130 A Better Way To Select Your Accounting Firm Software

My brothers and sisters in accounting, it is a big day. It's been a big couple of days. Hopefully you've seen by now. I put out A roundup of 14 practice management systems, over 200 features, what they have, what they don't have. It was a massive project. Honestly the biggest undertaking I think I've ever done. We gave it away for free on social media yesterday with the goal of saving people a whole bunch of time when it comes to choosing the core app that lives at the center of their accounting system. So we're going to talk about that today, talk about how it came together and talk about what else can we do as a professional to like share more of this stuff kind of for the common good. So come on in. We are, we're talking about the roundup today. Okay, so big practice management system roundup, a whole bunch of pages, over 200 features, 14 platforms who we actually got to collaborate with us on pulling this together. Bless all of their hearts, because goodness gracious, was this a long, drawn out process. Really difficult, really imperfect in a lot of ways. Putting a whole bunch of products on like a standardized feature comparison in some ways is just like fundamentally flawed. Cause not everybody's gonna implement the same things in the same way. But I think as an example where you can absolutely abandon something like this because it can't be perfect when the reality is, buddy, some information is better than none information. Because right now if I wanted to go out and do diligence on 14 platforms, see you next may like, it would take so much stinking time. And that was the goal behind this. It's got down on some of that due diligence and help you find the platforms who are investing most in the aspects of practice management that are most important to you. If you don't have your hands on this report yet, there's a link to it in the show notes. Absolutely. Grab it. Like there is maybe nothing more important when it comes to tech and software to your firm than the practice management software. And the goal here is to create the single most comprehensive resource for people going through that process. So grab that, feel free to share it. It's in the show notes. We'll prob, probably update this a couple times a year, but as of this snapshot in time, it's really helpful, I think. And the whole reason it came around, came to being is a few months ago, actually back like six months ago, before I was even doing stuff on LinkedIn, I posted on Twitter a thread of every cloud practice management system that I was aware Of I said, here's every cloud PM that I even have on my radar. And in that process, a few other people jumped in and they're like, hey, we're here too. And I found some new ones and I put that out almost to kind of build a more complete list of maybe ones that I hadn't heard of. Now for the last three years, I've spent a huge percentage of my time talking with other practitioners. And I think that's actually a pretty darn good filter for what's worthwhile and what isn't. If I haven't heard of it from somebody by now, would I actually recommend it to anybody? So I've kind of got that filter as well. But that was kind of the initial building of a list. And everybody's like, gee, thanks, I'm overwhelmed. But it led to still some helpful stuff where people shared their inputs on like how different products worked for them, good and bad. And it kind of got my wheels turning, like, ooh. Like there really is a total lack of transparency in this information. It's very hard to go and do all of your own due diligence on this stuff. And I actually think we're fortunate. I think I shared on the POD recently in my global escapades. This year I've learned that the European market, when it comes to accounting firm software is way, way more oversaturated with providers. There's so many people that like you just can't, it's like impossible to know who to use. They're having to acquire each other to get any market share because there's just so many solutions for firms. And honestly I could see that happening and like the more the North American market where I see more of the day to day, I could absolutely see that happening here. And so how do we filter through all that stuff? Because what I really want to do is, is is reward the cloud practice management systems for small firms that honestly are crushing it, that are so much better than they were 24 months ago, 36 months ago. Like this stuff has come a really, really long ways. And the vast majority of firms still do not operate on the right like core central system. They're still using something from their tax software provider. They're still using Excel, they're still using you know, some sort system or desktop system. And I'm not like morally opposed to any of those things. A spreadsheet to manager firm I am morally opposed to. But for example, the, the, a lot of folks using stuff from their tax platforms, like why the hate towards that? It's genuinely not a place of. Of hate. It is. They're just not the best option right now. They're definitely options and if you use their tax software they'll quote, unquote, give you a deal on it. And it may be cheaper than having to go out and get a cloud practice management system, but that is not a reason to use an inferior platform. It absolutely isn't. I would love absolutely nothing more than for somebody to drop a killer cloud practice management system from attack software provider. I don't have a lot of like, real high hope that that's going to happen. We've had, we've seen Thomson Reuters try it with anvio and if you've used Onvo, you know why I don't think that's going to happen. I would absolutely love for that to happen. And so like future updates of this report, the participants can and should change. Right. So maybe we'll get some new pm' that are picking up traction. I hope we do. That's always really a really positive thing. Maybe we've got existing ones that get good. You know, maybe onvo in 24 months is killer. I would love that. Nothing leads me to think that that would be the case, but, but I would absolutely love it. And so I've, I mean, I could go down the list of, of people who have said I've moved from a tax software to a cloud practice management system and it just fundamentally changed my firm. I'm one of those people. I did that in my own firm. So that list, like, while it feels exclusive, buddy, that original list was still 17 tools long for small firms. And doing that amount of due diligence, absolutely outrageous. A few months ago I did a YouTube video that highlighted all of those. And again, every time I do that, that PM Roundup in some form or another gets great engagement. People are super appreciative. They're like, oh man, this is awesome. Found a few that I didn't know about. But equally, every time you put out information like that, at least this has been my experience, people are simultaneously thankful and annoyed because what you actually just showed them is there's more of these than you realized that are worth considering. So you're like, thanks, bub. But I don't actually know that I want for the. I want there to be more, you know, more things to decide between. And so we put that video out trying to be helpful of like a look at all these practice management systems and, and by and large we were like, thanks, but yeah, man, I need a whole lot more Information. How is anyone reasonably expected to do due diligence on 17 different platforms, right? Like, geez Louise. This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Client Hub who are building some super rad AI stuff into their practice management platform. And I want to. I want to tell you about stuff that they've actually got. It's in there, it's happening. When you look at emails inside of Client Hub, you can get an AI summarize threat like, like a summarized, shortened version of your long emails. They're writing an email and you just, you. Maybe you're a little hangry. Maybe it's just. Maybe it's just one of those days, you know? Client Hub is going to help you revise the tone of that email into something that will, let's just say, something that won't come back to haunt you in the future. More stuff they got in the works. Magic. Magic meetings. You've been in a magic meeting, meet with clients inside of Client Hub and it will capture the transcript for you. So it is right there alongside your files and everything else you're also working on. Generative email that can see into the replies, the past conversation and magic answers. A lot of sorcery happening. Ask Client Hub for anything related to a client. Client Hub will answer it based on all the context that it's got. Your meetings, your emails, your notes, your files. That is the kind of sorcery I can get behind. Love to see him investing in AI. You want to learn more about Client Hub, check out the link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Copilot. Is your client portal just a portal or is it a platform difference? With a platform, think of something like QuickBooks. You can plug a bunch of other stuff into it, right? Like it's like we got this thing. It's pretty cool. Meh. It can do some stuff, but we're also perfectly happy to let you build more stuff on it, to let developers build other stuff on it. On it. That's the difference in Copilot's approach. They want to create just that, just that candy coating around your firm. Just the layer that talks with your clients. Not all the other stuff. Just the frosting on the cake. They're going to handle that part in a way that will be flexible long term and ensure that your clients have not only the very best, most seamless experience possible, but also like they have all of that stuff in one place. You don't have this fragmented experience where they're having to like log into this and Magic Link into that and go all these different places, right? Like, nobody likes that. Kind of makes your firm look silly when their clients are like, why can you not just have everything in one place, like my utility provider and the library? And you're like, it's complicated. Okay, well, Copilot is taking a kind of a different approach and holding themselves out as a portal platform. Got APIs. You can actually develop your own stuff on top of that platform if you want to. It's interesting. And they got a whole bunch of accounting firms running on it now too, if your firm's missing that candy coating. I learned more about Copilot Link in the show notes. So this sort of idea was born. What if we put together a massive roundup report of all of this information? And I've been thinking about, like, I've talked about this on the show before, digital products and like, do we stand up something that we, you know, sell for folks? That's like a one time thing. Doing that, I think would even be kind of a fun exercise. And through the podcast, I can share the experience of developing that digital product and selling it and the marketing and a lead up and all that stuff. And so we thought about doing that and we kind of scratched out like, what would actually go into doing this with the hardest part being, could we actually get all these platforms to work with us on this? Because there's certainly clandestine ways that we could get all these this information. And a lot of the platforms offer free trials. And so we could probably hop in and do most of this stuff ourselves, but we would be wasting the time of like, the salespeople involved. And I know how irritating that can be if you do run a product. And at the end of the day, what I really wanted was for the product companies to be able to see what we put together and give us feedback to ensure that it was as correct as possible. So for all of the participants in this study, all 14, bless their hearts, I was able to get every single one of them to engage in this, to get us access, to give us feedback. On the other side of like, was this correct? And it is not always black and white. I can say that. And so there was, there was definitely like, I want factual corrections and stuff. We just didn't realize. And there was a good amount of that of like, hey, no, we actually do do this and we can hop in and validate. Yes, it turns out, do do that. And then there's the sticky stuff. Right. Which is absolutely inevitable when you're trying to standardize something like this across a bunch of tools because people have different approaches or they may do things like, we don't need tagging because you can have any number of custom fields and it's like, should you even have these features? So you can. You really can't even put this together in a way that is like, complete. But I would still argue it's a whole lot better than nothing. So we started working on this project and I put out some of my private community. The initial spreadsheet of. Here's all the features we're considering. Folks had a ton of great feedback around things like search. When you search in your pm, what's searchable tasks, emails, projects, files, file names, file contents, Stuff like that. Where it's like, oh, we could like break all that stuff down in a single view and show it in a single grid. Recurrence. Did they do recurrence? Do they do monthly recurrence? Quarterly, annual, numbered dates of the month, days of the week? Will it shift a recurrence to the previous day if it falls on a weekend? All these things that. How many times, like, have we had this thing that we didn't realize is actually really important to how we work? And then we get into a platform and you're like, excuse me, you don't do this. What a task. Not recurring until the previous task is done. And whether you can enable that or disable that. Like, so many examples of that stuff, right? Um, I just realized there's a pair of pants on the bed behind me. So I apologize for the video viewers today. I didn't tidy up. I'm a dc, by the way. I did a did an AI talk today. It was super fun. But there's just so many examples of stuff like that in this report. Like, in fact, I'll just pull this up. Does the platform pull in email at all? Like, we've got an entire email section with a whole bunch of features. Can I see into other people's inboxes? Does it integrate with Gmail or Exchange or just Office365? Do clients also have contacts? Are there contacts that go into clients? Can you do like related groups, right? Can those clients be tagged? Can you do custom fields? Can the contacts be tagged? Can your view include custom fields? Can you filter by properties besides, like the default 5 or 6 on the view? Can I save views and share them with my team? Every single fiddly little aspect of a practice management system has stuff like this. Where you get into a system, you're like, the heck, I can only sort on the Name you hacking me? That's not helpful. Invoicing. Does the invoicing sync one way to QBO? Two ways to QBO? Does it sync to 0? Can I do subtasks? Can I do two tiers of subtasks? Three or more? Will it do statutory due dates, like due dates based on a tax return? Is that the only due date it can have? Is that an additional due date that it can have in addition to an internal due date that I set? I mean, there's like actually genuinely like hundreds examples of this. And these are the things that we're trying to dig into and put into a single report. And there was honestly a very real question of like, like, is this even possible or are we getting to get down into the weeds? And it's like, oh, dang, this is so nuanced and people are taking such different approaches that this isn't possible. But I would actually argue as we got into it, there is much more in common across these platforms than there is different. And the reality is, I think it's because everybody's paying attention to what other people are developing. And there's actually quite a lot in common across many of these platforms. But that being said, it is clear that some platforms are investing more in some things than others, which is ultimately what really, really matters here. Because what this shouldn't be is a feature arms race, right? The best tool for you is not ultimately the one that just has the most features. It's the one that most meaningfully implements the stuff that is most important to you. And even the entire category of practice management is super blurry now. So for example, and I explained this in the main channel video we did a while back on this subject, but I was like, I don't even know what practice management is anymore. I don't know what CRM. Like, there's so, so many blurred lines. Basically. This is like my first round draft picks. Like, there's certain tools that are so compelling that you build your entire practice around them. And that's why like, like Keeper is on the list. I don't think Keeper tells anybody their practice management system. It's a way to manage all your month end closes, but it's got a ton of the same features and it's a tool that's strong enough to where that could literally be the first tool you build your practice around. If you run an accounting practice, pretty darn compelling. Same thing with Lisio, same thing with Copilot. There are people products that are positioned just to handle the client interactions which is extremely important. And they actually make the argument that, hey, you know what? You could go with an all in one that is a portal and workflow and all that stuff. But what if you don't like the workflow? What if a better workflow tool comes out tomorrow? What if you don't like all the aspects of it? We're just gonna do the client communication layer because you know it's gonna make you look like a knucklehead is going all in on a platform, training all your clients on how to use it and then decide that because you don't like the workflow, you're now going to change the entire platform and you got to retrain all your clients on this new portal. Right? Pretty reasonable argument for having a standalone portal. So how do you like standardize all these different types of tool into one thing? Like it is just all very imperfect. So we're calling it a Practice Management Roundup. The reality is like, this is my list of like. Here are the first round draft picks of people that you are. Tools that you ought to be considering. 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 We'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 the tools on the list are Aero Lisio, Count Mango Carbon Keeper, Copilot, jetpack canopy firm, 360 elephant, taxdome, client Hub and Financial Sense. And at the moment we put together the report, it was out of date. Like that's just how these things work, right? There was a lot of feedback that was like, oh, we're going to have this live soon. And we drew the line on like, will it be out this month? Like, do you actually have a date for it? Because what we couldn't do is let somebody say like, oh, we're going to have it in the next month or the next couple months. Because the reality is that stuff like almost always slides right. So like if they could prove to us that it was like literally imminent, like going out that week, we would allow them to include it. But that being said, like broad brushstrokes, I think this is super helpful to determine like, you know, across the different categories of features, what are most important to me and who is investing most in those categories. And so we've got a main channel video coming Sunday that is on this subject. But the feature groups that we ended up with here were email, contact management, workflow management, file management, portal, so all things client facing, admin, which was like a catch all for like internal stuff. Like do they have an internal native app? Can I assign custom permissions to internal users? Stuff like that, time and billing and Then support. So those are the eight categories. For some folks, like, the portal is going to be most important, right? For some folks, the workflow is going to be most important. Maybe they want, you know, a killer integrated email experience. Maybe support is super, super important. Time and billing, that's one where like people are going to assign a huge spectrum of importance to that, right? And so if you're just hopping into this report and if you haven't yet, absolutely grab it. If you're, if you're driving, put the old turn signal on the right hand, if you're in the uk, the left hand, pull on over, swipe on down to the show notes, click through the link and it's going to pull up a preview of the PDF. Don't, probably don't do this, but check out the summary page. It's like a heat map of who has the most features by category. And again, shouldn't be an arms race, but the value here is the relative amount of like, what people have by category. So, for example, if email is super, super important to me, I can see at a glance you've got carbon, you've got Count, you've got Canopy Taxdome. These platforms are super invested in email. It's like slightly below that. I think you've got Client Hub. But then you can also see the folks who are not invested in email. Again, doesn't mean you should be or you shouldn't be. But if that's the important thing to you at a glance, this is really helpful for you. File management. Not everybody gets into file management, so who are the people investing in file management, time and billing? If that's super important to you, you can quickly see who are the ones most invested in that. And so part of the communication with these, these companies and the process is like, I really, really want them to hear this is not a feature comparison arms race, because that isn't any good. What we want to do is cut down some of the time it takes to do due diligence to find the companies investing most in the stuff that's most important to them, but also highlight how good cloud practice management systems are. And five years ago they were not. Five years ago you had like a third as many players in the space, which is not very long ago. And the products were nowhere near as mature as they are right now. Back then I would look at, I would look at ClickUp, I'd look at Trello, something like that, and it was not even close. Today, like, man, these tools do a ton and they do a ton. That is very specific to us. And so a big part of the goal here is just like highlighting these things are really good. You don't have a reason not to be on one. If you run a small firm, you genuinely should be on one of these platforms. Now, I shared a bit about, like, how I recommend you select a system and that's what this next Sunday's video is going to be about. But basically, of the eight categories of features here, what are the two or three that are most important to you? Look here and see who are the platforms most invested in those things that are really important to you. And then start doing some due diligence because you still need to talk to these companies. But for most people, I think maybe only a third or a half of these companies may be on their radar coming in cold. Like, if you just listed PMs in your head right now, you may have, you may rattle off a third to a half of these, but then you also would never go through the due diligence of looking at every single one of these. So hopefully this is a much more direct path to the ones that are most relevant to what you're trying to do with your firm. Now, stress again, it's totally. It absolutely is imperfect. We'll have future versions of this. I'm sure we'll get a bunch of feedback and be able to improve upon it. You know, as soon as we, Even before we finalize this sort of thing, I'm already thinking of stuff that would have been really helpful that is not in here. Like, man, I'd love to see screenshots. Because a lot of these tools don't put screenshots on their website for whatever reason. I would love to see screenshots. I'm a pretty visual person and sometimes I will look at a system and be like, I couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it. That would be a really helpful thing to add to the next iteration of that. So if you have thoughts, like, I would love to hear what would be helpful to add the whole feature thing. That's probably going to balloon to be even bigger. We've got new types of features being developed that are even more nuanced. So like, we have, you know, generative email compose. Generative email in here. We have generative email replies in here, which is like a nuanced version of the same thing. As that stuff starts developing, I think we'll probably see more nuance and exactly how we detail that out, potentially even more nuance into how the integrations work right because like does it integrate with QuickBooks one way, two way sync? That's not super detailed. There's probably greater detail that we could go into there and so it's definitely a work in process but I really hope that it is, it is something that ultimately leads, leads more people into the cloud PM ecosystem altogether because the like, the stuff is really good and it is the biggest tech enabled way to significantly improve quality of life at an accounting firm but also raise up the category as a whole. Because I used to be a non industry category software guy and I've come full circle because the tools have matured a ton but also because I see AI and the long term impact of AI making the tools that are specific to us much more useful. Because Microsoft 365 is just around the corner and it's going to be really good when it comes out. I'm actually not super convinced about that now with how bad Bing Chat is right now and with how bad Windows Copilot is, I'm actually a little concerned, at least at launch when Microsoft 365 comes out, I'm kind of concerned it might suck, but that's either way that's going to be pretty cool, pretty novel. And so we're like, oh, do we all just jump ship to the mainstream solutions then that are building super rad AI stuff? There may be a few, there may be a really short time horizon period where that makes sense. But ultimately who's going to develop the most meaningful stuff for us long term? When things like chat assistants and stuff like that are table stakes because everybody has them, ultimately the people, the products within our category will go much further and that's going to get really important when it comes to like AI agents and agents that are hopping into QuickBooks files and zero files and like actually going and doing tasks for us that are very specific to how we work. Tasks where you know Microsoft's never going to do that and that's not something you're probably going to want to build from scratch. So the future of these platforms I think gets even more nuanced as they do more work for us. Which is what's brought me full circle from being the generalist tool guy. I put my cast practice on ClickUp. That was four or five years ago now to now honestly being the category guy and like having much, much more faith and the people behind these products because of how far they've developed and because how far AI can ultimately make them even more applicable to the work that we do every day now, I thought a bunch about ultimately how to release this. And, like, honestly, it's just a thing everybody needs. It's just thing people needs. So we just gave it away and it was a. So we had six people working on this project over the last couple months, and it has been a spendy thing to put together. But you know what? Like, I got a whole lot to be thankful for and appreciative of for the folks that, you know, tune in and like this stuff and share this podcast and share the videos and all these things. And it's because of y' all that I'm able to do this. And we're able to get sponsors that will pay for stuff. And, you know, people in the accountant community that were really, like, what financed this operation from the beginning? Because that's. That's, like, the only paid thing that I have. So I don't know, I just felt a lot better about. About giving it away and really, like, hopefully making that the, really the single best resource for choosing the practice management system at the core of your firm. Appreciate Yalls ongoing support. And honestly, I look forward to doing, like, more stuff like this in the future. Like, what are some. What are some resources that we can put together that we can all benefit from, especially when it comes to, like, the transparency of information and how we make hard, hard, important decisions like this. That's all I got for today. I'll see you in the next one.