450 The WILDEST Tech Stack I’ve Ever Seen in an Accounting Firm

Oh, gang, do we have a spicy one today? This is the wildest tech stack I've ever seen an accounting firm try to actually get away with using. I think I like it. It's very interesting. I think it's unbelievably scalable. Today we're talking about a very interesting accounting firm, only a couple of years old. I got all sorts of juicy details about them from how they run their firm to their last two years. PNLs and a tech stack that just might make you rethink everything. Today we're roasting a firm. Come on in. Okay, let me tell you about this firm. It is a Canadian firm, so we won't get super deep into tax stuff. Bookkeeping is 82% of this firm's revenue. 6% is personal tax, 12% is compilations and corporate tax. They did 107 grand top line in 2024. I' pays to do about 100 and 35 this year. Rural firm, works from home. As far as the team goes, they have one non voting team member, their spouse. Their spouse recently joined the firm doing some bookkeeping stuff and may get more into some of the tax work. 95% of this firm's bookkeeping clients are service related. So construction, professional services, entertainment. But their biggest client is a, basically a property management firm where they do like a kind of a special flavor of property management bookkeeping for them. Very interesting. We're gonna, we're gonna circle back to that, but let's jump right into the tech stack here. Here we go. The competitive advantage, I'm reading their words now in our tech stack comes from the combination of live flow and co pilot. So for context, Live flow, if you know, I mean if you don't know who liflow was, who, who liflow is, you must be a new listener. Lifo, you connect your accounting ledger to spreadsheets. They also have their own like dashboarding sort of reporting platform. So they use Live flow with Copilot. Copilot is like a super flexible client portal. So basically you like build out from scratch your own totally custom client portal and you create all the sections to be whatever they want to be. You can embed other stuff into your portal, but this is kind of their bread and butter. Here is clients come into copilot, they say we link a Google sheet to live flow and bury that into Copilot per client. So they embed a live flow driven spreadsheet into Copilot, their custom portal. And now they have, they have live financial statements inside each client's portal. Then they Layer in uncat within the portal as a nav option that basically hands off to that client's uncat link. So uncat, if you're not familiar, is for managing uncategorized transactions. Basically you connect it with the accounting ledger and you say anytime a transaction hits any of these accounts, go out and ask the client what a category it should go to, or for a receipt or just for a little narrative of what that was. So somebody buys something in Amazon, you don't know how to break that out, you put that into uncategorized expense. It notifies the client on a schedule that you choose to go out and ask them for more details. Works for a bunch of other stuff too, like class tracking. If you've got say an AMEX statement with 10 different card owners on it, you can have all the transactions go out to those specific card owners. Uncat. Really cool platform. But this firm, they've built all of this stuff into a custom client portal. In fact, it goes as far as they have a loom video on their homepage that walks through the portal that you get access to when you become a client. And let me just read through for you what all of the options are on the left hand side of their portal. So this is a totally custom portal that the client has built with Copilot. Here's all the options from top to bottom. Starts with like a homepage that's got kind of a welcome message. Just under that is messages. And so this is how they message back and forth with the firm between the firm and the client. Third is uncategorized transactions. When you click that, it hands you off to uncat. Fourth is Status. This is actually an embedded spreadsheet that shows the bookkeeping status of all their accounts. So it lists out all of their bank and checking accounts. Those are the rows and then the columns are the months and it shows the status of each of those months for each of those bank accounts. So that's just embedded directly into the client portal. The fifth nav option on the left hand side is fiscal year to date. They click this and they see an embedded Google sheet that is their year to date fiscal financial statements or yeah, year to date. The next one is financials last year. So prior year. Next one after that is files. So it's a templated folder structure where they can pull whatever they need. Next one after that is book a call. Next one after that buckle up is podcast. So on some of their service levels they have NotebookLM generate with AI a podcast about their last month's financial results. So inside of the client portal you can come in and listen to this audio file that is a podcast recap of your own company and like what happened in the financials. And we could do a, like we could do an entire podcast on those last two sentences that I just said. I mean, points for creativity. I love that. I've never actually gone through the exercise of giving Notebook LM whatever data you would need to give it to be able to generate a podcast about the last month's results. I've never actually done that to know is it any good? What even would any good look like? Because any good to me and use probably any like looks different than it would look to the client. If you're not familiar with this, Google has a tool called Notebook LM so a really cool AI tool. Basically you give it anything. You give it a, a giant PDF, you point to a website, point it to YouTube video, you can even point it to the YouTube version of this podcast and then you can ask it questions about that context. So you can ask it while we're, while we're just list out all the apps. Jason just said in this podcast because he's terrible about linking them in the show notes. I, I say that somewhat jokingly because you know how I like go back and find these things. When I go to add them to the show notes, I do exactly what I'm describing. I'll go to an AI tool. I'll like grab the transcript for the podcast. I'll give it to an AI tool and say, can you just list out all the things that I probably should have had in the show notes here? I digress. Notebook lm, you can give it any information that you want. You can chat with it and ask it questions about it, but you can create what they call, quote, an audio overview, which is basically a podcast of two people talking about that context. And we've demoed it on the podcast before in the past. But it is a eerily interesting conversation that's completely made up. These are not real people. There's a male host and a female host and they talk back and forth and have a conversation about whatever that stuff was. And this firm is generating those like for month over month financial results and putting it in the client portal. I would love to know what the like client reactions are to that. And even in the little loom video that the firm has on their landing page, they're very clear. They're like, hey, we're like, we're doing this in a secure way. Here's how it works if you're interested because you can imagine like some clients who maybe don't know what's going on there or could be concerned about that. Right? This episode is sponsored in part by Kleinhub Kleinhub, who turns your firm's busy seasons into wow seasons. Because those seasons, they're an opportunity to wow the ever loving off of your clients. Wait just one minute, Scooter. You can't say that in an ad read. I'm. I'm sorry K. I get excited. Client Hub is going to wow your clients right off their socks because it is a game changing client experience. Simple, intuitive, easy to use, doesn't require Ph.D. and goodness gracious, this practice management system is complex. Is not some like herky jerky bolted on client portal that has like three options on the left hand side and each one you select, it looks like, I don't know, something some junior developer just made in like 25 minutes. Because let's be real, that's what a lot of client portals still look like. Can you get back to the bullet points here? Okay. One of the reasons people love Client Hub is clients. Clients just become users. Like the design is so good, they're like, oh, I get this. It's kind of just like a two sided task management system. Client hops in, looks like the other tools that they use, they can see their tasks, their files, their financials. It's not hard mobile friendly, so they can do it on the road too. But it's intuitive, doesn't really require training. And they're gonna be like, oh, you're like a cool modern firm. Not like that last firm that I used where I logged into this thing and I'm like Henry viii, is that you? You know what I mean. To learn more about Client Hub, check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing. I'm in another country today. 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 a, 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, realized 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 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, 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 gonna have a lot of like embarrassing questions. You don't even know what to ask. Just start the process, get on the horn of 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. Let me get back to the portal here. So that was the podcast option. Next is dashboards. They will build some custom dashboards for you if you want. Then they've got help desk, commonly asked questions, bookkeeping packages, edit your profile, leave a review, fill out some forms and a few Canada specific like registration sort of things. So there's like 15, 20 different nav options in this totally custom portal that they've built. And you can even is an interesting thing about Copilot, you can even from their landing page create an account and get instant access to a demo portal account. Like if you're not paying anything at that point, you aren't actually getting access to anything valuable. But, but anyone can go to the website and sign up and get instant access. And because this is roast affirm by the way, this, this firm gave me permission to anonymously share what their firm has going on in exchange for me kind of sharing a few ideas for, for improvements that they could make. We've done this a few weeks in a row now on the podcast there's a link down in the show notes where you can complete a little form and you can submit the details of your firm to, to me anonymously if you want. And you may be roasted in the future thanks to the 5 or 10 folks who went through and did that last week. So let's give this firm kind of a few bits of advice. How can they improve on what they're doing? We walk through their tech stack. I'll give you some more background about them after we get through the tech stack stuff. One thought I have honestly on the whole self service portal thing, they have A really interesting thing here where clients could get potentially a tremendous amount of value just by logging into their account and navigating all those options, right? Like they have so many things built in there, from financial statements to the status of all their current projects, these podcast dashboards. One idea I have here is this is really suited for a like freemium offering that goes lower down the value ladder than a firm would normally go, but doesn't really require any work from you. And if you think about an accounting firm that's, you know, leaning into thought leadership to some degree, you've got some content that's helpful for a specific avatar, a specific type of client. Think of all of the things that you could build into that portal where clients could sign up to that portal from your website at no cost, get instant access to some cool resources and maybe from inside of that portal even have the ability to like purchase upgrades. So you've got say a, a checkout page or like maybe this is a stripe checkout link or, or something like that. That is one of the options inside of this portal where maybe they start out with free access and that's got some sort of basic stuff about your firm, basic thought leadership, but they can then upgrade to get access to more thought leadership. I probably don't want to let them like self serve upgrade into becoming a full blown client because I need to have a say in that as well. But one thought I have here, just because this firm has such a unique tech set up here is how could we take this even further? And I think this is very, very well suited to come down market to folks who could get access to some of your expertise without becoming full blown clients. Like without you even having to lift a finger. And the devil's in the details a bit here, like it may come down to, well, if a thousand people went and, and signed up, would that like blow up my, you know, my co pilot plan when I end up having to pay a bunch of money for that or something like that? I think oftentimes our minds go there. The reality is that probably won't happen to you, but it's definitely worth considering and like planning for the downside there. And I could envision a really cool version of that if, if they were serving kind of a specific type of client. If it's a general small business firm, you're doing just bookkeeping, there's virtually no version of just bookkeeping thought leadership that is going to rise above what everybody else does. And to be clear, like you don't have to be the very best in the world. But when I think of people that are like at the top of the heap, it's the people like Nicholas Boucher who he had on the podcast a few weeks ago. He's got 1.1 million followers on LinkedIn and he's putting out like valuable information en masse that people are gobbling up at like a prolific level. And I'll be honest, I don't want to compete with that. I don't want to have to be that good. And if I haven't done a whole bunch of that stuff before, I'm just not going to be that good. Like, it's just not going to happen. The reason I can get by making videos and podcasts and all that is that I've made more videos than anybody else in the accounting space. I've just done it. I did it for 18 months. Two videos. Two videos a week for 18 months while running a 40 person firm. You know how many subscribers I had after 18 months? 500. So don't come at me telling me I'm a natural. I'm not. Because you weren't watching when I didn't look like a natural. And so you've got like people like Nicholas out there who are just prolific at this and you probably don't have the time, like the repetitions, the patience to pump all that in. And so the much easier version of that is just thought leadership through a more specific lens. The more specific we get, the lower that bar is. And I am, I am all about lowering the bar. As my wife loves to remind me. You're funny for accountants. Accountants think you're funny. And she says that in a way that's like, I mean, I think she knows exactly how passive aggressive that sounds. Like, it's one thing to be funny, it's another thing to be funny for accountants. I mean, I think you can imagine how that makes me feel. Just, just some stuff we're working through right now. Don't worry about it. So tip number one, explore if there's a cool thing you could do with sort of free access that isn't just demo access access, but is something that's actually valuable. Like where if you actually get somebody as far as they're signing up for your thing, can you give them something of value that makes it more likely that they would then upgrade to a more expensive paid thing or become more interested in becoming a client. Tip number two, I think there is a really cool specialization just asking to be captured here. So they said 95% of bookkeeping clients are service related. I mean, come on. Service, service related. That's not a specialization. And they're not saying that it is. But the cool thing here, their biggest client is this property management group where they do this very specific flavor of bookkeeping for this company. At the moment, they don't even mention this on their website. Like, they don't even talk about that. They do this type of bookkeeping and it's kind of an outlier project for them because it's done on a, a software called Condomanager. Condomanager is, they said it's a specialized. Requires some specialized knowledge and quite frankly, it's incredibly outdated. However, it does put the firm in a unique position that not many accounting firms are in. Buddy, this is, this is the opportunity. I did this in my firm where we ended up like working with these retail flooring, a retail flooring franchise where all the franchisees were pushed really hard to go to this awful archaic system. Not that there's like any system that's perfect for retail flooring companies. But we learned this stupid thing and my gosh, did we just eat it on time and cost and all that when we were getting started. But we became the go to for anyone on this platform and even though it sucked and like, we did not enjoy working on the platform at all, we were the experts in it. And so like immediately, if you have this expertise in this thing that. And you can't find any other accountants that have the expertise in that platform, like you're one of one. Like you have, you have captured what everybody's trying to do, eliminate substitutes, just by having the willingness to learn this stupid old janky system you got there. And it means you can command way more than you could for normal work. Like, this is the sort of thing that will take firms decades to find. And they're like, okay, we just figured out this is our thing now we're going to make. Hey, just doing this. So this is my second tip. If it isn't, if it isn't very obvious, already become the go to for property management companies using condo manager. And I went out and I poked around online. Condo manager, the company, they're at conferences. There's all sorts of associations for people who I don't know would need, like, would need the service that this accounting firm offers. But one thing I think is great for specializing is to buddy up with the software companies who have marketing budgets because they are on a hamster wheel where they have to continue putting out content and attracting eyeballs and all that. And you someone with actual expertise, you are a unicorn for them because they don't have the expertise that you do. And when it's a big giant company that makes money and is raising money and all these different things, there is just a pot of money that's sitting there and it's somebody's job to spend it. Wouldn't you like them to spend it on putting you in front of people who could become your clients? That person in control of that money, they literally get in trouble if they don't spend it. And if you consider all the different ways that you could be visible and attract people to your firm, letting them underwrite your visibility, that's not a bad option. And so that looks like where are they going to conferences? Like can you go out and even just help them in a booth? Or you know, bonus points if they'll get you up on stage writing blog posts for them, featuring you in their newsletter, interviewing you on, on their podcast, whatever that looks like. Or them even sponsoring your content. That's even better because then you own it and you control it. Become the go to person for condo manager, which is by all, like from everything I've seen is not a cool platform. But if you've gone very deep into industry software, you know, I mean that virtually all industry software sucks. I mean, come on, when Salesforce is like what everything aspires to be, you want to talk about low bars, buddy, Most industry software stinks. But if you can like put that outta your mind and get efficient with it and maybe you're not on that forever and that maybe there ends up being a better alternative, like great, you'll be well positioned to transition to that alternative. But right now this is just staring you in the face. You have this specialized knowledge, you're doing it for a very specific type of person. This is going to make you an incredible fit for a specific type of client. You just got to find ways to get in front of more of them and, and ensure that you can in charge that you can charge, I mean at least 2x the rates that you could charge any other clients. And if you aren't charging that now you got to, you got to rethink that because their options, if they come to you versus another firm, I mean that's like a wildly different level of expertise that you have that this other firm doesn't have. And that's something they need to pay for. So get serious about that. That dovetails really nicely with the first idea of how can we give people something of value in our client Portal where they don't even have to pay for it or become clients. Start thinking about the things that that could be, man, that could be like training for how to use Condo Manager. Could be a your affiliate link that gets them a discount. Could be a list of upcoming events that they may want to consider joining. A recording of you doing some sort of event with Condom Manager. Like there's all sorts of templates and stuff like that that you could put into a portal. Somebody could come along, they find you as the premier firm for Condo Manager, they create an account, they get to swipe these goodies and now like, you're the pro, like you've been put at a level that no other firm can compare to because you have this specialized expertise. Hey. This episode is sponsored in part by Canopy, one of my top recommended practice management systems. Because Canopy, it does a lot, man, and it doesn't just do it, it doesn't just try really hard. It does it nicely. Like it looks like a, a well built product thoughtfully designed. Because man, cloud practice management systems, there was a window there like five to seven years where it was. It wasn't that. And Canopy was like one of the only companies to come out of that generation of practice management tools, was something that was like really modern, super slick and like somehow is threaded the needle of being actually one of only two practice management systems I recommend for firms 50 employees and above. But it's still actually one of the very best ones for itty bitty firms too. And to somehow do both of those things in a product is like exceptionally hard. But they've somehow stuck the landing on that Canopy. If you're out and about at conferences this year, you're gonna see Canopy Day. And that matters a lot to me because if they're rocking up at conferences, they're having a lot of conversations with accounting accountants, account with accountants. They understand your needs like to a level of depth a lot of folks don't that don't make that same investment into like spending time with accountants. I've done some demos of Canopy on my YouTube channel if you want to take a peek at what they look like. You could be impressed. But to learn more about Canopy, check out the link down in the show notes. Today's episode is sponsored in part by TeamUp, who helps you hire talented accountants directly in the Philippines. You ever wondered how much it would cost to hire a senior accountant? That is, what do you pay a senior accountant in the Philippines on an ongoing basis? Senior accountant. Just so we're on the same page, somebody who can like manage the entire end and accounting process Post all the closing entries. In fact here's the profile of a senior accountant team up recently placed into a firm that a bachelor's in accounting We're a certified public accountant which is a Philippines certification bill.com and QuickBooks certified 6 1/2 years experience in accounting over 5 years experience with US firms experience managing, training and reviewing the work of junior team members. Doesn't that sound nice? Proficient with QuickBooks 0 bill.com Rippling gusto expensify a salary 2000 bucks a month the normal range for a senior accountant in The Philippines between 1700 and $2200 USD per month Buddy accounting it's a global language really is doesn't matter if you got butts in the seats in the land of the free or in somebody else's land accounting's accounting to learn more actually could swipe team ups whole salary guide that they just made. It's really good. I'll link that down in the show notes man I'm serious about firms looking for something just like this for decades. Not the tech stack but the specialization opportunity. Like this is the golden nugget. The type of golden nugget that we talk about where you stumble into something and you're like hang on, hang on. Okay. Property management is obviously absolutely massive. There's associations and events and everything everywhere. This is big money stuff. You mean to tell me they're doing bookkeeping on this piece of crap platform? Like, I mean we'll, we'll like there will be some kinks to work out but we can run this thing in our sleep. It's a lot harder to work than, than qbo. But also these people, like they'll come to us as the, the premier experts for this thing and they're going to happily pay top dollar. That's, that's exactly the type of thing everybody's looking for right now. Is there risk and going all in on that one thing? I would say no because anytime you go deep on something like that like you're going to the second level of depth of something that people know exists but don't really know anything about. And every time you go a level deeper you learn, oh, there's an entire ecosystem of people serving this space and all these other adjacent things. And even if this went under today, I would now be aware of a whole bunch of other opportunities that I wouldn't have otherwise gotten exposed to because I didn't go that next level deeper. It's like we talk about. I Think this was from the Win Without Pitching manifesto. Like you're standing in a room full of doors and you're afraid to walk through a door because now you can't go back through all those other doors. But you don't realize until you go through that door that you're in a room full of doors. Doors that you wouldn't have known existed had you not gone through that door. And those doors, with each level of depth you go into, those are better pan doors. Those are more interesting doors than the doors that everybody else understands and everybody else sees. Okay, last bit of advice I've got for, for the firm is around how they build out their sort of three tiers of services. So right now they've done what I think most people do. They have a bronze, silver and gold package. They're pretty upfront with it. It's. They literally show it in their, in their client portal. Like bronze, silver and gold look the exact same for everybody. This works. You actually usually see this more with firms beyond a certain scale where they don't want to change the configuration of packages to keep things simple. Usually that's something you see from bigger firms, not smaller firms. It definitely isn't optimized from a what you can get out of every client type consideration. But the upside is yes, it does make things more turnkey if everybody's buying the same dog food. But I would say the biggest opportunity for improvement on the way they've got their three tier proposal setup is right now. The differences between bronze, silver and gold are things like number of business, days to complete the financial statements after the, after the close, access to custom dashboards and KPIs, whether a CPA does like a financial analysis of the statements at the end of the month. Payroll, you get payroll on silver and gold, but not bronze on gold. You get year end adjusting entries and compiled financials from a cpa. I would carve this up a bit more and I've, I've been, I've been talking about this lately because I'm pretty hot on this right now because I think it's not the way that most people approach three tier proposals. I would carve up this bronze, silver, gold, three tier approach to separate scope from premiumness. In fact, I was riffing with Chat GPT on what are some different ideas for, for like a vernacular we can assign to these two different things because there's some things that are doing more and then there's some things that are like doing a more premium version of the same thing. So one is Elevating the service one is just more service. So for example, payroll, doing payroll on silver and gold, that's just more service. Doing year end, adjusting entries, giving them compiled financial statements, that's just more service. I personally I want to avoid a three tier proposal where bronze, silver and gold is more. What I want is a bronze, silver and gold, that's elevated, that's more premium. And so what I'm going to do, like just from a real practical standpoint is I'm going to nail down exactly the scope of what I'm going to do for the client. Am I doing payroll? Are we hopping on a call every single month? I'm going to nail down the scope of what needs to be done. And then the three tier proposal, the job of that is to capture their willingness and ability, ability to pay. So that three tier proposal looks like the economy class, the business class, the first class. And so the differentiators between those three tiers like to be clear, I'm doing the same work on all of them, but the level of premiumness just impacts who does the work, how quickly the work is done, how nicely dressed I am while I do the work. And so I'm looking at things like, is my work done by bookkeeper, done by cpa? If I have to hop a call on my talk, hop on a call, am I talking to a bookkeeper, an accountant, a cpa, a director, what level of expertise do I have access to? How long will it take somebody to get back to me? That's something that we should always have. Here is what, what is the expected turnaround time? That's a really easy lever where we can price that in 99% of the time. It doesn't make a lick of difference. But there are people who want to feel important according to the way they spend their money. And most accountants are not wired this way. And that's why we don't think through this as we're standing up our offerings to clients. But the fact is most people will buy things that make them feel important, make them feel premium. And by building that into our proposal, the gold package ought to be, you know, 2x what the bronze package is and maybe even more. But we're fundamentally saying that the deliverables here are the same. It's just the way that they're delivered, the expertise they have access to, the speed of delivery, number of days after month end, close. Like I would put that into the level of premiumness. That's what I want my three tier proposal to be, not scope. But how elevated the service delivery is because different people will pay different things here and that's my margin. Like airlines their margin is first class. If I don't give people an option of premiumness spectrum I don't have the opportunity to to capture that margin. When you got a lot of client list when you got a lot of clients on the list right now that would happily pay for that. This is such a cool firm the tech stack stuff. Husband, wife still very early days but also like turning the corner on what I think could be a super super unique specialization. Hey I love doing these episodes from the comments I think you guys enjoy these from the comments I think y' all enjoy these ones too. I would love to hear from it. Complete that little form down in the show notes for a chance to be roasted. Got any thoughts for this one? Thoughts on the tech stack specialization? Anything else? Pop that stuff down in the comments and I'll see you in the next one.