235 17 Apps Your Firm Might Just Fall In Love With

I'm just going to warn you right now, there's a very high likelihood in the next 30 minutes you're going to buy something. And I'm sorry, but we got some cool, cool stuff on this list. I went out to social media and I said, what was the last time you had a a shut up and take my money moment? Where when you saw an app and it clicked what it did, man, you could not get that wallet out fast enough. I still remember what I think my most recent one was, but over 100 people chimed in. 100 accountants sharing their last shut up and take my money by. I picked out my 17 favorites. I guarantee you have not heard of half of these, even if you are a super app nerd. Bunch of interesting new stuff here. Come on in. Let's get supes distracted today. Okay. Okay. I already gave you the disclaimer that you're gonna hate me for this episode. Don't shoot the messenger. Okay? Okay. Number one, I'll give you my last shut up and take my money moment. Honestly, it's like two or three years ago, it's when I first stumbled into Scribe. You may have seen Scribe before. Basically, it's a Chrome extension where you just hit record and it records all the things that you click on various pages in your browser and then you hit stop. And what you're left with is a step by step guide where you with screenshots of all of the things that you just clicked walking through a process. And you can like change the text around it. And so the final doc is like, you know, like how we built SOPs back in the day, Microsoft Word. Whereas like a lineup text, janky screenshot. Lineup text, Janky screenshot. It's like that, but way, way, way better. It shows all the things you click everywhere. You have to type. You can customize the captions and the text around it and then it's shareable. So for example, if I tell a whole bunch of clients, here's how to make an IRS tax payment, or here's how to do this or how to sign this document, we have so many examples of that, you know, across our firms where we're asking people to do the same things, you know, asking a hundred people to do the same thing over and over again, yet we instruct them in like, ways that are slightly different each time or manually when they need help, man, just make a guide for those things that your clients do over and over again. So Scribe's a really good way to do it. I'll have links to all of these in the show notes. But as I put this out online, Chris Williams and actually a couple other people pointed out Whale, which is like a scribe alternative, maybe a little bit less costly. Scribe, like kicked off a whole category when they first launched. Now there's a bunch of kind of copycats of what they do, but for the things we tell clients over and over again, man, you absolutely need something like this. Related text expander. Katie Ayer, is it Katie Ayer? Katie Iyer. I'm sorry, Katie, I should know this at this point. I've known you for years. She called out textexpander along the same lines as Scribe or a tool like Scribe. Textexpander. Super, super helpful because we communicate the same things over and over again. Like if we're doing deliveries, if we're asking questions. And textexpander is fundamentally just reusable snippets of text. Think about what are the repetitive things you do. Delivering a set of financials each month, delivering a tax return, stuff like that. Anything that you do to a bunch of clients. Textexpander gives you canned text that you can reuse for those deliverables and you can even share it across your team so you can have like an agreed upon messaging for how we're supposed to do certain things across your team. So you get more consistent messaging there. I believe the way textexpander works, is it a chrome extension? Because it works across like everything that you do. Oh, dang. It's like a. So it's a. It is a chrome extension, but it's also a standalone thing that'll run on your machine so that any way you're typing text, basically there's a shorthand, like you assign a label to some canned text. So you type that little shortcut. Like here it has an example, semicolon, FW sales. You type that shortcut in and then it expands that text into that saved snippet. And if you want to put a hat on a hat here, that saved snippet could even include a scribe link. Pretty sick productivityception there. Okay, number three, this was from Hatfields mama CPA on Twitter. My task element lms. So it's a learning management system that's got a whole bunch of training around like accounting and tax concepts. And it said this was really helpful for them because they're bad at developing training internally. Preach. I was awful at this, especially around technical stuff where it's like, I'm not gonna build technical training for how to do accounting or taxes, something like that from scratch. Like there's gotta be a bunch of good versions of this on the shelf. And for whatever reason, this was a really hard thing to find. They're using my task LMS for this. They said it's greatly improved how they standardize training for folks on their team. But link at the show notes to that one like all the others, Keith Kenes Kennez called out Motion okay, these are interesting to me. I haven't yet played with with them. Use AI to plan your work automatically. It's one of these apps that like scooches things around on your calendar and like prioritizes for you the stuff that you've got to knock out. And I'll be honest, I've had problems like ever trusting something like this, which is why I haven't dipped a toe in the water. Keith's review though, is glowing. Says it's my best kept secret. A hundred percent efficiency increase and 100% anxiety decrease. Better than pills. Okay, good. When I know all my work is meeting all my deadlines, anything I have to do goes in there with a time, importance and due date. And it builds my day around my calendar appointments. Helps me stop over promising when overloaded. When things go off the rails, it simply rearranges the day for me. Pretty cool. Particularly if you're like, you struggle like I do with prioritization across a bunch of different channels. My my wife just told me to do this, but my colleague just told me to do this and my employee just told me to do that. Somebody run the numbers for me on that one. Okay. Because some days I just don't know who I'm working for. Go high level 5th app here. It's I've actually heard about it like from three different people independently in the last week. It is like all of the marketing software you need kind of rolled up into a single system from like top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel. It even is like a website builder, a form builder you can do online like meeting, scheduling, email campaigns, even like free and paid courses. Like it seemingly just does a whole ton of things. The landing page is kind of janky, but I keep hearing from different people that they absolutely love it and it like consolidated all their marketing stuff into a single app. It's called High Level Websites Go High Level. If you have used this, drop a comment. I can't tell if it's something really new and exciting or just the latest MLM this episode. It is sponsored in part by LiveFlow. LiveFlow puts your client reporting on autopilot because you can sync Any old report out of QuickBooks to Google Sheets or Excel, I say any. Every report that I've ever tried to run from QuickBooks, you use live Flow to sync that report out to your favorite spreadsheet app. But then that's just where the fun begins. You can like move stuff around, like move the cells around and they'll continue syncing from the accounting system. You can use a different sheet and point to like the cells in the report. So you can build your own like custom reporting suite that's actually being fed live data from QuickBooks. And it means whatever reporting that you are running for your clients, LifeFlow is gonna support it. Even if it is just like boring old balance sheet, boring old P and L, whatever, sync those into specific sheets in a workbook. But then like build your own like KPI summary or aggregation of like, you know, the most important things that you want your client to pay attention to, all of that inside of a single Excel workbook. Google Sheets, whatever you want. And it means you're not subject to just the reports that QuickBooks will run. It means you can get people access to information without them having access to, to the QuickBooks file. See where I'm going with this? A lot of helpful things you can do with that. Just getting them access to like part of your QuickBooks data. Sync it out to a spreadsheet, just give them access to the spreadsheet. LifeFlow is the, the peanut butter to your QuickBooks jelly. Ooh, and they even do consolidations now. Roll up a whole bunch of different companies with different charts of accounts handles it pretty well. Learn more about lifelo. Check out the link in the show Notes. Today's episode sponsored in part by uku. Have you ever been frustrated with the state of billing and practice management systems? How the features, usually they're pretty light and obvious and honestly sometimes it just like don't even do what you need it to do. So you got to run this whole separate billing tool alongside your practice management system. UKU has gone super, super deep on billing, among other things. It's a full blown practice management system. But whether you do hourly recurring, whatever types of work you do, uku's got, uku's got the flexibility you need to make the magic happen no matter what. And they're running a big fat sale right now. Use the link in the show Notes. They got a 50% off discount campaign going until the end of June. Half off and 90 day money back guarantee. What do you got to lose? You don't like it? 90 days they send a man to your house, he's going to give you that money back. Is that how it works? That might not be how it works. Listen, my favorite thing about UKU you may have seen, I did a sponsored demo day for them. Uku spelled uku. If you haven't seen it, check that out on YouTube. My favorite thing. And they never tell me to talk about this in the ad copy, but I always do anyways because I love it. They have maybe the best view I've seen for like planning out your week. You have all of your tasks and your tasks have due dates, right? And we're all used to what that looks like. You know, a view of overdue tasks that's a mile long, but they have a view that is like entirely dedicated towards planning when you're going to do your work. And so like with a view of the whole week, you can, you can organize what tasks you're going to do, what day. And this is a day that's totally independent of the due date. Your teammates can do the same. So when Tina's out unexpectedly, you can see Tina's planning. You can see what she actually planned to do. Most of these systems just have a due date and that's it. But that's not really enough to like figure out when I'm going to do the work before the due date. Right. That's probably my favorite thing about uku. Okay, you want to take advantage of that, that half off thing. Use the link in the show notes. It's pretty cool. Check it out. All right, number six, Write tool. If you haven't heard Write tool at this point, stop it. Right tool is just a chrome extension that changes QuickBooks. Specifically, it makes it more better. So Chrome extension hanging out up in the corner of your browser. Anytime you're using QuickBooks, it changes certain things about QuickBooks. Developed by Hector Garcia, major QuickBooks YouTube celebrity. And it has a free version. I did a demo of it, a sponsored demo on YouTube that you can find if you want the quick like 5 minute overview of how it works. Right Tool. I like virtually never say this about any software anybody that is using QuickBooks ought to be using. Right Tool. There you go. The JSON stats Stamperoo. Number 7, Pitbull tax resolution software. Max Blythe called this out. I learned about Pitbull at a conference last year and was like, where the h was this? All of my tax preparing years. If you do tax prep in the US at all, you need this or something like this. I don't know, maybe you have an alternative to this. It is like step by step, how to handle every type of notice. Just like so many things that you go out and you figure out on your own and you try to draft from scratch, or you draft based on a copy of what somebody else in the firm made, like the last time they did that, as if that's somehow authoritative. Like the following, the prior year work papers version of writing a notice response. Like, no, why don't you just like take these things on the shelf that like actual resolution experts and like former auditors and all that have developed for you and just, just use that. Let's not make it any harder than it needs to be. If you prep taxes in the US like you ought to have something like this. I never at any stage in my tax prep career, 15 years had a tool to help with tax resolution. Or we did it the good old fashioned way, which was copy whatever. The most recent example of that we have on the network literally grab the word file, change the names around, update any, you know, like, specifics to that client situation. And that was the system, which is hardly like founded in anything particularly authoritative. Number eight, Ignition. You probably heard of Ignition at this point, but a whole bunch of people called it out on social media. In fact. When's this pod going out? Tuesday, if you're listening to this one. Piping hot, straight out of the presses. First of all, bless your heart, firm handshakes. Second of all, there's a demo of Ignition publishing on my YouTubes tomorrow, a sponsored demo where you can see how Ignition works in five minutes. I actually rolled Ignition in my accounting firm. Basically what it did for us was for the first time, get away from after the fact hourly billing to sending all of our clients proposals before the project started so they could see a price ahead of time. We didn't pull money and take payment ahead of time in our case, but we did require them to provide a payment method so that when the project was done, we could just pull funds for it. Basically, they're agreeing to a certain price or even a price range upfront. So they sign the engagement letters, they get the payment method in there before the project starts. Then when the project's done and we deliver it, we pull funds. And it just totally removed the accounts receivable process and even having to like invoice people or track them down for payment. I also saved a mountain of time for the partners on billing, but I've talked about that before. We don't need to go down that here. Number nine snipped shared by jrb3jerb3s n I p D. When I read it, I read sniped, but that's almost certainly not what they want. Snipped unlock the knowledge in your podcasts. So basically it is a way to like make a note and make highlights in a podcast, which if you are like me and you try to capture your favorite bits from books and stuff like that, this has been largely solved if you're reading from like a Kindle or reading on a web article online or something like that, but listening on a podcast, if I have, you know, 800 pounds over my head that I just clean and jerked, but then somebody says something compelling in a podcast through my air Bob, what do I do at that point to capture that? That's the problem with podcasts. Like, how do you do podcast highlights in the same way that you would highlight in a book? Snipped here is presumably the solution. Kind of the bummer is that it becomes your podcast player, which I already, I really like the podcast player I have right now and it has all my listen history and all that. So it just requires going to a different player. The really nice thing that it does is it integrates with our 10th app here, readwise. Ramey Zaki. I'm just absolutely murdering people's names today. I'm sorry, Readwise. I'm probably going to do a whole episode on this in the near future. Basically my capture system for how to capture stuff from reading books and online articles and podcasts and stuff like that. But Readwise basically is a way to centralize all of your highlights from Kindle from reading web articles and all that, so that all of those snippets and highlights all come back to a single place. So across, you know, hundreds of articles and books and all that, you can centralize it all. Readwise will push it all to like notion if you want, or it'll integrate with a number of different places to bring those back to some centralized repository where you can store all of your reading notes in one place and snipt. The last one we talked about also integrates with Readwise, so you can now pull your like podcast highlights in there as well. Number 11, keeper. At this point you gotta know what Keeper does and if you don't, what the Hey, I did a sponsored demo day for Keeper as well on the YouTube channel. Five minute demo of that. If you've never seen it in action before, check it out. I think as many people on social media said Keeper as anything else, Keeper kind of like almost created a New software category where it's a app where you manage the month end close for all of your clients in one place. So it syncs all of the actual Ledger data from QuickBooks or Xero into Keeper. So what most people do is they will have a bookkeeper complete the bank reconciliation in the accounting system, but then the entire rest of the month end close is managed inside Keeper. You're like changing transactions and doing quality assurance, doing reporting all that stuff from inside Keeper where you can manage all of your closes in one place. Pretty cool. Bunch of people called that one out. Number 12. Drew Sullivan, Brain FM. So Brain FM, the idea is it's music to help you focus. So you pull up the app and there's four buttons by the look of it, a focus button, a relax button, a sleep button, and a meditate button. I love, I listen to music all day long, but there's times when I'm like, I want to jam and listen to music and then there's times when I'm like, I got to work, but I like having music on. And I will say when I got to work, but I want music on. Oftentimes deciding what to listen to can kind of be a pain. And I've got like a couple Spotify playlists I'll come back to, you know, like most of us probably do, but this is more like we'll just start playing music through the lens of what you're trying to do in that moment. Whether that's focus, whether that's relax, sleep seems cool. This episode is sponsored in part by by Copilot, the most flexible portal you could imagine for your clients. One of the hardest problems managing a firm right now is you got all these different tools with so much overlap, right, that do like some of the same things, but some different things. Almost all of them also want to have a whole like client facing experience. Like, bro, how many portals do you expect me to put in front of my clients? You can have a hard time asking them to log into like eight different things. And even if it's just a magic link kind of portal, when you're sending them to like umpteen different magic link login things and they all look completely different. I know, just kind of weak sauce, you know. If only there was a portal for your portals. Wait, what? Somebody write that down. What's that? Oh, that's what Copilot is. It is the one portal to rule them all. Give that client a, a slick, consistent client experience, a single place to, to get all the goods. That's because you can customize it to look like it would whatever you want to look like. Even different from client A to client B. You can embed other stuff into it, bake it right in so that they're logging into Copilot. But some of the stuff that they're seeing is actually from external apps. And they recently launched an app marketplace which is like third party apps. You can hire a developer to build you something custom that will live in your portal. It is like a portal platform that you can build on and make it whatever you want it to be. Pretty cool. That's cool Copilot. Check out the link in the show Notes this episode is brought to you in part by TeamUp, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between teamup and all the other offshoring options is that 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 could source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Zero, QBO 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 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 ol 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 gonna 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 team up. Number 13. Judy's 10 key Carlos Lara brought this up and let me tell you that you're doing yourself a treat just to go out to the website for Judy's ten Key. When you hear Judy's ten Key, the landing page, you imagine in your head. It's exactly that. You will not be disappointed. It is a Windows app that's just a little 10 key evidently works just like a regular 10 key rather than a calculator, which I know always enrages accountants. It's 20 bucks. Enjoy. Multi level undo sounds, auto num lock, and more. Oh, you can even edit the tape. That's nice. I had a version of this. What was it? It was PD Flyer in Acrobat. They had like a little tape thing, but it's pretty limited and it says it's award winning. Millions of downloads, hundreds of awards. Hang on. Bless you, Judy. Used by millions of people. Where have I been, man? Judy's ten key. There you go. 20 bucks right down the drain. Number 14, decision vault. Laura French brought this one up. Estate planning client intake. I don't think I need to say anything more. You're probably either super excited or super bored. I do love like good tech solutions going deeper into the more nuanced, fiddly things we do in firms like estate planning, like more technical stuff like that being a great example, also a great example of how your domain expertise by and large has still not been built into software because you're like 10 levels deep into the nitty gritty on what your needs are. And software developers are like level one. Right tool being a great example here. Developed by Hector Garcia. Basically, it's just all the things that enraged him about QuickBooks Online and he's like, let's just fix this ourselves. And then he put that product out and as it turns out, everybody agreed. Everyone's like, yes, no, this is actually a fundamentally better version of QuickBooks. But he knows that because he's a power user. But I'm not a developer, I'm an accountant. Just spread those wings and fly, buddy. Okay? You can do anything. Don't let them tell you otherwise. Number 15, practice protect. I use this one in my firm. Practice Protect is like a password manager and SSO for accounting firms. So SSO and like larger organizations is how you authenticate into the various apps that you use. So like you go to your SSO provider, be it octo, whatever it is, you log into that website and then you have all of your icons for the apps that you can log into online. So you click one, it takes you to that website and it logs you in in a credentialless way. And that's kind of the goal is to be able to control access to the apps that a user in your firm may have in a more centralized way where you can, like with the push of a button, turn all that off or even like region lock it so that none of those logins work, you know, outside the US or something like that. And so practice protect AS has built something like this from the ground up for accounting firms generally going to get you a little further than an off the shelf thing. Like, who's the one that had all the data breaches? LastPass or 1Password 16 calendly. Right. I mean, there's a whole bunch of Calendly alternatives now, but a ton of people brought that up. And I would actually argue we are still far from peak scheduling app adoption. It's, I mean, still probably the majority of the time when I'm emailing back and forth with somebody, they will propose a list of times and I'm like, buddy, there's an app for that. There has been for the last five years. 2015 just called and would like you to find a better way to do this. There was, I don't know if this was real or just a little bubble on Twitter, but there was like people saying that somebody sending you a scheduling link is like offensive or impersonal. And I will agree that if I did not solicit said scheduling link, if you're just spamming me with scheduling links, I'm not into that, buddy. But if you're getting down to where, like, okay, we gotta find a time to meet scheduling apps, man, it is just. It's just easier to be able to click through and see your availability and just select something at a time when that person's gonna be available. Calendly also recent recently rolled out like voting for times if you have a whole bunch of people. I used doodle for this in the past, but now Calendly has this built in. If you need to get a bunch of folks to like vote on the times that are options that they are available. So let's say you got to get, you know, six people to commit to a time because that's. That scheduling app isn't connected to everybody's calendars. It can't see all that stuff and do it automatically. And so this like meeting voting sort of thing lets each person select from a list of possible meeting times which times they could meet. And then once the last person has done it and everybody has voted, it'll grab a time that everyone said they were available and then send out a meeting invitation to everybody automatically as soon as that last person comes in and votes. Scheduling scheduling stuff with a whole bunch of people, whole bunch of grownups is just the most frustrating thing ever because as soon as the first person gives their availability the next minute, it's out of date. And by the time, like, you've gotten around to the caboose and the last person shares their availability, the first person's availability has changed. Just the worst. Uh, and then 17 a bunch of folks called out Grammarly. Chrome extension not only helps you fix your grammar on the fly to make you talk more good, but even does more, like, suggestive stuff around. Like, is there better ways to phrase this? Is this kind of a weak sentence? What's your tone? Are you being a big. A big softy? Big pushover? Are you being a big jerk face? It helps you identify stuff like that too. So some of those, you've probably heard of a good chunk of them. I guarantee you have not before. If you have a glowing endorsement for any of these apps, drop it in the comments. But also, if you did get suckered into buying something today, I want to know about it. Pop that baby in the comments. Whether you're spinning a pit bull for tax resolution, you're gonna let AI schedule your calendar with motion. How do we feel about that? I don't know. I'd like to hear from more people on that one what it does and doesn't do for them. So there you go. I'm very sorry. There's 17 apps to go waste the rest of your day on, and if you've recently had a shut up and take my money sort of moment, call it out in the comments. Love to hear about it. Maybe we'll circle back to a few more of these on Friday. That's all for today. Thanks for coming and hanging. I'll see you tomorrow.