128 What Do Accounting Firms Need from a CRM?

What do accounting firms actually need from their CRM? I feel like we project actually a bunch of different types of things on CRMs. Is AI going to remove like the mid level accounting firm could take a big old bite out of that because the big guys have the tech and the money to invest in AI. I made a silly tax deadline AI video. Some folks asked how I put that together. It was pretty fun. And then a whole bunch of podcast ideas for firms. We did a podcasting episode on Monday. A bunch of people shared their ideas for what they're thinking. We're going to jam a that may give you a few new ideas. Come on in. It is a piping hot Q and A edition of Jason Daily Friday. Okay, the CRM discussion. We talked about this a bit recently. Like what do accounting firms. In fact, that was this week, I think what do accounting firms need to track calls and emails and text messages and all these like various ways that we get information in. Right. Like our systems don't handle all this stuff very well. And so we end up having all these different siloed sources of, of client communication. And the commission, I think the commission. Net, I think it was on YouTube. Comment. Hey, Jason, I just can't figure out the best CRM and I've tried them all. If I were to go down the rabbit hole of everything that I do to, to try to stay organized and on top of the projects and clients, you would think I'm crazy. Mr. Netflix, I absolutely don't think you're crazy. I said this in a, in a video I shot recently. But you're spending. I think what I said was you're spending too much time working on what to work on. And like, how true does that feel, right? The amount of time that you have to spend just to figure out and decide what to do next. And like, it can be really overwhelming when we have like so much information in different places, but specifically around CRMs. Like the phrasing CRM is so noisy. Like there's so many people that say they are a CRM and have a different definition of exactly what a CRM is. I would argue Most CRM SaaS tools these days are actually like sales and marketing focused. They're actually more focused on acquisition, not the management, ongoing management of the client relationship, which I think is the angle that a lot of accounting firms are coming from. Give me a place to organize all of the stuff to do with the client relationship, as the acronym would suggest. And as we talked about this week, most of the practice management systems do a really half baked version of giving us a place to track all of that stuff. Some of them like do CRM on like the sales and the lead side, like a really basic version of it, but not many. But to the point of this commenter, like how many times have you gone down that rabbit hole and you're like this, these are not, this is not the thing that I want. Like it does so many different things, but ultimately I'm looking for this very specific thing that it does not do for me. And so I think he actually followed up and said I'm trying to build this in not notion now. And honestly I think this is the appeal these days of the hyper flexible, like almost build your own software type of softwares. And so apps like Notion, apps like Coda is another one. Their whole mission is to basically reinvent software and make systems that are so flexible that you don't need to go out and buy a software for a thing because it's so quick and easy to put together in a. Like, put together exactly what you want. And like an area where I'm super struggling with this right now is content management. Like if I, if we produce a short, like a, you know, a short portrait style video, I'm on like six or seven social platforms where we're posting regularly. How do I track where that thing has been posted and where it hasn't been posted? And like what if I want to resurface that seven months down the road in like a newly relevant way? There's scheduling tools, but most scheduling tools don't work across all the platforms that I use and they're all missing various things. And so how do you organize all this stuff in a single place? And like what I've fallen back to is like, well frick, like I'm just going to have to hack this thing together in Notion because I'm comfortable with Notion and I have a clear vision for like, oh yeah, we could totally build it this way with Notion. It's just not going to have all of the razzle dazzle and the features of like a purpose built tool. Uh, in my case for you know, content management, it would be going out and like pulling engagement metrics afterwards and like that sort of thing. And when it comes to CRMs, like there is value in a CRM that does exactly what you needed to do, like integrating with however you text people and however you make phone calls and having all that information in one place. The service that you use for live meetings. That is the big downside of going out and building Your own thing. So, like, while it is oftentimes appealing to go out and be like, oh, I could, I'm going to roll my own version of this thing from scratch. The big downsides of doing that are you ultimately have to invest further in that if you ever want it to improve. All the other tools we use, they kind of improve without us having to do anything right. But that tool of yours is going to be static until you invest more time and effort into making it better. We are accountants, so maybe that excites some people. I like my tools to improve and then oftentimes they're like kind of to what we were talking about. They're like an 80% solution. Like, they're not going to. You're not going to have the native integrations with like, all the other stuff that works just the way you want it. But to be honest, sometimes that 80% version is better than what you're going to find anywhere else, unfortunately. So that's always a hard one. In my early career days, I went really quickly to building my own thing and I kind of enjoyed it. And like, the upkeep wasn't a big deal to me. I will say in my older years, as I mature, as my children suck the lifeblood out of me, I can say I don't have the same excitement for building my own things that I once did because I don't want another thing, like, to manage on an ongoing basis. But I hear you on the CRM struggles, man. Like, I. There's so many aspects of work life still where it's like, what? This doesn't feel like a hard thing. Why is everybody doing it in a way that I don't want it done? That can be really frustrating. I hear a lot of people say that with practice management systems where they're like, I've tried them all and none of them work quite like I want to. So there's certainly a version that you could always build yourself. And there's absolutely times to do that. And I still have a bunch of custom stuff that I built myself that I use a lot. But I've also gotten more okay with compromising and with like, opening my mind to, here's the way I thought this would work. It looks like they have a different methodology. Why? That's something that maybe I wasn't always as open to as I am now is understanding their alternative methodology to getting the same thing done and maybe giving that a little more space than I used to in the past. Tell me what you think about this AI Hot Take from Romeo in the comments, I think AI could shift the structure of the next generation of firms. Slimmed down solo firms with little to no employees. Or on the contrary, the productized services eventually price their products so low that they're leveraged to hell and force us all to be employees for our consolidated overlords. Medium sized firms get hollowed out and those solo firms get vastly simplified because they can use tech to do a lot of that heavy lifting. He says semi serious, but he sees AI kind of reducing that middle layer. And I'll be honest, obviously I've thought a lot about this and I think sometimes we fall into the traps of what automation has done in the past to inform the future. Like though the thing that, you know, I've seen way too much, that is, you know, the old AI will automate the menial, simple tasks, the tedious stuff that we no longer have to do tomorrow do anymore. And it's like, yeah, they might, but they might almost. They might also automate like the technical stuff. Like the one big difference with what's happening now is for the first time you have automation that's not just displacing the entry level people. You have automation that can stand to displace everyone in the entire org chart. And it's creating this really weird, like social, political dynamic within big companies especially where pretty much everyone is equally at risk. And normally with automation it's like, oh, we're going to, we've got robotics to do this and that on the factory floor. And it's like, it's the entry level stuff, it's the data entry, but this is bigger than that. Like this is everything. Like we talked about that study where you had these really high level consultants and those that were using AI for the really high level consulting tasks were like, you know, 40% more productive and like way higher performers. And this is like big brain knowledge work kind of stuff. But then they use the same framework for financial analysis using AI. And this financial analysis was fairly basic and they were actually worse when they used the AI. And so it's interesting, this like new kind of generative AI wave, it's disrupting stuff almost at like the entire skill spectrum. The other really interesting big difference with this one is for the first time everybody's largely using the same public AI models for this stuff. And in the past it cost tens of millions of dollars to train your own model generally. Not that there wasn't a cheaper way to do it, but in the past it was like, you know, your intuits of the world, your Bloombergs, like they were gonna be the ones to invest their own money in training their own models. And so that was just naturally out of touch for everybody else, right? And so in the accounting world, you could say like, okay, maybe the really big firms are gonna train their own models on their data and they're gonna have this mass. The reality is the intuits of the world, everybody is using these public models from anthropic, from OpenAI and around that they are like wrapping kind of their own customization. But at the end of the day, we actually largely have access to the same tools and anybody can start using those models for free. You sick of hearing people talking about AI, yet you get into the office and you're like, my inbox is still a dumpster fire, buddy, can you actually give me something that'll save me some time? I'm ready. Same, same bro. Listen, Client Hub, today's sponsor. You want to know their mantra? AI Client Hub. AI is not tomorrow, it's it's today, buddy. It is. It's already happening. They're already shipping stuff in product that are super cool AI, large language model driven solutions. They're not just talking about it and putting out webinars about how cool this stuff is. Like they've actually are, are implementing it into their product in really meaningful ways. In fact, I don't know, they're one of the only companies I've seen that have actually publicly put that roadmap out there to say gang, here's the stuff that we are most excited about right now and here's the stuff we're working really hard on and they're even extending like early beta access to some of these features. For the folks who are most excited to be on the cutting edge of things, I know a lot of whom listen to this podcast, picking your tech partners is as much about where they are today as where they are going tomorrow and the things that they're investing in. Get concerns about whether your Partner's investing in AI. Check out ClientHub might be for you Link in the show notes. You ever thought, man, if only there was a portal for all of these portals. One portal to rule them all. The portal, portal, you know, and we say this kind of tongue in cheek, but also kind of not because we really don't like giving our clients fragmented experiences. Spoiler alert. Copilot sponsor of this video. That's kind of their mantra is the portal for your portals. The notion that you can plug in any of the other tools that you use into copilot to give people a single place to manage their stuff. Totally customize like all of the options that the client sees within that portal, Even down to the client level. Like you can have different clients see different options down the left hand side. Copilot's got a bunch of its own like built in tooling, but you can also embed a bunch of the other tools you use into copilot, giving clients a single place that they can log in and see all that stuff all in one place. Which is the holy grail, right? I don't know. Like there's oftentimes where one more tool for all of the tools isn't the solution. But for portals, I can't think of a better solution because we're at like we've got all these different places we gotta go log into all these things, right. And so if that's something that you've grappled with, copilot might be for you. Check out a link to copilot in the show notes. And so in today's AI era, if everybody has access to the same tools, what's going to make the difference? At the end of the day, the humans will, right? So if we're all using the same systems, the differentiator and those systems may make us wildly more productive, but if we're all using the same systems that make us wildly more productive, the differentiator remains us. Now what remains to be seen is in this new sort of era of AI where we all have access to largely the same tools, will people still be able to develop the same like tool based advantages? So will a big four firm be able to do something with AI that fundamentally I couldn't do? In the past we would have said yes, but I think we would have said yes because they had the money to invest in training their own models and doing their own stuff. These days I'm not actually so sure because for all of the great things that big firm money and investment can enable, it also does like the opposite when it comes to agility and adopting new tech. It makes you really bloody slow and it takes, you have these massive change cycles and you will arbitrarily get like stuck into like oh no. We use this system for this thing because we have an agreement to do it, not because it's the best system on merit. Like in a perfect world, yes, like you're picking the best tool. But big firms are complex. They've got a lot more friction when it comes to changing those systems as opposed to little firms. This is what I loved about running a little firm is we were super agile and we could pick up new stuff and it was no big deal until your staff riots. That's always a problem. But man, stuff is changing so wildly fast right now. I don't know, there's like there's some upside to being a smaller firm now because you have that agility. I mean we've talked about the stuff that's happened just in the last three weeks from Bing Chat Enterprise, a totally secure version of AI chat that we all have access to. If you have a Microsoft 365 plan, GPT4 Vision, like we're still figuring out like the crazy stuff that that can do this. Last week I was tinkering with using that to extract pro forma data from tax organizers. If you're tax pro in the US you know what a big deal that is. ChatGPT's speech abilities, the ability to now talk with it. On November 1st we're getting Microsoft 365 Copilot. They're like big holy grail software release that's supposed to completely change the way that we work. That's coming the first of next month. We're supposed to get Google Gemini this month. Still Google Gemini is Google's new large language model with supposedly trained on three times the parameters of GPT4. Three times. And GPT4 is massive. The excitement around Google Gemini is you have all of this YouTube data that Google has that nobody else has that is this unbelievably rich source of information that has like contextual data that makes it even more helpful like how many people like this video versus dislike this video. Okay, well we can pull this information into a model and for anybody else to include that information into in a model, they would have to like scrape those videos and it would be like enormously data intensive. So we've got this new Gemini model from Google. It could like knock the socks off anything else that we've seen. But this stuff is happening like every single week. And I talk with software companies that sell into mid size and large firms and they're like, they'll do a demo with a team and they're like, we absolutely love it. We'll talk to you in nine months. And that's just the reality of how bigger firms work. So to be honest, like my answer to this question of like, does it remove the middle, the middle of, of accounting firms, the answer is really I don't know. Just like all things generative AI, like everybody's guessing and speculating. It is so hard to predict anything beyond six. Like, for example, Gemini. Gemini could be incredible, could be way more powerful than GPT4. And that really changes work really quickly. Microsoft 365 copilot. Like, maybe that is phenomenally powerful and it makes our lives way easier. It's so hard to predict, but it is interesting how this generation of AI is displacing almost all tasks on that, like, skill spectrum equally. And by displacing, it's not like doing 100% of something, but generally making people much more productive. So if you have 10 people that you can make 50% more productive, like, the reality is that probably displaces things, right? Or at least changes what people's responsibilities become. You've got Gemini just around the Corner. You got Microsoft 365. It's really hard to say exactly like, where we're going to go, but we do know for sure that who's going to be rewarded are going to be the most agile firms, right? Like, the ones that are able to lean into this really cool new stuff that's exciting. Of all the years to be a tech nerd that stops running an accounting firm and creates tech education content, right? Like, it's just absolutely wild and it gives us a lot to talk about. I'm having fun. Speaking of silly AI and tech things. So big tax deadline for us tax preparers. My background, my first decade in the profession, I just did tax prep. The firm I owned did a bunch of tax prep, so holds a very special place in my heart. My body has still not recovered from the annual cadence that is those busy seasons and all of that. Like, my brain has still not been mapped back to like, a healthy annual cycle. But on the 16th, I pulled together like, some of my favorite AI tools and I made like, an AI music video that honestly, I am very proud of. Like, I think it really slaps. Like, I think it is great. But a bunch of people asked, like, how did I do this? How did I put this together? In fact, I want to play it for you real quick. If you haven't heard it yet, let me figure out how to pull this up. Okay, here it is. The music video I put together for the tax deadline.

October 16th. Deadline to fear. What's that? The phone is ringing. Not a chance. Not today. Satan Deadbeat claims Knocking at my door Deadlines here I can't hear them anymore. We survive hold my beer all together get to stay with me now It'll go better next year. Quick question. Just got my K on. Hey, Gerald, is my Text return on I'm half in the bag Re one more he f confirm and went off to the bar Dead declines knocking at my door Deadlines here Can't hear them anymore we survived hold my beer all together now It'll go better next year hold my hand be with me.

Okay. Pretty proud of that. Was produced 100% with AI tools. So I've got a music, a tool called Chirp Chirp C H I R P by Suno that will let you generate music that is like, like pretty convincing. And so it is like all things AI right now, where you see the output and you're like, wow, this is magic. And the reality is, behind the scenes, like, there's a whole lot of duct tape and paper clips and like, re rolling trying to get new, better versions over and over again to actually get you to the good version. But it like, to AI's credit, like, while it is really janky to cobble these things together and like Internet think people, I think right now love to will sooner make like a Twitter thread about how great this thing is and it's going to change the world, then acknowledge that, like, oh, no, that was actually a pile of work. Your results will absolutely vary. It's probably not going to work that well for you. The flip side of that, to AI's credit, you know what I never could have done before is that make like a music video with like a song that's somewhat respectable, just using AI tools. So for the music, it was Chirp by Suno. The imagery was. It was some mid journey, it was some Dall E3, which you now, if you have chat GPT plus, you should have access to Dall E3 for generating images. And then I use like Adobe Premiere to put the images and the video together. But I tell you what, like, I mean, it was pretty good. We still need the music quality to get like a little bit better. Like, it sounds very compressed, like it's kind of crunchy. But, man, we get that music quality a little better and then we can start working on. Now that's what I call accounting volume one, right? Oh, boy. But it is funny. So the. The various reactions to putting that out there, a lot of people are like, is this AI? I'm like, yes. What did you think this was me? You think this is me singing this? You think I actually know how to do this? It was AI. And it's like, it's just an interesting talking point of does it matter? Or is this like, are we in this weird kind of transition period where we want to know. It's like if somebody took a picture back in the day when digital cameras were coming around and somebody was like, did you take that with a digital camera? And they may have been like, yes. And now, like, we don't really care about that. So like, that's an example of something like kind of like that in the past. Is this the same? I don't know. Honestly, we've talked about the example before of if you go and read a blog post and it solves your problem and it was written by AI, do you ultimately care that it was written by AI or not? And I ran a poll on Twitter and LinkedIn and it was like 80 to 85% of people were like, I could care less if it was helpful, great. If it solved my problem. That's all I care about. Today's episode is sponsored in part by firm360. You checked out firm 360 at practice management System. You know, I could tell you about the razzle dazzle features, about how it gives you a 360 degree view of your practice. Everything you need, all in one place. But instead, let me, let me let the people talk, the people who actually use firm360. What are the users saying? Here's Joshua S. About six months in using the tool, he has a firm between 11 and 50 people. Firm 360 is a practice management solution I have been looking for. In my 25 years in this industry, I've used many different products, all claiming to save me time, money and be the best product for my business. I've tested every other online practice management tool for accountants and all have fallen short. Except firm360. Finally, a product that has everything is easy to learn and use and support that is second to none. Because you know what? We all need a little support these days, right? Listen, stuff's going to happen sometimes. Maybe there's a surprise. Maybe you just can't figure something out and you need a friendly person to help you work through it. Right? That's why support is so important. Okay, gang, if you're looking for the supportive Practice Management system, look no further than Firm360. 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 going to get swiped. Cloud account staffing is 100% dedicated to the accounting industry and founded by a former accounting firm owner that understands your business, knows your pain points. They had to hire some accountants and they said, you know what, we're going to build our own pipeline in the Philippines, going to pull in some super talented people and then open that up to other firms. Basically that's the story I've been talking about a lot about staffing, building more resilient staffing pipelines for your firms. I had staff in the Philippines like totally red pilled me to like, oh geez, like we need to globalize the way that we get our work done. Check these folks out link in the show description Cloud accountantstaffing.com so it's interesting right now how much certain things matter that they were done by AI or not. And obviously the bad version of this is like theft or like replicating somebody's identity or pretending to be something that you're not with AI. And we may do another episode on this because I, man, I'm using a new like visual avatar cloning thing called hey Gen. And I posted this on social media last week, literally spent 10 minutes creating an avatar of me and I gave it like a 10 second audio clip from this podcast and trained it on the video of that podcast and it created a video of me saying that 10 second clip and I put it alongside the actual 10 seconds of me saying that clip and my wife could not tell which one was real. Like it's one thing for people who have never met you to know, is this a real person saying this thing or not? But the people that know you, like, they know your little ticks and your quirks and the way that you deliver things. My wife could not tell if that was me or not. And it kicked off this whole thing on social media. Actually Justine Bateman retweeted it and then like all the Hollywood people jumped on it and like that got several hundred reposts. And that side of things, like, man, that is getting so weird, the notion of like cloning somebody's identity. And I'll save this for another episode. But like the real hard thing for me to process was I have always thought turning up on video was the way that you protect yourself from like faceless videos and AI generated stuff. And you know, I've like, I've turned a bunch of people on to like video deliveries with loom and all that stuff. But if I can create videos of myself or anybody else, but let's just say myself, where people can't tell the difference is that ultimately going to super saturate video to where you have videos where you can't tell if it's real or not. And once everybody has that power to create those videos, are they going to make a whole bunch of them? And then it's like, nobody wants to look at video anymore. Like, it kind of sent me on this spiral of like, well, shoot. I could literally, honestly, like, create a version of this, this podcast where you probably couldn't tell if that wasn't me or not. Now, if you know what to look for, like, you can tell. Like, it won't. Like, you can't do ridiculous gestures and stuff in front of your face. And, like, there's definitely limitations, but this is the worst it's ever gonna be. And to bring it back to the question of doesn't matter if it was made with AI, I think what we will enjoy and what we will consume and what we will engage with is just gonna be different on the other side of all this, because some stuff in the past that has been really hard will be trivialized. It just became really trivial for me to create a video of myself saying a thing. How should I feel about that? I don't know. What does it mean when that goes mainstream and everybody else gets their hand on the same thing and it's part of Snapchat and TikTok and all these other things? Does it devalue video? I don't know. It's gonna be interesting to see. And then last podcast man, some of y' all shared some awesome stuff on Monday's pod, Monday's podcast about podcasts. If you haven't checked that out yet, super encourage you to trying to make it as practical and not scary as possible to consider. Like, should I make a little podcast for a very specific type of person? The world doesn't need more podcasts, but the world does need more podcasts for millennial beekeepers in Northeast Connecticut. And when that one sees that there's a podcast for them, they're gonna be jacked and will not be able to imagine working with anybody else. Like, that specificity. Maybe not that much specificity, but that specificity is still needed when it comes to content creation. And podcasts have never been easier than they are now to put together. But a few things people shared. Jawada lobby. I'm sorry, I'm sure I butchered that thinking about doing a pod targeted towards trade firm owners utilizing Service Titan. That's actually really interesting, the notion of using software as the source of greater specificity. My initial impression was like, is there some risk in that? Like, what if Service Titan sucks in five years? Or. Or you learn that you actually don't want to use Service Titan anymore? Like, is there risk in building a podcast around that? And I quickly talked myself out of this. I was having a conversation with somebody else about this the other day who was like, having to end a content project and go on to something else. And this can be a trap, thinking that it has to be this for everything, when the reality is it doesn't. The value of producing content is building trust in one human being at a time. And that trust stays. So if I stopped this podcast tomorrow and went and did a new project, the people who came and followed me and consumed that new project, they would be the people who were jacked about the stuff I had done up to date. And that is the value of doing that. So, like, even if you have to change courses or you find out podcasting is not for you, whatever, the value in doing that is building trust in other human beings. And those human beings, the ones that are most engaged, which are the ones that are like, you know, buyer services and stuff like that, if you run a firm, they will follow you. And so I don't know that you have to be that worried about, you know, what if we change course someday? Especially if that thinking 100 years down the road is what's blocking you from just getting started right now. Right? So I think that's really interesting. He's got. So trade firm owners utilizing Service Titan. I think that software specificity is actually an interesting way to go further down the funnel and get super helpful for a specific type of person. The Profitable Practice 87 love this episode. CFO services for private practice mental health businesses. I love that because that's specific enough where you could put out stuff that is really, really helpful for that type of entrepreneur, right? Like the problems they're going to have are so specific to their business that your pod, the stuff that you put out will be really, really valuable. The other end of the spectrum, when it's not specific enough, the problem is your stuff just isn't going to be that helpful. And same with, same with the Service Titan example. Also, like that podcast is going to be really, really helpful just because it is so specific. Tim Crouse Shared Target Target Client we are going after real estate investors, especially those who are Using syndications and funds, making over 200k a year. Yeah. And that's that 200k a year threshold is probably, like, who you want to take on as a client right now. But the beauty of podcasting and of YouTube and stuff like that is when you make that aspirational content, you're going to get the people who aren't at that level yet, but those are the people who will be there someday. Right. Like, everybody obviously started there somewhere. Alex Hermosi, meatball, Think Boy, entrepreneurship, stuff like that online. He said 80% of his audience has never built a business. Everything he talks about is building businesses. So even if, like, one of the beauties of content that is infinitely scalable like this, the beauty to me is you're not only going to catch people who could be great clients today, you are getting people who could be great clients tomorrow, but are, like, early on in that development stage. Right. And in fact, this podcast, more than any of my other channels, this podcast, there are more young people who are not firm owners who are thinking, maybe I want to be a firm owner day someday. There are more people plugging this to any of my other content. It's interesting. The demographics are very different across the different things that I do. And, man, I love that because this is what I needed to hear when I was like, mid-20s, late 20s. Like, this is really exciting to me. Like, I needed somebody to show me a path to doing a version of this that was going to be fun to me personally thought, like, me, that was of my generation. And that's just one of the really powerful things about producing content, is you're going to pick up a bunch of peripheral people who down the road, they may have listened to you for years, and they're like, hey, I'm in the game now. And you know how hot that person is going to be to work with you. Like, that's what's crazy about this stuff, is through no additional effort from you, they have been building this relationship with you for months, for years. And that is such a powerful thing. That's really, really cool, man. I had a lot of fun with this stuff this week. Monday, I'm going to actually do a pod that is a follow on to Sunday's video. I'm really excited for Sunday's video and we're gonna go deeper on it on Monday's pod. Like, build on it further, man. It's going to be a podcast. We're like, man, I wish I could have heard this five years ago. It would help me unwind so many like, areas where I was stuck in my firm. So how's that for a tease for you? Thanks for coming and hanging this week. And I'll see you Monday.