213 Can You Delegate Client Comms in an Accounting Firm?

Today on the pod. Can you really delegate client communications in an accounting firm? Police how to keep those glasses reflections out of your video. Nerd alert. Nice things to do for your team during busy season. A few ideas. Am I anti employer? I'm like, I've been dunking on the man lately and these days can you build an accounting firm around just 1040s or anything for that matter that's like once a year, super cyclical stuff. How do you do that? We're going to talk about it. Come on in. It's Q and A Friday. He. I can't remember who was. Somebody complained this week that I didn't say come on in on the intro. Sometimes I'm like I need to dress this up a little more and not say weird things like come on in. The daily's warm, but where's the fun in that? You know, be your own weird, weird version of you. Okay. Can you really delegate comms in an accounting firm? Is that realistic discussion that came up online this week? As you know, us tax pros are like staring down the barrel of just super busy deadline. But virtually all accounting firms have their own version of this regardless of what that deadline is for you getting down to it, a bunch of clients asking for status updates did a whole episode on that. But wouldn't it be nice if this person would just come in and just magically know what you wanted to say to those clients and would handle all those things out of your inbox for you automatically, gang? It's possible. Highly recommend some of the email delegation stuff we've talked about in this like on the pod here. I have a few other thoughts on this, but what I'd like to do first is bring back our guest that we introduced yesterday, AI Jason. If you missed yesterday's episode, we made a clone of me. Trained on 210 episodes of this podcast. 210, something like that a lot. And in early testing it was really darn accurate. So I'm actually going to chuck this question at AI Jason. Hello AI Jason. You're on my podcast now. Say hello to everyone. But let's, let's start out with the first question. Is it really practical to think that you could delegate client facing communication to somebody else in your accounting firm? Hey everyone.

Glad to be here. Jumping right into it. Absolutely. Delegating client facing communication can work, but it's all about setting clear expectations and having the right systems in place.

Think about it.

Not every conversation requires the head hon. Hey everyone.

Glad to be here.

Jumping right into it. Absolutely delegating client facing. Communication can work, but it's all about setting clear expectations and having the right systems in place.

Think about it.

Not every conversation requires the head honcho's touch. With a well trained team and solid protocols, you can maintain that personal touch while freeing up time to focus on the big picture. It's about empowering your team and trusting the process. And hey, if you've got more questions on running a smooth operation, fire away.

Okay, so let's. Let's get more specific, more granular. Let's say I'm coming up on a big, big tax deadline and a bunch of my clients are hassling me, saying, what's the status of my tax return? How do I get all of them off of my back? Tell me how to delegate that specifically.

All right, here's the deal. You're swamped and your clients are breathing down your neck. Classic, right?

Classic.

First off, breathe. Now, let's tackle this. You need a game plan that's as smooth as butter. Assign a team member to be the point of contact. They'll handle the what's the status calls and emails. Equip them with a status report. Think of it as a cheat sheet so they can give quick, accurate updates. This way, your clients feel heard and you're not pulled in a million directions. And remember, communication is key. Set up a system where clients get regular updates, maybe weekly emails, so they're in the loop without clogging your phone line. It's about managing expectations and keeping that trust tank full. Have you thought about how you're currently managing client expectations outside of tax season?

Not bad. It kind of sounded like an amalgamation of several things that I've said before. It, like, eerily bounces back and forth between things that I definitely say and things that are a little bit AI cheese, but the subject matter is there. What we covered in yesterday's podcast is every one of those statements is backed up by like eight things that it's pulled out of podcast transcripts, which is great, but sometimes actually muddies answer a little bit because it's pulling so much information as opposed to, like, is there one really relevant answer that I've given in the past that it should just pair it pretty much word for word. And that's. That's kind of behind the scenes and the nuts and bolts of how these AI systems work right now. That's one of the big pain points, is there's times where you just wanted to pull a single answer, and then times like if you're doing tax research, where you actually want it to pull 20 answers of all the different kind of related things to that answer to get you something complete. That answer is pretty good. It didn't go into a ton of detail. It said like a status report, which actually gave me an idea and is maybe a better framing than I had used if you're trying to get a member of your team up to speed on how to manage these communications. We did talk about boilerplate status updates according to just the status of the project. So if it's in prep, if it's in review, whatever, just have a boilerplate message for what you want to tell them based on the status that it's in, but some sort of like status guide for that person who's doing the communication that may include some templated messages, but also just a bunch of background of what that status means and actually maybe like 10 different templated messages for each of those statuses so you avoid the risk of like sending the same update to somebody twice. It is, it truly is all about expectations and creating systems. Lack of systems leads to an over reliance on expertise every time. And I'm not going to profess that I'm really good at this, because I'm not. But just like we get frustrated working with AI things not doing exactly the thing that we want, we get really frustrated with the intern or with even senior folks when what they turn around isn't exactly what you're expecting. But. But usually it's a matter of not clearly defining the expectations. And so right now, if you run a firm and there's a bunch of people hounding your staff for status updates, do those staff even know what the rule is? Do they even know no. It's my job to update them every week or every two weeks or something like that. In most cases, the answer to that is no. And so you're actually leaving them to make up the answer and leaving them to just do what they want to do. Whether that's keep working on the technical stuff or hitting pause and spending a bunch of time on client service. But that sort of thing generally should not be left up to your team. That's something that you are setting the standard for. So when there is no system, folks will come in and make up the answer. And in general, the more experienced a person is, probably the more likely they're going to do the same thing that you would. But the way to eliminate that altogether is by just having a system. Furthermore, the more you systematize and standardize what you're doing, the more you de skill these things and Too often in firms we will overskill things, certain roles, because we haven't taken the time to think through what that process ought to be. And there's certain things you can standardize, certain things that are really hard to standardize. But for this reason we should always be challenging the assumptions of just how far we can take standardization. A good example is, you know, a lot of the most progressive firms I know have put admins in the driver's seat of all information gathering. And depending on the type of work your accounting firm does, potentially 50 plus percent of certain projects like the time sunk into those things can just be gathering documentation and following up for what you need and all that. And so then when that project gets to the pro, you got this awful like start stop situation where you pick up a project eight times before you can actually get it done. Because you're missing this, you're missing that. Maybe the client didn't get you everything that you needed. This is a big compelling argument for staged requests going through before your busy season and building out explicit lists of what's needed from every client and then using software to collect all those things from them and auto follow up with them until they've completed every single one of those things. It removes all of the time that your team spends on following up on those items one by one on going back and figuring out what do I have and what do I not have, putting it down for three weeks, picking it up three weeks from now and having to do all that again from scratch. Software can absolutely do that stuff for you. But the most progressive firms I know these days are, are not letting the pros touch the project until they have everything that they need, everything that the client should have submitted for that project. And the big pushback there is, well, a non professional person isn't going to know exactly what they need. Two things I'd say to that. One, they won't ultimately take it as far as a non technical person will. But that's not a reason to do 0% of it with admins, right? If an admin can get me 90% of the way there, that's a whole lot better than the pro doing the first 90%. This episode, it is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Live Flow. Tell me if you've ever had this situation before. Somebody needs some information from the QuickBooks file. Maybe it's an advisor, maybe it's like the financial advisor, some other stakeholder, a board member, maybe even the client. But you don't want that person to have access to the actual QuickBooks file itself. 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Second thing I'd say is this is a great rationale for building those explicit request lists outside of your busiest season because then you can have non technical people or juniors build those request lists. You know, based on what we had last year, here's every single document that we ought to need this year. And if you want then you can have a technical person review it in a slower time of the year so that they have blessed it when you get into the busy season. But even if you don't do that, a version of admins tracking down all the stuff, the low hanging fruit that you know you're going to need that is a lot better than making the pro do everything. It's an example of I think where we split hairs over the last mile. So say you're doing annual tax prep for somebody, you know, the pushback can be, well we don't know everything that we need this year until we've actually seen their file this year. And that's true, you don't, but you know a whole lot of what you need that's a pretty darn good starting point. So all of the stuff that they had last year that you know, at a minimum you'll need this year, this isn't to say that it's going to be a, a complete list, do it all in one fell swoop sort of thing. Which I mean unless you've got a client that's super on top of things and they will somehow know everything they need to give you like that just generally doesn't happen. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to optimize for trying to eliminate even, even just one start stop for my professional staff by getting the admins to be the ones doing those follow ups, making sure that we have everything that we need overseeing the software that's doing that. If you've pulled in a tool to help with those document requests, de skill the function of getting everything that you need to do a project because if it's taking away time from your pros, that's your Most scarce resource related to that. Does this make it way harder to run a solo practice because you don't have that. That person that can help you out? In fact, let's check this one at AI Jason, I do think there's some things we've talked about in the past that could kind of synthesize into a solid answer here. Hey Jason, I'm thinking through how to better manage info requests with my clients and get out ahead of annoying status requests and all that. But for a solo firm owner, when you're the only one running the shop and you don't have a person to delegate those communications to, this seems like a pretty big downside of running a solo practice. Would you agree with that? What are, what are any ideas you may have there? Oh, absolutely.

Running solo does throw a curveball your way with managing client communications. It's like juggling with one hand tied behind your back. But hey, it's not all doom and gloomy. One trick up the sleeve is setting clear expectations with clients from the get go. Tell them straight up how often they'll hear from you. Whether it's weekly or bi weekly updates. Remember, a no update update is still an update. It keeps clients in the loop and can cut down on those pesky check ins. Another lifesaver is technology. There are tools out there that can automate some of the communication for you. It's like having a digital sidekick. And don't forget, hiring a virtual assistant can be a game changer. They can filter the noise and let you focus on what you do best. It's about working smarter, not harder. Have you thought about how you might integrate a virtual assistant into your workflow?

That was everything that I would have said it was. Build a system. Even if it's manual for you, a system's better than nothing. It was use tech because tech can handle the requests. Though it didn't get very granular in that. And that's that could be because of the response size that it's trying to fit the response within. And then third, consider hiring a VA for this. I mean, that's pretty much exactly my answer. If you really, really want to stay solo, lean into tech really hard. Lean into tools that will manage the requesting tools that'll send your clients automatic status updates when the project hits a new status. Is it super high touch for them to get like auto updates on statuses? Not really. That's kind of the trade off that you're dealing with. So lean into tech. But I would have a really hard time ever fully going solo. Just because there's so much trivial stuff when it comes to running a business and running an accounting firm that I wouldn't want to get sucked into just a VA to handle. Some of that for you seems like a big win. Otherwise you do end up getting stuck doing a lot of menial things. You know, we talk about AI advisors putting us out of a job. I'm feeling a little bit of that for the first time right now. Glasses, reflections. This thing comes up a lot. I shared some tips on Twitter the other day. You wear glasses. You know how annoying it is to do videos, and you always have the reflection either of the display or a light in your glasses. Couple of tips for you here. The main causes of those reflections will either be a monitor, a light, sometimes windows. If it's a light, move it up, get that light higher. If you think about the plane that the camera is on to your eyeballs, the light just can't be on the same plane. So if you get that light up higher, it'll get out of the reflection. If the problem is your monitor, consider a way to invert the colors on your monitor. So what's actually reflecting is, is the white, like light being projected out. If you can turn your monitor off, great, you've solved for that problem if you've got a script on that monitor. Some apps, I don't even know if this is possible at the op, like the os, the operating system level. But what you basically want is the colors to invert so your big white document is black and the text is white. Now I use a program called Cloud Prompter. It's a teleprompter app that's super, super basic. I think they've even got like a free level where when you have a script, you chuck the script in there and all it is is an all black screen with white lettering. So if you're having issues with your monitor reflecting off your glasses, either turn the monitor off, turn the brightness off, or find a way to invert the colors so it is white text on black, and then you won't see those reflections anymore. Hardest one to solve for is probably windows could be solved for by repositioning your desk, closing the blinds, that sort of thing. But if you wear glasses, hopefully that helps. In my case, I don't have a perfect solution and this won't be relevant to audio listeners because my, my key light is a huge 48 inch dome light at the top. It's literally pushed up against the ceiling right now. And the very bottom of it is like right at eye level. And so if I, if I look towards my light, you just see my light reflecting off the top of my glasses. But that's only because the light, the bottom of the light is like just barely on the same plane as the camera. If I had a smaller light, and I don't imagine many people listening to this have a 48 inch dome light. If I had a smaller light, it could just be up higher and then you would never, you would never see it. Patrick Dichter posted something on, on Twitter recently that I loved. That was a really good ide. Tax season. We try to do something nice for our staff. Mobile car detailing for our local office staff. Remote staff are getting care packages. Said it was a hit. Said he stole the idea from Brandon Hall. Man, that's such a good idea. That's such a nice little, like, quality of life thing. Get your car detailed while you're at work. If your folks are in, in the thick of things, that stuff can make a really big difference. You got any, like, good ideas for, like, what have you done? Stuff like that that people would appreciate? Pop that in the comments. I'll pin, maybe I'll pin that to kind of get the conversation going. Am I anti employer? So I've been dunking on like traditional employment lately. Not because everyone should go out and start their own firm, because they definitely should not. But I think there are a lot of ingrained things in our society that come from employers suppressing employees and just trying to get them to do what's best for the organization. And you know, examples we've talked about is never make your hobby your job, like putting kind of these scary barriers around going out and doing something else that ultimately isn't in the benefit of that company. We're going to do an episode on the pathless path. I think that's what it is. Talked about this book a couple of times, but they basically talk about how we are often blind, blind to like, the default path that we are on that is defined by the environment that we're in. So you go to work at a big firm and the way that you win within that universe is totally defined by the universe itself. It has nothing to do with what's best for you, what's best for your life, bigger picture, what's best for your family. It's entirely defined by like, that little bubble that you're operating within. So, like, and this is probably why for myself, my head never came up to start thinking about other things until I had like, conquered the bubble I was in. The bubble I was in was a small like 30 person firm. I eventually became partner, I bought out a couple of the old partners and then I started looking around at what else was happening. Honestly didn't at all until that. And it's because I was, without realizing it, I was on the default path, just playing the game. I was within to the best of my abilities. This episode is sponsored in part by Interval. Interval helps accounting firms unlock opportunities and optimize results for your SMB clients. This one's pretty cool. It's basically like a connector that will then surface automated insights based on the ledger connection. So with more business owners to serve and less time to serve them, Interval is the conduit to information and insights that put your advisory practice ahead of the curve. Here's the curve. How do you get ahead of a curve just from a. Just from a geometric standpoint? Is that like another curve with a bigger radius? Through a quick connection to your client's financial data, you get access to automated data discovery and advanced analytics. Interval delivers actionable insights on valuation, industry benchmarking, excess working capital, tax advisory opportunities, and more. Filtering out the noise and and highlighting only what you need to spark advisory opportunities. Interval provides foresight into financial forecasts and overall business health, while protecting and growing SMBs. Creating a shared understanding. Because when businesses grow, so do you. Man, I wish I had stuff like this when I was running my firm. If you've got access to the ledger, like that is a treasure trove of opportunity and good advice that you can give people. I was always like, if only we could like wire up all these ledgers to specific service packages that we have where anytime this triggers, we propose this package and we can set it up in a way where it's like a no brainer. We're like, hey, we see this thing, you should totally have us do this. And they'd be like, yeah, but where did that fall on its face? Like monitoring the ledger data to actually make that connection. Now I got cool tools like Interval to do that for you. We're still in an ad read. Learn more about Interval in the show Notes below. This episode is sponsored in part by tech guru Pop Quiz. Your computer just explodes right now. What do you do? A. We're gonna go down to Costco and get the. Get the best deal on a new tower that I can.

B.

Call my IT group and let them figure it out because they're the professionals. The correct answer is B. You thought there was gonna be four options. I'll be honest, when I started that I thought there would be four options too, but I couldn't think of anymore. Gang, we talk about delegation and the stuff that you ought to be worried about and stuff that you really need to get off your own plate. IT Tech, please just stop, okay? There's professionals for this sort of thing. I don't want Tina spinning up her new Etsy shop, going out and filing her own tax return. But computers? You got computers figured out, do ya?

You just don't, okay?

You just don't. Tech guru. They just work with accounting firms. You know the stupid apps we have to use, they know the great apps we get to use. They know the, oh, the cyclical natures of our business. So they're gonna get up off your back during busy season. But yeah, no, I'm sure that you know more about how to manage it than a company that literally just has a big old team of people that just talks with accounting firms about all their tech stuff all day, all night deals with it non stop. But yeah, no, I'm sure that you know better than they do. Why am I so upset? Check out the link in the show notes to learn more. We're getting to deadline season. If you don't have a good plan for it, just book a call with them now so you got something on the calendar to force yourself to circle back to it and put together a better plan going forward. Somebody shared right before I started recording this in the Tax Pros Discord. By the way, listener, I don't know if you want to grow the Tax Pros Discord. Let me know if you do and I'll. I can. I'll bring it up next Friday on the Q and A. But they're sharing the story of basically how they left a larger firm and their boss told them they were going to a community firm. Their boss told them they would be doing boring, simple work for the rest of their days. So it's like you've got this partner in a bigger firm that's like, we do cool, big impressive stuff and the best thing for anyone is to come do this cool, big impressive stuff when it's like, no, maybe I actually want to have like more of a community impact, even if that means I'm doing less technical work and maybe my more technical skills atrophy because I'm not spending any time on them. As a great example of something that like, is more about the person and what's best for you rather than the default path like within that little environment that you're living within anyways. Am I trying to scare everyone like out into starting their own firm. I'm not. But I am trying to make people who work for legacy firms much more aware of the opportunities that are out there. Which is exactly what this profession needs to keep everybody from leaving. Because I think a huge percentage of the folks that are leaving the accounting profession are in a sucky employment situation. And if people like myself, if people like you, firm owners who are running progressive firms can get the word out there that there is a better way to do this in a sustainable way that supports entrepreneurs and is actually a pretty rad lifestyle, like that's messaging that we need to get out. We've actually been working really hard the last couple of months thinking through what are some ways that I can connect progressive accountants with progressive accounting firms within my audience. I know I have a lot of progressive accounting firms in my audience and I probably have the biggest funnel online like collecting progressive accountants via content. And when most of those people find this content, the vast majority of them will be working for legacy accounting firms. And if that person's either going to leave the profession or go work for a progressive firm that like is also learning from this content, I would much rather them do that. So I'm not like, I don't want to like globally cash shade on on firms and be like, everybody just has to go do their own thing. Because that isn't the move. But I do want to make it abundantly clear if you're in a situation that isn't healthy for you or if you're in a legacy firm, there's so many cool, talented people out there that have started their own firm and created really cool places to work before you bounce to private or or something else altogether. Know that like to me the very best thing about this profession is you can kind of do it anywhere. Like not just like where you work remote and all that, but it can kind of follow your passions. Because accounting and tax and compliance, it happens where your passions are. Whether that's beekeeping or golf, catting or private air charter or summer camps, whatever it is, accounting and tax happens there too. So it can kind of be like this really cool marriage of the things that you're pass passionate about while also being a like super flexible job that can pay really well. Last one, Is it viable to run a basically a 1040 only business? So if you're not a US tax pro, 1040s are individual tax returns and the small ones generally the client will want them done by April 15 for the previous calendar year. For people who are Business owners and anything beyond like the most basic stuff, there are totally reasonable justifications for extending to the extended deadline of October 15th. And when you have those slightly more complex returns, it's easier to make that argument with your clients to say like, no, it's actually not in your benefit to file so stuff to pay, but to file within April. So this could be 1040s. It could also be anything else. Is it realistic to build an accounting firm these days around something that can only be done like you know, within three months of a 12 month year? On a whole, like firms are trending away from this, right? In a perfect world, if you could smooth that stuff out across all 12 months, that's, that's much more optimized. Right? But I would still say while that is the trend and in many situations advisable, there's still a killer business to be made around these like things that are harder to spread out so like folks can go out and run wildly profitable firms doing 1040 work. I mean, I don't want to lose perspective of just how fortunate many of us are are if you, especially if you like wind back the clock to past jobs that you did, like how short that path is to like making six figures just doing 1040s. Like there's not many professions where you could frankly work your butt off for a few months of the year but still take home like six figures and have a pretty chill rest of your year. Now that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to figure out like how do I keep busy the rest of the year? And there are ways to manage this. This is not unlike the age old problem of accounting practices where all their clients want to get their, their month end closed done by the 5th of the month, right? Or the 10th of the month, pick a number, what do you do the rest of the month? Like that's where you think about what other services can we sell to keep the team busy the rest of the month after we get that month end close done. So it's not to say you still shouldn't think strategically about other things that you can do, but you can still like, and I'm, I'm thinking about the US tax market with 1040s and all that, and every market may not be this way, but there's still enough scarcity there to where I can charge enough and it's really easy to find those clients and you can collect all the returns of the firm that the other firms are shedding because they're moving away from that. Like there's still a great super profitable business to be built there. Is it ultimately like as good as the one that's doing the other type of work and it's all spread out and everything? I don't know. But that's pretty subjective too. Like based on how you want to work. And if you don't mind working your butt off a few months a year, I would say don't feel trapped to that for sure because there are other ways to do it. But at least as I see like the US Accounting firm market and that's maybe the main thing I can speak confidently to. There's a really cool version of of any of these. There's good and bad ways to do each of them. But you can make really good money. You can control your schedule, like not overdo it. Just know the more you get into just those services that can only be served like sold very limited times of the year, it's just going to come with some really big trade offs. Right? But even with those limitations, like there is still a compelling business to be made there. That's it for Q and A Friday. I don't know if we're going to keep bringing this clone back. Honestly. He's pretty much aced everything I've thrown at him so far. I don't see a near future where this podcast is entirely my AI like host. It would be fascinating as a science experiment. I don't think it would be super compelling as like content. I think we're a long ways from that and I wouldn't subject you to that. But I'll be honest, I kind of don't know what to do with this guy right now. I wrote about it in the newsletter this week. I'll be fascinated to hear if you find ways of to make use of this. Is it just like a parlor trick or is this like the future of how people interact with your expertise? It's maybe hard for me to know right now because I'm on one side of it and it's not useful for me because it will just say the same things that I will say if I think about like talking with my attorney or something else like that. Yeah, I think that probably would be pretty useful. Not as a replacement for the attorney but as like a step between nothing and the false full blown deal. But it'll be interesting to see how that stuff develops, whether that ultimately becomes normalized or not. That's all we got for today. You got questions, drop them in the comments. This is my favorite day of the week, going through these. These questions each Friday. And I'll see you next week, too.