Cash Flow Demystified

Welcome to Accountants LawPod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge. Hosted by Lynda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhardt.

Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. And we're Sarah-less because she's a little under the weather. So we are just Steve and I again, which we just did one. So we're just on a roll now, Steve.

It's the Steve and Lynda show this week.

I know. It's, you know, the year is going by fast and we are just, you know, I just, I'm in kind of a panic mode. I don't know about you, but I'm like, I want to really take the time to go through every file. And I felt like after October 15th, I was going to have a lot of time to do it. And now it's already going to be, this is probably going to be on in December and we're looking at not that many because then you get the holidays and it's just, rapidly going by fast. And if you're going to raise your clients' prices or if you have it in your contract like we do, I have to make sure they all get notification on it because that was the— even though it's in their agreement that it goes up a certain percentage, they all yell at us saying, you didn't notify me. So we're going to make sure that we notify them this year. But yeah, which kind of rolls into our topic, Cash Flow Demystified. What is cash flow and how does it work? And Steve, I'm not going to throw it right to you. I'm just going to say that this is a place when I first started doing this work that I found confusing. And I think that maybe other people listening might also find it confusing. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know if you find it that— found it that way too when you first started to learn about it.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

Okay.

So it wasn't just me. That's good to know.

No, I think it confuses everybody. And they, you know, they forget about draws and things like that that are on the balance sheet. And they're like, where'd all my money go? How come, how come we said all this money was flowing around and where's the rest of it? And, you know, that's a typical question. So that, you know, definitely.

I think too, with cash flow, you're looking at, and I just did a thing with the Paralegals Association, just did a webinar and went through the different reports you need to know. And this cash flow one was in the, in, in the mix. In the content. And I think part of it is you're truly talking about cash. So you're not talking about any assets that are hanging out. Those are not liquid enough. You're looking at the cash coming in, the cash leaving. We always talk about how every person that owns a business, regardless of the business, should know what their net net is there. What does it cost to run my business and how much money—

The monthly net.

Yeah. What is, what does it cost? You should know that number because you, you have to look at money being spent. Of course, with law firms or lawyers, you're looking at payroll being the biggest cash flow thing that you have to have the money in the bank for. And I think that besides the rent, if they have rent or taxes, or if they're leasing, like we lease equipment, you're looking at an accounting firm, uh, any loan payments, anything. What's cost to run the firm, and then how do you have the money in there to do it? And I think anytime you work with a client that has tight cash flow, which we, we've had, you want to calculate that number because it's not a— it's not like, you know, take the total and divide it by 4 because it's 4 weeks in the month and say this is what you need because it could be—

It's not black and white.

No. And that's what makes it complicated. And I think that that's one of the things that You have to figure, and then you also have to figure timing, because most law firms do this big billing at the beginning of the month. The flood of cash comes in, and then there's little trickling in during the month. Those are the billing, and then the money comes in. But then there might be that lull. You have a lull where there isn't any money really coming in, or you try to figure out when the money's coming in. So it's, it's a delicate dance for sure. And I think that's part of part of it. And you also, you obviously want a positive cash flow. You don't want a negative one. It's hard, hard to sustain. But that's also why you want to have your rainy day fund somewhere in case that day happens. And we were talking to somebody that had a law firm that I think it was a real estate law firm, and they were affected by that during the pandemic. People weren't buying homes. Nobody was going out. And if they didn't have the money in the bank or, or that side rainy day fund, or at least a line of credit that they could pull out to keep their business running, how did you— they probably didn't survive. And a lot of businesses did not survive the pandemic for sure. So I don't know.

Well, very well put. And, and this is not a political statement I'm going to make, but with the state of where our country is right now, there's a lot of uneasiness. This is a very crucial time to look at your budget, which is a piece of cash flow in my mind. Look at your KPIs. What are your labor costs? What are all the different things that you need to take a look at? What are you spending? To your point, you know, where the cash floods in in the beginning of the month and then trickles later in the month, stretch out your cash flow over the entire year. Look at it monthly, quarterly, annually and see what it's doing. Mm-hmm. And this is a very good time to, to, if you're not doing it now, to be building that savings account so that you have a few months of cash available for any surprises.

We like 6, right, Steve? We like 6 months. Yes, we do. At least 3. And it's funny, like, as you stated, that obviously the big change coming, because we're completely changing everything from the last 4 years. So the people want something different, but now you're in this unknown space. But we at least had some history before, but nobody knows because it looks like it's gonna be completely different. So there's always that unknown factor. And anytime— it's funny because I talked to, uh, a tax professional that I really— a good dear friend— and talked about before this election because I had no clue how the election was gonna land. And like, how do you prepare for it? And what if this person wins? What if that, you know, what if it's Trump? What if it's Biden? Who's gonna Or not Biden, but Harris. How are you gonna, how's it gonna look? And I remember him saying to me, you know, these things happen, things change. It doesn't really change a lot because of the fact that it's the same other people up there that control a lot of what goes on more than the front-facing people. Although that does have a factor. And I think sometimes people worry about how I get in and it doesn't happen, but it'll be different.

Mm-hmm.

But it shouldn't be a dramatic shift. But then you never know with the economy because the economy, the economy's been kind of crappy, which is what caused the change basically. I think a lot of people, you know, weren't happy with the rising prices and everything. So now you're looking at a change, hopefully it'll be better, but there's no guarantee in that because with the economy, once it's the economy, stupid, you, it's always cyclical. And I, I, I always, get aggravated when I watch the news and see everybody blames it on this, whatever party's in, it's their fault, or it's their fault. But it's always been like this all my years.

It goes up.

It's not straight across. And if it's going like this, it's going to go like that because it has to level off. And I think— and I'm pointing up and pointing down for anybody listening— you know, this is how it is over the years.

So, yeah, very well put. And I think you also need to really look at the type of law that you're practicing.

Yeah.

So, for you accountants out there that are working with attorneys, definitely look at your mix of business and the type of firms and talk to them, you know, because I predict, and this, you know, I've been around long enough and so have you, Lynda. I think that personal injury cases—

Thank you.

I say that in all kindness. Personally, personal injury cases, I think, will go up. I think that divorce cases will go up. Really, I think that those two are usually recession-proof.

Immigration is completely crazy right now. I mean, that's— we are very— Sarah and I very much positioned ourselves to be an accounting firm that works with a lot of immigration firms, and they are just trying to right now figure out what to do because the influx is just so large. And I always appreciate one of my very, very favorite clients, probably the favorite, and how he's always thinking about, all right, here's what we're dealing with now and it's nuts. But he's always planning for, which is what the cash flow is, planning for when it changes because it's going to guaranteed at some point, whether we do everything that we were told during the election pre, you know, during the preseason of the election or not. It's like eventually it's always plan for what you think you can possibly plan for. And the pandemic's a perfect example of nobody planned for pandemic. Nobody. And how everybody pivoted and shifted. I still remember we were working with a client, Sarah and I working with a client, older established law firm in Florida, paper-centric, backwards. We were trying to help modernize their firm. They literally, you know, ran down the hall. Here's the pre-bills, ran down the hall. They're approved, ran down the hall. And was this classic old school way of doing things. And I can remember doing our meetings and they were— they showed up, nobody had a camera, half of them didn't have sound on their computer, and they scrambled to get it on their phone with Zoom. They didn't know what Zoom really was. And then they just got so excited about the meetings with us, they actually went out and bought the cameras before the pandemic, which was good because once the pandemic hit, it was hard to get them. And I remember teaching them how to turn it on and how— and, and they were having a blast with that. And I can remember that we had firms like that and the pandemic actually changed. So the people did pivot and go with the flow and the government did as well and the courts did. So, um, we're pretty much a bunch of people that are very much able to adapt. Thank God. Um, more things I read about AI in the paper. I still read some of the newspaper. My husband gets the Wall Street Journal and I still pick it up and read it old school style as I get more out of it, reading out of like even holding a book and reading a book. Sure, sure. And I get so much out of it. And one of the headlines was that you, you with AI, it's going to eliminate jobs, but it's gonna create new ones. So again, not worrying about the shift or change, just adapting. And I think that adapting, but planning is important because, and I think sometimes when it comes to cash flow, as we have demystified in here, cash flow and profit aren't the same thing.

No, no.

So I think, and it can get confused, right? Like you said in the beginning about how, where's my money? The classic thing we get asked every year. Well, if I have this much profit, where'd the money go?

Where did it go? Yeah. And, but you know, I like it when they ask that question because that opens the door for that discussion. One of the, one of the really big key things I think to consider too in the industry that we're in, folks, is that we have no inventory sitting out on shelves waiting to be turned into widgets. And because of that, we have to rely on pure cash to keep our businesses alive. And so, this again, I just can't reiterate enough. If you don't have a savings account, go open one right now. And just start putting—

You should.

Just start putting, put in whatever you can put in right now, work it into your budget, which is working it into your cash flow, and start building up that nest egg. Maybe you'll never need it, maybe you will. But here's the thing too, if you get into a tight place and you need to go to a bank to borrow some money for your business, if you've got that savings account as an asset, that's gonna help.

Yeah, you know, and I just went through this whole thing of getting a line of credit on this house 'cause ours expired. And I didn't agree with getting it a long time ago. I remember my husband said we needed one, and I was like, what do we need one for? Like, we don't need one. We have a house paid off. We have money in the bank. What do we need one for? And it's funny that when the hurricane hit, we had the money in our fingers within—

There you go.

Seconds to pay all these contractors hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix this house up. That would've hurt deeply to take out of our personal savings.

Or if you didn't have it at all, you, you, it would've delayed your entire projects of getting—

Oh yeah. There were people here that didn't didn't have insurance on their homes, which shocked me. They may have had some insurance, but they didn't have flood insurance, which we're in the A zone. Like, how you cannot have— but they own their home. It was up to them whether they wanted to put it on there. They didn't have it. And the fact that they didn't have the insurance, and it took 9 months to get paid. So people think you have insurance, they pay you off right away. They didn't. In fact, it didn't— didn't actually— we didn't actually get the money until they sent us a bill for the new year. And my husband said, take it off the money you owe us because he was so mad because we hadn't gotten our money yet. And it was a long process. So it's the same thing. If you have something happen that your business needs money and you have to keep families paid, right? You've got employees, wages. That's the biggest expense in a law firm. If you don't have that money and you're gonna have to let people go or whatever, you just don't wanna have that happen. Mm-hmm. Or God forbid, pay for your, like, taxes and things like that, you wanna have the money for that. And I think that being ready is important. And I think that's when you look at cash flow and start to analyze cash flow in a business, it's important to look at what's gotta go out, look at what needs to be paid in the next week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, plot it out, look at what's coming in and try to gauge the flow of it so that you've got the money. And we've had conversations with attorneys where we're like, look, you're doing the billing once a month. We think it would benefit you to maybe bill twice a month instead of the traditional once a month. And that might bring the money in. And there's other ways of maybe even changing your billing if there are certain kind of law firm that uses, um, like subscriptions instead. And so you have a more even inflow of cash instead of doing this, you, or evergreen retainers. There's lots of ways you can improve cash flow in a business. But like I said, with law firms, you're looking at straight-up cash. We're not looking at— I just went to do a— I met with the old yoga studio I used to teach at, and I'm gonna sub. I put my name on the sub list again, had to fill a bunch of papers, and I went into the studio and took a class, and I stood there, and I'm looking around the room, and it was just wall-to-wall stuff to sell for this time of the year, trying to sell yoga stuff, clothes, all this stuff, Christmas presents. And my first thought went to a lot of inventory. She's gonna be taxed on this. Like, what, what, what are they doing? And I asked, and it's all on consignment. So I don't know if that's— I guess that's not taxable. I have no clue. But all I could think of is, as far as a store goes, if you're looking at that type of business, how much money sitting, not sitting in the place, you know, that's not money, that's actually goods. But I, that's all I could think of when I looked at it. I was like, oh my goodness, there's a tax on all this stuff. And, you know, so my accounting brain does that, does does the math on a yoga class and it does, you know how my brain goes. But yeah, I think, and if you've got a business that's new and got a negative cash flow, how would you improve that? Like what would you suggest somebody do to improve cash flow to make it not, because you can't sustain negative cash flow for very long.

Yeah, it's especially when you're new. I mean, and, and when attorneys are new, they have such a full plate. They're trying to juggle getting business, stay compliant, cover their trust. You know, these are all things that you really need to take a look at and really tighten down on. And, you know, at year-end, you know, pay out the bonuses and all those things. And they try to draw down their bank accounts as much as possible. And I honestly think in the environment that we're in now and the uncertainty that we have right now until we know what's going on, which isn't going to be overnight, it might, it might behoove you to get a real— have a really good conversation with your CPA/tax preparer.

And right now is a great time to talk to them too, because they're not up against any deadline at the moment. If you don't have one, it's a good time to find one. I think too, if you actually look at your expenses, maybe you need a piece of equipment. Back, back in the day, we had the, you know, servers that were expensive and Even if you have to buy, like, all new computers, we were working with some law firm, and their computers were so slow and so old. And those are things that, okay, it costs this much to get new soft— new equipment. But how long— how much you paying people to sit and watch a spinning ball because the software— Exactly.

Exactly.

So you're looking at the offset. And I think sometimes implementing new software also is a cost. But if you're bringing in new equipment, you can lease equipment. You don't have to buy it. You can lease—

I was just gonna say, speaking to what You mentioned a while ago about how you lease equipment. Again, talk to your tax person. Is it better to go ahead and buy this and depreciate it now, or should we go ahead and lease? What should we do? What's better for us? Think, think of your cash flow as a great big giant water tank. Okay. And so you fill that, you fill that water tank up and then you, as you drink water, which is paying your bills and things like that, you're drawing down on that. But if there's a leaky pipe on the bottom of that water tank, which is maybe subscriptions to different things that you're not using, You know, I mean, there could be a zillion— look at your insurance policies. Look at all those things that are costing money. That's a good idea. Yeah. As you look through all of your expenses and figure this out, what can I do without, or what do I need to change? If you've been in business for a while and you have, of course, a business insurance policy, and 5 years ago when you got that policy, you said that you made $300,000 a year, but now all of a sudden, you're making $700,000 a year.

Good point.

Your insurance company needs to know that because that's exposure for you. If you don't update that information and then there's a claim against you or you're grieved, which happens to lawyers, that can cause a problem with the insurance company, which affects your cash flow. So, these are all things— while this all sounds a little scary and we're trying to peel back the onion here on cash flow, this is all very positive to help you design ways to avoid from getting in trouble with cash flow.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, if you look just, if you're trying to keep the cash outflows at bay, look at those expenses like you just said. Look at, there's probably software in that you're paying for that you don't use.

That you don't, everywhere, yeah, yeah.

Maybe you've got software that you're using, but you've got 25 users and there's really only 6. So that's another place.

We run into that all the time, don't we?

We actually do. And some of this software's expensive. So it's a way to get that number down. Also, we've seen it, the complete flip side of that. We've seen it where we'll go into somebody's books and we see that they've got $100,000 sitting in their operating bank making zero interest. Can that—

Sweep it out into a money market.

Rainy Day Fund that maybe has got interest bearing, especially nowadays where there's some interest out there. So you're making money off of your money. And I think that's another way that you can look at helping ease up the money and you should still keep the, you know, the rainy day fund. I've heard people argue, oh, I'm paying taxes on this money. Now you want to just sit in the books. But if you can put it somewhere where it's making some interest and it's ready for you at your fingertips, you don't have to go get that loan at the last second. If you can get that 3 to 6 months worth of money sitting there to cover your bills in case of a catastrophe, in case of something that's unknown that you're not ready for or prepared for, because these things can either sneak up on you or hit you like a brick wall. And I think that if you've got yourself in a place where you're prepared and ready. I think that that's the best way to be in running a business. I mean, lots of businesses don't survive. And if you're, I think the ones that do prepare for whatever the, that's gonna come down the pipe, at least if they're prepared, even if they don't ever have to tap into it, they're ready. And I think it helps you sleep at night. I think for, you know, me and Sarah, it helps me sleep at night, her sleep at night that we've got the rainy day fund. And I think that, And even talking to clients, sometimes they don't even think of it. I can tell you though, if you are looking at the QuickBooks checking account where you see that advertisement in your book saying 5% interest, it truly is 5%, but you have to move the money into what they call an envelope, which kind of locks it down where you could name it rainy day fund and you can put it there and it will make 5% interest. Don't put your payroll in there. Even though it's tempting. No, no. Because that is a disaster waiting to happen where if you don't move the money the right way or whatever, that is just bad. It's offered when you look at it. So be careful where you put it. I would say you're probably better off maybe going outside of QuickBooks and just get— what is the thing about having all your eggs in one basket? I think you're better off like finding someone. We're using Meow Bank, for example. Business banking, checking has interest. It's not 5%, but it's completely separate. I think it's a Green Dot Bank, but it's completely separate from Intuit, QuickBooks, all of that. It's just, it's just a smart thing to do. But you should think about having at least something put somewhere, if not that line of credit, ready and accessible for you. And let me tell you, it took us almost 6 months to get this line of credit aligned and approved. It was ridiculous. It's not like the old days where you could go in and we have great credit. There was no reason for it to be held up. But It was just very, very slow, and I think make sure you have the time where you can do it now before you need it. You really want to have it in place before you actually have a need for it. It's probably a good piece of advice if you're, if you're in that place that you just don't have the extra money anywhere, but you, you want to have money accessible. It's hard to get the line of credit, but if you can get the line of credit, I think, even if you start with a small amount, and they make you borrow it. That's the other game of it. They actually make you take money out and you have to hold it. Like the one my husband and I just got, we have to take the money out for 12 months. We don't need it. It was for the emergency fund again because the other one expired after 15 years and we had to re-up it and they're making us hold on to $25,000 and pay interest on it. No points, no interest when you get it. But yes, you are paying because they force you to do that, or they make you have a higher interest rate. So that's the catch with it, which I don't know, we're playing the game. I don't know why, because we paid it off last time before its time because of the, you know, we just waited for insurance, but we just paid it off 'cause we didn't wanna have any debt. So it really depends on how you look at life and in business. So I just think you have to be ready.

It doesn't hurt to have conversations with your clients either. Number one, if you're an attorney, like if you're doing corporate transactional type work, you're in a gold mine of finding out information from your clients and having that conversation with them, saying, okay, as your, as your legal counsel— and you can do this if you're a bookkeeper or an accountant too, with different types of law firms— as your bookkeeper/accountant, this is the type of work that you do. What can you tell me that you're seeing out there? What are you hearing from your customers? What are you— What are you doing? What are you doing? What's the temperature of the work that, that you're providing out there? And you'll get a lot of information. That will help you plan ahead. Also looking at the productivity of your staff, if you have a staff, whether they're working remote or in office, look at their productivity and what's going on there and see where you can tweak things. All of these things help generate more cash flow when you dig into them.

Yeah, absolutely. That's a very good point. Looking at— and you're looking at those are the KPIs that Steve likes to talk about, but those are—

I wasn't going to say that word, but—

But those are good KPIs to look at because that might help you make decisions about whether you're going to keep somebody in place or not. On staff. So I think for sure, making sure that you've got, you know, you've got your cash flow in place, everything's flowing in a good direction, you get some good profits. The end of the year, start to look at all your numbers. This is a great time, help you make decisions for your business.

Well, think of how daunting it was when you had all the excitement of, I'm going to go to law school, or I'm going to be an accountant, and you actually went through all of those emotions and the, the being afraid of starting that business and you know, your first customer and all of those things that went into play. This is something to not be afraid of either. This is something that is smart business. It's a smart— if you, to your point, if you have no money in there right now and you're like, how in the heck am I going to get it? Start with $50 a week, whatever you can do. All of a sudden, I mean, I have Grandma popping into my head right now, you know, by the end of the year, you'll have $10,000. You know, it does build up.

And if you're looking at the reports in QuickBooks and you found the cash flow report, know that the IOLTA account is going to come up on that. There's no way to exclude it. They wash each other out. They should wash each other out, the liabilities and the—

They should.

They offset the liabilities. Yeah, you have to disregard it because it's not your money, but it will show up on there. And that's why I'm glad you brought that up, because that is something that if you push that report out, especially if you're the bookkeeper and you're listening to the podcast, You push that out, we push it in Excel and just take those accounts out so that way they can see their true cash flow because it's really not when you're looking at a QuickBooks report because it pulls that in. I think that's something that I always think about when you're looking at a cash flow report, but it, it's a snippet of time when you're looking at the reports, a snippet of time of the inflows and the outflows. I think that's the best way to— and of the cash coming into business, you're gonna see all those bank accounts. You're just gonna see, and you're gonna see those expenditures, and that's really what you're looking at when you're looking at a statement of cash flow report. It's not as scary as you think, but it really is kind of, it's intimidating because it's not really something that we, it's not one of our typical profit and loss balance sheet reports that you see. I think that that's what makes it different.

Definitely.

And yeah, and you wanna look at, you just wanna look at that, the cash, right? That's the most important part of it is the cash. How liquid is the business? How liquid at any snippet of time basically. So that was a good one, Steve.

It was, and I'm glad we did that because I think it'll be really helpful to people.

I hope so. I hope it's helpful.

Pick up the phone and call your bookkeeper. I'm sorry to interrupt, but pick up the phone and call your bookkeeper and work through it with them.

You know, ask them. Understand it, right? Because yeah, you want to look at it, pull it out of your, you know, pull the report down, take a look, do different ones, different timeframes, and just take a look at it. And then, Truly, this is a great time to go through and look at, like you just said, analyzing the profitability of any attorney on staff or anybody that works for you, and then also looking through your expenses and try to clean some of those up. It's a great time to do that right now and get that reduced. Obviously, if you've got a lot of money sitting there, Dr. Lynda Artesani, look at your profit and loss. Look at the bottom line because this is the time of the year. You got one month left to make adjustments because the year is almost over. It's hard to believe. I mean, by the time—

Another week. One other thing I want to drop out there that has nothing to do with cash flow, but we're recording this podcast today right before Thanksgiving. And if this drops before the end of the year, just a reminder to everybody, if you have not filed your BOIR report with the government, I did mine yesterday. It took 20 minutes. That's all it took.

It doesn't take long, but the fines if you don't do it are huge. I did that with Sarah. Like, we did them in the very, very beginning of the year. In fact, my tax guy just sent us the bills for the tax return. And then they sent me a slip of paper because my tax guy is very paper. My old tax guy is very paper. And even like they even photocopied the attention, new federal filing requirement, like the old school, whatever they pull this down from. And it's like, yeah, the BOI for sure.

Something we normally provide as a service from—

We don't, we're not providing that at all. That's on the—

I'm not providing it either. But you've got to do it, business owners out there. And if you're a bookkeeper accountant, make sure you let your, your clients know they've got to get this done.

Because they're going to turn to you when they get their first fine and go, why didn't you tell me this? So you really want to tell them about it. But there's other companies out there that do it for you if you don't want to do it. It's not that hard, but you can pay like a CorpNet or something like that to do it for you. And it's a couple hundred dollars. But honestly, to get in there and do it, it's not hard.

And it wasn't hard.

It's really not. It's, it's a simple thing. You just need to know some of your numbers. I think have your driver's license and, you know, it scans, but it wasn't, was not hard. I had to do it for like 5 businesses and it wasn't a big deal. I got it done early before it was actually approved that we had to do it. And now we have to do it. And the fines are like really steep per, per week or day or something like that. They're really high if you don't do this by the end of the year.

So, do you know, is it an annual thing we have to do or is it a one time? No, it looks like it's only once, but it's, so every new new business then would need to do it.

Every new business, I think they have to do it within a certain time frame. Yeah, but it's, um, yeah, initial report. Yep. And it's just, yeah, it's not— and it's for all, uh, it's beneficial owners information, all owners who have 50% or more of ownership. And the purpose—

I never could figure out what the purpose of it was. And so I felt like Big Brother is watching us.

But yeah, the government trying— I think they're trying to find any businesses that are not— that are hiding money, I guess. I don't know. But I mean, they have all this information when you file a tax return. So if you're not—

Is the IRS tied to the BOIR?

Must be. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. The BOI is a beneficial— is it beneficial owners? Is that what it is? Information?

I think so.

Yeah.

And really, they want to know the legal name, the tax ID, the federal, the tax identification type, your EIN, federal ID without the dash. So when you're doing it, know that if you put a dash in, that messes it up. Country of formation, state of formation, and the complete address. And then they are going to have to see your driver's license.

Yeah.

Yeah. Or other form of identification. Yeah.

You know, it could be an immigration thing too. You never know.

Who knows? This is something that was— this is a whole year ago that this came up. I don't know. I have no clue. I'm sure there's a history behind it and we can probably ask ChatGPT why this is, but I thought it was actually because I know it's being challenged. I thought it was actually going to go away, but apparently it's not.

Oh, okay. No, no. Well, and it's, again, it needs to be done by January, so.

Just do it. Yeah.

Just get it over with.

Thank you. And Tiara?

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Awesome. Hopefully Sarah will be back next one. She's— hopefully she'll be feeling better. Let's hope. And we'll see you all next time. Bye, everybody.

Take care, everybody.