477 The State of Accounting Practice Management Systems

It's the most important software you use inside of your accounting firm, the practice management system, the one tool that you want to do as many jobs as possible. It's the biggest, like, highest stakes technology decision that you'll make. And today we're talking about what's changed in a Q3 roundup of the state of practice management systems. I can tell you in Q2, I had nine tools that were in my top recommendation category, but that's too many and I've chopped it down to five. Why we're gonna talk about, like, the leaders, the contenders, some upstarts to keep an eye on, and where everybody kind of seems to be trending to make sure that you're making the right choice. Come on in, let's talk about it. If you're new here, welcome into the podcast. We talk about run on accounting firms because it's not a bad gig in 2025, but one of the biggest stressors, getting your tech stack right, man. Tech stack, fomo, looking over your shoulder, grass is always greener, that sort of thing. In the show notes, I will link my big old app database of the tools I recommend for every single category and why today we're going deep on arguably the biggest category, practice management. But let me, let me give you a big old asterisk. I think, and I tell you I got this wrong, when I was running an accounting firm, I, I think that we all want to have the perfect, most optimized tech stack. And there's no stack that is perfect, but we want the best one for us, and that's only natural. We want the best stack for us, but I don't think that's actually what we want. Because even if you get to the best stack, you know what you're probably still gonna be doing, Looking over your shoulder, thinking about this and that. I think what we actually want is, is confidence, is the ability to turn that part of our brain off, to be like, okay, good, I don't have to think about my tech stack for another, you know, 12 months or something like that. That is what we should be striving for because the pain of, of just that perpetual distraction, of always window shopping every app out there like that is so much wasted time and effort. What I can give you is transparent tr. Transparent information about what's probably the best for your firm. But I'm increasingly convinced that you will only really find peace until you have a network of peers that you can validate this stuff with. Like, if all of my buddies that I look up to that are running firms, they're doing this, and I know that they're shopping around and they're smart people and they're finding success. Honestly, that's probably all I need to know. I'm going to get in line. I'm going to hop on that stuff. I'm going to have an entirely different level of confidence in the tools that I'm using. So really, we want both. I want the right tech stack, but I also want confidence. And that all starts with, like, making friends that do this stuff. If you're the only one, you know, that runs a firm, get yourself out there. Conferences, social media, make some friends. I have. If you need help with that, I run a community that'll do just that. Basically, within 30 days, you're going to have a friend group of folks who run accounting firms that are like, kind of serving as that first step into you just having an abundance of relationships with people who run firms. It's. It's the most powerful asset to have. Okay, let's get into tech selection. I don't even say what it's called. It's called Realize RLZ IO. It's linked down in the, in the show notes as well. I'm going to be working off of my app recommendation spreadsheet, which you can swipe just my app database. It's used by over 3,000 accounting firms now and disliked by a lot of software companies. This is the most expensive thing I put out all year because it makes a lot of people mad. A lot of companies that will never work with me. But I don't work for software companies. I work. I work for the people. Okay. All right. So my recommendations are broken down to four groups, and I'll walk you through each of those four categories in the practice management system. I guess software category. We've got 43 tools that are actively marketing to US accounting firms. My recommendations are through the lens of the needs of US Firms. There will be other platforms that are like, served or like serving more regional firms. And that comes in when you talk about compliance. Like aspects of how the products work are, like, necessary for some local compliance stuff. That sort of thing. We don't get any. Any of that. Frankly, I don't know anything about that. I'm looking at it through the lens of US Firms. If that's you, great. If it's not, your mileage may vary. So the tippy top category here, leaders. Five leaders in the practice management category. I'm going to go through each of them. We're going to talk a little bit about what they've done in the past quarter and where I'd like them to keep going. First one here, Canopy. Canopy is an og. Canopy is one of the very first cloud practice management systems. Big old team, big old company. One of only a few tools here that I recommend for firms beyond 50 employees have a very polished product and a load of features, most of which are pretty good. They still suffer from like, like every single company on this list. They suffer from the. The hard thing about trying to do all in one is you have this sort of like longer distribution of features that you've added functionality that's like not quite there yet. So like for Canopy, weakest stuff is probably proposals. In fact I, I would say that for almost every single one of the leaders on this list. So it's not to say everything in the platform is like, you know, as good as that functionality can be. And that's always the trade off with all in one is can you do the 80% that's most useful to most people and then have it all in one place? I would say if there's one thing we need to see from Canopy right now, it's a response to the explosion in tax workflow software. Either doing their own first party version of this or integrating with leading tax workflow tools like your, your Stanford taxes, your Sorbans, your trust. Is that sort of thing. We're going to talk a little bit more about that as we get to some of the other leaders here. Second leader in the list here, Financial Sense. Financial Sense, a really good all in one. Financial Sense has been a good practice management system for those who look at some of the big dogs like your canopies and carbons and you're like, that feels like a lot. Also historically, if you look at the price for those platforms, if you also thought that feels like a lot, Financial Sense has been a little bit more on the budget end of the spectrum. I don't know how long it will stay that way. Cause platforms usually just kind of evolve through that and then you have new entrants that come in sort of at the bottom of the market. It's always a struggle. For a platform like Financial Sense that is attractive in some ways due to its simplicity. That's always tricky long term as people ask for more and more things like how do you stay true to this being this sort of clean, not overly complicated environment while still developing and getting better and incorporating new things into the platform. It's a platform that I still don't see many firms beyond 20 employees using but I know they're trying to grow beyond that. For Financial Sense, there's plenty of alternatives up market that are more complicated. If there's anything I want to see from Financial Sense, it's probably an interesting take to the workflow conversation and so on tax workflow, we have cool tools now doing automated intake and stuff like that. These are not practice management systems. They're dedicated tools for automating tax work. And, and then on the bookkeeping side, you've got month end close automation platforms and practice management systems. Sometimes they kind of dip a toe into doing a little bit of those things. And if there's an opportunity for Financial Sense, it's probably to do that. Because the bigger practice management systems, your canopies, your carpets, like these are big mature companies. It's unrealistic, I think that these bigger companies are going to develop really cool workflow software within their practice management system. But Financial Sense on the other, on the other hand is a little smaller, still a little more lean. And the development path that doesn't just like lead them straight into being another, you know, big, more complicated platform. The development platform mix is probably the one that is more focused on workflow and trying to keep things simple. Okay, third leader here of five, it's carbon. Carbon, one of only three that I recommend for firms beyond 50 employees. So Canopy Carbon and Count Carbon's still got a sparkling reputation. A lot of the most respected firms are running on Carbon. But the biggest thing they did in the last quarter and they've shipped various things like an upgraded client portal experience, which is better than the one was before, still isn't perfect, but it is like a version one of kind of the reboot of their client portal. Biggest thing though is the deep integration they launched with Stanford Tax, the tax workflow tool. This is the first time that a practice management system has launched an integration this deep with a tax automation platform. If you're not familiar with these tax automation workflow tools, they do a number of things from helping to automate intake from your clients by like giving them a sort of modern web interface that is requesting actual pro forma items from the prior year return. But then also some of them are even doing like automated delivery, like kind of like what we've seen from Safe Send in the past. So you kind of automating the things around your tax software. The pain has been, I don't really want to pick up this tax workflow tool if now I got to like manually update documents and tasks and all that between that tool and my Practice management system. Carbon with Stanford Tax has shipped like the first, I would say worthwhile integration between a practice management system and a tax workflow tool. Where your project inside of Carbon, its status will update as the project is progressing in Stanford Tax, there's a deep link from Carbon that will take you directly into like that client's binder in Stanford Tax. And then when you know, info collection, for example, is completed in Stanford Tax, all the documents come back to Carbon so you don't have to manually move that stuff around. Another nice thing about Carbon is you have kind of these automators that can trigger whenever a project reaches a certain step. And in Carbon you can set those up to work on top of what is a Stanford Tax connected project. So, so when something completes the Stanford Tax, it can still kick off like automated stuff inside of Carbon two. That's really cool. This is the most impactful tech right now for tax firms. We're going to talk about bookkeeping firms too. But this tax workflow tech is the biggest thing changing in the tax firm world. And practice management systems like you don't want them sitting there like covering their ears and not doing something about this. Good to see this integration from Carbon. I want to see them do it with a bunch of other solutions. Because this tax workflow category is getting increasingly crowded. There's actually a pretty big number of new entrants to the space. That was really kicked off by Thomson Reuters acquisition of Safe Send. It was a big cash acquisition that raised some eyebrows and it's kicked off investment in this tax workflow space now. Should it have? Because right now the only people acquiring accounting vertical software, you had RightWorks acquire Practice Protect, which is like a security solution. You've had Thompson Reuters make a couple acquisitions in the last five years. You've got Iris, a UK based company that's spending all sorts of money. They, they acquired Dext, they just invested some money in instead. But for us, the user, you know, tac like Thomson Reuters acquiring your favorite tool, that's not, that's not a happy timeline. Iris not much better. So you got new entrants to the space. This tax workflow space, like more investment coming because there has been some exits, but I don't know that those exits were necessarily good news for you and I, but at least we're getting new tech into the space. That is good news. So Carbon is the third leader here. Fourth leader is Keeper, who still isn't really a practice management system. Keeper is the biggest thing to happen to bookkeeping tech in the Last decade it's a month end close automation platform, but I have them in the practice management category because they're like a first round draft pick in your firm. Like I know people who will just not even have a practice management system or manually manage anything that Keeper doesn't manage. You know, outside of Keeper, because the month end close automation and Keeper is so strong. I've shared this before in my private community. It's an accounting alliance of about 550 small firms now small being under 10 million a year in revenue. It's a extremely progressive collection of firms. Like they've all come from my content. I think it's as progressive as a group as exists globally right now. 80% of bookkeeping firms inside my community are using Keeper and that's outrageous. There's no other tool that has that level of saturation in any category that I've seen. So keepers up here because it's a very good month end close automation tool. But people complain it's not a practice management system. So they started shipping some stuff. They have like a, what do they call it, like a tax portal or something like that. Some like sort of light way to help you manage tax intake, but is by no means anything close to like dedicated tax intake tools. They've launched some practice manager sort of things, but if you still talk to them, they say we are most interested in cranking on month end close automation. And that's good news I think as much as it creates some headaches in my tech stack because it does so many things that some, some practice management systems do without giving me everything I need from a PM like time and billing and stuff like that. It has just revolutionized what it means to get a high volume of month end closes done. And I kind of just want them to keep cranking on that because they're doing that really, really well. I don't know, there's a ton of updates in Q2 at least that got me super excited. I have seen some stuff coming up the next couple quarters though that will be pretty dope that are still like focused on month end close automation. Today's episode is sponsored in part by ClientHub, the practice management system that delivers wow seasons year round, not busy seasons. Seasons that will dazzle your clients for two reasons. One, client hub is drop dead simple, man. If you're too tired of a practice management system that just feels like you gotta have a PhD in learning something new, ClientHub, you hop in, the vibes are great, it just all makes sense. But two, remember there's a second reason Client Hub offers a game changing client experience that is you can actually get clients to like collaborate with you and be helpful on the platform cause the portal wasn't this like afterthought. Bolt on now. Very cool. Recent development in ClientHub Magic Books review Twinkle sounds so Client Hub syncs in the transactions from your QuickBooks file. You can run an AI analysis on it like from inside of Client Hub. It'll highlight any potential issues you can mark like on the balance sheet in the P and L, you mark each account one by one, whether or not it's been reviewed. But if you want to troubleshoot, it'll pull you straight back into QuickBooks. Like you don't have to learn like a whole new troubleshooting tool if you'd rather sort that stuff out in QuickBooks. Other cool stuff it'll identify automatically expense inconsistencies, purchases without a payee purchases and parent accounts. Why is why can we not disable that QuickBooks Large transactions, new accounts, new vendors, new customers. It's Magic Books review inside of ClientHub. I think you might like it. Learn more about ClientHub check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is brought to you in part by makershub, who helps you automate your accounts payable department with AI. There's still such a huge percentage of businesses today that rely on like manual approvals, even paper processes and stamps and all that stuff. That's because most accounts payable products do not give you like the level of detail in your approval processes that you need. Maker's Hub got a bunch of flexibility here from separating bill approval from payment approval, because oftentimes those are two different groups of people that need to manage that. But when you can't separate those approval workflows, you end up kind of like fudging. Well, this person's got the keys to the castle. But we'll let them improve this bill because they're the only one that can make the payment. But they may not actually know anything about the bill. By separating out your bill approvals and your payment approvals, but also being able to drive these workflows based on any little fiddly item on the bill. This is where they're using like AI vision models and large language models to extract better information from bills than we've ever had before. Having that flexibility, then in the approval process we are like saving loads of time by using AI to automate extraction and then having a greater level of control over approvals. Super powerful tool makershub would help so many of my clients that had like hairy, ugly AP workflows. To learn more about that one, check out the link down in the show notes. Last of the leaders here, number five. And the leaders are in no particular order, is taxdome. Taxdome is the most vocal about being an all in one. And by extension they're generally not super interested in integrating with other solutions. The biggest issue this creates for tax firms and Taxdome, historically it's been a tool for tax firms, even though they now are shipping more sort of bookkeeping functionality and changing some of the marketing messaging a bit. The biggest issue and like fundamental risk with going all in one and building everything yourself is just how good the tax workflow category has become. So we've got leaders now that have been working on this stuff for several years. And Taxdome, they, they have said that they are shipping their own version of tax workflow. It's supposed to be here in the next couple of quarters. It is not the first time they've said that. Like, these things take time. And to be honest, like, I think it's unrealistic that the version one of this is going to be what you want it to be. If you compare it to the other tools in the category that have years of experience working on this. Would it be really nice if all that stuff worked inside of one platform? For sure. Hundo p a hundred percent. But when you've got a few leaders in that tax workflow space right now, and then quite a few new folks that have gotten investment that are kind of doing tax workflow with a different spin on it. Like you've got a whole category that's now getting investment and they're all innovating and kind of competing with each other. Is it realistic? Taxdome can ship as good a version of that stuff as as they can. Honestly, they don't have to. Like there's a 60% or an 80% version of it they could ship that is really nice because it lives in the same place as all your other stuff. It's just risky for, for me, the buyer. So something has to give there. Either taxdome has to ship a really compelling version of that or they gotta start building out some integrations because I can't have neither. But I also don't want to have like a crappy version of intake or a crappy version of. Of delivery. Right. All the opportunities there for sure. Like a version of that that works really well all in one place would be amazing. And taxdome's probably positioned for the person who most wants just an all in one solution. I am just sort of fundamentally at odds with there ever being an all in one that's a complete solution. And this is the way accounting software tech has always been. Is solutions aware buyers, they usually don't buy all in one because they can see the stuff that's on the bleeding edge. Like Keeper is a great example, totally revolutionized month end close automation, tax workflow tools right now, another great example, completely changed what the tax intake process looks like, largely removing humans from having to be involved in that process at all so that your professional staff doesn't even touch the project until all the work's done. That's great, that's awesome for us. But 90% of the profession is not aware of this tech. And so there's a solutions unaware buyer that will happily take the all in one version. You know, three years after it was cool. Now there's definitely a price to like being on the bleeding edge and using these different tools that don't integrate with each other and all that. But there's never going to be a day where an all in one is the best at all those things. Like that's just not possible. But what they all say is they see that cool thing out there that someone else is doing really well and they're like yeah, we're working on it, we're going to build it. And of course they are because they have to have an answer for that. But time will tell. Like is it any good? And by the time they've got a version that is as good as today's leader, the leader's doing something else, that like there's a next thing to build. And that's always been the trade off with all in one tools. Now in a tech environment where change is happening very, very slowly, all in ones are strong because you can catch up to that stuff, right? And I would say up to maybe 24 months ago we'd had a really slow five to seven years in practice management systems. Like everybody sort of built around the same kind of feature set you saw, you know, Financial Sense came, came on the market and built kind of a simplified version of what a lot of the other more mature players had. But they all had kind of settled around the same feature set more or less. Now workflow innovation is changing what's being asked of practice management. When I say workflow automation, I mean month end close automation and tax workflow automation. Because back when cloud practice management systems were getting started, that was workflow. That was the closest thing we had to workflow was what they did. Now workflow's gone deeper and that's a really hard thing for mature companies to copy. Like this level of workflow automation, particularly when it's regional. Like you look at a company like Carbon, which is an international company, for them to build a highly regionalized part of their product, maybe that's not realistic. Right. And that makes their approach of being integrations first make all the more sense for me as a buyer. I think that's a little bit less risky if I am hitching my wagon to a practice management system that says our goal is to integrate with as many solutions as possible. But that gives me, I think a, a greater likelihood of being able to choose like the highest performers and still get them to talk to my practice management system. But I can also still understand how the highest possible ceiling setup is the all in one that does all that stuff. Well, right? And that's the bet that Taxdome's making. And Taxdome's been crushing the last five years. Like they ship a lot of stuff. Like they had the most juicy, most compelling, like automated workflow builder. For sure the platform's not perfect. Like none of these are. But for the tax firm that really, really, really wants all in one, like that's who Taxdome's working really hard to serve. So those are our five leaders in the category. Canopy, Financial, Sense, Carbon, Keeper and Taxdome. The next category is contenders. And contenders are tools that I still recommend in certain situations. So first contender, we've got eight in this category. We'll cruise through these faster. First contenders, click up. Actually, let's talk about ClickUp, Monday, Notion and Trello, four non accounting tools. They're contenders because they're very good, they do a bunch of stuff and you can even with a bit of customization, extend them to do even more stuff. And so if it's very important to you to have like a lower cost, off the shelf non accounting solution, and there's a lot of big, very reputable firms that do this, then ClickUp, Notion, Trello and Monday, like those are probably the best options. Now I don't ultimately recommend firms do this for all the reasons that we were just talking about. What about deeper workflow solutions? Look at what Taxdome is building. Okay? Taxdome is building their own like tax intake or something like that. You look at what keepers built. Like Keeper is a great example of why the ceiling is higher for companies within the accounting vertical to do cool, innovative stuff than a ClickUp or a notion or something like that will ever do keeper sinks in the entire general ledger. Like you've got all that data in one place to do really cool stuff with it. ClickUp's never going to do that. And you can say like, well we can, we can do custom this, that and the other thing, we can do anything with this tool because it'll let us do X, Y, Z. But you don't. And if you do, you got to build it and then you're paying like playing software night janitor. In fact, the people that I know that are running like, you know, big ClickUp firms, they've got like ClickUp teams, they've got like the wizards that can hustle that platform for them. And it's not to say that an accounting vertical tool won't have that, but I will always buy the accounting vertical tool for, for two reasons. One, because I'm hitching my wagon to someone that's solving more specific problems and so they can continue to innovate around month end automation. And what does it look like to do tax workflow and integrate with other solutions, that sort of thing like what we just talked about with, with Carbon integrating with Stanford Tax. You're not going to get any of that with generic platforms unless you build your own custom integrations. But then second, I would rather spend my money with people who are innovating specifically for me. Imagine a world where the only tools that we have to run our accounting firms are generic tools. That's, that's not a good timeline for any of us. So those four tools, I had them as contenders because you certainly can build a firm on them. And I built a one and a half million dollar cast practice on ClickUp. I've done it both ways. I built a tax practice on vertical tech, I built a cast practice on just generic tech. And this is kind of where I've landed with what my preferences are. I've also built a tool about a year ago to give accounting firms customized practice management system recommendations. And as part of walking through that process, they have to provide the last PM they used, why they changed and whether they regretted it. There is a bigger movement of people going off generic tools than to generic tools. And so I think it's, it's very common that I've seen folks will be bent out of shape with limitations of accounting vertical specific tech. And so they go out to what seems like sort of the final perfect frontier of generic off the shelf tools that are much cheaper, that are extensible and you can do custom things with very, very common that those people ultimately come Back around to accounting vertical specific tools. That's not my opinion. That's like I have like actual data. I can see that. And I mean it kind of resonates because that's what I did too. I was abused as a child by practice CS and I saw ClickUp and I said, that is the promised land. I ran a practice on ClickUp a couple of years and I'm like, okay, I need a little more boundaries than this. I reeled it back into something in the middle. Okay, let's look at the other contenders in the space here. Next contender. Client Hub. A really good solution for bookkeeping firms. They kind of pride themselves on being client oriented. So it's kind of like a two sided task management system where like the, the portal wasn't sort of like bolted on as an afterthought, but also like simplicity. And so some folks will look at say a keeper and be like, I don't want a PhD in learning an entirely new platform. In fact, I'm kind of fine just managing the work in QuickBooks. Client Hub is a good solution for folks like that that may be overwhelmed by something like keeper. They've also shipped some pretty cool AI stuff that's getting a little deeper into workflow. Can I just say I'm sitting here looking at my app recommendation database. There's like seven or eight people just hanging out in here, clicking around. It's a whole vibe, man. Like there's always five to 10 people in this app recommendation database is just a Google sheet anyways. Client Hub, they've shipped some pretty cool stuff that actually you probably heard in ad reads the last couple of quarters. While they don't come with as many like raw features as the leading platforms, that's not what everybody wants. And so if that stuff feels like too big of a lift, especially if you're a bookkeeping firm, Client Hub's probably a good option. Another contender here, firm 360. So firm 360 was actually built by some folks who ran an accounting firm or and still run an accounting firm. Similar to what I just said for Client Hub. They don't have as many of the features. It's not as big of a team. The development isn't like at the same rate as the leaders that we talked about, but they've got a lot of the really important core stuff. And the level of support that you get from firm360 is second to none. Like firm360 users generally very, very happy. And, and that is something that can kind of go by the wayside as companies get bigger as you lose that personal connection to the brand. And sometimes it's really hard to get help. If you've felt hard done by by that, take a look at firm360. Like that is a. It's a smart platform because it was built through the lens of an accountant, but it's also a bunch of really good people. Next contender here. Count, spelled Q o u n t Count is probably the very most ambitious product on this list. They do a huge number of things, but that platform is ugly as all get out. And that matters for me. But it doesn't matter for a lot of people. Like it looks like Web 1.0. It almost looks more like, like an older desktop application with a very dense display. And you might love that. And that's why it's on the list. A really big number of the folks in pasba. PASBA is like a bookkeeping organization. A good number of the folks in PASBA use the platform count and they're very smart firm runners. And what's really interesting to me about that is they know a whole bunch of other firms that use the platform and so for them it's a no brainer to use that. And there's another argument for what does your peer network look like? Cause that really influences how you pick tech. If you've got friends that swear by, pick a platform and they love it and they can kind of show you the ropes, that's a non product specific thing that has honestly nothing to do with the functionality. That's a really good argument for using that platform. There's not any of these platforms that are like light years ahead of all the others to where they're a no brainer choice. The bigger thing comes down to like implementation and can I get help on an ongoing basis. I mean this is the value of a peer network. Again, one thing that we started doing in my community. Feel like I'm talking about my community too much in this episode, but just grant me this one thing we do in the community. Every couple of months we do a meetup for users of each of the major practice management platforms and and people will share their setups live. And I didn't realize how transformative that was until I had a private setting where I could see that the only things I'd ever seen was like a demo environment from the software company, which isn't reality, but to be able to see like in a private space of like 10 or fewer people, like actual firm owners sharing like hey, here's our actual setup. And here's how we do this and that and the other thing that was incredibly useful not only to decide what platform I wanted to go to, but but to just have some friends I could jam on ideas with like every two, three months. To say, like, I'm kind of stuck on this. How does everybody else do this? That's not something you can share out in the wild on social media and that sort of thing. But if you got a friend group where they're willing to be that transparent and share with you, that completely changes how you approach your tech. And it's interesting, in pasba, a ton of pasba firms have moved to count because they have a bunch of friends that use this platform. And then kind of like in pasba, they have sort of a like more opinionated framework for how to run your firm. And so they can just like steal ideas from each other and sort of set up that count the same way. This episode is sponsored in part by Verito. New Sponsor Alert. Have you ever gotten that gut drop feeling when a. 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Get to a better hosting platform with Verito. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is brought to you in part by Financial Sense, the practice management system. If you've downloaded my app database, followed my app recommendations. Financial. Financial Sense has been one of my top recommended practice management systems for a while now. Financial Sense gives your team one place to track client work, assign tasks, follow up with those clients, run reports and hit those ever so Important deadlines. Thousands of firms use Financial Sense, including Fiscally professional Corporation, a 30 person accounting firm. Jessica Wong, a director of the firm, says Financial Cents gives us the pulse check we need need ensuring we stay on track. The checklist templates have standardized our onboarding process very effectively. It's good. And we've done a number of demos of Financial Sense on the YouTube channel. If you haven't seen it yet, right now, teams of two or more, you're gonna get 10% off the team or scale annual plan. Take Financial Sense for a spin for free at the link down in the show. Notes count. I don't know if they raise money, but they've got some new folks on the executive team. They just did a rebrand count is. It's very, very good. It was one of the three tools that I also recommend for firms at 50 employees or beyond. The design, it's just the design. I don't know. It looks like an older, older product, but it isn't. Last one in the contender category here is Uku Uku. They launched in the United States in 2024. It is a good, pretty simple platform, not in a bad way. In fact, they do a really good job of letting you enable and disable different parts of the platform. So you don't need to have anything more there than you'll actually use. The thing I've always loved about UKU is I think they have the best like visual calendar planning view that I've seen. And that's not just due dates, although there are due dates. It's like a visualization of when you plan to do the work. One thing that I don't think the other platforms have solved for effectively is if I got a colleague that's all of a sudden out of the office one day, how do I know exactly what they were going to work on? Who's got like the best visualization that I've seen for that? And some folks like that's just how their brain works. And I've seen folks who have seen this bun Uku and they're like, oh my gosh, finally, like this makes so much more sense to me than a list of tasks or a Kanban or something like that. And so it super resonates for that type of person. That's why they're on the contender list. Contenders are tools I still recommend like in a specific context because not every firm is the same. We're not always going to get excited about the same things. Last category we're going to look at, there's We've got a laggard category which has a whole bunch of platforms in it. We don't need to like bemoan the ones that we don't like. But if I don't talk about them here, it's because I don't recommend them. So last we'll talk about six tools that are in the watching category and these are generally newer platforms where I want to see how they develop. They might be worth testing, but if it's me, I wouldn't move the whole firm to them now by any means. But the future leaders come from the watching category. So they're kind of like the next generation that may work out, may not. First up here, a tool called Accounta. It's a new practice management system, just still real early days for them. I don't know anyone in the wild that uses them, but what they've got so far looks pretty cool. Second tool in the watching category is Iwin. Iwin started as a like an accounts receivable tool. More mid market. Now they're moving towards becoming more of a full practice management offering and they're, I mean it's a pretty good sized team with some capital behind them. So I'll be interested to see what they can do for practice management. The mid market accounting firm has really not been served historically well by cloud practice management systems. Now we have a few, a few tools coming up market to them but boy, beyond a certain size that market still almost exclusively served by the platforms from our tax vendors which is just, that's a, that's not a place you want to find yourself. Next in the watching category here is Kone. I'm hearing from a few folks that use Cohen now and Cohen's out on the, on the circuit at conferences and all that stuff. So that's really good. I think they've got a little bit of momentum but I haven't seen anything yet that would make me recommend them as a practice management system before another or before some of the leaders and contenders we talked about. Levy, there's another one to watch built by an accounting firm owner. They've kind of got a different approach to visualizing how work gets done sort of thing where if it, if it works better for your brain and that was kind of the origins of this tool is there's no shortage of practice management tools out there. But the reason they built their own was none of the existing tools really just looked and thought the way that they did. Right. Next one here is Zenit. Zenit is kind of a cool smorgasbord of different sort of month and close automation features, but they're moving now more into practice management. This will be an interesting thing to watch because it's a little bit of like a workflow like month end close automation tool becoming a practice management system. They don't do month end close automation as well as keeper and it's still early days for the practice management functionality. But to see a workflow oriented practice management system that'll be really interesting to watch. Last one to watch here is Zoho Practice. Zoho has got a whole suite of all sorts of different things, including Zoho sheets. Sorry, including Zoho Books. Zoho Sheets is also a thing. Is it Zoho Sheets? I don't know. I think it is, but they've got Zoho Books which is like an accounting platform. It's still early for Zoho practice, but it kind of makes your head spin. Like what would a practice management system that was super integrated with an accounting system look like? Kind of be interesting to watch. All right, I'm not going to get into any of the laggards except for one, because they are the single biggest blocker to accounting firms modernizing their tech stack and it is good old Thompson Reuters Practice cs. They are the cork in a bottle of an entire generation of accounting firms modernizing. It really is. I I joked on social media recently that accounting firms will live two lives and their second begins when they stop using practice CS. Practices was amazing 20 years ago when it launched and it hasn't changed since. The the switch to a cloud practice management system is not just an apples to apples switch to a new platform. It's kind of like the QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online. Discussion Although QBD QBD slapped, I don't know the practice CS ever slapped, but it's not fair to compare one directly to the other because what you're actually getting into is now an entire new ecosystem of technology which we talked about month and close automation about tax workflow automation. Those tools will never integrate with your practice cs and so you're moving to a different cloud based system to manage all of your work and all that stuff. But you're also getting access to an entire ecosystem of tools that your practice management system then hopefully integrates with. Now that's not perfect. Not all integrations are made equal and many of them don't exist altogether. But you get light years more for your money with today's leading practice management systems than you get from practice cs. To go back to that practice management recommendation tool I built, again, I've had over 1500 accounting firms go into that. The platform that is being left in droves and it's not even close is Practice cs. And people are not looking back. They're saying, I wish I would have done this five years earlier. It's like pushing 400 firms I think that have said in the last five years they've left practice CS. And off the top of my head, I don't recall seeing a single person say I regret this. In fact, you post anything Practice CS on social media and everybody and their mom comes out and they're like, burn it to the ground. But that's still where the vast majority of accounting firms are. It's amazing. Like the echo chambers we end up in. And if you're listening to my content, man, we are in a very specific type of echo chamber. But I would, I would say the majority of accounting firms in the US have still not moved to a cloud practice management system. And the biggest culprit is Practice cs because you talk, you talk to your Thompson Reuters rep and they're like, well this is the only platform that'll integrate with your tax software. And that's true if you can call what it does an integration. But no amount of integrations makes up for a tool just being hot, hot garbage integrations. They matter, but they're still secondary to does this tool do the job that I need it to do. And if you're on practice, yes, right now I cannot recommend enough going to a different platform. I've shared this story before, but I, I had a firm that was on Office Tools, the like on premise office tool. Office Tools was great back in the day too. Like you want to talk about all in ones. It was very good. We at the time we moved the firm from L Cert to Ultra Tax. This was, the firm had like 32, 32 ish people at the time. This was an 80 year old tax firm. We moved it from Lacert to Ultra Tax. Learned a lot in that transition. But when we picked up Ultra Text, they're like, hey, we'll give you Practice CS like pretty much for free for three years. And we're like, well why would we not use this? Spoiler alert, don't. We shouldn't have used it because it was awful. But we dumped over a year and a lot of money into this transition. Got about two months into it and realized this is not the right platform. And that is, I mean that is your biggest fear as a firm owner. Like that is the thing that keeps you up at night, the notion that you're going to just be pulling teeth for over a year to get your people to change to a whole new operating system for a 32 person firm. And everybody gripes and complains and all the things that you'd expect and you're just kind of staying the company line and you get a couple months into it and you're like, yep, nope, this isn't the one. Now what? Now what do you do? You're in tax season, everything's a mess, everybody's pod. What do you do now? Do you go back to the last one? Do you change again? What? When everyone is just so exhausted with this, you really want to start that process again and burn another nine months on that. That's what I did wrong. That was when we switched to practice CS and nine months later we went to a cloud pm. It's actually one of the leaders that's on this list. Don't do what I did and make a buying decision based on what your, your sales rep would tell you. Like that was. When was this? Maybe five years ago, six years ago. The only source of information that we had was a sales rep. And that wild. And that's, that's the case still for the majority of accounting firms. Like they don't know anybody else that does this stuff. They may bump into a couple other firms at like local continuing ed things from time to time, but they don't have a relationship with them. And so we make buying decisions based on what sales people tell us. Which I mean obviously that's, that is a flawed framework for making decisions. It's really funny now these days, like you talk with reps at the software companies about my app recommendation database and they will act like they know more than me about it. They'll be like, oh no this. And that isn't right. That this is like, this is what gets me out of bed in the morning and excited about the content we can do here is this is in my opinion the best like single collection of transparent information we've ever had about making this decision. Nobody gets paid like nobody pays to be on this list. In fact, this list costs me an unbelievable amount of money. And we've got sponsors that I just downgraded this last quarter. Swipe this database yet if you haven't, we updated each quarter. Don't make the same mistake I did. Picking tech based on what a sales rep told me. I love the companies in our space. I'm rooting for them as we all should. Be a stronger category for accounting specific tech and investment coming into that space. We all win when we have really good tools to serve our clients. That's why I recommend spending money in this space and not going and you know, buying ClickUp or something like that. Excited to see what Q4 looks like as we're going to be heading into a busy season and that's kind of like last call for making any major changes. I generally don't recommend making big changes right before the end of the year. It's better than not making any change at all. But if you know you want to change by the end of the year, do it now. You don't want to be working out the kinks in January when there's just a lot of other stuff going on, right? There you have it. Q3 update for practice Management systems. Anything I missed here, Anything you want to share about any of these platforms, drop that stuff in the comments. All of that informs these recommendations. So please do share whatever you got. Before we go, I'm going to be in a city near you very soon. Let's pull up the event calendar. July 14th I'll be in Los Angeles. July 16th in Denver, the Old Mile High. July 22nd I'll be in the big windy Chicago, Illinois and July 25th, the Peach State, Atlanta, Georgia. Those are each one day accounting AI conferences. Got a rock star lineup of folks that are going to be there. I've met so many of y' all in the last six months. It is so much fun to get out from behind the desk and actually hang out with a bunch of other smart firm owners for a day. Like it recharges your batteries in a way that nothing else can. Tickets for these events head over to jasononfirms.com events we'd love to see you there. And thanks for being here. I'll catch you in the next one.