057 How To Pick Your Accounting Firm Practice Management System

It's Q and A Wednesday. We're talking about how to go about picking a practice management system for your accounting firm. Some follow up questions on the fully automated bookkeeping stuff we talked about last Friday. Change management. Should you go fast or slow? We got about eight or nine questions we're going to knock out today. Come on in. It is Q and A Wednesday. Hey, by the way, if you're thinking about where could I start with content in my firm, this Q and A Wednesday is like the easiest production day of the week for me because I've got like a list of questions ready to go and talking about firm running and all that. Like this is all I do anymore. Between this show, between my accountant community and so like you and what you do, it's usually really easy to have those conversations with clients because you know that stuff like the back of your hand. Being able to like just talk to a list of questions, that's really easy. Content that people would find really valuable. If you're looking for a place to start with content, something just like this, like could be enough. You get a pile of questions every week, right? Anonymize them maybe, maybe even just do it every month to start. But if you're looking for like an easy, reliable source of content, man, Q and A, you're already doing it right? Like that. It comes pretty easy. Okay, this is the most asked question I get. I probably get it a few times a week. Some form of how do I pick a practice management system and the practice management system. So like a couple, a couple like absolutes, a couple maxims, but then beyond that it gets squishier. An absolute is if you are a firm with 100 employees or less right now you need to be on a cloud practice management system. Like I think you know the cast of most of the characters there. Beyond 100 employees, it gets a little stickier. Most of the cloud practice management system started supporting very small teams and now they are working to go up market. But if you are 100 employee or less firm, which is most of the people that engage with this podcast, start with a cloud practice management system. Not a hosted desktop practice management system, that's not the same thing. But a SaaS Cloud first practice management system and you are ahead of 80% of the competition. So like that is, that is the biggest thing that's like what that is like the only kind of absolute for me in this process. Beyond that, it is a very personalized decision. The more I've talked with people, the more I realize they expect Very different things from their software. Two things like particularly of note right now that I would be mindful of. Are they investing in AI? Like that's a really fair question to ask. And how go into your practice management system like you are hitching your wagon, the core of your business to a company. It's as much about where they are today as where they plan to be 24 months from now. And then second, you really, really need to think about the client experience. I think people are coming around on quote unquote portals. We all hated portals for a long time, but I think selectively, like there are aspects of portals that are really, really valuable. So we've talked a ton about automated client requests and using portals that could just be magic links that go out via email to collect information. Let machines do the collecting of information and the humans do the asking of questions because those machines are going to follow up on an automated basis. Staging all of that stuff in your practice management system to go out to clients for the follow ups to be automated. Massive time saver in a firm. Like probably the number one thing I would say most firms are not taking advantage of. So, so when you're looking at the practice management system, that is another huge consideration. A really hard thing about like the current state of software in this space is who controls the client experience. When this kind of current crop of cloud practice management systems first came around, they started with task management and kind of the core of how the work gets done and better transparency into that. Now they have gotten wise to the fact that the stickiest part of their platform is the client experience. Because if I'm going to train all of my clients to use this other system, I'm probably going to put up with a whole lot of crap on the back end just to not have to train clients on another system. And so the result is we're now seeing more investment in the client experience in these tools, which is good. The problem for you is now it is like an arms race to get control of the client experience. Because now that these companies are thinking of this through the lens of client experience first, if you can come out day one with a really compelling reason to control the client experience, you can actually work backwards with your product to do everything else after that. You look at a tool like, I don't know, Keeper who's a month end close tool with a built in portal, they have some really good reasons for having a built in portal in that product where the questions that are populated from the ledger data that sinks in to take those Questions that are auto populated to a different platform and put them in front of the client in that way, that's a big pain. They're giving you a compelling reason to use their portal specifically. And honestly I would be surprised long term if they didn't kind of like back into more of the traditional practice management type things. So it's really important with your stack as it's coming together to think about where will the client experience live. In a perfect world, it's all in a single place that's admittedly really hard to do right now. The like second best version of that is just make sure that if anybody has to log in to anything, only give them a single place to log into. If you have to send them magic links from multiple platforms, that's better than them having to log into multiple platforms, but still isn't perfect. So this is actually kind of a, a really tricky like aspect of building your software stack right now, made worse by the fact that generally we're not seeing these companies integrate with each other to push requests between portals. And it's because that client experience I think is like ultimately the secret sauce like that is their moat. And so if they can simply push those requests from their platform into somebody else's platform, it kind of devalues that product for you. There's some real practical things that make that challenging, namely that like not all platforms handle requests the same way. So it's not as if they would be easily transferable. But in terms of where to start with practice management system, go to a cloud practice management system, not a hosted traditional practice management system and think about the client experience and kind of work backwards from there. Because how you engage with your clients and how they get you information is a humongous productivity unlock. We're not in a like, we're not in a great place with that right now though, admittedly like having a killer like client facing experience that will pull in stuff from all the apps that you use. Like that's tricky right now. Quick question, AI accounting ledgers. This is related to. I got a couple questions related to like the fully automated bookkeeping stuff we talked about last Friday. Definitely check that episode out. It is a biggie. It's one that we're gonna point back to I think for a long time. Gotten some positive validation from the folks even working on this stuff being like, yep, look like this is, this is where we're headed. Quick question, AI accounting ledgers. Do you think there are any worth checking out at this stage to consider using as a platform for clients as an alternative to 0/quickbooks? Good question. So is there any, are there any ledger providers leaning into what we talked about, a vector search AI classification version of the accounting ledger right now that are worth Switching from zero to quick zero or QuickBooks? I have talked with a, I think three really early stage companies that are from the ground up building a embeddings vector search approach to the general ledger. I don't know that any are actually selling their product. I think right now they're all like very, very early stage. So I think it would be it's too early to like pull the plug on 0 or QuickBooks and jump to something like that. Ultimately time will tell. Like will Zero and QuickBooks work on this? We'll see. The easy answer is like no. They're the big like slow legacy ones that won't change. But like ultimately we'll see like we've still got time and like that calculation would be different if there was a solution you could put your finger on today that was like they nailed this. I want this in my QuickBooks. Like if that were the case today, that would be a harder conversation. But, but I don't think there's a single company you can put your finger on right now that's absolutely nailing it. I also think progression to a different platform, realistically, like where would that start if that were the case, if there were awesome other solutions and the incumbent folks didn't lean into it? One, one killer use case for this is for us tax firms who do annual tax, like bookkeeping for micro businesses. And I guess that applies anywhere where maybe you, on a quarterly or an annual, an infrequent basis, do really basic bookkeeping for a client. This technology, as we talked about, like you have the capability of just plugging in the bank, the bank connection, pulling those transactions in and largely classifying all that stuff on like a fully automated basis. And so if you think about, you go back to like, you know, a decade or 15 years ago when I was first starting in tax, we had tons of clients who would just bring us a stack of bank statements every single year and you'd have to enter them into a QuickBooks file. And like that was 75% of the project was the bookkeeping. And with this different approach to the ledger, it makes cleanup work and catch up work like that near instant, which is really, really exciting. So if there were a new product to emerge that did this in a really compelling way, I think those would be the first places where we started to use it. The last ones, if we did migrate off the incumbent platforms, the last ones to move would probably be the ones that are very integrations dependent, using a bunch of adjacent tools. And the first ones to move would be like the infrequent kind of catch up cleanup type projects. But obviously, you know, if those tools do come around and mature, we're going to be the first ones to be on top of them and like talking through like what is, what is exciting about them, what works about them and whether it is the right time to make that sort of switch. Hey. This episode is sponsored in part by firm360. You know360 because it handles all aspects of your firm in a single, single platform. You don't want to hop around all these, all these different places to do different things. That's why it's 360. You think they've got. Hang on, sidebar. You think they've got like VR headset support? You see the new Apple Apple VR thing. Wonder what that would look like, right? Okay, let me tell you about Amanda Spivey. Amanda approached Firm 360 in the second half of 2020 because they needed a platform to streamline their processes, enable and Enable Remote work. Remember that old chestnut, remote work? Oh, a lot of people having to rip that band aid off coming into Covid. Before firm360, their team had to haul boxes of work documents between home and the office if they wanted to work remotely. That is disgusting. That is absolutely disgusting. But you know what, can I level with you? That was happening. That was happening at my practice more recently ago than I would care to admit. But let me tell you, thanks to firm360, they had the opportunity to add more clients. First three months they were seeing improvements in team productivity, better transparency into what everybody was working on. And it was because they could pull all that stuff together into one place all in one place. 360, put those goggles on. That's not a thing yet. Maybe soon. If you're still hustling information in a whole bunch of different places, check out firm 360 link in the video description. This episode is sponsored in part by dark horse CPAs. If you're a regular listener of the show, you've heard me say that Dark Horse CPAS is a platform CPA firm about five times now. And I know that each time I've said that, you're like, what the H E Double hockey sticks does that even mean? It's a community of accountants operating under the same brand, building their practices collaboratively together. Turnkey resources. You're not reinventing the wheel. All the stuff that solves for you and will get you through you know the hard things about launching a firm, about not making the same mistakes everybody else is making. Dark Horse brand will help you attract the talent you need and the clients you want. Buddy their tech team. There's a tech team? Hang on. Tech Team Alert will ensure you have what you need to automate the mundane and augment your advisory muscles. Advisory muscles. Do you have those? Dark Horse is the only CPA firm built exclusively for CPAs. Unlike a franchise, they will work with you one on one in group settings, get you everything you need. You're no longer a lone ranger. There's a better way. There's a better way. You got a whole squad behind you now. To learn more about how Dark horse is helping CPAs build practices from scratch and scale existing practices within a community that helps each other continuously up level their game, head over to a better way cpa. What cool AI stuff am I making right now? What am I working on? I think this was cj. I'm sorry I didn't write down who this was. I think it was cj. He said I didn't even know what Zapier or API meant and thought pandas were just cute bears like six months ago. And now I'm making some wild stuff. That is great to hear this. Like, people are learning so fast these days because there's better communities and better, better transparency around cool stuff that people are doing. Like, when I started posting to Twitter three or four years ago, I could count on like two or three fingers, let's say two fingers. The number of people I knew who were talking about Zapier. You had Heather Satterley, who was like the OG person putting Zapier content out. Chris Hervichon. I met Chris on Twitter and he was geeking out on a lot of the same stuff I was. But these days you've got way more people talking about it, way more resources, which honestly accelerates the path to implementing that stuff in a meaningful way, which I love. Like, that's great. We're not all now reinventing the wheel ourselves quite like we used to. But what cool AI stuff am I making right now? I. I'll be totally honest, I used to be like, I have struggled with like, what's the highest leverage use of like, really my identity? Like, that's kind of been a sad realization this year. And like, as I no longer run accounting firms and stuff like that. Like, my value to the universe is like, the answers to the quick questions and can you do this thing for us? Can you make this video for us? And so I've really had to, like, lock that down. But is one of those things potentially a product? Like, is. Is that a high leverage use of what I do? And the fact that my job is basically now to be visible and helpful and kind of in all the places and something that kind of blew my mind at the end of last year and apologies if you've heard me say this before, I saw a 1Password commercial with Ryan Reynolds that was shot at his. At the stadium of his football club. And everybody in the commercial was wearing jackets with aviation American gin on the back of it. But this was a 1Password commercial. And it was like, okay, he owns all of these things. He's like, cross promoting all of these things in one place. And it started taking me down a path of like, is the highest leverage version of my identity. And the things that I talk about, like, you know, beginning to invest in the apps that I believe in most and, and all that. And there was a time where I thought that was the case, and now I'm kind of going back the other way where I'm leaning more towards. I think what I'm probably best suited to do is like, as soon as I take investment, as soon as I'm the guy that like, owns products and runs products and that sort of stuff, there's just an inherent conflict of interest with me then and my relationship with other vendors and. And people maybe not being able to trust the things that I say because I have this, like, kind of built in motivation for my own stuff to be successful. Right. And so the moment I wade into that, it complicates everything else that I do. And where I'm at right now is, I think, rather than me making cool AI stuff beyond the scope of, like, just for my own education. So, like, I talked about that tax research app I worked on, where I learned embeddings and vector search databases and all that stuff. I think now, like, the highest leverage use of my platform is just like, inspiring people to work on the stuff that we want. And a really good example of that is, you know, this is your practice management system on AI, where we. We talked a lot about that and really pushed on that. And I know a lot of y' all shared that with your practice management system vendors within a span of a couple of months. Like, we had, you know, four practice management systems I'm aware of that actually ship some really cool AI stuff the world is much, much bigger than this show. But I like to think that we pushed that boulder up the hill just a little bit, that we made a difference. So for me right now, the framework I've settled on is rather than like making a cool AI thing in secret, I think the better thing for me to do is rather than working on that for three or four months, the moment I get a, like catch a whiff of what that Kool AI thing could be, I just shout it from the mountaintop. And you know, what we talked about last Friday with a better approach to building an accounting ledger is a good example of that. We turn people on to some, some people onto things that they weren't aware of. We put some pressure on the industry to invest in AI in meaningful ways. And I think that's where I've settled now is rather than like me really building things, I'd love to use this platform to kind of steer, I don't know, like the collective conversation in constructive ways for all of our benefits. If I launched a cool product that helped people, that would be awesome. But I think the cooler version of that is something like what happened in practice management systems where you had one person launch an AI feature and then a week later another company, and then a week later another company, like, let's kick that stuff off. Because that's a thing that is already impacting tens of thousands of accountants out there who use a bunch of different tools rather than just me making a thing and, you know, it being successful or not. So that's kind of where I'm at, is I'm. I'm investing less in me building my own stuff. We've talked about, like, is there a. Is there a Jason GPT someday? You know, like, is there some sort of thing that sits atop all the content that I've made? Possibly someday if there's like an interesting way to do that. And it. I don't know. And it could be if, if I actually think that would be useful to people, we'll see. But beyond that, I'm, I'm more like just trying to influence the people who are spending 24 7, like, trying to build cool stuff for us and like, ensure that they're working on a helpful trajectory for us. Herman posted this one in the YouTube comments. First off, this whole vector database model thing, mind blowing, dude. Totally is. And it's actually, it's like a entirely different software development paradigm that companies are migrating to right now. Like, it's, it is a big deal. He asked. It's got me wondering does this mean my mountain of supplier bills and receipts can finally find a digital home? Can they to be automatically matched with this vector database model? If so, I might finally be able to see my desk again. The answer is yes, because as we talked about last Friday, the the more context the ledger has, the more information it has around each transaction, the greater the likelihood of it being able to make a correct classification. And I actually think ultimately the best version of this is one that is home both to your documents, you know, and the bank feeds. And I think I said this on Friday, the the company, like there is no moat around embeddings and vector search. What we talked about. Anybody can build this. So what is the moat long term? The moat long term for a software company is access to context. So if you want to build the best fully automated bookkeeping solution tomorrow, like for the future today, you need to give me the most compelling reason to give you all of those supplier bills and receipts that are covering my desk. Because if you have those and nobody else does, you will do the classification better. Because like what we talked about was doing auto classification just on that little bank statement line. And that's not a ton of information, but a receipt, that's way more information. And it opens up like just a fundamentally better way of using the ledger too, which is not bank transaction based postings, but actually line item based posting. If it has all the documents I would rather like those line items appear in the ledger separately. And maybe this is a user preference thing or something rather than like the total amount of the purchase because you go to Costco, you buy 20 different things. I don't know, maybe that busies up the ledger. But fundamentally like yes, it gives you a. Those documents become more useful because they make your classifications better. Now there's versions of this that like Dext will do right now. But in my opinion this is like on an entirely different level. So second, this is going to be a game changer. This is from Herman for data quality checks, isn't it? Yes. And honestly this is already a thing. So Digits has a tool called Boost where they embed your accounting transactions and they do exactly what we're talking about. It's a after the fact quality assurance tool. So they embed all of your transactions and how you classified them. And if they, they find that something is an outlier, it was classified differently than all the other stuff around it, they will highlight that and suggest a different, not only accounting category, but also like contact. And I think there's even one other thing that they look out for. So yes, from a quality assurance standpoint, like this is a complete different approach to quality assurance that I think is better than like rules based ones where I say, okay, flag everything over $2,500. Like, as long as it's rules, rules based, it will be kind of limited. And so yes, I think this is something that can vastly improve our approach to quality assurance. And Herman said, lastly, the whole shift reminds me of when the cloud ledgers first came out. Remember how the desktop platforms were so invested in their tech that they missed the cloud train? Yep. And so that's, that's the big unknown is are the incumbent ledger players going to invest in this? An argument for them to not invest in it is, I think a ledger platform after, you know, embeddings and all this stuff honestly looks very different because ledger platforms historically have always been built around classification and reconciliation. But if that's largely automated, what does the accounting ledger look like after that? Right. It's probably more reporting focused, probably more quality assurance focused. You're doing air traffic control rather than like the UI being set up for you to do something on every single transaction. Some kind of interesting, maybe examples of what a higher volume, like air traffic control sort of setup would look like is like something like Bitwave, which is for managing huge volumes of, of crypto transactions for stuff like, you know, OpenSea. The UI for managing a huge volume of transactions in a very simplified way looks very different than like, you know, zero right now where it gives you 10 transactions for the screen. I guess you've got the cash coding tab that's like more of a spreadsheet view, but even like QuickBooks, like unless you have bank rules like auto matching, like you're still going through every single thing. So to be determined what a ledger looks like when most of that stuff is automated. This episode is sponsored in part by by Client Hub. This week on Tales from the Hub. That's right, it's back. Remember last week we were talking about super smart accounting firm and they were celebrating how everyone could stay on top of things from clients from Client Hub's jobs dashboard. That's right. I said celebrating. They were celebrating it. Now they're getting ready to head to conferences. It's conference season. I've been talking about conferences a lot lately. Right. Man, they can't wait to take their partnership with Client Hub to the next level level by doing some irl, glad handing, back slapping and a lot of other analogies like that. I tell you what, it's one thing to chuck support requests into a system to email with that support team, you know, share your new ideas for features. It is a whole other thing to stand in a booth with the delightful people that you've been talking with and actually build, build some human relationships. Client Hub co founded by a former firm owner. It's why they just seem to get it. It's why when you flip the switch on Client Hub, you're like, wow, these people understand me. They understand my pains and they understand why all I want is for my client to respond to my request. Well now, super smart accounting firm, they can't wait to see Client Hub at scaling new heights in a couple of weeks. You're going to be there, I'm going to be there. Client Hub is going to be there. Let's all hang out. Even if you're a Canadian, they're going to be at CPP CPB Ignite in September this year. I got no idea what that is, but if you're Canadian, you probably do. That's it for this week's episode of Tales from the Hub. Check out Client Hub. If you're going to be at these conferences, let's hang. Swing by their booth. You can meet the actual people behind it. Casey Hyland Any YouTube content? Any YouTube comment? This was on the video about change management. This was last week's Old Timey Tuesday. She said, is it better to go all in on a change, apply it universally across the board, or slowly dip the toes in the water and roll out the change incrementally across departments? Going all in is seemingly the better use of time and resources and prevents people from having an out to go back to the old way. Feels like I need a psychology checklist of ways to convince, slash influence different people to get them on board. I can say over time, you know, for me, the best thing for me is to rip that gosh darn band aid off and get to where I want to be tomorrow, right? And so like, if you're the champion for change, that's where you want to be. Like, how do I get there as quick as possible. And the more I've actually done this, the more I have skewed from the rip the band aid off guy over more to the incremental change guy. And that is hard and that is frustrating and it always takes longer than you wish it would. But I will say over time I have trended more towards kind of the incremental approach. Now there's probably still situations where it makes sense to rip the band aid off the hard things. There Is you got to think about like, staff attrition. Like, if you're just gonna piss everybody off so much that they're just like, see you later, then whatever improvements you're getting from making that change, you may have just blown up by people walking. Same thing with clients. Like, if you are uprooting the client processes and all of that, and you do do all of that in a very disruptive way, you do have to think about, like, is this going to tick off my clients? Are they going to leave? And all of that. So there are, there are risks to ripping the band aid off, but I'll also fully admit there's risk risks to moving too slow. I will say if your brain is wired the way that mine is, which is a hamster on a wheel and constantly fearing moving too slow. If there's any lessons that can be learned from history, it's that if it takes longer than you think, if it takes longer than you want it to take, you will probably still be just fine. I mean, look at like the people that listen to this show. Like, you are the nine, like the 1%, like cutting edge type of stuff. You look at how most of the industry is right now and it's like, oh, yeah, no, like they're still running a killer business with a bunch of clients that use QuickBooks Desktop. Fact of the matter is you can today, that's totally fine. Like, that isn't fun to me. That isn't like getting my clients ready for the future. But I will say I do think we put pressure on ourselves to change really quickly because we see what's possible and we feel this FOMO of seeing really, like other firms doing really impressive things where I got to eventually. And this was in a firm of 40 people. And so like, definitely the calculation of what level of agility is possible, is possible is dependent upon how much inertia do you have going into a direct in a single direction. Like, how big is that team, how change averse are they? And all of that. I will say over time I got slower. And maybe this is, this is Jason losing his edge, you know, maybe like that. And this is like very true that, that, you know, sweaty think boy of, you know, 36 months ago, like how I used to feel about certain things. Like that has changed and is it a good thing or a bad thing? I don't know. But I will say the more of it I actually did, the more I slowed it down. I tried to give the people involved in the process grace. I tried to understand their perspective and that led me to slowing down. Maybe that is just pathetic and pandering to people that don't like change. But I do think, I do think the easy thing to talk about in conference talks and online and all that stuff is to signal how cool and New Agey you are. And as we listen to all of those things, we're like, oh, dang, I'm not doing any of that stuff, but I want to. And it puts this pressure on you. The reality is like. And it's just like, there's like an element of, you know, Instagram and body dysmorphia and this is the accounting firm version of that as we consume all these cool things these people do all day. But like we're seeing, we're seeing the really appealing version of it. Not always seeing like the dirty details behind the scenes and what breaks and is this person's firm actually still making money? So all this is to say I try to be as practical as possible and talk about where things went sideways because that's life and I don't want to paint too rosy of a picture. And this is one of those situations where I wish I could walk into a room with my whole team and be like, hey gang, get ready for your minds to be blown with this cool thing that you're all gonna wanna pounce on tomorrow. When the reality was like, when you tell that to a bunch of people, most of them are gonna be like, well, shoot, how does this change my day to day? I'm scared. Like, it's a lot of very human things that just take time to work through. I don't know, rip the band aid off or take it slow. What do you think there may be if, like, what is the rip the band aid off scenario? Maybe it's an acquisition and you just gotta force a bunch of change through quickly. Like maybe there are scenarios where that does make sense. CJ asked in a YouTube comment random question over or under two years from the time that we will be able to type in a prompt and generate full length feature films with actors, plots and indistinguishable. Okay, he added in parentheses to one's grandma from normal movie. Now I'm not going to get grandma canceled here. Somebody in that AICPA AI keynote asked the question and they threw it to me of what about all these old accountants who are about to retire and may not lean into AI like the. The implication being that it's because it's because they're old and because they're change averse and all that I'll tell you what, doing all this stuff, like some of the most agile, like open minded people I know are old and they're like, I'm just gonna say old. And there isn't like a, A, I don't know, an absolute yardstick of what is old. Besides, like the older I get, that yardstick keeps going up. Right? But yeah, maybe the framing is like for, you know, the 75% of the people that don't know anything about AI and can't identify deep fakes and like fake pictures online and stuff like that. How far are we from being able to generate full length feature films that those people wouldn't know the difference from right now? Like we can generate full length films, plot, characters and all that stuff today and they are pretty darn good. And behind the scenes it's a whole bunch of duct tape and paperclip and together GPT prompts. It's actually some embeddings and vector search because we have the context limits of language models right now where you can't generate something that long. And so you could absolutely build a product tomorrow that can do that. With the technology we have today that is pretty darn good. And honestly, I would say like, and we're just talking about say a screenplay, a written version of this, not the visual version of this. I would say probably within two years you could get something that you could run by some just a normal person and give them three scripts and say, point out the one that is AI generated and this could be the next Marvel movie or something like that. Honestly, we might already be there right now because GPT4 has a higher level of writing ability than the average person. And that's a scary threshold because it means like we don't know the difference. Oftentimes of the stuff that is posted online that's AI generated. And if you do this a lot, you can have you, you develop an eye for AI generated text. Poor AI generated text. But right now, if somebody knows what they're doing with prompt engineering and they get in there and do a little bit of fiddling with it to make it feel more human, it's indistinguishable today. So honestly, like we might already be there. The only, the only kind of thing standing in the way right now is somebody productizing a way to generate all this stuff where they're, they're doing all the hard work behind the scenes of stitching together all these different types of prompts and like making that whole thing cohesive rather than like a bunch of distinct Generations. So I would say we may already be there. I still think long term, a phenomenal movie is gonna have a human brain pulling it all together. I actually think that may be a thing that takes a really, really long time to get to, like, where there is that human driven level of novelty that I feel like the closer we get to it, like, is one of those things that will get further away. But what is good enough? You know, this whole conversation around AI and it being good enough will be really interesting even in technical matters. Like, if you could fully automate bookkeeping tomorrow, the threshold for how good it would have to be is probably different than the threshold it would have to be if you paid somebody 60 grand a year to be on your team and do it right. So like if the two options are fully automated bookkeeping for free, or better bookkeeping and you pay an accountant $60,000 a year to come into your company and do this for you, the requirements of the quality output, like right or wrong, those are probably different. We're going to see this in a big way with tax reporting where the tax pros will say, well, this isn't as good as I would do it. But the fact of the matter is that person may not have the $5,000 that is your fee to do that tax return for them. And their DIY tax return was wrong too. Right. So it will be really interesting to follow this kind of pattern of like, AI can do some things not as good as the human beings who are prolific in that domain, but probably better than the person who isn't that expert. And will that be enough? Like, that will kind of be an interesting calculation that I think we're going to be navigating over the next few years. Nathan Zosa posted in a YouTube comment, I recently had someone mention to me that written the written mediums like blog posts should benefit your firm first. But should I do it? Should it be something separate, kind of curious everyone's thoughts? That's a good question. Depends on what your goal is. Blogs are a really helpful, reusable resource for your current client base. So when you get common questions over and over again, you can send them to that blog post. That's helpful. If your goal is client acquisition, virtually no new clients are going to find you via your blog. There was the kind of the SEO paradigm of the past where you could attract people to your website via SEO. I think that's dying really fast. We did a whole episode on that. Right now the way to capture new people is social media. But what's the matter with doing both, right? So like, if you do a blog post, like could that also be a Twitter thread? Could that be something that goes on LinkedIn? I think oftentimes we think of these things as being mutually exclusive when they're all rolling out of the same noggin. And there may be a way to do that work and repurpose it across several different platforms. I think that's probably what I'd say. Interested to know. Like, how are people using blog posts right now though? Like, is that something you're still investing in? Last one here. Larry Bernstein, in a YouTube comment, posted this on the video we did about PTO policies and output based work. They're using carbon and ignition. They're working on like an output based compensation model. He said, however, we're having trouble generating and sharing results based outputs. Timely. We have a managed revenue number that is shared across team members. But I'd love to know if you've seen any other firms that have a working solution for outputs based measurements and if so, here are a few examples of what worked for them. Are you using output based comp? If so, like what are the drivers of that? What are the metrics? One thing I avoid, so the issue here is it's taking too long. It's too hard to get to that number on a timely basis. One thing I avoid is like the bottom of the P and L because that can be a really subjective thing with what people are paying, with what the owner is expensing. Takes a long time to get to the bottom of the P and L too. And so like I've navigated this with clients where they needed a faster turnaround time to like get to a commission or a revenue share or something like that. I think the more simple this calculation can be, the better. Better. So like what is a revenue number that you can get to on the 1st of the month or the 2nd of the month, something like that, or even every single week. I do think there's a risk of over engineering that profit sharing calculation. So the answer is like without knowing all the details here, the answer here is probably just to try to strip it back to something more simplistic. Otherwise, like if this thing builds complexity over time, it becomes a monster to manage. But ultimately that is the downside of this output based compensation approach is rather than it being a game of how people spend their time, it becomes a gamification of the compensation model. And anytime you change that, holy smokes, buckle up, it's going to hurt some people. It's going to help some other people, but I would still trade that for the traditional salary model that disincentivizes innovation and all that stuff. So kind of a hard question to answer, but if you have a good output based compensation model that you're using, would love to see it in the comments and we can steal some ideas from you. Hey, that's been Q and A Wednesday. Got a fun show in store for tomorrow. Thanks for coming and hanging and I'll see you then.