013 Should Projects Start With Incomplete Info?

Hey, it's a beautiful day to run an accounting firm, friends. Oh, but I tell you what isn't beautiful. You get those clients old Starty Stoppy where they give you partial information and then you go to deliver it and they're like, oh no, here's actually some more stuff. I wasn't done giving you information. How do we draw the line here? How do we protect our own sanities should you start projects with incomplete info? And on the other side of that, what happens if you come to find out they didn't give you complete info? Maybe you already shipped off those financials and they're like, I found some expenses from a few months back or God forbid you filed a tax return. Now you gotta amend it. Oh, mama. We're gonna dig into it today. You know what it's called. Okay, real quick, fun little update. Tease this the other day. I'm gonna be emceeing the unique CPA conference in Chicago. Ish. It's called bridging the gap, connecting generations, prioritizing health and finding underlying your success. It's first time unique CPA is doing an in person conference. Gonna be a bunch of soup. Smart people there. But the reason I'm excited is I'll be emceeing it. Come hang out if you're on the east coast. I think Chicago's on the east coast. Is that Midwest? I don't know. People get real upset about that stuff. I'm on the west coast, so. So I'm not informed on these things. August 29th through the 30th, it's a two day. If you're in the area, please come out and hang and support running a first year in person conference, which is hard and it seems absolutely terrifying to me. But Randy Crabtree doesn't seem too concerned about it. Lots of cool people are going to be there. Kenji Kimoto, Nio, Geraldine Carter, Don Brolin, Chase Berkey, a whole Blake Oliver, a whole bunch of people. Oh, they let Los Anderson, John Garrett, Matthew May, Kelly Parks. It's gonna be a fun crowd. Scott Scrano, Christian Keats. So yeah, come hang. That is August 29th through 30th, which I think is kind of like a lull. At least a lull in my conference schedule. There isn't anything after that. I think I've got QuickBooks Connect, but before that I don't know that I have anything after June. So that is that. Okay, Little shower thought for you. Here, put the old shower caps on. I heard this in the context of AI produced videos the other day somebody said AI is about to ruin YouTube through the same lens of like, if AI can just generate gobs of text and all, all this stuff, like are there spaces where it's just going to be overrun with AI generated stuff? And it's really hard to suss out where the humans are, where the bots are. And somebody responded, if I can do what you do, or if I can put out better videos than you, AI isn't the problem, your skill set is. Think about that. Discuss amongst yourselves. If you have thought, put it in the comments before your thought passes through the filter of my thought. I would say I agree to an extent. The hard thing for folks to know right now though is what skill set will AI ultimately not encompass, right? So if like, obviously everybody agrees your skill set should not be set up in the same camp where any sort of automation is setting up camp in the same way that I'm not gonna set up where, you know, QuickBooks Live. Bookkeeping or pilot or TurboTax is setting up. The really challenging thing right now though, is just the ambiguity around what all AI will cover and what it won't cover. So I think the spookiest thing about AI right now is we're pretty sure it won't be able to do the coolest of the things that we are able to do. But it's all very ambiguous. And until like, you know, anytime there's. Now there's perpetually, you know, a new language model looming at any given time. When are we gonna get GPT 5 and 6 and some other language model and all these other things where you genuinely don't know if you're gonna get out of bed tomorrow? And there's this other thing with new capabilities that disrupts what you do. It's just a really weird time to go about doing what we do. And it's especially punching us in the gut right now. But, but I think this is kind of just the new normal and I'm hopeful at some point we adjust to it, the like, quick changing nature of all this stuff and just kind of realize, kind of just gotta take things day by day and make the most of what we can make the most of and keep trying to move up that like, spectrum of value, like keep getting better at what you do and keep getting more specific about what you do. Because the people who are always at risk of are the ones doing the most simple work, the most generic work, but there is always a place for specificity and specificity is always the thing that will help you escape from generic, you know, stuff that will solve problems for anybody. So would you agree with that? Like, where's the nuance there? If AI can do what you do, then AI isn't the problem. Your skill set is. I try not to get annoying by talking about AI too much. The one thing that I do feel like I'm well positioned. Positioned to do is just try to, like, give enough education to help people understand where it's going and what's happening so that you don't end up sitting on the railroad tracks without realizing it. So that you know what's around the corner so that you can be the first person to leverage the cool stuff when it does come out. And so that it doesn't take you by surprise. Because those are the people that get left out to dry when change is happening fast like this. It's the people that are surprised. And so if I was sitting here with my Homer Simpson, the end is near sandwich board on over my shoulders, and the accountants walked by me 20 times and said, no, that's ridiculous. You just didn't pay attention. I'm not gonna feel bad about that. As far as what I have control over, I'm just gonna stand here with the sandwich board sign. It doesn't say the end is near. I think it says, oh, isn't this fun? Or I'm excited, But then in, like, a much smaller typeface. I'm a little bit nervous, but I don't know, this is kind of like the new normal. And I think we kind of just gotta take things a day at a time and lean into what we can lean into. Cause the more educated you are on it, the less risk there is of it leaving you flapping in the breeze. Okay, question. This one stemmed from a conversation on LinkedIn. Catherine. Ah, Gracie G R A C. I. I'm sorry, in advance. Uh, please do tell me the right way to say it. We were talking through, like, and this was specifically with tax prep. What is the right time to start it? What? Like, what threshold does it need to pass to be worthwhile for you to start working on? Do you need 100% of the information? How much of the onus is on you to get them a mega, mega complete list of information needed? And where do you slot that work in? Into the queue. So if somebody provides something, do you immediately stop what you're doing and make sure you have everything you need to finish the project, or do you not look into it until it comes up in the queue? And this is a big thing for month end closes Also, do you stop once you think you have everything in and review everything and send follow up questions to them once they submit that info? Or do you not send those follow up questions until that return comes up in the queue, or that month and close comes up in the queue? And there's upsides and downsides to each of these things. Stopping what you're doing to check that you see, to see that you have everything can definitely fragment your days, can like turn what could be solid, focused work into, oh, great, now I need to stop for 10 minutes and figure out if they actually gave me everything. On the flip side of that, we've all been in that situation where you get to say you got to get the monthly close out by the 15th and you get to it on the 14th and you're like, I sure hope I got everything I need here. And then you look at what you have and you realize, oh, sorry, this bank statement file is busted. Or, oh. Or this is the. I don't know if I shared this before. I think I could share this. The best example of this in my entire professional career. I was at a tax firm. If you're not. So if you're not in the US Doing tax, the extended, like last tax deadline is generally October 15th. For some businesses, that's September 15th is kind of the last deadline. And we had a client that brought their stuff in. They had a QuickBooks desktop file. This was, I don't know, 10, 12 years ago. And brought everything in, gave it to the owner, the partner, and the partner at the time said, you know, to the senior, oh, I gotta sit down and go over this stuff with you. They brought it in in February, sat on a shelf because the partner needed to do something with it before he sat down with the senior over it. This was a business return. So we're coming up on the September 15th deadline. September 10th goes by, still haven't talked about it. September 11th, September 12th, September 13th I think it was. He brings the file over to the senior and says, I don't remember anything about it. I just know that we've got it and we got to get it done in two days. There was a flash drive there. Plugs the old flash drive in, grabs the QuickBooks desktop file. You probably already know what happened here. We didn't have the password, so we'd been sitting on that for, I don't know, six months, seven months. We're now two days from the deadline. Have given them all sorts of excuses as to why it hasn't been yet. Didn't been done yet thus far, and now we have to ask for the password to be able to even get into the QuickBooks file in the first place. And so what does the owner do? He goes to the senior and he says, I'm going to need you to call the client. Oh. And what probably goes down is like the ultimate, just awful move that I have ever experienced in practice. But I think that stuff happens a ton. I don't know, I'm sure you've got. You probably got similar stories, share them in the comments and we can commiserate together. But that is one such example of actually waiting until you can do the work to check to see if you have all the information. And maybe that's kind of ridiculous, but maybe to a degree that's a cautionary tale because if you don't check to see if you have what you need until the moment you can actually sit down and do the work, that's like kicking the can down the road further. So what is that right answer? Do you follow up, make sure you've got everything you need right away as soon as they get you the stuff, or later when you can actually sit down and do the work? Catherine shared her process and there were like various thresholds of, okay, if this is a thing that I can get done within 15 minutes, I'll do this or that. If it's not, I have kind of this other workflow, and that's through the lens of tax. I think there's probably different answers for tax and for month end. My here's, here's. My thing is I'm actually fairly opinionated on this and I have railed quite a bit on my belief in very detailed bespoke client request lists. I think the efficiency of accounting firms largely boils down to how efficiently we gather and request information and how automated that process is. My firm had, we. We filed something like 1600 tax returns a year and then had a staff tax staff of, I don't know, 25 people or something like that. 20 people, maybe not that much on tax. If you think about, no matter what volume you do, if you think about the amount of work that literally goes into building lists of things that you need to send people, then you send said list to that person, then they reply, and they get you half of the things on the list, and then you got to figure out what things you don't have yet. Oftentimes they'll submit those things via various different channels and then following up with them time after time, about here are the things that you need, you multiply. And not all clients are like that. Some will play by the rules, some do great. But if you multiply that amount of work across your entire client base, across all of your staff, that work is pure waste. Because you're not creating the output that someone will pay for you to do for them. They assign no value to you gathering the work. In fact, it's kind of the opposite. It's an annoyance, right? They don't want to have to fuss with it. They're annoyed at how much you generally have to ask of them to get complete information. So that is pure waste. And my opinion is it's not something that humans should be doing the requesting. That is, I think we need to move kind of that info gathering paradigm to the machines. Machines are always doing the requesting and the auto follow ups. And humans are doing the work, they're making the sausage. And they are layering in expertise on top of said sauce. No, they are layering in expertise. And the prerequisite to doing that really well to your machines, being able to intelligently request that information in a complete way is painstakingly building out lists of what you need. And so through the lens of accounting and month end closes, that's not too gnarly. You know, the stuff that you need. In a perfect world, you have access to be able to fetch everything that you need yourself. But especially as a business gets more complex, there's usually some complications with that. And oftentimes you need odds and ends from different stakeholders to actually be able to close the books. And when that's the case, that stuff needs to go out on an automated basis. Those requests, that is to the right people, not to the business owner who then has to turn to this other person to get the thing. Those requests ought to go out automatically to the person that has the information so that you can get that back as soon as possible. In fact, oftentimes you don't even need to wait until the first of the month. You can even like predate that stuff so that if it's something that ought to be ready before the first of the month, if you can get somebody working on that five days earlier, there's less of a likelihood it's gonna hold up the close. But if you wait for a human to do that, and all of those requests and all of that thinking has to happen all at the exact same time every month, the reality is those requests don't go out until further end of the month and, and you're losing time and it's pure waste. Like at the end of the day that human having to build the request lists, all that stuff like that is not getting the work done. That is all stuff that the client's not assigning any value to. So it's waste. And I did that video a while back about like why do accountants. Like just about, what was it called? Why do Portals suck or how accountants really feel about, about Portals. And I think with one exception in that video, everybody that I interviewed was like, I can't stamp portals, I don't like them. And to me I get the client pushback to a degree with portals. I also know a lot of clients who would like much rather self service and hop in and do that stuff themselves. So like there isn't gonna be any one right answer for all clients. But this is the most valuable use case of portals to me is request management. And I don't think people are doing enough of it. So I don't know that people have quite tasted the rainbow on just how powerful a timesaver that can be for those requests to go out automatically each month to clients and the follow ups to happen automatically. We talked about accounting month end close without laboring on this too much US tax prep. Your productivity is fundamentally defined by how efficiently you are doing this. And it is 100% a worthwhile exercise in the last two months of the calendar year to build out bespoke request lists that go beyond what the Tax Organizer requests for each client. Now it gets easier year over year. The year after you set that up, you've got at least got like a starting list to work from that's a little easier. But the reality is that Tax Organizer is a really low effort request. It doesn't give you everything that you need. I'm also not a fan of the like humongous organizers that have no context and aren't specific to that client. Because in my mind if I put that in front of the client and the client's like you, you know the answer to 75% of these things already. There's certain things you have to have them certified and that's fine. That's not what I'm talking about. But I also don't like the huge blanket organizers like questionnaires that go out to clients. I think the best version of that if you are going to do that, is a service that will let you pre fill answers and then you can hop in and answer the stuff that you know for them already and then they sign off on it, but then at least you're not making them do all the heavy lifting. So if you're a tax practice, it can be hard to keep junior people busy in the slow seasons. This is so valuable because your tax practice is constrained by your busiest seasons. Anytime you can buy out of your busiest seasons in your slowest seasons is like found time. And if you're not building out these bespoke lists ahead of time, and I get that feels like a big lift and a waste of time. And man, that's where most people get stuck as you know how much time that's gonna take to build all those lists. Here's the thing, bub, you're already doing it in your busiest season. Cause most people's workflow, I'm going to send out this tax organizer which gets me like half the info I actually need. And then in the heat of busy season, when they give me that info, I'm then going to figure out, okay, what else do I actually need? And now I'm going to send you a second set of requests. And all that stuff happens during your busiest season. So get that stuff out of busy season. Get like a very explicit complete list of everything you need. And then here, ultimately, I think the value of having complete lists of what you need is that you can then in good faith say, sorry, Buckle, I'm not gonna start this thing until I've got everything. And that answer, like being able to do that is harder if you haven't actually built a complete request list. If it's like a half baked list of things that you're sending to them that give and take with the client of when will I start versus not start, do I have complete information? Gets a lot more squishy if you aren't sure if that's actually a complete list of information. Now on the tax side, like the counter argument here is always, I don't know, I don't know what they did this year until I go and do tax prep. Reality is, you know 95% of what you need from them. Even if some things did change this last year, if you do tax planning for them, you should know 100% and have that conversation before the end of the year. But when you've got this rock solid explicit list of things that you need from them, you can truly say, I'm not gonna start this until you get me everything. Now for me, if I didn't go through the work of like building those bespoke request lists that I knew were complete, I don't think I would have the confidence to say, no, I'm not gonna start it until then because I would still need to do more work and say, oh no, here's actually these additional things I need. So for me, I think I kind of have two answers there. My answer on the tax side is generally going to be, I'm not going to work on it unless the last thing you can't provide is like a K1 or something like that that you're waiting on somebody else for. Because I would feel like a troll saying, no, I understand you have this PTP that won't be ready for another few weeks and I just absolutely refuse to touch your stuff until then. So there are some exceptions to that. Now, our firm switched to doing the info review as soon as we got that info in. So rather than waiting to see if we got everything until we could work on it, we switched to checking to make sure we had everything as soon as they provided it. The clients loved it. Before it would be like three weeks until we actually got back to them whether that was what we needed. So the clients loved it. Most of the staff didn't. Some of the staff did. It was disruptive to the staff. The staff was like, this is annoying. I am having to break up my day more. There are good versions and bad versions of that. I do think you could like batch those every few days you go through all the stuff that's been new stuff that's been submitted, and you like do it all at once. Rather than if a couple of people get you info each day, you like immediately stop and go through it like that's going to break up your day in a way that's maybe not helpful, but maybe do that every two or three days. I do think that's fundamentally better than waiting weeks until you actually have the time to work on the return. Now, through the lens of accounting, for me, this one's a little more cut and dried. I can generally pre build the list of everything I know I'm going to need for a month end close and and set that stuff all to automatically go out as requests on the first or earlier. And when it comes to the month end close, usually I can do the vast majority of the work without the info they're going to give me. So that truck will usually let keep going down the road even if they haven't gotten everything to us. Because usually that external information just ends up being like dropping in an adjustment or something like that just to finish the books. So on accounting month end closes, I'm more lenient on whether or not you start. Maybe the exception there is like if they have to give you bank statements because you can't get access or something. But generally, with the month end close, I'm going to start work on the 1st, whether I have that stuff or not, so that we can get it as far down the line as possible. On tax stuff, though, I generally won't do the work until I've got everything, but I will check to see if I have everything right away. What do you think? This is one of those things that's very nuanced and I'm also fascinated, like the different frameworks people kind of have of like, well, if it's X amount of work, I will do it now versus if it's more than X amount of work, I will shelve it until some future timeframe. I do think as like firm leaders, if you're running teams, I do think there's value in setting an expectation for how this works and getting everybody kind of on the same program. Because if a client drops stuff off or sends stuff in, they need to have a clear expectation of when they're going to hear back from you if they do need more information. So if Jim's doing it one way, Sally's doing it a total different way, that's probably not for the best. Speaking from a whole lot of experience on that. So both for yourself and how you feel like you're most productive, I'd be interested to hear what that looks like. But also, if you're a firm leader and you are sort of implementing that in the team environment, what does that look like in a team environment and how have you set that sort of like shared expectation of how everyone's supposed to respond when they get that. That info in? Talk about inside Baseball. That is some pretty nerdy firm stuff. Well, hey, thanks for coming and hanging. Happy Thursday. It's a Thursday. Got one more day to go unless you do tax. But even the tax folks only have one more weekend to go. Nice work, gang. Okay, that's it for today. I will see you tomorrow Friday. Have a lovely day. Have a lovely day.