How This Accounting Firm Built An App That Helped Them Grow With No Marketing or Sales

Of course, last time we spoke, I wanted to talk to you about ClickUp and then discover other things that I think are worth touching on, like Airtable, Missive, and just overall, you know, how you operate your business and the habits you have around project management, managing your team, getting the work done.

Yeah.

So of course, I think many of those things you have in place will be valuable for others. So I thought I'd just record it, have a chat, just a normal conversation, nothing Too formal or fancy, and then, you know, just publish it out there for people to see.

Yeah, it's my first YouTube video.

Yeah, you haven't been in public very much?

Not at all. I've recorded one podcast with a, uh, with a marketing company that, that works with the type of clients that I work with, and that was my only, my only time in the public.

Well, Future Firm featured you recently still, so your story is out there.

That's true, but I guess I didn't have to appear publicly.

Yeah, that's fair. Who you are, what does your firm look like at the moment in terms of size, how long you've been business and how you've been able to get where you are today.

Yeah. So my name is Miller Bradford. I'm in Birmingham, Alabama. And last month was 2 years of being in business for myself. Currently, we work with— we work primarily with building companies and with Chick-fil-A restaurants. So it's been super helpful to have 2 niches to focus on. And right now we're at, I think, 44 clients. And we have 3— I have 3 employees other than myself. And yeah, so we're, we're We do bookkeeping, bill pay, payroll for builders. We do work in progress reporting. So it's just an extra report on top of the regular financial statements. And the reason we work with builders and Chick-fil-A is because my brother is a builder and my brother-in-law is a Chick-fil-A operator. And so—

Interesting.

It was just a no-brainer to go after those 2 niches. Before I started this business, I was actually the controller for my brother's construction company. And so When I started, I asked him if I could start this business and turn him into a client. And so he would be my first client. And then I was able to just pick up other clients along the way. And then didn't really, didn't really narrow down to those 2 niches, you know, or almost exclusively to those 2 niches. It narrowed down until later. Cause when I started, I was, I was just trying to get revenue, pick up really any client that I could. But now if a random business came to me, I would, I'd be pretty selective on whether we brought them on or not if they didn't fall into one of those 2 categories. Um, it's been, you know, it's been helpful to just for the team and for our processes and our systems that we use just to have, you know, 2, 2 type of clients that we work with and then we just do the same thing over and over for those clients. So yeah, um, definitely. We're kind of high touch, like, you know, we're, we're, we feel pretty close to being an in-house bookkeeper or controller for, for For a building company, for example, you know, we try to just reduce any friction and outsourcing for them. And so when I say we're high touch, I mean, um, like we, if they have an account, if they have an accounting email, we take over that email for them and we manage it. If they don't have one, we actually set it up for them. If we're going to do their job costing and bill pay and all this stuff, um, we just, that seems to be what has worked best for our system is for to have an accounting email specific to each client. Um, You know, if invoices need to be fetched online from like a Home Depot or a Lowe's commercial account, you know, we're gonna go fetch those weekly if they're not being emailed, you know.

Yeah, we can't—

we have to go fetch invoices for the client. We're gonna do that and we do that weekly. And so, um, would it be—

would it be fair to say that if a client's working with you, they don't really need any other sort of like accounting or finance person in their team?

Yeah, 100%. So the only thing that, um, can sometimes be hard to outsource is sending invoices out to customers, to their customers, and we do do that for like maybe 3 builders. Um, and it has to be certain types of builders and certain types of invoices that we're creating. And then they have to be approved by the client before they're sent out. But usually the, usually the business owner themselves will, will send invoices out to their customers. And so outside of that function, you know, we're doing everything, entering expenses, entering bills, paying bills, payroll, processing payroll. On that note, you know, clients will have to approve hours if they have hourly employees. They'll need to approve hours before we submit payroll. But, but yeah, I mean, yeah, I might be biased, but I, I think if someone hired us, they wouldn't need to hire an in-house person ever. It doesn't matter if they grow, you know, doesn't matter how big they get. Um, I've never run into that.

But what's the typical size of the clients you're working with?

Typical size, you know, Chick-fil-A's are all the same. You know, you see a freestanding Chick-fil-A restaurant on the side of the road, that's who we're working with. Um, and they've got like 80 to 100 employees, you know, and but they've really only got 4 or 5 that we have to deal with that are actually— those are like managers that are making purchases and approving bills and stuff.

Okay.

Um, but so that's a bad example, I guess. But for a builder, you know, it's a typical builder's doing $5 million in revenue and they've got, you know, like anywhere from 3 to 12 employees, just depending on if they sub everything out. or if they do a lot of the work in-house themselves. But a builder, a builder could be doing anywhere from $3 million to, you know, we got one doing $18 million. So, but the most typical client is probably one doing $5 to $7 million.

Got it. Super interesting, man. And I want to circle back to another topic, which is the topic of kind of getting clients. I think that you were smart in that you kind of went into a niche that you had the network and the connections in already. And I think that's something that people sometimes neglect. Like, they have— they know people already in some space.

Yeah.

Would you say that referrals and networking and your connections was the main way in which you acquired clients, or have you expanded into other marketing channels?

Yeah, no, I can definitely talk on that. So when I started, a little backstory, I was working as the controller for my brother's construction company, and he was part of a national group that builders can join called— well, it's, it's, it's with the National Association of Home Builders, but, but within that they have groups called Builder 20 Groups, and they all have the same— they'll have the same CPA that was auditing their financials every year. And so My brother's company had been working with that CPA for like 3 or 4 years before I started my business. So when I started, he was the first person I called and I wouldn't have the business that I have today if I didn't make that call. There, you know, he's probably responsible for me getting half of the clients that I have and, or referrals from the clients that he got me. Referrals from those clients have trickled into other clients, getting more clients. And then there's 2, there's 2 other business coaches that I got connected with. Because builders, almost every builder I work with loves to work with a business coach. They all have business coaches. And I do too, technically, if Ryan Losantis is my business coach, but on a very, you know, community basis. Connecting with business coaches has been huge for me because they don't do what I do, but they have the clients that I want. And I got in really well with a couple of those. One of them just texted me before the call and said, he's got another lead for me if I want it. He said, I got another lead for you. Do you want it? And all I said was always.

How does that relationship look like? Like, is it, uh, is there any incentive in place or is it more of a mutual, hey, I'll send people your way, send people my way?

Business coaches, when they're like, oh, I'm just glad I found you because, because I couldn't, I didn't have a good bookkeeper to recommend. And my client, my client was doing their own books and it's a complete mess and I don't have any good data to go off of to give them advice. They're, they're honestly just grateful that I even took on the opportunity. Yeah, I don't have to, I don't have to pay them anything. But I think that might be a, it might be a construction-specific problem out there.

Although I think it could apply to other niches. Like, there's a lot of coaches out there that have niched down as well and probably have, uh, the need to know someone they could refer to.

Yeah, it's just, we have found it very easy to get clients. The only other marketing I did was I engaged with a marketing company that works exclusively with builders and remodelers, which is the type of clients that I'm trying to get. I reached out and was like, hey, obviously y'all know how to get these clients. Would you want to help me with my marketing? And I did a 3-month engagement with their CEO, and he just helped me set up some of my own stuff and I did a tiny bit of tiny— I posted like 3 or 4 times on LinkedIn and Instagram, and that didn't really result in anything. I think it just, at the same time, I was getting so many referrals from like business coaches and other clients that I just had to stop. I couldn't do any more marketing because—

Interesting.

We get 2 or 3 clients a month without even trying. So— Yeah.

Good problem to have.

It's a good problem to have. I don't know if I've heard Ryan talk about it recently too, just like if he was gonna, if he was gonna start over and focus on any type of marketing, you know, I think he said it would not be, you know, really generating content or anything. Um, it would be networking, you know? And so I don't know, maybe one day I'll, I'll have all marketing channels on full force, but— You haven't made it there yet, right? Yeah. I would say networking with business coaches and CPAs, um, has been the most successful thing for me.

Interesting. Love it. Now, as, as it relates to your operations and, you know, fulfilling your, your promise to those clients, You mentioned you have 3 employees and you have like 44 full-time sort of like full-service clients. So there's probably some systems and efficiencies you have there to be able to serve those clients. Could you talk about what are some of your best practices in terms of, you know, building the systems to deliver that?

That's a loaded question or very open-ended. I don't know that I'm the best one to talk to, but We try, we're trying to get better as well, having documented processes and keeping those the same for all clients that are similar. We're a work in progress, so we're not there yet. But for builders and Chick-fil-A's, we, we do weekly bookkeeping. And so we're just able to set up, we just stay on top of things and we set up recurring tasks in ClickUp, which I know we'll get into and maybe share my screen potentially. But in those, those just don't change, you know, like we don't, I don't have to, like, I don't have to reinvent the wheel for every new client. Because we've niched down. So when, when we have a week, a recurring weekly bookkeeping task for a builder or Chick-fil-A, we just don't have to copy paste. We don't have to document it because it's the same thing that we do for every other builder. You know, every builder needs good job costing. So every, every cost needs to be associated to a, to a job and a product and service. Part of our secret sauce is I created an app that clients use to work with us. And so I don't know if we'll get into that today, but That's really— my employees know how to use the app, obviously, and all of our clients are required to use the app. They use the app to upload receipts and to see receipts that were missing from them and to approve bills. Those are the 3 main bookkeeping functions is the way I see it. And those are the things that we do weekly. And because, because builders and Chick-fil-A's are kind of bigger clients and they, a lot of them need to, need to pay all their bills every week. That's why we do it weekly. So because they just have constant bill pay going on. If you did it once a month, you'd be behind on all your bills. Anyways, we reconcile from bank feeds and QuickBooks every week for the receipts they've uploaded. You know, we send those QuickBooks receipts we're missing. They show up in our app for the clients to upload their receipts. When they upload them, we update them. Bill approval, we just have one way of doing it, you know? And I mentioned how we manage an accounting email for each of our clients if we're doing their bill pay. And so bills come into that email, they get uploaded by us into the app for approval by the client. And so the client has to approve those bills in the app before we'll process them. And so that process is happening daily, but the weekly updates we do to their bookkeeping, that happens weekly. And so, you know, we just, we just have such a set system the way we're doing it that it just doesn't, it doesn't vary. So that, I guess that's how we're systematized, you know, um, clients, clients are educated on how to use our app. And what the expectations are. And we— I put— I started putting those expectations in my engagement letters of just when we need to get— when we need to get things from the client in order for us to finish our job. I think it's just—

Yeah, no, but that's, that's great. I think— go ahead.

So everybody just knows what they have to do and they know it's a, you know, relationship. We can't do our part if they don't answer it.

No, but I love it because I think like you are effectively a living example of the benefits of niching on both sides, meaning both the ease of with which you're gonna get clients, knowing who you're after, but also the repeatability and the consistency of the deliverables you have to ultimately fulfill, it's just much more easy to systemize. It almost happens by default, right? You don't even have to systematize. It kind of happens naturally.

That's what I was like, as I was talking, that's what I was kind of realizing is I don't have to create a new documented process for every single client because all of our clients are almost the same. So then the documents that we do create are just— there are a few idiosyncrasies per client of just like nuances, edge cases.

Yeah.

So, and when those come up, and they don't come up for every client, but when those do come up, we create a doc specific to that client with notes so we remember it. And that's in— that's done in ClickUp. So I can maybe show you. They're not—

Before we get into ClickUp, I know We might not going to get into the weeds of the app you talked about, but could you help people understand why you built it in the first place? What has it replaced, if anything? And why do you think it's such a big deal both for your clients and for your team?

So just full disclosure, it might not help other types of businesses other than the ones that we work with. So I created it very specifically for builders and for Chick-fil-A's. So I wanna just throw that out there. Um, and there, and so there's 2 different apps involved. There's one that the Chick-fil-A's use and there's one that the builders use.

Interesting.

My brand for, for our building niche is called Builder Bookkeep. You can go to builderbookkeep.com, see my website. And the app is, to access the app, you go to app.builderbookkeep.com. You won't be able to log in, but because builders need, builders have to do job costing, right? Which means they don't just use regular, they don't just use categories on profit and loss that you might see. They use products and services in QuickBooks Online. which map to, you know, maybe cost of goods sold. And so, and that's for their job costs. They of course have overhead stuff just like every other business, like, you know, car and truck expenses and, you know, insurance and rent, whatever. And those do use categories, but builders have to be able to use both.

Yeah.

And the receipt capture apps that are out there like Dext and Hubdoc, I just didn't, I didn't feel like they did a good job for builders because of the job costing piece of things. So there's that. Um, so my app replaces Dext in that scenario. And then we were using an app called Uncat that I'm sure you've heard of.

Yeah.

Or every accountant watching this has heard of. And, you know, uncategorized expenses automatically in QuickBooks automatically go over to Uncat for your client to see on a dashboard, and they answer them, and then you can update QuickBooks with a click. But I was like, I even talked on the phone to Dexed, and I was like, man, why don't— why can't y'all do this as well? Why can't y'all do what Uncat does in Dexed so that there can just be one app for these 2 things? And they're— I think they, they might have mentioned that it was coming one day. I don't know. But I know in Dexed you can connect a credit card bank feed, and then you can send a list of missing receipts to the client. But it's not the same. It's not the same as the easy dashboard that you got in Uncat of just the specific transactions that an accountant needs answered by their client.

Right.

If you've ever seen it, you know what I mean? It's just easy. But, but now you've got 2 apps and it's like my clients would see transactions in Uncat and be like, okay, do you want me to, do you want me to upload these in Dext or just answer it in Uncat? And I was like, well, if it's in Uncat, answer it in Uncat. If it's not in Uncat, upload it in Dext. And then on top of that, I, we do a lot of bill pay and we need approval from clients, potentially multiple employees at my client's company before we, before we pay a bill. So it needs a lot of collaboration. So I tried out an app called ApprovalMax to handle bill approvals and multi-step process for that. And so now, okay, now I've got 3 apps that I'm asking clients to use on top of QuickBooks. And a lot of builders are using a project management software too, to manage their budgets for their jobs. So now it's just app fatigue.

Yeah.

App fatigue, app overload. And so I was like, just set out on a journey of what if I could combine those 3 functions into one app and just lose some of the AI and the OCR capabilities that you might get from a Dext. But that's the other thing with OCR and Dext, we found ourselves checking every single receipt anyways to make sure that it was working. Did it select— did it choose the right vendor? Did it choose the right category? What if the category is different every time you use Home Depot? A builder goes to Home Depot and it could be a million different things, a million different products and services and for a different job. So it's like OCR can't, OCR can't read minds. That's why I say it might be specific to builders and Chick-fil-A's. But anyways, so I created the app to just do those 3 functions in one app and just lose some of those cool, you know, OCR and AI features. But I don't think it was really saving us any time anyways for the types of clients that we work with.

Interesting. Interesting. So it looks like you've kind of created your own custom client portal, your own custom app to enable that kind of better experience for your clients. So what has been their feedback so far?

Game changer. So the app for builders came out officially in September, and that's when I engaged with the marketing company to help at the same time just to reach more people. And I don't know, since September we've gotten like, I don't know, I think we had like 4 builders then. Now we've got like 20-something or 30, just word of mouth. And the app is the main reason.

Interesting. So you think that you can attribute some growth?

Directly to the app you built? Oh yeah. So when I— 100%, every time I, every time I get a new lead, you know, the goal is to get them on a Zoom call just so I can share my screen and do a demo of the app. And they're like, oh my gosh, wow, it all makes sense. It's so simple. So that's, that's my main— so then when I have a sales call, you know, I'm not having to really— I'm a terrible salesman. I used to do sales, but I'm a terrible salesman and I don't have to like, you know, persuasion or like psychology. I'm trying to like sell them. I'm just like doing a demo of the app and I have the same spiel every time. I just go show them each page of the app and I tell them how it works and what do you think? And I just, I just don't have to be real salesy because I'm not a good salesman. So it's been very helpful. Love it, love it.

I mean, that's super interesting. I would love to dive deep into that, but I do want to get into sort of one of the main reasons I wanted to talk to you, which is In the community, we kind of met in the Future Firm community with Ryan, and you talk a lot about ClickUp and rave about it almost to an extent. So what I've seen a lot in the market recently is a lot of shifts towards industry-specific kind of practice management tools, you know, the Carbons, Canopies, Tactiles of the world, and a lot of accountants sort of like having this, having to make a decision between do I go with some of the traditional tools like ClickUp or do I choose this supposedly more More targeted tools. So did you ever have to make that choice, and why did you choose ClickUp?

So when I started, you know, month one of starting my business, I joined Future Firm, and one of the hottest topics is selecting a project management software. Another hot topic is how hard it is to switch project management software. Yeah, or implementing one, you know, later down the road is hard as well. So I was like, okay, I need to start. I need to start with one. And so when I was starting out, part of the reason I chose ClickUp was because it's one of the cheapest.

Interesting.

And it has a lot of features that can eliminate the need for other softwares. Like, yeah, like the clips feature in ClickUp would replace, would replace the need for loom.com, although they're not as, they're not as good, but they definitely get the job done. But that was, that was one of the main factors then, if I'm just being honest, between like ClickUp and Carbon. I just wasn't going to pay for Carbon when it was just me. Shortly after that, this video might become more of a plug for Missive than for ClickUp, but one of the main reasons that I, that I love ClickUp is, is just being able to integrate Missive with ClickUp and create tasks from an email in Missive and it creates a task in ClickUp.

For the people that don't know, could you explain briefly what Missive is and what it does?

Missive is an email app. That it's like, you know, it's a competitor of Front. Front's another one out there, but Missive, you can have all your personal emails in your, in your private inbox, and then you can have shared inboxes that you can share with your team. And then you can assign, if you, let's say you've got it, like we manage the accounting emails for our clients. And when we do that, that email is shared with everyone that's involved with that client. And then an email comes in and You can assign it to a specific person so that they handle it, and/or you can, you can comment to your team internally on an email, you know, and then people outside your organization never see those comments, right? You're commenting on an email with your team right there at the email. Yeah, it's hard to—

it's like collaborating in the context of the email, right?

Yeah, it's hard to explain without visualizing it, but it's just really cool. And then you— and then it replaces Slack. With your team because you have private, private chat channels with your channel team. Yeah. All within one app, you know? So it's just all your communication can be in one app. And then I use a, our business phone is with Dialpad and I have those, we have 2 numbers and those are both in Missive to be shared with my team.

Integrated there.

So 2-factor codes go there and the whole team can see it immediately. And if clients have that number to be able to text us, we can all text the client from that number and it's right there in Missive. We don't have to use Dialpad separately, we just use Missive. And then there's just integrations in Missive like ClickUp. An email comes in from a client and you, you're not ready to address that email right now and answer it. It's like it needs to be converted to a task because it's a project or something. You just come within Missive, you just create a new task in ClickUp right there. And it— in ClickUp, it links the email to that task so you can reference it.

Interesting.

So because I use it in that way and because My business is heavily built on Missive. I don't need Carbon where Carbon's got email management in there and some other things. Like, I think my system accomplishes the same thing as Carbon between Missive and ClickUp and my app, which are all crucial pieces of my business. I think we accomplish the same thing and also a lot more things and do it better than Carbon.

But much more cost effective, I would assume.

Cost effective. You know, ClickUp is— there's different plans. I don't remember which one we're on. Maybe it's $15 a month per user.

Yeah, about that. We use So it's about 15. I think it goes up to like 35, but that's like at a price.

Yeah. I don't even think we're on the business plan because we're not, we're not even using it to its fullest. So I told you, you might not have picked the best person in the world for a ClickUp demo, but that's fair.

That's fair. Now it looks like your primary reason was price initially. And you've also liked the fact that it has, it replaces other software like Loom and so on and so forth. What else have you found it to do very well in your opinion?

I don't know. I'm sure other Softwares can do some of these things very well too. But we, I like in ClickUp, I like how you can get very custom with the recurring due dates of tasks. For example, for builders, I like to close out their previous month in the, on the second week of the following month. And if we do their weekly work on a Tuesday, I want to close out the previous month on the second Tuesday of the following month. And I'm able to do that in ClickUp because I, before I knew that existed, I used to have stuff recurring tasks on like the 10th or the 15th of every month and that A lot of times that falls on the weekend and then I'd have to move it. I'd have to constantly shift tasks around. But when I realized you could get more custom with it, I stopped having tasks falling on the weekend when I didn't want to actually work.

On the topic of like things that ClickUp doesn't do, you already mentioned Missive, which is a way to like manage communications because candidly, the email integration— ClickUp has an email integration, but it's not really good at all. I don't know if you ever used it.

I saw you mention that though. So yeah, I've never tried it. I don't even know what you would use that for.

Technically, it's for you to be able to send emails within the task itself and see the replies, but it works so and so. In any case, is there anything else you feel you had to, you know, use to fill the gaps? A couple of examples that come to mind, like client requests or file management. Like, is there anything else you feel ClickUp wasn't really fulfilling that you have to—

That I was wondering if you're— if that was going to come up because like Carbon and Some of these others would be— would also include a client portal type function, but that's what my app does too. So, you know, I filled that role in that way. And so I think because we have our own app, we don't need a Carbon or a Canopy or any kind of client portal, you know, within our project management because we handle that separately. And so part of the reason I created my app was, was with our customers in mind, not necessarily us as a team. I wasn't trying to make it easier for us, although in some ways it does. I was really trying to think about the best experience for the client and reducing the amount of apps they had to use. You know, I guess if somebody's out, if an accountant's using Carbon, you know, and they're— or Canopy and their clients are on the portal, they have to use that, but they also have to use Dext to upload receipts and they also have to use Uncat potentially to answer missing receipts.

But, uh, there's always something missing, right? And I think that's sort of like the— candidly, the reason also why we kind of have gotten into the market as well. Like every company claims they're all-in-one, but there's always something that they don't do or they don't do very well. So I think that ability to create a custom solution, whether it is like, you know, using no-code tools, which makes it a little bit kind of like easier and more cost-effective, it's always, it's something that I think will be a big deal and more popular over time.

If I was starting over and I wasn't going to create my own app and I didn't even know that I could and I was trying to find an all-in-one, one solution or the closest thing to it, I'd probably be going with Keeper.

I've—

I tested Keeper a couple years ago, didn't like the user interface, a little clunky. And they, they know they're clunky and they're working on updating and making it cleaner and easier to use. But, um, I think one day Keeper is gonna be the— is gonna be the one app that is the all-in-one solution. Cuz they just, they recently added receipt functionality and I'm sure it'll get better over time. But clients can have a client portal and that's where they can upload their receipts as well.

Yeah.

And see uncategorized expenses, but it's also a project management system for the accountant and all that.

It would be like integrating your app and ClickUp in a way.

Yeah. Yep. But I would prefer to use ClickUp because ClickUp is good at what it does, right? Keeper is probably, I think, just mediocre at all the things it does, you know, cuz it's doing all these things in one app. It's not like really great at any of those things. It's a bit hard to use was my experience. Maybe, maybe what I'm doing is best because it's, it's separating out all these things and letting ClickUp be really good at what it does, Missive be really good at what it does, and my app be good at what it does. There's different ways to go about it.

Yeah, definitely. Different ways to skin a cat. That's one of my favorite phrases. In any case, well, part of the, uh, what I wanted to do as well, it's have you share a little bit of your ClickUp instance for us to see how you have things structured. Um, I wanted to leave it to the end. Something else I think would be useful for the, for the audience as you go through it, it's how does your day look like within ClickUp, right? Like what are those habits that you think help you stay on top of things, help you make sure your team is executing, that they have enough work, and how do you assess, you know, all of that? So if you could share your screen and share with us, that would be appreciated.

Go for it.

So, um, I think we could potentially start like, okay, what are we looking at? What are the different structures? How do you have things organized?

Yep. Can you see my screen? All right. Yep. So I always start with the home, the home screen, and it shows you, you know, what are my tasks due today? These have to be ones that are assigned to me and they have to have a due date of today, obviously. So it's easy to, you know, you can, you can end up creating a bunch of tasks, but if you don't assign them to anybody or put a due date on them, they kind of get lost, you know?

Right.

Like these down here, these are some onboarding ones that I've just— they're just kind of tentative. I removed the due date because, you know, it's just kind of waiting on the client, right, type of thing. So the first thing I do, this, you know, it's for me, it's 12:15. And so basically halfway through all the work I got to get done today. But the first thing I would have done this morning is when you come in here, these are all kind of in random order. And I rearrange them in the order that I want to do them for today. So, you know, that's the first thing I do every morning is just trying to think about when I'm most productive for the day and look at the meetings that I have for today. So if I'm like, all right, I've got a meeting at 10 o'clock, let's do all these. I want to, I want to get some easy wins first. And actually, these are the ones I'm going to do that I think I can actually get done before the call. And then I knew what I could get done in between that call and this call. And now these are the ones that I got left after this call, after I eat lunch, and, you know, I can handle in the afternoon when I'm Less productive. So I rearrange these, you just drag them and do this kind of thing. If I get ahead, you can look at what's coming up for tomorrow and Friday. If I, if I finished all these, I could like knock out a couple of these if I, if it's possible. So that's another thing I like to do from the home screen. And you can customize this, but I don't really use any of these other cards. Curious question.

I see you have delegated also in that just below my work. Is that something you also use?

I should, but I don't.

Oh, that's fair. Well, let me ask you then, say you, you here, you're making sure you're doing your duties and the thing you have to get done. How do you also make sure your team is executing, you know, the things that are due for them?

The best thing I've found for that is dashboards. Um, and you can get, you can customize pretty well. So I created one just called employee tasks, taking a second to load, I guess.

Yep, that's one of the Achilles heels of ClickUp as well.

What, the loading?

Yeah, especially as you get into, you know, hundreds of tasks. It's just, yeah, it's not very fast.

Yep. So this is where I would be able to see, um, where employees are at. So I thought you might like this.

You probably would have done it a lot better, but No, but that's fair, at least for you that you have a kind of small team. You just need 3 other screens. This works for you. Of course, probably a larger firm might have to rely on other types of dashboards, but I think this is a great starting point.

That's true. Yeah, I haven't really thought about that, but you're right, it'll change. We get 10 employees, I'm not going to want to do it this way.

Right.

Edit it though, you know, just edit, add a card. I wonder what type of card you would use for that then. What do you— what would you do?

I mean, many ways to skin a cat, but depending on what you want to look at, there are dashboards where you'll be able to see what task each person completed. I can't recall exactly what the type of card there. I think completed report, Possibly.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, they have so many options, honestly.

Yeah, it'll evolve. So what other— pretty much only look at this in this task list view. It's just what I've gotten used to. For this, I created some that are just for me. I wanted to see ones that I'm on with other people here, and then separately ones that only have me involved. Okay, so on some days when I'm still training an employee, I'll, I'll keep myself assigned to a task even if the other employee's doing it, just because I know that that employee might have questions that day about that specific client. And so I just— it's just kind of on my radar that way.

Yeah, that's fair.

But then I wanted to see what's just me because I know that's going to be the most time consuming.

Um, to what extent do you guys collaborate within the tasks, be it commenting back and forth, sharing things, or other things like that?

Yeah, I have one employee that we do that with, um, a lot. And like, let's see if, I don't know if I can find a good example, but like an onboarding might involve both of us. We haven't even started this one yet, so it's not going to have anything. But man, it's loading. But here, yeah, we, we comment and tag each other and we use that pretty frequent, a few times a month, I guess. But we also just use Missive a lot for our chat. But if this is helpful when it is very specific to a task. And I've got a couple of tasks, for example, for Chick-fil-A's that, um, she's assigned to it and I am because it involves both of us. And so whenever she has to do her part first, and then she'll, she'll have to give me information that I need in order to finish. And so she'll just leave it in the task here. So it's just, I can open the task and see the info I need. You know, execute right there. Yeah. So, um, we use that a decent bit and it comes to the inbox, as you know, like, um, just don't have a ton. Here it is right here. So perfect. Awesome.

Is there anything about The kind of like structure you've chosen here, the different spaces, the different lists, anything you can share there that you think might be useful for people?

Yeah, I think we had a small debate going on in Future Firm about the hierarchy, and I actually, I had a call with ClickUp when I started, just what should the hierarchy be. And so for those of you that don't know what that means, there's, I guess this is the workspace, the whole thing is a workspace, and then You've got spaces beneath of that, which are these 4 things right here. But then within a space, you've got a folder, and then you got a list, and then you got tasks. Am I right?

And then you have subtasks, and then you have checklists. So it's like, yeah, big. Like, there's a lot of layers.

A lot of hierarchy, a lot of different ways to skin these cats, but The way we chose to skin the cat is for each client to have its own folder. And that's because we're high touch. And we might have several different tasks for one client. And we might also have a doc for that client. And so that doc might really want to live within the folder for that client. That's why we chose— You know, I heard others say that They have service lines as their folders, I think, and then a task for each client. But because we might have multiple tasks for each client, this is just what I wanted. I know the list is going to get long and long, but I think it'll only get long and long for me, you know, and like a director of operations or something. We can an employee, if they only work on 10 clients, they're only going to see 10 folders, you know.

Right. It's very pretty manageable for them.

And we might end up separating out spaces for different departments. Like, we kind of already did that to where we've got, we've got our clients right here, and then we've got our Chick-fil-A clients right here because that is a separate entity called Mission Financial. So yeah, we've got clients in its own space. Then we got all our other clients here. We might— you could separate that out even further somehow with spaces so that it doesn't get too, you know, clunky.

But if, if you were making the decision today again of selecting a project management practice management tool, do you think you would go with ClickUp again, having experienced it now?

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Why would you not?

No, I was just curious to ask the question because sometimes people, I think there's this FOMO in tech that there's, there, you always feel there's something better out there, right? Like the green is greening at the other side, right? So I was just curious to ask how you felt about that.

Yeah, no, it would take some hard convincing to make me switch. Um, yeah, it takes some hard convincing. I just, I don't want to switch, but I like the— I just like the way ClickUp looks and feels too, don't you? And that part of why they get so many people is just, it just looks good. Yeah.

And you can customize it to look whatever way you want if you don't like it. So I think that's sometimes what people complain about. Like there's just so many options. That can overwhelm some people if they're not as kind of technical. It can have a little bit of a learning curve for some folks, but we love it too. We use it all the time.

So yeah.

All right.

Didn't mention, like, it's worth mentioning.

Okay.

Just you can, every employee you add as a user in ClickUp, they have the ability to record their screen, With ClickUp Clips right here. So you don't have to pay for a Loom subscription for every employee. So that's been helpful. I have a Loom subscription for me, but I didn't want to, and I just only use that to send clients videos because they're just more professional looking videos.

Yeah.

And then employees communicating back and forth. Just use it all the time for screen recording and it's just super easy. So other than that, I feel like we covered everything.

Yeah, we covered everything. I love it. Now, if you—

what was it?

You know what? Forget about it. I was gonna ask something, but I'm gonna skip it. Something else that I think we didn't mention, it's Airtable. I think Airtable, I've heard more and more people in the accounting community, especially the people are like, you know, that are a little bit more technical discussing it, putting systems over there and started to use it. My understanding is that you use it too, and it's probably the data source for your application. So is there anything around Airtable you can, I guess, recommend or talk about?

Yeah, that's a whole nother video of itself.

I'm sure it is.

Airtable is— learning Airtable is not for the, you know, faint of heart. It's— I doubt if, if there's a big accounting firm listening to this, I doubt you're going to learn and implement Airtable if you're far into your journey as a business. But for us, implemented it pretty early on and it is the data source for our app and we We use Airtable more than we use ClickUp. ClickUp is our task manager. Airtable is our data manager, like you just said. But it's still one of those crucial pieces of our business that we wouldn't— we wouldn't do all that we do right now without Airtable. It's just a different, different animal. Yeah, it's like that's a whole different— a whole different animal and different topic. You know, we're pretty good at it. We're pretty good at Airtable, I'll tell you that.

To what extent does your— like your employees use it? Do they just use the app directly or do they have anything, any involvement within Airtable itself?

Yeah, both. So Airtable is our backend. Clients never see it. They never know about it. But we, we communicate on individual transactions in Airtable, just like you saw how you can communicate on a task in ClickUp. You know, we do that same kind of communication on, on things in Airtable. All of our clients You know, are in Airtable, their vendors are in Airtable, their transactions are in Airtable, accounts are in Airtable. It's just one big data source and it's all linked together, which is hard to explain. But I don't know what else to say about Airtable. It's a big topic.

But let's just try to help people understand why, like, what's the benefit of a tool like that when you already have, say, ClickUp or these other tools? Kind of a very high level.

Yeah, it's just, it's very different. So like I said, ClickUp is managing your tasks and your work only. That's all you're going to do in ClickUp pretty much. Airtable is just a, it's a data source, you know, it's a spreadsheet on steroids. It's, you know, clients are using our app to— our app is just the, what the client actually sees, the front end, you know, it's just what they see and it's formatted in the way they need to see it. But Airtable is, is the database behind the scenes and is what powers the app.

Let me ask you a question. When you started using Airtable, I know some people that use it just for them, meaning they never really had the vision of powering that data through an app for the clients. When you started using Airtable, did you already have that vision of that app or did you start using internally first?

Vision for the app. The way it all started was With Chick-fil-A's, it's been a journey, but Chick-fil-A's, they don't use QuickBooks or Xero. Like, they don't have an accounting software they use because Chick-fil-A corporate has their own that they're required to use. And so Chick-fil-A's didn't really have the option to use like Dext and things. I mean, they could use it, but they wouldn't be able to push it anywhere. It would just live in Dext. They can't like push it to Chick-fil-A's accounting software. And so I just had the vision to create an app that Chick-fil-A could use because they had never had anything like that at their disposal to, um, just to be able to have all their receipts in one place and their bills and everything. Because Chick-fil-A's system, you can use it on a desktop and it's not ideal. You would never use it on a phone. And the attachments don't even go there.

You have to—

you would have to store the attachments like separately in a folder until Until the month is over, and then you'd send them to Chick-fil-A in the specific format that they wanted. And it's just a lot of work for Chick-fil-A to do that when they're supposed to be focused on their guests and servicing their customers. They didn't— they don't hire admin people, you know, they hire customer service and cooks. So it started with a vision for Chick-fil-A's and then discovered Airtable as a source for the backend. That's how it all happened. And then it created that, it went really well. I was like, all right, I can create this for builders too. And they actually really need it. And so that happened next. And then the rest is history.

Is that something— is that journey that you went through of building an app using these no-code tools to try to build something for your clients, is that something you suggest to someone else or another accounting firm if they have the opportunity?

Yeah. If you're going to— it's time-consuming as all get out. It depends on who's gonna, who's gonna do it, you know? Um, it's real time-consuming. Um, I just happen to love it and it's like, it's what I enjoy most out of, out of all that I do. You know, we do accounting, but I just happen to love that part of it better. It's just, it's hard to implement. I don't know what else to say about it. I would recommend it though, if you, if you enjoy it and you like, you're gonna, you're gonna actually use it and run with it, but it takes a while. I mean, I'm still Still, I'm still editing daily, tweaking it to make it better. You know, it takes a while to go to market with, to switch, to switch your process from what you're already doing with, with Dext and, or Hubdoc and stuff. To switch clients from that to your own custom-made app in-house is quite an arduous project. If you're starting out, it's easier. Bring clients on and that's all they ever know. It's obviously a lot easier. It's hard to switch clients.

Fair enough. Well, an hour's passed by quite quickly, so I just want you— I want to wrap up here and say, you know, thanks for coming on and sharing your knowledge here. Is there anything you want to plug? Any of your websites? How can people find out more about you if they want it?

Yeah, I guess it depends on who's watching, but if a builder's watching this, go to builderbookkeep.com. If a VA's watching it, go to missionfinancial.co. To find out more, if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, I'm sure you can find me. Just search Miller Bradford. Happy to connect. And you can message me there if you have any questions about ClickUp, Airtable, making your own app. I've considered dabbling in the app-making world for accountants, but I'm not there yet. So, but if you want to bounce ideas off me, I'm open to it. So.

Well, thanks for coming on, Miller, and have a nice one.