391 Tax Tech Predictions for 2025!

Gang, this is a big one and a fun one. Today we're talking about what we're going to see in the tax tech ecosystem in 2025. Getting out the old crystal ball, recapping the very best new developments we got in 2024 and how that is dictating the future of tax tech. What will change, what won't change in a big ol like unknown that could actually turn how we do tax work on its head. This is the most exciting year for tax tech that I believe we have had in decades. Like it's hasn't to be excited about for a really long time. Right. So let's do it. 2025 predictions for what we're going to see in tax. There's no time to waste. We're going to get right in. It's worth acknowledging that when it comes to with a only a couple exceptions, when we're talking about tax tech here we we're not talking about your tax prep software. So it's funny, the feedback I get on many of my sort of tax tech related videos. Firms come in thinking, well, tax tech is my tax prep software. It's the tool that I use to generate the forms and all of that. And that is, I mean every firm has to have that obviously. But if that's your entire tax tech stack, that's a very rudimentary approach to getting tax work done. Ten years ago, that was all there was. It really was. That was. That was it. These days we've got a growing ecosystem of tools that work around your tax prep software because a huge percentage of the time that goes into doing tax work is spent on things like gathering information, making sure you have everything that you need, delivering the tax return. So whenever we talk tax tech, honestly we're usually talking less about your tax prep software than anything else because that's the hardest thing to innovate there. Did I just say innovate? There were hyphens in that. There hasn't been a new US tax prep platform in over two decades for a reason. Because it's extremely, extremely hard to build. People have tried and people have failed. But when we're talking tax tech, more often than not we're talking about the things happening around the preparation of the tax return than we are the actual like calculation of it. That being said, with a couple exceptions, we're going to get into that. So we're going to talk about. First, let's recap the very best things that happened in 2024 that are like wagons that you need to have climbed aboard horses that you should have hitched your wagon to. The juiciest stuff from 2024, because that really impacts what we're going to see heading into 2025. That's what we'll talk about after that is, is what we've kind of got or should expect in the pipeline and how that stuff bumps into like what your practice management system does and how everything shuffles out there. So first, the best things that happened in 2024. I've got five things here. Number one, the biggest thing. And I was teasing this thing early on in the summer on social media, you know, to the end of like 1040 workflows about to change with some unreleased stuff that I've seen. And what that stuff was, or what I saw was several examples of a tax intake tool using prior year pro forma data to automatically generate a list of everything that's needed for the next year's tax return. That's a big deal. That's the drl. The document request list is usually what we call that in kind of tax prep parlance. This has been a list that has been notoriously hard to get in the past because the only like pro forma thing you can get out of your prior year tax return is an organizer. And, and you've got some versions of that. Like Ultra Tax has a checklist organizer. But to simply get structured data like a list of just here's all the stuff that we need has been notoriously difficult for as long as people have been doing taxes. There have been a couple of solutions that have done a version of this. But the novelty of what we got in 2024 is a growing number of tools that do not just that, build that, that document request list almost instantly from real prior year data. So not boilerplate organizers, not talking about that. I'm talking about actual pro forma request lists. But then you, a member of your team or the client can drag, you know, 40 PDFs onto that screen, onto that checklist, and one by one, bang, bang, bang, it resolves those checklist items automatically, just based on the pile of documents that got chucked in. And if you've been doing tax prep for very long, you know what it looks like to get information in from a client and to have the file and to be flipping through it and flipping through the organizer, flipping through the prior year file to say, do we have this? Do we have this? Do we have this? And doing that skim of like, here's what we have and what we don't have. And using that to decide do we start the project or do we wait, do we follow up with the client to say, hey, give me these five more things and then we will start the project. That is a huge amount of work to to that just goes into like the, the work that goes in before you even start doing a tax return. Headed into 2025, there's genuinely no reason why a human being ever needs to do that again. And that's a really, really big deal. That's a really time consuming thing, especially if you're doing any volume of 1040 work. We now have tools where you can put a portal in front of your client that's populated with just their actual pro forma information, a truly pulled from the prior year file. It is not boilerplate. The best our practice management systems are doing right now unfortunately are still boilerplate organizers. But that doesn't solve the underlying problem of here's the info we had last year, do we have all that info in for this year? That's why I ultimately don't recommend using PMs for tax intake. I only recommend using a dedicated tax intake tool for this. There's a growing number of them. The big three that I've recommended headed into 25, RR Soraban, Stanford tax and Safe Send specifically Safe Sense Gather feature. But the fact that it will now put in front of that client a list of here's everything that I need. The client can drag those documents in and it will auto resolve the checklist items by automatically identifying what documents have been provided. And you can set that up in a way so that the project only goes to you once they've provided everything. So the whole problem, I mean the biggest problem in 1040 prep the old Starty Stoppy, getting halfway there, sending them a list of questions that hasn't been, you know, completely eliminated. Because ultimately like the best guess we can make of what information do we need is well, what do they have last year? But oftentimes that's not going to be a hundred percent of information, right? Because things will change, there will be new stuff, but this is a like vastly better approach. Now on the flip side, you can also use the same system to then upload docs internally. So let's say a client mails you those documents, that same interface that the client could use to submit items via the portal. Your team can use that same interface to scan the documents that came in and put them into that same upload process to resolve the checklist items. And you know, even if a client did a combination of let's say they get a 1099 brokerage statement late and they upload that while they mailed you some other stuff that they already had. Anytime they log into that portal, they can see an up to date version of what documents are still required regardless of how they were submitted to you. Like you can maybe some of those documents you even got in your end tax planning, you can submit those to the to effectively to the portal yourself so that you have a shared list of here are the things that are still needed. Tremendous amount of time goes into figuring out what do we need from a client, following up on what we need. These tax intake tools have made that problem vastly more manageable and maybe the biggest thing kind of infinitely scalable. Like it's one thing for a staff person to sit down and do that review on every single 1040 that came in the door. And that was, that was our approach. Like the best 1040 process we ever had as of 2022 would have been the last tax season when I owned my firm. The best process we had ever developed was we had a couple of people, every single 1040 that came in, they would do that side by side, skim the prior year file and see what do we have and what do we not have. And we would immediately follow up with the client to say here's the additional information that we have. And that process worked a whole lot better than the project coming in and sitting on a shelf for weeks. And then we ask for that information. From a client perception standpoint, it seemed like we were super on top of it because we would get them those questions right away. But that like all of that just went out the window with this tech. Like this is a huge step forward. It's why it's one of two types of tech in our category. Two types of new tech that I have said, you know, like every single firm, there is not a reason why you shouldn't be using this. If you do tax work, you should be using a tax intake tool. We could put links in the Show Notes. If this is new information and maybe haven't seen some of the main channel videos we've been doing, we can put links to the kind of the three intake tools that I recommend in the Show Notes, Sorben, Stanford Tax and Safe Send. So I don't want to minimize this by any means. And we had a little bit of a version of this. Sorben was arguably the first one on this. Safe Send did a little bit of this where they would like create sort of fillable organizers and Give you a document request list. But I believe it or not, has actually helped a lot here because it's AI that's used in most cases to resolve the checklist items to detect. Okay, here's a document. Is this any of the items on the checklist? And it knocks that out. This is a massive workflow upgrade that genuinely every tax firm should be leaning into. And as we're going to talk about and what to expect heading into 2025, that whole thing just gets juicier. Okay, second number two best things we got in 2024, automated delivery has evolved as well. Historically, Safe send was really the only game in town when it came to doing automated tax return delivery. And if you're not sure what that looks like, like, what do you mean by automated tax return delivery? We all know that our tax prep software, the format that it puts tax returns out, are not really a format where the client's going to understand it. It's not easy to hand it off to the client. And there's been all sorts of, you know, versions of, you know, your smart vaults and stuff like that, you know, like organizing those returns and kind of specific ways. But I would actually argue that the need here on the delivery side fundamentally changed when we started E Filing. Everything and everything was, you know, 8879. Like that super changed what this workflow needed to be. That's how much of an OG I am. I'm a pre8879 guy. When E filing became mandatory and that just kind of became the norm for firms tracking down 8879 then became a monumental task. Right. And you, I mean, let's be real. We've all had clients, we've all had tax returns sit on a shelf for six months because you're waiting for an 8879. So these days now, what automated delivery looks like is you have hopefully as simple as possible of a process to ingest the final return from the tax software that could be dragging a PDF on it could be a. I think I want to say access is the only one where you actually have a direct API connection. But in some form or another, you get the tax return into the tool. The tool then carves that up and separates out. Here's all the documents that require E signature. Here's the ones that require KBA versus just normal E signature. Here are all of the to DOS for the client. And very, very explicitly call those out, even linking to the payment websites if there's payments that need to be made. That's something that our tax software, you know, doesn't do a good enough job of. The transmittal letter. I don't know the transmittal letter. Clients should be able to understand the transmittal letter, but it's just, it's more wordy than it needs to be. It's not quite to the point. And honestly some of what comes through that transmittal letter is also kind of preference driven. Like you've got settings and how the letter generates where it's like, do they mail the payment and do they make a payment online? And it's just kind of antiquated at this point as opposed to like you log into the system and you've got a list of to dos that will link you straight out to the payment pages and you can like acknowledge those and even upload a confirmation so that the Tax Pro has a copy of that headed into the following year. Other helpful thing that they're doing here is sending out auto reminders for vouchers. So unless you disable those, it automatically following up the client and sending them reminders when voucher, when, when they've got quarterly payments to make. Now, to be totally honest with you, the. There's, there's time savings here. But the most valuable thing to me about automated delivery is the fact that it deskills the process of delivering the tax return. So when I would deliver tax returns historically those emails to clients were coming from me and I would bullet point list out. Here are all the things that I need you to do. Use this attachment, that attachment, that attachment. Here's my link to my calendar. If you want to, if you want to connect and discuss with an automated delivery tool like this, anybody on my team can do it. An admin can send it out and the pushback and if there's resistance to that, it's actually, you know, we talked with Derek Foote recently in the last couple of weeks about delivering tax returns over video and the pushback is, well, if I'm missing out on that client touch point at delivery time, then isn't that a lower level of service? I would argue not. Because the meeting that you have when you deliver a tax like some tax work is largely not something that's subject to debate. It's largely administrative. It's like, well, here's the outcome and here's the stuff that we need to do. And I want to make sure that you do these steps correctly. The time for advisory conversations are before the end of the year. If they're happening at any point during tax prep Time. I would rather have that conversation at intake at the beginning than I would at the end. But really I would rather not have that advisory conversation during the process of filing the return at all. Because at that point there's. There's nothing very little from like an advisory standpoint of, of what we can do. There's some things, but at the time that I'm filing a tax return, usually I'm like, this is kind of the administrative step. And this is maybe, this is maybe a little more like, I don't know, pie in the sky. Like, may feel out of touch if you just do, if you do a lot of volume 1040 work. To say that like, no, filing a tax return is largely an administrative thing. But this is where we all want to get to, is to be having smart conversations about the client's tax situation throughout the year. So the filing of the actual tax return is just like a check in the box. We already knew what the outcome was going to be like. At this point, we're just filing the forms and getting that out there. They're already paid in, presumably. And so the filing, the less of an event that fills filing can be, the better, that is, for your firm generally. And so I try not to stack up the expectation of having meetings and all this additional work around the time that we're filing the return, because I want to have those conversations at a different point in time. And that is what makes automated delivery solutions so useful for me, is they can take the seniors, they can take the partners, all those people out of the delivery process, and we can treat it for what it ought to be, largely an administrative process. Other thing I didn't touch on here, which is a huge upside of these tracking people down for 8879s. In fact, safe Sense got some like, hilarious metrics on before and after comparisons of firms that switch to Safe Send and how on average, like average 8879 turnaround time before safe send is like, you know, 35 days or something, which there's a lot of ways you can pick holes on that. You need a better process to auto remind and that sort of thing. But then after, it's like, you know, 48 hours or something like that. So that's another really helpful aspect of automated delivery solutions. Now, Safe Send, as I said, was kind of the OG here. Sorben now does automated delivery, I want to say trust. Does automated delivery. Trust is a early kind of new to the space tax workflow tool. But it is becoming clear now that automated Delivery is, is kind of becoming an essential part of a tax suite attacks kind of workflow solution. Which, which is great because there's, there's, that's one of those things where the work is done now. It's just like the work about the work, it's the tracking down signatures and all that that I don't want to fuss with because the actual work product has been done. This episode is sponsored in part by liflow. It is, it's the time of the year where we make resolutions for what we want to do better in 2025. And one of those resolutions might just be upgrading those client touch points, improving the client experience because at the end of the day, everything kind of boils down to that and how premium your clients perceive your service to be in one of the most automated ways to create really valuable touch points that are like actually connected back to the accounting ledger. But it's. It's life. It's Life Flow, guys. Gang Gals Squad, Live Flow. Originally, the secret sauce was, was they were a connector for your spreadsheets. They would connect QBO and Xero files to your Google sheets or your Excel, and they still do that very well. But they now also have like an online dashboard, or through all those same connections you can create like super quick and easy, not overwhelming if you don't want them to be dashboards that actually feed in live data from the accounting ledger, either on a continuous basis or just a snapshot. So I could like send a roundup to my client over text every single morning. It opens up all sorts of possibilities, but the tool itself isn't a bunch of work. That's what I never liked about reporting systems. You log into that thing and it's, it's just a lot. Customizability is a big thing here. Life Flow always has really nice templates you can swipe, but you can also build it into whatever you want it to be because ultimately how clients value our service, it really boils down to those touch points, what we put in front of them and what they get out of it. To learn more about LifeLow, check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by by cloud accountant staffing. Hey, scenario. What if. What if you had this buddy that was running another accounting firm and they stumbled into this thing and they like, they start hiring these really good offshore accountants in the Philippines and you're talking with them one day and your buddy's like, hey, I got some really good people here. You want me to hook you up? You want me to find you a few, find you a few accountants. What would you say? Would you be like, nah, I'm good. I could find accountants all day long. I don't need more accountants in my firm. Poppycock. You'd be like, tell me more. That's what working with cloud accountant staffing is. Because the team behind cloud account staffing, they were literally just an accounting firm that started hiring people in the Philippines, had a really good luck, like I did, with the quality of who they picked up, and then they just started doing it for other firms. It's not, it's kind of as simple as that. If you're looking for somebody who understands you, just works with accounting firms, not some rando sending you cold DMs on LinkedIn, a group that actually does this stuff just with accountants. Check out cloud accountant staffing link down in the show notes. Number three, best thing that happened in 2024 as a category, the tax workflow ecosystem has exploded. Like it's legit now. Like there's a bunch, like there's eight or nine different tools now doing some version of intake and some version of delivery around the tax prep software. And that's a great signal because it means these companies are getting traction in some form or another. The more you see them and the more they mature, the more legitimacy it lends to the functions that they're providing to tax pros. And I mean, the stuff that we've talked about so far today, like, those are really, really valuable things to like, ensure that you're getting work out the door efficiently. And we want these companies to continue to get investment and grow and keep doing new things, which we're going to talk about for 2025. So the legitimacy of that ecosystem altogether, that's really exciting to me. Number four, best thing that happened in 2024, practice management systems got put on notice, man. Like, practice management systems are kind of the alpha dogs in the ecosystem right now. Your cloud PM and kind of the PM category next to the ledger is really maybe next to bill pay 2 practice management. It's really the biggest category in the like accounting professional software vertical. Like, what else are you paying? 100 bucks a month a user for 50 bucks a month? Whatever you're paying for your PM is a really big category and it's, it's grown a ton in the last five years. And you know, even, even the way I recommend people build their tech stack is you start with your PM and then you build around that that might be changing and that these work, I call them Workflow tools, tax intake tools also month end close automation tools. We're going to do another episode on, similar to this, on what's changing around kind of bookkeeping tech. But you know, who's shaking in their, shaking in their boots just a little bit. I think practice management systems like you look at, you know, take, take Taxdome, who's a very, very good practice management system for tax firms. They've got a really good kind of end to end sort of workflow automation approach from like doing a version of proposals and their own version of intake to like setting up kind of automated reminders for every step along the way. And then you can, you know, block the delivery of the turn by the client having to pay an invoice. And then you get the 8879s. I like a lot of smart things that have become part of their practice management platform. Canopy's doing a lot of those things too. Carbon, like go down the list. Practice management systems have some version of these things. And in the past we would have called practice management systems, we would have called what they do workflow because it was like as workflowy as any software was. It was as in the work as any tool is besides your ledger tool or your tax prep software. Right. And, and these tax intake tools or kind of tax workflow tools are kind of redefining what workflow is like. They've come in and solved a really technical, meaty, meaningful problem for accountants that is arguably a more painful problem than those that some practice management systems solve. Like, that's a, that's a pretty hot take. But if you look at what a tax, you know, tax intake tool does, all the things we've talked about today about the ways that it saves you time and eliminates headaches. A tax firm produces tax returns. That's what it does. A practice management system is useful and it helps guide kind of how things go through the office time of billing and a whole bunch of really important things. But a tax firm produces tax returns and a tool that massively benefits your efficiency in producing tax returns. If you had to actually just pick one of those two things, a practice management system or a killer tax workflow tool, I would argue most small firms would pick the tax workflow tool and say we'll piece together the rest with off the shelf stuff or spreadsheets or something like that. While bigger firms would probably go to the practice management system to say like, we need the 10,000 foot view to manage, you know, a larger volume of projects. Would you agree with That I think that's like, that's really interesting. And for the practice management systems who've just been growing like crazy the last five years, I love that somebody is actually like nibbling at a, a, a piece of the market in a, in a really interesting way. Because right now what's happening is all the practice management systems, they look at what the tax workflow tools are doing, they talk to their users and they're like, yeah, we'll build that. Like most of them are like, yeah, we'll build tax workflow and it'll be integrated with everything else that you need in your firm and it will be vastly superior to that because it'll all be in one place. And wouldn't we love it if that were the case? But what are the tax workflow people saying, oh, we'll build practice management. I mean there's a hundred practice management systems out there. We could totally add that to what we do. So which of those two things is harder to build? And I can see the argument going both ways, but you can also look out in the marketplace to see a whole bunch of practice management systems. It's the tax workflow stuff that feels novel right now and some would argue feels harder to build. So I like to me both sides of this are still essential. Tax workflow, your pm, they solve different problems. We would all love it if they would work together a little more and integrate. But arguably tax workflow is such a core part of a tax firm that I don't think anybody's racing to integrate because it is such a precious, important thing. So it's, it's great for the ecosystem because it's pushing everybody in a way that ultimately benefits us. Like that's what gets me excited about it. Last one here for what's changed in 2024? Research. Tax research hasn't moved as far as I'd hoped but, but we have the most powerful off the shelf research tools that we've ever had in perplexity. Really freaking good. It's a fantastic replacement for Google. Honestly, ChatGPT and the ability of both of those tools to work off of specific bodies of knowledge. So the notion that you can give it the authoritative literature and it accesses that stuff in a vastly more meaningful way than any other research tool we've had in the past. I mean, 24 months ago there we didn't have tools, research tools that were anything more than text based matching search. So you type in some sort of phrase, some sort of vernacular and the research database retrieves everything that has that bit of text in it, man, that's not helpful, right? Like that's. You have to know the exact vernacular to get anything useful out of that. But then you've got a massive list of results that just highlights that bit of text in the results. And the results, oh my gosh, that's a lot of work to get to the bottom of and actually make a determination from, as opposed to what I can do where you give it the authoritative literature, you don't have to have the vernacular perfect and it will still figure it out. And, you know, the best way to do this is to ask it for the most relevant excerpts and, you know, exceptions to the rule, present that stuff back to you and then give you an answer according to that. This is where prompting makes a really big difference because we can't use AI ultimately as a black box and just say, give me an answer, we want it. And you treat it like an intern. If an intern just comes back and gives you an answer, you'll be like, cool, but you gotta prove it to me. Make a workpaper, something like that. That's what we want AI to do, is ultimately prove to us what the right answer is. That is such a vastly more compelling version of research than text based search in a research tool. Right? And so coming into 2024, my thought was like, dang, like by the end of the year, research is just going to be totally reinvented. Where are we? What have the players in our vertical done? Well, Thomson Reuters says they've spent $100 million on AI. I would love to know where that went because I'm not seeing it. And Thomson Reuters products, right, like they just recently launched an AI product, but it's literally just chat with documentation behind it, which we've been able to do in ChatGPT and stuff like that for a really long time. The advantage that these tools have in our space is they have the research databases, some of which are proprietary, proprietary, some of which are not. Like all the truly authoritative stuff like that, Anybody can get that. But it's not quite as simple as just swiping it. So take an IRS publication. And a publication ultimately isn't authoritative. But let's just roll with me here. An IRS publication has a bunch of text, but it also has a bunch of worksheets and tables and stuff like that. And AI struggles to make sense of those worksheets because they're big, like step by step, sort of sequential things. But what people are beginning to do now is actually use AI image models. Let's Take a tax table actually as an example. They're using AI image models to basically explain every path through a worksheet or through a table in plain English. Then when you ask the model a question about the publication, it can actually make sense of whatever is presented in that worksheet or table and apply it to the question that you're asking. So that's the difference between you just downloading a PDF and of an IRS publication and coming to ChatGPT and saying, what would the tax be under this scenario? And it can't make sense of the tax table. It's the difference between that and dedicated tax research tools where they're really going to the next level and like processing in a more complex way what exists in those documents. And that's what we need the research groups in our vertical to be doing is like creating the really, really juicy version of that. But man, I don't see it happening. So like the, the the really only have two AI tax research companies of consequence on my radar, Blue JJ and tax GPT. I've turned down sponsorship opportunities galore with both of them. They both want to be all over my channels and promote their stuff as they should because we get a lot of a ton of smart people that engage with this content. But I'm not willing to do that because I'm honestly still not convicted that anybody in our space is doing it in a fundamentally better way than than the mainstream solutions out there. We just got some unbelievably good new AI models from Google and now with Gemini, you can cut their models loose on a problem for three to four minutes and say go track down all the, you know, this, that and the other things, tell it how to do the work and come back with something super compelling for you. Google Learn About. Let's put this in the show notes. Google learn about an amazingly unique user interface for exploring any topic and learning about something and digging into sources like so incredibly innovative. Like it blew my mind when I saw that solution. I super encourage you, go Google or check out the link in the show notes. Google Learn about. That's what it's called is Google learn about us by Google and then type in some tax topic and the things that it will pull up. It will like quiz you like. It is such a novel interface for doing research. I see stuff like that from the Googles and the open eyes of the world and I'm like, I don't like if, if I were an investor in software, I might have a hard time getting excited about the tax research Base. So we may get there, and ultimately the advantage of. Of the. The folks building specifically for our vertical is, you know, deeper, maybe a greater focus on authoritative literature and all that stuff. But I don't know that I'm there yet. Now, that being said, if you zoom out, and ultimately, it doesn't matter that much to the Tax Pro, Am I buying something from Insider vertical, or am I buying something general? If we zoom out, man, are the tools way better than what we had 24 months ago? Right, right. Like, that is a win for Tax Pros. That's really exciting. Okay, enough talking about the past. I want to set that context because still, a lot of firms and I really struggle with this, like, I suspect you do. I struggle with saying the same things over and over and over again. Because the reality is nobody cares. Like, nobody's watching every single thing that I do. And if I say a thing a second time, it's not a big deal. But still, every single day in my email, I will get 20 emails from people that sign up to my newsletter. And they're like, I just heard about practice management systems. And it's stuff like where you just. You got to kind of keep perspective of nobody's looking at you all day, dude. Like, nobody's watching your stuff. There is, you know, it's pretty freaking cool. There's, you know, a thousand to fifteen hundred people that tune into this podcast every single day, bless your hearts, who are so plugged into this stuff, like, at a. At a different level to just about anybody else in the profession. That's so cool. And honestly, those are the people that I'm thinking about most when I'm. When I'm creating content. And that's kind of what you end up stuck between, is like, these people have already seen me talk about this thing on the podcast or something like that. But it's like, you know what? The world is way bigger than any of us give it credit for, and sometimes you just gotta keep harping on the most important things. So if you take anything from this podcast episode, that stuff we just talked about, the big stuff in 2024, lean into that hard, because it will save you a ton of headache. Like, immediately as you're getting into January and February, starting to think about 20, 20, 25, or I guess, 2024, tax prep in 25. Okay, but let's talk about 2025, what's to come. How many things we got here? Seven. Holy Shamole. Peter, I'm just going to apologize right now. If you're on the on the elliptical. Is that what it was? The elliptical? As you're listening to this, this is going to be a two day. Okay, this is hard if, if I'm you, this is harder than I and longer than I would want to go on an elliptical. All right, what's to come? Number one, this is a biggie. AI usage and the usage of AI assistance will become much more normalized in the accounting profession. There's still a lot of unfounded, pearl clutching, overusing AI with client information. Like it's, it's like you're like a heretic if you propose using client information in an AI tool right now. Like people, like I worry I'm going to get burned at the stake and, and I go to conferences where the, the audience is not going to be as progressive as a lot of the folks I talk with online. And I'm, it's like you see like visceral reactions from people and it's very similar to early days cloud where everybody was used to having all the information on their own server where they could touch it, it was in their office. And the notion of putting that data anywhere else, which, which is funny, it's like a geographic thing. It's like those ones and zeros are going to be somewhere not in my office. That's not safe. What about the tubes they travel through? What about wherever that server is and, and whatever dorito eating nerd's just gonna let his friends come in and see my client data and ultimately like that, you know, became less and less founded. Though along the way there were a lot of bad versions of cloud that were not secure. Right. And it's not until it matured and we got there that it was better. The same can absolutely be said of AI. The very first Chat GPT, every single thing that you put into Chat GPT was trained into the model and that has evolved. But back then loads of news stories of, you know, Samsung employees putting proprietary code bases into there and now OpenAI has access to it. But for quite a while now that's no longer been the case. The leading models do not train their, their models on user provided information. That's not the case for ChatGPT. OpenAI, it's not the case for Google, it's not the case for Microsoft Copilot. It's not the case for, for anthropics. Claude, if you're on a business plan, as you absolutely should be, if you're doing any sort of business stuff with these AI assistants, the stuff that you're giving and it's not being trained in the model. And that's the only thing that differentiates AI tools from other tools is the retention of that data. It's not the case on any of these leading tools on business plans. But we still have to do the usual due diligence with these tools that we would do for any other cloud app that we pick up. And so if you look at. And this is where it gets really interesting. If you actually put all the tools that you use and, and you like redact the name of the tool and you compare kind of the. The security capabilities of these different tools, like conversational AI tools today are more secure than many of the apps that are now commonplace in accounting firms. ChatGPT the team plan SOC 2 type 2 compliant. There's very few tools in the accounting ecosystem that are SoC2, not just SoC2, but SoC2 type 2 compliant. That's the AICPA certification. That's a really, really high bar that the vast majority of the practice management systems we use have not reached. And obviously we have an abundance of sensitive client information in there. Other big thing to always look out for, multifactor authentication. Most data breaches happen by somebody getting access to a login. Like that's how most of this stuff gets out into the wild. ChatGPT, you can have two factor authentication. And so I, I really want to get back to like a. More first principles considering how does this security stack up against the other apps that we use? Because the wrong way to make tech decisions, which I think is what most of us do in the space right now is they see, oh, a bunch of other firms use it. So it's okay for me, right? Early days AI meeting recorders. This was totally the case. Initial reaction. I'm not going to let something sit in on my meetings now. AI meeting recorders have increasingly been normalized and so people just start using them. But that's not a first principles approach to security in your firm. And I honestly think if you do the work of going full first principles, let's look at this. You know, AI and I recommend ChatGPT the team plan because ChatGPT from a performance standpoint is better than anything else right now. It's not even close. If you look at that specifically the team plan and you compare the security of it against the other tools in your stack, it's honestly better than most of the other tools in the small firm space. Okay, that's number one AI. Those things kind of becoming more normalized and opening up more access. Number two, research is going to get way better. We got some wild updates at the end of 2024 from Google and OpenAI specifically around solving hard problems and models being able to think over extended timelines to like think through these hard issues and pull in more materials and double check its work. And it's a like whole different level to AI than I see our vertical specific tools getting into yet though they will certainly follow one way or another. AI research going to get way, way better. And this is something that I mean pretty much everybody agrees with like even Justice Roberts like was very out there at the time this maybe six months ago. He's like going to fundamentally change like the judicial process and what things actually have to go to trial and what automated trials look like. He's like, it can follow rule based stuff, it's getting better at that every single day. That has to upset the legal system. I say upset, but honestly in a good way. And that will absolutely extend to tax research. Now context matters obviously and there's, I think when we hear this and we inherently kind of get defensive, our minds jump to the most gnarly, most complicated, most nuanced cases where you may not even agree with some of the interpretations out there, but you're willing to take this position. I think the main thing to hear here is all of the steps to get to that are getting easier and all of the determinations that are not that complicated are becoming more trivial. And so it's, it's better tools in the hands of professionals. I'm sure it's at some level it helps non professionals potentially. But I'm thinking through the lens of a professional, how do I get to higher quality answers faster? That stuff's just going to continue getting better in 2025. Research is a, is a pretty big focus for the companies developing AI solutions. This episode is sponsored in part by Team up, the people who help you find talented accountants in the Philippines, but hire them directly. Very common progression I see from firms who lean into offshore hiring for the first time as they, they turn to like some offshore megacorp and it's like this big skyscraper where they, they put folks in there and they're, they're maybe scared about security things and all that. Understandably, the first time they work with people offshore and they're like, oh yeah, give me this big sanitized environment where they like strip search everybody before they go into work at the beginning of the day and they leave. And it's like this is fundamentally more secure than the way that we do our work onshore. Like I can understand how this works. But before you know it, you're paying this group like you're paying them as much money to employ those people as you're actually paying the people. And when 50 cents of every dollar that you pay goes to some other company instead of the actual person you employ, that's just a bummer, man. That's just a bummer. So a lot of firms I know transition to just hiring people directly. That is what Team up specializes in. No, no middle people. You're just engaging that person to work with you the same way you would say somebody onshore. And 100% of that money is going straight to the person. One hundo dollar out of your pocket. Dollar into their pocket. Guess it wouldn't be a dollar. It'd be whatever the local currency is. You get the idea. To learn more about Team up, check out the link down in the show notes. 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 because 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. Hours in the first year. Because they didn't have to build all that stuff manually. Man with the condition. We want more business with impressive online proposals. No more hustling. Hustling 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 more profitable. Check out why over 7,000 of the smartest businesses run on ignition@ignitionapp.com. put a link in the show notes number three. Let's circle back to these companies innovating around tax workflow. One of these tax intake companies. Not. Well, let's just say one of them. Somebody's going to nail Workflow. So not just intake, but marking up the work papers, like organizing it into a work paper file where that's actually what you enter, you know, into the tax software based on, or there's an integration there that pushes that information. Right now tax prep is kind of in a sucky place where it's like, where do I put all my work papers that put it in an old platform like CCH Engagement? Do I put it in just a vanilla folder structure in my practice management system? I think that's what most firms are doing now. But that's not a particularly intelligent file structure. You know, for 1040, a lot of people just have it all in a single PDF and it's boom, bookmarked. But what is a smart version of that? Because if you have it all in one place where AI can see through those documents and it can run like double checks, like do a review of making sure this ties to that and like automate some of the organization of those documents as soon as we have those documents in a good platform where you can do annotation, AI can apply some logic. That's a really big unlock. That's a vastly better experience than a PDF, which is just static documents that you can draw on top of right now. SurePrep arguably was the first of the game here where a decade ago they had a really cool interface and they still do. That took OCR technology as far as you possibly could, where you upload all these forms and you have all the documents and it will pull the text off of it with a reasonable level of accuracy, sometimes push that stuff to the tax software. But it gave you like, um, you know, SP Binder was, was the solution that was like sort of a customized work paper solution for 1040s. And for a long time it was, it was probably the best like 1040 work paper solution. But it wasn't straightforward. It took a couple years to get the team up to speed. Thomson Reuters acquired that company. And so I don't have a really any hope of that being developed down the road. I mean, they haven't launched or announced a single AI thing for that product, which I think is all you need to know about whether it has relevance long term. If you're still on it right now, I wouldn't change yet. Like it's still good. But what I'm very excited for is we have these seven, eight, nine companies that are kind of making waves in the tax workflow space now. What's next after tax intake, after automated tax delivery? It's got to be Work paper management. Right? It's got to be AI doing really intelligent things across all those documents and sort of one intelligent workspace where you have all of those documents and AI can actually see, see into it. Man, that is so exciting to me. I mean, you can go out right now to chatgpt and have it annotate a PDF and like compare things and do some versions of this. But the most powerful version of this is one that is increasingly agentic. That is, AI is handling different parts of the process. And the very first one that it's already doing is give me a stack of documents and mark off the checklist to ensure that we have all that stuff in. AI is already doing that for us. So what's next? What is the next step in like getting a 1040 from a pile of documents to something that's in your tax software? Having a work paper platform where you can do all that and it can start chipping away at those problems one by one? That's super, super exciting. We're going to get a version of this. I know we will from, because a number of people have told me they will. We, we will get a version of this. It's going to be the current tax workflow, folks, I think that get to it first, especially around 1040. It's a hard problem to solve, but I think 12 months from now we'll have a pretty cool version of it. I'm really excited to see what that looks like 24 months from now, because just like these tax intake solutions allow you to scale tax intake to, you know, it could be 10 returns, it could be 10,000 returns, and it's the same amount of effort for you. An agentic work paper management platform where you have all your work papers here and you can cut AI loose on doing specific tasks. AI's ability to do those tasks is infinitely scalable as well. And so anything that we can get AI to do for us and managing those work papers and even just ordering them how we want them or making a specific type of annotation, anything that can do for us can scale across our entire prep process. And it's by and large something a human's not going to have to do. Again, we've done some testing on the YouTube channel and in this podcast in the past of throwing a checklist at AI and saying, okay, make sure this is a cash basis balance sheet. Make sure that this is, you know, a comparative balance sheet current period to a previous period. And like AI is to the point where I can do that stuff in A pretty compelling way. And so what does a massive checklist look like for reviewing a 1040 where you can cut an AI loose and say, do each of these things one by one and report back on the results? That's really exciting. The problem has been there hasn't been a work paper platform that was smart enough to enable that stuff. And I think we're going to get that from the folks that are doing innovative tax workflow stuff now. Yet another reason to hit your wagon to the tax workflow folks, in my opinion. Number four, I'm interested to see, you know, conversational AI assistance. So like Turbo, let's say TurboTax launches and I'm sure they have, they already have some version of this, like a chat assistant inside of TurboTax. But I suspect that consumer facing like AI advisors are going to get much more compelling because man, chatgpt and stuff like that, like if you give it some information, it's already pretty darn good. So I think we'll, we'll logically see people getting more comfortable going to an AI advisor for certain things. But one impact that that has kind of that normalization of interacting with an AI advisor for things is we'll probably see more pressure on us to have some version of that as well. And we've talked about this on the podcast quite a bit. If you have two accounting firms and one accounting firm has sort of an avatar of their own Expertise that's available 24 hours a day and will give a client simple answers, arguably the firm that has that AI assistant is a more compelling solution than the one that doesn't. And that's hard for us because it challenges our place. And I don't want this thing giving something answers without me being there. But important to remember, if you're standing up an AI assistant, the right way to do it is for it to only reference the materials that you've already put out in the world. So we've got, I mean, we're closing in on 400 episodes of this podcast. We've got an AI assistant that's trained on every single episode of the podcast. And AI is good enough honestly these days to stick to the source you tell it to use the source. Hallucinations have gotten 99% better than they were in the early days of chat GPT. And so I have a very high degree of confidence that if somebody asks that assistant a question, it's literally just pulling from the context that I've given it. So what information have you put out there into the world that an AI assistant can draw from. And that's what ultimately gives me confidence to give that AI assistant some agency and some freedom in answering questions if I know it's only ever going to stick to the things that I've already said. And like, there's a whole other angle to this, developing your own kind of AI assistance for internal purposes that reference your meeting transcripts. We have so many of the same conversations with our clients over and over and over again where, what if a junior had access to an AI assistant that could see into thousands of hours of advisory meetings that you've done? Wowie, wow, wow. Is that like, that's incredibly valuable, right? Yet another reason why I've been pushing people for the last 18 months have AI meeting assistance in your meetings. That's really valuable context that you'll never regret having. Even. Even if you don't feel like you're using the output of that today, when you look back, you will never regret having it. So I could see those like conversational AI experts becoming more of a thing. Interestingly, if there's anybody in our space that's in the driver's seat to deliver a version of it that we will give to our clients is probably our practice management systems. Our practice management systems already have portals that clients can log into. And the unique thing that we have that some other random AI advisor doesn't have is we have context. We have all the filing history of that client. We have past email conversations. Oftentimes you have connection directly into their ledger. So arguably a sort of advisor assistant that the client could speak with. We ought to be in the position because we have all of that valuable context. We ought to be in the position to deliver a better AI advisor experience than anybody else as a result. And this is, I think, an opportunity for practice management systems to potentially extend the portal to have some functionality like this. It's honestly a really hard thing to ship because you're like, how much leeway do you give it? Obviously reactions from accountants are going to be so across the board on something like that, right? Where you still have a whole bunch of never a that are going to be like, this is respons irresponsible. How could you ever do this? Meanwhile, they've got, you know, an Alexa in their kitchen listening to everything they say and they, you know, Siri can read their emails and all, all sorts of examples of where those exact same AI models are already accessing the information that they're concerned about. Stat Siri, go away. Sidebar ChatGPT integration and Siri Very good. Siri, stop it. No. Stop. Go away. Stop. Very exciting. The smartphone assistants may be getting smart again, right? They've been so dumb for the last few years being able to pull LLMs in. And I'm very excited by how good some of the Google AI stuff has been lately. Hopefully Android, the smartphone assistants get better there too. But exciting time for tech nerds, man, Such an exciting time. Okay, number five thing to expect in 2025, PMs, they're going to start shipping stuff. They have to start shipping stuff. Look for PM's proposal solutions to continue getting better. A number of them now have a version of like, I recommend Ignition and Anchor for a standalone proposal solution. That is what you send to the client to get them to agree to an engagement. Because, like, the littlest bit of optimization in that proposal experience genuinely changes the money that can hit your bank account and what you can get clients to agree to. Like, it really makes a difference. So practice management systems have been shipping a version of this, but it's historically been very, very weak, not at all as fully featured as the dedicated tools. These will keep getting better. But I will still be surprised if practice management systems ever get to the level where they can replace the standalone tools. Because it's very often that you will see a company ship like a 20% version of a thing and then it just kind of doesn't get any love because the company is doing a hundred different things. Whereas Ignition, whereas Anchor, all they're doing is they get out of bed in the morning and they think about how to make proposals better. It's very hard to compete with that. PMs are also almost certainly going to be getting into tax workflow. So you'll see a version. In fact, a lot of them are already saying that we're working on this. So you'll see them ship a version of what the tax workflow solutions we've been talking about do. The reality is like, my hopes are not particularly high. Maybe somebody nails it. I mean, at the end of the day, we want all in one. We want a single solution that does everything. Awesome. That's just probably not realistic, right? So I, I think you'll almost certainly see PMs shipping their version of this. The problem is they're going to be shipping version 1 and these other solutions, like Sorban's been doing this for about three years now. These other solutions are on versions 3 and 4 and already working on like, you know, know, work paper management and stuff like that. So PMs are, are kind of playing catch up PMs, you know, also when you think about same thing as with proposals, PMs also work on a whole bunch of other things. They're larger, more mature companies which can't always ship as quickly as a result. And so I think another thing that you may see is I would be shocked actually if this next year we didn't see a practice management system or several of them acquire some of these tax workflow solutions. It's a great signal to say that they're, they're working on it and then like create a native integration so that those two things will talk nicely to each other. I don't have any inside information on, on this. It just makes total sense. Like I could absolutely see, you know, take Carbon. Carbon for a long time has been friendly with Lisio and they have some really good native integrations between those two things. Lisio is like basically just a client portal. Lisio has done a pretty big pivot into tax workflow where they now have some pretty cool tax intake stuff. Carbon kind of has the problem of being a very international product. And so do you build a bunch of us tax specific stuff for what has historically been a kind of region agnostic product. Besides certain workflows and deadlines around, you know, a 1040 project template with a 415 deadline, it's kind of been a region agnostic platform. So do you, I think it probably makes a ton of sense for a PM like that to then look at like, okay, how do we get somebody under the umbrella so that we have a tax workflow solution? I'm totally shooting from the hip there, no inside information, but that logic applies to a whole bunch of practice management systems. And if they don't see a path to being able to build a compelling workflow solution themselves, don't be shocked if you do see them make an acquisition. Last note on this around PM's launching stuff, I think this will probably fragment the practice management ecosystem a bit because to date they've been able to kind of straddle like, oh, are we for bookkeepers, are we for tax people? And we're seeing a little bit more of a divide there now where they're starting to see more separation in the ones that are better for tax firms, but who then become the practice management systems that super lean into tax workflow. Like practice management systems have the same concerns that firms do around specializing. You know, like if they're perceived as the one for tax firms, then, well, we don't get any of the other firms now, like they have all of those same concerns. And if one, I mean, let's just pick taxdome, who's always been very tax heavy, is literally right in the name. Even though they say they do a lot of stuff for bookkeeping firms now, like most of the folks that I know that are most excited about taxdome or Tax firms, let's say taxdome goes all in on tax workflow, either building their own or making an acquisition. That becomes really juicy for tax firms who are trying to pick a PM because it's clear that they're doing a really deep investment specific, specific to us tax workflows. And not everybody's going to be willing to go that specific. And so it creates a fragmentation of the PM ecosystem, which honestly might be a great thing because there's so many PMs right now. If that fragmentation happens, it probably makes the decision making process easier, right? Because those, those platforms are presumably then just more tailored to the ways that you work. But I think this kind of has to happen because I don't think practice management systems can pretend that the tax workflow stuff isn't going on. Like they need a solution for either integrating with some of them or bringing that stuff in house. Because as soon as those tax workflow solutions start shipping practice management features, the alarm bells go off, right? And that's probably inevitable. This episode is sponsored in part by Carbon, the practice management system. Funny story about Carbon. So we did our 2025 practice management system recommendation. There's like 40 some practice management systems out there. And we pared it down to a list of, was it 7? Some much shorter list where I'm like, these are the only practice management systems that I recommend. And doing that was a big undertaking because we looked at basically six different sizes of firms and for each of those different sizes, firms have different service mixes. So if you did tax, only if you did bookkeeping only if you did tax and bookkeeping combined. And for all those different scenarios, we gave a top recommendation and two secondary recommendations for the practice management systems that are best suited for those types of firms. Now only two platforms got five top recommendations. One of them was Keeper, which honestly is not even a practice management system. It's like month end close automation. The second was Carbon. Carbon is really good, man. It's like it's one of the only tools out there that raises to the level of if you are considering tech change in your firm, honestly, practice management system or otherwise, you have to see what Carbon does and understand what it does. Because if you go down the list of really, really Smart, like thought leader accounting firms right now. Chad Davis, great example comes on the pot a lot, A lot, too much. A lot of really smart firms are running on carbon. And sometimes honestly, like that's what I need. That's all I need to see. Do I really need to like out big brain these other firms that I look up to or do I just say, okay, they've done a whole bunch of due diligence. I still got to do a bit, understand what works for me. But there's, there's something to that. Learn more about carbon. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Maker's help. If you're thinking about getting into some new, more profitable services in 2025, one that I cannot recommend enough is advising your clients on their kind of short term cash flow outlook. Oftentimes it's a prerequisite to be able to do more long term planning, which we want to jump into. And then we realized, oh, they're not going to make payroll on Tuesday. So that's kind of what they're focused on. That was the story of like my evolution. We tried to do long term planning, that didn't work. Then we started doing short term planning and then we're like, I kind of got to have a better understanding of your AP setup. So then we started doing bill pay and that kind of created the loop and opened up a huge advisory opportunity. And AP right now, funny enough, is being like completely reinvented by AI. It truly is because we can actually do much, much more automated extraction than we've ever been able to do before. Makers Hub, they're pushing it farther than anybody else that I've seen today. We did demo day on them a while back about how AI is kind of revamping ap. I think it's now the most watched accounts payable related video on YouTube anywhere. Because it's like really compelling. It's really impressive if it's something you're looking at for 2025, take a look at Makers Hub. They recently rolled out a bunch of stuff around price purchase orders too. Really impressive deck link down in the show notes. Okay, two more to go. Is this fun for you? I geek on this stuff so much. There's a couple of you for whom this is really fun and a couple of you who are like, yikes, I understand some of these words, but I'm still managing my work in Excel. That was, was that too targeted of an attack? Listen, I actually, I was on a podcast the other day. We may actually Air it on this feed and talk with a firm owner who still manages his stuff in Excel. And it's a solo, solo firm run. And I'm like, you know, he's got a hundred clients. And I'm like, there's. There's reasons why that's hard and maybe not optimized, but especially for a really small firm, sometimes Excel's really nice. Right? This is an extremely uncool thing to say. In fact, I'm sure there's practice management systems that are literally sponsoring this episode that market to single firm owners. I don't think I would do it, try to run my firm on Excel, but there is a certain, like, romanticism of, like, that simplicity, especially when we're feeling overwhelmed at connecting this to that. And it's like, can't we just go back to doing it on a. On a whiteboard or on a spreadsheet? It's attractive, but I don't. I don't think I would do it. All right, number six, we're talking tax prep software for the first time. What are we, 50 minutes into this episode and we're actually talking about tax prep software for the first time? We will be closer to a new platform, but we won't have one yet. So I think the only company that's come out and said we're building it is indeed. It's. It's the team behind Core V indeed dot com. They've already got some pretty cool stuff making it easier for you to do, like, R and D studies in house, you know, Augusta plan documentation. So Indeed's already got some cool tools, but they have come out and said, like, very clearly, like, we're building the next tax prep platform, which is awesome. I know a couple other companies that are doing it in stealth, but there have always been companies doing it in stealth, and that doesn't mean that they'll actually ever come out with anything. This is such a hard thing to build. You can't build half of a tax prep platform, then expect people to switch to it. So, like, the only, like, scenario where firms are actually jumping ship and changing full sail to something else is, like, you support the 50 states. I mean, there's. But there's even so much, like, local stuff that you want support for. So it's just very hard to get firms on board for a new platform. That's not going to happen in the next 12 months. But my hope is that 12 months from now, when we record this episode of what do we expect for 2026, that we're a Whole lot closer to it and can maybe see by the end of 26 being able to reasonably go to a new platform that's cloud based and has integrations. I mean, imagine being able to integrate that stuff with these tax workflow tools. How awesome that would be. Okay, last one, number seven. And this is the big old wrench in not only tax workflows, but software of every kind. The big unknown is AI agents. 2025 is absolutely, absolutely going to be the year of the AI agents. And AI agents are basically just AIs that can control computers. So you'll have them on your desktop. You already do? I already do. I mean I've got chatgpt on my, on my desktop and every day that tool is being able to do more things. Now, seeing into the apps on my computer to understand the context of what I'm working on now I can talk with it over voice while it can see what's on my screen, which is honestly probably the future of work. Having a running conversation with your computer and it doing some things for you, you doing some things yourself, but just having this ongoing stream of conversation with this hyper intelligent thing that can go out and fetch results from the web. And like, that's probably just the future of how we work with our computers. In fact, we may actually move more to monitoring what an AI agent does than actually hustling the keyboard and mouse ourselves. Like, I mean you can kind of see that, right? And so the idea behind agents is they are controlling our computers. For us, the big question mark is how good they're going to be. And in 2025 they're not going to be amazing. But because it is software, it's like, well, geez, as soon as this thing will go and like file this one compliance report for me, I can push a button and it can pull the data from my system and do that on a totally automated basis. I can do that a thousand times, I can do it one time, I can do 100,000 times without requiring any more inputs from myself. So it's one of those things where when it hits that tipping point for certain applications, that's pretty interesting. It also means for even legacy systems like our tax softwares, the notion of that thing being able to run on a, on a server in the background and automate things in legacy systems is really compelling. I mean, you look at, without getting too nerdy, you look at a tool like Plaid. You know, Plaid is like, you can log into Plaid and connect a whole bunch of different banks to a software tool. So if you're going to connect a bank feed. Plaid is basically an aggregator of a thousand different banks, where instead of logging into one of those thousand banks, you just log into Plaid, you pick the bank and it'll pull that bank feed in for you. It's. It's an aggregator service. You can totally see a reality where people then build software on top of legacy systems. If an AI agent can reliably go and do something in the tax software, well, then we can almost build modern software on top of that AI agent that then goes and use that legacy. Uses that legacy system. Wouldn't we love to not have to have the legacy system? Absolutely. But right now, that's the only way that we have to do tax prep. Right? So AI agents even open up the possibility of building more intelligent things on top of those legacy systems that we would like to get away from. Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, says that where we're headed is large language models. The AI assistants that we interact with, becoming the software itself. And they just kind of sit on top of databases because that's, I mean, fundamentally, that's what software is, is like. Software is a user interface presenting data from a database and then doing some sort of logic to like, transform the data in something that's specific to the business logic of the problem that software solves. Satya is saying that UI layer, the software layer is increasingly going away in favor of just interacting with an AI, and then the AI interacts with the database. And all that logic and all that is built into the large language model. You may have some scenarios where you need a special interface to view things specifically. And he actually talked quite a bit about Excel and how it's, you know, helpful to see things in a spreadsheet format. But he said even today you can go to Microsoft Copilot and say, create a table of X, Y, Z and present this to me. And I present it to you in a spreadsheet format where it's like, well, you probably wouldn't go out to Excel if it will just do all that stuff for you right there. And you can just say, okay, now sort, sort column D by date and do this and do that and then email it to Jim. Like, at that point, you're probably sidestepping Excel altogether. So the big unknown, not only for the work that we do, but for all of knowledge work, is how good are AI agents going to be? And it's maybe hard to believe that in 2025 they're going to be fully taking over our computers and doing all of These powerful things. But the bigger thing is probably the path that they're setting. Because if you're reasonably confident that in five years. Oh yeah, I mean, you could talk with an assistant all day long like it was a human and just kind of, it does your bidding and it can spawn 100 clones of itself to go do that for a whole bunch of clients all at the same time. If that's really where we're going to be five years from now. How does that change what you do today? I mean, it means like, I'm thankful I'm not a software company that has to predict, like, oh, how do I build a platform that, that in five years machines are going to be using, not humans. Right? Like 2025 may actually be the last year where software platforms have more human users than machine users. Because if we can cut agents loose to go do this stuff, you better believe they're going to be bouncing off the walls of your practice management system, breaking all sorts of things in the interest of trying to automate things for you. But that's a really hard future to see into. Right? Right. Like it's so abstract. What all changes there at that point? I think you're kind of taking things a day at a time, like my North Star for what we do. And what I need to be scared of versus not scared of is always, is AI ultimately going to make all the blockers to entrepreneurship that are related to compliance and accounting is going to make all those blockers go away? I think it's going to help a lot of them. But the notion that all of the blockers to entrepreneurship related to what we do, notion that all that stuff's gonna go away overnight and AI is gonna solve that seems pretty far fetched. Right? It's gonna be an interesting year. It's like in the tax base, I think it's the most exciting as as long as I've been in the profession, which is just about 20 years now. This is, I think, the most exciting time from a tech standpoint we've had in the tax base. Super cool, but on a more macro level at a really amazing time for like macro tech as well. But time will tell how much that kind of filters down into the very specific, more nuanced work that, that we do. Gang, if you made it to the end of this, absolute nerd alert. Bless your heart. Anything that we missed, anything you really want to see or stuff that you're excited for, drop that stuff in the comments. And here's to having a killer 2025 man let's do.