April 17, 2025 • 13 mins
I spoke with Matt Tait, the CEO of Decimal, a tech-enabled services firm focused on bookkeeping, tax filings, and tax preparation. We discussed how the economy is affecting the way law firm leaders manage their practices, the business mistakes they are making, ways to balance the application of technology and talent, and best practices for leveraging technology to maintain books and records.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Reinventing Professionals, a podcast hosted by industry analyst Ari Kaplan,
(00:07):
which shares ideas, guidance and perspectives from market leaders shaping the next generation
of legal and professional services.
This is Ari Kaplan and I'm speaking today with Matt Tate, the CEO of Decimal, a tech-enabled
services firm focused on bookkeeping and tax filings and preparation.
(00:30):
Hi Matt, how are you?
I'm doing good Ari, thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
I'm looking forward to the conversation, so tell us about your background and your
role at Decimal.
It's definitely not a straight-in, narrow path, I'm a recovering attorney currently running
an accounting company.
I started my career out practicing law at a pretty good-sized firm in Indianapolis where
(00:50):
I live and after that got into the tech scene.
I started running tech companies, ran some companies for other people, started my own and
ultimately noticed that all of them, the bookkeeping and the tax side was harder than it should
be.
Like every crazy entrepreneur I started a company to solve the problems that I was having
and we started Decimal about five years ago, January of 2020 and time to start a business.
(01:16):
But it ended up working out really well.
We were five years old, little over and at this point we've got little over a hundred
employees and little over a thousand clients.
So it turns out other people have the same problem that I had.
How do you manage the balance between technology and talent in a services business like this?
I think it's the same with law, it's the same with accounting, which is you want to look
(01:40):
at how much can we get technology to do and now artificial intelligence.
But how do we continue to build trust, create great experiences and relationships with people?
And more and more, one of the ways that we look at it is you look at work as a bucket and
you're trying to create smaller and smaller buckets.
(02:01):
And in each one, if you can say, hey, if I can automate this or if I can use AI to help
this or to accomplish it, that's what I want to do.
And you then say, what parts of it do I need a person?
I need a person to make sure we have verification.
I need a person to make sure we have quality.
And I have a person to make sure that we have trust in client relationships and experiences.
(02:25):
How does legal differ from some of the other verticals that you serve?
Number one, lawyers definitely look at our terms and conditions a lot more than other
verticals.
Yeah, so the sales process is a little bit different, but I think that's a good thing.
The others, they're just nuances to law.
Professional services in general is very similar, but in law, you need to make sure your
(02:48):
accounts are correct.
Now, you need to make sure that you're accounting for client funds as well as your funds
correctly.
You also, one of the biggest things that I see with a lot of law firms is really understanding
profitability of work.
And you get this, like we go to law school, they don't necessarily teach us how to run a business.
(03:08):
And so helping them understand how to run a profitable business that's a going concern
is something that you focus a lot on.
What are the challenges in the current environment as the economy softens for businesses who
are maintaining their books and records?
(03:30):
You just have to do this stuff.
You've got to pay your bills, you've got to get paid and you have to track it all at the
very least for taxes and hopefully on a much more frequent basis so that you can understand
the scope and profitability of your company.
And I like to call every firm a company because if you think about it in that way, you think
(03:51):
about it less as a group that's doing work than one that is trying to become a profitable
business.
What you're doing for your clients is a firm.
The way that you should run it is as a corporation as a business.
And the more you can understand where you're making money, how profitable you are, the
better you can understand where your opportunities and your risks are.
(04:13):
And that is a language that lawyers talk very well is opportunity and risk and your finances
present you with very grounded reasoning to see both.
How does your team collaborate and integrate with a typical practice management platform
or some other firm wide system that lawyers are comfortable with?
(04:40):
We use quick books extremely heavily.
I think we've got a little over 700 clients that currently use quick books.
So quick books is a known commodity in the legal market, integrating it in with a case management
software or practice management software is really important because what you want to
try to remove is the data entry and the people side of that.
(05:02):
If you can automate your buildings from the practice management software and integrate it into
quick books, that is a much better thing than having somebody key in the data.
Because people end up making mistakes.
We want our clients, our lawyers to work in their systems.
We want to integrate that into quick books and then we want to talk with them or their
(05:24):
team.
Maybe they have an office manager or a controller or somebody that's internal to them that
we can say, hey, on a monthly basis, this is what we're seeing in your practice.
This is what you need.
Maybe here's your outstanding AR who's not paying you.
Here's what you owe and here's your billing and your AP.
You want to be able to have those conversations on a regular basis, but the lawyers should
(05:44):
work where their poor competency exists, which is in that software.
What are your recommendations for lawyers that want to become entrepreneurs?
I think it's a great thing.
But I think number one, one of the hardest things is getting a true understanding of what
(06:10):
you're good at and what you're bad at.
That can be something that lawyers sometimes struggle with.
But if you can understand what you're good at and where you should focus, then you can
hire or fractionally hire to fill where you're not good.
I always joke with people that I went to law school because I can't count.
That's actually a pretty common refrain among lawyers.
(06:32):
So doing your books, doing your HR, doing the administrative back off of stuff should
not be something that you do as a lawyer.
You should outsource that.
You should also look at maybe getting a fractional CFO, somebody that understands lawyers
and legal practices and can help you understand what growth should look like.
(06:53):
If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to take the mindset that you are not creating
a job for yourself.
You're creating a company to run.
I say it in a lot of professional services.
I see it in accounting.
I see it in marketing where people who are good lawyers, who are good at the job, are
good marketers, good accountants, they say, I'm going to start my own firm to do the work.
(07:15):
And you have a choice when you do that, which is I'm going to create a job for myself or
I'm going to create a company for myself.
And understanding which one you're going to do allows you to make decisions that impact
your day to day life, your own income, what you're making, how you're growing your business,
all of that stuff.
(07:35):
And that's a really important distinction.
What mistakes do you see lawyers making and how they run their businesses?
They rely too much on themselves.
If you're going to run a good business, you need to get out of the day to day work.
And so if you are being a lawyer 80 hours a week, you're not going to have time to grow
(07:58):
a business, just hard stop.
So you need to actually think about it as I'm not, I'm going to figure out where my focus
and my time and my balance is going to come from.
The other thing is we just had a lawyer join as a client about a month ago.
It was very, very cute.
They did their own books last year.
And then they came and they said, great, you're going to charge me a couple of grand for
(08:20):
taxes and said, sure.
And they said, how much do we have to clean up?
I did my books.
I said, it's definitely not going to be a couple of grand.
It's going to be way more than that.
But I said, hey, we'll look, we'll determine what it is.
And sure enough, they did a horrible job.
They knew they did a terrible job, but taking on too much of this yourself will create costs
that didn't need to exist.
(08:41):
And so that's where getting into and understanding your core competencies and where I can outsource.
If you're going to hire, do a PEO instead of a payroll company.
A PEO will help you with HR will do some of the work for you and make your life easier.
It'll be a little more costly, but your time, what lawyers understand is the value of their
time.
Your time is not well spent doing that.
(09:04):
Those are some of the balances I think about that I also see people make a lot of mistakes.
How does the size of the firm or the practice area affect this type of service for bookkeeping
and for other financial related issues?
From a high level perspective, not much.
(09:25):
Affirm is a firm profitable is profitable.
The break really happens in one of two ways, which is are you an hourly bill or a contingency
fee bill or how those practices run is very different when you're billing on an hourly
basis or or even a fixed fee regular basis, most business attorneys as an example, those
(09:47):
attorneys can get a much kind of more reasonable idea of what their firm is going to look like
throughout a year.
You can build a budget better.
When you're doing more personal injury work, for instance, you have a lot of peaks and
valleys, a lot of ebbs and flows.
You may be planning on a different size and scale.
You also want to think about planning on a more conservative basis versus optimistic because
(10:13):
how you're when you're going to get paid, how you're going to get paid from whom you're
going to get paid is just a different way to think about it.
That plays in really heavily to how a practice is run.
Also a more business related shop can have the tendency to staff at a little higher level
because things are more regular, whereas you need to be more lean in a fish and if you're
(10:35):
running a more personal injury contingency fee basis.
How would you recommend that firms engage in more of a digital transformation?
Just do it.
The cloud has been here forever.
It is more secure than you running something on a desktop computer.
If you want to understand risk, which is why a lot of people don't make the change, you
(10:58):
are more risky running a desktop or server-based software because you are just not going to
do security.
The other part of that is you're creating work and time.
You are creating costs in your business by not running everything in a digital way.
I've got a co-founder in my business.
He's 27 years old.
(11:19):
His goal is to never write a check in his entire life.
That should be your goal as a business is to never write a check, never send a paper in
voice.
You should automate everything.
You should make sure that you're sending invoices via email that have the ability to pay
in that email.
You should, ideally, if you can, if you have recurring services, make that a recurring payment
(11:41):
that just occurs where people really don't like to see bills.
What they don't mind is Amazon taking out fees on a monthly basis.
You can create services that have that same effect.
That's how we actually bill at decimal.
The other side of it is you're creating risk and time and work for people by giving them
paper.
The other thing is, nobody else is doing that today.
(12:03):
If you want to understand why people make lawyer jokes, it's because they get the paper
invoice from their lawyer.
If you want to make it easy, I now pay a lot in legal fees every year for setting up stuff
and making acquisitions and stuff like that.
I pay my lawyers on a credit card.
They don't charge me.
They absorb all the fees themselves.
(12:24):
I'm going to keep doing that for the points, but hey, at least I can pay them this big firm
on my credit card.
People want to be able to do those things.
Also it gives you a better rhythm in your business when you're billing and paying your
bills in a digital way.
You get a much better idea of when things are going to happen.
(12:45):
Paying your bills is a great example.
If you are printing off an invoice and then mailing somebody a check, you have absolutely
no idea when that's going to get deposited.
If you're doing it via ACH and sending that, you know exactly when money is going to be
coming in and out of your business.
You want to create predictability as a company.
(13:07):
This is Ari Kaplan speaking with Matt Tate, the CEO of Decimal, a tech-enabled services firm
focused on bookkeeping and tax filings and preparation.
Matt, thanks so much.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
Thank you for listening to the Reinventing Professionals podcast.
Visit reinventingprofessionals.com or Ari Kaplan Advisors.com to learn more.
Welcome to Reinventing Professionals, a podcast hosted by industry analyst Ari Kaplan,
(00:07):
which shares ideas, guidance and perspectives from market leaders shaping the next generation
of legal and professional services.
This is Ari Kaplan and I'm speaking today with Matt Tate, the CEO of Decimal, a tech-enabled
services firm focused on bookkeeping and tax filings and preparation.
(00:30):
Hi Matt, how are you?
I'm doing good Ari, thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
I'm looking forward to the conversation, so tell us about your background and your
role at Decimal.
It's definitely not a straight-in, narrow path, I'm a recovering attorney currently running
an accounting company.
I started my career out practicing law at a pretty good-sized firm in Indianapolis where
(00:50):
I live and after that got into the tech scene.
I started running tech companies, ran some companies for other people, started my own and
ultimately noticed that all of them, the bookkeeping and the tax side was harder than it should
be.
Like every crazy entrepreneur I started a company to solve the problems that I was having
and we started Decimal about five years ago, January of 2020 and time to start a business.
(01:16):
But it ended up working out really well.
We were five years old, little over and at this point we've got little over a hundred
employees and little over a thousand clients.
So it turns out other people have the same problem that I had.
How do you manage the balance between technology and talent in a services business like this?
I think it's the same with law, it's the same with accounting, which is you want to look
(01:40):
at how much can we get technology to do and now artificial intelligence.
But how do we continue to build trust, create great experiences and relationships with people?
And more and more, one of the ways that we look at it is you look at work as a bucket and
you're trying to create smaller and smaller buckets.
(02:01):
And in each one, if you can say, hey, if I can automate this or if I can use AI to help
this or to accomplish it, that's what I want to do.
And you then say, what parts of it do I need a person?
I need a person to make sure we have verification.
I need a person to make sure we have quality.
And I have a person to make sure that we have trust in client relationships and experiences.
(02:25):
How does legal differ from some of the other verticals that you serve?
Number one, lawyers definitely look at our terms and conditions a lot more than other
verticals.
Yeah, so the sales process is a little bit different, but I think that's a good thing.
The others, they're just nuances to law.
Professional services in general is very similar, but in law, you need to make sure your
(02:48):
accounts are correct.
Now, you need to make sure that you're accounting for client funds as well as your funds
correctly.
You also, one of the biggest things that I see with a lot of law firms is really understanding
profitability of work.
And you get this, like we go to law school, they don't necessarily teach us how to run a business.
(03:08):
And so helping them understand how to run a profitable business that's a going concern
is something that you focus a lot on.
What are the challenges in the current environment as the economy softens for businesses who
are maintaining their books and records?
(03:30):
You just have to do this stuff.
You've got to pay your bills, you've got to get paid and you have to track it all at the
very least for taxes and hopefully on a much more frequent basis so that you can understand
the scope and profitability of your company.
And I like to call every firm a company because if you think about it in that way, you think
(03:51):
about it less as a group that's doing work than one that is trying to become a profitable
business.
What you're doing for your clients is a firm.
The way that you should run it is as a corporation as a business.
And the more you can understand where you're making money, how profitable you are, the
better you can understand where your opportunities and your risks are.
(04:13):
And that is a language that lawyers talk very well is opportunity and risk and your finances
present you with very grounded reasoning to see both.
How does your team collaborate and integrate with a typical practice management platform
or some other firm wide system that lawyers are comfortable with?
(04:40):
We use quick books extremely heavily.
I think we've got a little over 700 clients that currently use quick books.
So quick books is a known commodity in the legal market, integrating it in with a case management
software or practice management software is really important because what you want to
try to remove is the data entry and the people side of that.
(05:02):
If you can automate your buildings from the practice management software and integrate it into
quick books, that is a much better thing than having somebody key in the data.
Because people end up making mistakes.
We want our clients, our lawyers to work in their systems.
We want to integrate that into quick books and then we want to talk with them or their
(05:24):
team.
Maybe they have an office manager or a controller or somebody that's internal to them that
we can say, hey, on a monthly basis, this is what we're seeing in your practice.
This is what you need.
Maybe here's your outstanding AR who's not paying you.
Here's what you owe and here's your billing and your AP.
You want to be able to have those conversations on a regular basis, but the lawyers should
(05:44):
work where their poor competency exists, which is in that software.
What are your recommendations for lawyers that want to become entrepreneurs?
I think it's a great thing.
But I think number one, one of the hardest things is getting a true understanding of what
(06:10):
you're good at and what you're bad at.
That can be something that lawyers sometimes struggle with.
But if you can understand what you're good at and where you should focus, then you can
hire or fractionally hire to fill where you're not good.
I always joke with people that I went to law school because I can't count.
That's actually a pretty common refrain among lawyers.
(06:32):
So doing your books, doing your HR, doing the administrative back off of stuff should
not be something that you do as a lawyer.
You should outsource that.
You should also look at maybe getting a fractional CFO, somebody that understands lawyers
and legal practices and can help you understand what growth should look like.
(06:53):
If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to take the mindset that you are not creating
a job for yourself.
You're creating a company to run.
I say it in a lot of professional services.
I see it in accounting.
I see it in marketing where people who are good lawyers, who are good at the job, are
good marketers, good accountants, they say, I'm going to start my own firm to do the work.
(07:15):
And you have a choice when you do that, which is I'm going to create a job for myself or
I'm going to create a company for myself.
And understanding which one you're going to do allows you to make decisions that impact
your day to day life, your own income, what you're making, how you're growing your business,
all of that stuff.
(07:35):
And that's a really important distinction.
What mistakes do you see lawyers making and how they run their businesses?
They rely too much on themselves.
If you're going to run a good business, you need to get out of the day to day work.
And so if you are being a lawyer 80 hours a week, you're not going to have time to grow
(07:58):
a business, just hard stop.
So you need to actually think about it as I'm not, I'm going to figure out where my focus
and my time and my balance is going to come from.
The other thing is we just had a lawyer join as a client about a month ago.
It was very, very cute.
They did their own books last year.
And then they came and they said, great, you're going to charge me a couple of grand for
(08:20):
taxes and said, sure.
And they said, how much do we have to clean up?
I did my books.
I said, it's definitely not going to be a couple of grand.
It's going to be way more than that.
But I said, hey, we'll look, we'll determine what it is.
And sure enough, they did a horrible job.
They knew they did a terrible job, but taking on too much of this yourself will create costs
that didn't need to exist.
(08:41):
And so that's where getting into and understanding your core competencies and where I can outsource.
If you're going to hire, do a PEO instead of a payroll company.
A PEO will help you with HR will do some of the work for you and make your life easier.
It'll be a little more costly, but your time, what lawyers understand is the value of their
time.
Your time is not well spent doing that.
(09:04):
Those are some of the balances I think about that I also see people make a lot of mistakes.
How does the size of the firm or the practice area affect this type of service for bookkeeping
and for other financial related issues?
From a high level perspective, not much.
(09:25):
Affirm is a firm profitable is profitable.
The break really happens in one of two ways, which is are you an hourly bill or a contingency
fee bill or how those practices run is very different when you're billing on an hourly
basis or or even a fixed fee regular basis, most business attorneys as an example, those
(09:47):
attorneys can get a much kind of more reasonable idea of what their firm is going to look like
throughout a year.
You can build a budget better.
When you're doing more personal injury work, for instance, you have a lot of peaks and
valleys, a lot of ebbs and flows.
You may be planning on a different size and scale.
You also want to think about planning on a more conservative basis versus optimistic because
(10:13):
how you're when you're going to get paid, how you're going to get paid from whom you're
going to get paid is just a different way to think about it.
That plays in really heavily to how a practice is run.
Also a more business related shop can have the tendency to staff at a little higher level
because things are more regular, whereas you need to be more lean in a fish and if you're
(10:35):
running a more personal injury contingency fee basis.
How would you recommend that firms engage in more of a digital transformation?
Just do it.
The cloud has been here forever.
It is more secure than you running something on a desktop computer.
If you want to understand risk, which is why a lot of people don't make the change, you
(10:58):
are more risky running a desktop or server-based software because you are just not going to
do security.
The other part of that is you're creating work and time.
You are creating costs in your business by not running everything in a digital way.
I've got a co-founder in my business.
He's 27 years old.
(11:19):
His goal is to never write a check in his entire life.
That should be your goal as a business is to never write a check, never send a paper in
voice.
You should automate everything.
You should make sure that you're sending invoices via email that have the ability to pay
in that email.
You should, ideally, if you can, if you have recurring services, make that a recurring payment
(11:41):
that just occurs where people really don't like to see bills.
What they don't mind is Amazon taking out fees on a monthly basis.
You can create services that have that same effect.
That's how we actually bill at decimal.
The other side of it is you're creating risk and time and work for people by giving them
paper.
The other thing is, nobody else is doing that today.
(12:03):
If you want to understand why people make lawyer jokes, it's because they get the paper
invoice from their lawyer.
If you want to make it easy, I now pay a lot in legal fees every year for setting up stuff
and making acquisitions and stuff like that.
I pay my lawyers on a credit card.
They don't charge me.
They absorb all the fees themselves.
(12:24):
I'm going to keep doing that for the points, but hey, at least I can pay them this big firm
on my credit card.
People want to be able to do those things.
Also it gives you a better rhythm in your business when you're billing and paying your
bills in a digital way.
You get a much better idea of when things are going to happen.
(12:45):
Paying your bills is a great example.
If you are printing off an invoice and then mailing somebody a check, you have absolutely
no idea when that's going to get deposited.
If you're doing it via ACH and sending that, you know exactly when money is going to be
coming in and out of your business.
You want to create predictability as a company.
(13:07):
This is Ari Kaplan speaking with Matt Tate, the CEO of Decimal, a tech-enabled services firm
focused on bookkeeping and tax filings and preparation.
Matt, thanks so much.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
Thank you for listening to the Reinventing Professionals podcast.
Visit reinventingprofessionals.com or Ari Kaplan Advisors.com to learn more.
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