Introduction

having dinner and thought i'd do this quickly beforehand and then turned out despite them promising there was decent wi-fi there was absolutely none so i've um i've raced into town um so i'm going to be presenting from my car do apologize for that

Um, but yeah, essentially to give you an intro, uh, Jared, do you want to share the screen that you have?

Why Play With The Tools

Um, essentially what we're chatting about today is I think a core principle and something Joe's actually mentioned before at MindStone, which is just the value of having fun and playing with these tools. Well, I think Joe's put it more as the value of playing with the tools and learning and sharing how we can use them.

And I think what we want to highlight today is kind of the value of just having fun and not necessarily worrying about how do we build a SaaS platform off the back of whatever we're funding, or how do we capitalize on it, or how do we make money, but just purely the value of having fun with these tools and learning through it that way.

Who We Are

and um jared if you just hit the if you just click twice there should pop up the rest of this explained by myself i'm an accountant and jared's a dev so um if there are two people less qualified to talk about having fun um i'd love to meet them but um i think we're pretty much up there uh if you want to go to the next slide we'll have a bit of a chat.

So yeah, again, who we are essentially.

Jared and I have been friends and business partners and worked together for ages. We know each other from high school.

Jared runs BR Branch, which is a consulting and development firm i think it's fair to say do a little bit of everything um uh but yeah he runs that and he's he works on a lot of the more it uh tech and web 3 ai related projects than i do um a couple years ago i founded mercantile accounting um a chartered account by trade

and you know we're now a small team team of four and we basically work with a lot of tech startups but we're doing more there obviously bookkeeping accounts payroll tax everything finance side essentially helping raise capital etc um but yeah that's that's the short of who we are if you want to pop over to the next slide um

Embracing Fun Over Profit

essentially i was chatting to one of my junior accounts today about this i was saying i was quite nervous to be presenting here because there are a lot of phds and industry experts and it gives me quite a strong case of imposter syndrome to stand here and sort of tell you about what we're doing in the the tech we've found um and basically she said not to worry it's not imposter syndrome because i actually don't know what i'm talking about um and i am probably the least informed person in this room

um but i mean to that end we've got jared he's going to speak to you more about the the tech that we've built out um but yeah essentially what i want to chat about first is just again the value of having fun and where the project that we're about to present came from and the tools that we're about to show you came from and essentially it comes from the idea of was part post a monster event just having a bit of fun and fiddling with a couple tools that uh joe had actually presented uh and a couple of the other speakers previous did prevent presented and trying to understand well what can we do with them and how can we like taking aside how we're going to make money what is there that's interesting that we can play with

From Curiosity to Project Unprofitable

um and frankly the the things we found were well i i got onto this and i ended up finding jared and jared ended up sort of explaining the basis of an mcp server to me and then we had a little bit more of a look into it and we found that xero has a fantastic mcp server um or mcp server plugins that have just released um and there was a fantastic tool to fiddle with and we started talking about okay well how can we build that and what can we do with it etc and it came purely from just an idea of you know we didn't we weren't trying to make money and i don't think what we're about to show you is going to make any money ever but we just think it's fantastically interesting

And to that extent, we called it project unprofitable. And that's essentially what we're building at this point. And I don't think it's going to make either of us money, but we're fantastically interested in it.

How It Works

um so if we go to the next slide and essentially explain in a high level i'll explain on a high level what we're doing and jared will take you through a bit more of the detail and essentially it's an accounting software right so it's an mcp server which if you don't necessarily know what that means um i don't really understand either but jared will explain it as or he explains it as essentially

What Is an MCP Server?

a passageway through which we can attach doors and essentially give an LLM model or whatever AI tool, we can give it access to different data sets. And essentially, through doing this, what we've currently connected is we've connected zero to our model through this MCP server.

Connecting Xero to an LLM

and that essentially allows us to manipulate zero and the accounting data in any way that we want within the accounting software within uh the llm model and essentially what that allows us to do is if we plug it into claude which i think is what we're currently running it off um we can go okay cool can you take my accounting data and show me sales for the last year

From Questions to Insights

And then it'll pull up, for example, a month-on-month graph of what your sales look like. And off the back of that, you can say, OK, well, June looked low. Why is that? And it can go, OK, well, you lost x client, or this client reduced their orders, or whatever the case may be.

Or you could say, I don't want to look at this model in this traditional format.

Unlocking Financial Data

And this is a beautiful wording that Jared used, is data has been guarded up until this point, and essentially guarded by accountants. and you don't necessarily have access to the data in the format you want.

1But now we have infinite access to infinite different reporting possibilities. 1You can now on a text-based level, ask AI to present you your financial data in any report that makes sense to you.

So if you wanna see it on a monthly basis and you wanna see it broken down by individual employee, well, that's what you can do and it can generate it. And there's really an infinite possibility of options here.

But I think that's probably best shown rather than explained.

Live Demo Handover

So at that point, I'll probably hand over to Jared, and you can take it from there. Yeah.

Can somebody just say, yes, you can hear me because I'm presuming Yeah, we can hear you, Jared. Okay, awesome.

Technical Deep Dive

Thanks, Antonio, for that. Yeah, guys, I'll run you through a bit of the technical stuff to start and then try very quickly to get into a demo.

But yeah, essentially, Project Unprofitable is built upon what we're going to show you here. And the main pillar is require a little bit of technical skill to get up off the ground but frankly with all the tech and you know new tools out and about it's trivial to get spun up and I'll get down to the business the business

MCP protocol picture.

MCP in a Nutshell

MCP was open standard developed by Anthropic. It allows LLMs access to tools, data sources, you name it. It's pretty much agnostic.

I like to think of it like as an API, what an API was a few years ago when everybody thought that was the rave. This is like, instead of getting different systems to talk to each other, get your LLM to chat with the data.

Yeah.

Why It Matters for Business Data

after this i'll share a link to the zero mcp server and you guys can check it out but it's very much bog standards maintained by them and given all my testing seems pretty rock solid uh yeah tech behind it obviously respect anthropic's doing and that really has changed the game in terms of bringing these lms into business and actually making them commercially to your own data.

Xero Integration Details

Essentially it talks directly to the Xero backend. It's real time, so if the data is there in Xero, you can access it and manipulate

You do need a custom connector, but that's also a trivial matter. That's just a little bit of communication with Xero and signing up as a developer and you can get your API keys and you literally just give them straight there to the MCP server and it will suck them up and start working.

by my accounts pretty secure so that no more flows or we're all accounted for in terms of tech stacks um yeah i i run this mcp server locally on my on my machine i've got a tool code to to spin it up for me and it maintains it but uh if you want to have this sort of functionality for the rest of the company or multiple different other people at the moment.

Capabilities and Cautions

Pretty much anything that is exposed through the original Xero API for developers is available through the MCP server. And that includes pushing, pulling, and manipulating.

I wouldn't say go and talk to Claude or or whichever one you link this up to and say, hey, please generate an invoice. bit of a human in the loop there when it comes down to the dollars and the cents.

And yeah, obviously clouds would be great for large scale deployments.

Everyday Impact

What I've noticed using this tool is it's really helped my day to day have to worry about going through the normal flows with within Xero and also makes it way easier for somebody who might be less skilled not an accountant but still very much involved in the operations and has and has enough know-how in order to you know probably get them boys up and running and for give them access allow them to do it yeah then this the list of things that you can do with this is actually

What's really cool is like, if you've got a question about your data, your single source of truth is zero. It's only real if it is in zero, but now you can speak to it.

So eventually, I'm sure these connectors will end up coming to mobile phones at one point. You can imagine just walking around and asking questions of your financial data in natural language.

Real Use Cases

Something as trivial as, well, it's actually, here's a great example of what I use it for. I need to figure out my tax exposure. I didn't have access to Antonio at the time. And I was like, hey Claude, he has the tool, what's my tax exposure?

Give me everything. And that's something that I wouldn't have been prepared to do myself. And I was able to get that answered very quickly.

Organizational Benefits

Organizational impact, what I find really cool, because it's democratized, the people in organizations that have the big questions can now go, faster a because it's very accessible or b because they don't need to go through a whole bunch of systems which they might not be either have access to or you know want to go through i suppose if you're a ceo you know don't really want to be logging into xero and pulling an expense report for the lack of a better word um yeah the finance team that just makes answering the

You can go and say, hey, give me a cash flow. Bang. There it is, ready to go.

No longer waiting for four days, five, a week for your team, however big, to go ahead and pull the data and eventually get you the answers. And then on top of that, LLMs and these new tools are extremely accurate, often more so than humans, and that really does

Tips for Better Results

than a normal human and i can hear all the questions coming through unfortunately i can't see them at the moment but i'll get to them at the end um yeah improved decision timelines i spoke to this beforehand just getting the getting the data and the answers to the people that needed the fastest or needed the most and faster tips and tricks um i'll show you my personal setup um but essentially you want to provide llms with as much

of these ai tools if you let them run wild they are going to be wild so put in put in a bit of guardrails try and direct it as best as you could and a great example of that of that is use day changes if you are interested in last month use the words last month and you'll get a much better answer then you have a single chatbot problem this is something It just keeps everything a little bit tighter, a little bit neater and now with the new cross conversation memory, it just seems to work a lot better.

the documentation in there and then go in with that documentation in a new chat and use your connected MCP tools.

And then use it for reading, not for writing. I wouldn't say that we should be

Demo Walkthrough

the kid the keys but right now the six-year-old kid knows how to read and read better than us so we'll use it there um yeah let me go through a quick little demo for you guys and shout if you want me to stop but i'll just do a super super quick one so what i've done i've set up the mcp server

It lives locally. I've connected this here within my core codes.

You can check out with Xero. You can see all the tools that it has. Obviously, there's permissions in the background. You can go and customize that as you really want.

Querying Invoices

And I'll just show you a very simple example of what it can do. And it'll be as simple as, what did I invoice last month?

And if anybody's familiar with how the MCP sort of thing works, And LLM will look at the question and see if any of the tools that it currently has access to would be the right route to go down.

In this case, it found the zero ACP server. It was up square. We want to go and use that. I want to go and see the first page.

Handling Pagination and Accuracy

And then you can see I've got some responses back. And it will automatically do the pagination. It will go through and properly exhaust the full month of August 2025 in order to get everything. Bam, another one, another one, another one.

We'll actually add this demo company that we set up. And then eventually, well, let's do the same. I'll ask the same question up here beforehand. You'll be able to get a nice answer out of this.

Hey, 500 invoices. Here's the amounts. That's who they were for. And from this, you can now go and layer on

more questions if you want to get specific if you want to go and then drill into a specific invoice a specific clients you name it you have access to it and all with the natural language there's a little bit slow it's probably like the one thing that I could have a graph about but frankly it's faster than any human doing it and way more accurate so here you can see the the response coming back. Now, this is a very, very simple demo of a very simple question, but all factually accurate.

Artifacts and Dashboards

Where the functionality really starts stretching its legs is when you start using the artifact generation. artifacts and frankly you could use any any one of those systems you just connect up the mcp server and you'll be able to to have a go so here's a great example i i said hey give me give me a bunch of examples of um how you might be how you might use this tool within a real business setting and it went out and created a whole bunch everything from And then right here at the end, you can see it made some artifacts.

Now, many of these other ones, other LLMs, providers, GPTs, Tantrax, loss, which is actually that is a really, really cool one. If you want to do tax exposure and whatnot, you can use that tool. Recording payments, so you can obviously process drafts and whatnot.

If I just quickly click through one of them. A financial dashboard that's relatively trivial. He has an invoice generator. to them in order to generate invoices.

You know, you can now go and use the MCP. He has a draft, gives you something visually. It's not a brand consistent across the BlueZero and the MCP server and the now line. But for the high level stuff, it's pretty cool.

Cash Flow and AR/AP Views

Where I really like it is looking at stuff like cash flow forecasting. Honestly, it took me five minutes to go ahead and build a cash flow forecast. It's factually direct. It'll show you what's up.

you can now go and make a decision on this way quicker than engaging the facilities of a normal business. And we all know that those clocks turn really, really slowly.

And then yeah, AR, AP dashboard, amazing. Also factually correct, very visual, something that would have taken forever to do.

Anyway, there is my demo done.

Q&A

I will hand it back to whomever else wants to appear or answer some of your questions.

Perfect.

Sorry, I was just typing up a response to Brett there, but I'll I'll just chat out loud then.

Audit Efficiency With Xero + Claude

Brett was asking, so for financial year audit, how much faster would it be with Xero and Claude? I'm going to assume, Brett, you've got some sort of experience with the audit world.

Your planning phase is going to move a lot faster because you can give your auditors access to a tool like this. And they can query a lot of the data directly rather than having to ask the client about the questions. and they can build their understanding a lot faster.

Your sampling itself, they can pull samples directly from here. That's not going to speed up your operation too much because frankly, they could have sampled directly from Xero or directly from whatever the accounting software is previously, assuming all of your sample data is sitting in Xero correctly. um which if you know anything about the audit world a lot of those uh pdfs etc don't end up in the accounting software where they should be

But then the final side is after your sampling, after you've pulled your samples, any variances or discrepancies again can be drilled down on a lot faster by the audit team. And it's going to really cut down on the discussions that your audit team has with the client's accounting staff.

So I do believe there's some scope for it in increasing audit efficiency, but I think the more valuable tool, and I think there is value on it from the audit side, the more valuable tool is information internally within the business.

Beyond Finance: Building a Digital Twin

The way I love to look at this is, again, this MCP tool, we can plug any data we want in there. We could plug in every email that runs through your sales email address, for example. And now, or we could even if you wanted to, and this is something that would require significant controls, every email the CEO sends or receives could get plugged into the system.

Now, if you have perfect understanding of the financials and perfect understanding of all information that's being communicated to and from the CEO, you can basically build a digital twin of the CEO and he can answer a lot faster and a lot quicker and a lot more effectively and accurately than any CEO previously could. Um, so from that perspective, I think that's where there's more value and we're asking a lot of questions as to how we use it at the moment. Um, and frankly, we don't know the answers to all of them. Um, and that's kind of part of why we're calling it project unprofitable at the moment is we have no idea how, if you'd make money from this.

Um, Chris, you got a question. Um, Chris, I just.

Setup Questions

To your question regarding setting up the MCP server in Cloud Code, and is it available in Cloud Desktop without further config?

No, not at the moment. So yeah, not at the moment.

Cloud Desktop does have quite a nice library of pre-existing MCP servers, but what I've noticed is almost all of those tools have a Google or a Apple sort of auth link.

Almost every other HTTP server that I've either used or built has to do with some other API keys or maybe like a more stringent enterprise level authentication step.

Xero vs. Sage

And then I did see one, I think Reggie asked about Sage versus Xero. Xero is just really job getting ahead of the curve.

Sage typically has been really far behind and it's not to say that the same functionality can't be had there, but they haven't gone out and put out any open source software. Essentially, I hate to make this broad generalization, but any application that has an API that's relatively well documented, you can kind of shoehorn it into giving the MCP style functionality.

and it's not technically correct um but yeah that's very broad stroke so you know if you if you really had a concerted effort and you wanted this functionality with sage it can be done 100 and that goes for any other mcp integration that you could ever want so over to you

Yeah, I was just going to say that Chris had a question and it's very much a Jared question. And I think you've handled that one.

I don't know if there's any other questions. I think that's about it. That was great.

Closing Remarks

My comment would be, I can certainly think of more unprofitable things of the invoice generator that you've spun up using MCP. The real value of this is not necessarily changing the generations. You're able to get the information that your company has or that your business has into the right people's hands way faster. So it's very much a practical use of...

And I've seen it in my personal life, and Tony has seen it in his, is if you get the right people, the right data and accurate information quickly, it changes the game for running a company. And he has a great example of just that. That's great. It's exactly what this community is about, is making it profitable.

I'm just going to have a disclaimer, though, in general, which is like, Claude's outputs don't always source where they've got the information from. So, you know, I trust that you're obviously fact-checking against your original sources with that.

Yeah, maybe to that point, when it comes to setting up these things, proper project documentation and contextualizing prompt engineering, for lack of a better word, is necessary. I'm not a fan of getting things to mark their own homework, for lack of a better word, but in time, I'd love to talk to you more about this in the networking after, if you can stick around.

But I think we've gone well over and we need to get Alpesh on.