2024 Roundup: Top 10 Noteworthy Accounting Firm Tech Releases

Hello, hello everybody. I think we are live now, so thank you for all of you, uh, watching. Or if you're watching the replay, that's totally good too. Today we're gonna have a fun conversation because the year's coming to an end, and why not talk about the fun apps that have been popping up in the space that we've been testing and we're discovering? And who else to bring to this conversation than Chad Davis, which is a You know, previous firm owner and an automation lover and an overall nice guy. So, Seth, thanks for joining me.

I still have the firm as my main focus, dude. We don't want to say previous firm owner.

Okay, that's fair. Fair observation. Yeah.

So yeah, LiveCA up in Canada, it's been the best, you know, 12 years building out with my business partner and Literally hundreds of people that have come through over the years that have gone and left. And man, it's been fun, but it's exposed us to a lot of tech and the choice is really hard sometimes to decide what to put in. And sometimes it's just nice to talk to other people like you who have been literally building automations and tools for accounting firms that probably see different tech stacks and the ways that they interact with each other to kind of like put together a list of like what you're seeing and what we're seeing. So So for everybody here, I guess, what's the format for today?

Yeah. So what we want to do is talk about the top 10 favorite apps that have come up this year. So what we want to do is you share one, then I share one, and we just go through the process until we exhaust the list. It's quite possible we're coming blind. It's quite possible we have some similarities. So if that's the case, I have a couple more just in case. But before that, actually, I think it would be helpful to ask the question. You, of course, run a firm quite large, you know, as you mentioned, I think 100 employees at its peak.

Well, it's 60 now. Not super large, not super small, but yeah, we've gone—

But sizable, right?

Ups and downs, yeah.

Yeah. And literally just before this call, you reached out and you were kind of like exploring a new app and you wanted to, you know, evaluate the automation capabilities. Will it integrate with the rest of your stack? So, you're still quite involved in some of the technical choices. I think before we get into the apps, it would be useful to just touch on how should people think about making better technology choices and who should be involved in that conversation?

I don't know. I think everybody's different. And I think if someone does have the right answer to this, then they're way smarter than everybody else. Because honestly, when you're a one-person show or a 5-person show, you know, you're involved in everything. And then you get up to 100 people, you've got committees and people and teams, and you learn about how you want to adopt technology. I think there's a trend right now, and I think that trend is probably more important to talk about, which is we've grown up over the last decade with apps that have been siloed. And you connect them and you hope they work and you do them for a special purpose. And that's the world we lived in because there was never these all-in-ones. There's never—

Yeah.

A way to do this. But it feels like people are making their decisions now because they have that like app fatigue. They have the app exhaustion. They have the— they're angry that they have to do so many, use so many apps to make it work.

And then, yeah.

Half of the built-in integrations are crap and they don't work, or they don't exist at all and you have to do manual processes. And it's just so nice to see different platforms now focusing on building more. So they're— honestly, I'm talking to more accountants now than I ever have. And I'm actually curious if you've seen this too, where they say, I'm actually going to give up this tool because this other one Replaces 3 of them.

Yeah, a lot of replacement going on, and I think that's made it even more tricky to evaluate tools to begin with because effectively now every tool is trying to do everything. So, you know, it kind of makes the whole landscape and the whole evaluation much more challenging because every tool on their website says they do everything. When you double-click and try to see, you have to kind of evaluate feature by feature almost to assess if it's gonna do or be enough for what you want. But to your point, I see the direction of like, uh, trying to consolidate the tech stack more and more.

But there's also room for things like, I don't know, like everyone over at A2X, they're doing a really great job of staying in their lane, trying to be like the best in that space, right? And it's just like relentless. And that's hard for others to come at. And there are competitors, obviously, and they're doing well in some, some, some areas of the globe and some features. But like, they're just relentless. And like, that's really cool to see too, because there's always going to be places for companies like A2X who do the Shopify and Amazon and other, you know, consolidations up into your ledgers. But project management, Your write-up work, your document generation, your organizers, like that's the Wild West right now. So maybe to answer your question even more directly, I think having the right people involved in the decision is the key. And we're moving away from like authoritarian decisions in tech where one person makes it and we're relying more on the teams and the people involved. to really make sure that their needs are met. And of course, having 1 or 2 people in the firm that have like a pretty decent tech knowledge is great to help challenge those. But honestly, just the ability to listen to your team and to prioritize the issues that they're dealing with and then solve them from a priority basis and not from a—

Yeah.

It's a cool thing to try. I feel like that's what we're moving towards, which is Respect and I don't know, just doing the right thing.

Yeah, yeah, that's fair. Well, people are here for the apps chat, so why don't we start with your first favorite release of the year?

You're letting me go first. I love it because that way I don't get lost if it's the same one as yours. Okay, the first one that I'd like to chat about is an app called Translucent from Michael Wood, ex-Receipt Bank and Dex guy. And the reason he created Translucent is because he saw this massive need in the market to create— and the website's translucent.io— and he saw this need for there to be a smart platform where if he builds the platform and all the data structures and all of the backends, he can just bolt on tools that are needed. And his view from owning Receipt Bank with Alexis and a few others has been like, there are a lot of problems in the mid-market and there's a lot of problems with literally multi-entity accounting. inside of Xero and QuickBooks.

Yeah.

And you see QuickBooks going to that market. You see different apps popping up to try to solve it. And he's just like, even, even Midday over in the UK, like there's a lot of people attacking this. But with Translucent, I really, really respect his approach of like, we don't have to be everything right now, but we are going to put all of our resources into the platform, having a solid data model, having all the shared services around, making sure that the apps that he does build are quite easy to do. And it's like a very bolt-on type of environment where if there's a problem, he can come in probably and quickly build a tool because the data model behind it is so strong. So multi-entity, you know, auditing and bookkeeping reviews and entries and at-a-glance balancing and write-ups, just it's such an opportunity that it's really hard to ignore because it's not just one tool, it's a tool, a bunch of tools now, but it could be so much more in the future, which is what I love.

Interesting, interesting. I wasn't expecting that one. I've heard of it. Funny enough, I'm not super familiar. Would you say they're also trying to be like competing like with the GACons and That sort of tool where they're pulling reports?

I wouldn't think so. I mean, an element maybe, because Translucent does have this thing called Live Sheets where you're able to see the data in there. But that's just another reminder that if your business is one thing that a bunch of other tools can add into theirs really quickly, It's tough to have a long-term sustainable business off of that. However, with Translucent, like, I just— it's like the right people building the right things for the right group of people. And just like that deep, deep industry knowledge is so important when you're building tools for accountants. So that's, that's, that's my number 1 right now.

Perfect. Okay.

What's yours? Number 2.

Number 2. I think you might like this. My number 2 one that's been— it's a feature within a tool that a lot of people like that I know your firm uses, and that's been long awaited for many people, which is Carbon's shared inboxes. Of course, I think Carbon has been one of the first tools that adopted sort of like email management within a practice management software, and they've done that quite well. But I think a lot was kind of like desire in terms of, you know, sharing. You know, we always have within a firm an info@ or a sales@ tool that's shared between team members. And several of our clients had to kind of find alternatives to that to manage email. I don't know if you're familiar with like the tools like Missive or—

Yeah. Front.

So, it's too early. I haven't had the chance to like fully test this thoroughly, but I'm excited about this because I know it's been a pain for the Carbon firms that have shared inboxes that they want to kind of like have available across.

Just to be very clear, Carbon's not sponsoring this and you didn't have to pick it, right?

No, of course not.

Okay, good. So, yeah, with Carbon, we do use the shared inboxes. I know our head of operations, Belkis is in love with them. We were able to get rid of our TeamworkDesk help desk, which we've had since 2014 or something like that. And that's awesome because just to our point about consolidation, like if there is no need to have these multiple tools and you can replicate it, my only advice is to do what Belkis does. And she did a great rollout of this, which was Test it with one, still keep your tools, run it for a while, learn what's, what's happening, and then make an informed decision because every firm runs a little bit differently. And yeah, shared inboxes is a great example of not needing a help desk to give your team access to multiple things inside of your triage.

Yeah, definitely.

Okay. Number 3.

All right. Let's hit me.

All right, number 3. This is, is one called Aider, A-I-D-E-R, and that's Brendan Roberts. And Brendan's based out of Auckland, New Zealand. And what I like about Aider is that they're bringing in all of the ledger data into their own database, call it a Snowflake or a Doc or just like some, some type of way to keep your information in their systems. And then they're putting OpenAI on top of it. They're giving you the ability to create your custom prompts, which a lot of these other tools like, I won't name the other ones, but like there's other reporting tools where they control the prompts.

Right.

For your AI analysis. And they're saying, you know what, it's your data. Why don't we give you the tools to be able to gain insights into this? So you could use it to prep up for monthly meetings, send out a monthly or quarterly type of report, anything like that. But you could also see all of your clients' data in one matrix on the main page to be able to see really quickly where everything's at. And then also query the data. So one of the things they have is like, show me— like you could write out like, show me the revenue versus wages for the last 12 months.

Like who in our clientele has grown 50% last year?

There you go.

Something like that.

And because they control the underlying data, you're able to query it, and like it will not only answer that question, but because OpenAI has the ability to generate images and things and they use their own JavaScript graphing technology, they'll actually graph it for you too and create something that you can send to your clients or just understand the issue better. So it's a— I know it's pretty popular, you know, over there and it's gaining popularity in North America. But yeah, I kind of love what they're doing and they're listening and they're small but they're mighty. And yeah, definitely worth the number 2 spot for me right now.

Nice. I like that. And, you know, I've had that idea for a while. I know there's a tool that's called Sift that allows you to do something similar. And I had this conversation with a client at some point of like using that to actually inform Or reach out to clients proactively about potential, you know, how you can help them, you know, because if you see that they're growing or if you see they're stagnating or really any situation that you can extract from that data that could allow you to reach out proactively, it's just, I think it's going to be a great client experience long term. And hopefully great for the firm too.

Yeah.

If that leads to more business.

Like, okay, so ZeroBot Sift, right? Hopefully there's going to be some, some bigger integrations with that or some, some product upgrades or pricing help or something like we don't know. Not everybody's using Sift. Some people like have tried it and loved it. Some people have tried it and left it. And like we're entering in this like Wild West of how am I going to analyze my data? And there's literally 50 different options right now. But there will be clear winners start to pop out. And I think the more that that's integrated with where you do your work, the better chance it'll have of gaining adoption with your team and moving on. So yeah, what I kind of like about Aitor is they realize that like they're one of the— one of the first to kind of do this consolidated stuff, but they're also very conscious of like even with zero insights, you can't change the data. In the month, it's like the current month and the previous month. And it's really hard to see when you log into the dashboard there, like anything past or change the dates. Maybe I could be wrong and you can, but I couldn't find a way to do that. So like with Aitor, you can look at different date ranges and get different analysis. So like it's one of the first to really give you like your own custom prompting without having to upload everything into ChatGPT or Claude or something.

Yeah. Makes sense. Perfect. Well, talking about ChatGPT and AI, the next feature I have, it's actually voice mode from ChatGPT. I tend to be a very— like, I think while I talk, and sometimes that's led to me, like, hopping on in a call with my partner to chat about a decision we have to make. And oftentimes now I find myself doing a commute, Just like turning off my phone if I'm alone and having a conversation maybe about a decision that I need to make or any other pressing issue that I have. And I found that incredibly helpful to have. And it sounds sort of lame and lonely that I'm having to chat with an AI, but I think it's been incredibly helpful to help me sort through many things, at least think about them on my own before I talk to them with my partner or with another human being. So that's the second one for me.

We use it when we're driving with the kids in the RV and we're like passing a town and we see like a sign of like the battle of something was 200 miles this way. First we do a conversion into kilometers and then we ask the voice mode about like, tell us about this. And then we just, we sit there for like 10, 15 minutes and like having it share stories about it. And then the kids and I like, And my wife, we just know more about it now. So it's actually really great for a travel companion too.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. All right.

Number—

hit me with your next one.

Number 5. Okay. Number 5 is— I'm going to probably steal this one from you. This might be one you have too. And it's Keeper. Is that on your list?

Actually, it was when it was 10.

Okay, good. All right. So the reason I picked Keeper is because the rate of development is like untouched between other apps in the market. Like every week you're seeing massive developments and they're really going for the jugular against their competitors. So even just this year, they threw out a tax research AI LLM to chat with. They're allowing you to extract details off of documents to create journal entries. They let you do like closes and ask— I mean, we probably should start by saying Keeper was originally designed to be a communication tool between your clients to ask about uncategorized transactions. And now it's turned into this massive thing with like custom 1099 requests, um, client portals, apps in the App Store. They released a Dext competitor, right, where you can throw your receipts in and process them. Um, and then they have reporting as well. Exactly. And like, they're releasing crazy things coming up, right? They're, they're gonna have integrated email to kind of compete against like the Carbon Triage. They're gonna have a tax suite which is gonna let you have Like they use closes now, but they're going to have tax projects so you can create jobs and do tax work that way. You'll have organizers that can request information ahead of time, right? They're going to have e-signatures eventually. It's just like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like Ben and Kenny and the team over there are just like knocking out all these features. in an area to like learn more and to get better. And holy cow, um, receiving their weekly emails— if even if you're not a Keeper user, I'd sign up for their, their emails because reading what they're doing is kind of cool. And if you're like super nerdy and you want to sign up for the emails or run it through an automation and have it summarized and send off, or sign up for their monthly video thing, you totally could do that and get that delivered to you. But I know I'm kind of rambling here, but like, I'm just, I'm impressed with the Keeper team. And I think they're going to do a lot of good for the accounting industry.

Yeah. And I think you missed a feature that I know a lot of people really love from Keeper. And I think that no other practice management software has done this, which is like having the ledger built into the tool itself. And allowing you to see, for example, oh, for this client, 95% of transactions you categorize in that way, but this 5% is off. So kind of look into it. And that's like embedded in the tool itself. Like that, I don't, I don't know other tools that have done that yet. Yep.

What number are we on now? 6?

Yeah, number 6. So the number 6 I have for you, this is, this might be relevant for some firms that use the tool. I don't know everyone does, but it is ClickUp AI. So we use ClickUp internally and we have now AI embedded into it. And I think, like, just zooming out as well here, I think we're gonna continue to see this of every tool really integrating AI features into it to the point where you really would have less, less of a need to go into ChatGPT. But it's so helpful for us to say, hey, look at this task that I I'm scoping out for, for my developer, see if it's clear enough or if there's anything you would add or simplify the writing or whatever it is. It's been very helpful for me because primarily what I'm doing right now in the firm, it's kind of creating tasks, making sure that's clear, giving it out to the team and writing for our content or newsletter, which I'm actually doing now primarily kind of within ClickUp tasks because they've made it so easy to to leverage AI within the tool itself.

I mean, you're, you're an automation guy. What are some of the things you've, you've built on top of ClickUp?

I mean, we run everything in ClickUp, honestly. We have like a client dashboard tracker to see like the health of every client that we're working with where we can track changes. It's kind of like we have a separate CRM, but this has some CRM components there. And of course, it kind of hosts all of our work, all of our templates. Yeah, pretty much.

I mean, I'll ask the question just in case no one else is here. If you were considering like an industry-specific PM versus ClickUp, what advice would you have to somebody who's kind of thinking about those 2 choices?

Yeah. It's funny because we had a recent client kind of like go through that decision and kind of like settle with ClickUp along with another tool. That's kind of the thing that it won't cover, like the portal aspects of things. It might not cover the email side of things, but it's one of those cases where what they're supposed to do, which is like task management, be able to see different views, Of like the view that's relevant for your individual contributors so they're clear on what they need to do, the view that's relevant for me, for the different team members I'm kind of like managing, the view that's relevant for the client whenever I'm having conversations so I can pull up, hey, these are the things we've done for you, here's kind of like an update. I think they're getting like very good at the core of what a project management tool is, even though there's certain— and of course automation. Kind of like integrating search, having the ability to search like Google Drive files if you have that in your firm has been very, very helpful for us. And with the AI tool, like getting updates, like if we have all the clients' lists on a particular thing, you can click like what has happened with this client in the last week and get like a little update that then you can kind of copy paste it into the client so you kind of keep them up to date.

Yeah, it's funny. It's like you could be a regular ClickUp user and not really see different lenses of how to use the tool in regards to like how you do other things in the firm. And it just reminds me, I had a really fun conversation with, with a friend named Karen and she was using ClickUp, but she has crazy amounts of video that she's created for educational content that's both publicly available and for her internal team. And with ClickUp AI, it now obviously reads the transcripts of the video. And when you're commenting or questioning or querying the ClickUp instance, you can now ask it and it will look into the videos natively alongside of the tasks and the notes and the CRM sort of data. And it just—

It's kind of like trying to centralize all that context around the work you do. Which I think it's, it's, it's always a tough thing to have visibility on.

Yeah. And it saved her from having to think about, do I use ChatGPT and upload these all and get transcripts and keep a database and try to connect that to ClickUp? It was like, no, it was worth the $10 per user or whatever it is right now to turn on ClickUp AI to be able to have that access because now it just works. Instead of having to build something else to maintain.

Yeah. And I think it's super important as well, like, in transitions, for example, we're kind of like moving clients around because my partner manages certain clients, I manage certain clients. And sometimes if I don't have the context of what's happened or what's gotten done with a particular client, it's hard for me to take over. But I can just go and say, you know, tell me everything that's happened or give me a summary of what's happened with this client. Oh, we've built this automation, we've done this, we've help them implement this. And now I have the context to just message the client and kind of effectively take the baton there and keep the relationship moving forward.

Yeah, makes sense. All right, what are we on?

All right, we are 7 now.

Number 7. Okay, number 7 for me is Campfire. Campfire—

interesting—

is an up-and-coming ledger It's a competitor to QuickBooks and Xero and a competitor to Intacct and NetSuite. So if you're looking at a, at a scale of 1 to 10, and Xero and QuickBooks are sort of a 4, and NetSuite is up at a 10 with other Oracle stuff, Campfire is like a solid 5 or 6, just somewhere in there. Not quite there, but the reason why it's compelling is for a few different reasons. The first is that if you see something on the screen, you have access to it through the API.

I think I saw that in your interview, which got me pretty excited.

Me too. And if you, if you've done any type of work with QuickBooks or Xero, you know that they don't allow access to certain things.

Like the bank feeds, there's always that question, like, I can do this in QuickBooks, but can I do it through the API?

That's right. And you're like, oh, I can only hit certain elements, or I can't filter by things, or I can't do things. And it's like, yeah, it's like that's nerdy stuff because, you know, not a lot of accountants are playing around in the API of, of these things. But when you do need to understand, like, why does Ignition work with Carbon this way, it's because Carbon's API does some things really well and some things it doesn't give you access to. And it's like, it's not Ignition's fault, right? Same thing with bank feeds and things that work with Xero. It's like, no, unless you're a financial institution, you're not going to get access to the actual bank feed information, maybe the transactions that hit it, but not the actual feed. And QuickBooks, there's other limitations. So with Campfire, they're just like, yeah, it's your data, dude. Like, grab it, use whatever you want. You have access to it. And the way that they built it is like it's fully multi-entity. So we had a customer who left Xero and their multiple Xero instances and went to Campfire. And now all of their deferred revenues, prepaids, intercompany transactions, they're all just dealt with. And it's all in one login and you can run all the reports by entity and splice it and dice it, whatever you want. But this is the first I've seen, like, outside of like the NetSuite world where they actually create, like, for the nerds in the room, like a Snowflake database to be able to store all the source data from Shopify, from Stripe, from Amazon, from anywhere. And you can now have your millions of transactions in your ledger without needing to be able to like just create batch entries and keep it somewhere else. Kind of cool. And it won't degrade the performance because it's sitting somewhere else. And one of the cool things I learned from John, their CEO, is like, He's like, yeah, of course you want to put summary entries in, but now the summary entries tie right back to all the millions of transactions if you ever are in an audit. So that's why he has like $100 million companies on it, because they want that, but they don't need the one that's sweet.

Let me ask you this. I was having a chat with Anthony, uh, Cepeda. I don't know if you know him. He's actually part of the Automation Town community, which he starts— he tried to create a puzzle bookkeeping firm, like focus on using Puzzle.

Oh yeah.

And one of the things he talked about, it's like so hard to get people off QuickBooks and Xero. So I'm curious just for the audience, like, could you help us understand like who Campfire would be a good fit for? Is it just mid-market? Do you see benefit for small businesses at some point? And how do you think, or when do you think might get buy-in from the small business to actually make that change.

I wouldn't be able to say anything smart right here, but I would, I would say that the reason why our other client left the multiple Xero systems was because they needed visibility into all their entities and they didn't want to put extra effort into it. So the switch wasn't that much more money, right? Like, you could probably run a few small multi-entities for less than $400 or $500 a month, maybe even more. Like, I won't obviously talk to them about pricing, but depending on the number of transactions, the number of entities, like, you could probably be in like that $200 to $600 a month range and not have a deferred revenue tool and not have to have, um, all these prepaid schedules sitting outside of your stuff or anything else. It's just like all sitting right in the tool. So I feel like with a lot of decisions that people make, it's related to their immediate pain and the pain they see coming up. So if you're like in massive M&A mode and you're constantly adding entities and, you know, your accountant's charging you an extra $2,000 to be able to manage the intercompany transactions a month, maybe a tool like this that gets them closer allows them to spend that $2,000 on something more valuable than that. And that's what gets me excited about tools like Campfire. It's like they're just, they're challenging our notion that we need 100 apps to do stuff. And yeah, it may not be perfect. It's probably missing a whole bunch of features. They're pretty new, but they're approaching it from the right lens.

Yeah, perfect. Uh, that's not a good segue for the next one, I'll say that, but I'm gonna go with it anyway. Because this has been very helpful for some of our clients. And I think you've shared several instances where you want to sync data between a spreadsheet and QuickBooks or Xero. I know that's not the ideal, but what we found is that sometimes it's so hard to get accountants outside of spreadsheets that I kind of like have a safe place in my heart for the idea of, hey, if we can't, you know, if we can't win the enemy, let's kind of join in kind of thing of like, well, we can't get them out of a spreadsheet. Well, let's get the data into it instead. And there's a lot of tools in this space, all of them great. We just found GAcon particularly, you know, affordable for what it does and reliable and a great team on the backend as well making that happen.

What types of stuff have you built with Giacon that might be worth sharing?

A couple of things that come to mind. A recent example of a firm that was getting these long spreadsheets from a client with like 1,500 checks every month, and they had to do a lot of like manipulating to get that into into QuickBooks in this case. And traditionally we would have thought, hey, let's try Zapier or Make, but there's so many operations that that would take and it becomes such a complex automation as well. I think you did something similar in the community recently and you see all these routers to try to kind of get that data in and it's just simplified at least that little step of like Okay, let's just organize the data in the spreadsheet in a way that makes sense. Let's just— whenever we have that spreadsheet from the client, if they send it via email, wherever they send it from, let's just like format it correctly automatically. And your bookkeeper just has to come in, make sure the data is correct, and with 2 clicks, that data is in QuickBooks.

And that's because Giacon not only pulls the data from Xero to QuickBooks, but it pushes it bidirectionally as well. Yeah.

Yeah. And that, that's been, and there's use case kind of both, both ways.

We've, we've seen it used where certain departments shouldn't get access to QuickBooks or Xero. So we'll put them on Giacon and give them access to their sheet.

And then they— Like specifically the categories or the accounts that they, that they're relevant, looks relevant for them.

Yeah. Like some people use it to like watch, you know, payments coming in. QuickBooks and things like that and categorize them. Sometimes QuickBooks, like some outstanding transaction stuff, like Geocon is kind of cool. Like, like notable shout out to Live Flow as well, who's kind of like big in the space and creating a lot of great templates.

And the folks at FinOptimal have some products in this category as well.

Holy cow, they're kicking butt too. Even like just for those that haven't heard of FinOptimal, like being able to just write for the period in your description.

Yeah.

And then, and then have it automatically do all of the, the waterfalling down until the end of that period and splitting it like awesome, like just so good. Being able to like bring stuff in and then auto-create journal entries based off of that data and your own calculations and spreadsheets because that's where we like to love to live. Great. So it's like whether you're using Giacon or FinOptimal or LiveFlow or others, like there's, there's just a fundamental difference between the old grab stuff down, do a bunch of stuff, manually put it in, or it's like, I don't know, SAS/ANT was used for a while, right, over the last decade to put stuff back in. Just like there are ways that you can absolutely grab stuff in, have it be manipulated, and just click a button and push it back in. And like Giacon and FinOptimal and all those are great, great things to play around with.

Yeah. All right. Almost done. Number 9.

All right. Number 9.

What do you got?

Number 9 for me is content snare.

Ooh.

So nice. Content Snare is like in this family of, you need to get stuff from your clients. So what are you going to do? And this is an area where you're going to see a lot of disruption in the next few years because you've got like the Stanford Taxes, you've got the SafeSends, you've got all these places that are trying to be that thing that grabs data from customers and then pushes it somewhere. That is useful. The reason I like Content Snare, and it's not that I like it better than the others, I think they like understanding what the pros and cons of each one of these are is like pretty important. And, and then like Jason Stats has done some great videos on the differences and like some, some videos around there. So go check out those on his YouTube if you want to kind of see them.

I haven't seen him talking about Content Snare. I know he talked about Soroban. Quite a bit.

That's right.

Which is, it has become like ContentSnare has been our number one recommendation for document collection for, for a long time.

Nice.

Soroban, it's kind of becoming kind of like quite close with them, especially for US firms, because they have building a lot of these integrations in the backend with tax software, which is almost impossible to build integrations with because it's such an archaic software. But between those 2 tools, definitely like getting clients to give you stuff, reminding them on a regular basis until they give you that, having that ability to— so that they don't have to do it in one shot. They can just come in and, you know, give you what they have now, but then come back later. That has been a massive pain for tax firms, especially those that do a lot of tax prep, like high-volume ones. But that's usually the number one. operational improvement we see for firms that have kind of like a heavy element of tax preparation.

Yeah. So for the, for the techies that want to know, like, they, they didn't have an API for a long time. And then—

They do now.

They do now. And it's a good one. They also released these things called repeatable sections. And if you're like in this kind of techie world, they're really just dynamic arrays. So like any number of lines can be added to this request. So say you have multiple companies that you're onboarding, press a button and then the new company can come out and then the template for all the new company stuff is there without needing to put, you know, 4 different companies and leaving 3 blank like that you might have to do in other forms.

Yeah.

It also has an AI request generator. So if you're not quite sure how to structure your thing, just Throw in a bunch of text and it'll create the request based on some text. It also has a Make and a revamped Zapier integration. So if you love using those tools, you can, you know, have an assigned proposal from Ignition or from Anchor or something like that, and then have it automatically start sending out all these requests based on the services that are like sent out and the types of companies they are, which is kind of cool. Um, it— oh, it also does client ID verification, um, which is kind of neat. And I think one of the coolest things it released this year, uh, is the scheduling in advance. So you could use it as an organizer, like with Soroban and with other things. So being able to say, okay, send these out on January 1st, or if you're Like following a schedule, like so many people are online now. It's like, send this document out 5 days before the date that they signed up for their schedule thing or whatever it is, which is kind of cool. So there's lots of innovation in this space, but ContentSnare is definitely innovating a lot.

Perfect. Okay. The last one is for tech geeks, and I don't have a specific tool, but it's more like a tool category. If you have built any amount, appreciable amount of SAP scenarios, any automation tools, it becomes increasingly challenging to know how all those things connect. What's the dependency between this and this? If I delete this field in Airtable, or if I remove things, this field on the tool that I had, I built a SAP for, will it break? And there's a lot of tools coming up in the market to to now help you kind of like visualize all the dependencies of your systems. Make recently launched literally like this last month Make Grid, so their own building tool for that. Zapier has had Canvas for a while, which is kind of like flowchart tool, but it's intended to also kind of integrate some of those pieces of like telling you what are the different you know, tools available in this workflow. And we actually use one that's called Puzzle, puzzle.app. So it's like a flowchart tool on steroids that integrates with Zapier, that integrates with Make, and that you can pull in, hey, after this human does this, this Zapier runs and does these 2 things. And we're using these fields. So if you want to change it, it kind of is going to break, or do you know where to go to update them? And it has some cool things around custom field management as well. It's like, hey, I'm gonna change this field, let me see how many automations are using it, so you can know if you have to update something. So it's a category that's kind of developing that I'm pretty excited about just to help give visibility into how automations connect together and hopefully allow us, for example, as an agency to, when we hand it over to the client, that they really get that understanding and they can run with it if, if, if they so desired.

I can't say anything more than ditto. It is the bane of every person that plays in Zapier and Make and N8N and all these other ones. You're just like, How will this affect my other stuff? I either didn't document it well enough or I did, but I just— there's so many fields. How could you ever keep up with it? And like in the past, you've had to number the automations like 1, 1.1, 2, and then keep a doc somewhere.

We still do that. I think it's really helpful.

Well, there you go. So it is helpful, but at the same time, like you I love how like companies are listening to the problems that everybody's kind of going through and saying, yeah, it's totally great. And even these tools now let you run automations on errors. So like you can notify different people of different apps or different Zaps or Make scenarios are paused or they error out or something, which is also a cool little addition to that.

Yeah. Perfect. Well, I see a lot of comments that people threw While we're here around Keeper, around Translucent. So thanks for everybody that joined in. And any other shoutouts, any other noteworthy mentions, Chad, that you want to throw out there?

I mean, let's just call out the obvious. It's like things are moving so fast. Like accounting is, I don't know, it's just, it's one element that is going to be the result of all these extra tech innovations. And like the way that we use ChatGPT and possibly Claude is going to change in an instant as new things are introduced. So yeah, just yesterday we got all the big Amazon notices about their Nova models, right? Micro Lite Pro and Premier or something like that. New image generation stuff, new video generation stuff from Amazon. on. It's just like, oh cool, another one. And, and then you've got like different ways of prompting these models and, and, and this whole notion of slow AI versus fast AI, like what's better for different use cases. And I feel like just having conversations with your peers about some of this stuff in the hallways of conferences or just one-on-ones or online or anywhere. It's great because as accountants, like, we kind of have our, our focus, which should be like business models, clients, pricing, like the really important stuff. And some of this tech stuff is fun, but it sometimes doesn't have material impacts. But I think now, because the rate of advancement is so high, like some of the work that you've done probably the same way for 6 or 7 or 8 years can fundamentally be disrupted with an introduction to a new tool or a new way of working. And, and just, it's a great reminder that like keeping your pulse on just some of this stuff in your peripheral can allow you to ask better questions when it comes time to decide if you're going to change something up or not.

Yeah, definitely. And I know that to your point, like conferences are helpful to kind of like get a sense of what people are doing. The sponsors will be there. This is kind of like my first Intuit Connect conference this year. I really liked, but also like community, you know, an online version of that, as close to that as possible. Similar experience with communities are popping up in the market, including of course yours, that I know some people actually that have commented today are part of, that I'm part of as well, that really allow you to kind of crowdsource that knowledge. Because the truth is, even we that are so involved in this stuff, we can't know it all. And oftentimes, like, the way to keep up is just to engage with other people that are also, you know, doing their own research and reporting on it. So just a quick shout out to the automation community for those not familiar.

Yeah, that's what I love about it. It's like with the Campfire example is a great one. We did a really fun video with Taylor Hartman because he's a NetSuite accountant, right? So there's not a lot of us, like, like people that are specializing in NetSuite, but he was. So that video went up and showed people like what NetSuite was, was all about. But then in the comments, like Raphael and a whole bunch of others were just like, oh yeah, also check out Campfire. And like within a day emailing John, the CEO, and then within like 2 days got the video recorded and the intro and like Then that went up. And it's just like, that's what I love about this is like, it's, it's all of the people contributing to asking the right questions and trying to figure things out together. Um, and if, and if this isn't the right one for you, uh, Jason Stats did a great like week of accounting community stuff on his Jason on Firms podcast feed. And you can listen to like interviews of a whole bunch of other people that have created great places for, for people to connect. And I don't know, I feel like that's the future. It's like we're all busy, we all don't want to travel to conferences all the time, and there's a lot of people that are cutting back on their conference time because family is more important or their life's more important or there's business or something like that. So yeah, this, this new wave of just connecting is, is going to be pretty, pretty, pretty great.

Yeah, definitely. Uh, where should people go if they want to know more about Automation Town, assuming they didn't know and want to?

Oh, right here in the white, automationtown.io is the, is the place. And there's also like a guarantee if you don't like it after a couple months, you haven't saved any time, we'll give you all your money back. But, um, in terms of the, the ops or stuff, I'll just say that I've, I've gotten some DMs about, um, people that have reached out to you and hired you and said like, thank you for that. The whole idea of, of the community is to like connect accountants with agencies to, to help them build things. So you don't always have to be the only technical person that's, that's building things. But I just want to say thank you because you, you answer a lot of questions for free. You, you host tech support sessions for free and it's just awesome. I really appreciate what you're doing there and just giving people like access to you without having to necessarily pay a lot of money for it in the beginning.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It gets them understanding, and you're also doing it because, you know, you know this, you know, the moment you do a couple of automations and you see the power of it, you're like hooked for life pretty much. So more than happy to support the community in whatever way we can, and, you know, excited to continue collaborating.

Thanks, Isaac.

Perfect. All right, well, thanks everyone who joined in, and we'll wrap this up. Chat, thanks for joining us and have a nice one.

Thanks, Isaac.

Ending stream.