301 The 22 Types of Software Your Accounting Firm Needs

Nerd alert. Today we're Talking about the 22 types of tech that your accounting firm needs to do the accounting stuff. Did he just say 22? The most common app categories or features across our apps. Most firms we're going to have some gaps. We're not going to have everything. But also do I need everything? At what stage should I have all the things? If ever roll up those sleeves and come on in. Take a number. It's Jason D. Foreign. Buckle in. Today we're ignoring like technical tax software. Tomorrow's episode is actually going to be all about technical tax software. Today we're thinking more in terms of of software types. So it's gonna be somewhat accounting firm leaning but most of these things actually tax firms need to have some form of as well. Okay, we gotta get go. We're already behind 22 types of software. Number one, accounts payable software. Like, like bill pay. Even if you don't offer bill pay, it is worth being opinionated here on what is the right solution or, or a few solutions for clients to choose from. Because if you don't give them any guidance man, they will turn up with some weirdo thing that you have never heard of before. That then is a nightmare to have to interface with. So getting some level of comfort with a bill pay system and this honestly ought to just be in like what bill pay software does your accounting firm use? Like having some level of comfort with these is valuable because if we don't offer clients any guidance on this, especially in the US there's a ton of people still just mailing out paper checks everywhere and that's just a really, really bad idea. Good opportunity to have a like kind of financial hygiene conversation with your client. Accounts receivable. I don't actually, I didn't put that on the list because most firms are not touching it. So they didn't make the list of 22. But I will say if you work with an industry where there's an opportunity to specialize in AR that can be really interesting. Like I've seen a couple of firms that'll get into like medical billing or dental building. They are kind of like doing those two things hand in hand, super, super compelling use cases like that. I think getting into AR is totally worthwhile. But not today. Okay, ar, you didn't make the list. Number two, client portal software. As far as I am concerned in the year of 2024 client portals need to be non negotiable. The bare minimum is self service to like retrieve files. Like for clients to be able to hop in, grab a tax return, grab a month, end close, grab something that they don't have to, then just go ask you for. Like we all need to be doing this. And I understand there's still a bunch of resistance to client portals and having to have one more login to remember. Like that's just where the world is going. It's not where it's going, it's where it already is. Every service that you use, you have a login for. And if you think about the exceptions to the rule there, the services you don't have a login for, it's annoying because you have to call somebody to do something. You have to have some roundabout process to change a payment method or something like that. Client portals, you ought to have one. The sticky thing is, is it bolted onto my tool that does this other thing? Do I run a dedicated portal that's really good or like a half baked portal that's attached to this other thing? If you want to see Best in class for client portals right now, in my opinion, in our space, it's Copilot, Copilot. Com. We have done, Copilot has done some sponsorships and we've got a another demo day that's going to run for them in the near future. But like there is, there is just, there's no one making a portal as flexible as them right now when it comes to. I'm going to mention a lot of brands here, many of whom who have sponsored my content in this, in this podcast, I'm going to mention them. Worth noting. In general, anytime I say a company's name who's sponsored my stuff in the past, I will bring that up. But the only companies I let run sponsorships on my stuff are my favorite brands. This last month we actually eliminated like 50% of our partner list. They're not even allowed to advertise with us anymore. So in general, if I'm bringing them up, whether they've been sponsors or not, it's because I believe in them. And if I bring them up and I don't say they've been sponsors in the past, what the heck, man? Why are you not sponsoring this content? Okay, number three, CRMs or how you centralize all of your client communications. Jim just sent an email. Tina just sent an email. Craig just got a text. How do I see all that stuff in a single place to understand what's happening on various projects with a client, on all the communications with a client. This is a tricky one because I would argue we don't really Have I can put my finger on a single system in our space right now that does this really well across all channels. If you look at something like Carbon, who has sponsored some content, Carbon was the first to come out with an email centric version of a practice management system. And it still does a really good job of giving you visibility into all the emails exchanged with a client, across all your different team members and across all the different contacts associated with a client. That is like part of, in my mind, what makes a great CRM. But what these tools right now don't do is like, what about phone calls, what about text? What about all these different disparate places where we're having communications? What about meetings and meeting transcripts? Like right now that's just like a file that gets parked somewhere. We have to have some version of this. But this is an area that I think can be improved quite a bit if we can pull more of those conversations and centralize them. Number four, E signatures. In what contexts will you use E signatures? At the very least for proposals? The worst way to start a new client relationship is to be like, hey, can you print that out, sign it and then scan it in and send it to me or fax that to me? That's not getting things on, on the right foot. The easier you can make it for them to say yes, the better. The other huge use case here is for tax firms. KBA E Signature, massive time saver. Safe Send. I don't think they've ever sponsored any of our stuff. Safe Send has, has kind of been the gold standard for the gathering of signatures and delivery of tax returns. The rub is it's yet another place for clients to log into. And there's some additional security requirements around that because you have tax information in there. But if you want to see a tool that does that really well, Safe Send was something that's like built from the ground up to do that. There's other places like in your workflows where E signatures can come up, but the big ones are proposals and then tax return delivery. Please. If you are a tax firm, you need an E Signature solution. Stop asking people to email you hand signed 8879s number 5 files, slash work paper management. Uh, and the state of things here really kind of stink. When I think work paper management, I think CCH engagement, that whole thing basically a a binder for holding all of your work papers for in another context it could just be a single PDF file where you got a whole bunch of bookmarks. I know personal tax Prep happens this way in a lot of firms. But it seems like increasingly our workflow tools are incorporating files and documents, which is kind of fragmented them even more. If I have a tool that does this job really well, usually it it's going to ingest those documents. But now I have documents that live in a whole bunch of different places, which is kind of annoying. Or I have a kind of dumb file management system like a Google Drive or a Dropbox or something like that where then it's not connected to my workflow tools. Right. So you're kind of hosed either way, I feel like. And then you got like legacy platforms like CCH Engagement are just, they're not going to integrate with anything. Those platforms haven't changed in a decade plus. So file and work paper management kind of in a tough spot. The practice management systems have come in and said centralize all your stuff here and then you can enable sharing of some of those files with your clients. And that's probably the least bad of all the bad options right now. But practice management systems aren't generally doing workflow. They're not getting the work done. They're managing the work. And oftentimes I need those files where the work is getting done to make that tool work properly. All right, number six, your general ledger. QBO and or Xero for most firms. There's a lot of other people sniffing around here and it's a really hard proposition to get firms to look at anything else. I will say a good opportunity here is when there's a specialization or an industry that is using an industry specific ledger that is a great specialization opportunity because for them it's really hard to find an accountant that knows that tool. And if you can become one of the go to providers for that tool, it's not only a tremendous way to attract people with specific needs, but there's also a great partnership opportunity there with that software provider because they're going to feature partners that use their products and that can be a great way to attract consistent leads. Number seven, meeting recorders. Yes, this gets its own spot and accounts receivable doesn't even. That's how new age I am. Okay, if you're not sold on meeting recorders yet, I did an entire podcast episode in the past on that is strictly down to let me convince you to start using Meeting Recorders. The big resistance is the notion that's going to make clients uncomfortable. I don't want my conversations being recorded. Buddy, if you're afraid to say something that you don't want to be recorded. That's not a conversation I want to be having in the first place. All right, if you can only ever call me on your burner phone, I don't want to talk to you. All this takes is one conversation with clients, or one conversation when they're onboarding along the lines of just to let you know, every time we hop on a meeting, it's going to be recorded. And this saves our team a whole ton of time. When I have to go back three to five years and be like, what was that thing that Mike told me? That was this little nuanced thing like, you are going to be glad that I have that because it keeps our whole team aligned and it keeps us from asking you dumb questions. It's as simple as that. The only people that are ever going to see those transcripts are us. They're not getting trained into some sort of model or something like that. AI tools now are making it incredibly easy to search across insane volumes of volumes of information. Just like we've done with our our Jason Bot, the AI assistant for this podcast. AI is making it super easy to search across huge volumes of content to fetch specific information from past conversations. Now it needs to be integrated better into like the practice management systems that we use for sure. But. But there will never be a day in the future where you regretted capturing a meeting. There just won't be. So you need to start now. The big platform agnostic solutions to look for that can like plug into different types of meeting softwares are Fireflies and Fathom. Do your own security due diligence here. Don't take security tips from YouTubers, but they both support like HIPAA workflows. So like there is a way to use these that is plenty secure for you. Today's episode is sponsored in part by liveflow, the company that helps you put a jetpack on your spreadsheets. Connect any old QuickBooks file to your Excel, to your Google Sheets, sync data in one time, sync it in on an ongoing basis. One thing I really like is when I pull those reports in From QuickBooks to the Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets, I can move all those individual cells all around and they will continue updating. So if you think about all of the values, all of the things that you can get with a QuickBooks report, pulling all of that into a single place and then having the power to rearrange those things however you want into a single view for a specific company, even a single view across a bunch of companies, like, I don't know, maybe in a single sheet. I wanted every transaction and ask my accountant across all my QuickBooks files or something like that. You have complete flexibility to pull that stuff wherever you need it, rearrange it and it won't break. It'll continue updating. Pretty cool. So start getting crazy with your sheets with Live flow Link in the Show Notes Today's episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing and I got another resume for you to look at here gang. I got a live one. This is an actual resume the Cloud accounting staffing got for an accounting firm they were working with. How's this sound? Especially for you tax firms out there. Graduated with a Bachelor's in accounting in 2017, spent two years in audit before going to Tax. Good for them. So you know they got a good head on their shoulders. Spent their next two years with a Western firm just doing tax work. Two years after that with a top 100 firm whose name if I uttered here you would recognize there they were a senior tax associate also in charge of training junior tax associates. All sorts of accolades here around like culture awards they've won. Sounds like a real addition to the vibe to the vibes of your firm. Good vibe manager experience in the CCH Access suite and everything else associated with business Tax prep gang. Super talented folks out there just looking for a happy home and that happy home could be yours. People like to talk about like trying to hire big four talent and that sort of thing in the US and just how hard that is. Do you know how many big four and top 100 employees there are all around the world in the Philippines? The massive offices they have set up in the Philippines, those people just like stateside where they're like man I don't want to go work for this giant machine. Those people are looking for cool small progressive firms in the Philippines just like they are in the us Incredibly talented people and cloud account staffing. They're going to help you track them down. Looking to build your team of accountants in the Philippines? Check out the link to Cloud Account Staffing in The show notes number 8 month end close Management Software. Okay, this is the most interesting new category we've had in the last five years. I don't know meeting recorders is up there, but this one is huge. I think the company that normalizes for a lot of people was keeper. The notion of being able to see the status of all of your month end closes in one place actually qboa. So qbo, Accountant, whatever. I think that's what the A stands for. They did a very Very basic version of like month end close management maybe five years ago in QBOA and took like the first fraction of a step and then never circled back to it. Keeper was like the fully fledged realization of that. Now more upmarket we have tools like flowcast that are just dedicated month end close tools. But where are the tools that are helping me manage like 50 or 500 month end closes across a whole bunch of clients. Like what is that service that goes a step beyond task management to handle all the more fiddly aspects of the exchange of information and all of that. This is a really interesting one. And we're now saying practice management systems trend more towards being month end close management tools. Another. Another tool in the space iter. They're in the AICPA startup accelerator this year. They kind of from scratch were this hybrid practice management and month end close sort of deep ledger integration tool. So if a pure practice management system is just tasks and a pure month end close management system is just ledger activity, we're kind of seeing those things, I don't know, kind of, kind of starting to combine a little bit. But there's a tremendous amount of value in what like month end close management software can provide. Okay, number nine password management buddy. Firmwide password management. You gotta have it either basic credential management with like a1Password or LastPass or an SSO provider like Practice Protect who has sponsored some content. Practice Protect was what I used in my firm. There is no one else there really no other SSO providers specifically targeting accounting firms besides Practice Protect. That's something that you need to look really hard at. It is a step of security beyond what password managers give you. That's something we need to be. I don't responsible about number 10 payroll. You want to talk about categories that are just kind of in a bummer state right now for firms doing DIY payroll in the US this is probably either Gusto rippling or qbo. If they're outsourcing it, it's probably adp. People that have gotten beaten up the last few years. Paychex has gotten beaten up. Gusto's gotten beaten up mainly due to how hard payroll tax resolution is. I think the only people in that group that sponsored any of my stuff is adp. Payroll is just one of those thankless, loveless things where I'm glad I don't run a payroll software company. There was a time where I thought Gusto's like integrated benefits were going to like set the world on fire. And when they work, they're incredible. Now Rippling is doing a pretty good version of that too. Rippling will also support like Multi Ein where you have company groups, but you may need to like access all that via a single login. Watch out here for peos. Just making more sense for the future of work. When you hire a single person in a state and they work for you for nine months and then they leave. Like in the US that is so much admin that's such a headache. There's a very real possibility that in the future everyone's just employed by peos because it simplifies a ton of that admin. Not all of it, but a lot of it just works as a player here. Rippling's also got a peo offering number 11 receipt management tell me if you disagree and on all these things. If you have great tools for these categories, drop in the show notes Dext formerly Receipt bank was was kind of the biggest. I don't have Complex is the right word but like for the real workflow nerds, high volume receipt management across a bunch of clients. Dex historically has been kind of the main solution there and then we've had a ton of smaller options but receipt management is one of those things that increasingly is arguably becoming a feature in other tools. Keeper and Uncat. They've I think they've both sponsored some stuff but they they have their own receipt management functionality now. So it probably depends on how you're holding your services out. If you do large volume receipt management, a big lift tool like a Dex probably makes sense. If that's something where you put the onus more back on your clients, then it's not as big a deal what you're rolling internally. But not unlike accounts payable, it is still worth educating them on what a good platform is to do this responsibly. They're not just going to go out and like if you tell them to go out and find a receipt management tool, they're going to. They will just grab some random thing that has a nice landing page or some mobile app or something like that that is like oh my gosh no, I don't want to have to work with this now. So it's still worth being opinionated. But how much is going to drive your own workflow probably depends on do your clients value receipt management or not? Is that something you can stand up and get paid well for? If so, go all in. Because that's one of those things that can be heavily automated and super profitable. Number 12 request management there's a few things that I think my Content in this podcast have pushed more out into the open and more tech companies have developed around. I think a big one of those is requests. The notion of explicitly building request lists to eliminate the work of having to figure out what you need and then follow up with what you have and what you don't have and refigure out what you need. Practice management systems have been implementing requests kind of sorta not unlike client portals. They're like in many platforms are pretty half baked if you want to see the gold standard for what a dedicated request management tool looks like it is. Content Snare. They've sponsored some stuff. We've actually got a dedicated video for Content Snare coming on the main channel soon. They're a great example of a company that I believe in so much. I just, I basically beg them to come sponsor my content because I'm such a shill for them. But request management is one of those, one of the biggest things most firms don't lean into that will massively simplify the process of gathering information. Number 13 scheduling. Just grab calendly or calendly clone if it will let you customize the email sequence around a meeting. Sending out, you know, templated emails before the meeting and after the meeting, that's, that's helpful. Otherwise just make sure that you got some sort of scheduling app. Also make sure you can gatekeep those links because not everyone should have access to that anytime. Number 14 team chat. Question mark. Like Microsoft, teams slack discord. People have strong feelings on team chat apps in an age of distributed work. If you're running a remote team I, as much as there are downsides to team chat apps, I think I am, I don't think I am pro team chat app because if colleague A wants to send a meme to colleague B, they're going to do it no matter what. And I would rather them do it on a platform that I'm providing because once that different channel of communication has been opened up, who knows what else could get sent through there. You gotta put boundaries on this stuff. It is not a home for work where the work needs to happen and discussion around the work still needs to be. You know, probably the practice management system and the comments and all that stuff there because you don't want to fragment meaningful context to now be in multiple systems. That being said, team chat can sometimes be used to pull somebody into something urgently if something falls off the tracks. But you just got to be really clearly defined what it's for and what it's not for. It's not for documenting work. And you know, I just had a call with a client and they told me this important detail that doesn't go through team chat that goes into the chat associated with a project or into a work paper or something like that. If you need to tell that person to go look at that thing, maybe it makes sense to use team chat to tell them that. But it's not a home for like important work context. Number 15 video meetings zoom teams Google Meet. It'll be interesting to see if these become more integrated parts of other systems, especially as meeting transcripts are really valuable and I think platforms will start to do more with those. You know, my automated email assistant, if I get an email from a client and generative AI wants to write the most helpful email possible. A huge source of context is all the conversations I've had with that client. Like if you want that reply to be intelligent, give me a reason to give you that context and do something with it. I know Client Hub at one point was talking about integrating client meetings into the platform. It'll be interesting to see if this becomes more of a thing. Number 16 Quality assurance, mainly around bookkeeping. Some companies that are doing this digits Verify queue scrutinize is another one of those things. Where does it, does it merit a standalone app to do this job for you? This is a category of app that probably isn't as mature now as it will be five years down the road because it's actually a massive opportunity if I'm doing 100 month end closes every single month. What gets really tricky in a firm as it grows is maintaining the same standard of, of quality and certain rules for how we do things across a whole bunch of different books. There's a lot of reasons for that, many of which boil down to how the current crop of ledger apps, QBO and Xero, don't let us do partner level like bank rules or really anything if you're gonna create a bank rule. It's all happening in a siloed way in every single file individually, which frankly really sucks. And they also like do really nothing as far as quality assurance goes. Like just the ledger systems themselves. One of the companies here, Verify iq, they were in the AICPA startup accelerator last year. Acuity, a firm of 150 or so in Atlanta. They actually bought Verify IQ because having a standard across all of their month end closes was so important that they're like, we actually want to acquire someone and more or less just build this to our needs. We'll still sell it to other firms, but this is so core to our workflow that we're actually going to invest in it ourselves. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Client. And when it comes to choosing a pm, it comes down to the four C's capabilities, client experience, clarity and community. I already told you about capabilities and client experience. Today we are talking clarity. How approachable is that system? I tell you what, as these systems have matured, they have turned into monsters. Frankly, some of them, when you look at them now is like, it's just a lot. And, and there's a certain element of vibes to software. Like you see a software and you're like, yeah, that's me. I can get into that. Like, when I first saw Notion, I was like, this is my vibe. There's other people when they see Notion, they're like, I hate this Client Hub, man. It's the whole vibe. It's got a vibe. It's pretty clean now. There's usually a linear relationship between our first C capabilities and another C. You don't want complete complexity. The holy grail is a platform with clarity. Lots powerful features, but not complicated. Client Hub. It has the magic of clarity. Makes everything simple for a firm owner and their team and their clients. Clear layout, powerful features, yet simple to use. Makes it easier to onboard new team members. Spend less time supporting your team's questions. You don't have to run tech support for your clients because they can't figure out what the h is going on. Oh, that's the one. Worst. That is clarity as delivered by Client Hub. Spend more time delivering value, not trying to figure out how your PM works. Okay. Learn more about Client Hub. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is brought to you in part by Teamup. Helps you find talented accountants in the Philippines. Pop quiz. How much do you pay an accountant in the Philippines anyway? Do you know? I'll give you a minute. I'm just going to tell you. Here's the answer. It depends, but I'll give you some ranges. Monthly salaries for full time accountants in the Philippines for bookkeepers and accountants are going to range from 900 bucks a month to $2,000 a month. Tax accountants generally $1,100 to $2,700 a month. Senior accountants, managers, $1,800 to $3,200 a month and executive assistants $800 to $1,800 per month. For context, a three year accountant in Manila not working for an international firm, usually around $400 to $500. My mental framework was usually in India, you're gonna pay about half as much as in the Philippines. But another big cost factor is whether you're hiring through a bpo, which we recently learned about. BPO handles some of the logistics of managing and employing that person on the ground in another country, but you're usually gonna pay them another 40 to 70% for that service. Team up their approach. Hire folks directly, so you eliminate the cost of that BPO and they just help you find cool people. You pay a recruiting fee and no ongoing fees after that. Want to learn more about team Up? Check out the link down in the show notes. Number 16. Phones use a voiceover IP. Don't use RingCentral. I would look at Open Phone or Dial Pad right now. Something that gives you phone plus sms. You can take it anywhere, you can have it on your phone, your mo, your cell phone, optionally. So if you need to look up a phone number or make a call in a Pinterest or something like that, you can do that, but you can also prevent it from ringing through to your cell phone. You just have the app there. The main benefit to me of Voiceover IP systems is being able to pull call logging and text messages and all that into other systems. If you just have a traditional phone, there's not really any way to capture that information and put it somewhere else in a place where it's going to be helpful. VoIP phones, voiceover IP, you have some more flexibility there to get that data to where it needs to be. Number 18 reporting. These are like FPA systems, so like Fathom Reach, Spotlight, companies that do more advanced reporting on top of just the basic, like, financial statements that the ledger systems produce. The main argument for these, in my opinion, there are like very complex scenarios where they're useful. But I think the best argument for these is just that most clients won't understand financial statements and those financial statements for those clients will not be actionable. And a reporting platform lets me put together like a set of KPIs of my own design, where I say, client, here are the things that you need to see and understand from those financials. We will meet and we will discuss your KPIs and the ongoing evolution of what your KPIs are, because I think that's a more actionable approach to reporting than traditional financial statements. But number 19, these have picked up steam a lot in the last few years. Spreadsheet integrators. The OG here was G Accon and then Live Flow, I think through a combination of building something slick and marketing. What they do. And being present at conferences a lot made this category bigger. And then Amalgam is another entrant here. These tools basically just connect your accounting ledger to your spreadsheets. I think they're honestly eating into the reporting category to a degree or at least certain use cases for reporting tools because you can build out your own sort of just custom reporting and spreadsheets. It's not super razzle dazzle, super fancy, but argue doesn't really need to be usually number 20 proposals. If you don't have a proposal tool yet, what is the benefit of this? I would say that being able to present multiple options when you send a proposal to a client will generally increase the close rate because it will give them them some flexibility on which option they choose. It teaches you more about their perception of of value and their inclination to spend. You can talk about all these things with a client around pricing and all that, but really it all boils down to like what do they cut a check for? And you don't really know that until they accept a proposal. To me that's a big value of having a three or four option proposal is they're giving you valuable information about themselves. And if I only gave them one option, if they don't like that one option, I think there's a greater likelihood that, that we lose them. The main options here are Ignition, Go proposal and Anchor. Ignition has been a past sponsor number 21 training and I wish this was more of a thing. One company that's doing some stuff here is royal wise. They provide like training for QuickBooks and the Microsoft Suite and stuff like that. You can actually, you can use it internally with your team, you can white label it, even like using it with clients and larger companies. This is, this is referred to as an lms, a learning management system. And I think the bummer here in the current state of things is there's not a great platform that folks have latched onto to get your entire team up to a certain training standard. It's so much reliant on the person in your office that knows how to do that training the other person. Rather than there being an off the shelf platform that does a good job of getting everyone up to these sort of certain standards of comfort with how to use a tool. And instead we rely on like the QBO or the zero certification which is really just how to use the software and where the buttons are and all that. It's not here's how we do bookkeeping in our firm, here's how we review a Level 2, 1040 tax return right now to build that, you have to go in and find your own learning management system basically and build it from scratch. There's a big opportunity here for somebody to grow into becoming the leader in our space for small firms. And the Last one, number 22, those that just simply defy categorization, which ironically the first one I have here is uncat came out four or five years ago, a dedicated tool for doing uncategorized transactions. So a bunch of transactions come through the bank, you don't know how to classify them. It created a super streamlined workflow with the client where they could then indicate what it was, provide some notes. This has increasingly been integrated into other platforms as a feature. I think uncat still has the most flexible version of this because you can do all sorts of different rules around like specific cards and a whole bunch of users within a single firm and having different rules for each of them. The beauty here is it will hoover up anything that goes to specific accounts. In your chart of accounts that you point it to. Could be ask my accountant, could be whatever you want it to be. But then on the, on the accounting ledger side, you can create bank rules that will auto classify to those accounts without you having to get in there. That's the case with QBO because it will do those auto matches. 0, amazingly still will not. You have to come in and hit the okay button a hundred times. But as long as that bank feed's working, I could not even ever get in the file. And it will auto classify things to that uncategorized account. And then on whatever schedule I want, UNCAT will notify the client to come in and provide some context so that as those things are happening without you ever having to touch the file, you're gathering information that will help you classify that transaction. If it's Amazon purchases or you know, whatever those ambiguous things are. It'll also help you do class tracking, location tracking, like all of those different things that you have to hunt down over the course of a month and close. If you think about rolling that out across a company with a bunch of stakeholders where numerous people speak into that across just a whole bunch of different clients. If you're in charge of 30 closes a month, that's a massive time saver. Again, check and see if your PM does a version of this. Some of them do and it is better than nothing if you have more involved use cases. I think UNCAD is taking this further than anyone else right now. And then the other tool I had here under doesn't really fall into a category is Right Tool, which, If you use QuickBooks online, you need to at least be using the free version of Right Tool. It's a chrome extension that just improves on QuickBooks online in every way. Now, important question here. Which of these do I actually need to use and when should I use them? Like, are they, are they big firm tools, Are they small firm tools? Honestly, I would say that almost all of these things you want to have some version of when you're starting out. The trouble with deferring something like a practice management system and being like, well, I can, I can manage all the projects now and just kind of keep it all in my head or in a spreadsheet and so I'm going to wait, or when I have more money, I can afford it, I'll, I'll, I'll do it. The trouble with that is when you get further downstream, you're at some sort of constraint, you're at a tipping point to say, this isn't working anymore, so I have to go do this other system. When you pull in a practice management system, that thing actually does a whole bunch of things from requests to like a client facing portal, it changes a whole bunch of things that actually impact how you build the rest of your stack around it. And so if you built your systems without a practice management system, all those systems break because a PM generally gives you a better way to do things like collect signatures and ask clients for information and all that. So for most of these things, you want some sort of framework from the beginning. Doesn't mean you're going to get it right on your first try, but you will learn about what you want from that tool by doing it. It's one of those things where doing something like getting in the arena, you will learn and have a greater likelihood of getting it right the next time, even if you get it wrong the first time. Now, a tricky one here is when your internal workflows are connected to like that client portal. Practice management systems a few years ago went from being project managers to client portals. Like all the messaging around them changed because they realized the stickiest thing there was the client portal. Training a thousand clients onto a different portal is an absolute nightmare. Pulling out a workflow tool and replacing it with another one. It's not fun, but that's a whole lot easier thing to do than change the system that all of your clients have to interact with. And this is an argument for a separate standalone client portal. Now, there's very real benefits to those two things being connected because when you know a client uploads something or answers a question, it can automatically resolve something in the workflow tool. So there are benefits to those things being connected, but there's also benefits to them not being connected. There are a few things here like, you know, quality assurance apps, maybe you don't roll with those from day one. There are things that are really helpful for larger scale firms if you're trying to standardize across a bigger number of folks. Training. Maybe having a dedicated training platform becomes a bigger deal down the road. But frankly, almost all of these things are things where the justification for a large firm is the exact same as the justification for a small firm. It's a lot. And the like the compounding analysis paralysis of then how those things all plug into each other. Man, it is. It's no joke. Running an accounting firm is an extremely techy endeavor whether you like it or not. I personally like it, but that's not everybody's thing. Anything I missed? Any tools you want to shout out? Categories we're missing? Drop a note in the comments. Apps that you're just starting to use that you love or even the opposite, all that stuff's gold. Drop in the comments. In all likelihood you'll help somebody and I'll see you in the next one. RA.