159 The 61 Best New Things for Accounting Firms in 2023

So I put out the call on social media. Give me your very best thing that you picked up in 2023. We got a roundup of like 60 something things, some clear winners and some actually really cool stuff I had never heard of. So come on in, let's get wildly distracted with some cool stuff. We got a lot of ground cover here. No, no fooling around. Kay. Cool new stuff. Rise R I Z E Logan Graff shared this one so it's basically like an automated time tracker that just lives on your desktop. If you've been following what he does on Twitter, he's been sharing the hours that he spends on this and that like every week throughout this last year. Automated timekeeping stuff. Feel like it's still got a ways to go, but could end up being interesting. It's able to track like what windows you have open and it'll even go as far as capturing like the title in the Windows. For example, in Chrome, if you have a certain company open in QuickBooks, it'll actually capture that you were in QuickBooks and like what that header was. I haven't seen a super interesting version of like this automated time tracking for our space yet that will tie back to specific clients, but an intelligent version of this that will like actually associate that back to a client might be interesting. Sounds called Rise R I Z E Michael Meehouse shared he's been using textexpander quite a bit. So textexpander, basically you set up all these shortcuts that will then like unfurl big blocks of text. So you kind of develop your own shorthand for these canned bits of text, interestingly. And there's a bunch of different implementations of this and different apps that do this. The one he's using specifically is Text Expander, but his use case was actually for documentation. So he does EBP audits. But there's a lot of like boilerplate wording and all that stuff that you have to use for documentation. Hadn't thought about that. Like using canned text tools for documentation. Write tool I think we had three people that called this one out. Specifically I'm starting with the stuff that people called out once and then we're gonna build to the stuff that got the most common call outs. Write tool is a Chrome extension developed by YouTube QuickBooks celebrity Hector Garcia, which we did a demo day of it on the main channel not that long ago. Basically improves upon QuickBooks online in every way imaginable. There's a free version. Literally no reason not to be using right tool. That's right tool one word not sponsored it's just very good digits one person shared they were actually using digits to upsell clients on AI stuff. So digits does a number of things now does some fancy reporting, does like quality assurance type workflows for you, but also has a client facing like chat like AI chat assistant SurePrep if you're in the US doing tax stuff, SurePrep's got some interesting solutions around automating the flow of data from tax stocks to your tax software. Also around organizing 1040 tax files. Couple people said MacBooks man I'm close to going full Apple ecosystem. I've always been a PC guy but the MacBooks are so good right now and the Apple silicon like it is so much better than like PC laptop life these days. Oh don't get me started on PC laptops. Tim Abbott said larger text Sorry Tim Auto drafting monthly fees. It's a drug man. That's a whole vibe. The first time you go from having to invoice everybody to that money just arriving every single month. That is a nice, nice feeling. Reflect Notes this one's super interesting. The app is Reflect app and if you've ever seen like the networked thought or note taking apps like Rome or Obsidian, Reflect almost looks like an AI like automated version of this where you chuck in your notes and transcripts and stuff like that and it will organize and summarize them for you while also networking those various different thoughts. So it has like a visual like sort of brain mapping sort of look kind of like what you see with Roam. I think Obsidian does that also but it's making those associations automatically whereas with those networked thought apps traditionally you had to tag associations between notes like manually. This is actually when I may check out Reflect app somebody shared Monday as in like the workflow management app Monday Docu Clipper Docu extract stuff from PDF documents like tables, stuff like that. Man, it's shocking to me how bad the built in Acrobat export to Excel still is. It is bad. Reverdocs R E V V E R for am using it for document management. Hadn't heard of that one. Sorban this was my top tool of the year top new tool of the year last year. So each year on the main channel I do a rundown of like my favorite new stuff of the year and and every year I award here's the thing I'm most excited about. Last year was Sorban. Two years ago it was Keeper. Three years ago it was Uncat. Basically Sorban helps you if you do tax in the US it helps you do that tax document gathering in a more modern way and it actually uses prior year info from your tax software so you're only asking clients the questions you need to ask them. Got a few different tools doing this so Sorban S O R A B A N Stanford Tax you may have seen we did a demo day for them on the YouTube channel recently and then tax caddies probably the third big one in the US taking 15 minutes at the end of the day to review notes and make a better to do list. I don't know about you my capture system like the place I just chuck things it kind of just gets bigger like and slightly worse every single day as there's like detritus at the bottom that I never quite scraped through and it just gets worse over time. Claude the AI chat model. That one's just Claude.com, oneNote. Marcus Meyer brought up OneNote. He said they actually switched from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 this year and has been having the time of his life with OneNote. Is OneNote oh, I'm about to get canceled. Is OneNote the QuickBooks desktop of note taking apps? A lot of lot of people just got mad. Here's what I'm saying. Even Microsoft is making a Notion clone. They have loop like even Microsoft is making replacements for it. We've got stuff like Notion like Obsidian, like there's just so much, I don't know so many new paradigms of note taking that's much more robust. But people still love their OneNote and I don't know if it's because OneNote is actually somehow better than anything else or if it's just the Microsoft affinity that does it. But I have a hard time thinking about like on any platform. Goodness, I'm pretty sure there's something better than OneNote these days. Like bear if you're on Mac stuff notion if you are on anything. I just have a hard time getting behind OneNote. This episode is sponsored in part by Forwardly. Are you tired of waiting for payments that seem to operate on their schedule, not yours? What the heck? Say goodbye to slowed ACH transfers and rising credit card fees. Welcome to Forwardly, where you can receive payments instantly in 22 seconds. What? Okay, sidebar thought experiment. I just initiated a payment to you put a PIN in that. Receive payments instantly 22 seconds for 80% less and no monthly fees. I like that. With automatic payment options and automatic reconciliation with QBO and Xerox Forwardly streamlines the whole payment process same day. Ach man, I don't know why this hasn't been normalized like everywhere. Why are we not doing more same day? Ach by the way, your payment that I just started, it just arrived. It's been 22 seconds. How fast was that? Legal has informed me. I need to say I have not in fact paid you just to just clear that up. Just a mental exercise. The future of business payments is here. It's here and waiting for you at forwardly. Com. Check out the link in the show notes to learn more. 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 first firm. 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Link in the show description Cloud accountantstaffing.com PandaDoc for signatures Typeform for client info gathering Typeform Typeform still got like I think the prettiest web forms on the web. Odoo okay so I hadn't seen this one. O D o O It is like one of those sort of all in one work management online platforms but it has an accounting module like what this is like if ClickUp bolted accounting onto their all in one work thing. Said it took some work getting used to it but ultimately their goal was to get off of QuickBooks Online and they feel like they've done that successful bookkeep. So it's like a bookkeep's like an E Commerce integrator and like revenue automation sort of utility. One person shared. They're having good, good success with that. Have 20% of their clients on it now. Accruer. You may have seen that one in a demo day that we did. No, a pitch video we did on the main channel. Accruer. Accruer. Pretty cool. Basically, in plain English, you type into like a line Item and a QuickBooks journal entry for the period beginning date and then ending another date, and it will automatically create all the subsequent entries that need to be there in order to accrue that stuff month over month. So rather than having to create a whole bunch of entries yourself, it'll do that automatically just as soon as it sees that text in QuickBooks Online. Particularly helpful if you have clients who are recognizing revenue on a monthly basis for a whole bunch of different contracts or if you have something similar on the expense side. Probably a big time saver for you. SafeSend It's a way to like a more modern way to deliver tax returns. Pitbull Transcripts. Hadn't heard of that one. I suspect it's for transcripts. LastPass had a few just random Password managers gang if you do not have your accounting firm on a password manager yet, you absolutely need to. A password manager is like the very minimum. Uh, my favorite right now personally is one password. But you even need to be thinking about authentication for your team, like at a threshold that kind of goes past what password managers will do. So for example, if you've ever seen a tool like Okta, which is more like on the enterprise side, like authentication for all of your workforce, where they can log into a single thing and then like click through a collection of apps to automatically log into them. If you've ever seen something like that, if you've worked for the state or you see these in more enterprise setups, we have stuff like that for the accounting industry. One provider is Practice Protect. And the upside is you're giving your team a single place where they click through and log into all their different apps so that you can globally disable their access in one place. And ultimately the access you want your team to have is actually passwordless because if somebody leaves and they or they can even see the password like that's not really something you want because you want to have that power to disable access right away. When you have that single point of access to that, they're called single sign on providers. Usually when your team accesses the apps through that single place, you can also layer in some other cool controls like you can only log in from inside the United States or something like that data snipper for audit evidence, Perplexity for research. Perplexity. If you haven't used it yet. It's like a super cool AI search engine client. Engager. This is like a whole practice management system that I'd never seen before. Engager app Tiny Wow. This was a cool one. So tiny wow.com, it's like a collection of a whole bunch of little small AI workflows all in one place. So like doing file conversions or working with PDFs or removing the background on an image or generating an AI image for something. It's like all these different things you've probably been hearing about all collected into one place. Which is kind of how a lot of these new AI things like on their own, they don't really merit their own standalone product and they're probably things that'll ultimately be built into the other tools that we use. In the context that's helpful. But I like that it was like a single place to do all these different things. Rewind for especially when doing QuickBooks cleanups, they said. So Rewind is basically a way to take a snapshot of a QuickBooks online file in the event that something gets busted and you can like kind of restore it to that previous state. Particularly if you're doing like large scale fixing or automated fixing or pushing stuff through from like say an E commerce integration service where they'll do a large volume of things. And if you get that wrong, that can be a mega headache. Rewind may make sense there just to prevent you from like accidentally breaking something one person said Listening Good for you. Sift Analytics Syft It's a reporting platform Basecamp which I thought was interesting accounting firm that has moved to Basecamp. It's kind of like one of the old original cloud project management systems. They've updated it several times so like it still feels new and up to date but not an accounting space. One fathom as reporting platform data Rails that's also like more spreadsheet Y FP and a software SAS ant S A A S A N T specifically for their Bulk Upload to QuickBooks Online Feature Financial Sense and then Nathan Sosa said Jason Daly Bless your heart Nathan. Okay onto the multiple vote getters Start the music. This is where things are getting serious. Two people called out Carbon Two people called out Ramp the card provider. Three people called out ClickUp. Three called out Canva. If you're on my newsletter last week I shared why I love Canva so much. And honestly I hadn't even been using Canva until May three months ago and now it's like a massive time saver for me. Three people said notion not necessarily for like running your firm on, but for stuff like knowledge bases, employee reviews, applicant tracking, stuff like that. Four folks brought up Taxdome. Four folks also brought up Ignition. Four people brought up Keeper. So Keeper's like a month end close app. That was my top new tool of the year two years ago. Gang. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Live Flow is the easiest way to sync that QuickBooks data back and forth to your spreadsheets. You may have seen this they actually had a big announcement lately, so this fall G2 gave them the top spot in their fall 2023 report as the leader in the financial analysis category. That's right. They won number one. Nice work. If you've been around my channels for a while, you've seen life float kindly. They have sponsored quite a bit of stuff and I'm not. I mean I'm not saying I'm taking credit for it, but that was probably why I'm not familiar with Live Flow. Super easy way to sync that stuff. Sync your QuickBooks data back and forth with Google Sheets. They got a whole pile of templates too to make the process of building that stuff for the first time as easy as possible for you. Stuff for managing cache, AP, KPIs, like everything you can imagine. Sync that data into your existing sheets to make them smarter, get it to auto sync or build your like custom new sheets that talk with QuickBooks totally from scratch. Pretty cool tool. Check that one out at LifeFlow IO. This podcast is brought to you in part by Team up who helps you find super talented Filipino accountants hiring yourself without any sort of ongoing monthly fees. They can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian accounting firms familiar with tools you use like Zero, QBO and Dext. They can also recruit specialist roles like bookkeeping team leads who have leadership experience or US Tax specialists. What Team up recruits these people for you for a flat one time fee. They're headhunters, not the typical outsourcers and they can connect you with an affordable employer of record if you need help with payroll and compliance. Right now you can save 1000 bucks on end to end recruiting. Current price is 3000 bucks to find you a great accountant, but it is going up to 4,000 in January. That's right, act now. Remember, other outsourcing companies often mark up salaries by 50% or more. What? So you'll save a ton by hiring directly and get to build your own team for the long term. Just go to hireteamup.com to start building your Philippines team and sign up before January to save a bit of chatter even if you won't be ready to hire for a few months. Five people brought up Loom. Good for you. So Loom is for recording like quick little videos with like the you see the person in a little bubble talking in the corner. But you can also use loom without seeing your face. You can use it literally just for recording your screen. Most folks are using looms as like replacements for very quick or unnecessary meetings or to communicate something in a more personal way. I would use it for all that stuff. I also used it for tax and financial statement deliveries. I think we did a whole episode on that a while back. But my clients loved getting looms from me. The people who didn't watch the videos I sent to them were the same people that didn't read the emails that I was sending them. So I wasn't too hung up on that. But the people who loved it, they were super into it. Big fan of using video more in firms. The only other one that got five acknowledgments from folks AI meeting assistants. So Fireflies, Microsoft Teams Premium Fathom is the other big AI meeting assistant. A lot of folks having good luck with that stuff these days. Biggest upside is it's automatically taking notes of that conversation that you can then pull into your file system or something like that. A couple of people called out specifically that the value to them was they're very often the blocker for their team when they're in a bunch of back to back meetings and the team needs access to the things that are in that meeting. Just have a transcript that's searchable for your team and for your team to be able to fetch that as soon as you're off the meeting. Really valuable because then it's not just waiting on you. Those two things had five votes and first place with 13. Nerd alert chatgpt. And there are people right now who are like over the moon with ChatGPT and use it every single day. And then there's a huge cross section of people who are like honestly I don't know how to make this thing like make me more productive. Which is tricky. And I've been thinking a lot about that, like how do we bring everybody to kind of a more equal like standard on their comfort level with ChatGPT. So I'm thinking I'm probably going to do another main channel video or two that's just Collections of a whole bunch of use cases. What gets me most excited about ChatGPT personally, and this applies to actually a lot of AI tech, is you have your like institutional AI, the stuff that will be built into products, built into your practice management stuff. All of that and in the context of a firm like that is top down tech, that is leadership within a firm. Deciding we're going to use this tool or that tool and it has some AI stuff baked in. That's great. What gets me really excited about AI is the bottom up nature of like a chatgpt to solve very personal productivity problems. So the general problems that we all have, the common problems, that is where software gets built, is when you have a big collection of people that have the same problem, they can build a tool to solve it for everybody. But there's a threshold beyond which you have these nuanced problems that maybe not a lot of people share. Maybe you just have them with one client or with one month end close or with one unique combination of systems where you got to get something out of this system, into that system, in this other format, those very personal productivity problems. That's where I'm probably most excited about these sort of like chat assistants being able to help us is with the really fiddly stuff that we just have that we can't really explain to anybody else because nobody else has that problem. But you still waste a bunch of time on it every single month. That's probably the side of chat assistance that I'm most excited for right now. We got some great progress this year. If you think about where ChatGPT was, which is now 373 days old from the time of launch it launched with 3.5. We now have GPT4, a way better model. We now have code interpreter, the ability of the assistant to write and execute code to do things for you. And so if you have like large scale tasks, like I just gave it a thousand transactions or something like that now code interpreter will do that large scale stuff for you. We have image processing, which we only really got a few weeks ago and has not been meaningfully implemented into like any of the tools in our space. But image processing by these AI models like its capabilities just blow the doors off of traditional ocr. So when we have things like handwritten notes from clients, when a partner sits in a meeting with a client and does a whole bunch of scribbling and circles and shapes and pointing to these different things, you can chuck that into a vision model and it can actually turn that into a coherent Outline that takes all of that visual stuff into account, rather than just doing what OCR does, where it's like, I think this is that letter. I think this is that number. It's a fundamentally better approach to, like, getting information off of documents. That's really exciting. We got speech to. We got speech to speech. The ability you can now talk back and forth with Chad, if you haven't tried that yet, I'd encourage you to put the mobile app on your phone and if you're going to go like walk on a treadmill for 30 minutes or something like that, just like start a conversation and have a problem in mind that you want to work through. I'm telling you, being able to chat with it fires up a totally different part of your brain in a really interesting way. And going through that exercise of actually talking with ChatGPT, it's not that it's necessarily going to have a big, like, novel solution to a problem that you couldn't otherwise think of. It's that actually processing that verbally is really helpful. And we don't generally do that unless we have another person with us. And is it weird, like, talking to yourself? Like, yes, it is. But oftentimes that is the value and the function of, like, meeting with somebody or having lunch or talking through something over coffee is actually just that verbal processing. I'd encourage you to give that a try. ChatGPT. It's ultimately not a replacement for building a relationship with another human being or something like that. But in 2023, who does that anyways, right? I don't need human relationships. What was your cool new thing that you're pumped about? I'm going to do a main channel video on my favorite new stuff of the year. Haven't decided yet who's going to take home the crown. The best new thing of 2023. We don't have an actual crown. Maybe that's something we ought to work on. If you got something you're excited about this year, drop it in the comments. I'd love to hear about it. Apologies for totally derailing you with a bunch of stuff that you now think you need. And we're going to be back tomorrow with more fun and I think next week we might be going on Christmas break. We'll see. So we'll get the fun in while we can and I'll see you tomor.