386 Consolidating Client Work To A Single Portal?

Man, this is such an irritating problem in the current state of accounting tech is virtually every tool you have uses a client portal. And sometimes for very good reason, because there's built in like tasks in that system that can be resolved by the client submitting something. Isn't that nice that it auto resolves when they submit that thing? Yeah, but Jason, I already have a portal over here. I already trained 500 clients on how to use this other portal. I don't want another one. Okay? It sucks. And I actually think that it is driving the future of accounting tech in a slightly different direction, which is what we're going to talk about today. Scooch that chair on in and let's do some JSON on first. So for the past five years, best practice has been for your practice management system to be the portal that your client uses. And I don't care if you like portals or not, they're a fact of life. A business that doesn't have a website where you can log in and self serve, like that's just weird. In 2024 everybody should have that to at least be able to do basic things like fetch documents, pay a bill, something like that, right? And for the past five years, practice management systems have unequivocally been the right place for this stuff to happen. But increasingly we are getting incredibly powerful workflow tools that have portals of their. And if you've already got an entire client base trained on your practice management system portal, you're like, I like the cut of your JIB workflow tool, but here's the thing is, am I going to look like a knucklehead for putting another portal in front of my clients? I think this is where context matters. So to dig into a bit of context here before kind of zooming back out, there is three versions of like how you can put portals in front of your clients. One is the one perfect portal to rule them all. Not realistic, right? Like not. It's going to come with a bunch of trade offs behind the scenes. You're going to do a whole bunch of hustle and to move things around and ensure that they're all in the right place. But as far as the client is concerned, which in the end, like at the end is the North Stars, probably the most important thing is we should probably have more of a willingness to inconvenience ourselves in service of a better client experience. Because client experience is ultimately what drives what someone is willing to pay us and what they're willing to pay us is what gets daddy home in time. To watch the football game while my family eats dinner. So the first version, one portal to rule them all second is a portal that is a portal to the other portals. So if you have like to dos in that primary client portal, probably your practice management system where you ask clients to go out and do these things, creating a to do that is a link out to the other portal. So you still at least have a single place where they can see all the things that you need from them. But you're still putting multiple interfaces in front of them, which kind of stinks. And then third, multiple portals with multiple logins. That is the very worst if they're having to remember multiple logins to use you. Like that's almost a non starter for me. And this is where like magic links help and not having to do those logins or like have an actual login credential that you remember for the secondary portals. Now accountants have varying levels of preciousness with like what we're willing to put in front of clients and what we're not. So not everybody's gonna land on the same place here. I would add a couple layers of seasoning here. Very infrequent portal use. You know, if you have something that is a once a year sort of thing where the client only does that process once a year, don't fool yourself into thinking that they sit up at night thinking about what your portal looked like last year. They honestly don't give a hoot. So if they have to go out to a magic link or some other portal that looks different than the normal portal once a year, that's less of a big deal than say you got a bookkeeping practice and, and you use, you know, keeper or you use client hub or something like that. But then you've got some other practice management system and that's where they go and they get their tax returns or pay bills or something like that. If that's month over month work with a client where you're requesting information for every set of monthly financials, hopping back and forth with those two portals, that's a very different ask of the client than your PM portal. And then once a year having them go through a different workflow for tax intake. So it is worth delineating between those two things because that frequency matters. You are fixated on that problem much more than your client has does who like does not think about the thing that they have to do once a year Very much. Now an interesting flip of the script that I'm seeing happen more and more. And this goes a Little counter to my recommendation that the first tool that you pick in an accounting firm should always be your practice management system. I am seeing increasingly a number of of firms who are either newer firms or firms that hadn't previously committed to. Let's see, basically what they're doing is that they are workflow portal first and in some cases workflow portals only. And there's three situations like what's the underlying context for these firms that have led them to work that way. One, they're late to the party on portal stuff. They didn't have a PM before they that had a portal that they pushed on clients. And as they're making this decision today, you can see very reasonably how a tax firm for example will get super into a tax intake tool and be like oh this will save us so much time, we just want to use this portal. Second scenario where I'm seeing that is where a firm doesn't use a practice management system. They use a non accounting vertical tool like a Trello or a Monday.com or a ClickUp or something like that where a or notion where a weakness of these tools is they don't really have quote unquote portals. They have like views that you can make public. But managing that across a large number of clients is a real headache. So oftentimes firms using those non accounting vertical tools don't have client portals. For those firms, the portals in the intake solutions, those make a lot of sense. Right? And the third scenario is people who are just like raving superfans of workflow tools. I think you'll see this with Keeper seeing this with some of the tax intake tools where they're like this is so much better for us and saves us so much time that I'm actually going to cut bait from the PM portal and just use this. One wild card here is there are dedicated like portal solutions out there where that's all that they do. And so the, the main ones that firms are using right now are copilot, copilot.com and, and Lisio. Lisio has really made a push the last couple years into tax intake, into doing a version of tax intake where in the past they were just kind of messaging and information gathering. They've done a bit more of a pivot to tax. And the strongest argument for these standalone portal tools is kind of the downside of all in ones and also the fear that comes from training a group of clients on a client portal because of exactly the issue that firms are running into now the tool that has the best portal Experience in all likelihood is not going to be the tool that is the best workflow experience. And let's say a tool comes out tomorrow or next year or something like that that unlocks some amazing workflow things for your team. You're going to be right back to the same problem of gosh, I don't want to have to retrain all my clients on a different portal. This is the most compelling argument for standalone portal tools where all they do is is the client facing stuff, giving you the freedom to then behind the scenes run whatever workflow stuff that you want to run. It's a bit of a different way of building your tech stack, but I can see the argument for that. It feels maybe a little bit more future proof. Like, you know, if you're picking a pm, you're hitching your wagon to a platform to do everything for you and be the best at everything. And we're already seeing how they're falling behind on workflow. That is not to say the PMs are not doing a huge volume of tremendously useful stuff from managing how all the work goes through the firm to request the time and billing. A whole bunch of essential things that you need that workflow tools do not do yet. But this is what's really interesting to me is there was an age when practice management systems were workflow tools. They were the pinnacle of workflow. They were as good as it got. Now in both bookkeeping and tax work, there's something better. Keeper is not a practice management tool. The tax intake tools I recommend Safe Send, Soroban, Stanford Tax, they're not practice management systems. They don't do a whole bunch of essential stuff that you need. But they have redefined how good workflow can be to a level that I have argued this year has for the first time become essential. Even if you're adding a bunch of manual work, having to move information between different portals and that's a pain and nobody likes it. It is still low skill work. And the downside of that is vastly outweighed by the upside of how good these intake solutions have become, how how much time they can save you, tracking down information from your clients and what a premium experience that is for your client. If you compare it to the dumb organizers that we put in front of them that are not tailored at all and they're like why are you asking for my name again? Or my address or why do I even have to look at this page? Even if it has it pre filled from last year? Why were you giving me this stuff it's very clearly not something that has been tailored for them, which creates a whole bunch more work in the tax prep process because that lack of tailoring then has to be done by a human as they're putting together the return and figuring out what information they need to ask for. This episode of Sponsored in part by Live Flow I had the opportunity recently to give a talk at a like a Live Flow leadership sort of retreat where they actually pulled together 30 like thought leader accountants sort of folks into a single space for a couple of days. And I watched in amazement as they ran these sessions getting feedback from folks of everything that they want to change about the product to big thing from big things to little tiny things to. Then on the second day I turned up early for my session and they were wrapping up a thing previously where they were outlining literally all of the changes that they had made in the product overnight according to the things that the accountants had told them the day before. And this gang is the value of vendors that are actually plugged into our ecosystem and showing up at conferences. LifeFlow raised a series A a couple months back and most of the time that money just gets poured into web ads. But to see them investing it in like creating a space and literally like flying people out and saying tell us everything that you think about our product and how we can make it better. Actual accountants, man, that is really cool. And that is the way to do it live. Well, if you're not familiar, it's a tool to sync QuickBooks and zero data either to your spreadsheets, Excel or Google sheets, but also now to these live updating dashboards that are pretty cool. We did a demo of it recently on the YouTube channel. Learn more about Live Flow. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Team up, who helps you hire talented Filipino accountants directly. Let me just run you through what they did in the last week. I think you'll be impressed. Just kicked off two new recruiterments looking for a senior tax accountant and a staff level accountant, both for firms who are returning to team up for more hires. MO hires, active projects they've got in the works, man. I got access to the mainframe here. Not really. They send me a weekly report now they've got 23 active projects going. Just over 50% of those are with new firms. The rest are with with firms who are coming back for more hires. And they've got five new hires that are kind of in the early stages. Pre recruiting the positions executive assistant, senior tax accountant, Senior accountant, senior tax accountant and accountant for those five are firms who are coming back to team up to do another hire. And you know what that means? Means they didn't regret it the first time. You know what I mean? I know I said it like that. Learn more about team Up. Check out the link down in the show notes. So these tax intake tools are saving you time on workflow, but also delivering a much better client experience than ever before. And then Keeper, if you're on bookkeeping practice, like Keeper has totally redefined like what month end automation looks like. And so how should the practice management systems feel about that? On the one hand, especially in tax intake, you're going to see, I think it's almost inevitable that the practice management systems that are leaning into tax lean into tax workflow and start like doing a version of what tax intake tools do now. And the way that this always happens is they will roll out a version one and it does 20% of what these more mature solutions do. And they're like, we got it now. And all the people that use that practice management system are like, yay, I'm glad we waited. And then you get into. And it kind of sucks because the version one of everything sucks. The version one of these tools that are crushing it right now, that sucked too. I wasn't recommending that version one. The fact is they're on version like three and four right now and that's why they're better. But for practice management systems, they're bigger companies and for them to pivot into this, like build a really good version of this workflow stuff compared to these workflow companies that are still very small, who's got the easier shift to make PMs mature? PMs getting into workflow or people who are crushing workflow already getting into PM stuff? Bum, bum, bum. Did you just soil yourself thinking like crap? I'm so into this pm, don't tell me that my workflow tool that I also like is then going to turn into a PM buddy. I think it's inevitable. I kind of think that's where we're headed. And I don't see one side or the other winning. I do see it maybe consolidating the options a bit. Gosh, there's way too many PMs. I'm up to a list of like 46PMs now. I think it is that are marketing to US firms. And my gosh, two thirds of them should never be touched. I recommended like 9, I think this year. And then there's another group after that, that's like maybe, but. And it almost seems like there's a better solution always, but most of them are like holy moly, nobody should ever be using these. So I suspect we'll see some contraction in the PMS that are out there now and some of that stuff going away. Similarly, some of these workflow tools ultimately will will probably not be capable of building a really good PM because that's a really hard thing to do in its own right. But it's going to be really interesting to see because PMs, not long ago they were workflow. Now these workflow tools, they are workflow. And I think most people will gravitate towards what is the most core helpful tool for my workflow. And that's no longer PMs now. Cool. Interesting conversation. Jason, Tell me what to do with my portal. If I can give you any wisdom here, it is something that I've been actually railing on quite a bit here is don't be afraid of manual processes. Like there is no version of a unified portal experience that can be totally done with tech and so many people are like offended by that and refuse to accept that reality. Gang. The best tools to do a specific job right now do not integrate with your practice management system. That is a reality and your choice is to either not have the benefits of a practice management system or to not have the benefits of of a dedicated workflow tool, the benefits of which are massive. Like when I say these tools are now no longer optional, it is factoring in the really sucky aspect of having to manually integrate these tools with your other stuff. But because the upside is so great, that is worthwhile now. Not only because at the end of the day that's actually not a hard thing to do and not particularly time consuming. It's also a low skill thing to do. And if you're a solo firm runner, that sucks because it means that you're still doing it. You don't have somebody that you can pass that responsibility off to. But our there's like an over glorification of automation and things working perfectly with each other. That is by and large a pipe dream. Like that's very rarely been the case. I mean I can go back to, I mean the FTE's worth of time my team would spend on support with Bill.com troubleshooting their two way syncing and I mean integrations have always been a total crapshoot and anytime your client information changes in a tax system you have to go update it in 14 different systems. The solution to that is not somehow the universe overnight all working together and integrating perfectly. No, the solution to that is documenting systems and what needs to happen doesn't mean that you have to like the systems, it just means that you have to document them and make sure that they happen one way or another. And I'm willing to make that trade off to have the best of the best tech in front of my clients, saving me as much time as possible on our workflow. For me personally, like where I land on the portal thing, I'm probably still going to try to have one portal that rules them all and then within that tasks that jump out to any other portals that clients need to use. As long as those portals do not require their own logins. They would have to be magic link or something like that. I'm okay doing that. Even though it is a little just disjointed. I'm okay doing that on an annual basis. I should clarify if it's month over month. I don't want a client having to use multiple multiple portals month over month. I'm either going to solve that with manual processes syncing things between systems, or a standalone portal solution which creates more issues because you still have to manually integrate that portal solution. By and large some of them integrate with like PMs a little bit, but File Exchange and all that like by and large you're going to have to manually move that stuff around so you don't escape that problem with a standalone portal solution like Lisio or Copilot, but you are a little more free to do what you want on the workflow side as a result. Because changing workflow tools doesn't mean changing client portals. Which I had a perfect answer for you. I think the most interesting conversation right now is if you had a tax firm who didn't have a PM yet, how would you have them build their tech stack from scratch? There are people right now who are die hard fans of these tax intake tools enough to where I think they may actually say start with a tax intake solution. And that's a huge deal for our ecosystem because if we truly get to that point, if we get to a tipping point where that's the recommendation to start with the workflow tool instead of the practice management tool, that kind of rewires how we build all of our tech stacks. Very interesting. A little bit of a mess, but will be super interesting to see how that stuff develops. I'm particularly excited for how these work workflow tools continue to get better. I've seen some really cool things and where they're going to be 12 months from now. Like handling more work, paper management and just more of the entire process rather than just intake. That stuff just gets all the more juicy. That's really exciting. I don't know that I helped you come to a decision here at all. Besides, just like outlining kind of here's the bummer situation that we're in and I think the different ways to navigate it, none of which are perfect. You got any sage wisdom on this? Pop it in the Otherwise, thanks for coming and hanging today.