88 CAS Tech: 2 Recs...but Stop Following Trends

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Tired of chasing every new app or automation trend? In this episode of CAS Minute, Roman Villard calls out the shiny object syndrome plaguing modern accounting firms—and offers a practical mindset shift for building a tech stack that works for your team, your workflows, and your clients.

Learn how to avoid tech debt, reduce distractions, and make smarter, stability-focused decisions that actually improve your firm’s performance.

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⏱️ Chapters

00:00 – Intro: Stop Chasing Tech That Doesn’t Serve You

01:04 – Fit Over Flash: Why Hype Isn’t a Strategy

04:17 – Flashy Tools Are Often the Shallowest

05:35 – Two CAS Simple Tools That Solve Real Problems

07:44 – Let Your Team Drive Tech Adoption

08:46 – Simplicity Scales: Why Stability Beats Novelty

09:43 – Tech Debt: The Cost of Poor Implementation

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✅ Key Takeaways:

• Fit trumps hype – Evaluate tech based on how well it solves your firm’s problems, not someone else’s.
• New tools come with hidden costs – Consider the time to train, document, and implement.
• Involve your team early – If they don’t buy in, the tech won’t get used.
• Simplicity scales – Fewer tools, used better, drive more value than a bloated stack.
• Don’t build your tech stack for influencers – Build it for your clients, workflows, and team.

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📢 Want to grow a scalable CAS practice that doesn’t collapse under the weight of complexity?

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Full Send | Accounting & Data

LinkedIn: Roman Villard, CPA
X: @FullSendCPA
YouTube: Full Send - Accounting & Data
Data Podcast: Data Fuel

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of CAS Minute. Did we like the intro voice? I don't know. We'll, we'll see if we keep that or not. Welcome to another episode of CAS Minute. Hey, I'm Roman, founder of Full Send. Today we're gonna talk about why we need to stop chasing tech and build what works for you. What happens is that you can get whiplash from every new.

[00:00:20] App that comes out. Every new automation hack or probably influencer tech stacks, I mean, we all see it, right? Here's the 19 recommended systems that you should be looking at. Here's the top three Bill Pay products. Here's another blog, another newsletter, another piece of content that's pushing you towards some type of new tool that doesn't exist in your tech stack today.

[00:00:40] Today, here's the truth in that. Chasing shiny objects doesn't necessarily help scale your firm. It can really be a distraction to your team. It can clutter up your workflow, install your actual progress, like I suffer from this all the time. So today we're gonna break down why building the right tech stack and not necessarily the flashiest is gonna be the, the, the power move that you're probably looking for at full send, we built a modern lean tech forward CAS practice by

[00:01:04] in some cases, ignoring a lot of the noise and doubling down on what's driving results for us. So here's five different areas about how we think about tech decisions and why your tech stacks should serve you and not necessarily the algorithm. So when I think about how to.

[00:01:19] Implement new tech, what tech we need. I'm often gathering a lot of data from our team and also gathering a lot of data from what people are saying online. Now, I'm not going online to seek out a new tool, even though that's often what comes through my LinkedIn feed, a lot of hype around this or that. Um, ultimately what I'm trying to do is find tech that solves a problem, so fit of technology.

[00:01:43] Overrules the hype, and it's really easy for me to get hyped on something that is new, that is flashy, that has got good branding, uh, things like that can be really, really attractive to me. Yet I needed to solve a core problem in my firm. And so first there's this analysis of like, what problems do exist, what things can be solved by new tech?

[00:02:02] And so that's where we're starting from a new tech evaluation standpoint. Our problems within the firm. Now you have to know that in the market, when you see people recommending tools, you always need to be cognizant of people that are getting paid to promote different tools More often than not, they're recommending tools that are fits for their firm and not necessarily your firm.

[00:02:23] Now, there are a lot of really genuine, authentic people out there that I think are very much worth following and listening to, but you just have to be cognizant that they are not in your exact shoes, and you've gotta make that evaluation for yourself and not just blindly leap into a new app. Just 'cause it's trending doesn't mean it's going to integrate with your system, support your workflows.

[00:02:43] An example of this lately for me is I've been hearing a lot and seeing a lot about what Keeper is doing in the market now. We do not use Keeper today. I think there's probably a lot of value add to the platform that they have. However. Every single time I evaluate it, I'm like, it just doesn't seem to solve a core problem for us right now.

[00:03:00] And that is a problem for me because every tool that you add has a switching cost. So I'm generally evaluating any new tool that we're looking at, even if it solves a problem as. I know that this is going to create a 10% increase in my costs, even if it's not a dollar cost. Time costs over, let's call it a three to six month period, so it needs to drive upwards of a 20% increase in productivity after it's fully realized.

[00:03:31] Then my break even is gonna be in that, you know, nine to 12 month range, even if it's just a small thing. We looked at a really simple tool switch within our QBO to sheets. Workflow and it is a very simple ad. However, we recognize that the ripple effect of how this impacts our processes across multiple clients that have nuances would actually be a lot larger implementation than we thought.

[00:03:56] And so all of that training, that documentation, the SOP changes, like that time to value, it all adds up. And realistically, when your team is. Being trained on that and you're actually switching tools. What you're battling is context switching, and that is a crusher of productivity Usually introducing a new tool for marginal gain is gonna cause a lot more chaos than it is clarity.

[00:04:17] So you really need to understand tactically, how is this going to impact your team on a day to day, and to the extent possible, model that out from an hour standpoint to gauge the impact on productivity. Now, it's funny because I talk about influencers recommending tech products. You need to take them with a grain of salt, figure out where the money's going, look at what their firms look like if they have them, and then look at your firm.

[00:04:39] Now, here's where I contradict myself, and I'm fully aware of this. I'm gonna recommend two tools, and this comes within the entire point that the flashiest tools that you see in the market, the ones with the best branding, the one with the best messaging that are AI forward, this, that and the other. Um, sometimes they're usually the shallowest.

[00:04:59] In my experience, I really haven't seen that many tools that have this phenomenal branding that actually solve a deep problem for us. Those Jack of all trades type tools, often lack in depth and in core functionality. I know accountants by nature, we want to go to that one tool that solves the one thing for us really, really well.

[00:05:18] And there's a lot of tools in market that do that. But more and more often we're seeing tools that actually have this really broad. Application, and they might not actually be very good at any of them. So two examples where I think this is really, really helpful. One, you've got Accruer, the tool that FinOptimal puts out there.

[00:05:35] All Accruer does is that in QuickBooks, when a transaction comes in and you need to accrue for it, you type in for the period from X date to Y date. That's it. It's no fancy ai. There is no wild messaging. Well, Tom has some wild messaging around it. However, what I'm trying to say is like, this solves a problem that accountants have.

[00:05:58] And that problem is trying to figure out how to book monthly accrual adjustments in journal entries. Accruer does that for you in a simple single step. It is pretty shallow. There's a suite of products that Fin Optimal has that goes alongside of it that helps expand and create a more robust.

[00:06:13] Application of the FinOptimal tools. However, ACCRUER in and of itself, you can use it standalone and it solves a simple problem,

[00:06:20] would recommend. Now, another tool that I've seen that has done something similar is Uncat. So we don't use Uncat in our firm. We actually use the Redcat functionality within Financial Sense. However, Uncat has built an incredible business on just taking Uncategorized expenses and seamlessly sending them to the clients for categorization.

[00:06:41] It is simple. It is to some degree shallow, but it solves a problem. I think that Accruer and Uncat, what they've been able to do in the market by simply demonstrating value through solving a single problem that is important to accountants, demonstrates the ability to connect with accountants really, really well.

[00:06:59] When you see all of these big companies coming out, this new tech, ai, this, that, and the other, there will be some degree of functionality And adaptation of tools like that over time. But just be cognizant as to what problem you're solving and don't always go for the flashiest tools. Those tools that go deep. You need them to go deep where you need them to and not try to do everything poorly across the board. That's why we see within our GL tech stacks that can manage things like bill pay, sending invoices, things like that.

[00:07:27] Um, not all of that Functionality is actually used within those GL products because there are other tools out there that do them better. So think about how you can do that. Oftentimes the mental aspect of this is, well, can I save money by consolidating my tech stack into this one tool? Yeah, maybe.

[00:07:44] But the cost saved upfront often leads to opportunity lost long term. So the next point that I kind of alluded to in the beginning is that your team should be driving the tech adoption, not the leaders of the company that aren't in the day to day. You need to be solving a problem. Thus, you need to be listening to your team as to what the problem is.

[00:08:03] You may not be the primary user. Your team is if they're not bought in or trained properly. It doesn't matter how cool, how sexy that new tool is. They may not be looking for the problem that it says that it solves. So. Involve your team in demos. Assign internal champions of new tech that you're looking to bring on.

[00:08:24] Validate that tech with your team on the problem that it solves before you deploy it. Adoption isn't a feature, it's a cultural behavior that you have to learn. You have to understand how you bring your team into that adoption of new tech. It is critically important. The last point here that relates to point number three, that flashy tools are usually the shallowest, is that.

[00:08:46] Simplicity scales. Oftentimes when you bring in highly complex, difficult UI UX tools, that complexity will compound so. In my belief, one clean system that's used consistently will beat five best in class tools with poor implementation. So if you take a system of maybe two, three tools that work really, really well, and they're consistent, it might beat out five other tools that say they're best in class but are implemented poorly.

[00:09:12] So if you can simplify the process, simplify the tools that you're bringing in, you can. Train your team really, really well on them, and then actually minimize the impact that future new Tech coming out will have on your organization because you know that you're already running an efficient practice.

[00:09:28] Now, what this all drives to, if you have poor implementation and you're chasing shiny objects, is it builds tech debt. What happens is that you start bringing on all of this tech. Nobody knows exactly how they're used or how they work together. And you, and you have good intentions, you want to be tech forward.

[00:09:43] So you say you wanna say you use all of these tools, but oftentimes it ends with some broken processes and technical debt that needs to be unwound later. Stability will beat novelty in a service-based operation. Stability will beat novelty in a service-based operation. I believe that with a caveat that in order to be successful and continue pushing the boundaries of.

[00:10:08] Of your firm's capabilities, you do need to be novel. You need to be novel in how you message and how you market, how you acquire clients, how you serve them. However, you cannot be so novel as to give up on the stability that it drives to the client. You need to understand the true value prop that you're giving to them.

[00:10:25] So focus on the stability that that new tech can drive, rather than the novelty of having the new tech in place to share with your friends that you are tech forward. You don't necessarily need more tech. You actually need less tech with a little bit more traction. Another app isn't gonna solve all your problems.

[00:10:44] You likely have the functionality to lean into tools you're already using to solve the problems that exist at your firm. However, if you're gonna look to the market to solve this problem, reach out to your team. Figure out what problems exist. Bring them into the process. Talk to your friends. Talk to your colleagues.

[00:10:59] Listen to a podcast or two, have a conversation with vendors. Go to conferences, educate yourself, and then make a wise decision that drives stability. Technology is a tool. It's not a strategy. So don't build your tech stack for influencers. Build it for your team. Build it for your workflows, build it for your clients.

[00:11:16] The firm that works smoothly and may move a little bit more slowly is gonna win in the long term. It's not gonna be the one with the most tech logos on its integrations page, even though that may look sexy in the beginning. I hope that's a helpful overview of how to think about tech trends.

[00:11:32] I hope some recommendations are helpful. I have no affiliation with those tools. Uh, check 'em out. Happy to point you in the right direction more next time.

[00:11:38]