445 Follow THIS Process To Nail Your Tech Stack in 2025

There was a time where we didn't have enough transparency of information to know if we had the best stack for our firm, the best tech stack. And the result was like this perpetual tech fomo, a tech stack dysmorphia. You look around at all the things everybody else is using, and you're just constantly wondering, am I on the right thing? You're living in uncertainty, and you're window shopping 365 days a year rather than focusing on the important stuff, which is not picking tech. It's the execution of your firm. It's the people. But until you are confident that I'm on the right stack, you can't turn that part of your brain off. My friends, my accountants, hear me when I say this. This is a solvable problem. And if you've never found yourself in a point in a place where you had supreme confidence in your tech stack, let 2025 be the first year that you feel that I can give you the information that you need to make this decision and feel good about it if you're a US Firm. But I'm a little less confident outside of that. Let me give you the framework. We're gonna run through it today, because the firms that are sure here, like, they're cranking. Imagine not having to live with all that confusion and the unknowns and all that. I want that for you, and I think I can give it to you today. Let's talk about it. Come on in. So what's changed? I would argue in the last five years, we now have a growing number of spaces where folks can talk openly about what works and what doesn't work. Twenty years ago, if you're running an accounting firm, your network was the other firms around town. And back then, things were much more competitive than they are now. So there wasn't that same. There wasn't the same, like, familiarity or relationships with other firms that a lot of people have now. And so how could you make software buying decisions? Calling up software reps? Like, there weren't places where you could do this stuff. There were some industry groups where you could get some information, but now the Internet, social media, online communities, it has broken down the barriers so that we can get real answers from other, real firms to understand what works and what doesn't work. Because there's an unbelievably huge number of tools out there. In North America alone, there are 38 different companies marketing their practice management solution to accounting firms. And that's. That's only in the accounting vertical. That's not including your Mondays, your trellos, your clickups, like all the other general tools out there. And the result is people like me leave you perpetually window shopping and maybe not knowing like, do I even need this type of tech? Is my practice management supposed to solve for that? And so what I've put together is basically a sequential like six step think like Maslow's hierarchy of needs that but for selecting your accounting firm tech. Because the biggest mistake people make is they pick their tools in the wrong order and they end up like picking out these cute little like apps to kind of plug a hole and it's a band aid. And this is the leading cause of your tech stack being way too big and you actually burning a lot of money on stuff, stuff that doesn't solve the core problem. I talk a lot about all of the things that affirm needs and a lot of people will come back and say like you're really telling me I have to buy a workflow tool and a PM tool and an engagement, like all these different things? And I'm like, yes. But when people hear that, usually it's coming through the lens of here's what my stack already is and I've got to add something when the better approach here is to start with your core tools that will solve as much as possible and, and then only layer in what you need beyond that. And when you can do that from the ground up, like when you're on the right core tools, you eliminate a lot of like the fluff, the duplicate stuff. In fact, somebody sent me a DM the other day, like what do I use for a dms? A document management system. Honestly the answer for most firms you don't even need one anymore because the cloud practice management system for all but audit I would say have pretty much replaced this. Now there's actually a couple like international vendors that are doing interesting stuff around document management that hasn't come to the states yet, but it's as part of an, an ecosystem that is much weaker around practice management systems internationally. So there's a little bit more of a void there. I don't want to distract you with that. That doesn't even make it on my roadmap of like stuff that US firms should be considering. So I'm going to walk you through those, the six step process. You may see me talking about it on social media this last week. Right now, if you do any tax and you're a US firm, this is the time to change your tech stack. Not at the end of the year because the worst thing that you can do is ride into battle next year, right into busy season on new tools without all the kinks ironed out. When you change now, the problems you have, the questions you're asking, the changes you're making this coming November, December, they are much higher quality questions. And that's more fine tuning rather than kind of all the initial implementation stuff. My recommendation for you is you got to put a kind of time bracket around this. Give yourself 30 days to make decisions, execution and implementation. It will take longer than that. But you just, you need to decide. And maybe I am biased here, but I think there is more great information out there than ever before that can help you make a decision. And I am like extremely biased here, I'm sure, because I've worked with genuinely thousands of small accounting firms now the last couple of years. And so I've had a load of conversations that lead me very convicted on what the right and wrong solutions are. I also founded a peer networking community where this is a really, really big part of it, like asking questions. So my community realized, we talked about on the podcast a lot. It's basically the what funds all of this that you see here. Private community folks can ask each other, hey, what's working? What's not working? We run like recurring events that gets together, people that use all sorts of different platforms. So, like, you can have a community of other firm owners that use the same tech that you do, see how they use it, get ideas. We've got a huge library of demos in there because I don't want to sit on a demo with a salesperson. I don't want to, like, draw from a big demo library. Just let me see it, save me a bunch of time. Another really cool thing we started doing there, the way those demo videos are hosted. Community members can comment on timelines in the demo. So the software vendor gives me the demo, gives us permission to host it on the community page. But then community members comment on the timestamps and they're like, yeah, no, this is legit. Or they're like, yeah, no, this isn't quite what they're saying. So it's one place you can go and see a whole bunch of stuff and get like very real answers from other people. Now there's other versions of that too. You can get a version of that on social media, a version of that by like building a friend group of other people that run firms. But there's enough information available today where you can, you can make a clear, correct decision and be done with it. And that's the goal to like have the focus of knowing. All right, my tech stack's pretty much there. I'm not gonna revisit this until next April. That's, that's the goal is we, we visit it once, we come to what is the best decision at that point in time and then we circle back to it in a year's time. Like, let's not make this any harder than it needs to be. I, I don't care if you join my community for a month, steal a bunch of ideas that it's. Right now it's 180 bucks a month, it's about to go up. But imagine paying a $180 to know that you're on the right tech stack as opposed to like some consulting group paying them thousands. $180. Like that is like less than one month subscription for your team on the wrong tool. Like, please, let's not make this any harder than it needs to be. This, I feel like it's just turned into me shilling the community hard trying to illustrate like the availability of information that is out there. Do this, make the right decision and be done with it, please. Now, there is no perfect tech stack. And this is where a lot of firms I talk to get paralyzed and then do nothing. There is no such thing as a perfect tech stack. But what you can have is very complete information so that you can have the confidence to know that of all the options out there right now, today I have the best combination of tools for my firm. Now I can kind of put that out of my mind and move forward with what we've got. Okay, let me run you through the six steps of how to approach this. Because the order that you build out your tech stack in is as important as what tools you choose first. Number one very first thing you gotta pick is your core workflow tools for tax firms. If you're doing tax work, that is your tax preparation platform. So the platform you use to prep the forms, if you're doing any bookkeeping, that is your accounting ledger. So for most firms that's QBO or zero, you're going to spend more time in these platforms than anywhere else. But also what platforms you choose can have an impact on what the correct downstream software selections are. So for example, if you're running more for like mid market companies and you're going to be rolling NetSuite, let's say you're a netsuite firm. Huge opportunities here. If people want to specialize in NetSuite because it sucks and everybody's trying to stay away from it. That creates an opportunity for the folks who are willing to get into it. But for example, if you're setting up around NetSuite, that really impacts the downstream tech decisions that you make. And so that's why we have to start here with your tax software and with your ledger software. If you are a new firm that is gun shy on spending money and may not think you have the money for a practice management system, all these other things, this same hierarchy. And there's, there's. I created a visual graphic for this hierarchy. Actually we'll link that in the show notes. I recommend you grab that, you save it, maybe even literally shoot it out of the old LaserJet printer and tape it on a wall like it's a single visualization to remind you, like, what order do I need to be making these decisions? That same order. If you're a new firm and you may not feel like you have the money for all this stuff, this is the same order that you should prioritize buying stuff. So you gotta start with the core workflow tools, the ledger, the tax software. That's how you get the stuff out the door. The this episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing. I'm in another country today. I'm in. I'm in London, which is not a country, it's a city. And I realize that. But I'm here because there's accountants everywhere. Accounting is in many ways a universal language and a great upside of that is you can hire accountants to work for you anywhere in the world. Cloud Accountant staffing, they're an accounting firm that started hiring folks directly in the Philippines, had such good luck with this that they started doing this for other accounting firms and now they will do it for you. This is a true story. I was in a coaching call with some folks in my online community, realize every Wednesday I run like a live coaching call with different types of firms. And offshore hiring came up because people were like, I think the prompt was, what's the biggest positive change you've made in 2025 this year? Something you wish you had done years earlier. And one person shared it was for them, it was offshore hiring. We talked through that a little more like upwards of probably a third of the people on that call were actively making offshore hires. I've shared before, I did that at the end of my firm running journey and it completely changed how we approached hiring and very rapid succession. We brought in four people from the Philippines. If you haven't done it before, you're going to have a lot of like embarrassing questions. You don't even know what to ask. Just start the process. Get on the horn with cloud accountant staffing. They can answer all those questions for you. Got nothing to lose. Check out the link to them down in the show notes. Hey, real quick. I write a weekly newsletter, goes out every single Thursday and let me tell you, it is a a banger. Do you ever struggle to keep up with like a high news updates? Things are happening so fast Jason. Where do I learn more? What is the most up to date Tippy, top hot goss in the industry and tech advice and all that? It's the newsletter buddy. Straight to your inbox Every single Thursday, 2pm Eastern. Thousands of accountants read it. I'll put a link to it down in the show notes. If you aren't on that list yet, you better get on it. Step two and step three. That was step one. Now step two and step three, they actually happen in conjunction with each other. And this is a new development. So the second thing you choose is your practice management system. The whole point of the practice management system is to be the brain for as much of your firm as possible. So that is definitely project management. It's oftentimes also client portal time and billing, your CRM, your file management, oftentimes how you make requests for information to clients. You want as much as possible to be handled by your practice management system. That's step number two. But the simultaneous step number three is your workflow tools. And we've talked about workflow tools on the podcast a lot in the last year because it's the biggest change to the overall tech hierarchy that's happened in accounting firms in a long time. The reason is the workflow tools have gotten really, really good. So to give you an example, bookkeeping tools like bookkeeping workflow tools, Keeper is the really clear leader here. I went out to my accountant community and I surveyed all of the bookkeeping firms and I said how many of you are running Keeper? And so like for perspective, my community, 500 firms. I only talk about it in content like this. This is like probably the most progressive subset of firms that there is. These are small firms. When I say small firms, I mean under 10 million a year in revenue. I surveyed them. How many of you are using Keeper? Over 80% of those firms are using Keeper for month end close automation. There is no other tool in the entire space that has that level of saturation besides maybe QuickBooks Online. But that's only in the States. You look anywhere else, Nobody else has 80% market share keeper. This tool is like three or four years old and 80% of bookkeeping firms have moved to it. And that is because it offers like such a dramatic improvement to the efficiency of getting month end closes done in volume. Like your ledger is where like that client's books are. Managed Keeper is the platform where you manage 100 month end closes in one place. And workflow tools like this have gotten so good that it changes what we need from our practice management system. In fact, right now, workflow tools and practice management systems are, are butting heads a little bit. The practice management systems are scrambling to say yes, no, we're building that right now, we'll have it by Q2. The parallel on the tax side is tax intake solutions. They're really, really good, saving you a tremendous amount of time on every single 1040 that you do because it does a much better version of tax intake. Now many of them are doing automated tax delivery. And the practice management systems that serve the tax base, like your tax domes, stuff like that, they're now scrambling and they're like, yep, no, we'll have that by insert quarter here. The truth is they won't. They might have a version of it by then, but that will be their version one. And it will be vastly behind the workflow tools that have been working on this for a few years now. And when the practice management system says, yeah, we're going to ship that, that is a validation that it is very, very important and it is something that you need. But remember how we make our tech choices here is we can only make decisions with, with what we have right now, the information we have and the stuff that's actually live. You can't compare the idea of something to something that already exists. And I have time that needs to be saved now. So I'm making decisions based on what's available and actually works and has been validated by my peers today. And if it's true that, you know, insert practice management system here, if it's true that they ship a really compelling version of that in the next year, I'm going to hear about it. My peers are going to be talking about it when we revisit tech next year, that's great news. I can maybe remove a workflow tool from my stack because the practice management system solves that. But to say that that exists today is a joke because nobody even has a version one out of it. So don't sit on your hands waiting for that whenever it may come because the reality is it will take longer than you think to come. And when it comes, it's going to suck. Like go down the list of practice management tools that have shipped like proposal solutions and stuff like that. They're always very half baked. So right now we decide based on what's available today, what's the best stack I can roll with. We go from there. And so unfortunately, those workflow tools and your practice management system, you need to pick them in conjunction with each other and they aren't integrating, unfortunately. And it's because workflow is such an important aspect of like the whole software ecosystem in the future. Right now practice management systems don't know if they should integrate this or if this is like such a core part of their platform that they need to build it themselves. Because you can imagine a world, in fact Keeper's already doing this, where workflow tools start shipping some practice management features and they squeeze out the practice management systems altogether. Now this feels unlikely to me because it's very, very hard to be a good workflow tool, but it's also very, very hard to be a good practice management system. But right now there is no such thing as the thing that is good at both. And I wish that that wasn't the case. Just being realistic about where we are in 2025 and what the like most progressive successful firms I talked to are telling me they're getting huge gains from workflow tools and leaning into what they do really well, but they still need a practice management system. And I get that. That sucks having to pay for both. That's just where we're at right now. So that is step two and three, your practice management system and your workflow tools. I'm going to do like a probably on the main YouTube channel, like a deep dive on beginning to end, doing this step by step, but also breaking down what every single tool I would recommend in each category is and what ones I don't and why that's. That's probably going to be like a two hour video though. We'll probably, we'll do that at some point. In the meantime, in my newsletter this last week for each of these categories, I broke down the short list of tools that I recommend for each of the categories we're talking about. Whether you do books, whether you do tax, whatever it is, you're gonna get a short list of ones that are worth considering. It throws out 80% of the vendors out there so you don't have to waste time with the ones that I don't see people having success with, many of whom are the ones with the big marketing budgets too. So you see them a lot and just kind of assume, well, they must be legit. I shared that in my newsletter this last week. I'll put a link down in the show notes. If you sign up for my newsletter, I will send you a copy of that email so that you can see all of the tools that I recommend for each of these categories. Again, I'm trying to give you as direct of a path to building the right tech stack like as possible. A reminder like for context, I don't get affiliates from any of this stuff. The only way that I let brands pay me is through sponsorships. Basically I will recommend a brand and then we'll do outbound to that brand and say like, we will let you sponsor our stuff for every one of those companies we do outbound to, we get inbound from five others and we say like, no, we don't actively recommend you right now, so we won't do any sponsorships with you. It's the best way I found to like toe the line between like, is this YouTuber influencer person? Are they actually independent? Because like, through my perspective as a former firm owner, I honestly don't know that there's like anyone else in the space that I can look at and be like, they're not taking money from, you know, Intuit affiliates or they have a tie up with this other brand, like a long term partnership. So can I totally trust what they're telling me about, like, what's the right practice management system? Like, it's messy, but we've tried to design this in as transparent of a way as possible. I make my money from my online community which accounting firms pay to be in each month. And the beauty of that is, is I found a revenue model that isn't dependent on software companies giving me money. And why I think that's good and important for you is that when I talk about what tools work and what tools don't work, it's not through the lens of who's, who can sponsor me, who can I get money from? Or ooh, I took money from this company. So I'm not going to talk about this one over there. We don't do that. In fact, we work. We're actually thinking really hard about like, is there a path forward for my business where we don't do sponsorships at all? And it would require like growing the community that getting a little more profitable. I just, I would love the optics of not doing any sponsorships at all. Okay, so step one is pick your Core platforms for tax prep for your accounting ledger. Step two and three. Step two is your practice management system. Step three is your core workflow tools. On the bookkeeping side, that's probably keeper. On the tax side, that's probably like your Stanford Tax, your Sorben, your trust, your safe. Send. Get get on my email newsletter in the show notes. I'll send you the full list I recommend for each category. But that's step two and three. Those have to be decided simultaneously together. Step four is the system that you use to re engage clients or to send them proposals. I railed on this a lot at the end of the year because a lot of platforms have shipped a version of this and this is normally practice management systems that have like proposals light a very basic version of it or your liability carrier gives you like Word engagement template docs like, like in Word, Microsoft Word that is. And so that becomes the platform that you use to engage clients. Like you're sending them word files or PDFs or something like that. Having a dedicated proposal tool that presents, you know, three different options, a bronze, silver, gold. We've talked about that a lot lately. That gives you ways to like create urgency in the process where it's like, maybe I'm only going to do three more of these gold packages across my entire client base and you either get it or you don't. That presentation, being professional, clearly outlining differences in scope. This is the last screen a client sees before committing to paying you money. Before agreeing to a price. Do you think that the best, most optimized version of that screen is a Word document? It's not. I'll just spoil that for you. It isn't. And that's why having a dedicated platform for managing this stuff is so important, is it literally adds money to the bottom line every single time you nail it. I mean, even if it's as small as getting another 40 bucks on every single engagement that clients agree to, that's not only 40 bucks today, that is another $40 in perpetuity for as long as you work with that client. Because that's the floor now, you're going to increase it in the future. And that difference that probably compounds because you can increase it more year over year if you're delivering a better renewal experience using, you know, three tiered options where you're letting clients self select who's willing to pay you more. But who, who's the cheapskate that still just wants the bronze plan? Well, by letting the client self select that, I got a really clear roadmap for who are the clients I want to work with long term and who just self selected to pay me the minimum. So many benefits to doing that. There is a cost to using these engagement platforms, the tools that you use for sending out proposals. But like that's literally the checkout experience. Like that's where they agree to the proposal or they don't. And if you're looking for anywhere to invest money on software spend that is a really immediate roi, man. It's hard to look much further than the engagement platform. And that's why it's so high on this list. Like, that's why this is step number four and it merits like its own sort of category step. Some people would put this even sooner. Like the more sales oriented firms would put this even sooner. I am more of a, I don't know, at my core, I am still a workflow guy that wants to make sure that I'm delivering on the things that I'm promising, not selling stuff and then figuring out how to do it later. So I've got all the workflow stuff positioned before my proposal tool. Hey, real quick. This episode is sponsored in part by the folks at Teamup Team Up. They help you find talented accountants in the Philippines. Team Up's got a killer PDF guide to how to do this stuff. They call it the 2025 salary guide, but it covers way more stuff than just salaries. And one of the things that digs into is, I think the biggest misconception about hiring folks offshore is the difference between outsourcing versus hiring direct. A lot of folks that have had negative offshore hiring experiences, what they're actually doing is working with an outsourcing group where they're buying month end closes or buying tax returns. And it's up to that outsourcing group to manage how it gets done and the training of the team members and all that. That was not the model of offshoring that I did. I did what Teamup does, direct hiring. All it is is you're working with human beings in another country and they're capable of all of the things that my onshore people are. At the end of the day, it's up to me to train them and kind of develop them from A to Z. But there's no like middle person. Oftentimes in these outsourcing groups you're paying and I've this was the case for me because I'd done both. You're paying that group pretty much the same amount of that person's salary. So like doubles the cost. I Just want to work with person directly. Team up will help you do that. Check out their guide covers a lot of just like kind of the questions you're kind of too embarrassed to ask. You can download that one down in the show notes. Hey, quick word from one of today's sponsors. Me. Me. Yes. I run a community Realize that is for accounting firm owners. And realize is kind of the secret behind how I've done all of my content and been able to like find financially turn thought leadership into a business. About 100 firm owners in there Realize is a systematic way to build connections with other peer firm owners. If not a framework for how to run a firm. It's a way to introduce you to other super cool firm owners. Right now we're putting together small groups so you can have a group of like 5, 6, 7 other firm owners just like you that you meet with every single month run very similar firms. Having this for me totally transformed from firm running my North Star like my goal for you coming into this group is to make a new best friend, somebody that runs a firm because that was what I needed in my journey. The whole community is built around that. It's called Realize. Link down in the show notes if you want to learn more. That's step number four. Step number five is tools that serve specific service lines. So let's say you do payroll or you do bill pay or you do advisory. These are the tools that you know, maybe for advisory you need a reporting tool. Maybe for payroll you obviously need payroll platforms. Maybe for a receipt management service line you need a more beefed up receipt management service. But this is a really important example of why this is fifth down the line of how important it is to go back to say, you know, Keeper as an example. If I'm using Keeper for my month end close automation, one of the things they really pride themselves in is their management reports. If what I instead did was went out to my favorite reporting platform and and I bought that and it's really shiny and it does all this cool reporting stuff and then I go back and figure out how am I actually going to get these month end closes done. That's exactly the problem we're trying to avoid. That's why like the tech that supports specific service service lines is fifth on the list. It is near the tippy top point of the pyramid because it's one of the last things to choose. Similar for receipt management. Receipt management like this that's built into the accounting ledger, built into some of our workflow apps. That's come a Lot way a long ways in the last 24 months to the degree that maybe I don't need a dedicated receipt management platform anymore. Even we see this with bill pay like ramps. Bill pay is freaking free now. And it's really, really good. So don't start with your service line specific tech offerings. And it's interesting, if you walk around, say the, like the expo hall floor of an accounting conference, many of the things that you see there are actually like the fifth thing on this list, service line tools, or even the sixth, which are like even more fleeting and kind of small. And they may have a giant booth, they may have a humongous booth. And that may lead you to think like, oh, this is a really important thing for my firm. This is a big deal. The reality is like, no, we have to follow this sequential path to ensure that we're building our tech stack in a logical way. Last one, number six here. These tools, they're just, they're the toppings, they're the band aids, the shiny things that a lot of us plug into, like fill a gap here and there. But what most tech stacks look like today is they don't have the core tools right? And so they have a whole bunch of band aids everywhere. And this is where you end up with a tech stack that's way too big. You've got like a third of the firm using any one tool that you're, that you've got a monthly subscription for, and it's just kind of in disarray. You've got like all these different sites, siloed sources of information. And like, that's a, that's. Siloed information is a problem in any version of accounting firm tech stacks right now, unfortunately. But having too many of these like peripheral tools makes it worse. So examples of toppings. Uncat. Uncat is a tool that helps you manage uncategorized transactions. Was kind of the first one to do this, to offer a solution for this. And it's really freaking good. And that's still the deepest solution for managing uncategorized transactions. But many practice management platforms now offer a version of uncategorized transactions, as do a few workflow tools. None of them go as deep as uncat does. So for example, if I got to manage gathering transaction information for like an AMex statement with 15 different users, like, that's a slam dunk. I'm putting that on uncat because it can notify all those different people independently with just their transactions. Like, it's just, there's a different level of depth there. But you can see how, how if I started with Uncat and then worked backwards on my tech stack, I would probably be overusing Uncat, rather than that being the thing that I plug in selectively in the client scenarios where it makes sense. Write Tool is another example. Like anybody that's using QuickBooks online should be using Right Tool. It's a Chrome extension that just makes QuickBooks Online like better in every way. But I shouldn't be using QuickBooks online because of right tool. You can even say ChatGPT is another example of this. Or Zapier, like a custom workflow builder that will integrate your apps. Just because Zapier could integrate App A to App B doesn't mean I should be using App A or App B. Like I have to start with what are the core apps that will give me the furthest and then you, you deal with what's left. Now, is there a degree of like intermingling of every single one of these sort of levels of techniques? Like, let's not pretend there is. But if you need a solid starting point, like this is the most logical sequence I can give you this progression of 1 through 6 almost certainly a little hard to visualize on the exercise bike I recommend in the Show Notes. Grab the graphic for this, print it out, stick it on a wall, something like that. Much easier to process this visually. Second thing, if you're not in my newsletter yet, sign up for the newsletter. You'll get an email with all the tools that I recommend for each of these categories. And, and if you're still struggling with confidence, bro, consider, consider my community Realize there's a link for that in the show Notes of every episode. 500 other firms in there that can give you all of the information that you've ever wanted to know about this app or this app versus the other app. Hop in and see like a library of so many different demos of all of these tools. Ones that you may want to use, ones that immediately when you see them you'll be like, oh, okay, now I know that I don't want to use that. Great example. Some folks are talking about trusts on Twitter today. Trusts is like a cool growing tax workflow tool, but they don't give you pricing on the website. There's not a ton of information there in the community. We've got a 25 minute demo of trust from the founder with commentary from real users on it. Like, let's not make this any harder than it needs to be. What I want for you is total confidence in your tech Stack. There's no such thing as a perfect tech stack. But if you have enough information, you'll be like, okay, like, here's what I understand. Here's what's been validated by my peers. I'm gonna roll with this. And then 12 months down the road, we'll revisit it. Imagine how nice that would feel. And I don't think most firms are there. I think most firms are like, perpetually grappling with, I don't know if I have the right, this or that. And so they're kind of like have half of their brain in tech selection land, like around the clock, like year round, when there's other way, cooler stuff to work on. Like, how can I better position my firm to serve a more premium client who will happily pay me more and go home by noon? Because I'm making more money on every single engagement. For each new client I add, I can cut two legacy clients. Like, how can I find my next killer hire? Like, that's the really important stuff that will be the bigger driver of success in your firm than playing house with tech selection until the end of time. Listen, I geek on it as much as anybody else, and I'm a huge. Let's, let's not, let's not kid ourselves. I am a huge distraction in that regard. Right? Because it's fun, tech man. And tech changes and some things get better, some things get worse. It's always moving, it's fun. But in the interest of focus for your firm, give yourself 30 days, make those decisions, make whatever investments you need to make to ensure that you're making the right decisions, and then get on with your life. Go outside, touch grass, talk with your team members. For the first, go bowling. Have a Minecraft night, boy. Can we talk about the Minecraft movie? Nevermind, we're not gonna go there, gang. Thanks for coming and hanging today. I could tell you the entire time I ran an accounting firm, I grappled with this, like, who do I trust? The salesperson's telling me this, oh, what's this other tool over here that I've never heard of? Is it any good? Maybe not, because it might be brand new. We got solutions for this stuff these days. It is another example of the power of building a peer network, of being visible, of engaging, of not being a lurker. Literally post in a comment under this podcast like, hey, anybody use this or that? You'll get helpful stuff. And even if you don't, you got absolutely nothing to lose. That's honestly the cool thing to me. The coolest thing about running a firm these days is I can make other friends that do the same thing. And we can share that journey with each other. Gang, thanks for being here this week. I'll see you in the next one.