From Niche to Necessity: Tax & Accounting for Web3 and Digital Assets

[Speaker 2] (0:00 - 0:47)
Okay, hello and welcome to another episode of Niche to Necessity, your go-to podcast for everything tax and accounting in the realm of Web3 and digital assets. I'm Taylor Zork, and every episode we sit down with the top finance professionals and CEOs in the world of Web3 to dissect the latest developments, solutions, and best practices in this rapidly evolving field. Our mission is to demystify the complexities of digital assets and blockchain for tax and accounting professionals.

Whether you're deep in the finance or just starting to explore the impact of digital assets, this podcast is designed to keep you informed and ahead of the curve. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Atik Bana and Isa Hassan of Actual about Web3 AP and AR. Welcome, guys.

Thanks for having us, Taylor.

[Speaker 3] (0:49 - 0:50)
Awesome. Thank you for having us.

[Speaker 2] (0:51 - 1:43)
Yeah, so I just wanted to start off by just kind of giving a little bit of a background of how Atik and I met. I guess it was about a year and a half now we met in New York at WeWork, in SoHo. Yeah, so I was in town for the Flyfish Club year-end bash and was just like trying to meet with everyone I could in New York because I'm normally stuck in Costa Rica.

And Atik and I connected on LinkedIn, and we decided to just have a meeting. And that was when I first heard about Actual, and it was in its stealth mode stage. So probably a little bit different from when we were talking back then, but it's good to be kind of there at the beginning of the journey and then have a conversation.

You guys have gotten some funding and the product has evolved a little bit. So excited to have you on. And I'd love to get you guys to give a little bit of background about yourselves.

Atik, why don't you start first?

[Speaker 1] (1:44 - 4:15)
For sure, for sure. Thanks, Taylor. Yeah, it's pretty crazy that that was a year and a half ago.

And finally back at a bull market, which is exciting as well. But yeah, so Atik, my background has been primarily kind of building in complex product spaces. So I got my kind of foot in sort of Web3 early on, circa 17, 18 ICO days.

I was working at Storage Labs, which was sort of one of the first decentralized storage protocols as a sort of a first product designer. And then, yeah, I spent a couple of years there. It was really interesting to kind of just be in the weeds of that, but also sort of getting to start to see the value of these like utility tokens, as an employee, getting paid in a token and sort of dealing with the complexities of that, and also seeing the network and sort of compensating people and even vendors in tokens as well, which is kind of interesting because of where we are in terms of actual. But yeah, kind of fast forward a little bit, spent a little bit of time working in a traditional kind of developer tools company called Datadog, where I was working on identity and access management, selling design.

And then most recently, I came over to Stripe, where I was working on sort of revenue recognition. So the ASC 606 standard, more traditional fiat space. It was kind of one of the early forays into sort of accounting products at Stripe, but it was really cool to see that product grow quite exponentially over the span of two years that I was working on that product.

And I went from sort of the unsexy product that had no business leads and no one caring about it to, wait, this actually is making a lot of money. How do we get this to grow even faster? And yeah, it was kind of right around the time that I met Issa at our third co-founder, Momo, and yeah, started to think a little bit about sort of web three and ways that we could maybe bring our skills and sort of web two kind of financial operations into this space.

Originally kind of thinking about it from more of an accounting perspective more broadly, we'd talked to a number of web three kind of CFOs and accounting firms that supported digital asset clients to sort of see, okay, what are some of the pain points? And we realized just, it was a ton of kind of fragmentation, but the one that we chose to really hone in on was accounts payable and receivables. I'll be the most specific one, hearing a lot of teams kind of augmenting tools like build.com or making up sort of these makeshift solutions and Google Docs. This is how we do crypto and AP and AR and decided that there needed to be a better standard. And yeah, that's a little bit about the journey that's apart. I love it.

[Speaker 2] (4:15 - 4:16)
Yeah. Yes, sir. How about you?

How about you?

[Speaker 3] (4:18 - 5:43)
Yeah, definitely, man. So my background is primarily in engineering. I started off working at a security AI ML startup at the start of my career in Canada, which is actually where I grew up.

I worked there for about three and a half years, but then I got a job at Google starting initially in cloud, but then moved over to payments analytics, which is kind of, I guess, my start and interest in payments and that space in general. And then moving forward to, I guess, the summer of 2021, when I had met Atik, who was really into crypto and I was kind of new in the space, dabbled a bit more interested in like the algorithmic trading or the MEV side at the time, but kind of gone to dive into some different parts of it. And yeah, I guess our journey on Actual kind of just started with us trying to identify what patterns or what problems people are having and kind of honing in on our concept, which is, I guess, payments engineering from my side and design revenue recognition from Atik's side.

And that being an area where we feel like we can excel and have an advantage. So, yeah, I guess that was kind of the start of Actual as we dove in a bit more to the problem, noticed APAR was something that was a really central problem. And it seemed that it was something no one was focused on.

So, yeah.

[Speaker 2] (5:44 - 6:15)
Yeah. I've talked to a lot of people in the space about how, you know, payments is the big thing, you know, from an enterprise level and from like, you're looking at businesses and Web3, that's like the big thing that a lot of people are focused on right now, especially incorporating that into the stack. Right.

So that kind of like leads me into the question about, can you give people a little bit more flavor on like what it is that you like, what the problems are that you guys are solving and kind of how your tools help to do it?

[Speaker 1] (6:18 - 7:36)
For sure. For sure. I can take this off.

So I think in its simplest form, we are the easiest way to sort of send an invoice or pay an invoice with digital assets. But taking it a step further by kind of being a bit more integrated into the different systems that teams need, you know, most specifically sort of the ERP, like QuickBooks or Xero, sort of creating those journal entries as bills, you know, mapping to all the different fields that you need to in that system. And so everyone with a wallet address should be associated with as a contact, but as more specifically as a vendor or a customer, so on and so forth.

And so I think really the magic of and what we kind of solve for is sort of just being that one to one to your accounting system in some sense, but then also just solving for a lot of the typical problems that occur in traditional sort of AP and AR, which is sort of preventing a lot of the different fraudulent transactions that can often occur, paying the wrong invoices, paying the same invoices twice, paying the wrong wallet address by just bringing a proper sort of standard of procedure to crypto payments by bringing sort of a proper AP and AR solution. We can start to mitigate a lot of those problems. And then for the teams that, you know, use accounting, then taking it a step further and doing all that sake as well.

[Speaker 2] (7:38 - 7:57)
And so how difficult do you think it is for, or do you guys see it being for kind of Web 2.0, more Web 2.0 native companies that are looking to just accept or pay or receive crypto? Do you see more of that or is it more Web 3.0 native orgs that are looking to implement your tools?

[Speaker 3] (8:01 - 9:01)
Yeah. No, I think that's really interesting and something I guess we've been surprised a little about as well. And naturally, of course, the Web 3.0 companies, the big foundations, the exchanges, the decentralized exchanges, et cetera, all commonly use crypto to paying contractors, vendors, payroll, even a lot of the times. So that's a common use case that comes up a lot. But the, I think the really interesting part was that there seems to be a lot of companies that maybe aren't traditional crypto companies, but maybe in areas where banking is, I guess, less convenient, or they are required to send money to areas where moving money to that location can be inconvenient, like dev shops, dev agencies. And there seems to be a big use case there as well, where these companies don't even necessarily share Web 3.0 companies, but this is the way that they pay their vendors, and they pay their contractors, and they also receive payment from their customers.

[Speaker 2] (9:02 - 9:35)
So maybe someone who, I imagine the journey of some types of your clients would be like, or your users would be like, oh, okay, I'm venturing into this realm and I need to, I'm breaking into this new jurisdiction and, oh, this company that I'm contracting with, they need to receive payment, but I don't have any rails to that. Let's leverage Actual's tech or Stack to be able to use Web 3.0 and have it be easy to implement. Is that the direction that you guys see a lot of these going?

[Speaker 3] (9:38 - 9:38)
Yeah, definitely.

[Speaker 2] (9:38 - 9:54)
Yeah, cool. And so, as far as the way that it works, can you walk me through a little bit more in detail, like the AR side versus the AP side and kind of how those items kind of flow?

[Speaker 1] (9:57 - 12:39)
For sure, for sure. So I'd say we have sort of more of the traditional AP and AR product, and then we have something that's a little more of what we call like AP, AR lite. And so I'd say that more of the traditional AP, AR workflow sort of looks like this.

Every instance of Actual sort of gets hooked up to an ERP system if you have one. And then from there, you sort of just build out your invoice as you typically would, give us the sort of customer's name, their email, drop in your line items, tell us what wallets you want to be paid in, what assets you want to accept. In the case that you have an accounting system integrated, what DL account do you want this revenue to hit?

And then from there, you can just click send. The brilliance of Actual is also that your payers or your vendors don't even have to have an account. They just get an email where they can click the hosted payment page, where they can then go and make that payment.

Alternatively, if they're a user of our AP system, this is where that other side comes into play, where sort of the bills get loaded into Actual to be paid. So in the case of an AR, the bill would come into the AP. Otherwise, you could sort of forward a bill in via email, or you could just upload the PDF invoice when you log into the system.

And again, kind of the same thing. We run our OCR, kind of automatically load in all that data. You tell us what geo category you want that to hit, add an MLO.

How do you want to make this payment? And then you go ahead and sort of mark that bill to pay. Right now we support sort of EUAs, but then we also have multi-sig support.

So if you're sort of leveraging SAFE, you could just sign and execute those payments right from Actual, which is a lot better of an experience, especially when you're doing sort of a bash, where you can sort of see the invoice context alongside what you're signing. And then from there, everything gets synced over to the GL, both bill payment or invoice and invoice payment. And so that's kind of more traditional, like AP, AR experience, but with crypto, we have more of this live experience that we're also launching really soon.

The first half of it's already launched, which is cryptoinvoice.new, which is the easiest way to just create a crypto invoice for free. And it looks really nice. And we do this really cool thing where you just put your email address in and we'll autofill the details of company logo and your company name, your address.

You drop in your line items, tell the preferred payment methods, and then you can send that off to your client right now via downloadable PDF. What we're launching next is a hosted payment page. And so now without an account, you have this sort of full loop where you can sort of create an invoice and then you send a link to sort of pay that invoice.

And then your vendor can then pay that invoice without an account. And we see that as sort of just one of the easiest ways to sort of get started with creating and paying crypto invoices as well.

[Speaker 2] (12:40 - 14:00)
You guys are going to laugh at this, but back when I was working as a CFO, it was like none of these tools work. We're there. And I wish that your tool was there at the time because I would have to send people...

Because a lot of the devs that I would have to pay, they wouldn't really realize how to even create an invoice. So I'd have to send them an Excel template that they would have to fill in. And then it would be like pulling teeth to get them to actually fill it in.

And then it's like... And it would look... They'd all look all the same.

So there's not as much legitimacy to it because it doesn't really look like it's coming from a person because I'm sending them a template that looks like all the others. So it was like... I had a lot on my plate.

So that's my defense for using that at the time. But I wish I had a tool like yours to be able to manage that a little bit better. And back then, I was managing a lot of this stuff in Excel, which I'm sure you guys heard was happening earlier in the industry.

But it seems like people are starting to wise up and use tools that actually can help them do their job without losing their mind. So it sounds like there's a little bit of a subledger component to your tool as well. Because you obviously have the journal entries aspect of it.

Can you talk to that piece of it? Is it a subledger as well? Or is it...

How do those aspects work?

[Speaker 3] (14:02 - 15:06)
Yeah. So it's actually really interesting to say that. One of the initial things we explored was actually building a subledger.

But I think there's this really interesting place where we sit, where we don't do all the actions of the subledger. And we focus primarily on APAR. And the way we do sync the bills, the journal entries to the clearing account, it actually makes it so that we're able to be used alongside any of the subledgers.

So sometimes, a lot of these companies already have a subledger that they're integrated with that works well with their process. And kind of ripping them out from that to offer our values if it's unnecessary. So we play this kind of almost, I don't want to say identical to build.com, but we kind of play a similar role that build.com fills in the traditional fiat world, where our aspiration, at least as of now, isn't to become a subledger, but it's more to manage the APAR really well. Because that's where we believe there's a significant amount of depth. Can we Absolutely.

[Speaker 2] (15:06 - 16:12)
And I mean, there's a lot of subledgers out there. So I think that it's great that you guys focus on a specific aspect of that, because it streamlines the process for the end user, because they don't have to... I'm sure there are some instances where they don't really even need a subledger to manage it a lot of times, if they're just sending or just receiving or whatever.

I mean, obviously, there's some aspect of that they might need some outside help with, but it sounds like a lot of it can be managed with just this tool. And the fact that you pull in the items directly into QuickBooks as well, or whatever ledger they're using, is really a time saver as well. So that's really cool.

Where do you guys see, in this market, where do you guys see the, I guess, how do you see digital assets transforming the tax and accounting profession as we kind of continue to progress in this bull market and maybe into the future past that?

[Speaker 1] (16:15 - 18:10)
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think it's so interesting is, or even when we would talk to investors and they would be like, oh, well, why would anyone ever pay bills with crypto? And I think one of the obvious things is that oftentimes when we're talking about paying bills or invoicing in cryptos, usually not Ethereum or dog with hat.

We're actually talking about stable coins. And stable coins are just fundamentally a dollar. And really, I think when you think about it from sort of an accounting realm, I think the only real big implication that we still have left and we're thinking a lot about is sort of the network fee that still kind of happens with an asset that's a little more volatile like Ethereum or so on and so forth.

But I think that that starts to even be extrapolated quite a bit as well when you start to leverage tools like gas relayers, where you can actually cover the fee using your stable coin as well. And so now you just have this full on one to one dollar transaction, which really kind of streamlines that process to feel a lot like spending fiat. And so I think where it sort of helps sort of the accounting and finance problems that now effectively you can displace Swift and wires, which I think a lot of finance teams probably don't like using due to sort of a lot of the challenges that happen with money getting lost or money not being sent on time.

And second, it just kind of opens up the world to sort of transact a lot more freely and be able to take advantage of different sort of opportunity or talent or services providers that maybe weren't able to as easily. And so I think, yeah, it just fundamentally allows us to be able to take advantage of crypto in a way that that's easy, record that data on a ledger in a way that still feels like a dollar and then get sort of the instantaneous transactions globally that we sort of never had at the same time as well.

[Speaker 2] (18:11 - 19:01)
Yeah. Right. I mean, if most of your users are using simply stable coins, they don't really need a sub ledger at all.

Right. So I mean, like you mentioned, if they're using ETH, they're going to have to account for gas fees. And that's going to be pretty significant on some of these transactions, I'm sure.

But yeah, most people have wised up and they use the L2s and they use the stuff that's more efficient to send payments. So it's basically null unless you're sending a ton of transactions. So really, really cool.

I love that. So what do you see? What do you guys see as the main challenges and on the flip side of that opportunities ahead for professionals adapting to Web3?

Maybe we start off with and then we'll take.

[Speaker 3] (19:04 - 20:28)
Yeah, I'll start. I think that there's this kind of hump that the kind of traditional Web2, maybe controller or CSO might have related to crypto. And I know a bunch of the larger companies, like I know Google has a big treasury of Solana and other assets, but maybe for the less like tech enabled or tech focused companies, I think it could be just getting over that initial hump and a light amount of education to kind of show that, you know, it's really not that different, especially when you're dealing primarily in stable coins, which Ateeq was just talking about is probably the best use case for most companies that are doing any market making or trading or DeFi activities. So I think it probably starts at education.

And the other element being just that some people will naturally adopt new technologies later and just being able to for them to see more and more of their peers diving or touching into or being required to take out for digital assets. I think that natural progression of adoption, education will kind of start making it more clear to people that this is something that's that's here to stay, like I'm sure we all and naturally it will be interesting.

[Speaker 2] (20:30 - 21:21)
I love that. I would love to hear from Ateeq as well in just a moment, but I would love to make a comment on that. I think that like it's tools like yours that allow for this this kind of transition to happen, just like you're speaking about, because a lot of times folks don't even really I guess the goal that we need to get to reacting with Web3 to a certain extent.

Right. Because when you have these stable coins that can leverage and really nice tools that allow you to interact with the blockchain, you can not really have familiarity with it and offer that as a benefit to people and then also kind of vice versa. So I think that there's a lot of ways that you can integrate these types of tools and make it not feel like you're in crypto.

Right. But yeah, I'd love to hear your take on this as well.

[Speaker 1] (21:22 - 22:34)
Yeah, no, definitely, definitely echo that sentiment, Taylor and Isa as well. And it kind of reminds me of a blog that I'd read a couple of months ago on the SAP's website where they're talking about piloting, you know, like digital assets, stable coins as a way to make payments in sort of their AP flow. And I remember they had this comment section at the bottom of the site and people were basically asking, well, this sounds great, but can this information get into sort of my ERP or like my main sort of ledger?

And so it really just kind of comes back to like, you know, meeting them where they are and like fitting into their processes and flows more than anything else. I think that it seems like people are not opposed to digital assets, especially when they kind of understand what stable coins are. Like we constantly see these, you know, these surveys coming out of like, you know, CFOs of really big organizations saying that like they're open to it or that they're exploring ways to like leverage it in their stack.

And so I think really it's just going to come down to the tools and the overall experience. And if it can feel just like me, you know, running an AP and AR process like I was and Bill or any other tool, but I get all these other benefits of sort of stable coins with that, like, I just feel like that becomes a no-brainer in a lot of sense as well.

[Speaker 2] (22:34 - 23:22)
Here's some alpha. I think you guys should, I mean, you're probably already thinking about this, but like, I think the cannabis industry specifically could benefit a lot from your tool just because they're challenged with, I mean, it's getting a little bit better now, but they're challenged with basically having to take on cash a lot of the time because those payment rails, they can't really make ACHs because they're kind of shut out of that aspect of the banking sector. And so having an easy, low cost kind of way to streamline these payments and get them out the door really quickly and efficiently. I feel like that should be a big target market for you guys because it's a way, generally, a lot of those people in that industry are more open to pursuing types of tech like this.

And I think that it would be a really good use case for that as well.

[Speaker 1] (23:24 - 23:47)
Pretty sure. Now, it's something that we've been thinking a lot about is like, obviously there's sort of these lists of like, you know, sectors that are excluded from sort of PSPs. You got to look at them with a little bit of granularity, but like, you know, the marijuana industry is definitely one, obviously regulated and legalized that we should definitely be spending time to kind of figure out how we can help different folks.

[Speaker 2] (23:47 - 25:02)
And you've spent time, right? Sort of working. Yeah, I still run a practice where I work with retail dispensaries, mostly in Massachusetts, but yeah, yeah.

And I mean, I would love to get paid by some in ACH, but I mean, now I'd love to get paid, you know, via your tool. It'd be a lot easier for me. But, you know, a lot of times they have to send me paper checks in the mail because they're just, you know, like I've even gotten shut down as a person who just provides accounting services to the cannabis industry.

I've gotten shut down out of three banks now. I don't even touch the product. I don't, I don't even, I'm not even an employee of them.

I'm just a contractor. And, but the fact that I work exclusively with cannabis companies for my other company, I've been kicked out of banking. So yeah, it's a big problem.

Sure. So a couple more questions just about the future and what you guys have in store. I'm sure there's some stuff that you guys can't share, but I would love to kind of get a sense of any new features you guys are planning on rolling out.

You mentioned a couple earlier in the call, but, or any projects or partnerships you guys got in the pipeline that you can speak about.

[Speaker 1] (25:06 - 26:05)
Yeah, for sure. I mean, so at high level, I mean, we'd be thinking a lot more about partnerships. I mean, one that we're obviously really excited about is the crypto CFOs partnership.

And yeah, I mean, we were starting to just kind of think more about ways that we can sort of help enable different experiences, like, you know, working directly with accounting firms who support a lot of digital asset native clients who, you know, are starting to see more and more sort of AP and AR needs, especially as we go into more of this bull market. I think the other side of that is being more integrated into different tools as well. And so that's something that we are kind of exploring pretty aggressively.

And so more to look for there and just some different integrations we have coming with some accounting kind of subledgers and tools from that perspective as well. And I'd say really the last part of this is just, you know, how do we make this process so easy that anyone could just start the moment they learn about us? And so, yeah, just to reemphasize again, sort of that crypto invoice generator and the hosted payment page that we've got coming to that experience really soon.

[Speaker 2] (26:07 - 26:17)
Love that. And any advice either you guys have for aspiring entrepreneurs or people that want to start focusing on Web3 just in general?

[Speaker 3] (26:22 - 27:14)
I mean, I think this is always a funny question to answer. It's almost, yeah. But no, I think that when I was kind of getting ready to leave Google and deciding what the next thing I would do is kind of just do what is pulling you instead of, you know, what feels safe or what feels right.

And funny enough, I was actually telling Ateet the other day that a Google recruiter reached out again. It's like, hey, you want to come back? And my first thought was absolutely not.

But at the time it was a lot more question of is this, you know, am I sure about this? Is this a high risk? Yeah.

I think just doing what's pulling you and what kind of drives you. I love that.

[Speaker 2] (27:15 - 28:07)
I think that it's important to, I mean, obviously there's risks involved with jumping with two feet. But when you do that, I feel like it allows you to go with the flow of what your life, where your life wants to take you. And the more that you're in that flow, the more things start falling into place that you couldn't have ever planned or envisioned falling into place the way they do.

So that's where the meetup in Soho ends up where we're a year and a half later. You guys have funding. We're now talking.

And, you know, I think it's like these little serendipitous moments happen more and more often when you're doing what you love or doing what you feel is your true life path. So I commend you guys for what you're building. I'd love to just highlight real quick or have you guys highlight real quick where people can either get in touch or learn more about your product or just any other information you guys want to give to our listeners.

[Speaker 1] (28:09 - 28:40)
For sure. Yeah. Well, the easiest way to find us is just actual.com with two C's. So A-C-C-T-U-A-L.com. And then yeah, also is our domain. So if you want to email us, it's just our first names at actual.com.

And then on Twitter we're actual team. So that's the easiest way to find us there. We're also on LinkedIn.

Yeah. We'd love to meet everyone in service space or anyone interested in what we're doing and any ways that we can help support or collaborate. We're always up for it.

[Speaker 2] (28:41 - 28:51)
I love it. Well, thank you guys so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure talking with you guys and a pleasure to be connected.

Thanks so much, Taylor. Thank you for having us. Take care, guys.

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)