456 The Most Important Software Tax Firms Will Buy!

The most important tech in your tax firm right now. It is your tax workflow software, not your tax prep software. Not the. The tool that you put the numbers into the generates the forms. That kind of is what it is. Most of them suck. Your productivity with those tools is largely a product of muscle memory, but we have a growing category of tax workflow tools that do the bits around that that can make you way more efficient. And I've got some new data on which of these tools are working best and for what parts of that process. Heard actually from a bunch of firm owners who use tax workflow tools for the first time this tax season. Made a really big difference. I'm going to spill the beans today on what worked and what didn't. Might cost me a couple sponsors. Hey, I don't work for the men. I work for you. Okay, let's talk about it. Okay, Couple reminders here on what we mean when we say tax workflow tech. It's basically the tools around your tax software, your tax software, ultra Tax, Drake Lacert, whatever it is that you use to prepare the forms. Tax workflow software are the other tools around it that automate either intake, some part of the prep process, or even delivery tax workflow tools. Usually you're billed on a per tax return basis. One thing that I found preaching the merits of tax workflow tools is folks who have never bought them before, especially firms who are more volume firms that aren't charging a huge amount for their work. The cost of tax workflow tools can feel like a lot like that. Like there are providers who you can spend literally over $100 per tax return for their tax workflow solution. And that, like, there it is a lot. But as we've talked about on the podcast before, I mean, all of accounting tech right now is sort of, there's a lot of, like, following each other, pricing where they're looking at what everybody else is. And right now, the pricing of tools right now is a lot for discount firms who aren't charging a lot. But that same price is astronomically inexpensive for firms on the more premium end of the spectrum. And so if I'm going to spend $100 per tax return on software, if I charge the client $200 for that tax return, yikes, there goes half my margin. That hurts, right? But that exact same software, if it's a, it's. If it's a $1,000 tax return, I'm paying the same amount for that software, whether it's a $200 tax return or 1000. DOL and so there may be a stage in your freem running journey where it is where you just can't stomach that. I will say the one risk, the thing to keep in mind is will that tech move you down the spectrum of being able to charge more, faster? Because you can see a world where you can't justify charging enough to like buy that software. And as a result you're doing a lot more manual things that the software would have done for you. And so you can't handle as many clients and progress maybe slows like you could see a world. And there's, I mean, let's be real, gang. This is a really, really big percentage of professional tax shops. They're not charging more than 3, 400 bucks for a tax return. Like they are working themselves to the bone until they have a stroke. At 49, this has gone too far, you know what I mean? And so you can see a world where you get stuck at the bottom of the market and like you're not making enough money to buy those software tools. Invest in the tools if you think that they will take you down that spectrum to being able to run a more premium firm faster. But also, yes, if you're not there yet, these can be expensive. So the players in this category, let me walk you through them and then I'll, I'm going to actually dig into who's nailing intake, specifically who's nailing delivery, and a couple who are nailing kind of the stuff in the middle. Because the vast majority of people, you haven't bought a tax workflow tool yet. And, and this is, this is actually really valuable context that I wish that I would have had. So the players in this space, there's 12 of them. I'm going through my app recommendation database, it's down in the show notes. You can grab it for yourself for free. It's over a hundred apps for accounting firms and the short list of the very few of those apps that I recommend you use. And, and also why, like what they do well and what they don't. I think I said 12 apps in this category. 11 apps in this category. You've got Soraban, Stanford Tax, Lisio, SafeSend, SurePrep, SP Binder Tax, Caddy Trusts, 1040, Scan, Blackor, Gruntworks, and Numero. Now all of these tools do some version of automating, a process that happens on, on every 1040 actually is what these are oriented around. And if you've already got a practice management system, you're like, but can't my can't my tax dome. Can a canopy do this? Why do my financial sense, carbon, whatever it is, can I, can I just do this with my practice management system? Because that's where all my stuff already is. And I wish, I wish that were possible. Right now, all of those platforms have a version of intake, but right now, here, here's where they fall short, is it is like boilerplate forms. It's not something that's actually based on pro forma information. And in a world where these tools have been working on these specific workflows for a few years and the practice management systems now are kind of scrambling to catch up, but they don't even have a version one out yet. I don't see a world where your practice management system doing a good enough version of this is just around the corner. Because these companies, well, a short list, A few of these companies have been crushing this for like two years now. And I got a load of firms that can back this up. Your practice management system launching their version one of this. They don't know what they don't know yet. It's exceptionally unlikely that by the time we get to next tax season any practice management system has a version of this that is good enough. I always tell people buy software based on the state of the software today, not based on future promises. We have all seen just how long it takes to get software actually out the door that's been promised. And then so often when it does come, it's not what you wanted it to be because we project on that everything that we need. Oftentimes that's not what's actually being built. So it's always, it's always going to be unfair to compare the thing that you can go by and is useful today, but versus the thing that somebody says, well, yeah, we're working on it, we'll have it in, in Q3, right? And I understand why they do it, but I got tax returns that need to get done today. And actually this, right now, if you're a tax firm, this is the time to be implementing new tech, not after the extended deadline. You do not want to go running into battle next tax season on tech that you haven't used. Like, this is the time to do it, when you can shake out all the kinks so that by the time you hit next tax season, everything's humming. But my two top recommendations in this space and they haven't changed, there's Soroban and Stanford Tax. The other ones that are pretty good are Lisio, SafeSend, SurePrep, SP Binder, Tax Caddy and trusts. I'm gonna walk you through every one of these and actually give you the real feedback that I've heard from firms about what they're doing best and what their shortcomings are, because all of them have things they do very well and things that they don't. So, number one, let's talk about Sorban. Sorban arguably created this category, and their intake solution is still very, very good. And so intake is, you know, building the document request list based on pro forma information. What are all the very specific items that I need from the client to get the tax work done? Intake. For all the things that happen in this category, I think intake's still the biggest opportunity, because If I have 100,1040s or a thousand 1040s, and each of them have, you know, between 10 and 70 unique items, I need to track down. The tracking down of those items is a huge job that I don't want my professional staff doing. That software can do for you. So intake Sorban. Sorban does intake very well, but I can give you some real, real, some inside information from actual users. Sorban's freaking growing like crazy, and from what I've gathered, been a little hard to keep up. Support hasn't been what it was. Heard some rumblings that they may actually only be onboarding firms that can commit, like, several hundred returns as well. I would want you to confirm that for yourself because that stuff can change very quickly. But basically the reality is this is a company and they're hiring people as fast as they can. We, you and I, know how, how that can go. They're trying to keep up with it. I like every time we have this conversation, like, there's a bunch of people that are going to listen to this podcast and go out and buy one of these tools for the first time. So we are partly to blame. They've got two other offerings that are not as mature as their intake offering. They're working on automated delivery, and they're working on a solution that will extract the information from the documents and automatically put it in the tax offer. Both very, very exciting. Right? Just know that they're both in beta and not at all as fleshed out as their intake solution. But, like, let's, let's zoom out a bit, because choosing a partner here is like, part of the, part of the math. While we don't make decisions based on what's been promised, it does matter where they're going. And this is why I get Excited about tax workflow providers compared to practice management systems. Practice management systems do a hundred different things. Most of them are very mature now big teams usually hard for a company like that to execute really well on a new type of workflow. Whereas these companies, they are still lean. They're going after anything and everything that they can automate for me in the tax process. And I love that and I can acknowledge that the version one, the beta, it's not going to be perfect, but the beta is a prerequisite to the version that that's better, right? So sorban, the thing they do best still is intake. The other stuff. Test it out, your mileage may vary. My second top recommendation and I only have two quote talk top recommendations. Stanford Tax. Biggest weakness of Stanford Tax today is the questionnaire. Part of the intake process is boilerplate that like there's not much customizability there. But to be clear, the document requesting the checklist of here's all the stuff I need you to get me that is fully customizable and is pulled from real pro forma information. And to be honest, on the intake side, that's the most valuable thing to me. It like, it is still annoying. Like if I've got this short list of questions I have to ask every single client, like crypto transactions, stuff like that, a lot of that is built into Stanford. But if I have something else that I, I need to gather on every return, like yes, I want to do that as part of the intake process and there are some workarounds like do you frame that actually as a document? Like there's kind of some hacky ways to get around that. And I know this is actually something they're working on. But that's the biggest limitation of the platform right now. The best thing that it does is I actually think Stanford right now has the most reliable and best dynamic Generate me a checklist of all the stuff like that I need based on pro forma information. But then the really nice thing is in the interface, you're just looking at this giant checklist of all the documents that need to be submitted. I can drag a document onto there and it'll automatically identify what the document is and then check that off. But in the exact same interface, the client can do the same. And so part of the issue with any changes to your intake process is most firms, the reality is you have clients that will swing by the office and drop stuff off. They will mail you stuff, they'll fax you stuff, they'll email you stuff, like they'll Give it to you 100 different ways and you have people at different levels of comfort with using a portal. The great thing about Stanford Tax approach, where it's like you, I want all my clients to give me this stuff here, but also like my firm, we're also going to collect that stuff the exact same way so that regardless of how it comes in, it all gets dumped into the same place. This is a great opportunity to make use of admins so that your professional staff aren't doing the document gathering, but all that stuff goes into a single place and that project doesn't start until every single checklist item is done. And so until then, myself, my staff, the client, everybody's pumping those documents into the same collection spot. Now Sorban does like a version of the same where the checklist will automatically resolve based on the documents that go into it. Anecdotally, I think this experience might be a little bit better on Stanford Tax right now with how good it is at recognizing documentation and all that. Very hard to like ab test benchmark one against the other. But I have heard from a very large number of firms who use Stanford Tax for the first time this last spring. Very happy. Like it's the number of people I hear from. It's very rare that I don't hear negative stuff about every single tool. Like just, I mean, and that's kind of the nature of a software company. Like you have so many people using you, there's going to be situations where things go sideways or that person came in with a very different expectation. And so I will hear a lot of good things, but almost always I hear like negative things also. I don't know that I've heard a single negative thing about Stanford Taxes last tax season, which says a lot. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Team up, the people who help you find talented accountants in the Philippines and hire them directly. Did you know in the Philippines there's actually some really good tax talent out there? What did he just say you can hire tax professionals in the Philippines? Of course you can get hired, any type of talent. In fact, Big four's regionals, they all have huge offices in the Philippines. Hiring there looks, I mean it looks a lot like hiring in the States. Let me give you the profile of a recent actual hire Team up made for a firm who was looking for a senior tax accountant. They had over 20 years of accounting experience. The last eight with US accounting firms working on tax, they'd done it all. Partnerships, S Corp. C corps, individuals, Trusts, proficient with QBO Lacert Go System tax RS oh gross. CCH Engagement SurePrep tax Caddy. Nice firm hired this person. What do you think they cost? Drumroll please. 2,700 USD a month salary for a senior tax accountant in the Philippines. Usually Gonna come between $2,200 and $2,800 USD per month. A lot of folks worry about whether this jeopardizes like your onshore pipeline. I always tell folks doing the two things they are not mutually exclusive. I need to be billing, I need to be building talent onshore. But when this sort of talent is about a quarter of the cost offshore, the reality is I also need to be building talent offshore. I got to be doing both. Team up. They just work with accounting firms. Great place to start to learn more about them. Check out the link down in the show notes. Today's episode is sponsored in part by makersub. I took some heat on social media lately because I said that nobody's crushing accounting AI. And if you think about it, the tech and the accounting vertical, there's like, I hate to say this, there's kind of no cool AI happening there. The cool AI is like meeting recorders, chatgpt stuff outside the accounting vertical. But there's one exception to that. And the exception is inside accounts payable. Makersub, arguably the leader here. They're like an AI first, accounts payable, like bill pay solution. They are driving innovation on what is literally the fastest changing part of accounting. The part of accounting AI is most disrupting ap and it's because vision models combined with large language models can get us way further than OCR ever could. Vision models, they can read everything down to like handwriting. Way more accurate than OCR was. But then large language models, they can use a bit of intelligence to be like, does this pass the sniff test? Like, does this actually look correct? And the combination of those two things, like it can, it can take it way further than ever before. MakersHub especially good at really hairy stuff, pulling a huge number of like itemized things. All the dumb ways that people invoice you that are like off the wall. Done some demos of Maker Sub actually on my YouTube channel if you wanna see how it works in like five minutes. It is very, very good to learn more about Maker Sub. Check that out or check out the link to them down in the show notes. So those are my two top recommendations, but I've got five that are kind of in the tier below that in the good enough category where if you're on them right now, they're pretty good. And it May not be worth changing, but let's dig into these and what I've heard on each of them that is going best and not going well. First up, Listio. So Lisio has been around for a while. They were kind of the original client portal, but last year they did a pretty strong pivot into tax workflow. So if you're a US Tax firm, they now have like a version of what we've talked about for automated intake that it is not quite as sophisticated as what Stanford Tax and Sorband do. But upsides for Lisio. Lynn Lisa's got a killer carbon integration. Like, they have worked together for a very long time. And one of the biggest issues with these tax workflow tools is it's yet one more place to manage your information, which is totally a pain. Like, there's a lot of downsides to having to have another tool for tax workflow. What's changed in the last 24 months is the upsides are just so big, there's so much time to save by automating your intake that it is worth the trade off of those downsides. Lisio integrates really nicely with carbon. If there's a downside here, it's just not as far along as Sorban and Stanford Tax on the tax workflows. Next one here, Safe Send. Safe Send was acquired last year from Thomson Reuters. And this is something that we're going to be seeing more in accounting firm software, which I'm not happy about. You've just got some incumbent folks. A lot of the tax software platforms with deep pockets, and a whole lot of people sat up when that Safe Send acquisition happened because it was a lot of money and it was cash, and it actually, like, reinvigorated this entire software category and investors got more interested. The problem is that's usually where good products go to die. Like, the reality of how these things work behind the scenes, we've seen this. I mean, you want to go back to, you know, Intuit acquiring T Sheets. Same company Thompson Reuters acquired SurePrep a couple years ago. Dext got acquired recently. Like, the reality of how these transactions work is most startup founders, the goal is an exit. Like, you don't take money from investors unless investors believe that they can get a return. And the only way investors get their money back is when somebody buys it out. But imagine yourself an entrepreneurial person who founds a company and builds it from scratch and has this big success. Imagine you then going to work for Thompson Reuters. Never in a million years. So the transaction, you have an Earn out, you have to go back and work for that company. X number of years. Oftentimes in these sales, a lot of what they get paid comes down to employee retention, down to user retention. So a transaction happens. I don't know anything specific about these transactions. Besides, this is how every transaction works. So you go into these transactions and what does everybody say when it happens? What do you, what do you mean? No, nothing's going to change. Everything's fine, guys. Nothing's good. Nothing's gonna change. Now we've actually got access to all these other resources. Okay, you know what's gonna change? All of the entrepreneurial people who built this thing from the ground up are not then going to go and work for this company long term. They're gonna work through their earn out, they're gonna maximize that, and then they're gonna be on to the next thing. Like, let's not fool ourselves. So Safe Send, it's a product I love and got acquired by Thompson Reutes. And everybody's saying the right things, but let's be real about what that means. So Safe Send, what do they do? Really, really well. They do automated delivery better than anybody. And Sorban is now trying to do a version of this. It falls. Frankly, it falls well short of, of how streamlined Safe Send does this. If you're already using Sorban for Intake, then do you really want to use a different tool for automated delivery? Almost certainly not. But Safe Send, they tried to do a version of Intake this year and it looked really cool. Really razzle dazzle. I've heard from some firms, it didn't quite deliver, unfortunately. So while they are very, very good on the automated delivery side, better than anybody else, what I've gathered is on the intake side, while they are. Or they. I don't know, Honestly, I don't know if they're working on it. They've built a version of Intake. I don't think it's at the level of Sorban and Stanford Tax right now. Now they've nailed automated delivery. And like what that looks like, if you haven't done that before, that is like printing directly from your tax software to Safe Send or giving Safe Send a PDF. But then it cuts that up and it pulls out the vouchers and the signature pages and the instructions to the client and it will hand them off to the payment pages. If there's quarterly vouchers in there, they'll pull that out. They'll remind the client each quarter, hey, you need to get this paid. And it will also hound people for 8879. They've actually got some really amazing data of firms before and after using Safe Send. The amount of, average amount of time it takes to gather, get assigned 8879 back before and after. And like, let's be real, unless you have an automated solution for this, it takes a long freaking time to track down 8,879 usually. But what I think I like most about automated delivery solutions is for me, like the big boss, the tax pro, the senior person, it kind of deskills delivery. So when a return is done, when it's through review, it's then up to my admin team to handle delivery, which is, which is awesome. The way I run my tax firm, I'm not into taking a client meeting at delivery time. Like, at delivery time, we're ticking boxes. We're making payments that you're pretty much done. If I'm going to have a conversation during the tax prep process, it might be upfront, it might be during prep while I'm still making decisions. In a perfect world, it's the year before when we can actually still do stuff. It's during tax planning. The best way to run a tax firm is to have those conversations during the tax year so that the filing of the return is purely administrative. That that's all it is. Right? The trouble is, most, you know, clients, they won't, quote, unquote, pay for tax planning. Or maybe it's a very simple client where you can't justify the additional work of tax planning because there's really not that much that you can influence. Like if the tax return is just coming off of government forms, and there's really not all that much you can do oftentimes. But in a perfect world, the best way to run an accounting firm that isn't, you know, heavily cyclical is you're doing tax planning with clients and the filing of the return is just an afterthought because by the end of the year, you already know where everything's at. If they haven't paid in, they at least know how much it will be. And come April, you're already thinking about the next year like you're. You're getting the forms done. But I can tell you I'm certainly not preparing the return and then having a call with the client to review the return. Like, that's the worst way to put a return in front of someone because all you're doing is watching them with their mouth open, process what you're telling them for the first time. If I am going to communicate with them at delivery, I'm going to record a little five minute video walking through it and then I will give them my calendar link. If they do want to talk after they've done that and after they've processed it, you'll find that 80% of people, they don't even take you up on doing a live meeting. They're like, thanks for sending the explainer video. Makes sense. So I love automated delivery solutions. I think we probably spend more time. Not probably, we definitely do. We spend more time on intake than delivery. So if I was going to buy a tool that just did one of those two things, I would buy the tool that would automate more of my intake because I think that's more time consuming. But Safe Send, they are super crushing automated delivery still. They have for a long time. I mean it's a product of them having worked on it for a decade where these other solutions haven't. But like for sure, like let's, let's be real. It's a bummer that they're under Thompson Reuters now because you just, you don't expect the same level of innovation if you are not if you run a tax tool that is not a Thompson Reuters tax tool, I don't think you have that much to worry about. Like if I'm on CCH and I use Safe Send, do I need to worry about Thompson doing like a rug pull and you know, killing the integration or killing support for CCH access tax or something like that? I don't think you really need to worry about that because you're a paying user and I, I don't think they're going to do a rug pull on paying users. But if they build new stuff, for sure they're going to build new stuff optimized for Thompson Reuters. Right. This episode is sponsored in part by Canopy, the practice management system. You may have seen a lot of the content I've been putting out around building your, your tech stack from scratch and why the order in which you pick your tech is so important because your core tools, you want them to do as many things as possible for you. And Canopy, bro, Canopy's got features for days and not, not all just like bolted on sort of half baked features, features, pretty polished stuff. Everything from like really, really well done document management to a super polished like client portal. All the client facing stuff's not gonna be embarrassing. It looks really nice, a level of depth and workflow management down to things like like on the views, just being able to customize all of the columns and, and save those views. You know, you work with apps, sometimes it's like those views are super locked down. So irritating. Canopy's got a lot of those details, right, the flexibility there that you need. And they're one of the only tools, cloud practice management systems that scale really well beyond like 30 or 40 employees. No tool can do everything perfectly for your firm. But when you're trying to build a more lean tech stack, a practice management system like Canopy that'll do a lot of things for you can help you run a more organized firm. Got some demos we've done with Canopy on my YouTube channel if you want to see how it works in like five minutes. Otherwise, check out the link down in the show notes to learn more about Canopy. This episode is sponsored in part by Ignition. Come, come, come, come, come. Here's the thing. Here's the thing about client billing. Here's 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 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 in the first year because they didn't have to bill all that stuff manually. Man. With Ignition, we want more business with impressive online proposals. No more hustle and hustle and PDFs and Word docs. We automatically pulled payment upfront or at the end of a job. When it was done, no more dial in for dollars. We transitioned our firm to more recurring revenue and better management. Managed scope creep. No more leaving money on the table. Ignition is making thousands of firms more money and genuinely made us more profitable. Check out why over 7,000 of the smartest businesses run on ignition@ignitionapp.com put a link in the show notes. Okay, three more that are in my sort of good enough tier tell you what they're doing best at, what they're doing well, what they're not SurePrep SP binder this is the only really complete solution for work paper management for 1040s. So we've talked about intake, which happens before this Talked about delivery, which happens after the return's done. SP Binder, frankly, it's a cool solution. It is for managing all of your work papers associated with the 1040 and referencing and all that. And it's really the only way to do 10 pap. 1040 work papers that isn't just marking up PDFs. It was a super ahead of its time solution. Um, it's, I don't know, six to eight years old now. It, it's a bit of a learning curve because it is like, it's got like built in spreadsheets and all these things. And I've talked with a number of firms that have tried to roll it out and actually a few of them that have, that have given up because man muscle memory for tax pros is like, it's so hard. And it, you, you may have experienced this maybe going from paper to paperless for the first time. Like just how much time it takes just hustling documents and fiddling with dumb little things. You get that when you're going to SP Binder, like it takes time. So SP Binder is the kind of tool where it will take you like two seasons to feel like you're really getting the most out of it and being productive with it. The problem is Thompson Reuters bot sure Prep two years ago and as you may suspect, most of that team is gone now and we haven't really seen anything new in the product. I tell you what though, they got somebody spicy hustle in their social media who will hop on some of the things I post about with honestly very well done commentary. Like kind of little, little like actually fun well done clapbacks to which I say, whoever's managing those accounts, hey, come on over. I got a, I got a, I got a much more interesting job for you. Can I say, can we leave that in we get, get in, get in trouble for that? What am I saying? They don't care. SP Binder, it's in the good enough tier for me because it's still a really good tool. Like it really is. It's very unique. Doesn't do anything on intake or on delivery. But for like work paper prep, it's really cool. It's one of the more expensive tools out there. But if you're using it and you're having good luck with it, stick with it. It is still good. I just wouldn't expect them to do anything innovative or interesting or new really. Okay, two more to go next. One tax caddy, another tool that was very ahead of the of its time. It was kind of the original tax intake solution. It was also built by the team at sure Prep, or maybe they merged at some point. I don't know the backstory on that. But the product tax caddy hasn't really gone anywhere in the last few years. It's still fair. Fine. As a way of gathering information. It's actually like a consumer product. Like it's for any old normie person to go and they can set up an account. And interestingly, if your firm uses tax caddy, your clients will always have tax caddy accounts, no matter what. And if they go to another firm that can take their tax caddy account with them, and if you go to a different tool, they will all still have their tax caddy accounts. So those accounts are actually kind of independent of your firm. While they can be connected, the client ultimately owns their tax caddy account. It's kind of weird. So they do intake, but Sorban Stanford Tax, like, those are the intake solutions of the future. I have tax Caddy in good enough status. That'll probably get demoted to don't recommend by next year. The difference to me is if it's in don't recommend, then I actively recommend you change. And I would say with Sorban and Stanford Tax having another year of maturity under their belt with this, I would recommend you do get off tax caddy. I don't know if you got a whole bunch of years of history there. That is really nice. Right? That's kind of. That's the tough one to balance. Last one here. And it's probably the one I'm most excited about for the future. It's called Truss. Truss is get. Is real close to moving into the top recommendation category. They're doing everything very well. I know a lot of people who use them who are very happy with them, haven't really heard negatives. They just haven't been doing it as long as the folks in my top recommendations. So they aren't quite as polished and aren't quite as far down the tracks. And in many ways, anytime I give recommendations, there's. There's like, reputation risk there for me. And with companies that are very early on, you run the risk of, like, sending. I mean, we've had situations where we will. We'll talk about a product and 70 firms will be beaten down their door the next day. And oftentimes it's a very small, very new company. They have no way of handling that, and things can then kind of fall apart. The. The recommendations I can most confidently give are like the Tools where I know hundreds of firms that are like this thing just works. Like I have no regrets about it when I hear that from hundreds of firms. That's the stuff that I recommend that becomes my like top recommendations, the stuff that I put out. Because in all likelihood if you do the same thing, you are also going to have a good experience. And as soon as people don't like, as soon as they start having a bad experience, I hear about it. Like sometimes people come back to me mad about that or just, just being helpful and that's great. Like that's like the best function I can serve as for you I think is kind of as a filter or, or a funnel for all of that. Because that's all I do is have conversations with firms all day long. It's my full time job. And so that stuff all getting kind of built baked back into the recommendations. I always try to go back to when I was running a firm. What would the most helpful stuff have been for me? This sort of thing, I mean saves like this sort of information would have saved me years of zigzagging on the wrong platforms. Like I would go to my Thompson Reuters rep and they would be like, oh no, the only thing you can use here is SP binary or a safe send because it's the only thing that integrates with your tax software. And I'm going to then legacy platforms that aren't going to develop all these other solutions are getting better and better. But because the only person in my ear is my Thompson Reuters rep, I don't know any better. Right. So that's one reason why I, I do a lot of thought leadership on tech selection. Just because the only people talking about tech seem to be the software companies themselves who are, who are obviously very biased. So we do these recommendations. Anytime we do a top recommendation for somebody, we will then go reach out to that company and say do you want to sponsor stuff? So I just recorded an ad for Canopy. Canopy is one of our top recommendations Practice management systems. We just did a Demo on the YouTube channel for Soraban. I actually got a great feed, bunch of feedback when we published that video from people about what, what sort of is doing really well and what they aren't. It's actually kind of what led me to making this podcast. But that's kind of the inside baseball of how we decide who we recommend and who we're willing to do sponsorships with. Because I can say I'm, I'm unbiased. And then right before this you get an ad roll for a software company. Right. Like that's not unbiased but a really good example. SafeSend, we did all sorts of sponsorship with Safe Send until Thomson Reuters acquired them and haven't taken a dollar from them since. And that, that was, that was our decision, not theirs, not to pick on Safe Send. But there are a lot of examples of that. There's also products that have gotten worse over time that we've just stopped, stopped recommending, stopped doing partnership stuff with. If you haven't grabbed this app recommendation database you yet, it's down in the show notes. Covers a bunch of categories from tax prep software, ledger software, practice management, tax workflow, close automation, not like clothing, like month end clothes, engagements and proposals, software for specific service lines like, you know, payroll for example. We've got 18 payroll tools in here and which ones I recommend a lot of good info in there. You can swipe that down in the show notes. And hey, if I, if I got anything wrong here or if you have experience with these specific tools, good or bad, drop that stuff down in the comments because the more useful thing than you hearing it from me is you hearing it from your peers. So I always appreciate when you do share that stuff and then it gets kind of like re kind of built back into recommendations and that ultimately helps everybody. That's all I got for today. Thanks for being here. See you in the next one.