Navigating Legal Accounting File Reviews

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 hey, we're not Stevelets this week. That was hard to say.

Hey, everybody.

That was hard to say. We're not Stevelets.

Last week I was under the desk. I just listened.

I was under the desk.

We didn't— if you go back over an episode, we didn't mention that we were without Steve until like the very last second.

It was bad. You sound like my mom. Oh, we left Steve at the gas station.

Yeah.

How many kids do you have? Whoops.

And where were you, Steve? Where were you, Steve, last week? You were—

I was at the Meeker Classic Sheepdog Trials in Meeker, Colorado.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, I hosted the rally and I had 29 Airstreams there and it was like—

You left an Airbus behind.

My Airbus, yeah.

I was thinking that you were off in your Airbus and she was like, oh my God, why do I keep calling it an Airbus? Now it's just a running joke. It's like—

Yeah, yeah. So I left my Airbus there because I had some truck challenges, but it was like herding cats last week with all the attendees.

Oh, was it?

Yeah. Like people would come up and go, where are we supposed to be this evening? I'm like, did you read what I just sent you? Yeah.

Did you see— I don't know if you guys saw this because I was up really early this morning, so I went to bed early and the spacewalk this morning with this— that was so cool.

Isn't that cool?

Oh my God. So you got to go look at it. I actually watched it on X so I could see like their SpaceX, right? It was hosted by SpaceX. It was amazing. I mean, they— it was, it was so cool to see like them come up out of the thing and they were checking in what they could do with their arms and being out in the— out in space. And they just opened it up. Like I said to my husband, I said, look, they opened it up like they opened up a plane, you know, and they opened the plane doors. And it was like that. It was so amazing.

It has come so far.

And that's great, right? So watching that is just like— it just almost brings you back to like Steve, when you saw them land on the moon a long time ago.

1969.

Wait, okay, so what's interesting is I'm— I was watching a series that featured that exact 1969 moment historically, and it's— that was last night I was watching it. So it's kind of interesting.

Like, that is so weird. I watched Apollo 13 last night.

I did too.

I watched Apollo 13.

I forgot about a lot of that, and it was so That was a really good documentary.

We need to buy a lottery ticket. How much do you guys want to chip in?

Okay, let's do it. Those are true personalities. We're supposed to have a topic in here somewhere, but—

Oh, yes, we do. We have a topic. We do have a topic.

It's called— We do.

Navigating Legal Accounting File Reviews.

So file reviews for the legal industry.

Basically about the file review. And first and number 1 tip on file reviews get paid for them. I went many years without getting paid for them. You deserve to be paid for your time and legal ones especially because they're more complex. So for sure, make sure you get paid for them. And then of course, the logical thing is how much do I get paid? Kind of depends on where you are in your practice and the size of the firm you're analyzing, right? So if you have a complex firm that's multiple locations and multiple attorneys or— Yeah. A lot of attorneys, you could charge like $1,200, $800, $900. I mean, you could go upwards to that. Smaller ones, maybe $500, but you should get paid for it. And that's just kind of a guide. Charge what you can get away with because you should get paid for them.

Well, it's not that you should get paid. It's the same service that's being offered to evaluate when a firm is taking on a case and—

Exactly.

So it's the same conversation in that way, the way that I see it. The— I feel like what really happens in that moment is that you're not just a package price commercial off the shelf. You really are tailoring to the service needs, and you're starting to see— maybe not to say anything bad about someone else's prior work, but maybe things were not done to the exact way that should have been done, or the rule books, or you have a different lens. So you're bringing that forward, and it's like you're It's twofold. It's a service of doing a file review to offer a good price for your time to do the work going forward, as well as allowing them to see things that you'll see differently. And it gives them stuff to walk away with. If they don't go with you, at least they understand, okay, I can see the exact point of when they're saying my trust was this, or my metrics didn't align with this as I thought. Most think they're okay.

Mm-hmm.

Until somebody else puts their eyes on it and realizes what a detriment or an exposure of something that needs some fine-tuning. And you just need to work it differently, or software wasn't integrated right. And so that's why everything's been out of line for so long. Those are the ways to approach it in a healthy, positive way. But it's also the value of your time to what Lynda you're saying is exactly.

Well, and in that initial interview, the client's going to tell you a lot of things if you just listen. They're going to give you a lot of clues that are going to help you price that review of their file. They're going to tell you this happened, that happened. I don't like this, I don't like that. We do. You can ask probing questions.

Yeah.

To get that information and that'll help you determine how much you should charge, whether it should be a flat rate, an hourly rate, whatever to review it. Generally it's a flat rate. Would you agree?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

To Sarah's point, if you're examining the records and you see, you know, you could all go into the audit log and see who's been in there.

Exactly.

When you're in the file and you see that and you don't ever wanna bash somebody else's work, even if they didn't do the work very well, when you go back to the attorney to explain what you saw, your findings, or if you write out your findings, which Sarah and I tend to do, sometimes we just do a Loom video instead of writing it out a big long drawn out thing. We want them to see it live in their file so they can comprehend what we're—

Oh, that's beautiful.

Yeah. And we've done that many times, a lot of times, especially if the file is messy. But we also, we don't ever bash. Even if the work is really bad, we don't go, wow, your last bookkeeper was terrible. Don't ever do that because you don't know if the last bookkeeper was that person's husband or wife or you don't know.

Well, sometimes the situation—

It's just not professional.

Yeah, yeah, it's exactly— I mean, I think Lynda and I both, and you're probably in the same boat, Steve, it doesn't shine well for us. It doesn't give us any accolades difference. I mean, I think really what it is, is to our point, what we try to do is really stick to the facts. And we used to do these elaborate write-ups Oh, it's really hard to digest those pieces. So when Lynda was like, hey Sarah, let's just try and do a video review of it. Not every single file needs that, but we will high-level top key points, or sometimes it just makes sense to start a new file if it's really bad.

It's not— We just had that happen, right?

Exactly.

Looked at it and it was best for the client because it was going to take less of our time than figuring out how to fix what was there, just creating a whole new file and just starting over.

Yeah. Well, and to your point, Lynda Artesani, on not bashing somebody else's work, I like to turn that into a positive and say, looks like we have a great opportunity here to work on X in your books and then drill in and point it out. And they, they get that message. They know what you're talking about. But it's like, here's, here's what we are going to really focus on and do because this is what we see. And it doesn't have to include that, that past person at all.

Yeah, exactly.

And I like your, your comment on the audit log too. That's, that's really key. Don't overlook the audit log when you're reviewing the file.

It really is important. I mean, we just, we're talking about a client the other day that it's like, remember this client changed accounting Teams.

Mm-hmm.

Almost like changing the software. I think they do that too annually. They just change and change and change like it's gonna get better. But we spent a lot of time cleaning up files. So you wanna look at the file when you're doing the file, doing this file review. I think, you know, use your tools. So use the overview window with all the— it tells you how many transactions and all that. We kind of always start on the balance sheet. We dive right into the balance sheet and look at the records through the balance sheet lens to start to see where they're at. We ask the client for the last filed tax return. Don't miss that step because obviously if you find a lot of mistakes that are in the past, it, it's gonna be a process to fix that and you're not gonna affect the past or change the past. You're gonna make adjustments in the current fiscal year. So it's really important to also do it that way to go through the file meticulously look at the bank accounts, look in that, use that accountant's toolbar, tool, what is it, briefcase? They used to call it the accountant's briefcase. I think it's just accountant tools now. Look through that and look at when was everything last reconciled.

That's specific to QuickBooks. But if you're in a different software and some of, not every software has it, I mean, these are very specific tools, but in a generally accepted way, I would say the best thing to do is, to your point, take the tax return, evaluate that to the financial statements. Look at the details of those financial statements. See where they're currently year-to-date at. Do they even remotely get close to the balances on the bank statement?

Guaranteed they don't.

I can— They don't because everything's in the wrong place.

Nobody— you want to be a great standout bookkeeping firm, accounting firm? Tie the books to tax. Tie the books to tax. I mean, nobody does that. And it's like, how does this go on and on and never happen? And because let's face it, the tax professionals don't ever give us the adjusting entries. They don't. And so we have to figure it out. And it's still good. Like, you know, we talk to our staff and we, I think a lot of times that that's missed. I think you learn, Sarah and I were talking about yesterday because we're kind of doing a little thing this afternoon with our team, show them how to do this. And it's a good action to do because I remember the first time I looked at the tax return next to my, my own personal books and made those adjustments that the tax person didn't give me. And I can remember going through that line by line by line, but it helped me understand why we we do what we do for the taxes, right?

That's brilliant. Yes.

It's a great process to do. Look at that, to Sarah's point, look at books to tax to see how far off we are. We had a client recently, he wanted us to rebuild a couple years of his file and nobody ever reconciled it. They just dumped the bank feeds in, but nobody's ever reconciled it. And at some point in time, the bank feeds broke and somebody reconnected it. So you know what came in when all that happened. The beginning balance was reconciled and they had a bunch of duplicate entries that all got put in because the person doing the bookkeeping put all those duplicates in. And then there was things missing. That's the part that—

All the missing stuff.

There's a lot of missing stuff on the credit card side.

Yeah. Yeah. And I was cleaning up not an attorney file, but just doing a little cleanup, making sure— because the person really— and I felt it was great— wants to learn how to do their own books. Okay, great. So I oversee it from the other side. And of course, like, just to Lynda's point, one thing was missing, almost $3,000. Well, that individual needed that expense on their books based on what I'm seeing for the net income. And, and of course, the expense incurred, you can't pick it up later, so you really want to pick it up then.

Yeah.

And it happened through the account. Well, it's, it's our roles. We know what we're doing as you as the business owner in your profession, is that time well served for you to, to be doing that?

They don't want to do it.

Attorneys really need to evaluate and structure your time so that if you're the managing partner in the firm, that this firm is producing and humming and the HR needs are met. And I mean, if— let's face it, employee retention has been a struggle, just getting employees in certain levels of areas of expertise is also hard. And then on top of that, maintaining client satisfaction is also really important. And then you've got the trust compliance on top. You've got all these components. Where, where are you best served as a business owner of a law firm? Not doing that part.

Exactly, exactly. And you know, you, you just said trust compliance. I was going to say legal compliance. You know, that's a big hot button. The three of us know that. You know, that's besides the balance. Well, on the balance sheet, obviously looking at that first and seeing how it ties to the bank balance. And, you know, a lot of firms will just dump everything from trust into legal fee income and there's really client expenses in there. And, you know, there's some unraveling you need to do to look at when you're reviewing the file and making notes. And I like your— that's brilliant that you're doing it.

And then also look at your chart of accounts. That's one of the first things. Look and it's like, oh my goodness, does that have somebody's name? It's like, you know, and it's got employee names on the balance sheet or whatever. It's like, okay, so this person didn't have an understanding of what they need to do.

What's hard for a client, and I completely understand. I mean, we went through this in an exercise of a different way, is collecting all the things that we need. It is a lot of work. We see this. I just saw something float past really quick as a reminder, but it's true. We're looking for these things not because 'cause we wanna pester you and get all this stuff and just have validation. No, we, we're looking at it because we wanna make sure you've trusted us to review this. If you hire us, great. If you don't, that's okay. But at least we've given you a prognosis of what needs to happen and where things could be misaligned.

Mm-hmm.

From there, you could dig in deeper, fully on you. But we need some of these factual documents to validate. This information. And I personally am not interested in having your personal sign into all of your banks to do that, because that's not a great spot for me to be in. That puts me in a liability spot. But I would like to collect as much as possible from you as we can to ensure that we can make sure what we're going to give you is truth and accuracy in that moment of time. And so, yeah, it— I mean, Lynda and I just recently experienced this, like, oh my gosh. this is a lot of work. But it's great for us to be reminded of this because it's the same thing that we put clients through too in the front end. Yeah.

You said that the other day because I was complaining about something that we're doing that we hired a firm to do, and it seems like it's a heavy lift on our side to just get them the information. And Sarah goes, what do clients feel like then, huh? Do you understand what that feels like for them? And I'm like, oh, yeah, that's exactly what we do for clients. We ended up having a little bit of a mini staff meeting with our global team, and it was like, we don't want our clients feeling like this. So the, the, the Ask My Client account should not be a dumping zone. That was an issue we had with an old global team. It shouldn't be— suspense deposit shouldn't be just a dumping zone, because it, it irritates the client. The client's now paid this money to us to do the work, and we're just sending it off to them like we're lazy, and we don't Google some of these bank feed things that come in. And Google— sometimes you have to Google it. Like I was telling the team, this firm's in Miami, Florida. So use Miami, Florida. If the company's named CLC or something like that, there might be a million CLC companies, but do CLC Miami.

Regionally, you're saying regionally.

Regionally. Look, but they're out of the country, so they don't, you know, tell them that is helpful as they're doing these searches. And I will see how the project goes, but we kind of made a set rule because these are things that as they do clean work and project work, this is what we expect, our expectations.

Our entire team, all of it stateside and our staff on the global side, our entire team, it's— Steven, you've brought this up before in past conversations. When we're reviewing a file, We're looking at these things. And the same thing goes the other way when we're doing the work. The client may not be in the file as much as us, but it's just the perception of the value of work.

Yeah.

And that's, I think, the biggest thing. And that's what we're doing too, is we're looking at, okay, the health of the file, the value of the work, and what needs to happen to make it done. And that's sometimes where the critical mass idea of You know, it's so messy. Why would you pay me to undo all of this heavy lifting? Why don't we just start fresh and have a clean start? We have a tax return that can give us a clean start. Let's just go forward and we'll help you make that decision because it's not— doesn't benefit us to sit here and have you spend all your dollars and time validating all these things that were done incorrectly when we could just start a fresh file and know exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

And you have to— goes the other way.

What you were saying to Google, I like a search engine called What's That Charge? Have you ever used it?

No.

So check that out. It's called What's That Charge? And when you get those really weird transactions that have all the little numbers and stuff in there, you can put that in there and it'll tell you what it is.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

Oh, that's a good tip. See, we'll have to tell everybody about that.

What's—

Well, I didn't know this. Did you guys know this? Sometimes when merchant people pick up new devices, it's in the other— it's not wiped, so it's in the other firm's name. So when the merchant comes through, you're like, wait, this doesn't— like, the phone number doesn't attach.

That's really interesting.

And it's happened to me a few times. Not often, but you do see it because there's third-party sellers to purchase the equipment, right? And so when I look at it, so we have to do a little digging. What phone number is it? If it's truly an ask, it's truly an ask. I'll ask you. I'm not above myself to be like, you know what? You went to the store that I know sells office supplies, furniture, and groceries. Please tell me what's on the receipt so I don't get myself into trouble. What's Amazon for? Hmm?

What's Amazon for on the books?

Oh, yeah.

Well, office expense. But was it?

Well, you know, if it's of a certain value or money, Yeah. I mean, yeah, no.

And that's the other thing you want to look at when you're doing a file review. You want to go through things that people have put as assets and look at those transactions to see the value, the cost that was put in. Because a lot of times people just go, oh, that was a desk. I'm putting it in an office furniture when the desk only costs $700 and it shouldn't be in his office furniture because it's, you know.

Oh, as the asset versus the expense.

As an asset. Yeah, but some people don't know that rule and they just dump things up into asset category, which, you know—

Which I find comical. I got into a file and everything got labeled as the bank's name, all the expenses and all the deposits. And I'm like, okay. And when I dug a little deeper, I'm like, there's no way the bank's paying you, right? The bank isn't giving you the money.

It's always interesting to see the creative ways people—

The creative way. So I get in and I was like, oh, that's the name. And then I had to explain the value of why it's important to put the actual vendor name or client name associated with these things.

Amen.

What about 1099s? And what about this? But it was, I mean, it was like even like verifications of like, say, a Stripe or a Zelle or something coming through to validate. And it was under that bank name. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we got issues here. We can't be doing stuff like this.

So.

I find it comical what people will do and then how you have to demystify or realign the things and say, look, this is why it has to be this way. I'm not looking to find myself work. I'm looking to give you a clean set of books that I could stand behind if something were to come about.

Right.

Some people go through people's books and I'll say to Sarah, what were they thinking? And then we kind of like talk it through and figure out what they were thinking because it's like, I don't get why they put this here.

And, uh, Oh, you could actually turn on features like sales tax and didn't mean to, or projects and didn't mean to. There's so many things depending on the software you're using.

Sometimes the settings aren't set up. I mean, I just did that with a lady today with coaching. She did not have on the billable expenses and she's doing it without any legal software. And I'm like, there's this button and we turned it on. She's like, oh my God, that's amazing. But, you know, it was for client costs. And I said that way when you go to make an invoice, it'll trigger that these are billable. And oh my God, that was like a big epiphany. But these are things that people don't think about. And if you are in QuickBooks, I mean, going through the— you go through that overview tab, you can kind of go through and see at a high level how many transactions, vendors without payees, like you're just mentioning, there's a lot there. And you can go through the reclass tool and do a little bit of the cleanup there as you start to look. But when you're getting into the trust account, I mean, first thing we do is the balance sheet. We collapse up the trust account if it's sectioned off. If it's not, just look at the two balances. Usually they're like night and day. They're completely—

Well, you hope, you hope. We've had this happen, like to my point of the bank stuff. And Steve, tell me if this has happened to you. All deposits, all withdrawals, transfers out, and that's how they're labeled. Yeah. So, okay, that's great, but what were they?

The transfers, people using the transfer feature. I thought they were taking that away.

I thought that— You're specific to QuickBooks. Just to clarify who's listening, she's really referencing QuickBooks quite a bit here. There are other ledger systems out there, but there are features within the tools that we all use that you start to question the value of why that feature is available on types of accounts. Certain types of accounts should not have that feature turned on in that ledger system. So yeah.

Well, the thing to understand too with the file review is to ask them how many different software platforms have they used? Did they use Quicken and then they went to QuickBooks? Did they use Xero? Did they use whatever? Find out how many iterations of—

FreshBooks.

FreshBooks, exactly.

A free one. There's a free one too, isn't there? Free one.

Oh yeah. What's the one that's—

There's the self-employed that everyone likes to try and get away with. I'm like, what are you doing? You're a business.

Oh, it's called solopreneur or something. Isn't there one like solopreneur now with QuickBooks? I don't know. Buy that. I mean, they— I know. I don't know why. Don't. It's a business. Don't do that. Yeah.

Especially practice management software too, because that messes the integration. Yes. Yeah.

So, well, sometimes you can't connect it depending on the level of file you get.

Yeah, that's true.

Ledger General, you know, they got the ledger types. Those are, don't have high functionality. They're for basically for tax firms to rebuild data on the fly. Basically that's what those cheap ledger, $11 a month system, those—

You get what you pay for.

Yep. Exactly. And here's something else to consider when you're doing a file review is Setting clear communication channels. Who is the person? Who's my contact person in the firm? Because quite often we've run into, you know, 2 or 3 different partners with 2 or 3 different ideas.

Mm-hmm.

And they don't talk to each other. And so one will say, do it this way, and the other will say, do it that way. And so, you know, you need to set clear communication channels and also creating a review checklist for them. This is what we've talked about. This is what we're gonna do. This is what you want us to do. This is what we're going to look at, because sometimes these file reviews, like you said a while ago, Sarah, they either hire us or they don't. But when you're doing the file review, sometimes it grows bigger and bigger and bigger. And, and, you know, some— if they don't hire you, they usually— I have found they'll come back 7 or 8 months later and hire us or, you know.

Yeah.

So those are some important things to think about when you're reviewing the file. Who is my point person? What is the checklist? What's expected of us? And I love, again, your Loom approach. I really like that.

And also, if you're looking at someone who's in like a QuickBooks or a Xero and Clio, look at the AR in QuickBooks, look at the AR in Clio or QuickBooks. Don't, in Clio, don't, make sure they align. If they're so far off, or are they connected? Is Clio connected to the software? Because people leave that as a standalone a lot and You wanna make sure that if it is not connected, there can be a completely different set of records inside of Clio 'cause nobody's really validating what's in Clio or any of the other products. I mean, there's other ones too, but Clio's the bigger one that people don't connect for some odd reason. They think that it's not necessary to connect. So you wanna make sure that they're connected and that they're free-flowing data. I know Clio has that button sync and you can go look and see what sync errors are, where things that didn't get ported over.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Check on those. Check on undeposited funds if you are using QuickBooks. I mean, it is the one that most people use. Look at undeposited funds. Don't forget about that because that's a big black hole that can be, you can, I'll never forget the file that I missed on it and the guy had like 500 transactions. This is not law firm. He had 500 transactions and I only saw the one page. I did look, I saw one page. Wow. Went on for pages. I'd never experienced somebody not ever doing it. And when I got the job and I started to look at it, it was many pages of, well, 100, right? Because there's 50 on a page, 100 pages of things I had to deal with that had never been moved over. He had connected a software and it was just a mess.

Interesting what we gleaned from past experiences, because I, I see it and I love it about you because you remind me of it. Is the trigger points that, like, your own triggers of like, oh, God, I've been through that hell. I'm going to have to make sure I check that. Or does the financials actually align with this? Or so it is amazing what we do after kind of the war wounds, I guess you'd say, of things that we've been through. But the value, the ultimate value back to the firm owner is it's your choice to do what you need. But now you are equipped with information from an unbiased place. You've paid for that time, and from there you can go. I mean, it's not— every client is a good fit, and not every— and it goes both ways. But also transactionally, sometimes things happen in a firm where an in-house person was working really well and it— nobody knows what's going on, and then something happens to them, and now you have this big black hole. You've never had an outside firm overseeing it. To understand it. So that's also a way to look at it through that lens too. It's not, not questioning in-house people's work, but do things actually align the way they should? And who has their pulse on that?

And just know that if you're working with a law firm, it might be a paralegal or a legal assistant that got the job of doing the bookkeeping. They just don't have an understanding of it. They're just told, this is how you enter the bills, this is how you do this, this is how you do that.

Yeah.

Don't know all the pieces connect, and that can make it difficult for them to understand because they don't have the accounting background. So you're looking at big picture and, and yeah, that's the end result. And then a lot of times when we get asked this a lot in the Law Lab is, how do I know where to go? How do I know where to start? How do I know where I should do the cutoff? What if the client doesn't want to pay for going back really far because the file is like messed up from the very, very beginning? What do I do? How do I handle that? And that's a different, whole different conversation about what do you do if the file is 5-year-old trust account.

I have a question for you guys. So you brought this up, so I'm gonna ask you both and each, you can each answer. So you're engaged, you, the file reviews happened, you're engaged and you realize the big picture moment is not being shared with you and decisions are being made outside of you. Now what?

So big decisions are being made about what to do.

Big partnership decisions are being made and you're just seeing money leave the door or expense it and you're like, wait a minute, I'm an integral part to this. Now what? You're an outside firm. But you're not— You're trying to help them with their goals. Now what?

Go ahead, Steve.

Well, we're experiencing that right now with a firm that came on earlier this year. And the two partners both have different ideas. And so the best solution for us has been to get them in a Zoom meeting, the two of them together, and say, okay, you said— and you have to be honest— you said this and you said that. What do you want?

Hmm.

No, you've got—

you—

we literally— they wanted us to do class accounting. Love these guys. These are great people to work with, but they have different ideas on how their class accounting should be And so, you know, the train left the station with class accounting set up one way and then they've changed the course of it in the middle here. And so we need to go back.

And they didn't tell you.

They did. But the two partners have different ideas on how it should be classed. And so, you know, that's a common thing that happens. So it's getting that clear communication. And back to what I said a minute ago, my answer here, Sarah, is who is our key point person? Yeah. Who's the managing partner?

Yeah.

That's my answer.

I mean, that happens to us when all of a sudden it's like, oh, we didn't tell you we're moving to XYZ software from the one we've been— Oh, we didn't have part of that conversation. And all the company did the migration, but did it validate back? Who validated it? Oh, I thought they did. They don't.

So— Or we opened a new office 45 days ago, a new location. Were you going to tell us?

Yeah. It's amazing what they don't tell us, and it's amazing what they do.

It partly goes back to my thing about the non-judgment of the file review in the sense of whoever was doing it, because sometimes we're ill-equipped with knowing these decisions are being made. And that's great that y'all went off on your journey and made those decisions. There needs to be a loop back. But yet in the same breath, I feel like that's what's happening sometimes in those file reviews without even knowledge to it. Like, we— you just don't know. So thanks for entertaining me because these things have come up, as Lynda noted, and I often am like, wow, how do you miss the most integral person in this?

Like, the accounting people that works in the file. That's the thing that gets me is like, you didn't need to include us in this conversation at all. Yeah.

Yeah, but we're here to help, not here to, you know, dissuade and say no.

I always say we're not here to torture you by asking you this question.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So let's just have a conversation. Yes.

Yes.

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That was a good conversation. So thanks for everybody for joining. Thank you, everybody. See you all next week.

Bye now.

Bye.