354 Should Accounting Firms Have Portals Or PMs?

With all this talk about practice management systems, where do client portals fit in? Huh? Where does a tool like Keeper fit in? That's not a practice management system. How do I know what the right way is to start my accounting firm? Tech Stack plus client just left a bad Google review. What do you do next? What do you do if it's your only Google review? Do you burn the ships and start again from scratch? A big old AI boost that all accountants are about to get just around the corner. And some funny stories from a recent conference I was at in Florida. Come on in. It's a Q and A edition of Jason on Fern firms. Let's get into it. So last couple weeks, whole bunch of content around trying to help you pick a better practice management system for your firm and is the single most important tool tech decision you can make. It's like the backbone of how all the work goes through your firm. It is lead sheet 2.0. That's really the best analogy, isn't it? It's like a digital, digital lead sheet. Remember those things people like to challenge my street cred and like bro, I don't. I, I was k. I was cut from OG accounting cloth. I know Lead sheets. I know Rosies. Do you know Goldies? Please don't challenge me. Okay, so some, some tools that aren't on the list or weren't even considered. Lisio Copilot these are tools that are like a client experience, like just the client portal bit. And this is where ultimately like the tech in your accounting firm comes down to what is the entire stack? That's ultimately the most important thing. You have to start with a single tool and in most cases you start with a pm but if there's a, if there's an entirely different like mental framework for how you build your stack, you can almost, if you'll forgive me and let me make a sports ball analogy. It's almost like a draft where. What's your first round draft pick going to be? If you're a football team? American football. You going to draft a quarterback first? Maybe, probably. If you don't like. Assuming you have no players on the team already, you might start with a quarterback, almost certainly. If this is a baseball draft, I could. I don't know anything about baseball. If this is a basketball draft. No. You can make an argument for a lot of different positions there. I used to know more about sports than I do now, but I think you basically start with like what is your first round draft pick? And what I have found is most firms these days Are not client experience first. There's actually quite a bit of evidence of this on my YouTube channel when I show off things that are like very oriented around a premium client experience, but might be a little bit more work. Generally people are like, pah, it's way too much work. You think, I'm gonna do this? And this is the state that I think we find ourselves in like 90% of the time when we're busy and we gotta get stuff out the door. But then that 10% of the time when you can zoom out and you think about your business and what the most important things are, you're like, yeah, we probably should be investing in the client experience a little bit more. And if the roles were reversed and you were forced to use your firm's systems from the outside day in and day out, you know, what you would do is pour a whole lot more love into like the client experience. You can make an argument that almost nothing else matters. You can make an argument that you could probably ship a garbage technical work for years and the client is never going to know the difference. But what they will understand is the client experience. And I know you're mad, you're super mad that I just said that. Listen, I'm mad too. If you cut out a cross section of me, there would be like 16 rings for 16 years I've spent in the profession. And most of those years, man, I was just hustling, doing tax work and month end closes and all that stuff. And I wish that accounting was a meritocracy and the best of the best rose to the top. I don't know why I'm talking like Donkey from Shrek today. I'm sorry, but the reality is, boy, when the client doesn't understand what you do, they're gonna make their buying decisions on all sorts of things that have nothing to do with technical expertise. Could you get them a great outcome? Yes. But if you didn't, would they know that a great outcome was even possible? No. That's what sucks. Honestly, it's super, super annoying. But if you are like a bumbling mess when you talk with them, if you don't help them to feel heard and understood, if you rush in too quick with solutions to all their problems and they're like, this dude's always got like an answer, like, just ready to go. I don't know if they're actually thoughtfully digging into my situation. If you don't navigate that engagement in a way that makes them feel like they're cared for and understood and that you are great specifically for them, whether that ultimately matters or not. Maybe beekeeping work is the same as any other type of work. If they don't perceive that you're the best for them, that's kind of all that matters. And so while we're back here, like thinking about the technical tools and how to, how to go to that next continuing education thing to maybe do something slightly better for one or two clients, you turn up on a zoom call and you got like a mustard stain on your shirt not coming across the way that you want to. And then clients don't perceive this to be like a premium experience. Perhaps starting with the practice management system isn't the right thing to do. Perhaps what we should start with is the client experience. And herein lies the problem of building a tech stack is everybody and their mom has like the same feature set or feature overlap. Every single practice management system has a client portal now because they learned that the way to keep somebody on your platform is to get the accountant to train the client on that platform and then they will never leave. And therein actually lies the the greatest argument for a standalone client portal tool. If I have a tool that just does the client portal side really, really well, let's say Lisio and Copilot, those are the most widely used standalone client portal tools in our space. If I have a tool that just does that, you know what it lets me do? Change everything else as much as I want. If I have an all in one tool where the client uses the portal, but I use it for workflow and for engagement and for proposals and file management, all these other things, what? Well, if that tool sucks at say, file management or workflow or something like that, and I just made the mistake of training 500 clients on how to use the portal. I am now trapped, like tied to this inferior workflow solution just because my clients know how to click around and do the things. And I don't want to look like a dummy having to retrain them on a new portal. That is actually the single best argument for a standalone client portal solution is then the interface that the client works with is separate from your own portal. Workflow makes a lot of sense, right? And I get the, the NER the like the nirvana perfect hypothetical solution where it's all connected and all talks and it's all integrated and when they upload things, it resolves tasks and all that. In a perfect world, that's how everything works. And maybe you got a system where you feel like you're there, but oh, I'm Just thinking through the list of practice management systems, I don't know that anybody's absolutely nailing that. So there's arguments to be made for doing this either way. Rolling a standalone like client facing experience and then having all your workflow on the back end separately versus trying to do an all in one. But inherently you've got a lot of trade offs in that all in one solution, right? In fact, I would even argue, and we talked about this recently, how a lot of platforms all in ones especially, they will roll out enough of a feature to be able to stand up a landing page and say with a straight face, yeah, we can do proposals or we have a client portal and then you get in and you're like, what in the world is this? How could they even say that this is something that I could put in front of my client. And so then what you do is you buy the all in one and then you go buy a bunch of other stuff that you bolt into your all in one because there's a whole bunch of things that it doesn't do well enough for you to actually use. Right? This is the way. This is the perpetual struggle that we live in. And I wish I could give you a super easy, clean solution to how to navigate all that, but I'm not smart enough picking your PM from that list. I do think that is, that is step one. The next question is what's step two through ten, right? Like where do you go from there? But I will say getting that step one right, I would argue that is the most important thing. Because more commonly what you see is people have step one wrong. They don't have a practice management system, they're on the wrong practice management system. And then I have to make 10 other tech decisions to cover up that core problem. Whereas the best case scenario, the best position you can put yourself in is to have the very best core system for you and then build from there. Not to botch together and like Band Aid, paperclip, all these other solutions around the wrong core solution to try to get you to something that works. I've loved the conversation that's come from this whole PM thing. A lot of people were mad at me for the tools that I recommended with them, but by and large most people like super appreciative and stuff like that. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow gang. Lifflow launched a new dashboarding platform and I got to have a play with it the other day. It's actually pretty darn cool. They've got loads of templates. Like they've always had live flow for context. In the past there were utility that connected your qbo, your Xero with your Google sheets, your Excel so that pull any like client data into there. Now they're doing the same thing but for dashboards. Bunch of dashboard templates you can swipe with like full blown like a suite like combinations of all these different reports, executive summaries and it all connects to that client data the same way their spreadsheet tool did. So you literally just pick a different company from a dropdown so I could pick like make a cool custom reporting suite looks super impressive and then to like deliver it to another client. Literally. As simple as changing the dropdown to a different company and pulling all that live data in a no brainer way if you're tippy toeing into advisory to put better information in front of your clients. That's Lifflo's new dashboarding feature. Learn more the link down in the Show Notes this episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. It is it is tech change season when you got to make those hard decisions and a practice management system decision. Oh, that's just about the most stressful tech call you can make. But let me simplify it for you. Comes down to the four C's capabilities, client experience, clarity and community. When it comes to capabilities, there's a lot of PMs with all sorts of capabilities. They do all the things. But Client Hub, it sets itself apart with two things. Specifically, it's built to support cast slash bookkeeping work with QuickBooks and Zero Integrations. And they're investing in AI with Magic Email replies, magic workflow and magic answers. It's a lot of sorcery. Tell you what I appreciate about Client Hub. They're like we're for bookkeeping firms. A lot of PMs are like we're for everyone. We can do everything great. And you're like really though tax audit firms go away, skip this ad. But if you're doing books, if you're doing advising stuff, Client Hub might be for you. Check out that that linky link right down in the show notes. I try not to. Yo yo. Between the spectrum of people that want wildly different things, just because anytime you put something out into the wild, you have folks on either end of the spectrum, right? So you always have people who are like, just tell me what to use. Just give me the recommendation. And then you put the recommendation out and everybody's like, you're wrong. What about this? What about that? I will say a a Common recurring thing that came up through the PM process is, well, what about this one? And I think I railed on this a little bit last week. The whole like, well, you obviously don't know about this or that system. And this isn't a me thing like this. This applies to somebody telling you about a system that you've never heard about either. But if you haven't heard about it and you've heard about a whole bunch of other ones, and you know people that run firms and nobody uses that tool they're talking about, ah, I don't, I don't know the nicest way to tell you this, but it's more likely that that tool just isn't very good than it is that you've. You've stumbled into a software platform that that platform would like to keep secret. That's just not, that's just not the approach that most businesses take. And I myself, I don't. I spent probably a decade thinking that I was big brain and everybody where I'm like, well, I'm not. I'm not going to be like every other accounting firm. I'm going to pull. Pull all sorts of weird stuff out of the woodworks and run my firm on that. Because even though all these people that are decades ahead of me and have way more experience, even though all of them are much more successful than me, surely I'll be able to put the machine together in a way that they couldn't possibly understand and it'll be better in every way. Maybe this is like a thing that you do in your 20s. Maybe it's a thing you do in your early 30s. Maybe I'm just old and crusty and washed up now. But the thing that sounds really nice to me is just finding the smartest person I know and saying, what did you do? Oh, that. Yeah, okay, I'm just gonna do that because I honestly think that we often make running accounting firms way harder than it actually needs to be. The reality is if you put your tax firm on TaxDome, or you put your accounting firm on Carbon, or pick a tool where you can go out and find a whole bunch of other firms that are using the same tool set. The reality is there's so much value in having that overlap with other firms and that common ground where you can learn how they use the tool and steal ideas from them, there's so much value in that over having to go out and build your own thing and tinker with it and build it custom from scratch. And like, I get the appeal of that. And I spent a lot of years cranking on that playing software night janitor. I totally understand the appeal of that, but let's not make this any harder than it needs to be. I'm kind of over the whole reinventing the wheel thing. This was a great one from the comments. Not great one. Great's the wrong way to put it. Just got their first review, first Google review. And it is the very first Google review that their firm has. Talk about an oof. So you have one review and it's a bad one. I absolutely despise Google reviews for professional service firms because we are snowflakes that have the option of whether or not we want to actually work with someone. I'm not running a bakery or a restaurant. My biggest fear was doing mass firings and people like review bombing me. Interestingly enough, boy, we. I fired probably over 500 people in my time. Clients, that is. And I don't think we actually ever got a negative review from someone we fired. And maybe that's a testament to like, oh well, we did it the right way and made everybody feel important and understood and all that. I don't. There's maybe a degree of that, I think in our head. We probably just build up the likelihood of people doing that to. To be. I guess it's not as likely as. As we think it will be. But this exact scenario where you get a bad review and you don't have other reviews to kind of bury it. And it's literally the only reason why I ever ask clients for reviews. And clients aren't just going to leave reviews. You have to ask them for reviews. And it sucks. And I hate it. I don't like it. And most people, the way that they do it, breaks the rules because Google says you can't do like a pre filter to say, hey, how happy are you? And if they say happy, then you send them to do reviews. You can't do that, but everybody does. It's just a big dumb game. The reality is, ultimately, once your firm reaches escape velocity, nobody's making buying decisions based on Google reviews. If they are, you've already lost the battle. It's the same as making buying decisions based on your credential or something like that. You're trying to escape comparison. The folks that are rocking up and making buying decisions based on Google reviews are not good clients anyways. If you're going to go out and hire a tax firm to do your own tax work, what are you going to do? You're going to ask around, you're Going to find smart people and see who they use. You're gonna, you know, consume stuff on social media. You're gonna find somebody with a podcast and build a relationship with them and be like, oh, wow, like, they're sharing some smart novel stuff. I want them to do my stuff. That's how, like, AAA clients make buying decisions, not Googling accountants. In my area, I generalize. It's not to say the good people aren't doing that, but if your goal is to be, like, differentiated, then the clients who find you via those means, like, because you are the guru in a space, they're not making buying decisions based on Google reviews. They're coming to your squeeze page. They're downloading the lead magnet. They're like, yeah, this person's for me. But unfortunately, especially early days, before you have that control over the market and the privilege of being a snowflake, you got to ask for reviews so that you don't get buried by a bad one, which is so annoying. So, so annoying. I did a video earlier this week on sending the clients that you fire to another firm. Because you see, and clients could be in other firms, like AMB clients. A point of clarification that a couple people called out in the comments. Does this mean you can send all your jerks to somebody else, your partner firm? No. You know where you send your jerks? You send them packing. For me, those weren't the hard ones to fire. The hard ones for me to fire were, like, the good people that I enjoyed working with that just were no longer aligned with what we were doing with our firm. Like, we couldn't help them that well. We outgrew them. Something like that. Like, we started getting more specific in the clients that we were serving. And so some of the earlier clients that we served, like, man, we. The energy just wasn't there anymore. Like, it wasn't a great fit, but there were still great people and had cool businesses and something to offer another firm. Those are the people that you want to refer out to another firm. I would argue they're also important ones to cut loose and are the hardest ones to cut loose. Just because they are good people doesn't make them a great fit for your business. But no, the stinkers, the jerks, stuff like that, you fire them because they're stinkers and jerks. You don't send them to your fledgling accounting firm that you're trying to, like, help, support and get them to the next level. Don't do that. I go without saying, but thought I should clarify. I was at a conference last week in Florida. Hector Garcia's conference. Major YouTube celebrity Hector Garcia Reframe. It was very good. It's in the Miami area. If you were in the area and you didn't come hang out with me right over there, I've got just off screen I've got a list and your names on it. Next year, if you are in the Miami area, totally check it out. I think you can even pre register for next year's Reframe was really good. Someone unironically called me Jason Daly and I quickly realized it wasn't a joke and it makes me feel like maybe things went too far and we should have changed the name of the podcast earlier. Am I allowed to do a quick plug of something on my own podcast? Just got past the tax deadline if you're an accountant that works for a legacy firm, I place accountants that work for crappy firms like I used to into the progressive really cool firms in my audience. If that is you. If you're looking for a new role, my team will literally like take you by the hand, put you in front of a bunch of really cool small like progressive firms and try to find you a great role. It is one of the things I am most proud of that we've been able to do. Arguably like the best, maybe the very best thing that we can do, like as a community of people that hang out around this content is bring accountants and accounting firms together because you're already like minded by being here and by this stuff resonating with you if you are looking for a new role. If you're just applying for jobs, there's no context there. You have no idea what it's going to look like on the other side of it. If you just go out to a recruiter to get shopped around, you're going to end up at an average firm. The people that tune into this podcast, while we don't all have it nailed, we're all aspiring to something better and it is a vision that you ought to be more aligned with than your average run of the mill firm. I'll put a link to that down in the show. Notes I would love to help you find a better place to work. It's exactly what I wish I could have had earlier on in my career. My career path would probably look completely different if I've been able to find some of like the cool people that I know now that were running firms back then. This episode is sponsored in part by Mercury. Hey, you know where my money's sitting Right now it in a Mercury bank account. Look at me chilling the dog food that I eat. Mercury today is loved by over 200,000 customers. Does business banking that is transformative. Corporate debit cards, credit cards for expense management, free wire transfers. Treasury yielding over 5% interest on idle funds. But Mercury for accountants, that's you lean in. It's their new accounting partner program which wants to get you your time back and drive client value. This is cool. They got this thing called Panorama. You can actually see a whole bunch of client accounts in a single view so you don't have to like drive into all these different things or log in and log out of umpteen different accounts. Panorama. That's right. That's. What a great name. Plus they get all the cool features that you do if you use Mercury Banking Bill pay, custom approvals, invoicing, document upload, GL code mapping, reliable integrations with QBO0, NetSuite, everything you need to make those accounting workflows sing. Learn more about Mercury. Head over to mercury.comaccountants to learn more about the accountant channel. Or check out the link down in the video. The show notes the words under the thing. This episode is sponsored in part by Fin Daily, actually an app that I founded a few years ago and then sold Thin Daily. In short, it's almost like an email marketing platform, but for all of your financial data. So you build these email templates and then you plug in like banking balances, QuickBooks, or zero data, like outstanding bills, outstanding invoices. You connect this email template to all these different variables and then you set that email to go out to your client on a recurring basis on a schedule. And then right before it sends makes an API called All those sources, pulls the most updated information into the email and sends it out. Now I was doing a cash reporting process for my clients. They're paying top dollar for it. But it was a pain in the neck to go out and like wrangle all the stuff I needed for those emails. So I actually founded this to automate that process. How's that sound? A fully automated cash reporting service that your clients will pay top dollar for you. It's a thing I could tell you could have done it. Pretty nice. Fin Daily will even let you connect with like multiple accounting files so you can push out a single email digest pulling from like multiple sources, bank accounts, credit cards. Pretty cool stuff. Okay, check out the link down the show notes to learn more. I just want to drop a quick note here. AI nerd alert. I try to keep these podcasts Evergreen and not dig into like current events things. This one's just a biggie. We've talked in the past about the O1 preview model and how it is pretty darn good at doing like open ended review of financial statements. We've done some tests on the podcast in the past. This O Preview model, it's called O1 Preview for a reason, because it is. Drumroll, please. A preview. And we got confirmation that the full O model, which we should be getting anytime, is a big step up from O1 preview. So O1 preview a pretty darn good at reviewing financial statements imminently. We're getting the full model. In fact, by the time this goes live, we may have it. That is supposed to be another pretty big step up. And O1 Preview was outperforming like PhDs at math and physics problems. Again, not stuff that we do, but some benchmarks have been released of what O1 can do relative to O1 preview. I can just tell you it's unbelievably impressive. If somebody had told you, I mean, even two years ago that we would have a language model that was outperforming PhDs at like very common benchmarks, you'd have been like, well, that's the beginning of the end, right? Like, what would your reaction have been to that, gang? We're here. Like, it's happening and I don't know about you, it doesn't feel like our profession is running to it fast enough. And maybe I need to do more on this, more practical, like, how do I actually build this into a workflow? We need to keep driving this conversation so that the software tools that we use are integrating it in a more intentional way and being more aggressive about pulling it into like all aspects of the ways that we work, from how we reply to emails to how we review financial statements. We do need to keep driving this conversation so that everybody gets on board. Because honestly, like, if somebody had told you this a couple years ago, we would have been like, well, yeah, county has to look completely different then, right? But it doesn't. How do we make that happen? Is it you? Are you and I going to do that? I think we can. Honestly, I think this podcast has driven a ton of AI progress in the profession down to like actual features being shipped in practice management systems and that sort of thing. But we got a long, long ways to go. I gave you a long enough rant on that recently of all of the features that PMs are missing that AI can enable like today. And we still don't have it in product accounting industry tools. If I'm going to be your hype man, I'm also going to crack the whip when you're not shipping the stuff that we need. One last thought. I was on an AICPA webinar last week, and I don't know what it is about the aicpa, but those webinars attract some of the, like, most extreme ends of the accounting spectrum. It is so odd, the commentary that I see in those webinars that I don't seem to see anywhere else. And it's just a reminder to me that all the places that we're hanging out are subject to, like, their own versions of groupthink and tunnel vision. And it's totally true. If you go to, like, Reddit, are tax pros. You go to, you go to Twitter, you go to Facebook, you go to LinkedIn. Like, there's this sort of momentum of the norm and the collective group think that is platform specific. And it looks different every place that you hang out. And boy, the comments section in an AICPA webinar, that is a, that is a weird little bubble that's very different than the other ones. And it just like, reminded me of how big the profession is and what a massive spectrum of accountants there are that are just different in every way imaginable. And it gave me, like, I don't know, help me feel a little more grace for, like, software providers who deal with accountants that tell them wildly different things every single time. I mean, even just on a YouTube video that I do, you'll have a person that's like, you just changed my life with this. Thank you so much. And then the next person is like, I cannot believe you even emerged from your mother's womb to make this video. But you know what? I've, like, what I've landed on is just the act of showing up every single day and trying to be helpful in good faith, not making it about you trying to be helpful in the long run. Like, that's, that's ultimately how you build your own credibility, is by building other people up and helping them out. Honestly, it's like the ultimate hack in being a professional these days. I always tell you, being visible online, but, but more important than that is being helpful online. We're so caught up on ROI and how much time to spend on this and that that I honestly think if you just turned up on social media for 12 months and were incredibly helpful to people going above and beyond, everything would work out. You build those relationships with people on the fly they make connections for you. Like that's, that's enough. Because of the reach that social media and, and these platforms can enable for you. Like just being helpful is enough. Now the more specifically helpful you can be, if I can make this slightly tactical, the more specifically helpful you can be, the better. If you're very helpful to beekeepers about tax reporting or month end closes or managing the back office or something like that, that's better than a more general version of being helpful. But while there are like strategies like lead magnets and stuff like that, that can kind of optimize your efforts and that sort of thing, so much of it just boils down to having a servant's mindset. And I think most accountants are actually wired that way inherently. But right now we only do it like behind closed gates, walls, behind a closed thing for the people who are already on our client list. And if we could just carve out like 20% of our time to be helpful to strangers. I think it solves so much of the client acquisition problem. I think it creates all these opportunities that you couldn't otherwise yourself manifest by leaning into like the serendipity of being visible and being helpful online. Stuff just starts happening that you couldn't otherwise have brought into being yourself. There's a challenge for you. This weekend maybe or today, if you're listening to this on Friday, just go help some folks. Don't like pump stuff on your own timeline. Be helpful. Don't just post those blase like, oh, interesting insights there. Hop in and be like, I had the same problem and I learned that I was stuck on this and that. And ultimately this helped me like, just go out and be helpful and don't expect anything in return. And good stuff happens. That's my experience. Anyway. Hey, thanks for coming to hang in this week. You better believe we're going to be back next week and I will see you there. Okay, bye.