015 I Already Sent That To You

You email a client a list of some docs that you need and they reply, I already sent that to you. Do you A, flip over your desk, B, tell them to go find a new accountant. Three, go back through the pile that you've already gone through three times. Four, something else. Let's talk about it. Come on in. Welcome. It's a nice, cheerful Monday on Jason Daily. So I put this question out on Twitter and absolutely triggered everyone. What's your process for handling, quote, unquote? I already sent that to you. Do you log everything that comes in? Like, do you have a way of proving it to the client? Do you even care? Or do you just put the onus on the client to deliver? What is that responsibility look like? And we can all, like, take the position of, you know, like, I'm, I'm the pro here. Like, push, push the onus back on the client. I think the real, maybe the most important aspect of this question is just the fact that usually by the time a question has gotten to a client about a missing document, if you do all that work yourself, you've searched the stack three times, so you've wasted a ton of time. If you run a team and the junior's doing the work, and maybe it goes to the senior to ask the question, oh, mama, dad, junior. They've looked at least three times. They then sent the question to the senior and the senior's like, nah, I don't know about that. And then the senior goes and looks three times and then it goes to the client. And at that point, you've already wasted a ton of time. Like the amount of time it takes to do a thing versus the amount of time to look for something. And all of the places that we have to look for things these days, oh, my gosh, that's a huge waste of time. So there's gotta be some sort of system, right? And there's already people bristling and, and shouting at their AirPod right now, saying, I do have a system. And I just want to kind of explore this because some systems are going to be better than others, but they're all in many ways, like, incomplete. But I just thought this was an interesting thing to explore because we don't often acknowledge the amount of time that goes into looking for things to see if we even have them in the first place, and then sending them off. Okay, so one sort of interesting aside, little tidbit here is I feel like audit companies, like firms doing audits. Audit companies. Oh, gosh. Firms that do audits have a more explicit approach to this, I feel like, because such a big part of that process is just how you request things and who those requests go to. It's a, it's a very locked down process, I think much more than for accounting practices or tax practices where that's kind of part of what you do. And like a couple dedicated apps that people use for this one is, it's called surelink, the leader in request list and document workflow platform. What did that make sense? The leader and request list. It's like if somebody had told me five years ago, you're going to have a software program that is just for asking for things, I would have probably thought that was kind of weird. But I totally get it. Obviously I've harped a ton on the value of bespoke request lists and why I think that's valuable so that they can be automated and so that the machines can do the asking and the machines can do the following up. But like surelink is an example of a tool that's just like hyper focused on requesting stuff. Uplink is another one. Stop chasing PBCs and you just load up requests en masse for all of your different clients into the system and that system will pester them and try to track all those things down. And when I put the question out on Twitter, there were a hundred different flavors of, of how people responded to this. A couple people chimed in, they're using Carbon's client tasks for this. Tyler Clark said centralized location for sending things. It gets verified or sorted. If it's not where it's supposed to be, a templated message explaining how to send it to the right place is sent to the client. I know Nio has talked about this. She has like a client communication policy that's like a little roadmap sort of instruction manual for here's the right ways to get in touch with me, the right ways to submit information. And that could even be just be like a simple one pager. There's definitely an element of client training to all this. I think Tyler said that he's using Carbon for all of that. He also has some beautiful analogies. Imagine accountants and analogies. I think accountants love their analogy. Don Cooley, are you out there? Don Cooley always uses Dr. Analogies. Here's one from Tyler. Imagine a manufacturing company that had all its raw materials dumped all over the floor and co mingled. Okay, doesn't sound like a good time. That wasn't it though. He had another one. Do you take your silverware out of the dishwasher? And just dump it into the drawer. No. You have an organizer. I don't know that I'm an analogy guy, because I feel like he can pick them apart. I. I will tell you what I did, though. I put those two analogies Tyler gave into ChatGPT and said, Give me another edgy analogy about gathering things in an organized way is what ChatGPT came back with. Imagine using the bathroom in a nightclub only to find out that the toilet, sink and urinals are all combined into one chaotic, unhygienic mess. That's why organizing things in a helpful way is crucial. I think AI has arrived. Beth Loxley shared everything's coming in digitally with dates, access logs, et cetera. She's using Verifile for that Now. The person said if it comes in digitally, it's easy to prove, but it's. But if paper docs were provided, she tells them to come in and look through the info. Dropped off, as I already have, and it's not there and nobody ever wants to come in. Robert Jepsen says he responds, understood, I'll search your file again after April 18th to see if I can find it. In the meantime, would you like me to extend your return? It's like 50 Shades of accountants passive aggressively telling clients to go jump in a lake. And so on either end of the spectrum, you've got firms that mandate specifically how they want the client to interact with them, how they're supposed to submit things. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got the real kind of white glove firms who will take things in any old format. They'll let people provide things however they want. And as with almost anything firm running, I don't know that one is absolutely better than the other. You just got to know which one you are and charge accordingly. But here's the thing, and I was thinking about this as I was working on some of this, like how AI impacts your practice management system. Content is even if you give everyone a locked down channel where everything has to come to you through this specific portal or something like that, there's still sources of context outside of that. There's still phone calls, there's still zoom meetings, there's still these other peripheral ways that these questions get answered from qualitative questions that people provide over email. So even the people flexing on everyone else saying, oh, here's the regimented way of how we collect everything, there's still stuff that comes in outside of that for a lot of kind of squishy reasons. Now, for the firms on the other end of the spectrum, who will take stuff in pretty much in any old form. And that was where we were at. We were targeting really just like the more white glove, hands on types of folks that would pay for that level of service. But they would mail stuff to us, they would email stuff to us, they would pop in and drop something off. They'd tell you over a zoom call. It was anything and everything. And it is. It was fundamentally harder. Like, you spend more time just trying to find the stuff, trying to figure out did they ever give you that or not. One really helpful thing that we did was we set up like a mail log to like, explicitly log everything that we were sent. Ultimately, when we moved to Canopy, I think that log got replaced because we had a more explicit filing system for putting those things that came in. But it was interesting, the variety of responses there were on Twitter. There were people who had like a shared folder with their client or that a folder in their portal that would just be a copy of everything that client's ever given them so that the client could hop in themselves and see everything that's there. But when they would pull stuff out of there for prep, they would just take a copy so that there was still like the original record of everything they'd given them. I can't in good faith be that person that's like totally dismissive and 100% puts it back on the client, because I've absolutely gotten burned on that before. I. I'll, I'll say, oh, I've never been wrong, but the staff's been wrong before. Like, the more you're running a team and you have junior people and stuff like that, like, sometimes you're just not going to be 100, right? But also, sometimes people will send you like the only copy they have of a document for some reason. And so if I just say like, nope, you gotta track it down, sometimes that's not easy. Sometimes that means going back to a bank or trying to get somebody to reissue something in a way that is painful. And the only, like, common thread, like the kind of, only absolute maxim I can really pull from this is absolutely. The fewer the channels there are, the easier it oughta be to manage. And so if you're gonna lock it down, if you're gonna leave it open, you just gotta know what end of that spectrum that you are on and charge people accordingly. Oftentimes the issue is you will let people do anything and everything, but you're still like a budget, like, cost leader firm. Just gotta recognize that, like, that is a premium service that people don't get, or at least shouldn't get without paying for it. But there's one. Like, the one main takeaway I've been able to take from this is I think it can all come back to explicit requests. So if you had all those requests loaded into a single place, you can then put the onus on the client to resolve those requests when you have that information. And it may mean they told you in a zoom call and may mean they mailed that thing in, may mean it was part of an email. But the beauty of requests, to me, and like, at its worst, it feels like, oh, you're making the client do some work. And I'm like, I don't know if that's the case or not. The beauty of it to me is requests and a portal enable a mutual understanding of what is outstanding and what has to happen for you to continue work. And so those requests are like a, like a big old red light, green light. And it should be plainly obvious whether those requests are up to date or not, whether the client agrees with the state of those requests or not. That should be a really obvious signal that. Here is what I think I need. So I do think even if you take information in, in different ways, and even if it's hard to lock it down, when you do say, you gotta do it via this channel because there's still stuff like zoom calls and conversations and stuff, you're just supposed to know stuff from a related company where maybe you're supposed to put two and two together and tie it back to this other. That is all hard. But I think it gets easier when you have those, like, shared outstanding requests with clients. They can see that those requests are outstanding. And there's a little bit of, a little bit of joint, I guess, accountability there. Like that is. That is, I guess, kind of the best balance I can find between spending too much time on all this stuff and just totally pushing it off on the client. What do you think? I will tell you the whole notion of being able to search across all of your context with AI. Oh, baby. Like the notion that you could write a request three months from now, and as you're writing the request, it says, hey, here's a bit of context from a zoom call that your colleague had with them six months ago that may answer this request before you send it out and look like a dummy. Oh, man, that is going to be so nice. Making sure you don't send requests you don't need to send. And then also like resolving Requests. So let's say you get off a call, a zoom call with a client, and when that transcript comes into your practice management system, the ability for it to search that new context to see if it can resolve any of the outstanding requests automatically or at least surface something to say, hey, I think this is the answer. Now, does this look right? AI is going to be a big helper in that when it can search all the context. Okay, Shower thought. Put the old shower caps on. I was hopping on a Zoom the other day, and I've got to do all sorts of weird, like, pass through camera things with my setup. And you know how in Zoom you have the ability to, like, horizontally mirror your video? Here's something I've never been able to get my head around. When I look in the mirror, is that me or is that the horizontally flipped evil twin version of me? I'm not sure. And I was in this situation where, like, Zoom was flipping my video, but, like, the camera was also flipping. It was. There was like a double flip happening. And it got me thinking. If I don't stop to figure this out, then when people see me in person, like, my impression whenever I see a horizontally flipped version of myself is just like, it's kind of an off version of you, right? Like, it's a little bit uncomfortable. That's why I say evil twin. And it got me thinking. If people have spent all this time looking at my ugly mug on video and then they see me in person and I'm actually the opposite. I'm actually the horizontal flip version. Does that mean every time I meet people, their first impression is this weird, like, evil twin vibe? I'm not sure. I don't know what it all means. Should, when I look at my video, should it look the same as what I look like when I look in the mirror? Is that the right answer? I'm not sure. If we have any quantum physicists, please pop a note in the comments. And then a question. I had got this from someone on Twitter. They asked how fast will the ramp for regular small businesses be when it comes to AI growth and AI adoption? He said, I was discussing this the other day and I think it will be slower than many believe. In other words, I don't expect to see a lot of layoffs, rather a slowdown in job growth or jobs added. I'm a controller at a car dealership and I feel like we're still five years behind the tech curve. And there's just. I keep seeing interesting analogies with the AI stuff to desktop, to Cloud and that whole migration and how long it took and how long it is still taking, like the number of businesses we still have that are on desktop software for no good reason. There are a few good reasons, but 90% of the people on desktop, it's still not for good reasons. And I've noticed a, an abundance of, of people going out of their way lately to be like, everything's going to be fine. We've seen stuff like AI a bunch of times before. You just got to keep growing. It is what it is. Like those kind of like nice warm blanket platitudes. And even I've done that. Like accountants using AI will replace accountants not using AI. And what was the other one? Oh, if AI is going to replace you, then it's your skill set that's the issue, not AI. And I'd love to keep saying that stuff, honestly, I, I just don't know. Like nobody knows what AI is going to displace and what it won't displace. So everybody's guessing. Try to avoid having an opinion and like taking a stance because nobody really knows. We kind of just got to take things day by day. But I will say in general, small business when it comes to tech adoption has lagged behind us, the accounting firms. If you think back to cloud adoption, man, it was us oftentimes cramming cloud down our clients throats. And there's always going to be exceptions to the rule there. Like maybe you work with software clients, these are like very forward looking people, early adopter types. But in my experience, the vast majority of the small businesses I've worked with, like we were light years ahead of them. From a tech standpoint we're talking about integrations or building like custom integrations with stuff like Zapier, just using a stack of cloud connected tools. Like we were ahead of most of the people we worked with. And it raises, I think a really interesting question where when cloud came about we had this really cool opportunity as accountants to introduce people to the cloud for the first time. Like we were able to introduce small businesses to not cloud accounting as a fundamentally better app than desktop accounting, because I still don't really think it is. To me the beauty of cloud is the entire cloud. The fact that things will integrate with other things, that all those apps will talk to each other. The beauty of the cloud is like the collective upside of running a connected set of businesses online rather than on premise. And I think there's gonna be a similar opportunity here like with AI, because if there's all these really cool AI developments out there. Are your clients plugged into this stuff right now? Like, no, they're reading all the same dumb headlines that we do that like, aren't particularly helpful and maybe like, highlight stuff that's very ambitious but still not super practical, like preparing tax returns. So who's going to bring them along? Like, I don't see it really being any different than cloud accounting and oftentimes accountants, since we have so much to gain by building efficiencies through automation and stuff like that. Honestly, like, we're usually at the front of that stuff. So let's say AI does wipe out a bunch of work for us, or we're able to wipe out a bunch of our own work with AI, I think we actually end up in a really interesting situation where we're able to be advisors to our clients on what AI means for their business. I mean, this is something we've done before, right? Something we're still managing with clients going through accounting system migrations and that sort of thing. I made this joke, I think it was in a meme, meme review video where it was like, hey, there's this big new thing. It's like a. I think it was the COVID relief. Like politicians, they're like, hey, there's this new thing. We need somebody to implement it for us. Who's gonna do it? And someone at the table suggests accountants. And the other person's like, oh, they just did all this other stuff. And they're like, no, I'm sure they'll be good for it though. Like, I feel like accountants just end up being the catch all for the things that your small business clients should be doing, but they're not actually doing. So how does this all end? I don't know. Maybe we automate a bunch of our own stuff and go into business helping our small business clients with AI. But I think I would agree, like, I would agree that small business adoption is probably gonna be behind the adoption curve of what accounting firms are doing. Obviously you can't generalize all firms, but I do think we're going to be ahead of the curve in general. And that's going to be an interesting opportunity for us to be a sort of a different kind of advisor for our clients. So that's all I got today. Happy Monday, tax people. Oh, man, you are. You are so close. Hang in there. Bless your hearts and I'll see everybody tomorrow. Sam.