Ambitious Accountants Podcast

From Baker to AI Pioneer: How Jason Lougher is Revolutionising Accounting Practice

• Sumith Dissanayake

Share episode

In this episode of the Ambitious Accountants Podcast, Sumith Dissanayake chats with Jason Lougher, director of Calc Business Advisory and co-founder of Numera AI. Jason shares his journey from small-town baker to accounting firm owner and AI innovator after a wrist injury changed his career path. The conversation explores how process automation differs from AI and can transform accounting practices right now. They discuss Jason's approach to genuine work-life balance in his firm, tackling the industry's burnout crisis, and how automation can eliminate the mundane admin tasks that bog down accountants. Jason explains how his team uses AI tools to deliver better advisory services at scale, empowering junior staff to handle major clients independently. The episode highlights practical solutions for reducing administrative burden while improving client relationships and staff satisfaction in the accounting sector.

Got something to say about the future of accounting in NZ? Let’s chat — you could be our next guest.

Email - Sumith@brisca.co.nz

Jason Lougher: [00:00:00] It's not about how AI is gonna change in the future or change our jobs in the future. It's actually about how process automation can change our jobs now. So people get confused, I think, with what is AI and what's process automation. So AI for me is more about large language models and how things are pulled out of stuff, where the process automation, the stuff that we are really focusing on at the moment, that's about replacing.

Jason Lougher: Administration that humans don't need to be doing. It's not about replacing the human, it's about giving them a tool where they get some quality of their life back. 

Sumith: Welcome back to another episode of Ambitious Accountant Podcast. Today I have a special guest who is not only the business owner running an accounting firm, but also someone building an AI solution for accounting firms.

Sumith: I'm. So excited to unfold his story. Jason, director of Health Business Advisory and co-founder of Numera ai. Jason, it's great to have you on the podcast. [00:01:00] How are you today? 

Jason Lougher: I'm good. 

Sumith: I'm good. How are you? Pretty good. I really glad to have you here because I am excited about what you're doing for the industry especially, and but I, before I go down that lane, but I really like to understand how these, the innovativeness, that excitement came from.

Sumith: You grew up in a small New Zealand town and that helped you contact with people from all walks of life. How has that skill 

Jason Lougher: influenced your success in business? I grew up in a small town called Whakatane. I think there's about 30,000 people in Whakatane. I actually dropped outta school when I was 15. I thought that I would be a, a better baker than I would be anything else.

Jason Lougher: Spent a few years baking, became qualified and broke my wrist. Do you still bake? Much to the disappointment in my family. I don't, oh my, I actually cooked a birthday cake probably about two months ago for a friend, and it was a disaster. But anyway, and the only other thing I was good at was numbers, so I actually went back to university as an [00:02:00] adult.

Jason Lougher: So I sort of started studying when I was 21, 22, so I was a bit late to the game, actually. 

Sumith: Right. That's interesting. So you started at Toba and then because of the mishap, then you had to change the gears. 

Jason Lougher: Yeah. So I find that every time a door opens it's because you're not supposed to be standing in that room.

Jason Lougher: So yeah, it was the worst thing that sort of happened at the time, but it sort of led me into where I am today. 

Sumith: So you are now planning an accounting firm and also trying to do things to elevate the industry. So tell me about how you started your accounting firms, or did you work for other firms before you started?

Sumith: Or tell me about your story. 

Jason Lougher: So I worked for a small whakatane firm, and I was lucky enough that the owner of that firm allowed me to move to Auckland and work remotely, and that's where I could study and work at the same time. So I worked full-time, studied full-time through the last three years of my degree, so it was definitely a big shock.

Jason Lougher: From there, I moved to PWC in Auckland, spent, I don't know, four or five years, [00:03:00] great pedigree to have, hard lifestyle to keep because then I decided I wanted to move back to Whakatane. I started working for a little firm here and did a couple of years and decided for some reason that I wanted to start my own firm and it was too stupid to think I'd fail, so we just started and that was 11 years ago.

Sumith: How was it like the journey at the start? I'm sure you have to wear different hats as a business owner at the same time, the technical expert. So how do you cope at the beginning, like. Doing your sales, marketing, recruiting, training, and at the same time delivery, what the clients would, 

Jason Lougher: it was quite an experience.

Jason Lougher: So I think we started with about six staff, including ourselves, the owners, and from there we sort of built it to close to 30, and then at the beginning of last year, last financial year, actually went through a business separation where we split off from Legacy and we started calc by ourselves. We're about 15 staff in totality here in Whakatane.

Jason Lougher: We've got a couple of people that are remote throughout the [00:04:00] country, not everybody's full-time. And we really focus on trying to give our team a really good work-life balance. So making sure that the moms that we employ, they have the ability to spend their time with their kids after school, and very much about work-life balance.

Jason Lougher: And I know that's quite a cliche or a click word at the moment, but. We put a lot of effort into making sure that our team has time with their family. 

Sumith: Yeah. You are kind of definition for work-life balance is a very interesting one. It's not equal. Right? So tell me more about it. 

Jason Lougher: Everybody picks how many hours they wanna work over a fortnight and they work those hours depending on what their work schedule's like.

Jason Lougher: So they may have big days on Monday, small days on another. We close the office early on a Friday, and it's not that everybody goes home on a Friday. In the day, but we don't have, we don't have client facing meetings and those sorts of things. 'cause people have time to catch up and just balance their life out.

Sumith: Right. So it's really interesting because sometimes this is the hardest thing for us to achieve in an [00:05:00] accounting industry because we sometimes get in with that cyclical movement, right? So we have always something coming up. There's a deadline to meet and all that. So how do you balance the, the demand for the work as you, especially from the compliance side?

Sumith: Of course, making sure that we give the people a nice choice to work the way they want to work. 

Jason Lougher: Well, I think it all comes down from really trying to figure out whether or not the system that we've worked in for so long is working for us. And the latest stats I saw is that about 43% of accountants are feeling burnt out either constantly or often.

Jason Lougher: That's some big numbers, 74% experience symptoms at least sometimes. So that means that a couple of times a year. We as accountants, 74% of us are feeling burnt out, and then we've gotta look at what we are doing. And there's a lot of times where we need to be saying no to things. There's not the right clients sometimes there's not the right mix of staff, there's not the right mix of systems.

Jason Lougher: And even in our own firms, there's still sort of 40, 50% [00:06:00] of small firms using manual Excel work papers that they design themselves. Why are we doing this? I do a set of accounts every year for a small company to keep my head in the game in terms of work papers. We log in and we get the same information from the same places.

Jason Lougher: We go to IRD, we go to company's office, we go to a CC, we ask our clients for our bank account statements. It just goes on and on. There's so much stuff that we do in our firms that we shouldn't be doing. 

Sumith: So really obvious, but it sounds like you know, something that I come across all the time. 

Jason Lougher: Oh, it's amazing.

Jason Lougher: And it's sort of where Numera, our AI project came out of. I think what people need to be thinking about right now is it's not about how AI is gonna change in the future or change our jobs in the future. It's actually about how process automation can change our jobs now. So people get confused, I think, with what is AI and what's process automation.

Jason Lougher: So AI for me is more about large language models and how things are pulled out of stuff, where the process automation, the stuff that we are really [00:07:00] focusing on at the moment that's about replacing. Administration that humans don't need to be doing. It's not about replacing the human, it's about giving them a tool where they get some quality of their life back.

Sumith: Yeah. Have you think about it, but I wanna explore more about it. Before we go down to AI side of your business. I want to explore how to achieve the balance. Why you need to make sure that you source the right cohort to work with. So first cohort is our clients. So how do you determine whether a client is a good fit for your firm?

Jason Lougher: We really only have one rule, and it's whether or not we work well with a client. And I think as business owners we get really good at picking up people's energy in a first meeting. The questions we need to be asking ourselves and the client, the prospective client is, why do you want to make a move? How often have you changed accountants?

Jason Lougher: What are your processes in keeping your accounting records up to date? What sort of help do you want from us? Are we just a one stop a [00:08:00] year? Compliance driven practice for you? Or are you wanting somebody who can partner with you in business? And so sort of the focus that we've had here at Calc is not being an accountant support, it's about being a business partner and how do we deliver advice on a massive scale using our whole team.

Jason Lougher: That's the biggest challenge that we've had over the last couple of years is getting our juniors and intermediates, being able to work in a way that gives some really good advice to business owners, and that is how we've actually been able to leverage some of the AI stuff and being able to set up systems where it's taking the owner's thoughts or the director's thoughts, the director's systems, and then giving the accountants tools that are easy to use to provide information to clients that actually explains why things matter.

Jason Lougher: So. Templates. You quite often will see this year's sales was X, last year's sales was X. And so you get accountants going in and just typing in what the [00:09:00] sales were this year, what the sales were last year, what gross profit was this year, who cares? We need to figure out why that matters. We need to be showing the clients YA change in gross profit matters, where it comes from, what they should be looking at.

Jason Lougher: What are the key points to be focusing on? Is this a good change? Is it a bad change? How do we get that information to clients in a way that they understand it? And every time I set up my AI tools, I ask the agent to be talking to somebody around 12 years old and explaining it to them in a way that a 12-year-old would understand it.

Jason Lougher: And it's not because I think clients are dumb. It's because each of these clients have a different understanding of their business, and what we are trying to do is give them a language that they can now understand what we do to support what they're doing. 

Sumith: Yeah. Oh, that, that's really good. Good support for the, especially the business, the people start business from their passion.

Sumith: Right. It doesn't mean that they know everything that you [00:10:00] need. You're getting to the success. So basically they're coming from whatever the trade that they owe, the proposition that they are, that they have learned or or worked in, and then come in and then you think that's the business. But no, there's other components.

Sumith: At the same time accounting for all and finance probably the last thing that they absorbed into the mixture. 

Jason Lougher: Exactly. Yeah. These people are good at what they're doing and we are good at what we are doing, so why aren't we helping them learn what we do? True. 

Sumith: No, that's, I love the way you are thinking about it.

Sumith: I'm the same. So I think that's the best support for our, especially the semis sector clients, because they don't have all the superstars working for them. So they are probably the only superstar in the business, or then we to sit next to them to guide them through the process. 

Jason Lougher: So there's 38,000 small and medium-sized accounting firms in a Australasia.

Jason Lougher: Yes. We have such a pivotal role in supporting our communities. We're quite lucky in the fact that IRD and a TO do a lot of our advertising for us. Oh, course. You know, that's how biggest advertising channel, because these companies [00:11:00] have to file tax returns. But what these companies need to be getting is information so that they can build their businesses, support their communities, their families.

Jason Lougher: If we can do that easily. One of my bots writes up the draft financial letter or email to a client and it takes 38 seconds and this is really good information that we are feeding into a client that used to take an hour and a half. We use that bot 70 to a hundred times a month. We'll be able to pull in a hundred hours and produce better outputs by using quick systems.

Sumith: Yeah, that's interesting. Interesting because we get that compliance piece because it's legislation, so that's the best point of contact, right? So the clients come for that. But that's not the best support that he can give. We can give that support to grow and look after their families and then achieve their dreams pretty much.

Jason Lougher: And why can't we just bolt on a little bit of advisory onto every single letter if it's coming out automatically? It doesn't cost anybody anymore, but we're giving people something that they haven't had before. We [00:12:00] get a lot of comments back at the moment, really nice emails saying things like how well the letters, the information that's coming through, how, how valuable and how much it's changed in the last six months.

Sumith: Yeah, for you to achieve it, scale your business by you. The other best stakeholders that you need is your team. And I know you are hiring more on attitude than anything else. Talk to me more about how you are sourcing your team members and how you help them grow into their dreams. 

Jason Lougher: I'm really lucky, so everybody who works here has worked for me for quite some time.

Jason Lougher: I've got a couple of people who have worked for me for about 11 years, right from the beginning. Everybody else has either approached me or they have been sort of shoulder tapped to come and work for us. So we've got a team that's really engaged with each other if they've got a really good fit with each other, and we're starting to really get this AI really embedded into how we are thinking.

Jason Lougher: So when we look at our policies, we talk about how our attitude is when we talk to clients and those sorts of things. [00:13:00] We've actually moved some of those policies down the list. We've started to introduce more around having AI towards the top of the policy list because it's something that we want to embed.

Jason Lougher: It is something that's our culture. 

Sumith: Yeah, that's right. Now there's a bit of a misperception about when AI comes in is going to be a challenge for Accounters to find jobs or the jobs are getting maybe shrinking the level of engagement or there might not be opportunities in the future. I think there's a huge.

Sumith: Skill shortage we are sort of experiencing now. At the same time, 

Jason Lougher: I don't really see it because I think we actually got a people shortage coming into our industry. Yes. And so what we are doing is actually allowing more capacity for the teams that we've already got. So I actually don't feel like my team will shrink.

Jason Lougher: I don't think that will happen in my firm. It's not about actually replacing humans, it's about giving them better tools so they're not facing the stresses, they're getting the support they need straight away. These bots allow them to work [00:14:00] alongside me 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Inputs and the outputs that are going through it are stuff that we have set as a director about how it goes through the system and comes out.

Jason Lougher: So not only is it better for myself, I'm not being pulled from meeting to meeting. The stuff that I'm reviewing takes less time to review. I. It's much more valuable and it's giving the team a real sense of accomplishment. They're learning from it. I don't see it being a replacing accounting or accountants.

Jason Lougher: I think it's about supplementing what we are doing. 

Sumith: Yeah, true. The industry is transforming and then giving us more time and we can be more human and support at that level than just inhuman. I mean, I would say we both. Hundred percent. That's what I see the benefit of what's happening in the industry because you gain your time and some of time for you to even doing a podcast, kind of something like this.

Sumith: In the past it would've been huge effort and I could have done only maybe one per month, but now I can do a few [00:15:00] per week. 'cause technology is helping and everyone's connected and it's not possible for me to do it in from Brisbane. 

Jason Lougher: Ah, you should have told me I would've come for a holiday. 

Sumith: That's right.

Sumith: That's right. Your new focus is, I can see your passion in ai, so you are bit different to most of the accountants at the moment in the market. So numerous ai where the idea come from to make it a business, like a business model or a company and how you thought of, okay, if you give a serious thought and a effort into this.

Sumith: 1, 

Jason Lougher: 2, 2 reasons. One is obviously I faced burnout over the last couple of years as most accountants have. As I said, 50% of us basically struggle with it most of the time. The second is, every time I did that one set of accounts, every year, I was going to the same place, doing the same things, getting the same information.

Jason Lougher: I see the emails that go to clients. We are asking the same questions. We live in a digital world. Why can't we get this information digitally? And so I was lucky enough to have a client called Jared Rumble. He's done a lot of process automation for [00:16:00] some really big international companies. We sat down over a beer and just had a really good chat about what we could do.

Jason Lougher: What we decided to do is rebuild work papers from the ground up. And so every work paper we've built, we ask ourselves, how do we get rid of a human touching this work paper? So for instance, we've been able to do open banking before open banking was available in New Zealand. We've got the ability now to pull all the information from IRD company's office.

Jason Lougher: We've worked with a CC on building their API, so we can get the invoices out from there. So that's basically what we're trying to do is work through each of the work papers and systemize as much as the data gathering is possible. So how do we compare Xero or Green XPM, which is the practice manager in New Zealand, most likely Australia.

Jason Lougher: So how do we get all the information that's there and verify it against somewhere else? And so we spent close to two years. We've probably invested upwards of half a million dollars in time and money into building this platform. [00:17:00] It's currently running just over three and a half thousand human directions, setting up work papers and pulling data, and we're just going into the testing stage and having an accounting firm with 15 staff is the most amazing gift I can give Numera because.

Jason Lougher: We've, we can test it in-house before we even go into beta. We've got a waiting list of over 200 accountants wanting to test our products. Wow. Yeah, we've done very little advertising. I do some ramblings on LinkedIn every so often and I really just am so looking forward to this year because by October it should be out in the marketplace and really like kicking off and it's gonna be cool to see it.

Jason Lougher: It's been a passion project. 

Sumith: I can see that. And good on you night. 200 old firms are wanting that already. That sort of solidifies the offer. 

Jason Lougher: We're sort of outsourcing to ourselves in a way. So it's such an interesting space and I think everybody's been focusing on AI and we've missed the boat with process automation.

Jason Lougher: [00:18:00] And process automation is where I think AI is really delivering or can really deliver sustainable outcomes for the next few years. 

Sumith: So it's the first step. I think you have identified it correctly because if the things are not in order, so it's even AI getting confused, like what to sort of speed out.

Sumith: But if everything's smoother and it's coming in a more regular, in a more orderly manner, the AI can see the pattern and then of course make the predictions based on that. 

Jason Lougher: Yeah, so ing things are making sure that our language models are really concise and so we don't use the big language models that other people might use.

Jason Lougher: Because a lot of the data that the big language models have, it's just irrelevant for what we need at the moment. We need process automation with some AI coming through it versus huge amounts of AI with hallucinations 

Sumith: and the AI agent. So have you worked with the AI agents and is it something that is going to help the account industry in the future too?

Jason Lougher: Yeah, so we're building a bit of a language model ourselves at the moment. So we've got a hosted server. [00:19:00] We're working with that. We've just been in touch with a guy whose parents registered the first domain name ever on the internet, and he's only lived and breathed tech, so he's an AI specialist. So we just wanna get the process automation right.

Jason Lougher: We want to get our work papers out to the world, and then we're gonna start building in the bits and pieces that the future's gonna take us to. I think we're talking probably three to five years before we really have AI agents that are meaningful to the accounting industry. And I might be wrong on this, like things move quicker than I can ever imagine.

Jason Lougher: But you know, for a meaningful change in terms of what we're doing every day in compliance. It's gonna be process automation first. 

Sumith: Perfect. So that the movement, I love what you're doing because it's going to change the landscape of what we do and give us more time to do the other stuff, especially the advisory, which is the trend these days that everyone's trying to get into.

Sumith: So what do you think from the advisory perspective, what sort of tools available in the market or [00:20:00] what you think they better to have? That one For us to scale up the advisor, because one of the biggest problems the advisor is like. Especially, everyone wants to sit, talk to the partner of the firm, but it's possible for you to talk to everyone or get them on the journey, but you have to definitely pass it on to the next level team.

Sumith: So how do we do that transformation through ai? 

Jason Lougher: I think you just summed it up. We give, we empower our team to showcase that they can deliver advisory work. Then it becomes a more of a normal conversation to have with clients. So in the past you've had juniors and intermediates who are almost scared of delivering advisory work, or they need your help or all those sorts of things.

Jason Lougher: Then you've got clients who haven't seen their skillset come through. But if you can put your advisory into the draft letters, the GST letters, even just day-to-day communications, we're having conversations on the phone every couple of months with clients. If these people are now showcasing what they can do, and it becomes a much more natural conversation to be having with clients [00:21:00] at that level versus at my level.

Jason Lougher: Obviously they still wanna come and see the director or the associate, but it does give these guys an opportunity to really, to deliver some really cool things. One of my intermediate girls, her name's Lily, she's been delivering the finance meetings for a big national company that I used to work with.

Jason Lougher: Every month she does it in my place. Now she can do all of the reports herself. She goes to toga, meets with the director one-on-one. I get really good feedback from the director. The reports that are coming out are exactly what we've all agreed on. So it's about building the bot in a way that can give you the same consistent messaging, but based on information that updates.

Sumith: I'm glad to hear that your intermediary can handle the large companies now. 

Jason Lougher: It's so cool. I'm so proud of my team. 

Sumith: I mean, that's the end goal, right? So as a deep owner, my partner or the the proprietor. You wish your team's doing well means you gain something out of that, the freedom and the fulfillment of bringing up someone to that level.

Jason Lougher: [00:22:00] Absolutely, and we get better engagement and low turnover of staff that comes with it. So we all know that it takes about a year to start making money from a new staff member. It takes two years to train a junior into anything that delivers a good product. Why are we not keeping our own staff by giving them these tools that they can balance their life and deliver some really cool things that they're proud of.

Sumith: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And Jason, I'm also running a company similar to what I'm going to talk about. It's about outsourcing. So basically the accounting firms in Australia and New Zealand, they're working with the overseas accounting professionals. So how do you see the future of that and what's the benefit we have right now having the access to another talent pool elsewhere?

Jason Lougher: It's the same thing. What we are doing is we're empowering our industry to carry on delivering with a shrinking population base. I think the institutes and the accounting profession, they're all quite old and boring for people coming into the workforce, and so I think it's about being able [00:23:00] to give something that's a little bit sexy of back.

Jason Lougher: So we've got people coming in and they're excited. AI's new thing, da da da da, dah. And when we are getting junior staff in now, you're just so excited to be working with a firm that can deliver this stuff. So I don't think it's about replacing outsourcing. It's about, again, having enough capacity in our industry that we can service our clients in a meaningful way instead of it just being compliance.

Sumith: That's so true. I know very well. They're also transforming themselves. It's not the same, but we were doing 10 years ago. It's all different. And they're also human beings and they don't want to do the same kind of repetitive jobs either. 

Jason Lougher: Even just giving our clients the ability to not have to find bank statements and, but you know, mean like nobody enjoys that part.

Jason Lougher: No. This whole job and you send us a query email out and it's like, Hey, look, I need this back statement, that back statement, this loan statement, that loan statement. Two or three weeks later, Hey, have you seen my email? And you can just see it in their faces. I see it, but oh God, I can't bothered for this.

Jason Lougher: So why are we not just pulling this data out through [00:24:00] APIs? 

Sumith: Exactly. If you can reduce that interaction, like, I mean, that's the boring part for the clients, right? 

Jason Lougher: They don't want to give us this information, they're like, go away. But I think honestly, we can remove 30 to 50% of a job by using process automation in itself.

Jason Lougher: And this isn't even talking about putting AI models on top agents or anything like that. This is just taking away the sort of garbage admin that we've dealt with for the last 20 years. 

Sumith: Jason, so do you think that industry as a whole, are we trying hard, are we trying enough to, on the same journey, like what you are going on?

Sumith: Or are there anything that you think that we should change? And maybe from the ary accounting bodies, the partners like Xero, they are also sort of helping or part of the bigger part of the what we do. Are they doing enough or you think that they should do something different? 

Jason Lougher: This is a real hard one for me to answer because I have a little bit of an issue about the way that we are training our accountants nowadays.

Jason Lougher: So when I look at the girls that are coming through as chartered accountants, my [00:25:00] associates, they're so clever. One did a financial reporting course as part of her can sign off, and it focused it on nz. Now, if we actually look about what the majority of accountants in New Zealand do. We don't use it for us.

Sumith (2): It's 

Jason Lougher: actually just a big waste of time in my opinion. And so I'm starting to really, and I have for some time really like challenged my thinking about whether or not the chartered accountancy path is actually viable for many people. Obviously having been a a company or a business owner in the accounting firms, there's an expectation that there is a chartered accountant in my firm, however.

Jason Lougher: If you walk across the road to the bookkeepers across the road, they're great. Absolutely great. They don't have the same sort of compliance regulatory, the challenges that we had in studying. I sort of see that there's people in our accounting industry who are chartered accountants that aren't actually really good at what they do.

Jason Lougher: I see people in our accounting industry that [00:26:00] what I call a qbes, qualified by experience. They're amazing what they do. I just don't see the letters being the issue anymore. It's about. What we are delivering to clients. So, and I don't think public practice accountants have actually been supported as well as they could have been by some of these software providers.

Jason Lougher: A lot of this stuff is more focused on gaining traction in the business community versus the support that we've got on our side. So it's a really hard one because I don't wanna be out of fe people, but also I've got pretty strong opinions on. And what I think is value, and that's why we did Numera in in the end, is that we actually haven't had that support in the accounting industry before.

Jason Lougher: And if we're not gonna deliver it, who is gonna deliver this? 

Sumith: Someone has to sort of, and Jason, before we wrap up, so one last question. So what's your advice for young and upcoming accountant and anyone who is thinking of starting their own accounting firm? 

Jason Lougher: This isn't just for accountants, this for business owners coming through entrepreneurs, everybody.

Jason Lougher: AI has to be a second language for you, right? So [00:27:00] that's it. This is the value that you're going to give to a business owner, yourself, your family. Learn how to use AI in a way that's meaningful. 

Sumith: Yep. Love it.  Thank you very much for being on ambitious accountant's podcast. Thank you so much for having me.

Sumith: Thank you for joining us on Ambitious Accountants Podcast. I hope today's conversation has provided valuable insights for your professional journey. Remember, this podcast is about building a community of all key accountants who understand the challenges you face and celebrate your success. If you have enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe wherever you get your podcast and share with colleagues who might benefit.

Sumith: And if you have a success story you would like to share on our show, reach out at to Sumith@brisca.co.nz . Until next time, keep ambitious, keep innovating, and keep transport. This is Sumith signing off.