267 How To Build Systems For Messy Work

Whenever we're thinking about systems or setting up something that's more locked down than it used to be, our mind always goes immediately to the exceptions, all the contexts in which it's gonna break down. And sometimes this can prevent us from having a system at all. How do you manage this? Systems for imperfect things where not everything's gonna perfectly run through it. We're gonna talk about that today. We're also gonna dig into what do you do when clients give you inaccurate information or incomplete information? How to define success, and whether that's even the right question to ask in the first place. And what happens to the accountants who just set up camp doing the work, like not advising on the work? Is that the sort of thing that AI may jeopardize in the near term? Come on, let's talk about it. It's Q and A Friday. Oh my gosh, the weekend we're almost. Okay. Imperfect systems. I've encountered some form of this question in a bunch of different contexts. We've talked about it on the show before. I think it's just an important reminder that every system is imperfect. But this comment came up on LinkedIn in the context of talking about scheduled work. So if you're going to move your firm to a scheduling when you take client work in and when you will deliver it, just locking things down a little more so you have more control over capacity. I. I want to run this comment by you. I've stripped anything identifying from it because it's not about who it's from. It's about a sentiment that I think we all have a degree of inside. It's from someone who had tried this approach to scheduled work and it fell apart. Here's the quote. The main challenges I noticed with it this past year were all based on incorrect assumptions that all the peripherals would be the same as last year. It assumed that we would receive client docs the same week as the prior year, despite having new points of contact at some clients and other unique client challenges. It assumed that work would take the same amount of time as last year despite new managers on the job and brand new staff being assigned work that experienced seniors performed last year. It assumed no additional worker delays resulting from tax changes or pending tax legislation. It assumed staff won't get sick or have family emergencies. All of these assumptions were incorrect. This resulted in a major backlog of work sliding several weeks later than the prior year and work piling up with no way to schedule around it as the deadlines loomed. I expressed these concerns about the system prior to busy season and was later proven right. Time budgets are really just fictional numbers assuming that the current year will be identical to the past year. The system is wholly incompatible with the churn and burn system where the departing managers and seniors are replaced with brand new associates and interns. Lean staffing leaves no margin for error. So the solution is to very slightly overstaff or to enforce client deadlines to send their docs by specific date or they get extended and worked on over the summer. Otherwise, as soon as partners let clients walk all over them or the partners override the scheduler for their own benefit, or staff has any kind of emergency or illness, the whole system breaks for the rest of the of the busy season. There's a number of things wrapped up in there. Sounds like this is a bigger firm. They have seniors and managers leaving and staff level and intern people coming in to do that work. I don't want to say there's any mismanagement happening here which, which could be a factor for how this wasn't a positive experience, but it doesn't sound like the most fun place to be. But just to take one system and kind of pick it apart and say what about how do you manage all the variables and all the unknowns? Because these are all totally valid points. If I'm going to schedule my capacity and tell clients you have to have info in by this date and I will deliver it by this other date, how do I manage the fact that I don't know what the scope is yet until I get their work in? Maybe let's assume that's the case. The fact that people get sick, that stuff happens. They alluded to it a bit. But where my mind first goes is, well, first of all, we can't make the mistake scheduling the ever living heck out of our capacity if you want to. And like the greatest example of this is zooming down to a single day where you're like rolling out of bed, man, I'm going to get all this long list of stuff done today. And the trouble with that list of stuff that you absolutely will not get done today is that it doesn't take into account all the other things that are going to come up along the way. And the fact that what we recall and how long we think something will take is always based on the best case scenario scenario. And I don't know about your universe, but mine just does not operate that way. It's why we perpetually don't get as much done in a day as we think we can do. But at least on the Flip side, on a longer time horizon, we can usually get more done than we expect. But it's that like micro planning, the manager looking over at that person and being like, how did it take them that long? It's because in your head, it's always a simplified view of that work because you never remember all the peripherals and the details. You never remember all of that stuff at once. That causes you to always estimate, underestimate how long that's going to take. And if we do this super granular capacity planning across our entire client base, you sure could run the risk of making every single day for the rest of the year like that, right? Doing that roll out of bed, here's all the things I'm going to get done today, and then planning that out for the entire rest of the year. And you can see how that would be unrealistic to think that you could actually get that done. Now the question of budgeted hours. And we're risking wading into saying the word time and making people angry territory, the people for whom time does not exist, like Voldemort, you just don't talk about it. Budgeted hours are not perfect information, but they're still information, relatively good information, like, and something that probably ought to be taken into account if you have that information for the last year. So the biggest issue I see with something that comes down to the volume of work that you can get done is the fact that we always overestimate our capacity. That's just how it always is. I got burned on this big time several years in a row in my firm, where when I wasn't taking enough into account, new clients, the volume of new clients that we would pick up along the way. But the sneaky one was the increases in scope for all the clients that we already had. Our biggest source of revenue year over year was the fact that we were upselling clients and doing more work for them along the way. And so that makes all of this planning hard. But let's look at the inverse. Let's look at the opposite. And so the flip side of this is what are the downsides of having no system? And are they any different? I would argue you actually run into all the same issues and constraints if you don't have a system at all. It's exceptionally hard to tell people when their stuff's gonna be ready. Maybe you get a little bit more egg on your face when you say, yeah, we're gonna try to turn around, turn it around, an X deadline, but then you can't deliver that. But the age old problem of being behind the entire year and not having control of your volume of work. And then we tell people like, oh, it's gonna be two to four weeks. And then four weeks goes by and now the client's calling asking for a status update. And you have this of managing the people that want updates because it's late, making you more late. That lack of a system, I would say also has issues. And so why I try to bring it back to, oh man, it sure seems like some system is better than no system is. A system, like an agreed upon approach for the whole team at least is like defining the goal lines and it doesn't have to be super, super locked down. Like it can be flexible, but it's at least defining something that we can improve upon going forward. And we may find along the way that there's parts of it that work really well and other parts of it that suck that don't work well. But you know what we learn if we don't do that? Absolutely nothing. And so maybe sometimes we're too in love with this all or nothing approach where we do it on absolutely everyone, absolutely every project, and we lock down the ever living heck out of it and we tell clients, no, this is how it has to be. Maybe we fall in love with that too much because that's kind of like the dream scenario where you can simplify as much as possible. But if we fixate on that too much and it ends up feeling too hard and then we create no system, that still feels like the worst case scenario to me. Not having any sort of system, not having something that you can iterate on year over year, not having clear expectations for the clients, not getting your entire team, that is partners, clear down to interns bought into the same process. I know this is a huge point of friction when you have partners upholding different sets of rules and wanting to steamroll the rules and all that, you at the very least then have everybody playing by the same set of rules so that even if it is a broken system, at least everybody's playing the same game. At least you're disappointing clients according to an agreed upon like setup. Right. Which is just better than madness and having no system. We talked about this maybe most recently when it came to setting up agreed upon response times for different types of folks in your team. So my response time should not be as fast as the response time for the rest of my team. Otherwise there's no incentive for my clients to go to the rest of my team. So I need, if I'M if I am running a team, I need people on my team whose job it is to be available. They have the shortest, like the fastest response time. Maybe that means a client can pick up the phone and call them anytime. But the mistake the big bosses make a lot of times is they make themselves more available than the rest of their teams. And so it's incentivizing the client to go straight to them. And if that's what you want, that's what you want your role to be, maybe that's fine. But oftentimes they're the same people that are like, I can never get my work done because I'm always getting pestered. Now, some of the pushback I got on social media for kind of outlining a few different ideas for how you can set up these standardized response times is, you know, a 48 hour response time or a 72 hour response time is not going to be adequate for my client who's trying to sell their business. And so immediately we jump to that exception, the scenario where it won't work, work. Right. And this can become a reason not to adopt the system altogether, when all it is is a reason to create an exception for the system. It's as simple as here's my normal expectation of how, like, reachable I am. Tina's selling her business right now. She can give me a call anytime, totally fine. Like, while she's going through this process, like, that's completely reasonable. But not having a system at all or having an unbelievably, like, fast turnaround system is inefficient all the time. Rather than just handling the exceptions, when we would do a bill, pay for clients, there was a channel where they could upload a bill to us and we would run it through the system immediately. It was an urgent channel. Several people got notifications and that stuff would get expedited. But the default channel, we would enter bills once a week, twice a week, whatever. It was all outlined in the engagement letter, how frequently we would do that for a client. But if we would only do that every Monday, and then somebody found a bill that needed to be paid on Tuesday, the water's about to be shut off. That can't wait until the next time we enter it on Monday. So we had a system for that. The way that they submitted it to us was different than the normal way they would submit it to us. But you know what we did before that? We did bill entry every single day just in case something urgent came through. And you know what sucked about that? That Wasn't fast enough. If that water bill came through at 1:00pm, the client's gonna be on the phone at 1:15 saying, can you pay this now? And we're not gonna say, oh, no, sorry, we do your bill entry at 8am you'll have to wait until next 8am they'll be like, no, I want you to pay that right now. But we actually did this for years. We would do bill entry all the time because these exceptions would come up maybe once every couple of months when the better system was the one that had a system for the exceptions as well. So it's in many ways it's good that our minds immediately go to the exceptions and why can this not work? But we need to push back against that a little bit. And the biggest thing that I think we miss if we let that control the conversation is just how much you learn by giving it a try. Because the best version of it's never going to be the first thing that you do. It's going to be the, the sixth or the seventh thing that you do. But then by going through that process, you're actually going to get a bunch of ideas for other things that you could do. And unless you start down that path, you never get those ideas. And before you know it, you've gone through. And we've probably all been in firms like this. You've gone through like a decade and nothing's changed. And you still have the same problems that you had before. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow, the company that puts a wee little button in your Excel, in your Google sheets, that lets you connect any old QuickBooks file to your spreadsheets. How would you use this? Having all that QuickBooks data at hand anytime you're in a spreadsheet, one way, buddy, month end, closes. Hear me out. You can build out a template that is any number of sheets in a workbook. If this workbook is your month end close, that could be a collection of, you know, 30 different worksheets that are all pointing to different reports inside of a QuickBooks file. You build this thing out over time and to set that up for the next month and close, the click of a button, all that stuff loads in immediately for the next month. Think about how much work it is to run those work papers manually. But you set up that template month over month, you pull it in immediately, you got a ton of information all in a single place, right? I bumped into a few folks in the wild now that have switched to using Live Flow for managing month end closes super interesting use case. They do a bunch of other things, but it just goes to show you having all that data handy in a spreadsheet. That's really nice, right? That is live flow. Put a link in the show notes if you want to learn more. 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 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. Okay. Somewhat Related Comment on a demo day Amar's 600 hi Jason, I have a question. How do you deal with clients who don't give you accurate numbers, for example year end inventory or sales tax filing? How do you estimate? Probably depends on the context. There are certain contexts where you just can't estimate. Like if it's going into a filing, like say a sales tax filing, I am never going to use an estimated number. In fact, in the context of like income tax prep in the US you can get penalized for that sort of thing. So there's some situations where I'll just say I'm not going to do that. But if you want to file a return yourself, knock yourself out. So there's that Kind of boundaries of certain situations where you never do that. There is the solution to the bigger problem of are my clients prioritizing what I need from them? And you're going to have clients, some who do and some who do not. For the ones who do not, it's worth understanding why is that? Am I trying to deliver a service that's not valuable to them? And if I am like, why am I doing that? Are my services actually aligned with the pains that my clients are feeling? So it's kind of some meta considerations like that. But to get down to, you know, brass tax, let's say you're doing a year end tax plan or something like that. Something that is just going to go to the client, not something that's going to get filed. It is worth getting really, really explicit about any assumptions that are baked into work that you deliver. And that can include estimates that your client gave you. Because when they look at the output, you just need to be really clear about all of the variable variables that can change the output that are not yet set in stone. So kind of three layers to that cake. There's certain scenarios where you never want to use a client's estimate because it could be your hiney that ends up on the line. Second, kind of give some consideration at a meta level too. Is this just something that's impossible for them to know? That might be the case. They may just that figure may be unattainable and that's fine. And then third, in situations like that, just be really sure that you outline assumptions that are baked into any sort of work product that you give back to the client. Brooks Brown posted this on Twitter. I always wonder when I shout somebody's name who listens to this, what they were doing in the moment and what their reaction is. So Brooks, please post that in the comments. If you were like on a bicycle, I need a little bunny hop or something like that. I know if somebody said my name when I was listening to a podcast, I would jump out of my skin. I said listening to Jason's podcast 261 is the one about the trap of being rich. I'm still struggling to answer the question, what is success to you? Super cool to hear this perspective. And more money doesn't always mean more happiness. What is success to you? I can tell you something that I've been asking myself as I define success. I think in many ways I am successful and in other ways I'm not. Entrepreneurially, business wise, I am more successful than I ever thought that I would be. From a family standpoint, in many ways, I am more successful than I ever thought I would be. But I also have a lot of failings in that domain still. But another thing that I can tell you that I grapple with as someone who is generally would be considered successful by worldly metrics, yet still tries every day to impress my parents, despite giving them all of the grandchildren they could ever want, finding, you know, greater business financial success than they were able, like, ever able to achieve inside, like, there's still a big part of me that's like, I'm still. I. Who am I trying to impress? There's still people that I'm trying to impress. Why does this matter? And it brings me back to just this question of what is success? And that word success doesn't even matter. Who the hell cares is success? To me, success is usually something that's framed through the lens of other people's interpretations of you. When I frame that through my own personal lens, I don't know that I think of the word success as much as I think of, like, fulfillment or satisfaction or joy. Success, to me, almost feels like the external view of what you are and what you're doing, which is a trap, right? Something that we need to kind of stay away from. That DHH blog post that I linked in that podcast episode, he, you know, he said ultimately he got to how he would. Could kind of get in this. This flow of doing the work that he enjoyed, and that was when he was at his. At his happiest. And I think that's kind of what I'm looking for, is what is that flow? That is the marriage of family stuff and work stuff. Because I do love work. I really, really do. And less and less I'm not. I'm not trying to fight that, because when I have spare time, oftentimes what I would most love to go do is a work thing that I'm excited about. And I'm giving myself permission on that more than I ever have before. Not everybody's that way. And it shouldn't come at the expense of, you know, say, my kids and stuff like that. I don't know. I'm also kind of getting allergic to success. And maybe that's just my framing of success because I think of that as, like, the optics of how someone else looks at you. But maybe the problem is the fixation with success itself, right? Unless success is, you know, finding fulfillment and all of that. I. I got a lot of comments on a recent LinkedIn post that were tied to, like, achievement and what people want to achieve. I'm personally not a big achievement guy. I think oftentimes achievement is staked in what do I want people to think about, you know, what, what impact do I want people to see that I had when I'm gone? I couldn't care less about what people think about me when I'm gone. When I'm gone, I should be gone and it should be somebody else's time. To the degree that I care. I would like for my kids to remember like the example that I set. But I don't think about achievement much anymore. Beyond like what does the day to day look like that is, that is helping people and the rest kind of takes care of itself, but not unlike that whole conversation around wealth and being rich. What I don't know is, is that an entitled perspective to being have on the other side of feeling like you found success, you know, like it's easy for the rich person to tell you how you shouldn't care about being rich. Is that me like feeling successful and then being on the other side of that and being like 9, that doesn't matter? As opposed to the 19 year old version of me who still wanted to impress my parents and was scared going out into the world without any money and like not understanding how the world works and all that. Maybe that is a privileged thing to say to, to say that you shouldn't be staking everything in, you know, achievement and success and all that. I don't know. I think probably the fact that you're just having this conversation and thinking about it probably means you're trending in a positive direction. This was a, an interesting conversation on social media the other day. I heard a framing of AI replacing designers recently that said the job of a designer is not to create a design. The job of a designer is to decide which design ought to be used. And if there's an accounting analogy, it would be the job of an accountant is not to do the accounting but to determine if it's right. Like glean insights from it and all that. But designers would say the same thing here. The fact is there's a huge percentage of accountants just like designers who are just employed to do the thing, to make the work and it is the doing of the thing that that tech and AI, you know, has always been on a path to displacing from computerized ledgers to bank feeds. You better believe bank feeds put some people out of work. Did it leave them out on the street though? Or did it mean like, oh Steve, you don't have to sit there king all this stuff in now you can come do this other thing. Heck man, I the partner who hired me used to tell me how he spent about three years just running 10 key tapes. That was his job. Oh, recently we did a sponsored YouTube video for an accounts payable tool that's doing some really cool AI stuff to make that wildly more efficient. Genuinely have clients who had team members who this would have completely air quotes wiped out, but in these businesses they would have immediately plugged those people into something else because they were so shorthanded. The reaction to that video, which is a sponsored video, but it's literally the most watched video in the first week that I've ever published on YouTube. Just about how AI is automating accounts payable the response from my audience who is accountants has been universally positive. There's like 90 likes and 0 dislikes. That is a tool that will actively replace the work of a bunch of accountants. I think accounts payable is usually considered an accountant's role or an accounting function, but boy, the accountants are plenty happy to jump out of the way on that one, right? Not doing the manual entry so a Reply A comment on that social media post from Philip Schaefer. I don't know if Philip listens to this or not. Spooky, but accurate. While I realize we don't know everything yet, what should the guidance be for those who are just doing the work now, though I know that most of us should at the very least embrace the coming wave of AI improvements. But what else can one do to ensure they're in a good position? I would think firm ownership is a great option, but I don't know. That's not for most people. Or that's that's not a great option for most people. I don't know that firm ownership makes you any more protected. I mean, there's plenty of firm owners who all they do is do the work. Right now, the nuance is probably in what does doing the work look like. It will change. And as we've hashed quite a few times on the pod, the biggest issue is the rate of change. Our work has always been changing. None of the things that people were doing 50 years ago, by and large, are being done now. So the issue now is just compression. If very quickly things that we do get replaced, what does it look like to adapt to that? Is there still more stuff to do? And I mean, in most cases, I think the answer is a resounding yes, because there's so much more that we can do and so many more clients we could take on if we wanted to than what we do today. We dug into that a bit with like that lead discussion. I think that was last Friday, where it's like, can you imagine buying leads? But a lot of accounting firms do because they're trying to grow and add more clients. But the fact remains there are people in our profession who are doing the work. And I'll be totally honest with you, this is an opportunity for us as leaders to ensure that those people have a future in this profession. And that looks like developing your people and ensuring that they're always growing into more valuable work. In our firm, we would always talk ambitionally in one on ones about, here are all the tasks that I want you to do, but you can't do those tasks until the tasks you're doing today are done by somebody else or eliminated. And that was probably the part of my job that I took the most satisfaction in as being able to see a person go from A to B from the time they started working with us to the skills that they had in the end. And along the way, to me, among my most important jobs was figuring out how do I get these tasks off this person's plate that are now beneath them because they're capable of more. And sometimes I would see that before they would see that. That sounded kind of conceited, but you know what I mean? When you see those people and you're like, dang, you're really good, maybe really good, even in a way that you don't realize yet. And I want to enable that and create that path for you. Let's go back to the accounts payable example. If we're paying people to sit in chairs and manually key this stuff in and not lean into what's possible out there, we're absolutely setting those people up for failure. This is one of the things that I get really passionate about in my job and that I'm trying to be a mouthpiece for all the ways that we can use AI so that we are not taken by surprise. So that when you stumble into these really cool tools or solutions or ways that we can use AI, you can plug that stuff into your practice and everybody is getting upskilled along the way. But this has always been the case. I mean, in the past, robotic process automation was the last big thing that was supposed to replace accountants. And in some contexts it probably did. There was probably a skyscraper somewhere with an entire floor of people that were doing this manual process in SAP. And somebody came through and made this RPA bot that could do all of that stuff. And that was the one thing that all of those people were doing. And when they created a bot for it, you didn't need those people anymore. That stuff, I have no doubt, absolutely happened on a micro level. But I think by us just being here and having these conversations and talking through what new, cool stuff is being enabled by AI, I think you and I are protected from that because we are pushing the envelope of what's possible in a way that, like, developers can't do, because we have a deep understanding of the problems. But let's not do our teams the disservice of, like, leaving them in the rearview mirror doing stuff that's very clearly going to be automated. And the folks that I talk to that listen to this podcast like, they're the most progressive firms out there where they hear about this stuff and they're like, oh my gosh, like, my team is going to love this. There's so many more valuable things that they could do. So again, I think this only really blows up on not only accountants, but any profession if it's just like this boom, overnight thing. But, and I think I shared this before on the podcast, Sam Altman even said recently in an interview he's like, the universe has inertia. The way that everything gets done, it takes time for that to shift. And even if you go through the thought exercise of what if an AI model came out tomorrow that could file a tax return, that could create the XML file that was the E filing, you know, submission to the irs, what would we do with that? I don't know that we could even use that. Because somebody still has to be accountable. Like, somebody has to be able to review the output. Like, there's so many things that would have to be figured out in there that would slow down the process of, okay, this is cool and this will be valuable, but how do we use it responsibly? That inertia is probably a good thing, but most of us can agree it does seem like things are going to be changing faster than ever before. And so we need to build organizations that are more agile than they've ever been before. Because if we are change management blocked now, we, oh, buddy, it's not going to get any better with the rate of stuff that's happening. That's something that we admittedly do not talk about. Enough on this podcast is change management. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing. I got another resume for you. An example of the super talented accountants in the Philippines that cloud account staffing will find for you bring to you to become valuable, valuable members of your team. How about a tax hire? Let's do a tax person today. This one's a CPA and a certified tax technician. That's a, that's actually a Philippines thing. Got their start an audit and you went to tax. Good for you as you should have two years of experience doing tax work for US individuals and companies. Prepared 1040s, 1065, 1120s and 1120s fixed assets communicated directly with clients to gather information Conducted independent research on applicable applicable tax stuff as needed Experience with ProConnect tax RC reports Corvi tax Planning Just a few years removed from school man, this is the type of person where I would try to sink my teeth into him super early. The hires we made in the Philippines were so, so good, like so capable. We had great luck with it. The way cloud account staffing works, they have a call with you, talk about your needs and then their recruiters on the ground in the Philippines will go find great applicants for your role. You decide if you want to interview them and you only pay anything. When you actually hire somebody, it is like win, win. You kind of don't have anything to lose because you're only going to cut a check when you've found somebody that you've fallen in love with that you want to be part of your team. To learn more about cloud account staffing and get some like real life resumes like this, check out the link in the show Notes. This episode is sponsored in part by UNCAT, my 2021 new tool of the year. Man, it has just gotten better since then. We recently did a five minute demo of the latest cool new UNCAT features on my YouTube channel. If you're not familiar with UNCAT, it handles the uncategorized transaction problem. So basically you point UNCAT at any set of accounts in the client's chart of accounts. Anytime any transaction hits those accounts, like Ask my accountant Uncategorized, that sort of thing, it gets pulled into uncat and then on a notification schedule that you choose, like once a week your client gets an email notification, says I need you to provide some clarification on these transactions. They click a magic link in that email, don't have to log in or anything like that. It takes them straight into uncat and they provide whatever details you need. Now you can ask them to just give you a text description. You can ask them to try to pick what account it ought to go into to upload a receipt to pick A class to pick a location and you can make any of those things mandatory. So just imagine if you set up some bank rules that put stuff like Amazon transactions sets them to automatically classified, uncategorized. You could touch that client's bank books once a quarter and every single week your client's going to be getting notified of the transactions you need more info of without you even having to get into the accounting file. But wait, there's more. You can add as many client users to a company as you want. Let's say you got five people at the at the clients that have their own credit cards and you got to track all that stuff down every month. You can set all of the transactions specific to payment methods to go to specific users. What they recently rolled out Customer Quest. They can actually ask for any old thing, questions, documents, whatever via that same uncat experience. And they recently rolled out receipts. They will auto match receipts to transactions that are in the accounting ledger. So the client emails a receipt in, uploads one to uncat, sms, messages a receipt in and uncat will find the transaction that's associated with in the ledger. All you gotta do is confirm the match. It'll actually push that receipt into QuickBooks, Xero, whatever you're using. Super cool tool and easy to start with. A single client like doesn't require changing a whole practice management system or something. You've actually got a free seven day trial. You don't even have to give them your card. Go to UNCAD.com check that one out. Take it for a spin with your firm. Even to get comfortable with it. Really cool tool. That's Uncat U n C a t like a kitty. Okay. Another comment from YouTube video Echovisor commented, is offshoring just the boomer version of using AI to do your work? Let me reword that in a in a way that'll make less people angry. Is offshoring necessary when you if you have AI, if AI is going to do your work, why do you need offshore team members? I would argue this and people do talk about how AI is going to be the death of offshore. I think that is anchored on the notion that offshore people just do entry level work. And for sure a lot of people use offshore laborers for entry level work. You think about call centers and stuff like that. Like yeah, that is absolutely going to be impacted by AI big time. That's never really how I thought of offshore folks in my team. Like they developed up the skill spectrum just like everybody else that was onshore in my team. So if you think that AI is going to replace them? I guess it would mean that AI is also replacing those same people in my team. If I were running a firm today, I have a hard time seeing any path in the next few years to an AI development being so fast and so impactful that I would let anybody on my team go. It may mean big changes to what we do for clients and how we can help people and how hands on we can be. But I was light years from downsizing because some tech unlock was going to eliminate a ton of our work. Again, maybe that happens when there's like this step change, you know, GPT5, maybe when that drops. But again, there's, there's a level of like inertia that would even take time to adopt those things. And I would argue who's going to lead the charge on adopting those things. It's going to be you and I, right? The people who are feeling the pains that those things solve. Absolutely. We're going to jump on that. We're not going to hide from the thing that will replace us. That seems like a losing strat. Like we're going to lean into the things that will replace us. And we've got 100 examples of that in the past. Bank feeds. I mean, extracting stuff from invoices to make AP less time consuming. We already do this and we're going to keep leaning into it. So it just depends on how you use offshore folks. If offshore is like your entry level, then maybe AI replaces that interestingly generative AI. Like, while it does impact entry level stuff, it also impacts really high skill things too. So. Too early to say, but I don't see AI being a reason to not lean into offshore. Like, if I'm building a firm tomorrow, probably half of my hires are onshore, half of my hires are offshore. And anytime I will just, I'll just say this. Anytime people ask me questions about offshore things, oftentimes they will qualify it with, I know you have offshore advertisers on your podcast gang. I will crap on sponsors so fast. I got no problem. In fact, people are only allowed to sponsor my content if we approve them. There's a lot of sponsors, a lot of brands in the space that we do not allow to sponsor our content. We are in the very fortunate position where I don't have any ad inventory available for like four months into the future. We turn away people left and right. And the really cool and exciting thing about that is I can put in front of listeners what I think are the coolest brands and that hasn't always been possible, but we have an approval process where if I didn't believe in Offshore, I wouldn't be letting Offshore people advertise on my channels. Anyways, Offshore, I see them as different things, not. Not that one will necessarily replace the other. Last I shared on the newsletter. This was last week's Newsletter. Newsletter. Jason Dot, CPA I dropped 45 bones on some AI headshots. So you've probably seen ads for these all over. I was just curious to see were they actually worth it. I was never willing to pay $45. And then I was like, but for the content, it's worth it. I uploaded six random pictures of myself and it spit out like 60 headshots of those headshots. Like maybe five or 10 were like, okay, I can kind of see it. But the interesting thing that I stumbled into as I thought more about it is when I look at those headshots, there's nobody as critical as me at how those look. I see it and I see all the flaws and I'm like, I don't. That doesn't look like me at all, gang. I have built an entire living around my own vanity and getting to look at myself all the time. Can you believe there are multiple people under my employee whose job it is to have to look at me and edit stuff of me all day, every day? Can you imagine the level of narcissism it requires to build a business around yourself like that? So I get these AI pictures back. Nobody's going to be more critical of them than me. But when you put them in front of somebody else, they're like, oh, yeah, that's pretty good. Somebody that you know. But then when you put them in front of somebody who doesn't even know you, they're like, sure, yeah, looks like a person. And I'm increasingly seeing this come up more and more in different contexts. Take Generative email. You have a tool that tries to mimic your way of writing. When you get that thing back, you're going to be like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Like, you're so critical of it. When somebody who knows you and has seen your emails sees it, they're like, oh, yeah, I could see that. But somebody who doesn't know how you write emails, they're like, yeah, I mean, I guess the wr fine doesn't really matter. And so when I have these, like, AI headshots taken, who are they for? Are they for me or are for. Are they for me to put out for other people to see by the way I'm not actually using them, I appreciate, like human things, like lo fi things. I would sooner use like a crappy smartphone picture or something like that as an avatar than an AI thing. I think we'll continue to trend this way where there's just an appreciation for stuff that doesn't feel too shiny. That's kind of where I'm at right now. But anyways, say I were to use these. Who are they for? They're for all the people that don't know me that might find me and, you know, see this picture on my landing page or something like that. They're not for me. I don't need pictures of myself, man. I got mirrors, I got camera equipment. I don't need pictures of like, just for me. So then should I be hung up on these internal blockers when I'm like, ah, that doesn't look all that much like me. And I think the biggest context where this actually really does matter is when we start thinking about how AI can pretend to be like you, you and I. And obviously there's, there's scary applications for that, but then there's really useful applications for that. Like, could I have like sort of an avatar of my expertise that a marketing agency could use to help create marketing content that aligns with how I advise and sounds like my tone of voice and stuff like that, that'd be really valuable, right? If you've ever tried to work with a marketing agency and get them to do that in a way that feels consistent to you, that's really, really challenging for them to advise. The way that you advise ends up just all feeling like stale, generic stuff. But if they have, you know, this AI assistant that is trained on your data, like Jason Bott that we have on this show, it makes the prospect of a third party building helping build that marketing content much more compelling. Now the spooky example is, is a client facing context, like a client facing advisor. And I still maintain that there will be a version of that that makes sense down the road. And this was a big realization for me this week. The reason why I think that will make sense down the road and how I think that will come to be is I will create that avatar, much like I have for this podcast already. If you've heard that, and I will be the most critical person of it. I'll see it and I'll be like, nah, I wouldn't have said it just like that. Other people. Let's just use this podcast as an example. So we've got a. If you're new. Welcome. We've got an AI assistant that's trained on all the episodes of the podcast. Occasionally I'll chat with them and it's really good at answering questions the same way that I would. But when I see the responses, I'm very critical of them because that's like me. And I'm like, nah, that's not quite right. Podcast listeners, when they hear the responses, they're like, I can see it. That's actually pretty good. Somebody who has never listened to the podcast, when they get those answers, are they valuable? I think that's what this all comes back to. If you've gotten any value from this podcast, I think you would probably argue that would be valuable for non listeners. Even though it's not me right now, I'm going to have blockers with that because it's not me. And you have the distance and the perspective to say, jason, that's not reasonable. If somebody could come and chat with that thing and it helps them, then it helps them. That's a good thing. Okay, let me turn the tables on you. You have expertise and you advise clients. And the notion of standing up your own avatar of your expertise and letting people come and self serve, that's terrifying, right? We go to liability to all these different things. For sure. You have to put constraints on it. But remember, this avatar is only parroting things that you have already said. If somebody misuses this advice, is there exposure? Potentially. But the same could be said of blog posts of social media, that sort of thing, right? They're not talking with a real person. So if someone has never talked with you before and they could get access to a version of your expertise that you may not think is perfect but is still valuable to them, then is there a place for these things in the future? I think there is, but the blocker will be that no one will be a harsher critic of that than ourselves. And I think we have to try to get over that. Because if it helps people, it helps people. And there's a lot of reasons why, almost like vain reasons, why we could be like, well, what if it doesn't think I'm quite as smart as I actually am? And stuff like that, right. That are also blockers. I think we have to get over that. Because I could unlock your expertise, what is in your brain, it can unlock that and enable access to that in a way that's never before been possible. And I'm here for it, man. There's more people out there to help than we can actually reach right. Hey, have a great weekend. Thanks for coming and hanging today. I'll see you next week.