258 Is Offshoring Ruining The Accounting Profession?

Is offshoring ruining the accounting profession? Are we pulling up the ladder for the generation behind us to not learn, like, the crucial skills they need to be good advisors? Because everything's getting offshored. Also, highlights from AICPA Engage, the Mothership's biggest annual accounting conference in Vegas. Just got back. Still still got a bit of Vegas lung. How to press your bill pay services, plus the downside of recurring revenue. That there is a downside. Come on in. Let's talk about it as Q and A Friday with me, Jason Daly. All right, let's. Let's dig in. Outsourcing, current state of the accounting profession. We got people leaving the profession in droves, worried about the folks coming in. There's obviously not enough of them. And are we making that problem worse by offshoring? Which is actually what people are really saying more so than outsourcing? Like, are we creating more problems for the next generation of accountants by offshoring? So to. To delineate their outsourcing, is hiring another company to get some of your work done. Offshoring is crossing an ocean to get the work done. And you can offshore without outsourcing. All firms beyond a certain size have offshore resources that are still part of their own firm. You can also outsource without going offshore. Hire folks in Canada, Latin America, that sort of thing. So basically, by pushing work to anyone that is not part of my practice, are we handcuffing the next generation of accountants? Not giving them the skills that they need to be successful? People get. People are very opinionated about this one. It's worth, like, acknowledging. What's the quote? It's something along the lines of, you see someone where they're like, you just can't understand their perspective. Like, it's so wildly different to yours. The quote is something along the lines of, if you lived the life that they had lived, you'd probably think the same thing. For whatever reason, particularly on social media, when people disagree, it's like a, like a there's, you know, there's something wrong with them kind of thing, when the reality is we all just have lived wildly different lives. There are people that are just jerks, but that's something different. So I don't know. I guess rather than tell you what, what. What the right answer is, I'll tell you how. Why I feel the way I do about this, according to what has happened in my life, that's changed my perspective of this because my background is very small accounting firms, legacy accounting firms, not firms. I mean, the firms that are terrified of Outsourcing and could never imagine doing this. Not the bigger firms. Like, there's firms mid size and up have been outsourcing for decades. And like, without exception, firms beyond a certain size these days, like they have teams offshore. My experience is the opposite. I didn't go into big firms. I went to it went into itty bitty traditional firms. So none of this was normalized for me in the process of going to work with somebody else where I would be in contact with either outsourced companies that were supporting us or offshore team members. So two things that changed this for me. One, just in the course of meeting really smart firm owners, I was increasingly finding that people who I looked up to, who, you know, all of the other advice they were giving me was absolutely gold. I was finding they were offshoring, they were building teams offshore and having really good success with this. The way they talked about it wasn't as spooky and confusing as I guess I thought it was. And at a certain point, you know, we've talked about this before, when enough people tell you they've had success with a thing, you start getting convinced somebody can lay it all out for you very logically and you can be like, yeah, I guess that makes sense. But when you see other people in a situation similar to yours that are finding success with this, after you hear that story a certain number of times, your mind comes around and you realize, like, okay, I'm missing something here, or I don't know, there's. There's something that's not clicking and I maybe needed to change or challenge some of the assumptions that I have. So that's what started me down that path, was just hearing the stories of people who are having success offshoring. This started, I think, when I first got plugged into this. It was in the very early days of my accountant community that's now three or four years old. And that started me down that path. But it got me enough of a taste to start seeking out people who were experts on this and who had done it quite a bit. Not looking for success stories, just looking for truth and reality and what's the right way to do this and when does it work and when does it not work. And so I started seeking out a bunch of these conversations. And people love to have an opinion on something that they've, that they've never done and never experienced. And my hope is when you bump into something like this that's like, you just can't make that connection. Like, why am I not getting this? It's usually about some assumptions that we have that we're not aware of that are kind of baked into our decision making framework. And the next step there is like to try to reconcile that, to seek out conversations and education and all that from independent places, not from offshoring groups, not, not from like folks who are very clearly biased. And sometimes it's hard to tell if somebody is biased or not. But to go out and talk with people who have nothing to gain or lose by discussing like what they do and what works and what doesn't work about their setup because there's stuff that's great about offshoring and stuff that's not. On the subject of bias, we have advertisers that help you find offshore folks. I've shared before for perspective. In my practice, we hired four people in the Philippines in the last like 12 months that I was there. We went from exclusively hiring onshore to hiring two offshore team members for every onshore team member that we hired because they were so good. And it totally changed what we were capable of doing within our accounting firm. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. But I started down that path just by having conversations with firm owners who are having great success with it. And it's really hard to stick your head in the sand when smart people keep telling you like, this is what I'm doing and finding success now when I follow that through to like doing it myself. And again, I did this in an 80 year old legacy tax firm with partners who had all of the blockers that you would expect partners to have in a firm like that came into it with all the ignorant and embarrassing questions that were too afraid to ask and how do disclosures work? And just every single one of those things, we worked through those things and there are solutions for all of them. And when we got to the other side and we started, you know, working with folks offshore, it humanized this whole conversation in a way that definitely changed the way that I, I think about it. We were creating life changing opportunities for people who we talked with every single day. And in the context of my team, they, these folks were joining my cast team who is a distributed team. There are people all over the country, people on the team who would oftentimes travel outside the country. By the way, when it comes to 7216 disclosures in the U.S. it's not just about working with people offshore. It's about software companies you work with that have offshore servers. It's about software companies with support teams who can access Your data who are offshore. It's about you going to British Columbia and opening your laptop anywhere outside the country. 7216 is a, is just a wildly antiquated set of rules that we still have to comply with. But I actually think these days, pretty much every firm is in violation of 7216 if they're not disclosing it just through their software partners alone. And that's not a reason to not follow the rules by any means. It's just kind of a frustrating state of affairs that it is the way that it is. I mean, most of our software vendors, you don't, you have no idea if there are offshore team members that can access your data or if the data itself is stored offshore. Anyways, in my distributed team, we had folks all over the country and folks all over the world. Yes. Did our Philippine staff always want to talk about Korean dramas? They sure did, but otherwise they were extensions of the team. And I mean the world as a whole is getting smaller. Covid definitely accelerated distributed work. I think the biggest long term impact of that will actually be the globalization of work. People realized, oh, we can run our business just fine being across town from each other at home, this still works. So then it actually doesn't matter so much if they're across town or in Canada or in Mexico or in India or wherever they are. Someone who's, you know, if I'm in Washington state and I've got a team member that works for me five miles over the border, I don't know, should I think differently of, of that person and the approach to how I work with them? There's different rules for sure, and we have to comply with those rules. But what is my framework for how that person being an integrated part of my team is different than anything else? So if that doesn't feel foreign or if that doesn't feel strange, at what point does it begin feeling different? I would argue when there's a language barrier and there's contexts where language barriers matter and context where language barriers don't matter. If I'm putting this person in front of my clients, I do need to be mindful of how clients will perceive a language barrier. Unfortunately, because the context in which most people interact with foreign non native English speakers, unfortunately, because that context is usually like on a support call, do like low level types of menial things like that. And those experiences are so frustrating. If this is the only time in their lives that they interact with somebody in India, for example, and then they come to your firm and they interact with somebody from India. There is a risk that people will perceive that as not being a premium experience. Is that wrong? Like, maybe it's also why people project on, I can say offshore. It's really not even offshore people. It is just people who don't speak English as their first language. We project on those people the notion that the tasks that they will come in and be able to help us with are entry level tasks, which is absolutely not the case. I know a number of firms whose most senior technical people are, are all offshore. Is that a problem? Only if you maybe need to put those people in front of your clients a lot and your clients are going to have a problem or, I don't know, have some sort of issue interacting with someone who's not a native English speaker. If I could add a super, super technically capable offshore person to my team, would I? Man, you better believe I would. There are some common things that people will come back to, like surveillance when data's in other countries. Probably something to be mindful of for sure. But the rest of the world says the same thing about the United States. We're arguably as bad as anyone in the world. Most of the offshore services that firms first go to these office environments. Oftentimes, if you're like working with a group that brings a bunch of folks into an office, these offices are unbelievably locked down. The staff can have none of their own personal devices, smartphones, anything like that. In the area where their computers are set up, they have like biometric access to the facility. I used to tell my clients, your data is more secure in the Philippines than it is in my office. We had a lady who would dress up in professional clothes during COVID and come into the office several times a week. And about a week after we first saw her, somebody saw her leaving with a couple rolls of toilet paper. This was during COVID And somebody was like, anybody know why that lady was just leaving with toilet paper? And people started asking around, do you? Nobody knew who this lady was. It was during business hours. This lady would very confidently come in and had evidently been stealing toilet paper for about a week. All of these things are factors, and I don't wanna dismiss any of them. That was kind of my, like, journey. I developed relationships with these people just like I did the rest of my remote team. They had lives and families and financial needs, and we created an awesome job for them. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Pop quiz. Look to your left, look to your right. You're in Excel or Google Sheets if you're into that kind of thing, how long is it going to take you to pull QuickBooks data from any of your clients? Any report into that spreadsheet that you're in right now? The answer to this pop quiz? It'll take you a little bit, a little while, decent amount of time. But imagine if your Excel or your Google Sheets just had a button you could push a magic button that would pull in any old data from QuickBooks from any of your clients that you have access to in qpo. Let's talk about this magic button a little more. Here's what would happen. You'd click on it, a little side panel would come out. It would greet you, say hello Keith, how's your day going? It'd give you a drop down that was every single QBO file you have access to, and then a second dropdown of all of the QuickBooks reports you could possibly want to pull out of it. And then various other buttons and knobs for it, adjusting settings, filters and all that stuff. Just to be super clear, this button exists and it's called Live Flow. Anytime you're hustling spreadsheets, you are a mere few clicks away from dumping out some data from an accounting file. Not just once. You can set it to update like ongoing. You can set the date ranges of the reports to be like rolling, like relative to today. So like an AP report that is always up to date or something like that. Because you know where you oftentimes need your QuickBooks data. Not in QuickBooks. And you know who I oftentimes don't want to be in my client's QuickBooks file. The only place that data is almost anyone. Oftentimes I don't even want my client in that QuickBooks file. That's live Flow basically sticks a button right in your spreadsheet app that'll let you pull anything from any of your clients QuickBooks files. Learn more about that one in the link in the show Notes this episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing. The people who find you awesome hires in the Philippines to make your wildest getting stuff done dreams come true. I've shared many times. I hired a bunch of folks in the Philippines, completely changed our approach to fulfillment in our firm. I got a resume in front of me that is an actual person Cloud Accountant staffing placed into a firm. You actually get both a resume and a video intro. Based on that, you can decide if you want to do an interview with them or not. Let me just run you through this. This person Got their bachelor's in accounting in 2019. Ever since then, they've worked with US based public accounting firms. How's this sound? Daily recording of bank transactions, monthly reconciliations, preparing financials, posting payroll journal entries, clean up, work for new projects, 1099 filing, work directly with clients and even became the trainer for their colleagues on QBO practices. Experience with qbo Xero Gusto, QBO certified. I mean, you run an accounting firm, you get a resume like this, you're like, yes, please, right? This person's actually got experience. Experience. Not an accountant that's just like gone and work for a company, but somebody with a bunch of public accounting experience working with US companies. That's what I'm looking for. They know what like volume, getting the books done looks like. Again, this is a real person, a real resume. When you work with cloud account staffing, basically all you do, you hop on a call with them, you say, here's my needs. They have recruiters on the ground in the Philippines who will go find great applicants for you, bring all that info back to you. Resumes, intro videos, all that. You decide whether you want to interview them. And you only ever cut a check to cloud accountant staffing. If you make a hire, what do you have to lose? Huh? Huh? Learn more at the link in the show notes. So the question of like, are we pulling the ladder up on the profession. I heard an interview with Seth Godin, the author Seth Godin, recently, and he framed it really well. And it was through the lens of what do I tell my kids to go to college and study? And the question was actually more about AI than it was anything else. And he said the biggest thing that people need to be thinking about is, is we live in an age where the world is completely connected now. And for American companies around the world, there are people that are every bit as capable, generally more eager and willing, and far lower cost than hiring onshore team members. How does this change how all work gets done? He's talking about this like it was a question about AI. And he's like, yes, AI will probably change things, but this is the conversation people aren't having enough. What does it look like that we have people who are just like, eager to do this work in a way that most onshore folks aren't. And obviously there's a lot of generalizations here around the world. And now, thanks to the Internet, it's super easy to collaborate and make all that stuff happen. The nature of work is for sure, for sure, for sure changing. Does it qualify as pulling the ladder up. I think there's, if you look back, there's probably a lot of examples of what at the time we would have thought was pulling the ladder up. You know, I mean, I wasn't around at this time. But imagine the first time you've got software to prepare tax forms for you and how unthinkable that would have been for tax professionals and how you're going to, you're going to manually prepare the tax return alongside the computer as it does it because you're like, there's no way, I don't trust it. And then eventually that becomes the norm. And you can't imagine doing it any other way. Using a payroll service and trusting the payroll service to file the quarterly payroll reports. How is somebody ever going to know how payroll reports work if they don't do them? There's a million examples of this. And it is one of those things for me where it's like, I don't have a great answer for that, but what I don't want to be is like the person from the 1950 newspaper snippet that just says this ridiculous thing like, oh, well, this is going to be the downfall of society when xyz. Because things generally seem to like, have a way of working themselves out, particularly when it comes to work changing and like the nature of the things that we spend our time on being different because that other thing got obfuscated. Now, usually the whole pulling the ladder up conversation baked into that is the implicit assumption that Offshore people do entry level work, which isn't the case. People also say this about AI, that AI is going to wipe out all the entry level work. It's not the case at all. AI, the impact of AI actually impacts like the entire skill spectrum. And I'd argue Offshore does the same. And this is why I don't agree with the notion that AI will replace Offshore. If I can train a person to do a thing in the States, I can train a person to do that thing anywhere in the world. Like, how is it that folks that are not native English speakers, like, have this inherent ceiling or something that Americans do not? Like that just doesn't make sense. Right? But, but it, for some reason that gets kind of baked into the conversation and we cruise right past that. Sometimes we've also got the force of just not being enough people in the profession. And this is like, I don't know that we talk enough about what's going to break when there just aren't enough accountants. I worry about the SEC sidestepping accountants when it gets to the point where companies can't put out quarterly reports and, and all of that. Like the public markets start having problems because there aren't enough accounts to get that work done. The markets will find another way to solve the problem that current accountants solve. I worry about like systemic issues like that. If we don't have enough people in the profession, the tax system, my gosh, like we already have a big gap between productized solutions and how far up market that they can come and how much it costs to work with a professional. And even now like the biggest trend in the profession is everybody dumping their clients who can't pay them, you know, more than x thousand dollars a year. And so more and more of these people are getting cut loose and they have to go somewhere, but they need more than product solutions can, can give them. And it's why I say AI can't come soon enough because we all need to get more efficient and higher leverage. And as far as I'm concerned, in my opinion today, offshoring is just, it's an extension of that. It's being able to pull more people into the team to get stuff done. It does split some aspects of the technical work from the relational work. So when you do pull in offshore members to your team, it means your onshore team ends up being more focused on like client management and that sort of thing just within the bubble of your accounting firm. If all you ever do is give all of the entry level work to offshore people, are you going to create problems for yourself when you need someone that can be, I don't know, a higher level person where they needed that experience of the entry level stuff maybe like within the microcosm of your firm. But there's a very real question right now of what if the accounting profession doesn't do this when every other profession is, is offshoring and all that? I don't have a great answer for that. But it is definitely the way that the world is changing. If you want to flip this on its head. Another way to think about it is there are a lot of people out there in the world who can help you, who you have a lot to offer for you can create an amazing work environment for them. But uh, the folks that came and worked with my firm like they were the primary breadwinners in their household, they did amazing work for us. Super appreciative. You pay em a 500 bonus and that's, that's life changing. I pay an onshore team member a 500 bonus and many of them would Actually be like insulted by that. And I don't know if this is anybody's fault as much as just that's the state of the world today. But had I not gone through any of those processes, smart people telling me like, this is working for me, me being willing to take the time to learn more and push through all of the blockers that I had that someone without any context would have, and then do it and, and build amazing relationships with people and have a great experience. Had I not gone through those things, I wouldn't feel the way that I do. And it's very possible people out there have had super negative offshoring experiences or even been replaced by offshoring. Google, I know, laid off a bunch of their accounting team and said, we're going to offshore our accounting team so that we can invest more in AI, which feels like a pretty rough, rough framing. And so there's going to be people that have very different relationships to offshoring than I do. But me specifically, through the lens of running small firms, that's where I land today. Because it was truly transformational for my own practice. The members of the onshore members of our team, many of whom had the same blockers before we got into this, not a single one of them had ever worked with an offshore team member before. We started hiring a offshore folks, and overnight we're like, this is 100% the way forward. And that's not a profit thing. That was a how do we build our team thing. Like, they weren't on board for the profit. They weren't biased by that. My team was growing really quickly. We wanted to get them into kind of new responsibilities, but we're really struggling to hire people onshore fast enough to elevate them to the next things we wanted them to do. It was much quicker to find folks offshore that would come work for us. They started work, I mean, they were working up the same ladder in the end as the rest of the team. But that greater availability of talent helped everyone else evolve quicker through the projects that they were wanting to get off their plates and onto, onto somebody else. Okay, enough offshoring. We are going to do a full week on offshoring at some point, doing the same thing that we did around client scheduling, just getting people's stories, good stories, bad stories, just learning about it, you know, because it's a big thing. AICPA engage. AICPA's biggest annual conference in Las Vegas. As I'm recording it, it was, it was this week. I was there for about a day and a half. Saw a bunch of folks listen to the pod. Thank you very much. Thank you for introducing yourself. Don't be weird, don't be awkward. It's just as weird for me as it is for you. I think there, there were two or three cross threaded fist bump handshakes. When in doubt, just go for the handshake, okay? It's an accounting conference. If you're going to go for the fist bump, you really got to telegraph it from a ways away. So don't be afraid to get that fist up early. So everybody knows what's happening. But if you're in close bringing that hand across the body, nobody's looking all the way down to see if there's a knuckle there. So just, just stick with the old tried and true, okay? As you may expect at Engage, huge number of folks talking AI everybody in the expo hall was AI this, AI that. They had over 200 exhibitors at the conference. This is a great, great opportunity to talk to the people behind the products. And there is so much to learn from this on either ends of the spectrum. So I, I've talked with certainly every company touting AI at Engage, and there's a lot obviously that aren't at Engage, but two companies that outwardly you cannot tell, you know, which is more impressive than the other. Oftentimes, the ones who can put together the more razzle dazzle, copy and landing pages and all of that, they will look much more impressive. But behind the scenes, that is. That does not mean that the product and the team and any of that is building anything particularly meaningful. I was shocked at the spectrum of understanding of accountants and meaningfulness of the solutions that are, you know, holding themselves out as fundamentally changing the accounting industry. You know, virtually every AI company in the accounting space is, is saying, you know, work will never be done the same way again. And there are companies on the end of the spectrum where they have a really deep understanding of what we do and they have the right people on the team to understand accounting problems. Well, who will change how we're doing work? Like I've shared before, I'm super excited. The most exciting stuff right now is in the tax space. There's some other pockets of cool things going on, but definitely 1040 will look different. And there are a few companies that have got this figured out. This episode is sponsored in part by T Squared. How digitally ready is your accounting firm? Hmm? You ever think about that? You ever lay in bed at night and think, am I properly securing my data? Is somebody hacking into the mainframe right now. Well, great news. Let me point you to a completely free 10 minute assessment that will give you customized results instantly about your firm's digital readiness. It's from the folks at T Squared. They help accounting firms like yours get their IT stuff sorted out. Oh look at this. We've been working with accounting firms since 2014. B. Hall, CPA Past Past Guest of the podcast Sherwood Tax Little Fish Accounting Kila Is Keela been on the podcast yet? Alison McLeod I see here T Squared supports a whole bunch of smart, capable accountants, but they put together this free tool to help you figure out if if you're doing what you need to do. You know, keep on the straight and narrow. And personally, I love self assessments as much as the next guy. Which Harry Potter character are you? If you were a pizza topping, what would you be? To be clear, this is not that this one's actually helpful. Check out the link down 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 Team up 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 can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xero, 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 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 Team Up. There are just as many, if not more companies really, really, unfortunately, that do not yet have a deep understanding of the way that accounts work and how all this stuff comes together. The unfortunate thing is, is so many companies right now are not involving accountants enough. They will go to mid or mid market or big firms as kind of their first few users and use this as leverage to be able to raise money to say that we have X number of companies in the top 30, top hundred, whatever it is. But these firms are generally not going to give you very practical feedback and how to actually use this, this tooling. Because these firms, the change cycle to adopt new tech is six to 18 months. It's outrageous. As opposed to a small firm who will come and happily give you their credit card in an instant if they think that you will save them time and immediately become users of their product. And there are a number of those companies right now, unfortunately, who are just not close enough to the actual important problems to solve yet. And they'll get there. They'll get, they'll get better over time. And everybody's got to start somewhere too. So, like, you can't be too harsh on folks, but I would say landing pages are cheap if somebody hasn't shipped something that you can use yet. And this isn't a. There's a bunch of companies in this place right now. Temper your excitement. Now. We want to be the biggest cheerleaders of all these companies to keep investing in the space and give us cool stuff to use and all that. Obviously, you know, as this stuff comes out, like, I am putting it on blast. I also had several conversations with these companies that wanted to put things on blast. And I'm like, it's not there yet. Like, I'm not going to do this. I turn away a number of, a number of sponsorships where it's like, hey, we want you to promote what we're doing. And I'm like, show me what you're actually doing. And you have that conversation. And I'm like, no, maybe, maybe down the road, but not yet. So sponsorships are not. That doesn't impact what I'm going to put out there. Like when it's like, this is a big deal, like, this is changing things. Like sponsorships has zero impact on that. But I will actively not like partner with a company to sponsor this stuff if I just don't believe in what they're doing. If I, I don't like the company itself, if they like have not figured out the right approach to solve the problem yet. I was a little disappointed how many flashy companies that Were like spending big money on boost are still in the very, very early stages. But I stand by the fact that there's some actually pretty big things that are going to change in the 1040 space over the next three, four months. Not on the tax software side, that's a bigger lift. But in how all the work gets done up to it going into tax software and, and how we calculate estimates, projections, that sort of thing. Really cool stuff coming on that. Johnny Smith asks as follow up from Monday's pod where we talked about document management, which people got excited about. That's awesome. It was. That's. That's a really cool service that is so suited for, for automation very inside baseball. Sometimes I worry about getting that into the weeds and then I'm like no, these are accountants, like in the weeds. That's the good stuff. He asked, can I ask you how you price the bill pay service? Trying to make it fit in my head but can't come up with a number. Bill pay. You want to frame through the lens of how painful of a problem is this for, for a business if it's a manufacturing company or like I've shared we were working with like retail flooring folks. That was a big problem because they had inventory management and the whole receiving process. Every time they get an invoice and the quantities of all these different things that they got, that all has to be tracked very closely and accurately. And as it's. It's fundamentally different than just paying cash basis invoices. When does it do, what's the amount like? Because all of the itemized detail is really important. A company like that, that's a big painful thing where they got people, they got keisters and chairs spending a lot of time on things like that. So how do I price that? The pain is what are they paying people to do that right now the pain is actually more than that because if they can outsource and get you to do it and not have that one more person to manage and all the overhead of one more person, they ought to actually be paying more. That doesn't mean they wipe that person out. And in the case of all of my clients, when we would come step into roles that were previously filled by their team members, they were like I got 100 other things this person can do. This is great. Internally we would do like some internal calculations of like what's our basically our minimum effective hourly rate at which we are willing to do certain types of work that wouldn't impact how we price it externally with the clients. But it would determine is this something that we're even willing to touch? Right. So accounts payable is not a painful problem for all types of businesses. We have kind of also a minimum threshold where what is the minimum headache that we're willing to take on to add this thing to an engagement for bill pay? I don't think, I don't know that we waited into bill pay unless it could increase an engagement like a minimum of 800 bucks a month or so. And that was a helpful threshold to where if a client had a, a little bit of bill pay that they didn't want to do, ultimately that was not a super painful problem. And we're like, well if, if you want to pay at least 800 bucks a month to do this, like, we will do it for you. But that was a helpful filter for the folks for whom it wasn't, wasn't very painful. And it just kept us from doing these little onesie twosie things that were not, not very meaningful. Particularly as what makes this service super valuable is when it's at a happening at a larger scale and you can automate the volume of things that are going in there, that's when it really gets profitable. So the itty bitty stuff like for us wasn't worthwhile. So that's not a direct answer for like how much do you charge? It's just very dependent on how painful is it for the type of client that you support. And it's even something that can like get you into a niche. Like if you have, going back to the retail flooring example, that whole company ran on an industry specific like vertical software that was the accounting ledger and inventory management, all of that stuff. We developed an expertise with that over three years and it was a brutal piece of software and it just sucked in the beginning. That's an example of where those companies think they need a very specific design type of tool and they're actually part of a, a franchise where there's over 100 other locations. And that franchise pushed that tool really hard. So a ton of the franchises use this tool and that's where you can go out and pick up all these different clients because you have this comfort level with this software. But even like we talk about solving rare problems, you can go do tax and accounting for all these people. But to say like, we've got accounts payable on this platform nailed and we can do it better than anybody else, that's a very rare problem for this specific type of person that makes you attractive and means that you can charge top dollar for what you do. So totally worth trying to find those, those painful problems that you can solve for folks. Last is a great question from Derek Foote on the subject of trying to build around recurring revenue for context. Derek Solo Tax Guy My biggest fear of recurring revenue is the recurring commitment. With healthy deadline management, AKA no ot, no overtime, it's kind of nice to lack commitments the rest of the year. Having monthly deliverables feels like committing to regular, quote, work. So where's the sweet spot of recurring revenue without recurring commitment stress? Well, what a nice problem to have, Derek. I don't want to work all year, man. I don't want to work all year either. Yeah, the answer for solos here is probably the difference different than the answer for non solos. As soon as you hire somebody, you also have the same problem of. This is actually one of the worst parts of hiring. You have like this obligation to keep the person that you hired busy, especially if they're on salary. You're like, man, I'm paying this person to sit in a chair. Now I got to find stuff for him to do all the time. I still think there's a kill. There's like killer firms to be built around 1040 work where you work like half of the year. Increasingly you're just going to be able to charge a lot of money for even basic 1040s anyways. Yeah. For a, for a tax business if you want it to be cyclical so you don't have to work the other parts of the year. I, I like that's a situation where I definitely don't recommend pushing people to do the recurring revenue thing because recurring revenue works best when there's a consistent delivery of value. You don't wanna do recurring revenue around a thing that's like delivered once. And then people like, kind of, I don't know, people don't like having to pay for a thing that they're forgetting the value of because it's not happening on an ongoing basis. So in that situation, yeah, I would, I'd probably shy away from recurring revenue. We had the recent roast where we had a solo person that was thinking about making their first hire that was more a. That was like 9010 cast attacks. So that was more a bookkeeping practice in that situation. They were, they were building around recurring revenue. But one of my recommendations there was the next step was like, you could probably still manage all the client relationships yourself. So what would it look like to go out and hire, say an offshore bookkeeper to handle the ongoing monthly closes for your clients? That's gonna give you much more freedom where you're just doing reviews and deliveries. And in a business like that, you could probably remove yourself from, you know, half of the month's work once most of the month end closes are done when you've got that person on hand. But definitely wouldn't get to the point like you could get to with tax, where you've got like entire months or a couple few months where you could largely be unplugged for the firm, from the firm and not having to work. That's honestly, this is kind of the beauty of accounting firms, small accounting firms is there's so much that you can shape around your lifestyle. And there is a point beyond which where that gets a little harder, where you start building a team and, and all that. But then the next opportunity there as, as you've built the team is just because you have the firm doesn't mean that you need to be plugged into the firm every single day. Like, you can also build flexibility around, around being the owner. But that one's. That one is admittedly a tougher nut to crack than you being the only one in the biz and being able to put up those boundaries and not have an answer to anybody. Right? Like, that's kind of the, that's the beauty of, the beauty of running a solo firm. Definitely trade offs, but that is the beauty of having that, that independence. I don't like having to answer to other people. I've got team members now. There's definitely some of those days where you're like, man, the fact that you went out and you got team members, like, does keep you glued to the chair a little better or glued to the chair a little more. But not to say that that too is not something that can't be managed. It just goes back to the old working on the business versus in the business sort of thing. That's it for this week, man. If I got to hang with you at Engage, thanks for coming and hanging. That was a lot of fun. We'll be back next week with more small firm stuff. I'll see you there. Sa.