Why you need to liberate your data, according to Martin Chee of Amaka

Public practice accountant Martin Chee knows: no one likes wasting time on tedious data entry of the same numbers over and over again. That’s the gap he uncovered in the financial accounting industry — and the gap that his company Amaka fills seamlessly. Their accounting integrations software lets businesses capture their financial data and use it across all their systems, so there’s no double work. Martin talks with Andrew Seski of the Modern CFO podcast about the importance of data accessibility today and the evolution of Amaka, especially during an unprecedented pandemic, plus how parenting is good prep for running a business.‍Show LinksCheck out AmakaFollow Amaka on LinkedIn or TwitterFollow Martin Chee on LinkedIn or TwitterConnect with Andrew Seski on LinkedIn or TwitterKey Takeaways5:04 — A really, really clunky processA great idea — like Amaka — always starts with a problem, in this case the overly manual, time-consuming, and error-prone process for exchanging financial information.“This process around organizing finance was really, really clunky and antiquated and just deeply inefficient, and effectively what it was, was the exchange of financial information. So, you want to borrow money for the business. You need to provide the business’s financials and a whole host of other documents and information...What a lot of banks were doing is, they'd consume that information in a really manual way. Like you would email them a PDF or worse still, you'd hand deliver documents to them and then they'd give it to someone else. And they'd be like keying in the numbers into this piece of software, which would then spit out a result. And it was just a really, really long, time-consuming process. And it was really error prone as well.”‍‍‍10:42 — Same information, different systemsAmaka was carefully developed to capture the myriad data points from a single transaction (date, time, price, cashier, etc.) so they can be used across all systems.“We definitely put a lot of work into architecting something that made it really easy to understand the same information, but in different systems. Take a sale, as an example, can you just talk about generic attributes of a transaction? You might have the date of the transaction occurred, the time when it occurred, the day that it occurred, the employee that was responsible for it, the value of the items, the discounts that were applied on it — you can quickly see how much data is there just in a, in a simple transaction like that.”‍13:36 — Data liberationMartin and the Amaka team call what they do “data liberation” — they free data so it’s no longer tied to just one system.‍“One of the phrases that we kind of throw around at the office is data liberation. Like we liberate your data from whatever system you might have. Because as a business owner, you have this information there, but it's just not always easily accessible. We're really trying to solve that problem, so you can leverage the information that you have in a really, really easy way.”‍18:35 — Stay positive and knuckle downA strong team and honest, hard work is what kept Amaka going during the pandemic, says Martin.“We really just had to stay positive and knuckle down...We're developing new products and we're enhancing things and it's like, whatever was happening in the broader economy, in the broader market, macrowise — well, if you didn't have a positive outlook and you didn't think that this was going to be something that eventually was going to go away, then I don't know what the alternative really looks like. And no one was going to stick their head in the sand and just, like, ignore it. But at the same time, we had a full schedule of work to get through. And we just kind of knuckled down and focused on that. Rather than, you know, looking at the things that were happening, which were outside of our control anyway. And we knew other businesses largely anyway were having that experience. So it just didn't pay to do anything else, except that.”‍20:19 — Plan accordinglyAndrew shares a comment from a different interviewee that struck him; it removed all emotion from the equation and focused on just getting the job done.“One of the more insightful comments I've heard that just took me aback, as somebody who hasn't been through at least one pandemic through their lifetime, was that if the world is only going to end, plan accordingly. If you're confident that this is the time, that the world ends, then plan accordingly. If you don't believe so, plan accordingly. It was such a detachment from the emotion that was running through.”‍24:32 — An annoying distractionFundraising rounds, while essential, can be a distraction from the important work of growing and directing a business“There's a lot of components to the business as well, particularly when you're gearing up for a fundraising round — that is a really big, annoying distraction for the...