In this episode, we speak to Jana Lamprecht, a CA(SA) and Programme Director of Chartered Accountancy at the University of the Free State, in South Africa. Jana has been lecturing at the University of the Free State since 2002, initially focused on auditing and assurance. Prior to that, she completed her articles at PwC. In November 2024, she was promoted to her current position as Programme Director.

We speak about the ways in which accounting students and accountants can embrace automation tools, such as Power Automate, to level up their work. From the importance of learning digital skills to the impact of automation on the wider industry, this podcast covers it all.

Rapid-Fire Recommendations

• Book: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
• Biggest lesson Jana has learned when teaching accounting: The only constant is change.
• Key takeaway: For accountants and future accounts - embrace automation. You need to be able to future-ready yourself. It is not just about saving time on tasks like invoicing and data entry; it's about unlocking your potential to solve problems, analyze data, and to be able to connect with your clients like you have never done before.

Today, we’re diving into one of the biggest opportunities for accounting firms looking to scale: ditching bulky, expensive ERP systems and building a lean, integrated tech stack in the cloud.

Our guest, David Tuck, is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mayday. He is joining us today to unpack how accounting firms can save money, boost efficiency, and stay agile by choosing the right combination of apps - and how to avoid the common traps along the way.

If you’ve ever wondered whether your tech stack is helping or holding you back, this episode is for you.

Rapid-fire recommendations:

• Tech that's great: Xero
• Tech that's overhyped: AI as the next generation of accounting. AI will sustain the industry, not disrupt it.
• Key takeaway: As a small and medium business, it’s not just possible to scale with Xero and its ecosystem but it enables you to build a superior quality system as well.

In this special episode of the podcast, we speak to two professionals who work together, hand in glove, to executive changes through businesses. We consider the growing partnership between HR and Change Management, what this means for organizations and what business leaders can apply to changes in their own organizations.

Our guests are Eve McKenzie, GM Change Management at Xero, and Tina Karia, People Experience Business Partner at Xero.

Some of the topics covered include:

• The real meaning of change management and the practicalities involved.
• The long impact of change.
• The interaction between HR and change management.
• The pitfalls of change management and how to avoid them.
• How to deal with resistance to change.
• Measuring the success of a change management initiative.
• The Three S Model applied at Xero: Simple, Safe, Structure.

Rapid-Fire Recommendations

• Software: ChatGPT & Gemini; Slack; Miro

• Book: Neuroscience for Organizational Change: An Evidence-based Practical Guide to Managing Change by Hilary Scarlett

• Podcast: The Diary of a CEO

• Valuable lesson about building a business: Your culture is your business. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if your people don’t feel connected or feel empowered, it won’t work.

  The secret currency of an organization is your relationships.

• • Key takeaways: Change is inevitable but it’s how you plan and execute the change that is important. The people experience is vital to that experience and can make or break the outcome. It’s about involving your people early on, ensuring open and honest communication, and giving room for emotional outlets. Change is hard.
  • Don't forget the number one rule of any change is connecting people to outcomes. How do you do that? How do you get their minds, emotions, and behaviors involved? If you’ve got a strategy that designs for those three components, then you’ve got the greatest likelihood of success.

This week, we're peaking behind the curtain to find out about the unorthodox career path of one of our regular host on the podcast - Jodilee Manuel.

Jodilee Manuel is a Chartered Accountant who is the Head of Product at Syft Analytics. She is committed to finding ways to innovate and improve Syft features to serve customers in their business endeavors. She is passionate about business, accounting, and education. Jodilee also loves developing content and features to help business owners make better business decisions and to help accounting students grow their knowledge and digital acumen.

Jodilee also won SAICA’s Top 35 Under 35 Game Changer award in 2023 for the amazing work she’s done at Syft!

We dive into some of the most interesting parts of Jodilee's career journey along with what she's learned along the way.

In this episode, we speak to Juan Visser, the Managing Director of Meshed Group. Meshed Group is an award-winning consultancy specializing in software implementation and cloud solutions. It excels at offering tailored software tools that enhance business efficiency and achieve client objectives.

We discuss the following:

• The benefits of cloud integration for accountants
• Hyper-automation - the combination of AI and open APIs
• Optimizing the use of cloud tools
• Making the time to automate processes to save time down the line
• No-code or low-code options for accountants

• Why you should specialize in a particular app stack and not try be a Jack-of-All-Trades
• Future tech trends to keep an eye on

In this episode, we dive deep into the art and science of building strong teams, a topic that’s crucial for any organization. We exploring key concepts and practical strategies from the perspective of someone who is intimately familiar with finding talent and building teams in the dynamic world of tech.

Today’s guest is Philip Joubert, Co-founder of OfferZen, South Africa’s largest tech talent marketplace, connecting top tech talent to the best opportunities.

In this episode, Wenzile Ngcobo speaks with Marissa Oerlemans, a Senior Designer at Syft Analytics. Marissa has designed some of Syft's most beloved features, such as the new and improved Cash Manager tool! She also has an interesting background, initially studying and working as an accountant and then transitioning into Information Design.

This is the episode for you if you've ever wondered:

• What design is really about and why accountants should pay more attention to it
• What goes into the design of your favorite apps
• Why good design is really about solving problems
• How even the most simple appearances mask complexity - or make the complex seem simple

Rapid fire recommendations

• Software: Figma and Excel
• Book: Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
• Most valuable lesson learnt about designing software: There's no one-size-fits-all solution. Sometimes, you need to deviate and come up with a different solution or approach that's best suited to the customer. Sometimes, you need to push the boundaries to find the best solution.
• Key takeaway: Design matters. Making things look pretty or look good is such a small part of design. Every brief a designer gets or every product they need to design is a problem that needs to be solved. Something that's especially difficult and inherent to design is that none of these problems ever has just one clear solution. So, before you can make anything pretty, you need to come up with the best possible solution to each problem.

References

Want to learn more about this topic? Here are some of the sources we used.

• Redesigning Finance: How good design builds trust in banking apps by Figma
• Why Life Can't Be Simpler by Farnam Street Media

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) is a set of standards used to measure an organization's environmental and social impact. Many companies are now required to report on their ESG, which can lead it to be considered as a kind of tick-box exercise. In our discussion with Pieter Scholtz, COO of Digby Wells Environmental, we unpacked why companies and individuals should think differently about ESG - and why ESG does indeed make financial sense.

Rapid Fire Recommendations:

• Book: Pain Forms the Character: Doc Bester, Cat hunters & Sealers, edited by Nico de Bruyn and Chris Oosthuizen
• Podcast: There’s No Such Thing as a Fish
• The most valuable career lesson: You can never stop learning. No more learning is death.
• Key takeaway: Sustainability done right unlocks real value, not only for ourselves and our companies, but very specifically, also for future generations.