A few weeks ago, I was talking to the SVP of Product for a successful American company – SVP meaning seriously valuable person or something like that. And we were talking about remote working, because his company is famous for having no headquarters. I wanted to learn about how to do remote working really well.

At this SVP’s company, everyone in their company works from home – from the CEO and the QFP to the XRN. They are masters of remote working, all 800 of them. My team and I are based in the UK so we don’t see our Australian partners very often. We are in many ways like remote workers.

This SVP told me, ‘The key thing you need to remember is to over communicate. When you don’t have a watercooler that you meet around every day, you need to reiterate messages. To repeat things until you’re almost bored of them. That’s the only way people will manage to hear you.’

This year at Receipt Bank Exchange, I will be repeating myself a little. Though, I promise it’ll only be the important bits of what I was saying in 2019 And only because I think they’re still as important this year as they were last year.

So with this in mind, here we go.

My mission as Chief Product Officer

There is a terrible thing called admin that drags people away from what they love. Thankfully, many people get an advisor involved to help. We’re focusing on those people: the small businesses who want to do what they love doing, and not waste a day to admin only to spend two further days worrying about what they’ve done or dreading what they have to do next.

Our mission is to make accountants and bookkeepers more productive, by automating manual processes to help their clients save time and money. Last year, we launched sales invoices as one step closer to taking in all kinds of paperwork.

We’re also focusing on getting information out.  We launched line item extraction last year, which means we are now extracting more information than ever. Not only do we want to take all the paper in and deal with it for you, we also want to read what’s not on the paper. A receipt will never tell you why you bought something. If you buy a printer, a receipt will never tell you that it was inventory for resale or a tool to use in the office. Ordinarily, that’s what your accountant or bookkeeper will categorise.

Now we are doing everything we can to capture the context. We launched suggested categories just before Christmas to automatically categorise receipts based on your specific client’s behaviour.

Upping the impact, reinventing the reward

Chasing clients is like telling your kids to put their socks in the laundry. You’re spending more time nagging than on more productive tasks – say, asking them what they want to be when they grow up or playing lego.

So we’re trying to help accountants and bookkeepers spend less time talking to a client to chase paperwork, and more time talking to them on the interesting, rewarding parts. It’s about eliminating the low value of the relationship. In 2020, we’ll be using our Series C funding to deepen these product capabilities.

Why come to Receipt Bank Exchange Australia

Only very recently have I found that talking to people who are really good at something is a great way to learn something. It sounds obvious – almost so obvious that I look stupid for writing it. But it’s something that I’m only making sure that I give my time to now. Now, I seek people out to learn from their ideas, and their mistakes. People like the SVP of Product. People like Andrea Clarke. And people like you.

That’s why Receipt Bank Exchange is so special. It’s a chance to meet experts in the field and outside the industry, to hone your craft and most importantly, make the choice to invest in yourself. Choosing to take a day off the office and switch on the Out of Office is not always easy, and even less so when you run a business. Yet, I know first-hand how valuable it is.

This year, we’ll be doing something different – celebrating the accountants, bookkeepers and BAS agents through the first ever Receipt Bank Awards.

Just as you make the choice to attend Receipt Bank Exchange 2020, 2020 is the year to choose choice, change and challenge.