Watch this before hiring an accounting automation agency in 2025

Hey, this is Isaac from UpSell.co, and in this video I'll share the questions you'll want to ask before hiring an automation agency for your accounting firm. We internally have maybe 20 to 40 conversations a month with accounting firm owners and operators, so this is based on the questions we get from them all the time. So just take this as a framework to not only, one, vet the automation you are considering working with, but also, two, know if your firm is actually ready to talk to one or not. Question number 1, what are some common processes or use cases you work on or you automate? I think that's probably the first question you want to make sure that you bring up. If you already have a use case in mind, maybe you would ask specifically if they've done that. But what we've seen is that many people come to us or they consider working with an agency not only to implement but also to know what's possible. And just overall to give you some ideas on like big buckets we've kind of categorized the things we do on. Typically we see a lot of areas on like sales and onboarding. Think about from the moment you're prospecting that inquires all the way to the moment they accept, and you have to do a ton of things on your systems, CRM, proposal, project management, and integrating all of that. That's like one big bucket. There's also like tax prep. We work a lot with compliance, tax, and accounting firms. So everything from the moment you engage with the client, the proposal tool, task questionnaires, practice management, document management, making sure all of those tools are talking to each other. On the month-end accounting side, right, ensuring that everything that's not talking to your accounting software is, that you're creating journal entries from different systems, whether it's payment processor, POS system, or like archaic billing platforms that your clients use. That's another big area that we see, as well as reporting. Because typically what happens is some of these things I've talked about, you're integrating workflows, meaning you're moving data from one tool to another. It takes the same skill set to bring data from multiple tools and data sources to create metrics and KPIs from. So that's another area where if the data the firm wants to report on lives on multiple tools, they have to like download, create a bunch of spreadsheets, and manipulate those to kind of get the metrics that they want. And more often than not, they end up not actually getting that insight because it's just so much effort to even put it together in the first place. So that would be question number 1, common processes and use cases that they've worked on. They should have that available and ready to share for you. Number 2, what industry tools are the most primed for automation in your space? One of the things realized over time is that the tools the firms have, it's really the foundation that an automation agency will be building on top of. As a result, that foundation is going to matter, right? Primarily, we believe that your practice management, as it's called in the industry, or like project management tool, is like at the core of your firm, right? You, you have to nail that, and that have to ideally have some capabilities to automate certain things and integrate with other tools. And what we found is that some of the most robust applications with the most automation capabilities are things like Carbon, which is our number one recommendation, Financial Sense, or more non-industry tools like ClickUp, Monday, or Asana. There are other tools that have a lot of like built-in automations, but one of the challenges we find is that they might have relatively little in terms of integrating externally. So it's kind of potentially hard to push data into it or get data out of it outside of the automations it does with its own product features. Uh, examples of that might be like Canopy or TaxDome. It's not impossible to automate with them, but because it's more technically complex, I just expect that there will be higher fees and longer timelines associated with getting an agency to automate those, uh, for you. So just make sure that it is a use case that's worthwhile. Question number 3, it's what automation tools do you use to automate? And that is a question we've gotten quite a few times as well. I think one of the challenges of us like trying to answer that is like there's so many tools, not only on the tech stack of the Clients we work with, right? Every firm comes with this unique tech stack, but also there's multiple automation tools over time we've mastered, and we have like a team that specializes in different of them. That said, I'll be sharing on the screen right now what we call the process automation pyramid that gives you a little bit of a better sense of common tools we are working with to automate our work. At the bottom of the pyramid, and by the way, this is how we think about getting the most for your automation buck, because as you go up the pyramid, the complexity to develop those things increases, and And so does potentially your ability or the need to maintain them. Okay? So we always think about bottom up in terms of let's see if we can solve the problem first with your off-the-shelf applications. As I mentioned earlier, some practice management tools, some CRM tools have automations built in. So we're often using those to automate the work for our firm, for our clients whenever we can, and leveraging native integrations when possible. This is typically the easiest to implement. Sometimes firms already have some of those in place. We help them optimize it if needed. But probably 60, 70% of our work is in the middle layer of low-code, which includes not only integration platforms, but tools to store data as well as APIs or application programming interface. Common tools we use in that area are things like Zapier, which you might've heard, as well as some other alternatives like Make, N8N, and Power Automate, which is a Microsoft product. And on the data side, we might be doing Things like Google Sheets, Excel, if those are enough for the needs of the firm, or things like Airtable. On the high end, when we're talking about bots and scripts, we might be doing Google Apps Scripts, Office Scripts if it's on the Google or Microsoft environment. And we may also be working with robotic process automation tools like Axiom.ai and Robocorp to— when effectively nothing else can get the job done, we can use those tools to actually mimic what a human would do. And typically this is only needed when the tool has no API or we're working with a desktop-based application. Question number 4, do you have experience automating what we do? We are an accounting or tax firm. I guess that's another question you might want to ask an agency. Hopefully based on what I've mentioned at this point, it's evident that we specifically have only worked with firms for the last 3 years and have been in business for the last 5. So if you're working with an agency, make sure to ask about how long they've been in business, ask for proof, tangible case studies with results if they have them, and ideally having some of those in a video format. I actually will will leave in the description just a link to like our— some of our client successes as well as some of our top hits in case you are coming to this video and you don't know about us. Most of the firms that come to us either saw us speaking or on our community or found our content. But if you are watching this video, you're new to us, feel free to check the videos in the link in the description just to get a better sense of like the clients we've worked with and some of our most popular videos in this channel. Question number five: What's the ROI of automation, and how do we even think about that and try to measure it? I'll say this: What I've learned over time is like most of the firms that come to us after they implement, they're not necessarily getting rid of their team. That's very rare, maybe like one in twenty. More often than not, they're using automation to free up time for their team to make more. So the way I like to think about what it's the more tangible financial benefit that they're getting, it's. Effectively in terms of extra revenue capacity. And you could calculate that by taking the hours they've saved times their average hourly rate you would expect to sell, quote unquote, those hours at if your team was working, for example, with more clients than you currently are, or were offering additional services to your existing clients. We even launched a service just to help firms measure these metrics to assess As we work with them, how much influence do we have on the amount of hours they save, on the average hourly rate that they have for particular service lines? And also depending on the firm, if we don't— if they don't track time, for example, we might just have like the increase in client count they've been able to get from their existing team. Just as rough examples on those videos I will leave in the comment description, we work with a bookkeeping firm. We help them go from 45 to 60 clients with the same team and save about 1,050 hours a year. And with the tax firm, we helped them grow from $225 to about $330 per hour in terms of the average hourly rate for the personal tax return work. All in all, I guess what we expect or hope and aim for, it's typically that we are paying for ourselves like 2 to 3, maybe even 4 times in year 1 in terms of the costs to or investment to work with us and the ultimate benefit that the firm is getting. Question number six that you should get very clear on if you're going to work with the automation agencies: What's the scope of what they do and what they don't do, and what you might have to do to make sure you're relying on that from the very beginning? This will look different for different agencies, so I'll just speak a little bit about what we do and what we don't do. As an automation agency, I feel like we are kind of positioned to bridge a gap between operations and technology because typically what we've been told at least is that in order to gain some efficiency gains, sometimes that's falls on the operations side, but they don't have the technology or the technical expertise to make that work. And I'll talk about first, like, what are some of the areas that we haven't dived into yet, at least as of this recording. And more often than not, the firm's better off either doing that internally or in some cases engaging a separate service for that. One of them, it's practice management implementation. Think about maybe implementing Carbon as an example. Often that's not the best use of our time or the investment The firms making us, because some of those companies, for example, have onboarding teams helping their new users get up to speed. So that's one of the things that, at least as of this recording, we don't quite do because we feel there are better options for the money than us doing that. Another one, it's custom client portals. We actually have dabbled into that in the past, but there's so many options available for accounting firms, and often one of those is going to fit that meets 80, 90%. So we found that trying to custom build a client portal was not, again, the best use of our resources. And the third area is like sometimes yes, sometimes not, is desktop-based automations. And the reason I say sometimes yes, sometimes not, is like there are certain apps that are just desktop and there's no better alternatives. In the tax software world, that's pretty common. But sometimes it's a firm is coming to us and they're using like Practice CS or they have a practice management tool that's Still a desktop application. Uh, sometimes we feel it's not worth automating that, but sometimes just better off migrating them out of that, uh, in the first place. So that's why we primarily have one offering, which is an efficiency audit to help firms evaluate their tech stack and know what automation opportunities are available to them. And then we offer automation sprints focused primarily on developing automations, scripts, dashboards, and internal tools. Question number 7, what skill sets do I need from an automation agency? Could you help me understand what are some of the, uh, team members you have and What are the different roles? We internally have 3 different roles that we assign to each client. One is the automation consultant. This is the person that's the main point of contact for the firm. They are bringing ideas, clarifying them with you, and aligning those ideas with your business goals. There's also an architect role, which has someone knowledgeable of the tools you use, what's technically feasible, and it's gonna help you make sure that we build systems properly. And then there's the engineer, which is the developer that's bringing those ideas to life and building them. Those solutions. So similar to how firms have a bookkeeper, a controller, and a CFO, or a preparer, a reviewer, and a tax manager, we also internally have those 2 to 3 roles to be able to bring about an efficiency transformation for their firm. This is also helpful because it enables redundancy, so things are not depending on one individual person as it might be if you're working, for example, with an individual consultant. Question number 8, at what size does it start to make sense to outsource automation? This is more them for smaller firms. And I'll say that over time we've played with and have gotten inquiries and spoken with firms that may be solo or making, you know, in terms of revenue, they may be below $300,000, below $250,000. We found that $250,000 a year in revenue to be a good threshold. And here's why. Let's say as an example that the systems we can put in place can increase efficiency 10%. I think that's conservative, but let's say that that's what we're working on. If you're making like $90,000 a year or $100,000 a year, that's going to be like $10,000 in potential opportunity. That's kind of hard to work with because, I mean, it's going to be tough to give you a return as an agency fundamentally. If on the other hand, you're like a million-dollar firm or a larger firm that has a million-dollar tax department or accounting department, 10% would be effectively $100,000 of additional capacity. Then we have a lot more leeway there because even if we cost you $40,000 over a year, you still get, say, like a 2.5% in that particular example. We've found that sweet spot again to be probably between $500,000 and up, but $250,000, somewhere in that range, it can start to make sense. If you're below that, I would really encourage you to either consult, use YouTube, watch our videos, try to learn a little bit more yourself. And typically that might be the best use of your time and resources rather than working with an agency directly. Question number 9, let's talk about the other. At what point does it make sense to actually do automation and how? I'll say this because to do it right, you need multiple skill sets. And I think people don't appreciate this, but you need like the person that's the builder and the data and engineer is not necessarily gonna be good at like finding use cases, thinking about the big picture. Even those 2 people might not be the best at talking about the different tools and the execution and the details. So there's definitely multiple roles needed for you to get the best results because it's rare that one guy is gonna do it all. And we've definitely heard cases where firms have tried to bring like an automation guy in-house and maybe that doesn't pan out as they expected. I'll say that probably above or close to 100 FTEs is where we see firms like really rolling out in-house roles because at that point it's realistic for them to bring multiple people. And unless it's like for a specific product, for a specific smaller division of a service line, typically firms above 100 are going to be hiring in-house rather than working with an agency. Frankly, at some point too, for an individual agency, it might become hard to manage a larger organization. There are so many more points of contact. So they should tell you that if they feel that at some point you've outgrown them. And you're better off on your own after that. So again, typically before for you to be able to afford multiple roles, make sure you can do it right. Somewhere around 75, 150 plus is when we'd recommend. Kind of like when you would outgrow an outsourced agency, you might want to go and build an in-house team for automation like data. Question number 10: How long does it take to get results, and am I locked into a long-term commitment? Now we personally don't believe in like 12-month contracts or 6-month contracts or even 3-month contracts at this point. We always like to give clients the flexibility to opt out if they're getting value. That said, realistically, like, process improvement is a long-term investment. It's not like in a month we're going to change the world for the better. So expect that you'll invest a little bit over time and it will compound for months and years, years to come, right? We believe that also something we think about a lot is like, how can you streamline a process, not just automate this individual thing? And that's something that clients appreciate from us as well. That's not like, yes, just automate this thing. Let's look at your entire month-end. Let's do to entire tax prep and work through all the kinks to make sure that workflow is as efficient as possible. Now, more tangibly speaking, in terms of timeline, a small simple implementation of like a build that you'll actually be able to start using, that might just be 2 weeks. But if we're looking at the entire process, our experience has been depending on how mature or how complex that process is, how many people are involved, we might be looking at 4 to 6 months to fully streamline that process. If it's more simple, mature. If it's maybe a little bit less clear what's done, we need to spend time and effort clarifying that in the first place. And it's a more complex process because maybe there's a lot of clients, there's a lot of team members, we might be looking more closer to 6 to 9 months in that particular instance to fully streamline the process. How do you implement process changes when people are too used to the process or they don't want to change? Right? Because that's one of the other questions we get is like, well, I'm a little concerned that Our team's not gonna want to change. How do you make sure you work with them to enable that and manage that change accordingly? I'll say that because again, as I mentioned earlier, we're not like an individual product, an agency. As a result, our process tends to be very consultative, very collaborative. In no way are we like stepping in anyone's shoes. So really what we're doing is we're helping document what they do, discuss what issues they're facing, and just helping them find a better way to do that process. And in our experience, even though teams might be skeptical initially, right? They might even be a little bit fearful. What's this guy talking about automation? Are they going to automate work? Whatever, blah blah blah blah blah. Typically, later on, they start sharing ideas with us directly after we've done a few things, and they start to see and understand the value that we bring. So as we build that trust, and guess what? When they suggest change, you've won them. Like at that point, change management becomes much much easier. Question number twelve: How do you keep our and our clients' data secure and compliant? I'll reiterate what I said because we're an agency and we're not a platform or a software. Here's how we do it. We actually work inside your accounts. What does that mean? We configure like a permission scope user in your systems, just like you would be adding like a new team member, for example. And what that means is that we never directly get your data. Everything we do, we're gonna do it on your account, on your environment, and none of that's gonna be copied or retained in our systems. The other thing we'll say is like, as I mentioned earlier, there's a variety of tools that we use to do our work. Most of those tools serve and are vetted by large, large enterprises. So what that means is they have their security basics covered in terms of having SOC compliance, 2-factor authentication enforcement, and just encrypting that data at rest and in transit. So you're like, have to cover basics from an IT and data security standpoint. Question number 13, what are the different pricing models that agencies and automation agencies use. I'll say that there are like 4 of them: project-based, hourly, kind of like as-a-service or like hosting, and sprints. What we've found is that there's some challenges that come along with doing by the project because typically the nature of systems is that we'll go in, we uncover new things, and we always do. So over time we'll have potentially, if we find opportunities that are worthwhile, more things to do. On the hourly side, of course, there's just challenges with that in terms of setting expectations and how much you end up paying, as well as really incentivizing efficiency on our end. Because if we charge by the hour, we disincentivize the efficiency of the work we do. And around the host team and like almost like micro SaaS model, we've found that really doesn't allow the firm to own those assets long term. It can make sense for certain people and some agencies are doing pretty well offering that model. What we have internally is really is a one-off audit offer, as I mentioned earlier, where we're helping firms evaluate their tech stack, know what their operational opportunities are, and that's just a one-off fee for the strategy and I guess the initial plan. And then we have sprints for effectively the improvements that we're going to implement. Think of a sprint as maybe like a mini project, typically of 2 to 4 weeks. That's pretty popular in the software world. This is really how most development companies operate. And sprints are your short bursts where we're building something tangible that you can start putting to use. So you can kind of see, I guess, each sprint get a benefit. As we go. Question 14 and last question: what happens after we go live? You've built these systems, we're running efficiently, and we are done. Are we now on our own? What level of ongoing support do you provide, if any? What does that look like? This will depend again on the agency you work with, and it will also depend on the expertise of your firm and your people. I'll talk a little bit about what's happened for us. We've had clients that are quite tech savvy, they're pretty comfortable with these tools, and once we're done, they just run and maintain their systems. Like, I think that's the ideal. We do our best to leave them the documentation, the access, so they're not locked in, and then they can continue to benefit from that without having to, you know, have us involved. For other firms, however, their systems change. They add new clients, new services, new tools. They change things. It's the nature of business. So sometimes What might happen is an example. A particular client comes to mind where they came to us. We work on several sprints for the over the course of six months. Then we stop, and they came back like six months later. We work again like one or three sprints, and then we stopped again. I saw them recently commenting on some ideas they had, something that they might reengage. I guess engagement could also happen in terms of hey, I want these implemented. I'm gonna test this, work it out with the teams. We find any other kinks or any new. ideas, then we'll bring you in later on. We're more than happy to do that. As I mentioned, I feel like the power of automation is that you don't have to rely on software powerhouses long-term. So sometimes agencies, them hosting solutions means the benefits— they'll handle the support on an ongoing basis. If something breaks, they're responsible for it and not you. So that's the benefit. But you can like paying them, you're renting them solutions from them, just like you would pay a software company for, for example, and they would maintain their software. And again, we believe that the power of automation is allowing you to not rely on those software powerhouses, building systems of your own, and ideally not being locked in into any particular vendor. And with us, you're not. If you wanna learn the steps we follow to achieve some of the efficiency gains I talked about and kind of putting some of these answers into practice, I recorded another video where I dive deeper into our process and the journey we guide our clients through. So feel free to check that video next. And until then, stay efficient.