting team with 20 countries. And so the discussion with the CFO and the chief accounting officer was, we need, we won't have the time and ability to scale that big. And build inhouse. So we're gonna outsource all of our accounting and payroll and everything for those regions, but with a clear business plan that we're gonna bring everything inhouse set up like a global center of excellence in India, which I'll oversee, so we have like a 30 member team today, blah, blah. However, what was the business plan to build out an internal finance team was that the cost of operations will be much cheaper if you outsource it. The outsourcer has to pay their labor, cost and attack on a margin. So the cost of operations and also what happens is once you have a third party organization, they have specific rules on how many hours in a month they'll service you because they have 25 clients. So they'll give you six hours on the third Friday of the month could be your day or that particular working day is yours. On that day, if you don't have your data ready, then it's going to cause delays and risk to closing books on time. Having a full fledged finance team in house will eliminate all that noise because you're managing it fully and how it's your team. You close books at your convenience and all that good stuff. So that is, but that is the balance you have to maintain on. Do you want to then build out a full fledged finance team, hire a finance leader managing that business also? So as you scale up, it makes a lot of sense that it's not called a break even point, but it's like the inflection point, right? Where you realize. As a scale up, the other model is hybrid, you keep third party accountants to do the daily bookkeeping, go collect the transaction details at the branch level. So they'll do the collating data because you don't want your for your employees to kind of not do you know, non qualitative work. You, you hired, say, a real smart Alex to actually do the analytics. You are, they are, they are the ones who are going to identify a branch 13 are less than one mile from each other. It's eating into each other's profits or eating into each other's business, right? So, so that's the qualitative stuff you want your finance team to do. Then you kind of. I'd say that, okay, it's going to be a bit higher for cost perspective, but I'll still use a third party firm. So that's a hybrid model, which is also very popular. So did I understand, so switching this away from now this cafe example. So I've, understood now how it can get complex going from my little garage cafe to the 25 stores, understand kind of how are the problems scale, but switching it now to your company and did I understand that you're just. A three person team managing 20 countries? No, we were three person team. Then we became like six. So the other three that I hired was managing the outsourced companies, which were managing the other countries. So each person would manage like six countries, but. He had a full fledged third party accounting team. To today, those six or seven people are now the senior guys who are my directs. And now we hired, like, junior level accountants. So we had to figure out the mix. Do I want, like, qualified CPAs? Are college grads with, like, a few years of accounting experience good? So we built that mix so that we have cost optimization, but at the same time, compliance and quality doesn't drop. So what's the, that's, so it sounds like a lot of people involved. So it's the six in house with how many of these outsourced outfits? It sounds like there are many kind of strewn around the world is the mental image I had. I got. Yeah. That's what it was. So it was like 17 countries. So each country had their own third party accounting firm. So now we brought that all in. So today the entire org is in house. So that was my journey over the last. I mean, I've been here almost six years in that the last four years was to kind of bring everything in our setup shop, but also handle complexities because I'm managing Korea, Japan, China, where they have local bank accounts, which only turn out local language financial statements or bank statements. So I had to I had to kind of figure out how best to navigate through the Japan bank account to log in. And so same with something like France or a Germany simple things that we take for granted. Right? How you use a comma right, yeah, yeah. After three digits. That's right. Like it's, it's actually a dot, or it, it's a, yeah, yeah. Decimal points, comma, yeah, decimal points. So just training my team, super smart but just explain to them the nuances of, hey, managing a PJ versus. India was EMEA. What are going to be implications? So that's been a real, real fun learning journey because a lot of it is when something really crashes is when you learn a lot. Yeah, totally. Yeah. No, but it still doesn't seem, it seems I'm surprised at how lean the team is. Like if it's just 30 people. Yeah. Okay. That makes more sense. I feel I would have guessed. Tens of people. Okay. Yeah. I, in that 30, I have three, what I call as digital. Creatures or digital beings. So we've actually I mean, I, my company is an automation product company. So we automate processes. So we actually could actually help our team members identify more mundane, repetitive processes and have it automated. So we could, the intention was not to reduce headcount, right? In the sense that I have the existing folks. I'm like, Hey, what is the most boring thing that you do? everyday kind of a thing, identifying that. And most times it was like receiving that invoice from a particular supplier, setting it in the system for it to get paid 30 days later. We automated the entire accounts payable process to help them do the more qualitative stuff. Yeah. And so coming to that point of boring work and what separates a good accountant from not a great one so a very high level, of course there is a company OKR, then there is a finance team OKR, but to be a good accountant is not about. Just knowing your knowledge, book knowledge to pass your CA or CPA program, right? That's obviously the qualification, but just the real life experience of handling accounts, understanding the business of a company. So, so as students, when you're studying for the CA program or CPA program, you do an internship. You go join a Deloitte or a KPMG for three years. You do audits. The purpose of that is to just understand the ins and outs of any business in different industry. Yeah. So that. When something doesn't look okay, you're able to challenge it. So the, the willingness to always question, right? Trust, but verify. So you, you accept that, you know, this seems okay, but we'll check it in. So I think that being open to being curious is a very, very important trait, I feel, because it's in the most boring, most mundane stuff where you actually identify a fraud, something didn't look okay, kind of a thing, right? And you're not looking to identify a fraud. A lot of it is accidentally identified but that's the thing, right? It's the bank reconciliation, which got screwed up, which Satyam's at that time 7, 000 crores was equivalent to 2 billion scam. Right. At that point of time. So it was because when a junior accountant was tracking something, he said, look, the numbers don't look okay. Raised it up to their manager who was clean guy was not in, in, in cahoots with the founders kind of thing. So yeah, I think being curious in addition to being good with having a good hold of your numbers is important. So what's an example of the, oh, it's almost time for you. I can do three more minutes. Yeah. No, no, no. It's, it's good. Let's pause here. This one. So no, this was great. This was great by the way. So It's all small nuances, but a couple of good things happened with this call, right? You're a great user, customer or whatever, if you were a potential user, because you automatically give out a lot of information, a sticky situation is when I get one line responses from people, you really tease out info. So if I were to look at a breakdown of talk time. It's perfect. I want to be big eyes, big ears, and I want you to be big mouth. So that worked out great on this call. The other thing is you know, I didn't ask you yes, no type questions. It was mostly how, why, you know, open ended. And so it, and you were great with like, just giving me lots and lots of info. Typically what would happen is I would set up like a series of these, like maybe two or three or five or something like that with you on a real world scenario. And we'd kind of peel into this a little bit more. So some things we didn't get to, you know, what's an example you mentioned, for example, you've automated away some boring work. So what's an example of a boring task that you automated away you know, this week or last week and that kind of thing. And then, you know, other discovery pieces, like when was the last time you introduced tooling you know, into your accounting stack? How did you go about that? Could you just go in, put in a credit card and start to try it? Or did you have to go to someone and get approval? How does that typically work? And then to really kind of peep into that workflow, this usually happens over a few calls. You can't get everything knocked out. You know, this first call, even this was a pretty hectic call. Like normally, No one will want to join a call back with me because this is pretty hectic. Normally, yeah, normally it's a little bit harder. You're my free ride to Sonoma, so that's fine. Karan, this was great. No worries. We'll catch up for another session whenever you want. That's not a problem. Have a good evening.