216 9 Ways To De-Skill Roles in your Accounting Firm

If you aren't careful, if you aren't intentional about the work that you sign yourself up for, you might find yourself getting sucked into a whole lot of really menial things that are a waste of your time. When you are the big brain boss and you can do all the stuff up here at the very top, the most technical stuff, sometimes that ends up meaning that you do everything, when in reality what you ought to be doing is just the tippy top stuff. That's a problem for you if you run a team. It's also a problem for every person in your team. How, how do we better align the tasks that those people are given with their best capabilities? How can we give them the good stuff to work on so that they're actually being upskilled and carve out the bits that can be done by less technical folks, Lean further into admins, into interns, into entry level people because we can find more of those people. The technical unicorns. Good luck. Come on in. I would like to discuss this with you. This is my tippy top hiring hack. My tippy top staffing hack. This is the hack of all hacks, gang. How can I get meaningful what we would normally consider technical work done by entry level, like lower skill folks, the type of people that I can go out and find in a snap to help me. If only all of the work could just be done by those folks, right? And it can't, obviously. Otherwise people wouldn't come to your big brain for technical expertise. They would just walk up to a person on the street and that would be the end of it. But I think most accounting firms, we probably overskill most of the things that we do, as evidenced by the fact that a very, very small percentage of the time are we actually pushing those noodles to the limit? Are we actually like figuring out that new thing or doing that super hard thing? I don't know about you, I mean, that's probably less than 10% of my day. And the same is TR of your entire teams. And so what you end up with is you have all these really capable, talented technical people that spend 60% of their day hustling documents or annotating work papers. Good grief. People annotating a work paper isn't. That's not a technical thing. Sending an email to a client, asking for documents, following up with them for the umpteenth time. This is stuff that we can get off of technical people's plates, as evidenced by the fact that oftentimes you have the exact same role being done in different firms by Wildly different people from Admins to like CPAs. A good example of this we've seen recently is around the discussion of status requests and how irritating those can be when your clients are just like dogging on you like is it ready yet? Is it ready yet? And you're like, get off my back when we talk about status requests. Some firms are using genuinely they're lowest skill admin role type folks for this while. When we had that discussion and there was a bigger discussion on it online, where a lot of those people went to right away was boy, if I could just hire a CPA to just do my client communications with me, or if I could just hire, you know, this ea, or if I could just hire someone with tax experience where all they wanted to do was just respond to client emails. Meanwhile you got a whole bunch of firms who are either just using straight up admins for this or they'll upscale their admins a bit, like send them through kind of a, an entry level tax course, entry level bookkeeping course just to get them like a bit of, a bit of the vernacular so that they can be that much more helpful there. So what is the right answer? I can tell you what the what in some ways what the easy answer is. The easy answer is to, to throw it to someone who has more than enough capability to do that thing honestly. And that's what we do. That's what we do. A lot of times even if you're running a team, you're like, yeah, Jim's probably going to screw that up at some point, so I'll just keep it for myself and that's the end of it and that becomes routine and before you know it, you've done that for years. When had you pushed back on that just the very first time you made that decision? Had you dug into it a little more and been like, yeah, but could we have a system that would accommodate for that? Could we have a templated work paper that would actually catch that thing? Would you? Where I could make that work paper template once and then everybody could use it and it like kind of extends my, I don't know, capability, my influence like via that work paper that other people can use rather than me having to do it all myself. Ultimately a lack of systems requires more expertise, right? In some ways expertise can be a replacement for systems though it is ultimately far, far from perfect because humans are gonna make mistakes. But the firm that is leaning really, really heavily into systems can, can generally get the same work done with less time from super skilled people. I've got nine examples of where roles can be deskilled inside of accounting firms. But just to talk a little more about systematization. Is that a word? We talked about this a bit when we were talking about, like a quality assurance process and how that may be like the single most important part of a firm and what you should really take pride in, like in an accounting firm, are there really. Is there really much in the way of assets that we build that then belong to the firm and things that are permanent? If somebody comes and works for you for a couple years who's really smart and then they leave, what of that person's essence is left over? That's the value to me of quality assurance of systems. They can make those systems better, and those systems belong to the firm forever. And it ought to be like the collective, like, expertise of everyone kind of contributing into that. So we talked about that a bit in the context of quality assurance. But this starts with, like a cultural mindset to always be pushing the notion of what things can and cannot be systematized. Because the easy thing to do here absolutely is you think of that thing and you're like, oh, no, there's no way that we could delegate that or systematize that because it has this and that nuance. And boy, nobody knows nuance quite like public accountants because they've seen that one thing that went sideways once. And if you apply that across the entire business, what you end up with is like, almost this sort of like manic fear of delegating anything or of systematizing anything, because you've just seen all the ways that it can go sideways. But if you do that, I mean, you end up being the person on the hook for everything. You have these wildly overskilled people wasting their time on tasks that are way beneath them. So how do we challenge the notion that certain things can't be systematized? Is there a way to carve out part of the process and systematize that part of it while still using expertise for just the part of it that requires expertise? We do a lot of big, complex kind of end to end things, and within those processes are a bunch of kind of smaller things down to, you know, every single work paper, every single calculation? Is there a way that we could split this up to enable delegation where it's possible without delegating the most important bits? Is there a way to build a tool to do, like, part of that? You know, building a tool to do the entire process may be unthinkable, but if there's part Of a process that's really high volume for you. Putting a copy of the bank statement into a working file for every single month end close you ever do. Like what are those common things that we have to do? A ton. How can we carve those things out and just descale them bit by bit? Cause every little chunk that we bite off, like that's a win. And this is, it's very foreign for service business owners. I mean I will definitely not profess to being phenomenal at this, but it was interesting. I was reading recently about just some of the, you know, the Boeing stuff with like the 737 planes that have been problematic and all that. And learning in the process just how unbelievably detailed and meticulous their systems have to be. Like you have to submit a request to remove anything from the airplane. And this explicit request has like several steps of approvals and all that. You got this airplane sitting here for anyone to literally touch it. Like there are approval processes. It's obviously a massive, big complex process that's built into a kajillion little steps. And every single one has an owner comes back to like some type of accountable party. But when we look at how we do our work, generally it's given to a wizard who has X years of experience. So they ought to know how to do it. And the wizard just kind of does the entire thing. And then ultimately at the end of the process somebody blesses it, right? Somebody who has adequate experience to bless that sort of thing. That's what I want to break down. That's what I want to get more granular about. Because most firms I don't think have gone low enough yet on the skill spectrum. They aren't making use of talent from the bottom up. They usually do the opposite. They throw everything on the most capable people. Before you know it, those people are at their limits and can't find any more of them. So nine examples of ways firms can approach this differently, more contextually as it, as it applies to like the specific work that we do. So document requesting. I know a good number of firms who exclusively have admins handling all the requesting of documents for preparing tax returns, for doing month end closes for any type of work. That work has to start with a required set of documents. Here are all the things that the client has to provide. It may not just be documents could be like questions and stuff like that as well. And it doesn't go to the hands of the pro of the technical subject matter expert until everything is in as a Rule Pro isn't allowed to touch it until they get there. Now, what are, what are, what are our internal blockers? What are all the, the dialogues inside of us right now that are. They're telling us, well, that's not possible, that Fern must be cutting corners or something in a way that we just wouldn't do in this shop. Things that come to mind for me, well, they're not going to know all the questions to ask. They would never ask the questions as good as me. And you're absolutely right, they wouldn't. Thus is, and this is the problem with all types of delegation because nobody's going to do something the exact same way as you. The bigger question is not, not would they do it like me. It is, is that better than the status quo? And in the case of having an admin help gather documents, probably because they're probably going to be more on top of it than you. They're probably still going to save you a pile of time. It doesn't mean that you still won't have to ask for more information. But you know just what a pain in the old game of starty Stoppy is when you've got to pick up a project six different times to get it done. Even if an admin can get you ahead and knock out one of those rounds for you. Awesome. In reality, man, it should never take that that many rounds. Usually the worst of the starty Stoppy scenarios come from never getting explicit upfront about what are all the things that we need and asking for all those things and telling the client we won't start work until you give us all those things. Probably worth saying also that you are good at asking for those things because you've done it a bunch of. And the highest leverage application of you, you know your essence and knowing how to do that stuff well is building systems to help other people do the same thing well. And that's probably not just shooting from the hip and doing it from memory, from your X years of experience. That's probably like documenting it, building systems for how we need to request this stuff. I think it was Tim Ferriss said something along the lines of systems survive vacation or maybe it's the other way around, Vacation survive systems. I don't know. You want to build a machine that will work and then employ people to like follow the rules of that machine. And I know there's a million things that it's not as simple as making a set of rules for. Otherwise we could just snap our fingers and all the accounting work would be done right now. But the opposite end of the spectrum also isn't the answer. You know, that's what we're trying to avoid. So if that's a really uncomfortable thing to even consider starting, then what is a smaller version of it? Because it doesn't have to be a complete win, and it probably won't be. But what's a partial win version of it? What is the type of request that's maybe most realistic to start with? What's the one that stresses you out the least? Start there. The way that some folks manage requests is to build those request lists ahead of time and then they actually have a senior review those request lists before they go out to the client. So maybe that's a better trade off is rather than the senior managing the whole process themselves, the juniors, the admins, whoever it is, they build the request lists and then the senior just has to review them all at once. The same task being done by two different firms, by people at wildly different levels of capability. This episode is sponsored in part by liveflow discussion going on online this week. Frustration with accounting ledgers and the tools not always doing what you want them to do. And so it's like, why are all these additional kind of ecosystem tools necessary just to augment the core app with the things that, that I want. And oftentimes the things that you want are gonna be very different than what anybody else wants. And this is where LifeFlow can actually be a way to customize your QuickBooks experience because it can sync out to Google Sheets just about anything that's in QuickBooks reports. So Ledger activity, specific account balances, you can lift all that information out, organize it however you want, but then give access to that Google Sheet to whoever, whoever needs it, like third party stakeholders, internal users, maybe even members of your team. And then because they have a consolidations product now obviously you can use that to, you know, consolidate and roll up related companies books. They can also use that for internal purposes. If I'm looking at a cross section of, you know, 30 beekeeping clients that I have and there's specific things that we want to monitor or benchmark, we're really like augmenting the ledger experience and kind of building whatever we want in the spreadsheet. Because LifeLow bridges all that data from Quick QuickBooks to Google Sheets, can do a one time sync, can do like a sync that continues like auto updating anytime the data inside of the accounting system changes. I've always been a like, let me kind of build my own solution sort of guy. LifeLow could be a good way for you to do that. Learn more about LifeFlow link in the show Notes this episode is brought to you in part by Team up, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between Teamup and all the other offshoring options. The Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, Gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you so you can retain your team for the long term. Team up can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xerocubio and Dex. Also recruit specialist roles, team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistants. Thought Experiment what if you had an executive assistant for the first time this tax season? Just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky old inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take. Robert Half reference. We ever going to get Robert Half to sponsor this pod? Not anymore. And they can connect you with an affordable employer of record if you need help with payroll and compliance once you hire that person. Big fan of hiring in the Philippines. You know I did a bunch of that. Check out the link in the description to learn more about Timo. I was beginning to organize my firm around pods, basically supporting all of our most senior folks because I saw the value of it for me and it all started honestly with probably delegating my email inbox when I saw oh there's only really like 15% of the things in here that actually require things that I'm capable of that nobody else is capable of. And then we look downstream and we're like oh this is also the case for our most technical people. Like we would love to keep them focused on the most technical stuff for us. A big A big driver there was. As I've shared before, we were hiring in the Philippines and just having fantastic success getting really good people in the Philippines. Now you can hire really any level of person offshore. There's kind of a misnomer that it is you're looking for low skilled people probably because you know your bigger companies. The Comcast of The world, they're generally hiring offshore folks for those lower skill positions. But, but in what we do, you can genuinely hire folks at any level of skill. I know firms whose most, highest level, most technical people are offshore and that's totally fine. In my firm we were having such good luck hiring. Our main area of emphasis was like hiring entry level folks offshore who had just finished, who had just gotten their accounting degrees. So these were like 20 somethings and they were so good and they were like learning so fast. And so we're just looking for more ways to plug them in and keep, keep growing them. And in the course of doing this, of deskilling things that were once very technical and getting help from, you know, I could say hey, we want to hire another person in the Philippines and we could have that person ready to go in a week. That was not possible for, you know, the technical roles we were hiring for where we would have jobs out for years. And in the course of descaling some of these tasks so our more entry level folks could do them and it really doesn't matter whether they're offshore or not. What we were enabling was actually the upskilling of the folks who had been doing that. So for me, I was able to focus on the most important aspects of firm running rather than the trivial stuff for my senior team members, they were able to focus on the stuff that would help them to grow. And as we're talking with our team members, oftentimes there's a lot of like ambitious stuff and everybody's excited and you're like, yeah, we're going to get you into doing this and that and that and that and that's great. And you do want to keep growing folks. But that can only happen when you have a plan for all the stuff they're doing today. Like that growth has to look like real rubber meets the road. Have your tasks turned over. Are you doing the exact same tasks today that you were doing 12 months ago? If you're not, then you haven't grown as much as I want you to grow person on my team. I'm not enabling that for you until I can actually show the very real like turning over of tasks. So on the one hand you've got folks upskilling who are shedding those things they shouldn't be doing. And the reality is like even in the shedding of those tasks, you are then upskilling the folks that come and take them over for you. Second one I've got listed here is pre accounting. We did a whole episode on this, if you run an accounting practice, you absolutely need to have a pre accounting process at high level. Basically what it was was building an explicit list of. Here are all the things that we need to, you know, do a month on close, for example. Hopefully we have like self service access to all those things. Oftentimes it's logging into various systems to get a report or a number or something like that. In a perfect world this would all be automated. We are very far from that perfect world right now. Still automate everything that we can. But when we can't automate things, we still have to have a system for it to make sure that it gets done. What I don't want when the monthly financials are due on the 15th is for the accountant to start that project on the 14th and find out they don't have 80% of the information. So pre accounting starts on the 1st of the month and it can be deskilled. So we have this giant database of. Here are all the things you know, for this month end close. Maybe there's 15 things from bank statements to a screenshot of the login to see the loan balance because they don't do statements for that thing. It's different client by client, but we've got a giant database of all the things that need to be fetched, the destination for those things where they go in the client files so that admin folks can handle that process for us. And so we'd have a couple admins that would spend the first couple of days of the month fetching all this stuff for us. So it was all ready to go. And that's an example of upscaling the admin people. They're providing a really valuable function that's an essential part of the month end close. But what started with just logging in and fetching things that, you know, the accounting pro didn't want to have to do because it's a real pain. Eventually started looking like workpaper preparation because then it's like, okay, how should these files be named if they're saved to the workpaper files? Okay, how should the files be annotated? Like what's, what's our standard for annotating those files? Basically, how do we get these files to be in the state that they would be when the month end review is signed off on and done so that when the pro gets into the file and 80% of the work papers are already there. Now we have admin people who we can hire at the drop of a hat doing 80% of a month end close. I don't pick a percentage, but it's really powerful. And it only starts when you start kind of breaking up those processes into the bits that people can support your professional team with. Oh, that was my number three was work paper preparation. One other thought on work paper preparation is trying to better templatize work papers. The whole concept of a work paper is like pretty much anything that can prove a thing. Well, when it comes to payroll expenses or payroll liabilities, that's something that can be templatized. Like, what exactly needs to be there? There's certain things in a month end close where exactly what that ought to look like every single month really ought to be the same month over month for a client, and potentially even across all of your clients. Particularly when you're looking at things like tax preparation, where you are standardizing everything for a client into like a given set of rules. I don't think we make use of templatized work papers enough. And for you, this can be as simple as thinking through, like, what is that thing that I'm afraid of delegating where I commonly see people do it wrong? Could I, in an Excel spreadsheet, build a work paper template where somebody has to do a few inputs and it will automatically indicate and catch like, what are all those things that people commonly get wrong? Maybe that's, I don't know, tying out an M1 on a. On a tax return. Maybe it's tying out payroll liabilities on a month end close. When you contemplatize those things, it takes the mysticism out of how it comes together. And that's what we're trying to do, is make something that just about anybody could reproduce. And it's only gonna be as good as what you pour into that template. That is the highest value use of all that stuff you got going on up in your noggin. All those years of experience, pour that into scalable things. And templates are scalable things. Number four, answering the phone. Are you one of those firms? Do you have a phone? I know a growing number of firms are post, post phone, but there's a lot of firms that are still like, excuse me, an accounting firm without a phone. We went through a process of having various different people answering the phone in our firm and found ourselves getting frustrated with the wildly different outcomes that would happen. And so eventually we just like made a system for, here is what answering the phone looks like. Here are the paths people can go down. Here are the. The. Here's the decision tree for who they can Request access to, in our case, they could get instant access generally to the person, quote, person in charge or account manager for that client who was not the partner. So every client had a partner and then they had a kind of person in charge. We didn't call them partners, actually. We called them signers eventually. So there's kind of a hierarchy there where you had the signer who was the big boss, then you had the account manager who was still a technical person, not just a relationship manager, but they were the ones whose job it was to be more accessible. So that person on the phone, the person on our team answering the phone, was allowed to make that handoff immediately or schedule a call with the signer. And we basically just got really explicit about like, here's the decision tree of the things that you can handle on the phone and what that ought to look like. It also was really helpful, actually, because it got all of the stakeholders within the firm to commit to what was okay and not okay over the phone. You would have this person who's like, anybody that calls for me, they can do this, that or the other thing. And then somebody else would be like, this or that or the other thing. And until you make a rule, it's really hard to explicitly communicate to clients, here's the bar, here's what we do. And absent any sort of rule from you, everybody's going to choose their own adventure. And that just kind of becomes a mess. It means clients aren't as transferable between team members either because they have very different working styles. Now you may have situations where you have to have exceptions to the rule there, and that's fine, but exceptions to the rule are not a reason to not have rules. So we locked down kind of that decision tree for what answering the phone looked like. And I think what you find anytime you do that is like, oh, the person that needs to answer the phone, like, doesn't need to be in the building or can oftentimes be a third party service, which is actually great. That was actually really good for us. So I. The firm I acquired was basically an 80 year legacy practice with a ton of local business. And so folks, especially during taxis and folks were coming in the office a lot, um, it really went down like after Covid. But that person who was sitting by the, by the front door, they were kind of on an island because the layout of that building was a little unfortunate. And if they had to be on the phone the whole time, it made them. Made it really hard for them to manage folks who were coming in Sometimes folks would come in to pick up tax returns and they would do the handoff. And it was actually a huge relief to, to get phone answering responsibilities off of that individual. So we actually kind of de skilled that into oblivion where we could have anybody do that. And once you get to that point you can start looking like even third party services to help you there. Number five, the month end close like in the actual accounting system. So there are a tremendous amount of menial things that go into like closing out a month in an accounting system that have absolutely nothing to do with your technical expertise or classifications or anything like that. Good example, reconciling a bank statement in QuickBooks Online. It is matching up a bunch of numbers, it's checking boxes, it is entirely administrative, but because it exists within the accounting system, it's this thing that's like reserved for accountants, bookkeepers I guess. But like if you take the pre accounting process one step further, that person goes out and they, they fetch the bank statement but then you've got them actually like putting the work paper where it goes and marking it up and naming it how it needs to be named. And then a very logical next step is well, what has to happen with that bank statement inside the accounting system? Well, they come in, they make sure the feed worked, all the transactions came in and they reconcile that before the pro even has to get into the account file. And before you know it you've got admin people that are like doing a big old chunk of the month end close. And actually practice management systems these days make this much easier to manage because you have a way more granular like task by task approach to getting this stuff done that can be assigned across different teams. When it was, you know, every client has a bookkeeper, every client has a tax preparer, that sort of thing. Then it's just like, well, anything and everything related to that function just goes to that person. Instead of having a crack team of, you know, operations folks or something like that who are not the bookkeepers who are capable of doing all that stuff. And that was ultimately what we went to was, was not a admin level operations person for every client, but just a pool. Because we're standardizing how this gets done across all of our clients, which is a win, which is great. But then you have like a pool of folks who can tackle these tasks, can cross train each other on how to get that stuff done and then it's done in a standardized way across those different projects. And that can absolutely go as far in as the stuff happening in the accounting software each month. I would say a lot of that holds up for tax as well. US tax pros. Do you need a CPA or an EA to key in a W2? Probably not. This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Accruer. If you have not heard about a crewer yet, all it does is it gives a sick sweet new skill to your QuickBooks. All you do in a QuickBooks online description, you type for the period, start period, end period, and it posts accrual entries covering that whole date range. If this is a payroll journal entry that straddles month ends, you say the work period and it will automatically post a journal entry. 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Or skip the demo and sign up directly at accruer.com with code Jason Daily One to try for just a dollar this month. Oh my gosh, $1. Code Jason Daily 1. Do it. I'll put the link in the show notes. Go use that promo code. What do you got to lose? Today's episode is sponsored in part by the folks at Cloud Accountant Staffing. How's this resume sound for you? This is a real resume. Let's do a tax one this time. Four years US tax prep experience, LACERT ProConnect, CCH Access, Taxdome carbon tally for QuickBooks, zero experience 11, 2011, 20s, 1040, 1065. They've done it all. This is a real resume from Cloud Accountant Staffing, where you can hire the accounting team of your dreams from the Philippines. This person's got looks like last four years doing US Tax and another three years beyond that, working with western companies sounds pretty darn good, right? Well, maybe they just cherry picked that one. Maybe they're not all that great. Gang, here's the thing with cloud accountant staffing. You don't pay a dime until you hire somebody. So you can go hop on a call, you can talk through your needs, they will cut their recruiters loose. Go find some folks that could be a great folks. You can go through the resumes, you can interview them and you're only going to spend a dollar. Once you have found somebody that you are jacked about, that's it. Worst case scenario, you get some experience going through the process. You have the chance to ask a bunch of ignorant questions about, you know, doing this for the first time, building your offshore team. Whether you're looking for tax pros, accounting pros, they can help you find what you're looking for. Not to like be overstated just how much big foreign regional firms and the industry has invested in the Philippines. There's so much great talent over there now. I've shared before, when we started hiring folks in the Philippines, it completely changed the strategy of my firm. Got some really, really good people. Like I said, you got nothing to lose. Check out the link in the show notes below. Book a call to make sure you get back to it. At the very worst, you learn something the very best using you hire a killer employee. Right? So check that one out in the show notes number six, peer detail reviews. Instead of everything just being like these big overarching technical reviews, there's a lot of types of work that we do that is just putting a number on a thing. Not that many, honestly. Like most of them, there's still gotchas there. But if the main thing is to make sure that number A matches number B. Man, doesn't doesn't take your biggest brain rocket surgeons in the firm to do that. I think as I, I mean I don't know a ton about big firms, but a lot of the more regional firms I worked with, they actually split out what they called a detail review separate from a technical review. The detail review was looking at the numbers, making sure there wasn't transpositions, that sort of thing. The technical review was is this actually correct? And the first time I saw that I'm like, that's so dumb. You got a whole extra step that is just wildly inefficient. The reason it worked was because that extra step that they added saved a pile of time for the technical person. And the detail review could be done by just about anybody. I think there's also a great benefit to making preparers do review of some kind like it. It demystifies. It shows them that everybody makes mistakes and does a little more to get them to start thinking as a reviewer, if that's ultimately where you want them to go. So instead of, you know, chucking everything to the partner or you, the owner to review every single aspect of it, is there a detail review somebody else could do? Some firms actually use like work papers for this. So they have like a. And which kind of blew my mind like. And I saw this more in the context of tax prep, like a big Excel work paper that's like a tie out to the tax return and somebody else can do that before it gets to you to be reviewed as kind of a double check of their own work. That's interesting. That's a version of it. But you know, technical review is a great example of something where very obvious reaction to let's systematize. This is you, you can't systematize like all the review aspects of something really technical like a month end close or a tax return review. And that's totally true. You can't. But within that big ambiguous thing are things that have to happen every single time that are not so mystical. So how do you keep pulling chunks out of that to get help to standardize those parts of it so that it isn't just a big ambiguous process that totally falls in your lap? Number seven, buy or build a tool to do part of it. You're probably not going to find a tool that's going to do like this big complex process from end to end that probably isn't realistic, but these little bits you can carve out of it. And an Excel like template work paper is an example of technically a tool that you could build to help you, but be looking for software to help here. Also, I've got a growing number of quality assurance tools out there where they connect to the accounting ledger and they do kind of some automated review functionality. And I find that firms struggle to use this not because they can't see the value in it, but because they're left unsure how to build their own processes around it. They're like, well, I. It doesn't check everything that I'm going to check, so I still have to go in and check everything. So it didn't really save me any time when the better way to think about this is like, what is the bigger overall process? How can we carve this up into like more explicit functions and systems that need to be checked to then be able to have a system like a subsystem there that tech can do for me. Like, it isn't until you parcel that stuff out further that you can actually get the tech to help you with it. I don't know about you, if you ever, if you've ever gone through, like, change management and accounting firms, you know just how much you. And how frustrating it can be to pull in a bit of tech that does this thing. And then all the accountants are like, that's really cool. I'm still going to do it my way, though. And so then you're like, well, why did we just spend all this money on the tech when all the accounts are still going to do it their own way manually? And so then they cut the tech spend because they're like, oh, it's not actually saving us any time or money. And then the firm just like, never goes forward as a result. Some of you just are feeling that so deep in your soul right now. So, tech, think about ways that tech things can be deskilled to the level of tech. Doing it for you. Number eight, inbox management. Oh, you all know I'm a huge fan of this. Not just for you, but for your professional staff to depersonalize the email inbox. Man, it's like this thing where there's like this propriety around email inboxes that is so misplaced. If you work for my accounting firm and clients send you things all day long in that inbox that is like a receiving bay of really important things. And you don't just get your own receiving bay. The team needs to help you with that. It is part of the overall collective service. Get over this misplaced propriety around the things that come in our inboxes. If you're sending things that are sensitive to your employees to two email inboxes, stop. Send it somewhere else. Find a different way to deliver it. Because there's like, valuable stuff coming in there all day long that we need to help them with. The reason to not do that can't be because they get a pay stub there once a month. Like, find an alternative. We got to find a way around that. I think the analogy I gave was this is in a main channel video. If Tracy gets a DVD mail to her once a month from Netflix and she knows that's going to come through at some point, so she has to, like, keep an eye out for it. That doesn't mean that Tracy needs to handle all of the mail herself. It's not a great analogy, but I feel like I'm something of an expert at bad analogies. Okay, last, last one here. Number nine, new client onboarding. Oh, you telling me that I'm supposed to let these knuckleheads that work for me see new clients and manage the sales process and onboarding and all that? Ha, Fat chance. They don't have the riz that I do. They don't know the things that I know. Yeah, I dunno, think like, go back and think about how you first started doing that stuff. For me, it was itty bitty clients that honestly the firm probably shouldn't have been taking on to begin with, but they're like, ah, throw this, throw this one to this guy who really cares if we get it or not. And I'm like, you know, I'm, I'm who I'm set my alarm early that morning. I. This is like the biggest thing that's ever happened to me. What is that? For your team, like start carving things out, itty bitty, more bite sized versions of this to get started. You're not going to overnight delegate this entire process to your team. But the beauty of bringing in new clients who never ever even see you is you totally sidestep the thing that everybody hates, which is they come because of you and then they get passed off to somebody else. Everybody hates that, nobody likes it. And then every time something has to get escalated, it has to come to you. If it comes in from somebody else on day one, mission accomplished, buddy. You are now totally in the driver's seat of deciding whether or not you stick your nose into client engagements ever again. It's up to you. And even if you're not at a point where you're like, oh, I don't want to do that, at least you have the option now. It doesn't all have to be on your back. A couple of months back, we ran through a series of questions, kind of challenges, and one of them was, is there a threshold below which you could delegate client management where you say, okay, every client under 2500 bucks a year, I don't need to be involved in it anymore. Maybe that's a really scary thing because you've never done something like that before, then set that threshold really low. Maybe it's clients under 500 bucks a year, maybe you've got 20 of those. Great. That little eager beaver on your team that wants to do more of that stuff, they can cut their teeth on that. Not a huge risk to the business. And you've. You started Somewhere like, you have to give them the opportunity to start exercising that muscle before they're ever going to be any good at it. Now, it doesn't mean you just throw them to the wolves. You try to build a system like, that's what Skilling is all about, is building better systems, being more explicit about how things get done so that anyone can do them and like, meet the expectation. Because most firms are run the polar opposite way. There's zero systems. Nobody does things the same way. And this frustrates clients because they don't get a consistent experience. This frustrates reviewers because you get stuff to review and it's just all across the board, like, what are you even doing here? It makes it hard for people to grow and even know what they're supposed to do. Because somebody comes in new and totally green and you expect them to be able to do the things that are only possible once you have a bunch of experience, as opposed to, you go to work for Amazon and they're like, here's the thing, you're going to do this and you have to do it umpteen times by the end of the day, otherwise you'll be fired in two weeks. And they're very explicit things that the robots can't do. And from day one, the person very explicitly understands what the expectation is for them. I don't know that you can quite get an accounting firm that far. But the polar opposite, where there's nothing and you just throw them a pile of documents and see what they do and then expect the output to be anything at all that like, resembles something helpful. That's probably not realistic. Thank goodness you got the prior year file though, right? That is the system, isn't it? Just copying the prior year file. Really exciting for me was hiring a more entry level type of person and being able to make them big contributors right away while giving my more senior people honestly, like a better growth trajectory. Like relieving them of the trivial things that they shouldn't be doing because they're overqualified so that they could get to the better stuff. That was super rewarding as an employer and for me, selfishly getting myself away from doing the trivial tasks. The stuff that I'm like, I'm so sick of doing this thing. Meanwhile there's somebody else that's like, I would love to do that thing. Like that sounds like an awesome new challenge. I gotta facilitate that. And there were times where I was really good at that. I was like Teflon. I just had stuff sliding off me and I Wouldn't let anything really stick to me. And then there were other times where I could look back and be like, why did I just do that for the last three years, man? How many times have you experienced that, right? Where you finally give it up and you're like, well, shoot, that was a whole lot of wasted time where I probably didn't need to be the one doing that. Or the first time you hire a, you know, a VA or something like that, and you're like, boy, I will never go back to doing that myself again. I'm always amazed as accounting firms as, like, a black box machine largely churn out the same things, but the way that they get from the inputs to the outputs are wildly different. And the teams that are required, they're wildly, wildly different. Got any hot tips on deskilling? Drop in the comments. This is one of the big things I pushed, buying a legacy firm and trying to modernize that when it had it kind of stagnated and you had these technical people that had been doing the same thing for the last decade. And I'm like, do any of you want to do something new? And they're like, yeah, that would be nice. And so we had to challenge a bunch of assumptions about, do you really need to be the one to do these things or can we bring somebody along to help you? And they're like, I have, like, my own helper now. Like, that kind of blew their minds. Like, they didn't think they ought to be entitled to that almost. So while it took some, like, helping them to understand what that would look like and helping them to understand, I'm not replacing you by any means. I want you to do something better with your time. Ultimately, it ended up being a win for everybody. That's all we got time for today. We got a fun one tomorrow, one. I've actually been researching quite a bit, a whole lot of things that I really needed. I'll leave it at that. I'll see you tomorrow.