How Valuable is an Accountant to your Law Firm?

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge. Hosted by Lynda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhart.

Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. And how is everybody, by the way? Because we're halfway through the year as this is being recorded.

So—

Hmm.

Oh my.

More than halfway. Sorry, more than halfway. Lynda Artesani. I know, it's kind of crazy and scary though, right?

I know. Why do they go so fast?

I know. We're all busy too. We're not even into comfort season, which is kind of crazy. Although Sarah's been traveling all over the world, so she's been—

Yeah, Lynda just watches me.

And you don't want to fly with her because she's got this curse on her for some reason that every flight she gets and has a tire problem, a pilot problem, a staffing problem, this problem or that problem, she can never just hop on a plane and go home even if it's a short trip.

A CrowdStrike problem that has to do with Microsoft. That was a, yeah.

Oh, that's when you were traveling last, isn't it?

Yeah, it was interesting 'cause we, thankfully one of our employees got out before that hit, was on flight en route, so she was able to get out, but I woke up to a myriad of text messages like, get to the airport early. It's a madhouse. And—

Well, she flew into Atlanta for Delta's hub, and she said there was a lot of—

Oh my God.

A lot of angry people when she got off the plane. And she's like, what? She had no clue. And it's like, oh, here comes Sarah. That wasn't Sarah. That was our—

Our employee. But for me, Funny. It was just the staff was affected, I think. Just, yeah, like normal things, but normal flying, I guess you could say.

For Sarah, it's been normal.

Well, every time I went through—

remember I went through the spurt where everybody, every time I went through, they patted me down. I was getting to the point, go ahead, I was randomly selected. Boy, I should buy a lottery ticket because I kept getting randomly selected. Every single flight I got patted down. Every flight I flew with my dog, That was a big fun thing when they came and they took the dog. It was just a mess. And I went through this long, like a whole year, like you, all every flight I had, as soon as I walked into that thing, boom. And then it wasn't until Misty was flying with me and I was like, go ahead in front of me and see how it feels. And then she ended up getting, and then it passed the torch to her.

He's just saying I should mix up the line. Let somebody else. Yeah. Let somebody else go. Yeah. Well, we got an interesting topic today.

I feel like we do. It's how valuable is an accounting person in your firm?

Steve?

Very.

Next. That was the door. Okay, we're done. So all the accounting people in the room. I think if you look at it this way too, it's like, how valued are you? Because sometimes it feels like that. Clients don't value us and the work we do unless they need something, like they have a mortgage that they're applying for or something like that. Then all of a sudden we're their best friend and we're like, oh, we need this right away. And then they don't tell you. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, what do you, you know, what is the big rush all of a sudden? What's going on? They're like, oh, I applied for a mortgage and they need all this paperwork now. It's like, oh, okay.

It became a spicy topic of conversation in just a casual conversation in our group where one of our staff members was saying, you know, this is the most undervalued position in almost every company, whether you're internal or external.

Yeah.

Feels valid point. Feels that way because it's not a, it's not very recognized, but it's critical. It's crucial to a business.

Well, it's one of those positions that's behind the curtain doing its thing. Very valuable work, very valuable product that we turn out, but it doesn't come in front of people until A, there's a big problem, or B, they really need something like you said, Lynda, right now. Otherwise, it's a great place to live. But for those firms who don't have an accounting person who think they can do it themselves or that AI is going to do it for them or whatever, that's where they run into problems because we've got that human touch in it. We've got the knowledge, the know-how that advice, we can justify the return on investment, which is huge for—

I don't think we should have to justify it, though, is my argument. You shouldn't.

You're right. I agree. We shouldn't have to. But sometimes when a firm says, oh, well, we're not— we're just not going to do— we're just going to let our paralegal do it. Well, the paralegal is not well-versed in accounting principles, and we're not well-versed in how to do pleadings and filings in court. So you know, there's a reason everybody has the job that they do.

How incredibly important is it that the stuff that we do? Because if something gets in the wrong place, right, it might become a bigger taxable event for the attorney or the— Yeah.

Right.

If we— and we have the knowledge of it where usually when we run into firms where the paralegal or they didn't have the accounting background, and it's usually the transactions that are kind of tricky that will trip them up a little bit. And you'll see these transactions, it's like, they'll be booking in, for example, they'll be booking in bank matching and just putting things in, you know, operating— oh, it's legal income, but they might be also handling invoices coming through and payments coming through. Now they're doubling up the income, and that can be a pretty expensive mistake that's going to cost you a lot more in the long run if it's not caught. You'll be paying double income, be taxed on double income.

That's an incredible point. So to take that a little further, you're saying that they might receive a payment in their bank account or mail, whatever, and they post that as legal fee income, and then they go over to their billing software and post the payment, and that integrates back over to QuickBooks, and there's a double payment. Is that what you're saying? Yeah.

Or they're just taking the bank feed and anything that comes into operating—

Right.

That's income, but then they're recording the payments, or maybe the payments are coming through Clio, and they're recording the payments through an invoice and a payment, and invoice, well, it's getting booked in as income, so now you've got it in there twice. Those are the kind of things that can be really harmful. We had one where the client had the paralegal doing the work. I think it was a paralegal, legal assistant, and they booked in these giant transactions to their distribution account that were not distributions to the tune of like $250,000. So the client paid on the distribution, the funds that, that looked like they were taking out of the business, but it was their way of marrying up the trust account to make it balance. But—

Well, and here's another, here's another example too. Vendors. Let's take an IT vendor and they send a bill to the firm. They send an invoice to the firm for $13,000. $5,000 of that is contract labor to install equipment or fix things or whatever. And then the rest of it might be computer equipment that they purchased. And we see that all the time. So that invoice needs to be split up. You know, as to what happened, you know, is it equipment, is it office supplies, you know, what is it that that invoice makes up? And so many times they'll just lump it all together and it's not what it really is.

Or they book, they book things into anything that should be capitalized. To your point, they book it in as an expense or vice versa. They stick these little teeny pieces of things like, oh, that's office, and they see office and they just put put it in and it's maybe office furniture, but they're booking in office expenses. So now the client's not getting that expense because it's sitting up in the asset. And depending on the tax person, they might not catch that. Some tax people are diligent about going through the assets and getting the depreciation and all that, and some miss that stuff. So you really want to make sure that things are being placed in the right— In the right buckets for the tax return purposes. And that all comes from the knowledge of working and doing this work.

And a lot of—

Exactly. A lot of times too, they have money going into, you know, they get the money in the trust account, they're not moving the money over, they're not showing the income when it's supposed to be, they're leaving it over there. I mean, it's just, there's so many places. So those are the, that's the value we provide by knowing how, having the knowledge to be able to fix these things that I think sometimes is lost on it because they may see, I can remember when bank feeds first came out and started using QuickBooks Online, we're gonna do bank feeds. And I moved everybody over at once. I had this whole plan. January 1st, everybody went from desktop to online. And I had a couple people say to me, well, if this makes your job easier, shouldn't I get a discount?

Seriously, you had that? Wow. Okay.

So here's the funny thing. You both are so spicy on it. I love it. You guys are like both supercharged.

I see.

The thing that's interesting about it is the thing that's not been said, and I feel like it's lost, is we're business owners. So we look at it through a whole different lens. This is our dedicated space that we work in. This is what we do every day, accounting.

And we see a lot of different books.

Yeah. See a lot of different books. We understand the language. The benefit of folks like us that have this purview of multiple is when something works well somewhere else, we might be able to suggest it here to help provide you a different—

Exactly.

Consultation prices, all these other things. But also the bottom line is, and Lynda and I have this with our own clients. There's a few clients that they want to hold it strictly to their— to themselves, right? They want the totality of what the accounting looks like. It's just us and the owner. I understand that because they've had instances in the past where they've had employees feel entitled to things that they should otherwise not feel entitled to. We sit in such a neutral space that we can able provide you some value. Very key word right there. Yeah, forecasting, not just our services, but just the types of people that we are and all the things that we see. And it's interesting because yes, it comes down to sometimes tasks, but what you're asking of people like us nowadays is you're asking us to have IT app support. You're asking us to have deeper knowledge in different ways. You're asking us to know the GAAP and principles and also the accounting, all the compliance metrics. You decided to hire somebody in Oklahoma and now you're moving them to— they're moving to a different state. How are you going to set up, tear down that, hire them in the other state? All of these extra compliance pieces. And that's, you know, okay, that's just an easy job and undervalued.

That's— And here's another example. Let's say they have somebody in the office. It's a small firm. Back to that paralegal example. And they're entering the books and they do the payroll today. And there's not enough money in the bank. But do they go that extra step and look at that? You know, because they may not have access to the bank account, but we do.

Mm-hmm.

And so when we run that payroll, we can look at the bank and we can get in touch with the client right away and say, you don't have enough money in the bank to cover your payroll today. You know, that's the proactive approach. And that's that neutrality that you're talking about, that we're out here watching all these things because that's our focus. We have that one job. To do for the client. And I love what you said about looking at different— the way things are done in different books and different law firms. We have that experience to bring it to the table for the current firm that we're working on and say, hey, have you tried this? Have you done that? You know, so on and so forth.

Well, Lynda and I— Lynda could speak to this. We were looking at a set of books and it looked like it was reconciled, and Lynda just looked a little deeper. It was so— I don't even understand the reconciliation. Was it done by— how was it done? It was done annually?

Oh, it was done and dumped in. It was— yeah, there was no bank reconciliation. So you look and see, she'd see it monthly and it was done as one big one, and then they booked in bank reconciliation discrepancy account to make it fit, fixed. So it wasn't really fixed because what the heck account is that? I always— I was so mad when Intuit brought that out because I was like, why are you giving somebody an out and a dumping zone that there's no place on tax return for? You gotta figure it out. But they just have one giant bank, bank reconciliation for the year and then tidy that away into another account, which was really no purpose.

So— We had one that was going into the chart of accounts into the checking account and just entering the R for reconciled and moving on because that's— yeah, because that's what they saw at the bank, but they didn't really do the reconciliation. And so when they, when they brought us in, we found a ton of money out there. It was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, you know.

And then you go to undo the reconciliation and it all still stuck.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I think payroll is a perfect example of where we're not valuable. They don't see us as a value.

Yeah.

Until payroll breaks or until something happens with payroll, whether it's they get a notification which could be randomly done by the, you know, that it was paid or whatever. We have to go back and prove that it was paid or, and it's just like, well, that's part of your job. And sometimes some crazy things happen in payroll where I've seen Sarah have to go through leaps and hurdles and unbelievable places. Thankfully, she's got all these deep connections and knowledge of it where most of the time someone on staff that's just, I shouldn't say just, but if they're a paralegal or they're, they, they were hired for another job and they got, you know, oh, you're the best paralegal here, you're gonna do the bookkeeping. They don't have a knowledge of that. That's one of the places when you hire anybody that they struggle with. I remember struggling with it. It's not uncommon to start out to do this work and then you really are afraid of payroll cuz it's tax, it's compliance. It's like, ugh. Yeah. A week, a law lab that don't want to do payroll at all, that have no— they don't want to touch it. And I'm like, yeah, but you need to know it because if you have a client that had one payroll program and then they came to you and they're down the road and they're like, I'm on— I started in Paychex, but I'm ADP, but nobody told ADP about Paychex that you can't have two. So that's wrong. And you have to have that all be one. It's one year, one tax year, one program. And if you don't know that, I mean, how many times we've seen records that we look on the balance sheet, we're like, oh my Oh my God, what is all these negatives? And it's usually in the payroll accounts.

Well, it's funny, we had a non-practicing CPA at a firm that was paid fairly well, doing a lot of work, but not— and we dug deeper, we found a lot. There's a kind of a beauty to Balance and to offer some support is you've got somebody in-house That's amazing. That's great. We've interviewed a couple of people that have some amazing people. You also want another pair of eyes to help guide you. And that is a value of service too. It's like kind of what you're leading down, Lynda. There's these in-betweeners, I think, of knowledge.

I've seen you pick some payrolls, Sarah, that I'm like, hours on the phone and got the courtesy hang up. And I don't think the client really realized it until they decided they were going to do that and they got the courtesy hang up, which That should— those two words don't go together, by the way. Hanging up on me is never courtesy. I don't care what you say. And, you know, and then they—

Courtesy disconnect. Right.

Yeah. They just disconnect on you and you're going to start all over again. I mean, I did that with the state of Rhode Island. You should hear the swear words that come out of my mouth when they— you listen into that awful canned music, then all of a sudden it stops and you're like, what the heck just happened? And then you're— you've lost your call altogether. It's like, what? Kidding me?

Or you get transferred wrong.

Yeah, you get transferred and you're stuck and you start over, yeah.

I mean, like if you just kind of look up the value of the role, I mean, it's all the things we talked about, the financial statements, forecasting, budgeting, taxes, payroll compliance is listed on there as like a top number, problem solving. It sounds funny to say that, but it's so true. I feel like sometimes all I'm doing is problem solving. Oh, my software won't export the data like how I need it to. So can you go validate it from the books? Why is there a discrepancy between these two numbers? Or state audit comes up or federal. I mean, who do you go to to help support you? So it's such an interesting space. I don't know. I don't know how you reevaluate that for people's mindset. I don't know how you begin the dialogue.

And how do you prove? Yeah, how do you? Provide— you're providing value. How do you convey it? What is the way of conveying it other than they say, here, listen to the Accountants Law Podcast when this one lands? How do you convey the work that we do that we don't feel valued? Because there are times where we just don't feel valued. It's like you go along, you're doing the work timely, and then the minute something doesn't go right, and maybe it's the client that didn't finish up, you know, I, I tell that to some of our staff members, I'm like, why isn't, why didn't the financials go out? Well, I'm still waiting on XYZ. I'm like, make a note of that somewhere because someday they're gonna go, well, you never provided my documents on time. And it's actually because of the fact that you didn't provide the answers that we needed.

Great advice.

You know, you really need to document, document, document. And then you're the whole, Steve's my favorite tip of saving the side spreadsheet. When you do save that money, you do find something that's not right. You do come along and you've, found this genius way of saving them a lot of money, save it on a spreadsheet because at some point you do have to raise their rate and you want them to understand this is the value I provided. Yes, you saved money. I mean, what the raise that we're doing here is just a standard, you know, you've got a bookkeeper, you really love her. Well, we have to compensate that person and raise their rate up so that they can be happy too. Everybody wants to be happy, you know.

So, well, back to what I was saying a while ago, that's that return on investment if you can justify that. You know, if you're doing a trust cleanup and you would see to your point where they haven't moved a lot of money that they should have moved, you know, keep track of that because you can say, you know, I just found another $19,000 for your cash flow.

Mm-hmm.

You know, and we've had, we've had that happen where we'll do a cleanup and we'll sit with the client and we'll go through all the things that we found and you know, the job is pretty much done and everything's clean and we'll sit with the client and they just sit back and they're like, oh my God, this is so great. I don't have to do this anymore. And sometimes it'll be a cleanup and it leads into an on— And what, how do I get you guys to do this all the time? They're very, very happy. So then you do get the flip side of feeling not valued. You feel very valued where the person's so happy that they've had this mess that's been keeping them up at night for months. And then you came in and you cleaned it up, you figured it out. And, and sometimes, I mean, there are times where Sarah and I working on it together, cuz I feel like I have like, I mean, Inspector Clouseau trying to figure out what the hell happened here. Because sometimes it's like, What happened? And so I was like, let's just follow the money. And we get the T-accounts out. We're like, oh, it's here.

It's here.

Oh my God. And you figure it out. But it's like such a, like, we're like on a high five even though we're on different coasts. Like, high five. We figured that out. You know, it's so funny.

Yeah.

We have had those moments where we're like, we've gotta figure this out. And I think sometimes finding, we can find the beginning point of when it goes awry and then getting down to, especially if it's off by, I'll say $27.55. And you're like, it's off by this in the month of March. Where is it wrong? Then you start searching, of course, logically, $2,755, where is it? Well, it's 2 transactions, but you don't know that. And then you start to, okay, so I know it's the month of July. Now let's see what week in July that it actually happened. And you find out it's actually 2 weeks that it happened, and then you find the 2 pieces. But then it's a good feeling that you figured out what the problem is and you can fix it.

The other, the other thing that we're critical in, I think of all of us, like, I'll just speak for the 3 of us. You have to, you know, you're taking on a partner. How, what does your equity look like? You're evaluating where you're going to be for the next 5 years. What are the transition points? Some key people in the, in the company, how do you want to be evaluated there? What does that look like? There are things that go beyond the day-to-day. And I always say this, when the relationship becomes transactional, we have a problem. Yes. Your past experiences with transactional style accountants is not the way that we choose to lead. And we'll give a few grace points, but really we need to work as a team. It never helps anybody that you're pointing fingers at people.

You know what I mean? How much is your hourly rate? How many hours do you think this is gonna take?

Yeah.

You know, or we had the other day, how many hours, how many hours do you work on my account? Been a client for a while.

We don't do that.

We don't do that.

Why?

I love how you word that question.

You know what's prompting this question? You know, but it's sometimes people thinking things through and it's easy to—

Fighting them.

Yeah, it's easy to take offense to it sometimes. And it's easy to do a lot of work, extra work sometimes. And you may actually go outside of the scope, which is a whole nother show. We could do a scope creep show. But those things can happen where you're doing extra, and that's what makes you really feel not valued is you're doing all these extra things that really weren't in the contract to begin with. And then that's the person that seems to come back at you and say, you know, you raised your rate. Why'd you raise it 3% or whatever it is? You know, and you're like, well, this is what we're doing now. Your firm grew 3 more attorneys over the past year, and that added 3 times more billings and 3 times, you know, you, you try to go through it. And then I feel like that, why do I have to explain myself? You know, your work. Yeah. Your work tripled.

That's why I lean away from the justification of things or the return because really, truly, it's a critical function of any role in a company. It has right from day one compliance. We've got this BOI thing we all have to do now, right? Most people are like, what is this? Did they end up getting—

I wasn't—

I thought they said no.

No.

No, they didn't.

We did ours, so.

That's what's crazy is how is it whatever the federal government releases, why are we in charge of disseminating this information so that you can understand it as business owners? You open the business and you have my tax return.

You have everything you need right there. Why are you making me do this extra paperwork? And it was a one, one-time thing, but it was like, why? Like we had no— and that, and it was originally you had to do it like within a certain amount of, was it 18 months or 12 months or something like that?

It's coming up in 2025 that you make sure that you're—

Because it was under the year.

All associate— yeah, all associated businesses have to comply with it.

All businesses. Yeah, not just accounting firms. So—

Yeah. And then Steve, you have a tip of the side spreadsheet that you do, like the value of who we are on our side spreadsheets of like keeping track of all these things like found money, saving money, the bill that comes through that's maybe $10,000, but $5,000 of it is equipment. The other 5 is dues or something like that. These little nuances of things that—

Well, we provide clarity.

Yeah, there you go.

This is all we do are the numbers for you people. This is our world, and we can provide you so much clarity with your numbers. As an example, your labor cost. Notoriously, law firms have these exorbitant labor costs and then wonder why the owners of the firm or the partners of the firm are not getting the draws that they think they're entitled to because they fell into that position in the firm. They're not, they're not an hourly attorney or an attorney who earns commissions, eat what you kill scenario. You know, they're, they're actually the owners of the firm and they're wondering why they aren't getting more money in their pocket. And so we provide that clarity. We can go and say, well, look at this very rich— we compliment them. Look at this very rich benefits package you have. Good on you. But we need to help you figure out a way to afford all these benefits because your turnover ratio— here I go, Mr. KPI— your turnover ratio is huge this year. So you had all these benefits to attract these people. They took advantage of them and then they left.

Yeah.

You know what? What, what can we help fix here through the clarity of your numbers? I mean, that's— that makes us worth gold to them. When you do this work, people out there listening, don't just bang the numbers in because you decided to be a bookkeeper. You know, don't just bang the numbers in because you can't afford a bookkeeper and you hope like heck that it all comes out clean at the end. You know, find people like us that can help you focus on being an attorney, Mr. and Mrs. Attorney, and bookkeepers out there, it's more than just banging the numbers in and sending reports and then hiding under the rock.

Right. Head down. Don't talk to the client ever.

Right.

Right. Except maybe in January. That's it. And you really, it's so easy to do that. But if you're not getting paid the right amount for the work you're doing, then you don't wanna have that. And we have legacy clients that are just in that place that I barely talk to these people. They've been clients of mine for a very long time and once or twice a year. I may talk to them if I see something going on. I might talk to them, but they're not really at the level they should be at. So another project I need to get done is to get them raised up because I haven't done it in a while. Um, but it's easy not to have— I don't want to have that kind of a client base though. I'd rather— I prefer the client base that we have. Although some days I'm like, oh, I wish I had the clients that I was talking to because so many meetings and it's like, oh, so many meetings. But it's It's, when you do the work we're doing and you're helping them, it's very, it makes you feel good when you actually sit with a client, say, look where you started. When you started with us, you were here and look where you are now. And to hear that, I, I had one the other day, one of our clients, Sarah, and I was talking to him like, you really surprised me at how much you've gotten, how much work you do as a solo. And he is like, really? And I'm like, yeah. I mean, I see all these different files and the work you're producing is—

Yeah, yeah. We see all that.

We see it.

Right. It's impressive the amount of work you're getting out with so few people and the, and your profit margin or whatever. And they're like, oh wow, I didn't really— that makes them feel good. And it's true. So it gives them a little bit of a good perspective so they have an idea of where they're at. And then that way you can really talk to them about different things. And they typically, sometimes it, they come to us more if they have a coach. And I find it's kind of fun. Sarah and I kind of will do working with those clients will, will give them advice as we're going along and they, they don't understand what they're being asked and they're a little bit lost with their coach and it just provided them with a little bit of information like, this is what I see on your file. Then they can go to the coach and armed with some knowledge and hopefully it's in the long run, maybe they get rid of the coach if they're not doing too well. The coach, because these coaches are very, very expensive. Very expensive. And I think sometimes they just don't realize that this is the work we can do too.

The other thing too I was thinking about as you both were talking is if you do have that person that's in-house that has maybe come to you with a few ideas and you're like, eh, not right now, maybe take another look at it, see what they're asking for, or appreciate them differently. Because I mean, I remember being in-house and feeling so So underappreciated, always being told my role is critical, but I was completely undervalued and never paid well enough. And honestly, for the overhead factor, it is hard right now. It's hard to— it's hard for people to see it for what it is, what it needs to be. It's also an area that we don't have a lot of individuals coming into.

Right.

There's not a lot of accounting people going into this industry because of sort of the way it's kind of built. Long hours, unappreciative. It needs— the coin needs to flip pretty drastically. And we are not just tending to your financials. We also have ideas of how to drive that with you. We also have ways to support you, like to your point, Lynda Artesani. Thank you. We may not always display it, but it'll come out in a conversation, which actually, that's the part. I know we do a lot of meetings, but sometimes it's just the sheer joy of seeing that light bulb switch, that turnkey moment.

They understand it. Yeah. And you know, sometimes too, if you think about it, if you're, and we're not, none of us are the tax person, but I think that the tax person feels this way too, right? They have a short window of time to get all the data out, get it all filed, and they're the person that comes to them and says, you owe the IRS $150,000.

It need, they need April 15th.

April 15th or whatever, and then they're sitting there going, oh, and then they start and turn it back to the tax person going, you know, you're not doing your job right. Why am I paying this much? John down the street doesn't pay that much. I mean, you can hear the conversations. And this is why the tax people want to get out doing the taxes. They don't want to do that.

Tax planning.

Yeah, they don't want to do that work.

The relationship of things.

And it's really not on the— we've had many a client that forgets to send their estimated taxes. You know, that can happen where they don't really or don't know they have to pay it. And we have to tell them about it. Like, you, you have your estimates all set to go. What's an estimate?

Yeah.

Well, you don't get to keep that money all year. So sometimes we have those conversations too. And I think that truly that's something that I can see how the tax people feel very underappreciated. And that's why so many of them don't want to do it anymore, especially with the deadlines and trying to get all the work done really fast and get it done quickly and get it done for everybody and on time. Everybody just, Was it this year or the first? It was the first year after the pandemic. Everybody's like, pandemic, they're all in late. And then the year after the pandemic, everybody wanted their taxes on time.

Mm-hmm.

And everybody wanted us to get the books to the tax person on time. And guess what happened? The taxes didn't get done on time. We're like hearing peep from people in October, like, are my P&L still good? And like, well, you just pushed us so hard in January, February, and you never did it. It never got processed. Hmm.

So. I know, I know. You're like, ah. It's tricky, tricky wick of things that we have to do, so.

Being the neutral people out there for the law firms, you know, we can be somebody to actively listen to them when they have a challenge and we're confidential and we can learn so much about what's going on with their numbers or why they're perceiving them the way they are just if we listen to them. We can provide empathy and understanding because they're in the fireplace with, in the business, they're in there poking the logs, making the fires burning, keeping everybody happy. And we can provide empathy and understanding and we're problem solving for them. And, you know, we have all of those tools in our kit to help them with. And that makes us incredibly valuable because we're looking at it. One of the favorite words that I love that you use all the time, Sarah, is looking at it through a different lens. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

That's what we're doing for these businesses because we're not in there in the firm listening to what's going on with the Jones case and everybody, the herd runs down the hall into the boardroom, slams the door shut and sits in there and does their depositions and comes out pulling their hair and all that. We're over here on this side watching the numbers, making sure that everything is posted where it should be, that, you know, when they filed for the depositions and, and paid for them and got their expert witnesses and all of those things. We're getting it all in the right buckets so that they, when they're ready to close out that case, they can say, what do you show on the books for Sarah Prevost's case in client costs? And we can say, well, where you see that, that she owes you $13,000, that's what you've billed in your billing system. You're good to go. Or here's a ledger of it. Compare it to your billing system and go. And they appreciate those things. Because we're over here looking at them.

You know, we're— People have forgotten case costs. We've, you know, we've located— so I have these lenses, you can decide. I love it.

But it's, you know, we do have a set of eyes, Lynda.

Like, like, uh, like we have one of our girls, she is— before any money's released out of the PI firm, One of our ladies, that's all she does is validate that they did the spreadsheet right, because they choose to do it in a spreadsheet for all of them, right?

Well, that's key. That's another one of those neutrality things. I'm sorry to interrupt. That's, you know, they trust us and they know we're going to hold their feet to the fire in providing that settlement statement to us to audit and say, yeah, it looks good, or no, you made a 50-cent error over here or whatever. I'm sorry, Lynda, I interrupted.

But no, I was going to say too, sometimes we'll just get that nasty, grim email come to us and we're like, oh, where did that come from? But sometimes you have to step back and go, okay, read it a couple of times because sometimes email can be translated in multiple ways. So maybe you take it personally, but it's not. And then secondly, if it is coming across kind of nasty and there's no really validation to it, sometimes you have to go, okay, so this is a collection attorney and that attorney is in the court and maybe they had a bad day or they're a family lawyer and they're doing a custody case that day and the person lost their kids, they lost their side of the case. And that's why they're not, um, in a great stellar mood to begin with. And sometimes it's just a misunderstanding. I mean, had it happen the other day with a client, one of my clients, and they just didn't understand how client costs were. We went this whole big thing about client costs last month and agreed that they were gonna be done a different way. And now look at the numbers, and he's like, I, I see so much money here. I didn't make this much money. Well, yeah, you did. You did. You wanted it as expenses. You didn't want it up in the asset. So you took all the expenses in the earlier month and now you don't have them, but you got a lot of income because you're billing out client costs. So yes, you did. It's— that's why I didn't like the method that you wanted to go to, but you insisted we change everything. Well, we changed it and now that's the effect of it, which I did warn them about, but that was a month ago and we already forgot about it. So now I have to have another meeting and talk about the client costs again because they want to talk to you in a meeting and it's like, fine, fine, I'll talk to you. I actually made a video and everything already because I was like, I was going to bother me over the weekend if I hadn't at least made the video and reminded them and pointed it all out on the— on all the sheets to show, well, this is what you agreed to. This is what we moved. This is how you wanted it to be.

Yeah.

Making you happy. You know, I move things out of the chart of accounts because you don't like things in certain accounts. And then I take your email because I don't want to look dumb to the tax person. I know what bucket it belongs in. But if you're insistent, I take it out of here and put it in here. Your email is getting attached to those transactions where you told me you wanted it moved. So when the tax person says, why is this here, Lynda? Oh, let me look because I won't remember. And I go, oh, that's why. Talk to the client. That's where they wanted it. You can have the argument with them. I already tried, didn't win the argument. And at some point I was just like, I'm done. I'm done arguing.

Huge. That's huge. I love that.

It's huge.

And you know what else we can do? The employees in the firm are sometimes intimidated.

Yeah.

Or they're just too busy. The firm is just too busy to get that precious time they need. To hash some things out. And one of the, one of the phrases I like to use when the attorney is in high power mode, I call it, I just tell them, you know, let's take our attorney hat off and put our business owner hat on. Let's take a deep breath. Let's come down to this level. The numbers are what the numbers are, you know, so let's talk through them, but let's let go of all this other stuff for now. And it creates that safe space for them.

Yeah. If you're, if you're so goal-oriented, you're going to miss certain things. You're going to miss the patterns that we see differently. You're going to miss the area of conversation that we're trying to have with you based on compliance. There is an IRS guidance on this whole hard cost thing.

That's usually what we tell the staff to go to the IRS website, pull down what that's supposed to be. And then if they still say, nope, I want to hear, then we'll just move it and make it, make a note of it. But I always find it fascinating when we do a new client and Sarah will say, we're business owners too. We totally get it. And their face changes because they, they don't really look at us as a business owner. And she reminds them of that. And then their face is like, oh, that's right.

Still the same issues.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We deal with the same thing.

Same things.

Same exact thing. You know, same pain points. We have very similar pain points on a lot of the same things. So, and this is how we deal with it. And, and you just, that's just a reminder to them that we're not this other thing that's over here. It's not the same issue.

We're this other thing.

Yeah. Here's, here's something for those of you listening. I dare you to ask an accountant if they feel that they're valued enough.

Yeah.

See what kind of response you get.

Because we didn't want to name it this. Sierra made us. We were going to call it When Your Client Doesn't Value Your Services, but she made it in a happy, positive way. How valuable is an accounting person to your firm?

Well, it came from a staff conversation, which is a very valuable moment for us. And that's why we wanted to share this. Because no matter what, there's value in all the things that the service industry— I mean, I would never be able to walk into any sort of court and try and defend somebody. I would never try and pretend. As some crazy people try to do this falsely, but in the same way—

And if our staff is listening, we appreciate you all and we do value you. Just make sure you all know that we're not talking about our staff. We love them all.

And you know, one of the other things I wanted to point out is we have the ability from this side of the fence to embrace the firm administrators and become their best friends because they have the keys to the kingdom.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know, like I'm having a meeting this afternoon. I have a standing meeting with one of our largest clients every Monday afternoon. Sometimes it's 10 minutes, sometimes it's an hour, but I get the pulse of what's going on in the firm. I help her fix problems.

Yeah.

I, you know, I tell her, go, you know, figure this out for next week and let me know what you see. Can you get me that information? And you'll find that all of a sudden a lot of the floodgates open up because they'll get you what you need and then you look like a hero to the firm owner. Because they've got good numbers, good solid numbers, because you're not begging them over and over and over for the information. So we have that ability to make an— to have an influence in the firm without directly having an influence in the firm, if you will.

Yeah, so true. Well, with that, we had our spicy conversation.

Yeah, I want to keep going.

And then—

and wait, there's more.

We could do a part something on this at a later date, but this was good.

I enjoyed this conversation.

Yeah, definitely.

All right, Ms. Tierra.

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It was a great— Steve, next time just get the memo about wearing blue.

Right. Or you don't want today.

Oh, what does Tiara have on today? I didn't pay attention. Actually, this was all that was clean. I threw my back out last week and I couldn't do laundry this weekend. So So I'm like, I'm gonna get that black shirt out.

That's good. I'm just joking. Well, thanks for the great talk today.

This is awesome. Thank you, everybody.

Bye-bye, everyone.