036 This Is Why Your Email Sucks

Can I tell you about one of my favorite things, one of my biggest red pill moments? I think I got my pill straight now. Red's the one where you change that I had in accounting. What actually made me an even bigger fan of running an accounting practice. My background was in tax parsers. Yeah, no nerd alert. I know, I know. But here's the thing, like 98% of the people that I know still have not dabbled while with parsers. So I'm going to talk about it a little bit today, just how easy it is, how we built like some cool passive revenue opportunities around parsers and how I think it makes email a little more manageable because buddy, our inboxes these days just a big old stinky hot mess of, of machine generated robot emails that are cold and heartless and I don't need to respond to. But then some, somewhere buried in there is something important that I should probably read. So let's talk about it parsers today on Jason Daily. So I wanted to talk about parsing because I feel like it is one of those things, standout things that the highest output people I know fundamentally think about in a different way. And I know for me I had always kind of understand it, understood it from a conceptual standpoint but for whatever reason, like many things in life didn't actually like take the plunge or it felt like a plunge. Like it felt like this big new thing I was going to have to learn. So I just never bit that off when in reality it was like in five minutes. I had my head around it and it was one of the biggest like red pill moments and virtually anything I'd ever done. And it was probably early, no Cody kind of times, maybe three or four years ago when I first saw parsing tool that was like where I was like, wait a minute, you can super easily extract data from these awful emails. I'm getting these awful documents that we have to process on a recurring basis. And I think this has just become a more relevant conversation as more of the communications that we're dealing with every single day are machine generated and transactional. And you know, now even AI based stuff is making this even worse. So it's like there was a time when email was this really fun new thing and when you got an email it was a big deal because somebody took the time to like sit down and hammer out this email to you. And it just feels like we are so far past that to where now email is just for many of us the most stress inducing part of our work. But I would venture to guess that for many of us in accounting firms, a lot of this is accounting specific. 80 plus percent of the emails that we receive are not from humans. They're transactional. And a huge percentage of those are recurring transactional emails. So just by nature of like doing business these days and using services, we are building up this sort of like sawdust, this kind of like byproduct of just going through our days and doing work. That is this mountain, this growing mountain of email. That's not one off stuff, it's recurring stuff. It's like creating this, you know, new floor of work. And for many people, the solution is than for the email inbox to become the file system because they just don't want to wade through that ridiculous volume of stuff. It's a mess. It's, you know, billing notifications are the easy example. You know, the receipt for the recurring monthly charge, that sort of thing. But the other things that we encounter a lot are, is stuff like, you know, apps that don't give you meaningful controls over your notifications, where there are some specific types, some specific scenarios where you want a notification, but you can't pare it down to just that. And so instead you have to leave it on in case that situation ever comes up. And there's so many apps that do this. I mean, bill.com is a good example. ClickUp. Holy smokes. I always struggled with this with ClickUp. There's certain situations where I want a notification, but a whole lot of notifications where I don't. And oftentimes what we do is we opt into everything in order to cover the exception and it just makes the email problem worse. So let's just cruise real quick through how parsing tools work, because the more interesting conversation I think is then on the other side of that, how does that change how you approach work? How does that change how your team approaches the work that they do for clients? And how you can even build like new revenue streams around parsing, which was one of the most fun projects I ever did. So parsing tools. I shared my current favorite in my newsletter last week. That's a weekly newsletter I can subscribe at. Newsletter. Jason CPA My current favorite is a tool called Parsio and why I like it and is it will do both documents and emails. So I can use a single tool for both. Because with all these transactional emails we get, everybody seems to like to do these transactional emails a little bit differently. Some of them put that thing that you need in the body of the email. Some of them put it in an attachment to an email, some of them put it in a link that's inside the body of the email that takes you out to a web page. Oh, those people. Oftentimes you even get like multiple attachments. And so you're like, oh, what do I do? Do I combine all of these. But all of these different flavors and delivery methods, like fundamentally just end up creating a whole bunch of human work. Especially when you're doing stuff for clients. It's one thing, it's. It is one thing to have your own dumpster fire that's a mess. And you just let it pile up and you're like, meh, I'll go back and find it if I ever need. It's another thing when it's a client. And anytime I talk about parsers, usually people go to like, oh, what about Dext and stuff like that. So Dext is like a solution for bookkeepers for handling, you know, huge volumes of receipts and stuff like that and extracting the information and pushing it into the accounting system and stuff like that. And those systems are great. And in the biggest, most complex situations I do use those. But inevitably there's a whole ton of situations where those end up being overkill or for whatever reason they won't quite do what I need. That's half of it. The other half of it is that's only really parsing of financial stuff. There's a lot of emails that we get that are not financial in any way. They're error notifications or status updates. Stuff that I still need to be aware of, stuff that maybe my colleague needs to know about that have nothing to do with financial stuff. And there's a lot of great parsing applications for those non financial things also because many times like email is this fallback communication channel for, for. It's kind of a catchall for anything where there isn't another place for it. Like if you've got a bill pay platform where you approve bills, you shouldn't be emailing that person to approve it. It all goes through the bill pay platform, right? And so like email becomes this catch all for a whole bunch of things. A lot of things that are actually like disguised approvals where there's no other place to do this approval. And so it's not just financial stuff. There's a lot of things that we get in there that are non financial that something like a Dex wouldn't handle for you. So there's still value to me in learning parsing for all Those sort of peripheral things that it won't handle. But the way Parseo works, and this is consistent with all the parsing tools that I used. You set up mailboxes basically, or individual parsers. And each of these parsers you create kind of a methodology around how you want them to pull details out of that document or out of that email. So maybe it's a specific field that you want from it, maybe maybe on that receipt email that you get every single month, you want the last four of the card, so you know what card it came from. You want the dollar amount and you want the transaction date. And then maybe you want to turn it into a PDF so that you can save it to a file system or something like that. But for any given type of thing, there's certain details that you want to pull from it. And so you're generally creating a parser, or Parsio calls it a mailbox for each of those different types of things. And this is where people get stuck sometimes. And they're like, okay, if I get 60 different recurring emails in this inbox every single month, you're telling me I have to set this up 60 times? And the answer is yes. But I also think we have, we really quickly lose perspective of you're already doing all of this work. Like you already do this every single month and it will never go away for you or your team until you automate it. And so the great thing about like Parseo to me is like setting that thing up now is like less than a five minute process. It's very simple to set up new mailboxes to automate that however you want to. But also it is a, like one of those, I don't know. One of the things with automation is as you set that stuff up for yourself, over time you lose perspective of the things that you, that you've automated that you don't have to do anymore. Like we, we have like 2020 vision on like the things that we do, like what our day to day looks like, but often lose perspective of the things that we no longer have to do. And it's why in change management, when you go to, you know, a new software or something like that, people will always complain about what their work is now, even if it means there's all these other things that they hated to do before that they no longer have to do. Like, that's just whatever, that's just human nature. But just like over the course of doing business and whether it's our clients stuff that we're managing for them or us. You just keep building up this floor of more and more and more and more and more things that are coming in every single month that you have to process one way or another. And when I realized just how simple it was to create a parser to handle these things for me, that was a big light bulb moment for me because I realized not only can I create parsers to automate these things for me so that they just happen and so that I don't have to be hands on a specific time every month, send this to Tina or put this in the accounting system or something like that. But we could do this for our clients because everybody has this issue. Every business has this issue. And this is a great example of like a problem that your client has that you can build a passive solution for. And they're none the wiser. I mean, it doesn't really matter how it gets done. I can't tell you how many situations where we came in working with a client. We're doing back office stuff for them. And there's other kind of people in the orgs doing peripheral sort of back office functions. And, you know, a third of this person's job is logging into this system or processing these things every day. And they're kind of these adjacent tasks to what you do where you're like, oh, we need somebody to do this other thing that a human actually needs to do. Is that something that Jim could do? Well, no, he's tied up with these other things. How about this? Why don't we take over these responsibilities that Jim's doing now so that he can do this more meaningful thing. And before you know it, we've slid into this kind of administrative processing thing where we're able to, you know, increase the engagement by several thousand dollars a month. And it's something that over the course of three to six months, we'll automate, you know, 90% of it through tools like this. And some of those projects went on to be our most profitable projects because we were able to put the normal work kind of alongside this other back office support work. And it's actually what I loved about building an accounting practice was all the other stuff we got to do that was adjacent to the accounting where we could be really helpful. And all those things actually made us better at the accounting too, because we could feed all that stuff back into the accounting system. This episode is sponsored in part by LiveFlow. Let me tell you about Live Flow, okay? LiveFlow is a powerful product that puts your advanced reporting on Autopilot. You know what that means? Autopilot means you just set it up and it just goes. Software is designed to simplify the process of creating reports by turning your spreadsheet into a scalable and real time FPA platform. Buddy. This means that you can spend less time manually updating spreadsheets. That's a win. And more time analyzing the data and advising your clients. One of the key benefits of Live Flow is its ability to automate the process of streamlining reports from QuickBooks. This means you can easily import all your client financial data into Google Sheets where it can be transformed into a fully customizable thing that can be tailored to meet any of your needs. You little snowflakes even do like cool consolidations, custom dashboards, all that stuff. Anything that's in that QuickBooks file, you sync it back and forth. Bada Boom, bada bing. LifeFlow's gonna do it for you, bud. Learn more Check out the link in the video description. The show notes. You know. Check out the link this episode is brought to you in part by Meester & Co. Who is hiring a cast manager. You can put job listings on this podcast. Yep. Meester & Co. Is a firm in Northern California. They're hiring a remote cast manager. Teeny bit of travel required, but you can generally be anywhere. Let me tell you why Meester & Co. Is better than the firm that you work for right now. Buddy K Listen up. A few reasons. Our team is top priority, not revenue. We concentrate on our strengths and aren't afraid to turn down the wrong clients or projects. Our firm success starts with our team members. You sold yet? We believe in a work life balance. They probably won't have you running a daily show. No billable hours or timesheets. We focus on results. They specialize in tax, accounting and advisory engagements. Steer clear of audit and test work because who the heck wants to do that? It is a modern day forward looking firm that is building out their cast practice and you just might be the perfect person to help them do that. Let's just. Let's just zoom out. Of all the firms you could go work for the firm that's advertising on this silly little podcast. How many people listen to this? Oh, not very many. So if you're looking for something new in the cast space, check out this job listing. Put it in the show notes. Never know. Could be. Could be the job of your dreams. It takes what is like a really frustrating and dumb interface. Email. Like like Email is like the dumping ground for like like all of the notifications that they have to send you, but they don't have a better way to send it to you. Like, you get all these emails and you're like, boy, I sure wish all these things just went straight into this other system or the accounting system or, you know, file storage or something like that. But they don't. And so that, so then your email becomes like this sort of like, I don't know, approval, like human intervention step where it's virtually never the destination for that thing that just came into your email, but ultimately requires you to do something with it to get it to the destination. So it's like, it's like a fundamentally broken part of the process because a human has to come in and then process that thing each time. But email parsers and document parsers make it so that when you set that parser up once, any future instance of that thing that comes through gets handled on an automated basis. And so you're probably setting up like an email rule to forward those future messages to, you know, the parseo mailbox or wherever that thing's getting processed as soon as it hits. So it comes in, gets forwarded there, gets parsed by Parsio, and then after that you decide, you know, where do you want that to go? Do you want that to go to Zapier? Gets saved to, you know, your file system or Airtable or something like that. But the upshot is all the future times that email comes in, you know, I set my stuff to auto archive after it's been like forwarded to a parsing service like that, and I never have to look at that thing again. And when you start thinking about email that way, you realize email is actually like this kind of interface that you can build all sorts of automations around. So you think of all of the services that we use that don't have an API and don't integrate from app A to app B quite the way that you want it to. What is. So when you have these apps that don't integrate, like what is the interface that almost all of them share? Email. There's almost always a way to get that information out of the app via email, via their notifications that they love to send you that are just like so wildly overkill. And so when you, when you're struggling with these apps that don't quite integrate the way that you want, oftentimes a way to build your own integrations is just find some way to get that data out of the system via email and, and then use a parser to grab it and take it wherever you want to go. So think about the apps that you use right now and it's probably going to be easy to think of a few situations where there's this app that doesn't give you the information that you want and you would love to be notified. As soon as a certain thing happens or whenever a certain thing happens, take it over to another app automatically. But right now it doesn't do that. So you've got this like recurring task and somebody has to do that for you or you have to hop in and do it. That stuff is super common. It's really annoying. A huge part of our jobs right now, unfortunately, is still moving data from A to B. They told us the cloud would solve this. It hasn't yet. It's gotten better in some ways. But think about an example like that. And then in the source app, in the app where that thing originally happens. Take a look and see. And oftentimes we don't have like emails enabled for this stuff because then it just becomes an absolute fire hose and we never pay attention to it. But take a look and see. Is there a type of email that you can get out of the system that will give you that information that you can then go where you can then go do something with it elsewhere? An example of like the ways I've used this is with ClickUp and the fact that it gives you like no granularity over the type of email notifications that you get. But even in my case it was still fiddly. It was like, oh, I actually only really want to get notifications for these few time sensitive things that come through a couple times a week from like a specific client project or something like that. And so ultimately, like, there was probably never going to be a version of their settings that would ever support exactly my use case. But what I could do was turn on an email notification setting that would send me email notifications, a lot of them, but among them would be the couple that I wanted. So I would enable that setting. I would automatically archive those things as they came in, unless they included that specific scenario that I wanted to handle, at which point I could kick off, you know, whatever automation after that that I wanted to, or even just let that notification come through to me and then automatically archive all the other ones. So oftentimes you can turn on this bigger fire hose than you actually want and use parsers or email inbox rules to selectively keep just the ones that you actually need. And so going back to the systems that don't Otherwise integrate when you know, QuickBooks will send scheduled reports, for example, over email. What can you do with those scheduled reports like that? Like how else are you going to get a report out of a QuickBooks file on an automated basis, right? Like it takes third party tools, takes doing something with the API. That's an example of something that can be like scheduled to automatically run over email. That is something that you couldn't otherwise get. I did this a lot with Bill.com emails. Bill.com they have an API but they only use it with like you know, their little kind of partnership other software companies that they will build stuff with. So I can't actually use it, but they send out a daily email if you want, that has a shocking amount of information in it, like more than anybody would ever actually want to see every single day. And I can use that over communication to, in an automated way, selectively pull out just the things that I want. This episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. This week on Tales from the Hub. Yeah, that's a thing. Let's talk about a firm. This firm is called Super Smart Accounting Solutions. They realized profitability of their firm comes down to how efficiently they can get responses from clients. You know, that old chestnut. So they prioritized a practice management platform that would make their client experience so good that the clients would just be foaming at the mouth to get them answers as quickly as possible. Client Hub, hey buddy. It was the obvious choice. Practice management with an amazing client portal at its core. The fine people at Super Smart Accounting Solutions, this isn't fictional. They love the idea of a system that is boundaryless. Clients are users just like the staff are users. And the client portal's like the core of the product. It's not just this afterthought sort of bolt on thing, right? Client Hub, let me tell you, blew their minds. They loved it. They adopt it super easy. They had that sucker going in a week. A week. When's the last time you changed practice management systems in a week? That's Tales from the Hub. We'll be back with more tales next week. Check out Client Hub at the link in the show Notes video description. One of those some other examples of just like little fiddly ways we've used this. So payroll system sends you a payroll confirmation. When you run payroll, say gusto or something like that. And it gives you a couple, you know, a few amounts of what all is happening there. Sometimes clients want to know when that's coming up, like when is that money going to come out of the bank and how much is it going to be? Generally we didn't give clients direct access to the payroll system because we didn't want them fiddling with stuff. So we would actually parse those payroll confirmations and forward a base. I guess we wouldn't forward. We would extract the information from those confirmation emails and then use that information to send a branded email to them to say hey Jim, just a heads up is an automated email this amount of money's gonna come out on X date. And so oftentimes we, we would set that up so the clients would be notified and it didn't require this additional task in the project to say oh yes, send this email to Jim when the peril's actually been run. We use this a lot with sharefile also we had people with their own sharefile upload folders and it became this manual process where when a team member got notified they had to go out and download the thing and then take it to this other place. We did quite a bit with that. I got a number of things where I didn't really like the email would come to me but it ultimately had to go to somebody else. I had some stuff that would then like post to slack. In certain situations if it was something that a member of my team needed to be notified of that and I didn't want to fuss with it. But that situation even was one of those things where like one in every ten times they would need to be notified based on some of the specifics of the email. So like even in non financial situations like you can parse out whatever that important sort of variable within the email is that will dictate a follow on decision. Set that stuff up once to automatically be handled the way that you want so you don't have to fuss with it going forward. Now this all when you're figuring this stuff out it starts with you. But this is a great example of how an investment that you make in yourself can absolutely be 10x if it's something that your team learns as well. I think oftentimes we make these unlocks ourselves that are then hard to like multiply the benefit of across your team. But if you are doing this sort of thing and it's making you much more productive, man, you got to find a way to upskill the team on this stuff also. Now what like what ultimately got me most excited about learning this stuff and getting better at it was the fact that this is not just a me problem. This is like a state of work today problem. It is an everybody problem that I can provide a solution for. And so we actually had like named services that we would offer clients and upsell them on. And the way we sort of settled on doing this was the best practice we communicated with clients was we would work with them to set up like an accounting at their domain email address. And whenever they sign up for services, whenever they're gonna get email confirmations, receipts and that sort of thing, point all that stuff to the accounting email address so that everything isn't always blocked by whoever signed up for it. Like it's not all in the business owner name, that sort of thing. And we would incentivize them to do this by basically managing the information that would come into that inbox for them. And so it inevitably would be some work to switch this stuff over, but they only had to do that work as long as they hadn't switched it over. So it's kind of like a built in incentive for them to switch those accounts and the notifications to go to the correct destination. Now, like alone, that's a big step forward because you have like that email inbox would become oftentimes the most organized file cabinet they had, like, because it was one place that you could find that stuff. Going forward, though ultimately it shouldn't be like the final destination for most of that information. But then our team, who was super savvy at managing those inboxes and automating the stuff that runs through them, we started doing that for a bunch of people. And so we had, I don't know, in total, probably 40 plus inboxes that we were managing. And, you know, a really good chunk of the messages that came through those email addresses were automated. And then all that was left after that was to kind of handle the exceptions. And for most people, man, like in most companies, this is somebody's job or this is like several people. It takes up a good chunk of their time. And it was one of the easier situations to have that conversation around value. And here's what we're taking over and why you're actually going to pay us this thousands of dollars more a month to do it. Because Jim isn't getting any smarter processing these emails. Like, this isn't what Tina wants to do. Like, this is not going to be something where you take it away from them and they're going to be like, oh, I missed that. Like, no, like this is actually freeing up those people to do meaningful stuff. And for us, this was actually exactly the type of work that we liked to take on because it could ultimately become passive. And so within our cast business, the stuff I was most excited about longer term were these sort of data problems, the system issues where we could come in and be the ones to connect them and find these sort of inefficiencies in an organization that were taking up a bunch of a person's time. You can come in and say, hey, we're going to do this part of Tina's job now, and you're going to pass effectively what you were paying her, if not more, to do that job. And on day one for us, it would be manual and there'd be some stuff that we'd have to figure out. But over the course of time, we could automate more and more of that stuff that was coming through so that we were taking on projects that would start as something a human had to do, but we ultimately always had a path to making that project largely passive. And that was, you know, that was. Well, after figuring out parsers and working through, what does it look like to set up a bunch of mailboxes for a specific client? And, like, how do you isolate that from the mailboxes you set up for other clients? And just kind of like thinking through those nuts and bolts things that was very much the destination, but unlocked some really cool, like, largely passive revenue opportunities for us. And those ended up being the backbone of some of our most profitable projects. But that's not where we started. In the beginning, for me, it was selfishly like, boy, I would love for this email inbox not to just kind of seem to like, keep filling it up itself up every single day and creating all this meaningless work that I would really rather not do. So it started personally for me, as it should for everybody. But don't stop there, like, get your team plugged into it, because it's something that is an unlock for each of them. So, like, if you save yourself a couple of hours a week, don't hide that under a bushel basket, man. Upskill the rest of your team at the same time. Okay, put the old shower caps on with me for a minute here. Had a thought, shower thought, particularly as it pertains to AI generated stuff, because the ease with which stuff can be generated with AI right now is just going to have such a big impact on the human experience and the amount of just really low effort stuff that we're surrounded by. And how do you sift through all of this garbage text to find actual meaningful stuff that a human put thought into? We think about, you know, email specifically. We think about AI Generated email specifically through the outbound perspective and how we communicate with our clients. And so we've been talking about the work that Canopy and Carbon have done on generative email and making it easier to communicate with clients and what a great time saver that can be. What's it going to look like when clients are doing the reverse? When we're getting generative email from clients, we all remember the day that we got a Facebook invite from our grandmothers and we knew that an era had just ended. And when your grandmother first posted to Facebook, it looked a lot different than the way that you and your friends posted to Facebook. And at Google I O last week they just announced, you know, generative email built into Gmail. And I think they're starting with just like Google workspace accounts. So like business Google accounts. I don't think, I don't think the free Gmail gets that, but eventually that's probably a thing, right? Every email client supports generative email. So what's it going to look like for me, a responsible AI enthusiast that knows how to do things like tell it to only generate an email three sentences long, I give it, you know, a length parameter because inevitably it gives me like three or four paragraphs and nobody's got time for three or four paragraph emails these days. What's it going to look like when our email, when our clients start sending us AI generated email? And how should that make us feel about sending our clients AI generated email? I was thinking about that last night and I don't know, I think ultimately it, like when we first think about it, it's like, oh, it's this new thing, you know, that is kind of ambiguous and is it irresponsible when ultimately at the end of the day, like, no, like we still have to be responsible for everything that we do with AI. And so somebody generates and sends you a big long paragraph, like three paragraph email when it could have been a couple of sentences, that's still their fault. Don't do that. The problem is people are going to do that. And I do see a near future where our clients really irritatingly are probably sending us stuff that we don't want to read. But I think all we can do is be good citizens and leverage it responsibly. It is a time saver. You, you just gotta do it the right way. But I do think there will very much be this reckoning of like, oh, your grandma just found generative email. And we see this now with like every time I do a chatgpt talk, the comments are like anecdotes about how they sent a funny pirate poem to their friend and they've used ChatGPT and that's what they used it for. So we'll be interesting to see what we start getting from clients when the tables are turned and they start sending us generative stuff again. I don't think it's like it's not a reason for us to not use it because it can be used in the wrong way does not mean that we should use it in the right way. But it is kind of an unfortunate thing that I think is going to be just around the corner. So that's all I got today. We got Q and A Wednesday tomorrow. You got any cues? Drop them in the comments. Tell me your experience with parsing. Is this something you've had success with? What tools have you used? What has been the best way for you to upskill your team on this stuff? If you have or have not, give us your tales of success or cautionary tales in the comments. I'll see you tomorrow.