If you serve product-based SMEs, you can feel the ground shifting beneath your feet. In the next five years, AppVentory’s CEO Doug LaBahn suggests accountants’ “tech revenue could grow from 1% to 20%.” That’s not a tweak; it’s a tectonic shift. Arguably the firms that win some of that pie won’t be those who merely recommend software — they’ll be the ones who can design, implement, and continuously optimise an operating system for their clients’ businesses.
“When clients change their tech, it should change their business — that’s what transformational services are about.” — Phil Oakley
No one articulates that shift more clearly than Phil Oakley, Unleashed Partner and MD at Outserve. In our conversation, Phil framed the future in one line:
“The future is convergence — where accountants understand tech, and tech experts understand accounting. That’s how real transformation happens." — Phil Oakley, Outserve
The Convergence of Accounting and Technology for Product-SMEs
This is the story of that convergence: why it’s happening, what SME product businesses actually need, and how firms like Outserve are building the capability (and commercial model) to capture the 1%→20% opportunity.
“Clients aren’t short of tools. They’re short of setup, support, and automation that drive outcomes.” — Phil Oakley
Across wholesale, manufacturing, and food & beverage, small and mid-sized product companies know there’s software that could transform their margins and cash flow. They also know that the path to value can be messy: data migration, inventory structures, landed cost logic, channel integrations, automations, role design, and change management.
Phil hears the same pattern again and again:
“They know there’s fantastic software out there that can help with their accounting, inventory, and e-commerce, but they’re not always getting the advice to set it up or the right support to get the most out of it, especially around automations and integrations that could make them a lot more efficient.” — Phil Oakley
That phrase — “advice to set it up… support to get the most out of it” — is the heart of the opportunity. App advisory isn’t just about picking apps; it’s about designing flows:
- Orders flow correctly from Shopify/B2B portals into Unleashed/ERP.
- Landed costs are accurate and auditable.
- Batch/lot/expiry controls reduce waste.
- Replenishment logic actually reflects demand patterns.
- Finance sees profitability by channel, product, and customer.
- Forecasts, cash flow, and purchasing plans are connected.
When outcomes are defined like that, it becomes obvious why convergence matters. You need accounting expertise to define the measures that matter — and technology expertise to re-engineer the workflows and data that deliver those measures.
“At Outserve, we believe that business systems and financial improvement are transformational services that offer the greatest value to clients. Changing their technology stack should mean changing their business for the better.” — Phil Oakley
Why Traditional Models Mis-Serve Inventory-Led Businesses
Phil’s career arc mirrors the industry’s learning curve:
“I started out in traditional accountancy and trained as an accountant, and what I saw is that we were failing to help so many clients because we didn’t understand the technology.” — Phil Oakley
He left to build a software consultancy — and then hit the mirror image of the same problem:
“I started Outserve because I could see that accountants were not offering their clients enough technology support. Now we’re offering technology support, I really understand our clients need accounting support.” — Phil Oakley
In other words, pure-play accounting can’t deliver transformation without implementation capability; pure-play tech can’t deliver transformation without financial architecture and managed operations. The firms that dominate the next decade will blend both — with a commercial model that rewards ongoing performance, not one-off projects.
From Projects to “Design–Run–Improve” Services
Phil would argue that to serve product businesses well, advisory must look less like a sequence of disconnected projects and more like a service line:
- Design: Map the operating model (channels, fulfilment, purchasing, manufacturing/assembly), define the data model (products, BOMs, warehouses), and set financial architecture (COGS recognition, landed costs, margin analysis).
- Run: Deliver a managed service that monitors the flows — e.g., overnight order syncs, exception handling, bank reconciliation hygiene, inventory adjustments governance, automated reports to ops and finance.
- Improve: A quarterly backlog of enhancements: new channels, EDI with retailers, automation rules, forecasting tweaks, SKU rationalisation, and continuous training.
Phil’s next move at Outserve is precisely about enabling that service line:
“We have built an accounting team so we can offer all of the accounting services and even managed services to really support businesses and get the most out of the tech stack.” — Phil Oakley
And he’s explicit about the ambition:
“Those two converging areas together are going to give us the superpower at Outserve to grow 10x over the next three years.” — Phil Oakley
What Product Businesses Really Need (And Rarely Get)
From hundreds of conversations with founders and ops leads, a consistent set of needs emerges:
- Accurate landed costs, every time. Without this, margin reporting is fiction and pricing drifts.
- Channel discipline. Each sales channel (D2C, wholesale, marketplaces, retail) needs standard operating procedures for orders, returns, pricing, and promotions.
- Inventory truth. Reliable on-hand numbers, batch/expiry vigilance, and clear responsibility for adjustments.
- Demand → supply connection. Forecasts that feed purchasing and production planning — not an Excel hope-and-pray.
- Cash visibility. A 13-week cash view that reflects inventory commitments, creditor terms, and upcoming promotions.
- A playbook for scale. When the big retail deal lands, can ops fulfil without chaos and finance still trust the numbers?
Phil again:
“When we’re talking to clients, we can clearly see that some of the finance team have not got the technology experience to get the most out of their platforms. And unfortunately, sometimes neither are they getting it from some traditional accounting firms.” — Phil Oakley
The remedy isn’t “more spreadsheets.” It’s implementation excellence and managed optimisation.
Building Your Converged Capability Stack
So what does a converged accounting–tech firm actually build?
- A multi-disciplinary pod model
Pair an implementation consultant (inventory/e-commerce specialist) with a management accountant and a data/automation specialist. Give them a portfolio of clients and a utilisation mix that includes project, managed service, and improvement backlog. - A library of blueprints
Reusable templates for: SKU structuring, BOM and WIP flows, landed cost treatments, Shopify/marketplace workflows, EDI playbooks, replenishment policies, and cash forecasting models.
(For Unleashed-led stacks, standardise your AIM/replenishment settings, batch tracking procedures, and margin dashboards.) - A “signals and exceptions” layer
Monitoring that alerts you when: inbound shipments are missing landed costs, channels desynchronise, backorders breach SLAs, or margins fall below thresholds. Your pod resolves issues before the client feels them. - A commercial model that rewards outcomes
Combine fixed-fee build packages, a monthly run/improve retainer, and clear KPIs: stock accuracy, on-time fulfilment, margin % by channel, cash conversion cycle, and audit-ready reconciliations. - Partner ecosystem discipline
Work with a tight roster of best-of-breed tools; implement fewer tools, better. (For many UK/APAC firms, that means anchoring on Unleashed for inventory, with connected accounting, e-commerce, forecasting, and reporting tools that your team knows intimately.)
“Software consultancy needs to do accounting. Accounting needs to do software.” — Phil Oakley
Our role arguably has to shift from keeping the books to engineering how workflows. Today’s tech-savvy accountant blends finance, operations and technology: they understand COGS, standard vs actual costing, margin and cash; they know pick–pack–ship, batch/expiry control, supplier lead times, production constraints and returns; and they’re comfortable with data models, APIs, event triggers and permissions so automations run reliably.
Phil’s journey sums it up:
“Software consultancy needs to do accounting. And accounting needs to do software.” — Phil Oakley
That’s not a slogan — it’s a hiring plan, a training plan, and a pricing plan.
Capturing the 1%→20% Tech Revenue Opportunity
If you believe the AppVentory supposition, the pie will expand. But firms don’t capture opportunity just because it exists — they capture it because they package and price value clearly:
- Entry: Diagnostic + Design (4–6 weeks). Fixed fee. Deliver a target operating model, data blueprint, and roadmap.
- Build: Foundations (8–12 weeks). SKU structure, channels, landed costs, reconciliations, core dashboards. Fixed fee with milestone billing.
- Run: Managed Service (monthly). Monitoring + exception handling + monthly reviews. Tiered by transaction volume/complexity.
- Improve: Quarterly Sprints. A rolling backlog of enhancements prioritised by commercial impact.
Internally, you’ll need to realign partner targets and timesheets from “chargeable hours” toward portfolio health and recurring gross margin. That feels unfamiliar at first — and exactly right a quarter later.
What the market is already telling us
The demand signals are getting stronger. From events like Dan Cockerton’s Digital Accountancy Show being acquired by Easyfairs, to the growing number leaving practice to set up on their own to handle what the Top 100 can’t (Stuart Hurst’s Cloud 10 Accounting and Ryan Pearcy’s Digital Transformers). Then there’s the promotion of John Toon to CTO at HLB and the many others leaning into systems, not just spreadsheets, and building commercial models to match.
And Phil’s pipeline reality matches the macro trend:
“At Outserve, we talk to many clients all the time, and they’re struggling to get the help and the support they need.” — Phil Oakley
Where help exists, product businesses grow faster, waste less, and make better bets. Where it doesn’t, they stall under the weight of manual work and murky numbers.
A practical playbook for product-SME leaders
- “Show me my true unit economics.” Do we have landed costs captured on every receipt? Are we seeing gross margin by SKU, customer, and channel weekly — not post-hoc?
- “Stress test my next milestone.” If a national retailer PO dropped tomorrow, what would break first — purchasing, production, or reporting? What would it cost to be ready?
- “Automate my top 5 exceptions.” Identify the five most frequent error types (e.g., channel order mismatches, missing cost data, backorder loops) and automate the detection and resolution workflow.
- “Build a 13-week cash view linked to inventory.” Include inbound POs, supplier terms, and promo calendars; update weekly.
- “Set a quarterly improvement cadence.” One roadmap, one backlog, one owner. No orphaned initiatives.
And if you’re an advisory firm, here’s Phil’s guide to pressure-test your own readiness:
- Can a client buy design, build, run, improve from you, or just ad-hoc projects?
- Do you run pods with mixed skills, or siloed teams that toss work over the fence?
- Are your dashboards common across clients, or is every engagement a one-off science project?
- Do you get paid for ongoing performance, or just implementations?
Why Unleashed-Led Stacks Keep Winning
For inventory-heavy SMEs, the fastest path to value is a standardised stack your team can implement in its sleep — then tailor at the edges. Outserve’s clients, like many in the UK and APAC ecosystems, often anchor on inventory platforms such as Unleashed because:
- Inventory is the heartbeat of product businesses; get it right and cash, margin, and customer promises fall into place.
- Batch/expiry, BOMs, and replenishment are native concerns — not bolt-ons.
- Partner implementation patterns (templates for landed costs, replenishment rules, and channel flows) make the first 90 days predictable.
- Analytics clarity: finance and ops can finally look at the same truth.
But tooling is not the strategy; your operating model is. The winners treat apps as building blocks for a repeatable, measurable way of running product businesses.
2028: The Normalisation of Operating Systems
Convergence is our superpower — the path to 10x growth.” — Phil Oakley
Picture a near future where:
- Every product-SME board pack includes a flow health page: order latency, stock accuracy, exception rates, and channel profitability trends.
- Quarterly sprints adjust automations as suppliers, channels, and assortments change.
- Cash forecasting is a living artefact of purchasing and production decisions, not a disconnected spreadsheet.
- Advisory contracts are judged on time-to-margin uplift and cash conversion improvement, not just clean year-ends.
That’s the convergence Phil sees:
“Accounting and technology… together.” — Phil Oakley
And that’s the business model that will pull tech revenue from 1% toward 20%.
Closing thought: Build the superpower
Phil frames Outserve’s direction as building a “superpower.” It’s a great metaphor, because superpowers are trained, not bought. The training plan is clear:
- Cross-train accountants in inventory/ops and implementation consultants in margin/cash logic.
- Standardise blueprints; automate the boring, obsess over exceptions.
- Sell outcomes with the right service line and incentives.
- Commit to a stack you can execute reliably — and a partner ecosystem you can trust.
When you do, you won’t just sell more tech — you’ll engineer better businesses.
“Those two converging areas together are going to give us the superpower to grow.” — Phil Oakley
About Phil and Outserve
Outserve, based in Staffordshire, has spent almost a decade supercharging Unleashed deployments for product businesses. A true Xero house with deep Shopify and A2X expertise, the team blends accounting know-how with implementation rigour. Their partnership with Unleashed is genuinely two-way—from product feedback and roadmap input to joint marketing that showcases measurable client outcomes. Trusted by brands like Origin Coffee, Applied Nutrition, Minor Figures, Saint + Sofia and WEP Clinical, Outserve turns inventory, e-commerce and finance flows into results clients can see on the P&L.
FAQ
What does “converged accounting–tech” mean for SMEs?
It’s a single team delivering financial architecture and system implementation, then running and improving the flows that drive margin and cash.
Why do product businesses need more than bookkeeping?
Because margin is made (or lost) in operations — landed costs, replenishment, and channel execution — which accounting alone can’t fix.
How does Unleashed fit into this model?
As the inventory heartbeat in a standardised stack, enabling accurate costs, batch control, and reliable reporting for finance and ops.
How should firms price these services?
Package design, build, run, and improve — with a monthly retainer tied to flow health and commercial outcomes.
What skills should advisory teams develop first?
Landed costs, SKU/BOM structures, demand-to-supply planning, and automation/exception handling — anchored in cash and margin logic.
