107 How Accountants Can Live In Harmony With Intuit in 2023

What if there was a way for accounting and tax professionals and Intuit to coexist long term? What if we could all just be friends, right? All this aggressive posturing from Intuit about being the done for you company now and it has all of us professionals thinking, don't you remember what we had? Don't you remember how it used to be? How can I get back that feeling? And is it even worthwhile? I think there's a path to us working together. Let's talk about it. Let's get those ideas going. So come on in and let's make into it great again. No, no, that's bad slogan. Let's not use that one. Okay. So building on what we talked about last week, Intuit launched their little AI. Well they announced their little AI chat agent and the messaging wasn't particularly friendly for professionals, particularly some of the quotes from Sasan Gadarzi around them just transitioning to a do it for you company rather than build the products that you do it on. And that's not a new development, but it's just further confirmation of the direction direction they're headed. And some of the quotes specifically around AI were around, you know, certain types of companies going out of business and certain categories kind of dying off. And it all just felt, dunno, maybe I'm just seeing it through the prose lens that it looks like feels like I'm being attacked. But what I would like to do is rather than bemoan into it and their continued efforts to commandeer your client, work for themselves, what is the best version of this look like? Like where we can all work together and all have a positive outcome. It's unrealistic. I don't know if it's not going to be into it during the bottom of the market. I guess it's worth acknowledging it's going to be somebody else. You know, you've got your benches, you've got your pilots. So even if we're not into it that went into that bookkeeping space, it's going to be a hundred other companies. So does it ultimately change things that it's into it doing it? I would say only through the lens of how motivated are they going to be to invest in me long term versus invest in themselves. And so I've got three points here and they kind center around that which I take Umbridge more with their lack of appetite to invest in the pro channel long term and their tooling and all that stuff. More so than them doing bookkeeping. I could care less if they wanted a 200amonth bookkeeping. Knock yourself out, buddy. I don't want to do it. But if that takes their foot off the pedal for developing really good tools for pros, that'd be a bummer because they're in the driver's seat for doing some really cool stuff from a tech standpoint to enable pros that I would love to see. But if they're not excited about certain serving us anymore that I don't know that we'll ever see it. So how to live in harmony with Intuit. Three thoughts, three things that they could lean further into, I think. And for us accountants where I think we could open our minds and you know, open up that, that seat at the Thanksgiving table again that they once had. But after live bookkeeping, you threw them right out on their keisters. So it is a hard time right now. I wouldn't want to be the people that work in the QuickBooks Accountant channel. We've talked about this before, but Intuit's leadership right now is just. They're building killer consumer products like TurboTax. Live was a huge hit. The ability to pull in a pro Live was a really, really big hit. They're just, they're doing cool stuff on the consumer side and it completely makes sense. The investors are excited about it. Like stock price has grown ahead of the market. So I think we like to bucket people, accountants especially, into being pro into it or anti into it. I don't know what I'm really either. I completely understand why this is much more enticing to investors than maybe how they've approached then I don't know, then going all in on the, on the pro segment. So I don't really fault them for any of this stuff. But I would still like to have my cake and eat it too. So somebody's going to build the cool consumer products. Great. If it's into it. I just don't want them to leave me flapping in the breeze when it comes to the tools that we get to use. If there's any scenario where I'm anti into it, it's where accountants and accounting firms keep be moaning into it and compl and all that. But then they still buy their products and they never move off. There's no part of your firm right now that has to be run on Intuit products. There are perfectly capable alternatives. There's super smart people running mega profitable firms without touching anything into it. So if you're that mad about it, just make the decision, make the jump. I don't know if that's A good idea. I'm not saying that, but there is this like industry wide Stockholm syndrome where everybody wants to complain about this and that, but ultimately they never just make the jump. If it's bothering you that much, you can make the jump like a lot of people have. And ultimately when you are, you know, running all your client books on a certain ledger, when you are running all your tax work through a certain tax platform, you are hitching your wagon to that company's future and where you think they're going to go. Because it's not just about what they have today, it's about what you think they're going to build tomorrow. Biggest question mark. And if I'm running a firm still, like, the biggest thing that would leave me to lead me to move my work away from Intuit is just if I didn't have a high degree of trust that they were going to continue investing in the Pro Channel longer term. And I would say right now the jury's still out. Like, we'll see. Obviously they're doing cool consumer stuff, but unfortunately in this space, them doing cool consumer stuff like Intuit could still have the best suite for pros. Even, like, there's a degree of like indifference there where even with just a little bit of investment into it could probably build the best suite for pros. And that's kind of a bummer, but I think those two things aren't mutually exclusive. So they can build cool consumer stuff. They can still build cool stuff for us. I want to see more of an acknowledgement of that from the leadership because you just never see it talked about. So bring this back to three ways that I think we can work together better. One, specifically in how they present their services. So if you look at QuickBooks Live bookkeeping, if you look at TurboTax Live, they don't really go deep into what they will do and what they don't do. But just like every single other accounting firm, there are certain projects that they're willing to take and certain projects that they are not willing to take. And I for one would love to send so many people to QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping. Who are the smaller projects that I don't, I don't want to tackle. I have absolutely no problem doing that. I have sent hundreds, maybe thousands of people to TurboTax because I'm like, man, your stuff isn't this complex. You don't need us to do it for you. Sure, there's like ways that they could still get that wrong. But ultimately I don't want somebody to Pay me a thousand dollars to do a 1040, the W2 on it. And so I sent them to TurboTax. That ought to be more reciprocal than it feels right now. So if you think about the standard pricing setup of tier X, Y, Z, that enterprise tier, man, that ought to just be like making a referral to a professional that just owns a tax shop or owns an accounting shop. Like, it can really be that simple. And they still have the Pro Advisor program, which, I mean, a lot of people built their bookkeeping practices on back in the day. It's basically just a little directory where you can type in a physical location and it will show the bookkeepers from Intuit's ProAdvisor program who are like physically near you, which is adorable and it feels very quaint and old timey now. But there's a better, more modern version of that that we could absolutely plug into QuickBooks Live bookkeeping, TurboTax Live. Like the stuff that goes beyond the threshold of what those services will handle. Get that stuff to a pro. You're the greatest lead gen engine in North America. Like hand that stuff off to a pro. That's a valuable part of being into it. And they aren't like connecting the dots on handing that value off to a professional. In return, you're going to get a bunch of goodwill from the professional network and you're still going to increase the likelihood that the customer has a positive experience rather than just throwing them out in the cold and saying like, hey, sorry, we don't do that stuff. It's your problem. This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Cloud Accountant Staffing. Do you hire accountants? Bless your little heart. Not the best part of the job, in my opinion. Not something I ever enjoyed. Well, listen, you can build your accounting dream team with talented offshore accountants in the Philippines that work 100% full time for your firm. Their accountants aren't freelancing or contracting for multiple firms. They're all yours. They work exclusively for you and are incentivized to stay with you and your team long term. They're not gonna get swiped. 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The notion that you can build that client portal to do any old thing you want it to do because your needs, they're unique. You know us accountants, we are absolute snowflakes. Nobody understands the problems that our clients have quite like we do. Which makes nobody more equipped to know what they need than me. Tell me how to work with my client, how to collaborate with them on a website. You're lucky I don't know how to make the software because I'd make just what my client needed and they would love it. Well, gang, that day is here because Copilot gives you the ultimate flexible platform to put any old thing you want in that portal. Totally customize each section. Customize what? Different clients and different client groups. See, because your clients aren't just a bunch of drones that are all the exact same and need the exact same thing. And if you really wanted to be that locked down and serve everybody the exact same way, then you'd be off running some sort of software startup that's just gonna serve up this vanilla, lame, boring version that's the same for everybody, doesn't take into account their actual needs. That's not you though. You're better than that. Okay, and get a client portal that will lean into the snowflake that you are and the specific needs your clients have. Is that a bad thing to say? Does Snowflake have like too many negative connotations? You know what I mean? Nobody understands the nuance like you do. And Copilot's the portal that'll meet you in the middle. Learn more about this one at the link in the show Notes. Now, maybe there's like somewhat embedded way of doing that. Like in the AI examples, you can hand it off to a pro. Like maybe there are pros who can actually interact with them in a way that feels more embedded. But at the the really just basic vanilla version of that is like having this liaison that will connect the customer with an actual pro inside the. Whatever you want to call it, Pro Advisor program, whatever the tax equivalent of that is they've had a ton of success in communicating the value of getting connected with the pro. It's the whole premise behind TurboTax Live. Like the version of TurboTax where they connect you with an actual person. Because as it would turn out that's a helpful thing that some, that people want like the human layer in there, but keep leaning into that. That and you know, the fact that there's going to be a lot of work that goes beyond the scope of what they want to handle within their platform. But that doesn't mean that they still could make a meaningful connection there with a professional. So I think in house the services are presented, I think there's a reframing of that that doesn't necessarily feel like we're going to do a hundred percent of it in house. And there's like an enterprise tier where we will connect you with a professional and the Intuit network, like great. Like that's. That feels like a big step forward to me. Even just like as small as that is just the tip of the gap that we're not going to be for absolutely everybody. But there's people that use our platform who will happily help you. I think that would go a long ways. Second, I think Intuit can lean further into supporting pros in the tooling that they make available to support clients. So we've never really, and this isn't just an Intuit thing, I'd argue it's every platform never really gotten great partner level tools. I need something better than. Here's a list of all the QuickBooks accounts and the ability to switch between them. QuickBooks launched a super rudimentary a couple of years ago like month end close management sort of functionality and qboa. But then it never really went anywhere after that. And honestly now having seen tools like Keeper, which are, which is like a dedicated tool for managing the month end close and them kind of pushing the envelope of what a tool like that is capable of. Kind of makes me more annoyed that no more investment went into that being the solution. Like a partner level month end close solution that's more of a meta workflow layer on top of the actual ledger files to basically be my project management system and like see into those files and like do some sort of meaningful quality assurance and stuff like that. Right now we're reliant upon third party services to do all of this stuff. So there really isn't any like meaningful tooling at the partner level. It's all just happening in the ledger. And I mean to be clear, like every SaaS company has really struggles with this investment. The idea of investing in the partner level of the product versus investing in the aspect of the product that everybody will use. Small business, like the direct line of business, everybody's in a battle for resources. So are you going to invest in the part of the platform that is just for the advisor rather than the part of the platform that everybody uses? This is where like Intuit becoming an accounting firm may be great, because you know what Intuit doesn't have then either is like a layer of tools at the like partner level for managing that work. And so we've got this really interesting situation now where the tooling that Intuit needs to do that work in house probably looks a lot like the tooling that you and I need to do that same work. And so if you think about a service like Bench, where they're doing kind of bookkeeping at a really big scale, they've got their own proprietary ledger system for like auto classifying as much as possible. And that data is not like siloed down to like every business account like it is for us when we do a company's books. Right now, like the most you can do is export import bank rules, but there's like no crossover of any sort of learning from one file to another. We talked on a past episode about how to get to fully automated bookkeeping using stuff like embeddings and vector search and how then each file kind of becomes a unique fingerprint of how things are classified and how AI right now and few shot learning is good enough to where there's absolutely no need for explicit bank rules anymore. Like AI can infer that stuff just by how you classified it. And the fact that we have to manually create rules is actually working against the capabilities of AI now and its ability to auto classify. I'll put a link to that episode at the end of this. But that is the type of stuff that behind the scenes like lets you automate bookkeeping at a mega scale. And I like Intuit's absolutely doing this stuff. And so what does that tooling look like and how can the professional tooling that they become reliant upon be something that pros can leverage too? And a great example of this is specifically around tax prep. So Intuit right now is kind of divided in that they have ProConnect, which is a cloud based but fairly rudimentary tax prep solution, and they have Lacert, which is this legacy tax prep solution that's like desktop based, but will do a much greater level of complexity than ProConnect will do right now in order for TurboTax Live to handle more and more and do that stuff really well. Like they've got to have a killer suite of programs to do that stuff on. Right? Wouldn't it be nice if I could use the same tech? And then when something is beyond the scope of what Intuit wants to handle in house, great. Like we've got, we can, we can connect you with a partner on the same platform that can take this work for you. Imagine how seamless that could be. Like it goes without saying with the Ledger, they're in QuickBooks and then they refer it to Pro that uses QuickBooks. But even through the lens of tax prep, imagine how seamless that could be if they're using ProConnect within TurboTax Live and then. Or like the data from TurboTax, the product you know, can get pushed into Pro Connect and then I could just like have that as a starting point when that client is referred to me. That's a killer incentive for Pros to use ProConnect if you have that sort of seamless bridging from Intuit, the accounting firm and like that referral to a professional. And if you do tax in the U.S. you know just how dire the state of tax software is. You don't see any of the incumbent people really making a meaningful effort to build a cloud platform. There's seemingly nobody on the horizon that is even like sniffing at this and Intuit like they're in the driver's seat to create like the best end to end solution for pros. And it isn't even close. Like they're working on ProConnect right now. For most it depends on the level of tax program you need. But I have never been in a tax situation from a firm standpoint where like we didn't need stuff that was way more complex than what ProConnect will do right now. Team this episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Client Hub. Where AI isn't the future, it's now, it's here. I guess it's both the future and now, but it is happening in the present. They're shipping cool stuff every day. Not just talking about it, they're doing it. They got a new landing page, your firm on GPT where they kind of outline their vision for the stuff they've already shipped and the stuff that they're working on, starting to get firms in on like early access to provide feedback on this stuff. Leveraging AI everywhere in client hub and yielding. How's this sound? 90 plus percent time savings in many aspects of the work in your firm. The three core concepts they're building this around. 1. Generate it using AI to generate stuff that normally you would have to do yourself. Think emails, tasks, that sort of thing. Answer it. Don't just search by text. A more intelligent version of text that sees into your meetings, your emails, all that stuff. A lot of stuff we've been talking about on the show and third up level it summarize meeting notes, tell you what's inside a file without having to open it, sentiment analysis, whole bunch of cool stuff. In the coming weeks we're going to be talking about like the actual stuff that they've shipped so far and the stuff that's coming soon. That is client hub. To learn more about that and what they're working on, check out the link in the show notes. But the holy grail of being able to bridge that accounting ledger seamlessly over to the tax software and just how good that end to end workflow could be if they would give us access to some better practice level work management tools. But then the idea that that could go all the way through to the tax prep software gang, that would be killer. People would be all over that. There would be nothing else in the industry like it. There's third party tools that you can use to bridge between the ledger and tax software. Tally for is probably the biggest one right now. But an all in one solution to like manage just that. I would love that. Now I thought when they did their version of Carbon into a practice manager, I thought maybe they were headed that way where they were going to invest in kind of this like end to end solution. But I think they're, I think the whole IPM things like gone now and they've sent those people back to Carbon and so it's just really hard to know is like tooling for pros getting any investment right now or is just the tooling that they need to do the accounting, the tax work in house, getting investment and if it does, am I ever going to get my grubby little mitts on it or is it going to be like this proprietary thing for how they get their work done? Right? That would be a bummer because anybody that knows this space knows that there are so many more people who need help then we can reasonably help. And accounting firms will refer stuff to other accounting firms happily all the time. And it would be really unfortunate if Intuit like had that tunnel vision where they were just living in this box of here's the stuff that we do and we don't care about anything else. And I understand that the threshold for what stuff they're going to do is going to continue to go up over time. But I'll let you know a secret for pro shops that goes up over time too. Like, what I want to do this year is going to be different than what I want to do three years from now. And we are always looking for partners who will come in and support like that floor, like the bottom of the market. And that can either be your benches, your pilots, whatever, these, you know, umpteen productized services that will keep popping up and keep getting better with AI, or it can be Intuit. Like, I feel like just as if Intuit ought to be referring to their partners first. The stuff beyond the scope of what they handle in house. Honestly, pros would be perfectly happy to refer that stuff to Intuit. Like, intuit. Like QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping would be a phenomenal resource for firms who don't want to do all that bookkeeping themselves but still want to keep their fingers in it and be able to speak into it a bit. Like, I used bench, I outsourced a ton of my in house bookkeeping to bench. And it was a killer partnership. Like, there's a version of that where you can work together that would be super killer. I just don't see, I don't know, I haven't seen anything on the Intuit side to make me think they're interested in that. And you get all the people in the Accountant channel at Intuit who will say what accountants want to hear. But honestly, like, it feels like they're kind of just along for the ride for whatever leadership decides is going to happen next. And it's. The pros are still like a part of that business. And so they have, you know, QuickBooks Connect, which interestingly has gone like full accountant, only now they've got this whole part of their business, but nothing in the way that they speak with investors like, really indicates it exists for one, or that there's any excitement in that channel. So the third thing I had of like, how we can better live in harmony with Intuit is man, if just the comms they put out more publicly acknowledged that professionals still exist rather than into it having taken all of that stuff in house. And like, I'll say, like, they talk a lot about the value of being able to talk to a human. And that's going to be. There's going to be even more of a premium on that as as AI becomes more prevalent and chat becomes more prevalent and all the other things that we do, like byproduct of that is going to be a greater demand for talking to a human. Make sure I got this stuff right and ask weird squishy human questions. And they're quick to like tout the value of that as they should, but only like within the scope in my mind of QuickBooks Live bookkeeping and TurboTax Live rather than more holistically still acknowledging like the value of having a human involved in that. Whether it's someone you're going to refer from the larger Intuit network or it's something that you handle like in platform yourself, like I said, somebody's going to come in and do all this stuff in a super productized way, one way or another, like that's just going to happen. Intuit may decided to make the move into that space. That's fine. The only thing I don't want to lose sight of is there's still a lot of people reliant upon Intuit's tooling within their firms. And man, I would love to see some acknowledgement and like proof by actually shipping stuff rather than lip service of like, yeah, we're still investing in really cool stuff for pros, I guess. I can't think of examples of meaningful things from the last few years. It's almost like the unacknowledgement of what's happening is what makes it worse. Acknowledging that hey, now we are going to in house handle this type of bookkeeping and handle this type of tax stuff. Like acknowledging that and putting boundaries around that, fine, that is what it is. But the fact that they like haven't drawn a boundary between what they'll do and what they'll refer out is what makes this all really frustrating and feel like this confusing sort of stab in the back. Because the only reason you need to have the conversation around will they advertise QuickBooks live bookkeeping in a file that's connected to an advisor? The only reason you need to even have that conversation is because there's ambiguity around like what will they do versus what will the advisor do? Like just put a box around. Here's the stuff that we're going to do and here's the stuff that we're going to refer out the stuff that you're going to do. Like, sure, advertise it explicitly define that so that we all know what that looks like and that can be your lane. Like I'm totally happy leaving that for into it. All the other stuff Find a way to, like, pull somebody in, you know, like, refer that out to somebody that's been a partner and can do a great job with that. Ultimately take care of the entrepreneur. And then everybody, I feel like, has a better understanding of where everybody else stands. Like, that feels more like a give and take sort of balance. When we know exactly what Intuit wants to do and we know exactly what falls outside of that, because there will always be a lot of work outside of that that firms will handle. But just because there's ambiguity around that and we don't exactly know where that line is drawn, feels hard to, like, approach that with, I don't know, a collaborative mindset until that's more explicitly defined. A lot that could be done better in the messaging there, I think. But I do still see a future timeline where that totally works and a timeline where Intuit builds some killer products that they use to make what they do more efficient and make that stuff available to accountants. If Intuit's pouring money into the tools that they use to do bookkeeping and do tax, that could be the very best thing for product innovation for firms. Trouble is, we haven't seen any innovation in the tech at the firm level. We only ever see development and like, those, like, within the ledger, like within a company file. Not at the firm level. But nobody's ever had a more compelling reason to build really killer stuff at the firm level than Intuit has right now. Right. Uh, we'll just see if we can get our hands on it or not, or if it just is kind of a. An inside in house into a thing. I don't know. You got any ideas? I try not to, like, get sour grapes about this and be realistic about, like, okay, like, here's the direction the company's going. Where do we fit into that vision? I think there's much more still that can be done that is beneficial for everybody without it becoming this adversarial thing. So love to hear your thoughts. If you have any other comments on that, how everybody wins over the next decade, and I'll see you in the next one. Sam.