464 Roasting The Tech Stacks of 3 Accounting Firms

Got a fun one today. It's gonna be a little bit different. We actually got real accounting firms to give us their tech stacks and tell us what's working about their tech stack and what just isn't. So for each of these three firms, I'm gonna break them down. Any apps I would recommend swapping out, trying to kind of diagnose some of those pains and see maybe what are the most common solutions that I've seen to them. And from this, I think you're probably gonna get a couple tidbits around like, oh yeah, this is. Is maybe a pain that we've had in our firm as well, and probably discover a couple cool new tools as well. So, without further ado, thanks to the Brave Tools for participating in this. Let's get into it. Okay, we got a tax firm here, Kareem O. Kareem Basim. I'm just so sorry, because there's no way that that's how you pronounce your name. So apologies straight off the bat here. Cream is at Vista CPAs revenue mix, 20% bookkeeping, 75% tax, 5% advisory, hoping to substantially increase advisory and ad representation, four technical staff, and four admin. That feels fun. Unless you're saying that four people do all those things, but I think you're saying this. 12 people and total what feels like it's working. Taxdome, what feels like it's broken. Project management and taxdome, full tech stack, Microsoft Office. He says, obviously, dude, we get. There's a bunch of Google Workspace firms that I bump into now. I. You do you just assume that all accountants are Microsoft, but they aren't. ShareFile, TaxDome, CCH, Tax Access, QuickBooks, Stripe, Bill and Gusto. Initial thoughts? If the best and worst things of your firm are taxdome right now, best thing you can do is get some help with taxdome. And it is like, so important to pull in an implementer anytime you're working on a big project like that, like PM rollout, that sort of thing. Especially a tool like taxdome, which of all the practice management systems is one of the more fiddly ones. Like, not in a bad way, but in a configurability way. There's just so many ways that you can set it up that when you first come to a tool like that and you've never had those options in the past, you're like, oh, I don't. I don't even know what the right answer to all these questions are because I've never been asked them before. And in my experience, if you make the investment in pulling in an implementer in the beginning and maybe you've done this to which I would say if you're still struggling with project management, go back to the implementer or find a better one because taxdome is a great solution for a firm of your size. But the firms that make an investment in an implementer in the beginning, like you're shaving years off of the DIY learning process because these tools are not so on the rails as to just rock up and like be able to set it up just right for your firm. Because firms, they, they get this work done in very different ways, unfortunately. But Vivian implementers, if they've worked with, you know, tens or hundreds of other firms, they've seen what works and what hasn't worked and they just have a you a very unique collection of perspective. I'm actually going to tag in this reply here. Ryan Elblein and Jessica Smith, who I know are two taxdome implementers that work with a bunch of firms. So engage somebody to help. Your practice management system is like the single most important tech platform in your firm. So if there's anyone that is worth investing in, it's that. So that like that is suggestion number one. A couple other things that I don't see on your tech stack list that I would generally recommend for a firm like yours. For one, if you're looking to get into representation, I like I don't see a tax resolution tool here. I had a big old unlock the first time that I realized that there was actually dedicated platforms for like tax resolution and helping clients through that stuff. It makes the work so much easier. So I would pull in like what are the options you've got? Pitbull Tax Resolution Canopy has a standalone tax resolution tool. Like you don't have to use the practice management system. What's the other one? IRS Solutions or something like that. There's another popular one, it's got a name that's something like that. But if you're looking to get into like resolution, work representation, stuff like that, definitely make sure that you've got the tools for the job. I didn't see a proposal tool here. Taxdome does a version of proposals that for me is isn't good enough yet. So like very core tool in my tech stack is it's either going to be ignition or it's going to be anchor a dedicated proposal tool for like nailing three tier proposals. Because there is no other part in the client experience that is more important to optimize than the screen where they say yes to a dollar amount. And I've just heard from so many firms this year that did like three tier proposals for the first time this year or sort of changed their strategy where they're kind of just blown away at how big of an impact that can have on the profitability of the firm as a whole if you really nail it. Unfortunately right now there's not a single practice management system that for me is good enough at this yet. Taxdome being among them. Not really a tax gnome thing, it's just that like it's a hard thing to nail and like do really, really well. So I send to either ignition or anchor for that. You know, trying to upsell people to like tax advisory and, and that sort of thing. Last thought here. And the tax gnome people hate me saying this. A dedicated tax intake tool. It, it's like the biggest workflow opportunity right now is pulling in, I would say either Stanford Tax Trusts or Sorban to manage the intake of tax information from your clients. Now the way I would do this is to literally put it in front of clients and like here's it creates a customized specific to them list of everything that they need to submit that's based on prior year tax information. But if you don't even want to put that in front of clients, a lot of firms now just use that for gathering the information internally. So it kind of de skills the process of gathering that. So you got four admins here. If you have four admins in a 12 person firm, I would really want those admins to kind of be taking the lead on all things gathering tax information. And having a dedicated tax intake tool actually makes that much easier. It kind of de skills being able to do that really efficiently. Every time I bring this up, taxdome hops into the replies and they're like we're working on it, we're going to have it any day now. We've got our own, our own version of this tweet. It's just around the corner. The reality is they've been saying that for a while and they are going to ship a version of this. Like every practice management system that supports tax will have an answer for tax intake, but they don't yet. And we've got solutions that have now done this really well for like three years. And it's like both unfair and unrealistic to compare something that's already very good today that thousands of firms are having good luck with. It's unfair to compare that to something that is still unreleased. And as long as we have tax returns, I have to get out the door today. Like, I need a solution today. And the unfortunate reality is when a practice management system ships something for the first time, and there's a long list of these, it's still a version 1. Like they don't start with the full blown, like fully built out version, honestly, for good reason, because they want feedback and they don't want to build too much of it and then find that like they went down the wrong path. So usually that version one is very basic. I mean, you can go down the list of like platforms that have shipped proposals and time tracking and billing and reporting and all these things where you're really excited when you see the press release and you're like, oh, oh, sweet, it finally does this thing. I'm so excited. And then you hop in and it is just like the feature is just like paper thin, right? Like, there's not that much to it. Maybe taxdome proves me wrong here. In fact, I would love to be proven wrong. But if they ship a version of Tax Intake that would literally make me stop recommending the other providers, it would be the first time a PM has ever shipped a standalone feature, like with a version one that is that good. And so it's just very unlikely. So I send people to the stuff that's already working for a bunch of firms for tax intake. I mean, I could, I mean, I know like tens, maybe 100 firms now that are Taxdome users that also use a dedicated tax intake tool and say it's absolutely worth it, you can test it at a small scale. Uh, with the exception, I think, of Sarban now, who unfortunately, I think is making you commit like 250 returns or something like that, which is really annoying. But Tax Intake tool, totally worthwhile, big time saver. It's the sort of thing you want to test now rather than testing going into like next tax season. Because when you go into tax season, you want everything nailed down. You want intake, you want tax only, you want all that stuff like super fleshed out so that you're not figuring it out in the busiest season. Right, Kareem? Hope, Hope I'm saying that right, but hopefully you got something useful in there. You're, I mean, you're on a good, you've got a good start here. Like taxdome is an awesome platform for small tax firms, but those are the few sort of, few sort of things I would do with Today's episode is brought to you in part by Team up, who helps you directly hire talented accountants in the Philippines. But did you know that they can also help you hire an assistant? Did we do. I feel like we just did an episode not that long ago we did. About why you should have an assistant. Because if you want your team to learn the skill of delegation, buddy, all that learning starts at the top. And I know, I know I'm not the type of person that needs an assistant. Like it's like giving up gang. Here's the thing. You're gonna get stuff thrown at you every single day that is below you, that is beneath you. An assistant, they can help with that and the assistant can even help facilitate like getting some of those things to the right members of your team. This is ultimately an opportunity for you to drop the low value stuff that you're doing to upskill other folks for whom those same tasks are actually an opportunity. Now if you want to hire an EA in the Philippines, I'll give you the salary range. What this usually looks like one to three years experience working with US companies. They're usually going to come in between 1100 and $1200 a month. That is USD full time. Three to five years experience between 1200 and 1400 USD and five plus years between 1400 and 1600 USD, buddy. They're out there and they're good and they make a difference. I got an assistant. I'm not ashamed to say it and I think you should too. To learn more about Team Up Chipa help check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Finn Daily. Did you know? Here's some pretty good Jason on firms lore. Did you know I once founded and sold a SaaS app? I did. True story. It's the app that is the sponsor of this video, this podcast. Where am I right now? The app was Finn Daily. Let me tell you all about it because it was after it was my brain baby. So here's the thing. My firm got into doing like cash advisory work and cash reporting for clients where we'd send them these reports every week or every day to kind of show them like that very short term sort of upcoming cash situation, like everything leading up to the next pay run and all that. So we'd send these emails that were kind of sort of templated, but it was like a manual thing of pulling together all this different information every single time. So I built Fin Daily to be almost like an a templated email platform where you just pull in variables from accounting apps, from like banking connections, all that. So imagine you drafting an email template but inside of that template, having placeholders for upcoming bills from the accounting file for the credit card balance, all these different variables and it pulls those values right before it sends the email. Now the team now has built it out to do a bunch more stuff, like a bit of math to roll up several figures so that what it presents in the emails is like the total connecting multiple different accounting files so that all that stuff is piping into like one email summary. Super, super cool. Frankly, I'm still in love with it. Like the whole concept of just this automated email that pulls in live data at send time and then goes out to a bunch of stakeholders. Your client could go to you, but the whole premise is it's like a super connected email template. You could use the same one with all your clients, different ones with different clients, but just think like you got a client with a bunch of entities, how you can roll all that up into an unbelievably good digest to send them every single day, every single week. And the reason I built it, clients will pay really, really good for this. It's a super useful service. Anyways, learn more about FIN Daily. Check out the link down in the show notes. Okay. Jamie Thompson. Jamie runs Nicolin Advisors. It looks like a pretty cool firm. Jamie, I don't know that I honestly have all that much I can improve about your stack. I'm gonna give you a couple of hot takes though. Spoiler alert. I honestly think probably gonna hate them. But I, I will tell you what I would do in your shoes. Bit of background about Jamie's firm revenue mix is 40% bookkeeping, 30% tax and 30% advisory. Two owners, they're doing all the technical stuff and then one admin. Now they're in the process of switching from 17 hats to Suite Dash. These are both sort of like those all in one professional services kind of platforms that do everything in one place. And really the idea behind them is like scratching the itch of just our annoyance with why do I need so many different tools to do all of the things that my firm needs to do? So you come to the landing page, you come to something like this and you're like, oh, finally somebody built it all this stuff in one place. And on generalist tools like this, like they're a little more shiny. The landing pages look a little better. That is compared to stuff inside of the accounting vertical. And it's attractive. And I could. And this is one of the things you're going to hate. I'm just telling you right now, I'm going to tell you my story of of when I did something similar. I'll just share that maybe it's helpful, maybe it ruins your day but a full tech stack. The idea is 17 hats going to Sweet Dash that that handles your CRM, your proposals, your engagements, questionnaires, workflow stuff. They're on Google workspace. They use QuickBooks online, they are using in Kiro for secure email and E signatures but they're transitioning that stuff to Suite Dash as well, which will serve as kind of the client portal and mobile app. They're using Acuity Scheduling for on appointments but they may also be able to transition that to suitedash for tax prep and planning. They're using insteps, they're using ChatGPT team. Nice work. And NotebookLM actually very interested in what you're using NotebookLM for. We don't see that a ton because honestly I think most accounting firms are like Microsofties and they're not on Google Workspace. Last couple tools here, advisory tools, Fathom for reporting and RC Reports for reasonable comp analysis. Please and thank you. RC Reports is just a no brainer to me and then they're using Gusto for payroll. I already alluded to the to the my initial thoughts on Tech Stack that I know you're not going to like. So the reason I'll just give you the reason why I buy like practice management systems inside of the accounting vertical even though they are not as shiny and on paper don't do as many things as like the generalist tools. So my journey was this and my firm for a long time we used practice CS and many of us are still like wounded by past relationships with software platforms that were so frightening and so restrictive. Right. For many of us that's like deeply ingrained in how we think about tech and how we make tech selections. When I finally got away from practice CS and I launched my Cast practice inside of my firmware just doing bookkeeping and kind of accounting department in a box type of stuff. I was like finally I'm free of this monster and I'm going to go to the biggest, most flexible, most powerful thing I could possibly find. And at the time that was ClickUp. ClickUp was like features du jour, everything that you could possibly imagine. And I'm like well yeah, like this. This has everything that we could ever possibly need. So we went to that and I ran it's about a million and a half dollar cash practice ran it entirely inside of Click ClickUp and what I ultimately learned was it was like extremely powerful for sure but it was almost so open ended that it like, it was too flexible in many ways when we were trying to grow the team and put things more on rails and make things turnkey so that folks couldn't break views and do the wrong thing here or there. Like if I'm plugging in a growing number of people into a specific process, I want that to be as like locked down and simple as possible. And ultimately what we found with ClickUp was it was a tool that was so unopinionated we had a really hard time building in the guardrails and the structure that we needed. Now to go back to like the accounting vertical software equivalent, you have tools that do much, much less, right? And they're not as shiny and not as impressive. They don't ship things as fast as the bigger companies like suitedash. And, and they're ultimately more opinionated. They're like, here's how you should manage work. So take a platform like Carbon for example. Carbon has like a, a fairly unique take on like, here's how to manage all of the work happening across your firm and capacity and all that stuff. And it's what makes a lot of people love a platform like that. But then a lot of other people are like, no, I can't, I, I maybe I just can't get my head around like that methodology for doing it. What I found in my journey was, was I had to come back around to something with more structure that was more opinionated because it made it easier for me to like run a growing number of people in my team through that. And it was a really hard trade off to make. And maybe honestly, like, maybe that's not a trade off. That's necessary when you are, you know, two owners who are doing the technical work and an admin at that point, like it's much more about like, what do me and my partner like? Like, what are we most productive with? That's a really big deal. In my case, I was like, we went from 5 to 10 and then from 10 to 20 and I'm like, how do I like put something more on rails that, that the team won't accidentally break and will be easy to understand and all that. And that's what ultimately brought me back to a kick software. Now I have a tool that gives firms practice management system recommendations. It collects like the size of their firm and the service mix of what types of work they do and all that. 2,500 accounting firms have been through that now a number of folks as part of that process. What I Got what I capture is what do you use today and what did you last use before? But also some commentary on like was that a good switch? Would you recommend people do the same? There were a few people in that process that I know left suitedash to go to in industry tools and ultimately didn't regret it. And I would just say more on a macro level. It's very common for for folks to go out to the non accounting stuff but then like very oftentimes I see them come back around. That's my 2 cents. I already told you you're going to hate it Jamie. Okay, that's my two cents. You were to look more at accounting vertical specific stuff and start building from there. The first place to start would be Keeper. Without a doubt it's probably going to replace fathom like to me actually Keeper is a really great example of how tech inside of the accounting vertical in my opinion has a higher ceiling in that they can build it to do very specific to US workflows that say A17 hats or something like that would never do. Right. So those companies, your trellos of the world notion, stuff like that, they can make an unbelievably powerful platforms but it's always going to stop short of exactly what it is that we need. And to use Keeper as an example, Keeper is like task management with all of the transactions of QuickBooks like being synced in there like live and it's doing kind of some quality assurance stuff and all that. And I'm sure at this point Jim, you've seen Keeper before but you know another example on the tax side which is if I could give you a single tool recommendation it would probably be to add a tax intake tool, probably either Stanford Tax Trust or Sorban. And this is an example of like where the accounting specific version of Intake can take you further. None of these tools are very sexy apps. Very. I mean they're okay like they're not bad but they're not as polished as mainstream apps. But what they can do is ingest like a prior year organizer or something like that to do all of the information collection and like build this totally bespoke custom client intake that asks all the questions that you need for tax intake. And that's the sort of thing that ultimately has me investing in accounting vertical specific software and is they can go a little bit further on those workflows but a hundred percent hundo p there are trade offs with that. Right. Like it means probably hustling a couple more tools but with those couple tools I get a greater depth and support for my workflows because they're doing more accounting specific stuff. Jamie I felt bad before I even started recording this because I knew what I was going to have to say. I knew, I knew you were going to hate it from the beginning. What Jamie called out that feels broken inside the firm. They're operating across multiple platforms, especially during this transition to Suite Dash. It's creating friction in both team workflows and client experience. Man, transitions just suck. I don't know there's any way around that. Regardless of where you're transitioning, I would say one thing that I think is absolutely a worthwhile investment if you haven't done it is to pull in an implementation expert. Every platform, regardless of what it is. You can get so much further with it faster if you pull in an expert that knows that platform really well. Specifically if they work with a accounting firms like you look at, you know, a Taxdome or something like that and oftentimes folks will start using Taxdome but use like 20% of it. Whereas had they brought in an implementer that works with a bunch of other firms on day one, it gets them like three years down the road from where they would have been otherwise. And it's such a worthwhile investment. There's got to be the same thing for Suite Dash. Like if you're going all in on that, absolutely. I would, I would pull in an implementer Other Pains despite offering advisory services, internal capacity is tight, limiting how much time we can truly spend on strategic planning for clients. Capacity planning is hard. You have got an admin like the best, most valuable admins I've ever worked with almost are kind of a project management hat where they can kind of serve as an assistant to you and be looking out ahead a little further to make sure that we aren't overextending and committing to too much. Other pains we lack centralized visibility into firm wide performance metrics like client profitability, effective hourly rates and turnaround time which makes it harder to optimize. I know great solution for that outside of a practice management system that does that stuff really well and like honestly I'm not not familiar enough with suitedash to say could it do that well for you? Bottlenecks still crop up due to overlapping roles and the firm being too dependent on the owners for approvals, reviews and client communication solutions here around tax Usually that's a tax intake tool that eliminates all of the having to follow up and pester them for X, Y and Z and just the absolute waste that that time is. But also your practice management system. You know, I'd mentioned Tax Dome before. So like if you take a tax engagement, like having all those steps lined out to where it's like, here's what happens at this step and at the signing the 8879 and then paying the invoice and that being able to follow up with your clients and like progress them through every step of the project, that's really valuable. I'm sure Suitedash has some version of that. Maybe that's something that an implementation expert could help with. But having to chase down clients for stuff and for approvals, like, you know, that's just, I mean that's like kind of pure waste, right? And it even, it even goes further and I think almost devalues the work that we do for them in their eyes. Because if 80% of the touch points that we have with the client are us pestering them for things, then every time they hear from us, it's going to be like, it's going to be a groan. It's not going to be like, oh, I'm excited that they have something valuable they're giving me. It's going to be like, oh, it's like a chore. I got to go do something for them. So I'm such an advocate for like letting the machines do the requesting and the humans, humans do the valuable stuff. Right? Skull creep and underpricing still surface in some legacy client relationships. If you ever figure out how to, for that to not completely not be a thing, Jamie, let us know how to do that exactly. Last, we need to streamline and automate more of the repetitive admin tasks like text questionnaires, follow ups and scheduling to free up space for higher level work tax intake tools. I think that's the biggest win there. Specifically around tax workflows. I'd be interested to know how that would work alongside like a suite dash. Honestly, anybody that uses tax intake tools has this problem. Right now all my information is coming in the tax intake tool, but I have my, my practice management system or my suite dash or whatever that is on the side. How do I keep those things in sync? The trade off to me there is that tax intake tool is still worthwhile because there's so much time savings to be had and a tool that just nails like 1040 info gathering from end to end and none of us like putting multiple portals in front of a client. And like, honestly I completely get that. But specifically around tax intake that happens once a year, I think it bothers us in all likelihood more than it bothers most clients. Like my clients don't care enough to be like, well this is, this looks like a different designed portal. Like, I mean, especially your once a year clients, which you're doing in bookkeeping, where maybe you don't have a ton of once a year tax clients, but if they're only getting into that portal once a year and all likelihood your clients, like they don't even notice that it is, that it is something different. But for me, the time savings and the headache savings and being able to gather all that tax stuff really efficiently totally makes it worthwhile. Jamie, I wish that I, I feel like I just walked up to your house and like kicked the foundation of it and I'm like, I don't like this foundation. I want a different one. I. The, the move, like you're in the process of moving to Sweet Dash. Like, the move I don't think is to like pull the rug on the whole thing. There's a good chance you've already looked at both of these things, but I would point you to sniffing around Keeper, checking that one out and then checking out a tax intake tool, either Stanford Tax Trust or Sorban and Jamie keep running a great firm. Hopefully there was something fun. Today's episode is brought to you in part by the fine folks at Cloud Accountant Staffing. As you know, my last four hires in my accounting firm were in the Philippines and this was in an 80 year old accounting firm. And I came into this with all of the ignorance that you would expect, but man, did it work. Like it completely changed how I approached hiring Cloud Accountant Staffing, the team behind it, it's actually an accounting firm, they started doing the same thing, had a ton of success, started doing this for like some of their like friends firms and now they're just, they're in the business of doing this for folks like you. So they get it and they understand all the questions you're going to have the first time you get into it. Like, how does this person get a computer? Do they do it on their own computer? Do I, do I send them a computer? The awesome thing about working with somebody like cloud account staffing, they've got recommendations for all of this stuff, all of these questions, questions that you haven't even thought of yet. If you're like me, you sat back with these questions and you were blocked on them for years until I just, I like talked to an expert and that would be my recommendation. Hop on a call with them, they'll have answers for all these questions, but you'll at least then be able to make a decision from a much more informed place. The scales will fall from your eyes. Doesn't mean it's going to be for you necessarily, but you're going to learn a bunch more, right? I can tell you it was for me. I went out and started a firm. Tomorrow I'm probably 5050 offshore versus onshore hiring because I think I need both. But if you're looking for a place to get started, check out the folks at Cloud Accountant Staffing. They're going to be out on the conference circuit just like me this year as well. So you may see them in the wild, but either way, check them out down in the show Notes this episode is brought to you in part by Guess who Wrong Client Hub Client Hub is the practice management system that makes every season wow season, not busy season. We're delivering wows, buddy. That's, that's, that's for two reasons. One, because Client Hub provides a game changing client experience it designed with the client in mind. First, not like this afterthought bolt on portal. But second, it it's drop dead simple. Okay? It's not any harder than it needs to be. And one of the really cool things that they've got is magic email. So you actually use ClientHub as your email client. Some things you can do beyond just like some niceties they've had like creating work from emails, being able to pin an email. You can actually even reassign a pinned email to someone else. But in that screen where you're authoring an email like client sends you an email, you've got some AI options down at the bottom to generate a like a yes reply. Like it will look at the context of the thread and draft a response that's basically yes, a button to draft a no reply and then an AI composer where I can give it a custom prompt and have it draft that response. Got some other buttons for like change in tone, expanding the length of it, shortening it, using AI to try to take try to take the pain out of email because frankly email just sucks. So if you're looking for a delightfully simple yet powerful practice management system, take a look at Client Hub link down in the show notes. Okay. Travis Slade Travis Slade runs a firm for dentist. It's called Uluru. Uluru Advisors. I wonder what that word means. Travis I've hung out with Travis. Travis, come out to some events gang. If I have not had the pleasure of giving you a firm handshake and a slap on the back and sharing a taco with you, as I did with Travis, then I don't know. I'm just. I feel like I'm missing out. I'm a real boy. I'm a real person. Come out to an event and hang out sometime. Okay, let's talk about Travis's firm. It is a very cool firm. Revenue mix, 35% bookkeeping, 30% tax, 35% advisory. It's all bundled into sort of kind of one monthly deliverable. Travis is the sole owner. There's two technical staff and one admin. What's working and what's not working. What is working is. Clients are very happy. The end product, the deliverable. Everybody's good at that. What is broken and is Systems and organization says Taxdome doesn't feel robust and dynamic enough to track all the customer things. We need tracked. The rest of the tech stack. They're using ProConnect for tax QBO for every client on the ledger side. Like you mentioned Taxdome, he says, but the client portal, they like the client portal, but the workflow and tax organization. Okay, that's. I don't, I don't know. We'll talk about that. Proposals Ignition Financial Deliverables. Been trying to set up Live Flow for a while, but it's taking forever. Still using Fathom for good my clients and then filling in all the cracks is good old Excel, the ultimate Swiss army knife. Travis says, I really like having clean systems, organization and dashboards to track things. Having a hard time finding a good out of the box solution for this? Tippity. Top tip number one is just to get some help to make sure that you're getting everything out of Taxdome that you can. Because there's a lot of people that say, actually the thing you're complaining about with Tax Gnome is what it's best at. So the reality is no practice management system is. Is perfect for every firm. Sometimes just the way that you run things may not jive with the way that a platform is set up. But you don't know that until you pull in an expert that can help. An implementation expert here that actually works with other firms. I mentioned this in another tech review. I would send you to Ryan Elblein or Jessica Smith who help a lot of firms with this stuff. Like it's not. To me, it's like not worth pulling the ripcord, especially on a tool like Taxdome that is loved by many other firms just like you. The best thing to do is to pull in some expert help and ensure that we've pushed this thing as far as we possibly can, and only then would we consider going to a different platform. When you're, when you're this far in, especially with a small firm like this, where, like, you're the one owner and you've got three staff, all the tinkering of this, like, usually it comes down to you. So having a fractional person that can help on this, like, can just be a godsend. Not only because they vastly improved the setup, because it's saving you the time of having to do a lot of that stuff yourself. So, first suggestion, get help on taxdome. Second suggestion, sounds like you're kind of in this limbo where you're trying to get going on Live Flow for your deliverables, but haven't taken the time to set it all up. And so you still got some stuff in fathom. If there's a. If there's a downside to Live Flow, it is just this. It's the flexibility of it and the fact that you can kind of build like anything into it, as opposed to a fathom where the reporting packages are a little more on rails. There's upsides and downsides to each of those things. Lifelow does let you templatize things. But the reason a lot of people go to Live Flow to begin with is that flexibility. The risk then becomes like, am I giving a different deliverable to every single client every single time? And is that something I want to get into the business of? Either way, my recommendation here would be the same is ask lifo, like, do you have an implementation expert or somebody you could refer to that can just help us get all this stuff set up. So one of those things where it's like, if it's on your plate and you gotta be the one to do it, it kind of just never happens. But then it's costing you time and headache like every month that. That isn't set up right. So I'm a huge believer in pulling in experts, even though that's expensive and it costs way more than your team doing it or you doing it with. Which is free. Right. And your time is completely free. Of course it's not. But big advocate of like, building out your network of folks who can like, help you with that stuff. In fact, oh, Travis. Travis is in Realize. My. My community you can book a call with, actually with Ryan Ellen inside of Realize for free to like run through your tax dome set up for you. But otherwise with Live Flow, I'd like maybe ask your Live Flow rep, maybe post on Social you can post and realize see, does anybody have a good referral there to help me with the setup? Tax intake. I don't see a tax intake tool here for you. I don't suspect you do a huge volume of tax stuff since I gather you're probably just doing the personal tax returns for the business owners that you work with. Taxdome. They don't have a good like a good enough version of tax intake for me yet. So potentially it could be worth pulling in like a Stanford Tax or a Sorben or a trust to handle tax intake if that is a headache for you. But last, I mean you're really stressing here. I like having clean systems and everything where it needs to be the sad reality and people pretend that this isn't the case. And like I'm a, I'm a big time automation nerd. I literally started creating content. I'm almost embarrassed of it. My, my first content was like zapier accounting for monies and just like way off the wall automation stuff that's frankly out of reach for most accountants. And now I actually recommend, unless you're a super geek and you just enjoying enjoy doing this stuff, work with automation agency that can build that stuff for you. But I like, I am my, if you cut me, my blood runs. Automation nerd. But there's still like way too much shame associated with manual tasks. And anytime we see them and we're like, oh yeah, I got to put something from this system to this system, that system. Oh my gosh, that's unthinkable. What we do is we're like, well, I don't have the right tech stack then rather than being like, okay, I don't love that, but that's a thing that needs to be done. It's a task that has to live somewhere and it has to be somebody's job to do that now. And I can tell you the number of times I tried to automate something and I ran out of steam and I wasn't able to get it to work. But then I never actually built the SOP or the system for it or the task or anything like that. I did that so many times. And that's what most of us do is we get annoyed at those things that don't just work, but then don't ultimately create a task and make it somebody's job to do that thing. As much as nobody likes having to do repetitive manual tasks, there are a lot of repetitive and manual tasks that will need to be done in every single accounting firm. And we can employ people to do those things reliably. Like those things are not, uh, not hard for humans to do. Nobody loves doing them until the end of time, but they exist. And would you rather you do it or somebody else do it? Pre accounting is a great example of this. Like having to log into these different systems and manually fetch all of these things. Most firms, they don't have a quote, pre accounting process because they're so that it even exists to begin with. And so what they do is they wait to close the books until, you know, 24 months or 24 hours before the close is due, and then they start logging into everything themselves and they have their professional staff going in and fetching all these things rather than having a pre accounting process where admins go and fetch all that stuff on the first of the month. So when the professional gets in there, everything is there and ready to go. Any password issues that came up have been resolved. Like manual processes, they suck. But because they will always exist, we always need to have a system for them and acknowledge them for what they are. Unfortunate realities of running a business. And for sure there's a huge spectrum of like, firms where there's way too many manual manual processes and firms who are more automated. But we just have to acknowledge the reality of like, here is where we are today and these are things that need to be done and they can be built into a task list and tax dome or wherever the right place is for that to live. And you've got an admin, make sure it's not your professional staff doing those repetitive things. If you need more admin help, hire another admin, hire a, you know, virtual assistant, something like that, and just acknowledge those things for like, the unfortunate reality that they are. And, and you'll actually find that they grind your gears a lot less when they just happen. And sometimes you can even forget that somebody is having to do these manual things because they've just been done for the last six months and there's a little bit of a risk there before you're like, how's, how is your whole day filled up? And then they go through the task list and you're like, oh gosh, yeah, no, that, that kind of sucks. But the reality is in every single accounting firm there are manual tasks to be done and you shouldn't be doing them. We should be like systematizing around them, plugging admins to help with that stuff. So it is, at least to a degree, out of sight, out of mind for you. And I totally understand the counter argument to this of the people that just like, recoil at this and are like, no, my tech stack. My tech stack should do all this stuff. Just write all my systems should talk to each other and all that. It, like, it's just fundamentally is not a thing. There is no tech stack that does 100% of what you need and eliminates manual tasks. It doesn't exist. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't aspire to having a tech stack that minimizes that stuff as much as possible. We should. But even the very best tech stacks right now, the manual stuff still exists. So let's acknowledge it for what it is and get a team member plugged in to do it so that you don't have to. Travis. Because you know what, Travis? You are a superstar. You need to be spending your time out, dazzling those soon to be clients, talking about, talking about dental stuff, talking about stories about working in your brother's dental practice. And like, that's the things. Those are the things you need to be spending your time on. Not. Not the silly manual stuff that somebody else can do. We all have some version of that that drives us insane. But, like, we kind of have to acknowledge those manual tasks for what they are. Like, it's almost. They're almost so uncool that people are afraid to even acknowledge that they exist because there's so much shame associated with manual processes. As if the coolest firms today have no manual processes like they do. In fact, some of the coolest businesses are extremely reliant upon manual processes. They just always happen. Like, it's not hard for a human to do a simple manual process like collecting tax documents via a tax intake tool and having to get those documents back to a practice management system. That's not hard. Like, once everything is submitted, when you pull that thing over to another place, that's not a hard thing to do. The annoying thing is that it has to be done every single time. But if it's just part of the process and your professional staff is not doing it, that's an entirely different prospect than the professional coming in and being like, oh, I gotta pull a thing from here and pull a thing from there. Like, the problem is that the pro's doing it, not that that task exists to begin with. Have I railed on about manual tasks enough? Travis, Travis, keep doing what you're doing. Travis runs a super cool firm. Hopefully you got some nuggets from this and keep doing your thing. What do you think? It's kind of fun. If you, if you like this format, drop a comment. Got ideas for similar formats. I like this stuff because it's real, like it's people's actual firm setup. And I also like, anytime I can, like, put the coaching hat on you and you can kind of see from my perspective, what are the common themes that I see when I talk with firms, because it's what I do all day. And then like, when I see those common themes, it's what makes me super opinionated about, like, the things I'm a broken record about, like three tier proposals and having like a more explicit sort of communication policy of how you work with clients and all that stuff. But that's all we got for today. Got any thoughts? Put that stuff down in the comments and I'll see you in the next one.