345 Is Accounting Firm Tech Getting Too Expensive?

Software for accounting firms has never been more expensive than it is today. And buddy, the problem is about to get worse.

I'm going to tell you why. But what should we do about that ultimately?

Like what do I do with that information?

Do I buy?

Do I wait? Also because it's a Q and A Friday we're talking about, should I position.

My accounting firm as like AI nerd to attract a more modern, progressive type of client?

Why that might be a good idea, why it might actually be a bad idea. And the problem with half baked features in your software, how this is a.

Trap that is infecting a growing number of accounting apps in our ecosystem and ought to impact our buying decisions.

Come on in. It is Jason. What it is Jason Daly, Q and A Friday. Let's do it.

Okay. Accounting firm software. It is quite expensive.

Most people estimate it's 4 to 6%.

Of revenue for small firms. So for a million dollar firm, you are burning a 1998 headcount FTE on.

Software lines of code every single year. And it's only going to get worse because of a little thing I like.

To call artificial intelligence. Here's what's about to happen with AI developments in the pipeline and AI solutions getting more agentic. The word agent is like it'll go and do stuff for you. So rather than talking about the work, which is what AI has done to date, it will actually go out and do the work.

And that's a really exciting threshold to get over.

The problem, if you can call it a problem, is software companies acting in.

The interest of themselves and their investors will frame these new features as FTE replacements. What do you mean? Jim had to do that job before.

Now our agent will do that job first for you.

To be fair, it's the exact same thing I would do in a cast.

Or a managed accounting engagement with my clients.

Oh yeah, that, that AP function Tina's doing over there.

Yeah, we'll pick that up for you and then we'll just automate the heck out of it.

But you better believe I was charging them Tina dollars to get that work done. So if the future of software is.

It doing the work for you and AI becoming more agentic, don't be surprised.

If software companies don't start asking axing asking for more and more. Don't be surprised if software companies start asking for more and more.

Buckaroos. We're. I've already seen this with Canva, the online design tool. They're asking for 300% the normal subscription fee to get access to their AI.

Tools and their AI tools are all right.

They actually don't have the best AI tools of like creative tools right now, but they are timesavers. Canva was already a pretty cheap product which is part of what makes that 300% figure shocking. But this is going to happen in all of software ultimately. Am I going to transition my entire salaries and wages line item to software? I'm not. Because the technology that this AI stuff is being built on top of, everybody's using the same models behind the scenes. As prices increase, it creates more opportunity lower down in the market for other folks to come in. I mean a massive example of this right now is the accounting ledger space. You've got a small collection of cloud based accounting apps who've been around now for like 15, 20 years are pretty long in the teeth and the only place they really have to grow is up market. Like those companies have to keep making more money. So subscription prices continue to go up. They keep adding tiers on top of of what they do. Zero always had their, their, their partner and their ledger plan which were like very cheap back in the day. I don't know that I could say what I was paying for them but back in the day I was not paying much per account. For those into it to their credit they announced, they launched that QuickBooks is it ledger. It's like a itty bitty baby QBO subscription basically for your once a year tax clients. So you can pull them in, import the banking transactions, do all the classifications there and then hopefully get them on the straight and narrow going forward for ongoing bookkeeping. But by and large the main thrust.

Thrux emphasis for these tools is to.

Continue to go up market. And I don't know about your firm.

My firm has more entities that need less than need more because just about.

Every entrepreneur as soon as they have a successful business, well now they got an LLC for this other rental. They just bought an LLC for this other thing and this other little side business and all these different things with.

These itty bitty baby companies where to pay $70 a month for an accounting software subscription for that itty bitty baby.

Company just seems like highway robbery. And that's an example of the market.

Like going up market and up market and upmarket and eventually somebody comes in.

Beneath there, they sweep the leg, they provide the solution for all the other businesses that don't require all of that complexity. I'm hoping we get that soon on the ledger side. But I think that's what ultimately happens if all of our Accounting solutions go too far up market. It just creates space lower down in the market.

But in the short term, as the AI stuff gets really spicy, the incumbent platforms today, they're not going to get smaller, they're not going to get cheaper.

They'Re just going to keep going up. Now how should we feel about this? As you know, I'm a, I'm a advocate of accounting space specific tech because compared with mainstream tech it offers a.

Higher ceiling in terms of the ways.

That it can support us. If you look at the Microsoft suite of applications, if, and they're a million miles from this right now, but if they eventually build the ultimate AI enabled platform where it can see into all the other apps and all of your data and it's all just super seamless. If Microsoft absolutely nails that, it will never look into my client's accounting ledger to help me respond to an email. It will never, not without plugins or something like that, be able to look into a PDF of a tax return which is a completely unstructured PDF that makes no logical like sense in terms of just pulling the text out of it. What a number is and what it's associated with the Microsoft suite is not going to make sense of what's on that tax return.

And if the future of tech for accounting and tax pros is just using.

The same tools off the shelves that any old person can use, that is a really bad thing for the profession. We are, you know, part of what gatekeeps our ability to do what we do and other people not being able to do it is your tax software. Is the, the industry like specific to us tooling that we have to be really efficient in the work that we do. If you do bookkeeping, you know, tool.

Like keeper that lets you manage a bunch of month end closes like all in one really nice concise way that industry specific tooling gives us a leg.

Up on normies trying to do the work that we do. And I want to keep supporting the.

People who are going to build great.

Tools to enable the profession just for the health of the profession as a whole.

So for me the solution is to.

Not go by mainstream tech. The solution is for the accounting ecosystem to continue to grow. Because right now while I'm, I'm still bullish on tech and I'm going to spend a lot of money on tech.

Tech right now is priced for more.

Mature firms I would argue than it used to. So the thing with tech pricing is.

Your tech in many ways is a fixed cost.

It isn't actually. But what I mean by that is.

Basically if I charge $100 for a.

Tax return and you charge $1,000 for a tax return, I'm going to pay the same amount for a for the.

Same tech and for the thousand dollar.

Tax return firm, pick a number. I'm just saying hypothetically it can be 10x for that more premium firm. That software is a no brainer if it saves a bit of their time. But for that smaller firm, that's a much harder proposition to think through, isn't it? And right now, as things have continued to get more premium, where it's really put the squeeze on people is specifically for the firms who are general firms who do not have market power in order to price differently than the other people in the market, which is frankly still most firms, those firms that do not have market power to charge premium rates are having a hard time building a tech stack in a cost effective way.

This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Hey, cool new thing. Live Flow just shipped in their platform dashboards. So Live Flow, if you remember awesome way to connect your QuickBooks and your 0 ledgers with Excel or Google Sheets, you now have just a button in your Google Sheets or Excel that can.

Connect you to like any accounting ledger you have access to.

But they're building on that to now offer dashboards where via the same ledger connections you can now pull like widgets into a dashboard for your client. Because it's Live Flow, they've templatized a.

Whole bunch of it so you can.

Swipe KPIs, build out this super nice.

Visual for your client and all you.

Got to do to share it with them, just copy the little link, send it to them, bada bing, bada boom. Cool dashboard, bro. As I told you recently, Lflow just raised a big old Series A, so they're putting all sorts of cool new investment into the product we're checking out. Link down in the show Notes bud. Okay, this episode is sponsored in part by Team up, who helps you find talented accountants in the Philippines. Conversation Online I actually realize a lot of folks when they think about offshoring, what they're actually thinking about is delegating work to a great group that then does the work and gives you the work back. Because most of the offshoring failures I've heard they said, you know, the work quality wasn't good enough or something like that. And that is why the only way I ever touched offshoring was just hiring my own people, just like I do onshore. I honestly don't want to chuck my work into a black box and just.

Like hope that the quality comes back how I want it to.

I just want to develop people and I want them to work with me. That's what team up helps you do. They got recruiters on the ground in the Philippines that will find you really talented people and you develop them just like anybody else that you do in your team. And I think that's actually a big misnomer with how you offshore these days. And it's probably because a lot of the cold outreach, even though it's coming from people saying, I will do your bookkeeping, these are Personas that offshore groups use to pull more work into that offshoring service.

And you go down that path, you.

Get into the sales process and you get like their very best person who will dazzle you, and you're like, oh, this is great. And then you send them 10 times as many projects and it goes to.

The back of the office and you're like, this sucks. What have I done?

The solution, just hire people, test them.

Before you hire them, train them.

It's not any different than hiring people onshore is what I did. You want to get started? Talk to folks at Team up link.

Down in the show notes now. There's an argument to be made here that investing in technology can potentially accelerate your path to two having greater market power and being able to charge premium rates and all that stuff. It is, it is interesting though, even in, you know, the comments of a YouTube video around a specific tool and you see this on social media a ton for, for a given tool, you will have one person that swears by it and will be like, this has absolutely changed everything for us. We run every single engagement through us, through this and we cannot imagine doing it any differently. And the very next comment will be, this is so astronomically expensive. Nobody's actually using this. There's no way. And it's, I mean, it's just like a really clear example of how the reality, like your reality is so defined by what you know and the people you're surrounded with and all that you've ever done. And for the folks whose reality is that their firms are charging more premium prices and they can carry those costs, it's not a big deal. The software is, you know, probably a no brainer, but for the firms who aren't there yet, which frankly is most firms, you gotta make some hard decisions. Now I will add some seasoning to this to say I still believe that new age skinny gene avocado toast firm runners among Whom I count myself and the people that listen to stuff like this. Like, we are definitely progressive firm running folks. I do think there has been so much shame assigned to manual tasks that we forget the power of a repeatable manual system. So if an integration takes data from A to B, and that's ultimately the premise of a product, that it will integrate that thing and, and eliminate manual entry. Manual entry is something that you can hire for. I mean, it's. There's a whole lot of people where that is their job. It comes with higher turnover. It's not something your professional staff can do. It's something that's harder to hire for onshore than it is offshore.

But repeatable processes, like having systems to do something manually, we need to invest.

In developing those Systems and those SOPs. Too often we try to automate something, get annoyed that it won't be automated, and then create no system for it as a result. When everywhere around you in the world there are manual systems that everybody wishes didn't exist, but are being done in a manual way because they still have to be done. And so if you do the math on is this tool worth it for me, or is there actually a manual way that will work just fine oftentimes, and it may be smaller firms that are digging into this more, oftentimes there's a totally manual way that will be just fine. Maybe because you're not at the volume that justifies paying those software fees for it to be done by the software instead of just like hiring an admin who will do it for you. There are very real examples of that right now. And vendors know this. They're pricing it to be more expensive than like hiring an offshore person to do it or oftentimes hiring an admin to do it, because in theory it ought to be more accurate if the computer does it. But if you want to make a case for the humans, oftentimes these folks that you hire into these roles become really powerful members of the team longer term. They learn that work along the way and then they do something a little bit more valuable next. And before you know it, they're a super, super critical member of the team. But I can, I can relate. Like if you look at even what practice management systems cost now, those are kind of the core systems and it's easier to maybe justify premium pricing for those because they are so important. But even the adjacent systems these days have gotten more expensive.

If it's my firm, don't get me.

Wrong, I'm leaning super hard into tech. I'm Paying that ransom because these platforms know what they are ultimately worth. But if you're in a place where you're kind of taking the price of the market still it puts you in a tough spot where you gotta, you gotta make some real decisions of here may be what my dream stack would be, but here's what the budget will afford according to how much I'm making on these engagements right now. A bigger percentage than ever before of engagement pricing is going straight back out the door to software and it makes.

Clear information and right the right decision.

Making and really pressuring your vendors to deliver on the promise of what they've sold you more important than ever. It's also a case for not entering into contracts, which I will never do with my software vendors. It's a great way for them to hook you and then leave you flapping in the breeze with not quite what you expected and then not having a way out.

But it's no joke.

It's getting spendy and I think we'll continue to get more spendy.

Okay, voice memo alert. Up next. Check this one out.

Some context here. A person sent this question in.

They're coming into a more legacy firm.

Thinking about more progressive ways to present their firm externally is we have a.

Lot of older clients. We do not have great technology currently. So I'm thinking about sort of I'm looking at Tax plan IQ as tax planning software. I'm looking at Stanford Tax as like the upfront organization of deliver of client deliverables. So if I install those two pieces, I'm thinking about sort of rebranding some of our tax offerings as something along the lines of AI Tax Team or AI Tax Gurus or something along those lines. Publicly stating that we're AI focused and hopefully differentiating from all the other name and name and dead guy and dead guy accounting firms locally and hopefully getting entrepreneurial, younger, tech savvier clients. So what are your thoughts on a rebranded within the firm offering explicitly called AI Tax Team, AI Tax Gurus, something along those lines. Thanks, bye.

Uh, thanks for the question by the way.

You know, send me a video, voice memo, whatever, do it. I've got a little form for that actually that makes it easy to send me a voice memo or anything else or just a text like text message and folks are always surprised I actually respond.

Or they're like whoever manages this inbox, buddy, it's me. Maybe there's a day where that's not.

Me, but today it's me but tech.

Stack wise Stanford Tax Tax Plan iq.

Yeah, both Are good tax plan IQ for like tax advisory managing that engagement, Stanford tax managing intake? Absolutely. But do you stand up like at more of an AI angle in your marketing to attract more progressive folks?

I think in all likelihood it probably.

Would attract more progressive folks, but I.

Don'T know that it would rise to.

The level of actually making it like the cornerstone of your marketing.

I would say it's more akin to.

Like the aesthetic of a website. Does your website look modern of the times?

Does it look like the kind of website that you would design?

Okay, then maybe this is an accounting firm for me. And these days I would argue that we put way too much weight into the aesthetic of a website and not enough weight into the communication of the problems that you solve and how valuable they are.

So if all we do is stand.

Up some marketing saying like, hey, we're we use AI tax tools and stuff like that, that might be worth doing no matter what, just so that it's a kind of a signal that you are progressive and not kind of the.

I don't know, the casually old firm.

That I think people just assume that all accounting firms are right.

But I wouldn't say it ought to.

Be the cornerstone of, of what you present there. There's also a little bit of a risk of it attracting people who think that that's going to make it easy or that's going to make it cheaper or something like that.

The most important thing that you can.

Put on your on your website, in my opinion, is a really killer hook for a specific type of person that you know that you can serve and will value the pains that you solve. And if you don't know what that is yet, you can certainly go out and poke around in the dark and set up landing pages and online campaigns and stuff like that to try to find what that more painful problem is.

But if you don't know where to.

Start, a good spot is just to look at your client list. As it stands today, there's a huge spectrum of people there from the folks who complain every time you send them an invoice that's already been discounted. And those are generally not bad people. They just don't acutely feel the pains that you solve for, so they don't value what you're doing. But then you'll oftentimes have people on the other end of the spectrum who are paying you top dollar that love you and will likely even pay you more to do the same work. Dig into why that is on the other end of the spectrum. You're Solving a more painful problem for them. And that could be a product of past experience. Maybe they tried to do it another way for a decade. And so when they came to you, it was like, oh, my gosh, where have you been all my life? Maybe there's, you know, something very specific to them. Maybe it's an industry problem that you solve well for that they don't even realize.

Dig into why that is, and then.

That is a killer thing to start hammering on. An example I've shared in the past is one of our happiest dental clients, when we were doing dental stuff, was a lady who had spent 20 years trying to get her office managers to do the bookkeeping and pay the bills and do the payroll and all this stuff. And you have these issues with security and with asking them to do things they're not really experts at. Right.

And she kind of tried a couple.

Bookkeepers, but then they couldn't, like, work well with her tax preparer. And we took all of that stuff in house. The bill pay, the payroll, the bookkeeping, the tax work, tax planning. And she absolutely loved us. And she was paying us top dollar as much as any of our single doc dental clinics. And she probably would have paid half again as much as we were charging her. She was the one sending us all the monster gift baskets for the holidays. And it's when you have somebody like that that absolutely adores you that you got to stop and be like, okay, we're making really good money on this client. And my life would be a whole lot easier if my client list was. Was just a bunch of this client. How do we get there? And that's where you start, like building a landing page around. Are you struggling to get your practice manager to run the back office? Maybe you even stand up training content for the person in that role who's kind of destined to fail. And that's ultimately how they find you and eventually hire you to do that work. That ought to be the cornerstone of what your website communicates. And there's a lot of blockers here that we struggle with from the fear of getting specific because we think we're limiting ourselves when actually that's how you find people, is getting specific. We're afraid of putting that stuff out public because you have a lot of clients right now that don't fit into that box. And you're afraid that if they see it, that they'll think, oh, this isn't actually affirmed for me anymore. The reality is most of those people aren't watching you and they don't really care. You can stand up landing pages that are like we did an episode recently on why accounting firm websites are dead and actually squeeze pages like lead funnel.

Pages, landing pages speaking to a specific.

Person, which are not like your main landing page, yourfirm.com, it's yourfirm.com your office manager sucks. Like that's where you attract that new type of better client. Because ultimately the goal running a small firm is to find that single next client who will pay you 1.5x to do largely the same work for more money because it's a more painful pain for them. And you rebuild that practice one client at a time. And before you know it, one of those better projects that lets you drop three legacy projects like you've solved your capacity issues, your, your profitability issues, your daddy issues. You'll look better when you look in the mirror and your wife will finally treat you with the respect you deserve.

What's the last question? This episode is sponsored in part by Ignition. Come, come, come, come, come. Here's the thing.

Here's the thing about client billing. You can't bill for the time you spend billing. You can't. You can't. It is pure waste.

And we're bad at billing cuz it's. It's icky. You let things slide. You don't get paid. You waste time.

Waste time chasing people for money. That's not what I did. I would just. I didn't want to waste time chasing them and so I would just. I just eat it. Don't do that.

This is where Ignition comes in.

The leading revenue generation platform for accounts and professional services.

When I was running my firm, Ignition wiped out our ar. It's true. And significantly reduced the time spent billing clients. Saving our partners over a thousand hours in the first place year because he didn't have to build all that stuff manually. Man with the condition. We won more business with impressive online proposals. No more hustling, hustle and PDFs and Word docs. We automatically pulled payment up front or at the end of a job when it was done.

No more dialing for dollars.

We transitioned our firm to more recurring revenue and better managed scope creep. No more leaving money on the table. Ignition is making thousands of firms more.

Money and genuinely made us more profitable.

Check out why over 7,000 of the smartest businesses run on ignition@ignitionapp.com I'll put a link in the show notes this episode is sponsored in part by financial sense. Cause WorkflowCon is back baby. With the theme Freedom to Scale. Unlock your firm's potential for operational freedom and profitable growth. It's happening October 22nd and 23rd virtual conference, totally free.

Not just for financial Sense users.

This year the help of firm owners remove the themselves from the day to day routine so they can stop being the bottleneck in their firm. Systematize it so it can run without.

You giving you the freedom to focus.

On scaling, standardize your processes to empower.

Your employees and improve client satisfaction.

Scale your firm, whatever that means for you.

Hiring new staff, getting acquired by PE.

Get that out of my ad read.

Work 10 hours a week and travel or hit a million in revenue.

Bunch of smart people are going to be there speaking Don Brolin, Sabrina Paris, Kelly roars, Nancy McClellan, Erica Good, Chadwick Davis, Blake Olives, Brandon Hall, Keela Hill Trawick, Kelly Parker.

A lot of people we've had on this pod.

Logan McGrathman, Ryan Lazanis and others.

Fun virtual conference really. I'll put a link to register down in the show notes.

Check that one out.

Oh, the problem with half baked software solutions. Oh mama.

Let's take some shots today, Buck. Roll up your sleeves.

Let's call out specific brands so that you know what I'm talking about.

We got a real problem right now.

With with platforms trying to do too many things and they roll out a version of something so that they can have a landing page for it. And, and I bring it up not to just crap on people because I'm not really interested in doing that. I bring it up because we need to still be able to make good software buying decisions to solve for that problem if what they're delivering isn't solving for it. So I'll give you a few examples. This isn't particularly spicy. In fact, some of these people I think would actually agree.

Let's take Canopy.

Canopy rolls out proposals. They have a super basic proposal offering that is arguably better than nothing.

But if you need like a full proposal suite that will do this stuff.

Really really well, your solution shouldn't be to buy something that's not there yet and wait. And this is oftentimes what we do. We're like well my Taxdome does does.

This but it's not quite where we.

Want it to be so we're not using it yet. Then you don't have a solution for it as far as I'm concerned. And you need to be in the market for a solution for it if that is a really painful pain for you. Taxdome we're seeing a growing number of really good AI tax info gathering Solutions. And I'm a little surprised they haven't jumped on the bandwagon more here since info gathering. Taxdome is largely still like templated stuff. Like you kind of have organizers, but it's nowhere near as good as it could be. And if you're blocked by like, I can't customize this enough, it doesn't feel personal enough for my clients, or I can't get my clients to use the portal or this or that, all of these features that it has that you don't use aren't serving you, but should not block you from getting the solution that does serve you. Like the fact that it has a version of this. There's this weird like version of sunk cost fallacy where we're paying for a.

Version of this so we don't get.

A version of it that will actually use. Now canopy tax them like these platforms, it's a whole bunch of other things that they do really, really well. But the fact that they have a half baked version of a thing that you need today that you aren't willing to use should not prevent you from picking up a solution to do that thing. Now none of us want to spend even more money on tech, but the.

Reality is you have a thing there.

That'S not being used.

And I never advise people to buy.

Tech based on what they say they are going to release. A big problem in all types of software is you get a big flashy release and they push it out and landing page is killer. And you're like, this is pretty cool. And you get into it and you're.

Like ah, but this is actually paper.

Thin and I need this and that before I could actually use it. And they're like, oh yeah, this is just, this is the first kind of initial version and you don't get another version maybe ever or until a year down the road. Don't hit your wagon or don't make buying decisions based on where you think something will go or even where they tell you that it's going to go.

If you need a solution for that thing today you look at all the different things you need a solution for.

And you prioritize what's the most important thing we're going to do that next. And if it rises to the level of justifying the cost, then you do it.

Even if another tool you, you have.

Does a crappy version of it, that's not a reason to find the right solution for it. Proposals is actually a really great example here because almost everyone has done like a kind of half baked version of proposals. But if you want, like, you know, like what an ignition does, which is not a cheap tool by any means, but is very fully featured if you need that, the fact that your platform does, like, a really bad version of.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't go.

Out and find the right version of it. That's kind of the point here. Another good example is, like, email clients. In almost every practice management system, everybody's acknowledged the value of pulling email client emails into the practice management system, and most now give you a way to send emails out of them. But it is truly an awful email client experience. Like, as far as email clients go is really bad. Like, really light on features, not very impressive. The fact that they have it there.

Does not mean that you shouldn't use.

The right one for you. Like I use Superhuman. It's like an unbelievably good email client. There's a bunch of really good, like, more help desk or oriented tools out there, like front or teamwork desk, that may solve some problems for your team. But the fact that your practice management system is doing a bad version of it doesn't mean that you shouldn't go out and find a good version of it. This whole notion that, like, oh, it's gonna get to where I need it to go in this certain amount of time, that's just. That's just a recipe for sadness. And especially as we're living in a world where there's more and more overlap in the tools that we're buying, and that's frustrating, and it feels like we're wasting money. Where you can end up is you.

Have all these tools that do the.

Same things kind of badly without, like, solving the problem entirely. And so you don't actually commit, don't actually use those features. But because you have those features, you can't justify going out and buying something that does solve that problem. But zooming out, we gotta recognize you still have that problem and it's still not solved. And this is where it's really hard to make standalone software recommendations in a vacuum. Because ultimately the right decision for you is like, how does that Jigsaw piece fit in with all the other things that I have? And it's just a really hard thing to do. And it's really hard when you're looking at a website for a practice management system, for example, and they've got a hundred different landing pages and say, we do this and we do that, and we do this and we do that, and they.

Most of them have a couple of.

Things that they do really, really well and that's why they've been able to stick around successfully.

And then they have a lot of.

Other peripheral things that are like 20% efforts where it's borderline whether you can even use that functionality or not without looking like a dummy in front of your client. So that is a, it's admittedly a really hard thing to manage right now. Tippy top tips for managing that. Look for independent providers information. I try to hold myself out as that. And we're, we're trying to put more transparent information out there to make it easier for you to select software. But always look for social proof. Always ask, post a comment on this video, post on social media, really look out for like, is the person who's answering my question, for example, an implementer for that practice management system? Is it an investor? Is it somebody that is somehow connected with that company? That's actually very often the case. In fact, the most common example you'll see of that is you're having a conversation about something in the top tools for something and then some random tool totally out of left field comes in and you're like, I've never heard of this thing before. What even is this? And why are they raving about it? And then you can see like, oh, there's actually, there's some sort of connection there. The best signal for making the right decisions for you ought to be social proof ought to be what are other actual accountants saying about how it's working in practice?

But then as contextual as you can.

Get that like, the more contextual you can get it, the better because the.

Right platform for somebody else may not.

Be the right platform for you based on the other tools that you have. It's admittedly a hard thing to solve for, but the more information you can gather, the better. This is also a great argument for like, I, I think one of the best things accountant communities enable is permission for access to peers because we struggle with being like, is it okay to ask this person to like hop on a call? Like, would they be okay with that? And there's like the social element of like not being one, not wanting to get turned down on top of just like, I don't want to impose. One really nice thing honestly about account communities is there's an element of like, everyone's agreed to be there and there's, there's a, I don't want to say an implied different level of access to people, but it's, it is easier to build those relationships in a more intimate space like that than social media where it can be uncomfortable to make that ask doesn't mean it's not worth making the ask. Oftentimes you have like basically nothing to lose by somebody saying no. And I've, I've made tons of friends just DMing people on social media. I think, I think we need to be biased to overdo that rather than underdo that because most of these folks are completely real people that are cool and you can exchange value with them. But fitting that puzzle together for your firm, like, is tricky with how expensive.

Things are getting with the number of features that are like, is that. Can you really call that a feature?

With how half baked it is, it's getting hard. But the biggest lesson I've learned is don't rely on landing pages. Don't rely on salespeople. Ask around. Don't be afraid to ask. You have nothing to lose. More information is better than less information. And don't trust what your tax software vendor tells you. Right?

Hey, thanks for coming and hanging this week. You got any questions, pop them in the comments. If you're listening on the audio feed, your player likely has a link to.

The YouTube video where you can pop in, drop a comment.

Also in the show notes, there's a.

Way that you can send me just a normal text message or a voice memo or video. That stuff's always fun. That's the source for most of the questions and a lot of the content that we cover here.

So thanks for coming and hanging and.

I'm going to see you in the next one.

Sa.