330 Questions To Ask EVERY Lead Before Making Them a Client

Today, what are the questions we need to be asking every single new lead to ensure that they are not a stinker? That they have the potential to be an A or a B client rather than a C or a D? Other stuff, because it's a Q and A Friday, why not Thomson Reuters on VO and an exploration of non tax software that is sold by tax vendors. We got a new model from OpenAI last week. Couple thoughts from a listener who's developing custom software for a client niche. And then my thoughts on the state of reporting apps. Should we be using reporting apps these days? We're gonna talk about it. Come on in. Let's do it. Q and A Friday. Client intake forms. How to screen for some non quantitative metrics like maybe personality match. Will this person cast a curse on me over a zoom call? Do they value my services beyond them just being okay with my prices? Another very similar question I got. What are the best practices for finding A clients and weeding out the C and D clients before sending them a proposal? I was going to look a little different for each firm. Honestly, there's so much wisdom to be had and this is something I didn't do a good enough job with. There's so much wisdom to be had in mindfully digging into who our A clients are right now. And I've shared this before. We had some clients who, who just absolutely adored us and many of them were our highest paying clients. They would send us the gift baskets and they were so, so appreciative. And he didn't always know why because at the other end of the spectrum you would discount a bill for a certain client and they would still complain. And you're like, why do I have these people up here that are paying 10 times as much and love us and adore us and would probably pay us any more, even more. But then down here you got people that won't pay anything and we didn't do enough to understand why that was. And so the my first recommendation would be dig further into what makes your A clients your A cl and it may even be things about them or about their past that you're not aware of. It may be the fact that they try to get their, you know, somebody in their business to do their bookkeeping, their bill pay and their payroll for years. And it was just always a struggle because this person was not qualified for it. Like what is that thing about their past that makes you a killer fit? And then when we're thinking about how we attract more A clients, if, you know, going back to that example, say I'm going after dentists. And a lot of dentists have practice managers try to do their bookkeeping. Because it's bookkeeping, anybody can learn it in 60 minutes. Right? Shouldn't bookkeeping be automated at this point? Well, it never really works. And then you like, they get in processing payroll and all these things that still require unfortunately, like a little more expertise than this type of person is going to have. If a bunch of our A clients had that struggle where they spent a decade trying to get this type of person to do that work, boy, is that a great hook to go out and find more dental clinics. With my content, I could target practice managers who are getting asked to do this work but don't have the qualifications. I could literally put out bookkeeping training for practice managers. I can give them a DIY version of how to do this, help them to do it. Worst case, we make them better at it. But most likely they come to us for the more comprehensive version that we're going to do better. And they only learn about this because that practice manager is getting asked to do it. Right. That is a great, specific, painful pain that we could build content around that will attract people to us. So first recommendation on how to like avoid picking up more C and D clients is just having a more intimate understanding of what makes our clients value us. There's the other stuff Romeo hit on, like quantitative stuff, niche size things like that. Some other more squishy things that we don't always try to suss out. Preferred communications channel. There's certain people that just want to hop on a call anytime and you need to know if they're that type of person ahead of time or not. Kind of related, do they prefer working synchronously or asynchronously? I these days only work asynchronously. I take next to no live meetings. My entire team works asynchronously basically means you don't have to hop on and work at the same time or have live calls. Like, everybody has clear expectations of what they need to get done, when it needs to get done, and you get out of their way. And. And as long as they're getting that work done, it doesn't matter when they do it. And so that's my preferred way of working asynchronously. If a client, on the other hand, needs to always work on something together with you, and that grinds your gears and you don't want to do that, it's a good thing to know up front. And then last, there's still a lot to be said for like a vibe check. Like, how is it when you chat with that person? So much of our days are about like, what do we have the energy to do? Like, we are more energy limited than time limited usually. I think because when you find that thing you're excited and jacked about, you can work through the night and the hours just fly by. So a lot of what we do is more about energy than it is time. And folks that you love working with are energizing and folks that you despise are not. So when that phone rings and you look at it, are you excited to pick up that call or not? If you're running a small firm, this needs to factor into the equation. Even if they have lots of money to pay you for your services, if they're going to be super draining for you, then it's probably not a fit. Now, some context there very much depends on your firm size and, and your ambitions of where you want to go next. Because at the stage where you outgrow what you're capable of doing. So say your practice is getting to I would say a million, but honestly, you need to be thinking about it before you're at capacity. So say your firm is getting to a half million and you're still doing most of the client facing stuff. You are soon going to get to your limit of how much work you can oversee with your team while still being the face. And if you wait until you get to that limit to make a new plan, it's really, really hard because delegation, making the new plan, like that's all work, that's additional work that you have to do to get yourself over what will be a plateau. Some folks get there and they decide, this is just what I want to do. Like I like this level and from here I'm going to refine. And honestly, I think more people should do that because it takes an entirely different skill set to go out and build a team and, and remove yourself from the client work. And if you still enjoy doing the work, like what if you just ran a million dollar practice where you're like, we're gonna do this volume of work or we need to make this amount of money and the goal is then just to refine and refine and refine and not do more. Like the trap is to do more. And so if you get to that point and you're like, I kind of just wanna stick here, I think that's maybe the smartest thing that we can do because then we're Getting away from the lifestyle bloat and like, the. The problems with never having enough and just growth for growth, growth's sake. But for the people who are trying to remove themselves from the client work, which is what I ultimately did, because I learned that what I enjoyed was actually running the machine and the strategy and attracting talent to the firm, I learned that I enjoyed that stuff more. And so for me, it no longer became about what type of client is a good fit for me. It became about what type of client is a good fit for my team. And so when you're talking about both quantitative and qualitative things, this is a really big differentiator, because the type of person that works great for you and your team are going to be totally different. And oftentimes we can get frustrated because we will meet with somebody and we can hit it off with them. And maybe there's something there where your expertise makes you a great fit. And then you hand them off the team and you're like, what do you mean? They're great people? Like, how is it not working out? For me, that was software. Like, I have a little bit of software background. And so I started talking with more agencies and picked up a couple super successful development agencies that were like, you yikes. This is like a whole world of possibility that we haven't gotten into yet. And these people are just sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash and will pay way better than most of our other clients for these services that we do. So this is my justification. We need to go do more of this. But at the same time, I was in the process of getting myself out of client work, and I didn't have anybody else on my team with any sort of software expertise that could speak the language or really understand what was happening in the way that I could. And I had to make the really, really hard decision where I'm like, if I was going to go out and start a firm tomorrow that was just built around me, this would be a fun thing to pursue. But I'm not going to do that. I don't want to do that. And so I kind of had to close the door on that stuff. So be mindful of who am I, like, trying to attract and who is a great fit for my team, in addition to, like, who are our clients right now? Why do they love us? Why are the problems that we're solving painful? The better we understand those problems, I think the better we can filter those folks as they come in. Also, just like, and maybe this I'd go Without saying, having a very explicit filtering process, questions that you ask every single lead, you have to have some process to that so that the process can be improved and scrutinized. If it's just one guy sitting down, one lady sitting down who's always done this stuff, you're going to be good at it. And that's fine, like if you've done it for decades, whatever, but. But it's not a thing that can be improved and refined. Because if you get nine months down the road and you're like, boy, this client did not pan out. Could we have sussed this out ahead of time? When you have a process, you can circle back and be like, what could we have added to the process that would have called out that red flag earlier? And that is the value of the process itself and being able to improve upon it. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. True Story was just shooting a Sunday YouTube video and whenever I write these, I'm like, what's a good, like, ad partner that would fit in real nice and organically to this video? The video, I think is going to be a banger. It's about how to better use your scheduling app to like automate and standardize everything that happens around meetings. And I thought, what is a great tool to like, standardize the prep work for meetings? Oh my gosh, Live Flow. So many situations. Think about like a client discovery call. Being able to use Live Flow to pull a huge spreadsheet, Excel or Google Sheets workbook worth of data out of QBO or Xero, a whole bunch of tabs of information with the click of a button. Then literally select a different company that you're connected with. Click of the button, pull all that data for that company too. Say you're headed into a client discovery meeting. The client books that on your calendar. You also book 30 minutes of prep time. You pull all that data from their accounting file into a spreadsheet. You've got an easy way to review it all, go through it with them in the meeting. Another cool example. LifeFlow's got like over 100 templates of like different dashboards and advisory stuff. One of them is like a four week cash flow dashboard, like this big elaborate thing. You click the button, it pulls all the data from the accounting file. Let's say as one of my accounting packages, I do like weekly or monthly advisory calls with them. I use my booking tool for the client to schedule that live advisory meeting. I then book a prep meeting on my calendar, say 15 minutes or something like that to get ready for that meeting. I hop into my spreadsheet app. I hop into my spreadsheet app of choice with the click of a button. I pulled that cash flow data into a spreadsheet. So I got like everything and just like that 90% of my prep work buddy, it's it's there and I can customize that template to be whatever I want, use it across a bunch of different clients. Imagine making those types of meetings. So turnkey or you just use live Flow to pull all the data that you need for that meeting and with the the click of a button. Man. So cool. Really fun use case of liflow I often forget liflow also does consolidations. So where this is a real headache is when you got to pull stuff from a bunch of different company files. You can do that with a click of a button as well. Even if they have different chart of accounts set up the mapping. Once you could be heading into a big old board meeting with like a bunch of different companies involved. You can pull all the stuff that you need with a click of a button. Super cool. That's Lifelo. Learn more Check out the link down in the show Notes this episode is sponsored in part by Team Up. Team up helps you directly hire super talented accountants in the Philippines. Because you know what? Double entry accounting, you can do it anywhere. In fact, I'm looking at six talented people right here who are real, real live humans. The Team up have connected with accounting firms. Geralyn has got a BS in accounting. Went to work for a Canadian firm. They're paying her 900 bucks a month USD. She knows 0quickbooks bill.com she had one year of experience when they hired her. Sam he had to BS in accounting as well. US accounting firm hired him paying him 1430amonth. Had 5 years experience beforehand with US companies experienced with payroll. Was previously doing reviews on financial statements, sales tax. Sharnan BS in accounting, also a CPA QuickBooks Pro Advisor. Went to work for a US firm spanning her 1600 bucks a month. Had three years experience doing business returns, personal returns, even tax planning. So many people here where you're like if this was a I can tell you what most US firms would say. If this was a US resume you would be you'll be licking your chops. But here's the thing gang. If you're running a distributed team, really matter where they are. Now if you do tax in the U.S. are there disclosure requirements? Absolutely. But the 7216 rules are a reason to disclose, not a reason to not hire the best people to make your firm successful. That's it. If you're looking to find some folks who will work with your firm directly, Team has got a bunch of recruiters on the ground in the Philippines. You can find those people for you. I'll put a link to Team up down in the show Notes. Thanks for the question. Couple of people called out in the comments, I'm sure I'll just read this. I'm the head of an accounting team at a PASBA style firm that services around 300 monthly clients. This was Daniel in the comments. Thanks for calling this out Daniel. The fact that you called this out, Daniel helped so many people and it wasn't your intent by doing it, but it did. Back to the comment. We're all on board the Thompson Reuters CS Sweet Train to which includes practice file cabinet and. NET client portals. We're looking to make an upgrade soon. And onvio Envio is Thomson Reuters cloud based practice management system is the front runner in the race hearing onvio described. I think I said this in the episode he commented on hearing onvio described as quote hot hot oh hot hot doo doo is somewhat concerning. What are the red flags? Why is it so bad? How would you sell the red flags to an older firm owner? I must have said that. That sounds like something I would say. So here's the thing and I'll be honest, I'm stuck on this right now and if you have feedback or tips for me, I would gladly take them is I've worked with thousands of firms and I have this like mental network of what are all the little things I've heard from people and what works and what doesn't work and why did it work and why didn't this other thing work. And when it comes to Thomson Reuters anvio, there is just a preponderance of evidence that it works for virtually nobody. And that is just me. Like having conversations with so many firm owners over the last few years to where I just, I have this conviction that pretty much without exception there is no software besides tax software that we should be buying from any tax vendor. Name a tool, I'll give you a better alternative. We have to buy tax software from them because it's our only option, but nothing else should be bought from them. I feel very strongly that way. That's a product of my own experience, but it's a product of having talked with a whole ton of firms. So Daniel asked this question. Somebody else hopped in and they're like man, we were thinking about Amvio too. Like tell me More so I shared in the comments. I'm like anecdotally talking with folks I've yet to talk with a firm that's like, excited about this. And the ones who are on it and trying to stick it out, they will say we're not particularly happy with it. But those people also haven't kicked the tires on alternatives generally, because if they can see, here's the other tool that does the same thing, just way better at that point, you usually they jump. So, Daniel, if you're listening to this and we'll put links to both of these posts down in the show notes, it's a good question and it got me thinking bigger picture about how do I democratize these conversations that I've had. But also just the struggle of as soon as I say, well, I recommend this and I don't recommend that, people are like, well, why don't you recommend this? And I'm. And it's honestly, it's a hard thing to explain. And I want to do it the right way. And I don't want to, like, hear something that's maybe untruthful or unrepresentative and then parrot that to a bunch of people. So usually I'm only going to say that stuff if it's like everybody's telling me this thing. But how do I put that back out in the world in a way that's useful? Like, do I start collecting all those things people are saying? I've kind of been grappling with what is the best way to do that. And so I turned to Twitter and I turned to LinkedIn and I did a poll and I said, if you got experience with them, who do you go with? Carbon or Anvil? Because Carbon is kind of a. Kind of a. In some ways, in a lot of ways a similar platform. And both on LinkedIn, both on Twitter, if you could read the replies, nobody would ever buy on vo, you just wouldn't. There are people in those replies who use onvio, who read the replies and were like, well, I was completely blind to how awful of a platform this is that I'm using. And so the poll was one thing. The poll is not perfect, though, because you'll have some. You'll have people voting who, like, have used one, but not the other. The value was the replies and the experiences that people shared, good and bad for both platforms. But on a whole, when you read through all of those, and this is the power of getting out of doing what we do in such siloed ways, when you read through all of those replies, everybody would come to the same conclusion. Not necessarily that carbon is the answer for everyone, but that anvio is almost certainly not the answer for you. And so I've, I've shared this, this story a hundred times that I spent, you know, 18 months, the whole team, deciding what practice management system we're going to go into. So much training, so much cost, so much time. We went to practice CS, actually, we got two months into it and I'm like, 18 months we just wasted. What do I do now? The team is exhausted at this change and they're all PO'd because they're not happy with how it's working. Do I now say we're going to do it all over again, or do you sugarcoat it and you're like, let's just keep going, guys. I'm sure it'll get better. That is a awful, awful, awful situation to find yourselves in. Daniel asked this question and probably saved tens of people from going through that exact situation, Daniel included, probably from those conversations that it led to online. That's super, super valuable. How do we enable, like, way more of that, like, way more transparency? I've been thinking about that stuff a lot because I always tell people, like, having a network and people that you can ask is so incredibly valuable. But not everybody has that. Like I have that. And that's easy for me to say because the nature of what I do is very visible and that's what I do is I talk to firms all day, but most people have jobs, so, like, they're not doing that like I am. But it was just a really powerful reminder of how the answers we're looking for are already out there and we're all doing the same things. And that scary thing that you're looking at and you're considering a whole bunch of people have already done that and if you can only get access to them and learn their experience, you're going to be so much more informed about what you do next. So stop trying to figure it all out on your own. Like, hopefully, like even in this content, in the comments, like, hopefully some function of what I'm doing is bringing people together to share more of that stuff. Hey, OpenAI dropped a new model. I still don't understand how to say what it's called. I've got access to it. If you're on chat on a paid version of ChatGPT now, when your selectors in the dropdown you should be able to select it. It is 01 and then 01 mini. So inside of ChatGPT in the dropdown, you'll see two new models right now. Mine says 01 in parentheses preview and then there's 01. Mini 01's the big boy. Go with 01. If you're like kicking the tires on what can this do? First thing I tried, because I'm a nerd like that, I chucked a set of financial statements in there. I actually chucked a balance sheet in good old Craig's Landscaping and Design or whatever the sample company is in qbo. And one thing that language models have a hard time with is like doing a large number of tasks. You can chunk it out and have it do like one task at a time and that's much better. But if you ask them to do too many things, it just kind of, it kind of falls apart or too abstract of a thing. So I gave it a, a balance sheet and I said, you're an expert, a technical reviewer, you're an accountant. I'm not interested in insights about the business or its financial health. I want you to technically review this balance sheet to ensure that it is correct. Give me a list of possible errors in like the technical aspects of the accounting that we need to review. And what this model does is OpenAI says it's the first model that's capable of deep reasoning and that is a deeper level of thought than just generating one token at a time. So basically what it does is it has this iterative internal conversation before it produces anything that you see. Like it basically argues with itself, attacks the problem from a bunch of different angles. So there's a whole bunch of different prompting that's happening behind the scenes before it gives you an answer. And it is a version of stuff like chain of thought prompting and some, some prompt engineering strategies in the past that give you better results. Like you know, when, when they had chat GPT take the CPA exam, the GPT4 model got like 65 on its first try, but with just a little bit of prompt engineering structuring how it answers the question a little different. It got to like an 85 or something like that. And so this new model is a version of that turned up to 11 where it's like their best practices for how to make it do this internal dialogue to give you a higher quality result. And it's doing like PhD level physics, chemistry, a lot of really, really interesting stuff that it is capable of now that it couldn't do before. We talk about accounting getting replaced by all this stuff. There are way more like exposed professions of like white collar professionals right now than accountants. But it's supposed to be this deeper level of reasoning. So I chuck a balance sheet into it and ask it to identify potential errors and it'll give me a list of like 10 things and they're pretty good. Like it's calling out stuff like there was a, and this is in the QuickBooks demo file, there was a current liability balance that went negative. It's going to call that out. And it's like, that's probably not right. Opening balance equity. That balance changed month over month. And it's like, I don't know why things would be getting put to this rather than an owner distribution or owner contribution. But also this account shouldn't be here to begin with. It's really just a product of an account set up and needs to be moved to some other equity account. It was pretty good, honestly. It did a couple of things like it complained that there was $0 in retained earnings and I gave it a month over month balance sheet. And it was like, you probably need to look into this. But because it was a month over month balance sheet, I wouldn't say that because net income would get closed out at year end. Right. But I will say I have been very impressed. It is more capable for sure than GPT4O the last one, it takes longer. And so on average a task like that, it'll take 10 to 20 seconds, which I don't know, in some ways people will like bulk. Like I gotta wait 10 or 20 seconds for it to respond. It's like this is the most powerful technology humanity has ever had. If it will do magic for you, yeah, you could wait 10 or 20 seconds. What I'm more interested in, and it's stuff that I'm already testing is how this gets productized into an app for like quality assurance. So for example, what would happen behind the scenes with the software platform that we use that makes use of this? And I got a prototype of this that actually works very well. And I build this stuff with a tool called wordware which I've talked about quite a bit, Spelled how it sounds basically lets you just build like AI workflows of prompting different ways. But I did some prototyping with this thinking how far could we get with this with like a software platform that you know, for example would just do reviews of like is this financial statement correct? Without any real direct instruction. And so how I set this up is I, I have basically two prompts. I have a supervisor prompt and conversation and then like a worker prompt. And so the Supervisor first makes a list of potential errors and then one by one, each of those potential errors get handed off to the worker conversation. And the worker conversation is giving given more context in this case, it gets both the balance sheet and I give it the full G and L detail for the last two months. And then the error from I say your manager, so I give it the balance sheet, the GL and I say this is a potential error that your manager has identified. Look into the general ledger detail that they didn't have and decide one of three things. Either it is an error and propose a resolution that it is not an error. And if it isn't, provide the GL detail that led you to decide that it wasn't an error. Or third, that we need more information from the business, pull any GL detail that should inform how we ask that question and then draft the question that we ought to ask. And so there's this supervisor conversation that at a high level just sees the balance sheet and identifies possible issues by the way, the same way that we review, right. Like you start at the top level financials and then you look deeper only when necessary. And then for each of those potential errors that that identifies, it hands that error off to another conversation to do a deeper dive into that potential error before bubbling all that back up into that supervisor conversation. For then a more concise list of here's three potential issues that I'm unable to resolve and any supporting documentation that will help you decide if this is truly an issue or not. I scrapped that together this morning in about 30 minutes. It's really good. The problem with models in the past is we will come to them and expect something novel and say, do this thing for me. And we just expect that it will come back and do it the exact same that we way that we would have. And then we're annoyed when it doesn't, by the way, exact same thing we do with other humans. And so my advice has always been like, don't expect novel insights from AI Right now the better thing to do is actually instruct it exactly on how you would do that work and then cut it loose because if it will do work for you, that's valuable. And so an example of that is, you know, in the past we made a little GPT that would write a two to three minute video delivery script that we would use when delivering financials to a client. And that prompt was like, I'm going to give you a balance sheet and a financial statement and you're going to write a two to three minute script to go through when delivering these financials over video. But that prompt was really specific. It said things like always call out changes in the cash balance, always call out greater than 100% changes on balance on profit and loss items, always call out payroll, expense. The type of stuff that you know, that is the things you really look for when you're reviewing this. I instructed that all explicitly to the AI to say look into this stuff. And for the AI we've had to date, that's all it will really do for you. I can't cut it loose and expect it to do that the same way that I would. But if I give it very explicit instructions, it does it pretty well. Now, this new model, it's challenging that a little bit for me because it actually is coming up with some pretty interesting stuff. And I think the bigger problem that we're going to have in the near term is like, okay, I already have a process that goes from step one to step ten and I know how to get this done. You have to tell me explicitly which step and like in which contexts does this make my life easier? Because accounting firms are built around the prep, the review, the sign, the deliver. Right. And it's. It is the integrating into our workflows that I honestly think is the hardest part, like the hardest aspect of making this useful to us. But we'll keep talking about like cool ideas and cool things we're testing. I find the more that we do that, the more product companies pick that stuff up and build it into the apps, the solutions that they are building for us. We'll keep driving that conversation and hopefully we have some cool new stuff in our hands soon from our favorite software providers. Today's episode is sponsored in part by bookkeep, the tool that's going to automate a whole bunch of your e commerce accounting workflows. You know, apps like to get all up in your face and be like, come use me bookkeep. What people love about bookkeep, this is an actual user quote. Bookkeep works so well I forget I am using it. Don't you want the thing that just works his thing with bookkeeping? Bunch of their team. Actually most of their team are accountants and bookkeepers. They're not software nerds that were looking to cash in on some sort of plugging a thing into another thing, arbitrage. What's the difference with bookkeep? Well, they use sale data while other apps base their entries on payout data. This means that they're like inherently cash basis, right? Bookkeep uses sale data means you have way more granular control over what you can do with it. Seeing very detailed information from each sale and giving you greater power for handling very complex scenarios where, say, you're selling across multiple e comm channels, taking various payment methods. You can map all that stuff so you're not just stuck with the payout data, right? To handle tricky stuff like booking Shopify revenue based on fulfillment date as opposed to the default, which is the order date. Somebody listening to this just got really excited, man. No other app does that, okay? Your payouts will always reconcile to your bank feeds to the penny. And you're never going to miss a payout because bookkeep will literally tell you every single day how much money each selling platform owes you. That is the power of using the sale data, not just the payout data, right? If you're hustling e comm stuff, please just don't stop DIY and hacking together. You just, just don't. Okay? Get in touch with the folks at Bookkeep. They're counting some bookkeepers just like us. You will feel heard and understood. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Core v. True Story. I don't think I fully got my head around tax advisory work until maybe seven or eight years ago when I saw my first demo of Corby. What Corby does really, really well is it visualizes the savings you provide by delivering tax advisory work. And this is something that our tax software is just horrendous at. It doesn't do it at all. All it really does is report back on like outcomes. And you could use maybe say BNA and have like kind of comparison columns of before and after. But what Corvi does is they have over 1200 like quote unquote tax strategies, which are many things that we know and we take for granted, but we don't always present to our clients to be like, hey, look at this smart thing that I did for you. And it explicitly outlines the various strategies you're employing for the client in terms of like real dollar savings, dollar savings over time, year over year. Like, you know that selection I had you do two years ago? Like, here's the rolling savings that we're getting you. And this is why some firms are able to charge like north of 10k for tax planning work, even very small, like 3 person firms, while other firms are doing quote unquote tax planning at the end of the year. And like charging 300 bucks. It is all about the framing of the value to claim. There is kind of a small category of tools growing around just tax advisory. Corvi is one of them. Admittedly, they're not cheap tools, but the reason they exist and the reason they're finding success is because the firms that are using them are charging top, like top, top dollar for tax advisory work. If you tune into this pod, you know that my belief is if you run a tax firm, tax advisory work, getting people up that value ladder is arguably the best thing that you can do for the profitability of your firm. Now, tech can be a massive help here. I honestly don't know how I would do that work without Corvey or something very similar to it. Learn more about Corvey. Check out the link down in the show notes. Couple more here, Kurt. I'm working on a project to develop a basic financial ledger as a web app. It'll be for cash basis entities with a low transaction volume. How would you suggest marketing the product to clients? That is, there's a big gap at the bottom of the accounting ledger market right now. Your qbos, your zeros, everybody's going up market. But I would argue inside of the run of the mill, let's say tax firm, There are as many businesses that do not require a big expensive ledger as there are that do. Because you'll have LLCs with a rental in it. You'll have a management company for every client I would have that has a big profitable business. They would have four itty bitty companies wrapped around it. A staffing company like you just end up with all these little holding companies. And to pay into it 80 bucks a month for like a file for every one of their rentals or whatever it is, like, that is highway robbery. So there's a big old gap at the bottom of the accounting ledger market right now. It's kind of a bummer anyways. Kurt's asking, if I build this thing, how do I market to my clients? My initial reaction is, I don't know. The clients give a hoot. Clients come to accountants because they're like, can you get this stuff done? If I come to them? And I'm like, hey, here's a cheap ledger solution. They may be like, oh, so I can pay 20 bucks a month instead of 60 bucks a month? Like, I guess that's cool. But at least most of my clients, they would just be like, I don't really care cause I'm paying you like 500 bucks a month or a thousand bucks or 5,000 bucks a month. You just go Use what you think is going to be best. So I don't know if there's a version of that that like your clients get excited about. If it's better for you and more profitable for you. A hundred percent. By and large clients need to like what's a nice way to say this? Get in line. Because we are better equipped to make tech decisions when it comes to the accounting and finance stack than they are. Right. So I almost don't care what they think. I do, but I don't. But I do think like very niche specific versions of this are a great way to attract a client with very specific problems. Like what is a. What are some industries where traditional ledgers don't serve them? They need some additional thing that traditional ledgers don't do. That's a really interesting way in. I think if you could somehow tailor this just a bit to do something that traditional tools don't so that you are the one stop shop for that type of person that has that very specific need. That's the type of software and it doesn't even have to be full blown software. It can be like little automations. That's the type of thing that gets me interested for accounting firms and what becomes like a killer lead magnet I would say more so than like building the next accounting ledger, but if you do, by all means it's probably the accountants that are going to be more excited about that than the clients. If we can have a cheap, low cost like entry level ledger solution. Last Reporting Apps the question I've been looking at your demo day videos and I'm wondering if you ever use software that helps with modeling and forecasting. I recently started my own accounting/fractional CFO firm. I'm currently using Excel to experiment with different scenarios for clients and see what their financial Runway looks like given a few different triggers. Would love to use a sleek software that does this. Well, I've never been a big reporting app guy to be totally honest. The biggest thing to change in the reporting space in the last few years I think is all of the tools for spreadsheet reporting has gotten better. The main players there Live Flow, G Con and Amalgam. They're building solutions for like integrating your spreadsheets with QuickBooks and Xero and even other like Stripe other systems beyond even just the accounting ledger. If there's been any trend in the last few years, it's almost the unplatformization of reporting to get it back to a spreadsheet. I can tell you my experience with reporting and Trying to roll it out to clients is I was really impressed with reporting suites and they looked cool and they were valuable for me, but for my client, they absolutely were not. And this is not to say this is the case for everybody, because I know a lot of firms that use reporting apps for every single one of their client engagements. The I think what I came into it with was the expectation that they're going to see these reports and be amazed in the same way that I was when my blind spot was they don't even understand the balance sheet and profit and loss that I already send them. And sending something more involved, like they're just further from drawing actionable insights from that. Right. So my favorite version of reporting that I ever got to at the time I was doing with Fathom and. And what I liked about it was it reduced reporting to a set of KPIs. And fathom does KPIs really well. I honestly don't know enough about the other reporting platforms to know who does those best, but when it came to a small business owner, I had to reduce what they were looking at to get them to something helpful, not add more with what you're talking about, where you're talking about drivers and stuff like that. My mind goes to a tool like Giraffe that is built around, like financial drivers. Much higher like entry point from a cost standpoint for a solution like that. But honestly, if there's a trend that's happening right now, it is like, it kind of seems like that stuff's coming back to spreadsheets in many ways and there will be hairy situations where you need something more than that. The problem is it's just really hard to beat the flexibility of a spreadsheet and to be in a meeting. Anytime you're in a meeting, like, the conversation evolves and gets bigger and goes different directions. And oftentimes that reporting product doesn't have the adaptability to quickly get to. Well, show me this version of that and this version of that. Whereas a system that is just connected to the accounting ledger and pulling that stuff into a spreadsheet, like as kind of the ultimate flexible thing. Maybe five years ago, there was a ton of investment pouring into reporting apps, and I think that has kind of petered out. I don't know that those have totally panned out the way that folks had thought. And this may be a hot take, but I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that most accountants are not in the market for buying advisory tools. There's certainly accountants that do Quote, unquote advisory. But people are much sooner to buy the thing that will help them get what they already do done more efficiently. They're much faster to buy that thing than they are to go buy a tool that will help them to do a new thing. Now, oftentimes the solution to getting out of the rut that we are in is doing that new thing. And I think the biggest example of that is probably tax advisory work, particularly as tax prep is increasingly getting commoditized. Most tax pros, if you can prep a return, you can do advisory work. I think it's actually a bigger lift to be doing bookkeeping work for someone and then start doing BCFO type of work, particularly if you're a general firm and not serving a very specific niche. But in the accounting space the last five years there's been such a big push towards like advisory, advisory, advisory. Everybody needs to do advisory. And 90% of people are like, I'd rather not. Can you just sell me software that'll help me do what I already do better? And I can completely understand that, like human nature is just to do more of what we already do, not to go do this other new thing that I don't even know how to do. There's a lot of nuance in that. Like there's times when that is the right answer where we should be doing something different. But not as much as I think software has kind of driven things. So there's this big explosion of all these different reporting apps. They got a bunch of investment and I haven't seen, at least among the accounting community, there's been a huge amount of adoption. The big players in that space, as soon as I start listing them, I'm going to forget somebody. Spotlight, Fathom, Reach, Drive, Causal. I know there's a couple more that turn up at conferences I'm not thinking of, but I wouldn't go out and find a reporting app for the sake of finding a reporting app. I would start in a spreadsheet. And if there's things your spreadsheet is not doing for you, I think then you go look at a reporting app. But you certainly don't start in a reporting app. I think you start in the spreadsheet. What do you think? Is that too hot of a take? In fact, I know there's folks in the audience that really rely on reporting tools. I would say tell me why you disagree with that. Maybe it's just the esthetics of like having a nicely packaged up, much better looking, deliverable each month. Maybe that is the appeal? I don't know. That is a very, that's a very loosely held I don't know thought for me right now but but I also just don't bump into all that many firms that like swear by a specific reporting app and they're like we're so reliant on this. Thanks for your questions. Keep them coming down in the comments. If you're listening on the podcast feed pop over to the YouTube feed. It'll be linked in your podcast player. Drop a question or comment down there anytime. It's kind of the most fun part of this I think is the comments and people making friends down there. But those questions help everybody else out too. So if you've got it, somebody else has got it. I mean the Thompson Reuters on video thing is a great example of that. I think we helped a lot of people there. That's it for today. I'll see you in the next one.