126 Documenting Client Communications in Accounting Firms

Every client interaction you have needs to have a home, it needs to get saved somewhere. But admittedly this is really hard right now because the tools that we use don't do a great job of capturing all of those channels. So let's think through how we can have a better system for capturing all this information. Because not only important now, but it's important long term.

As AI makes this stuff more searchable.

And more discoverable and more helpful, it's more important than ever to ensure that we are capturing that context from any client communications we have. Come on in, let's talk about it. Capturing the five most common sources of client context. I said five, I just came up with a sixth. Let's do six things and let's start with a really hard one. Calls, you know, on the phone, ye olde timey calls.

These ones are tricky because they're not.

Like virtual meetings now where we've got like this tool set to capture this stuff automatically. And the whole notion of recording like phone call phone calls, it's total common practice in any business beyond a certain size. But I'll be totally honest, I don't know how I'd even do that. Like I'm a big advocate of like voip, phone providers like that. Those systems are just better than traditional phones generally. And I don't know is that is like native recording a thing that a lot of those things will do. I guess the one that I used didn't have it.

But how do you capture all the.

Context from a phone call, especially if you run a team, how do you get everybody on the team to do it now in the context of like a call center where it is somebody's job to call someone every three minutes and that sort of thing that software is hyper optimized for, here's the next person to call, here's all the things I want you to capture and get saved into the system and then you're on to the next one. And it's like the whole process is optimized for that. But because I think the core thing that we make is month end closes or tax returns or something like that, our tool set is built around that. And we think of these little client communications oftentimes that are very small and trivial as like this side thing and not kind of the core thing that we do. And so it doesn't get the same level of attention. And that's plainly obvious in our practice management systems. So as I assess different cloud practice management systems, the one thing honestly that all of them are sorely Lacking right now is a CRM that does a good job of capturing communications from all of these different sources. And some of them have kind of like catch all approaches. Like under a client you can leave a note, but. But that's very manual. And like doesn't really even necessarily give me the context to know like was this a text, was this a transcript from a zoom meeting? Like that's just not granular enough for me right now. And so for now, unless you're going to go out and get a CRM that is like dedicated for solving this problem and the whole vernacular of CRM is really messy because I think CRM now has become more about managing leads and sales than the ongoing clients client relationship. But unless you're going to go out and get something, some dedicated separate tool for this, which I think is probably not the answer, you need to identify a home for where these call notes go and set an expectation for like how to standardize the collection of those call notes. And the, the best thing you have for now may just be like this notes thing within your practice management system. Right. Maybe there's nothing better than that. Maybe better than that is like an actual file in the file system. I know it's probably going to be pretty system specific. And it gets even messier when you have a call with a contact who's associated with a bunch of different clients and they tell you two things about their personal tax stuff and one thing about their business. And you have the age old problem of do I create a duplicate of this and put it in multiple places or does my system let me have a single version of this and point it to multiple places? Which is much better because then if you make any modifications or markups to that doc down the road, you don't have multiple that you're then having to keep in sync. Right. But I can tell you I never in all my years got everybody in my firm to document phone calls. That was just a hill that was really, really hard to climb. And what I would love to see from our software providers is at the very least the ability to log like a placeholder to just say, Jim had a call with Steve yesterday, like, and that's the minimum. Like in a perfect world you get a pop up and you have to add some notes or you remember to go and add some. Not something like that or even better, it's recorded and there's like an AI summarization that goes in there or something like that. But from a technical standpoint, what I would love to see is you Know either stuff like Zapier Endpoints to add notes right? Now, unfortunately for the cloud practice management systems that do support Zapier, it's usually just around contacts, not around like adding a note to a client or something like that. And native integrations with common phone systems. So, like, I don't know a single PM that has a native integration with, you know, RingCentral or something like that, where every time it sees there's a call from a specific number, all it's going to do is just log who that person called and like put that in the client notes somewhere. Even that, frankly, would be a massive, massive win over what we have right now, which is completely reliant upon somebody remembering to go out and do that thing. This isn't going to be relevant to everybody because a lot of folks now that like just aren't doing phone calls in their firms. But at the opposite end of the spectrum, you've got the people whose personal devices are now in this state where it's like, I'm never going to recover from this. Everybody texts me, everybody calls me at this number. And you have to unwind this. The best way to unwind this takeover of your personal device is to create a new business number with a modern VoIP like openphone or something like that, that will let you do SMS and calls from like a modern interface, while also having an app on your phone so that you can still send those texts and take calls on your phone via that business number, but use a service like that to create a new business number. You then have somebody go through your phone and ping all of your business contacts that are in your phone saying, hey, I have this new number. Now all of your clients are directed to that new number. And if any client reaches out to you on your personal line now, you either ghost them or you text them like, hey, new number over here. Or maybe you just ghost them. Cause you want them to think that that number is dead, but all you're gonna use that number for is personal stuff. So I had a partner who was like in the throes of this and it starts really innocent. We're like, oh, you just text with a couple of clients and before you know it, everybody has access to your personal number. And then it's like impossible to delegate, right? Because all this stuff is coming to your personal number. You can absolutely overcome this. Gotta get to a new business line. Tell all of your clients it can still be on your smartphone. And then anytime business stuff comes into the personal number after that, you just gotta ghost it and the beauty of that dedicated business line then is with a modern VoIP, you can get your team in to delegate. Like you can actually get some help with it rather than it all being on your personal device. They can take those texts somewhere, they can take those voicemails somewhere. They can be a big help there.

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Link in the show notes. Okay, that's calls. We got five more to go here. Email, obviously this is, this is the biggest one and the biggest aspect of client communication that AI is is disrupting the ability for it to provide generative replies. And man, these replies are going to get really, really good the more those generative replies look into the rest of your system, projects, files and all that. There's already a pretty good argument for incorporating email into your workflow because there's so many tasks that originate from emails, right? The ability to directly add an email to kind of your pipeline of stuff to get done so that you're not juggling a separate task list along with your emails, which is kind of a task list on its own. But what AI now enables having everything searchable in one place. And in the next 24 months this is going to be way, way, way more compelling than it is right now. What will ultimately be really important is having all that information. And if all of my projects and my files and all that stuff are in one place, but all of my emails are in this totally separate place. Man, that stinks. Because my email client isn't going to be very intelligent not being able to see into all that other stuff. And then my workflow is like unimpacted by email, which is unrealistic because a lot of work comes from email. We're seeing practice management systems invest more in this now, but many of them are pretty rudimentary integrations where all it does is just pull in any emails that go in and out. And while that's better than nothing, I think what we ultimately want here is something that is integrated into the workflow and as a good email authoring experience, because that system, having access to all the other like adjacent details about that client, like what are their businesses, what's the email that my colleague got two days ago? That platform ultimately can be the most helpful when it comes to drafting emails because it has all that information. I'm so sick of the fall crud. Like man, kids go back to school, everybody gets sick. The amount of coughing and nose blowing that gets cut out of these pods right now. My editors could put together a sizzle reel that would ruin me. Okay, email, obviously huge. A lot of progress to be made there on the tech side that can make that easier for us. Third thing, texts. Texts. Why is it the no cloud practice management system gives me a good way to manage text messages? Right now there's some firms that'll say texts are just strictly off limits, but a lot of people are using texts more and more. And I like, I'm not aware of a single native integration with any VoIP system that will pull text into a platform. And again, I think all we're left with is like this sort of catch all fallback of like adding it as, you know, a quote, unquote note or something like that. And as you're thinking about this, I've got kind of six channels outlined here. As you're thinking about this in your form firm, what are all the channels that you accept where clients are allowed to give you information and you really need to almost like map this out to set the expectation for your team or even just for yourself. If something comes in this way, what is the correct home for it and how is that thing saved? How is it structured? Are there expectations for things that need to go into that note? That's something that needs to be explicitly defined. And so texts, for example, right now, if a member of your team gets a text from a client, what's the expectation? Where's it supposed to go? If you get a text, where does that go? If you are getting stuff off of your cell phone, your personal cell phone, and you've got this now in a business line and you're getting kind of delegation help with this for the first time. Do you even have a rule for where that stuff should go when you pull a person in? This isn't a hard thing to do. Literally just sit down on a sheet of paper, jot down like, what are the main channels? I've got snail mail calls, text messaging, live meetings and emails. You probably don't need to put emails on there cause you don't need to like manually log those. But for the other five, what's the expectation for those so that you can start documenting that stuff better. Fourth one, messaging. And this is kind of a catch all for like, is there anything else you use WhatsApp teams Slack, Discord, that sort of thing. Right now all that context lives in a totally separate system and a lot of it's like really valuable stuff that you actually need. And I've made this analogy with meeting transcripts before, but like if you're not doing anything to capture that, it's akin to like having an email policy where you just delete everything after it gets sent or something like that. Like think of how much searching we go back doing into old emails. Yet for whatever reason we don't assign the same value to this information that is captive in other systems. And it's not something that I think our tools make easy for us yet. And maybe that's why we don't put the effort in as is it is work to pull that stuff in. But if you're willing to transact with a client over those channels, man, it's a, like to me that is risky to say that no, we're not going to document any of this stuff. Right?

Okay.

Snail mail. Some of you might be super cool, super woke firms and like snail mail isn't a thing, man. Snail mail was always a big thing for me to the extent that we eventually created like this physical mail log, which it took me years to like get over myself enough to put that into place because it just felt so old timey, like we were running a Dewey Decimal system or something. But we literally started logging into Excel anything that came in in the mail from a client. Who is the client that it came from. What was it? What date did it come? Because if your clients are allowed to mail things to you, they will inevitably be a situation where they're like, oh, I sent you that in the mail. And you're like, no you didn't. And they're like, well, I don't have that thing anymore and it's your fault. And like the reality is without that logging system, we couldn't with absolute certainty say whether that thing ever came in the door or not. And when, you know, Covid hit and people were working in a more distributed way, that got really, you know, problematic because like if that thing got chucked in a file cabinet temporarily or something like that, how would anybody know about it? And so it's like, it's another example of regardless of how things come in, you need a methodology for capturing that in a perfect world. That's probably getting logged to your practice management system somehow.

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Got here number six live meetings and we've talked about this quite a bit. Hopping on a zoom, hopping on a Microsoft Teams chat teams like virtual meeting maybe use Google Meet. Frustrating state of things right now is we've got tools that will do like really good transcriptions and summarizations and stuff like that. But none of those things are getting back to our core systems in an automated way. So let's say you have a one hour meeting with a client and you're headed straight into another meeting with a client, but your staff needs that information. AI meeting assistant killer. You got that transcript right away. Your team can get in and pull the information that they need. But ultimately, where does that one hour transcript go? Like, what is the home of it? Because what I don't want long term is to have it in this totally separate system so that we're like having to hop out to like, oh, what is, what do you use for texts? What are you used for live meetings? Let me go look in this Excel file for the mail log. Like, what you don't want is just like all of these things happening in different places. So does that transcript come in as a file in the file system? Does it come in as a humongous note? If, like the PM's note system even lets you make notes that big, somehow it needs to be captured. And this is the, the proof of the value of this that I always give to people. How nice would it be if you had transcripts of your last five years client meetings in your file system that were searchable right now? Like, how many times does a situation come up where we're like, did we talk about that thing? Did they tell me that? I can't quite remember. And what you usually do, like most accountants, it means hopping over to Outlook and popping open the search box and you look for that thing. And sometimes that is the most powerful software in the universe and it can pull up this thing from 18 years ago that was this incredible reference. Other times you could search word for word for the exact email that you got three hours ago. And Outlook's like, no, nope, there's nothing. There's nothing. In fact, I can't find a single email that you've ever sent before. And so you're battling, you're battling that problem. But the value of capturing all of this stuff is it's going to save you a ton of time down the road, like having to ask the same questions again. And like, especially if you're running a team and not everybody is involved in all those conversations. The ability for them to query past conversations that you've had with the client, like, that's gold. And not only keeps them from having to bug the client, but it keeps them from having to bug you. To say, like, hey, did you talk about this thing or that thing? And unfortunately, unfortunately, that's a lot of. When you run a team, that's a, that's a lot of the team comms that you end up having is did you talk about this thing with Steve or not? And documenting communications like that alleviates that issue. Now if I had to craft my dream technological solution for what this looks like right now, like if there's a direction that we could steer our practice management systems in or a point of reference we could give them for like what is the great way to do this? I'm seeing more tools that are like omnichannel customer sort of management tools across like a ton of messaging apps and stuff like that. I don't know if that's quite what we need. I don't know if the solution is ultimately to build a native integration for like every messaging service under the sun. That never feels like the right answer. Right. Maybe like the most common ones that should, that ought to be a thing for, to capture like you know, the 80% of things that are most common. But at the very least right now give us a more robust, you know, note system and maybe it's, it's not called notes at that point, but a more robust system for capturing very short stuff and, and longer stuff like transcripts, ways to tag that stuff across multiple clients. Right. Because that's a really common issue with those communications is it's actually related to their personal thing and maybe a couple business things. So part of the answer is probably integrations like the ability to connect that stuff with third party systems. I know some platforms like Client Hub is, is talking about running those meetings like on their platform. So you actually spin up a meeting from the client portal and that's where the client goes to come and like have a live meeting with you. That's nice because then at that point you can keep all the transcript and all that stuff within the system. Ultimately then do you end up like building your own, you know, conferencing solution that's kind of like on this hamster wheel to keep up with all the other conferencing solutions? I don't know, I don't know what the long term answer there is. But right now if we throw out email and we take snail mail calls, texts, messaging of any kind besides texts and live meetings, like where do you even go with all that stuff? Those are all like very different types of structured information. And all we really have right now is like in most systems a note which is going to have like Character limits and just isn't this particularly intelligent place to park stuff. It's usually not searchable and it's usually just kind of like this half baked thing. If you've seen any like killer implementations of this where it like handles all the communications in one place really well, feel free to share that. I would love to see that in the comments. Well, I used Office Tools way back in the day and that was a desktop product and it was pretty good for what it did. And it was kind of like trying to be an all in one tool. And they had tabs for like calls, like they had dedicated spaces for like different types of ways that you brought info in. I don't know if that approach is realistic still because there's so many more channels now for how we take info in across like different virtual conferencing stuff. And like there's just so many ways we get that info in. Not sure that's realistic still, but maybe the answer is like just greater automatability and flexibility around what a note is some native integrations to like at least get like placeholders in there for all my calls or my meeting transcripts or something like that as opposed to right now like the entire thing is manual now. The one thing that I was always a trap for me that I think a lot of us struggle with is we go, well dang, there's not a way to automate this so we're going to have no system for it at all. Man, if I had a dollar for every time I did that, where I'm like, I go out and try to figure out how to automate this thing and I'm like, I can't quite figure it out, it's not going to work. And so I just communicate nothing to my team and there's no system. We, I think oftentimes we overlook the value of a good old manual process that everybody adheres to. And this is absolutely a situation where like the fact that you can't automate all of it or that it's a little bit of work right now, like that's not a reason to not do it and to not have a policy. So if you think about on the flip side of it, how much time do you waste trying to go back and find that information or how much of your staff's time do you waste holding them up because they can't get access to that information? You're burning that time on the back end trying to go back and scrape that information together. So because there's not a perfect way to do it. In my mind, that's not an excuse for not having a system and an expectation for how to capture all that stuff, because you're going to be glad he had it. You would absolutely be tickled if you had that for the last five years and it was searchable right now. Right. But it is something that I think our tech partners can help a little more with right now. So if you had any, got any good ideas on that, or any, like, kind of positive transitions you've gone through implementing something better, any tools you could put your finger on in the marketplace that do that really, really well. Love to hear about it. It's all I got for today. I'll see you tomorrow.