497 How To Get Accounting Clients to be More Responsive!

Today on the Potter your accounting clients just ghosting you, not getting you the stuff that you need. How do we fix that? Is it their fault or is it our fault? Also, because it's a Q and A Friday, best day of the week, will it still be worth it to get a CPA in 2026 or 2027? That's right. We're going to poke that bear. Will ChatGPT agent replace automation tools like Zapier that accountants use pretty heavily? Is that stuff going out the window with ChatGPT's new Really Powerful AI agent? Couple of thoughts on that, as well as some cool new use cases I've seen in the wild that folks have shared around how they are using the new ChatGPT agent. If you're on any paid ChatGPT plan, you've got it and it's really cool for accounting firms. Very exciting. Let's get into it. Okay, non responsive clients. We've all dealt with them. Super annoying. Here's what got me. Here is a question from Alison Reef on one of the podcasts regarding using videos to deliver like tax returns or financial statements to clients. She said, I've sent them to clients, I include them in the email and I explain how it will help them, but they don't watch them. What's a good suggestion to encourage them to watch it? This is a mixed bag. I hear from a lot of folks, they do the video thing and clients love it. But then occasionally I hear some folks from folks that they're like, well, they're just, they're not watching it so they're not getting any value. I can tell you, in my experience, the folks that wouldn't watch my delivery videos were the same folks that weren't opening the email or reading the PDF attachment either. So I don't know that videos for most is going to make anyone more likely to look at the thing that you sent them. But for the people who do, in my experience, they vastly prefer this. They love it. They get to see your face. They get to see some additional commentary, especially the way loom videos work. It's like you're talking head on top of a document so you're kind of explaining in context and pointing at the things so that they learn a little bit about the tax return or the month end close or whatever it is that you're explaining. So if you end up in a situation where this client isn't looking at a video or anything else, you're sending them on an ongoing basis, does this mean that we shouldn't Send it. Here's my take is that if it is additional work, like creating a little video, I would probably stop sending it. There's other people that will make the argument like, no, this is our preferred way of doing it. We're going to do this every single time, whether you like it or not. And I can get behind this too. It's probably up to you. But the big thing here is, is if they need something from me, I'm not helping them until they have gone through this stuff I've already sent them. And this may be actually a pretty good argument for sending that video no matter what. If they come back with a tax return question or something like that, you got to be like, have you even gone through the resources that we already sent? At the end of the day, I can't make them care, but I can make them follow our firm's rules so that you're not wasting my time and that of my team. So that is a. A short term problem, like a short term solution to a short term problem. Bigger picture, how should we think about clients that just are not as responsive as we want them to be? I would say this boils down by and large too. They're just not that into it. They are not as into it as we are, which usually comes from them not valuing it as much as we wish they did. I can tell you I noticed a difference going from running a tax practice to running a cash practice, a bookkeeping firm on the tax side, and this was an 80 year old tax firm, we did a large volume of once a year tax work on the tax side. With that type of tax business, we were kind of a means to an end. Everybody needed a tax return filed. They did it kind of begrudgingly. Some people were nicer than others, but at the end of the day, they would not be working with us if they didn't have to file a tax return. As opposed to the cast practice where the way we stood this up, we called it managed accounting. Kind of like managed it. We were their accounting department in a box. And for many entrepreneurs, this was the aspect of their business that they least liked having to manage. And when we could come in and usually like pricing started as like, you know, half an FTE equivalent. And so most of these situations were coming in as you know, anywhere from a half to maybe three or four FTEs, in many cases filling the role of folks that they would otherwise have to hire and manage and have on their team. And people loved us for this because they hated this crap. And we could do it more efficiently. And it was not out of sight, out of mind, but they were as involved as they needed to be and no more. Because nobody gets into running a food truck so that they can do their own QuickBooks or being a dentist so they can spend time away from being chairside and instead talking with this person about, why did you not get the supply bill paid this month? Nobody wants to fuss with that. It's like taking out the financial garbage. There's this sort of off gassing of being what it is to be an entrepreneur and these tasks that they don't want to do when we can come in and do that stuff. Well, for them. Oftentimes they were like, I have been fussing with this for decades. Where have you been my whole life? So not all engagements we come into with the same level of appreciation. And as much as we get super annoyed at the people that like complain about the bill and drag their feet on stuff, as much as we just fundamentally don't like those people to their core, it's oftentimes not because they're bad people, although there are like just some turds. It's oftentimes not that they are bad people. It's that they just don't value the problems that we're solving for them. And if we've got these people on the client list right now, we're at where we're at. That's who we've got. Right? But most accounting firms, I don't think, have gotten to a service delivery that's like, hey, I'm solving this really painful problem for you that maybe you struggled with for years. And so you will happily pay us to do this work. If you look at your whole client list in your A, B and C, D and A, B, C and D clients, those A clients, they're not only paying you, they're happy to pay you. And so we kind of got to think about why is that, that this person will pay three times as much as this other person and do it with a bigger smile. It's because they value what we're doing more. And to a certain degree we can educate them on the value of, of this. But by and large, in my opinion, it's a product of their past experiences and the problems that we can solve, like in their industry, in their specific situation. So if they've had a bookkeeper steal from them in the past, they will value you coming in to manage their AP more. If they are a business that has like, very nuanced, kind of gnarly specific to them, regulatory reporting, they're going to value what you do more because that's a real headache for them and something that they don't want to have to manage. Now, not all of those people will have the money to pay for it. And as much as you might love working with restaurant owners, hard way to make money, right? But my take here is ultimately that the, the more that person values what you do, the more engaged they are in the work that you do. Now sometimes there are like obvious alternatives, like do they have an admin, do they have an assistant, do they have somebody else that can help you with some of this triage if they're super busy. But most of the time it is an argument for like trying to push the client list to something that is more valued. And so that's usually steering away from like once a year tax work, steering away from like general sort of business offerings where we're not really working for a specific type of entrepreneur and solving very specific to them pains. And it's not to say I didn't have a lot of these clients that were like tough to get information from, but if I go down that list, there were not folks for whom we were solving like really meaningful problems. We were, you know, doing a job, doing a tax turn every single year because they just had to do it. And it was this admin headache. And this is, this is a slippery slope. You end up on this spiral. We talk about this a lot around the context of like, don't be your client's personal assistant. Like if you have humans requesting documents from them until the end of time, they're just going to think that's what you do. So if 80% of the emails we send to our clients are, hey, reminding you still need 3, 5 and 7, then every time they get a notification that goes off and it's from you, what are they going to think? They're going to be like, ah, crap, great, more paper pushing, can't wait to do this. And right or wrong, like their mind goes to like, that's what they're employing you to do. Which is so infuriating because of like how technically complex the things we do behind the scenes are. But they don't see any of that. They don't see any of how the actual work product get comes together. They only see the touch points. And so they will make their buying decisions on what those touch points look like. And if 80% of them are hounding them for documents, they're going to think we're paper jockeys. Some people are smarter than this. But it's also why some people will say things like, well, if I had the software, I would do it myself. Oh, be still my heart. Peter just did a full on wheelie on the stationary bike. Non responsive clients, big pain, but a signal oftentimes that they don't super value what we do yet. And there's probably a path to someone who does value that more. Next, will it still be worth getting a CPA in 2025, 2026 or 2027? This was in the context of some of the AI conversation and let's just acknowledge the elephant in the room. People are incredibly opinionated about this because people are super opinionated about anything. Or we are invested in so what is the right car to drive. We are very opinionated about this because it's one of the more expensive purchases we have. Where do you live? We're extremely opinionated on what the right answer for this is because we're so invested in where we live. Similarly, our professional credential, we are so opinionated usually about what we have because we've, we poured a lot of time and effort into it. Right? And it's a probably a pretty core part of our identity Now. I am a cpa. Here's my honest take on whether it has value longer term. And trying to like squelch the voice inside of me that's like, I have it, so I want it to be valuable. My take is honestly, already I don't like if folks are making buying decisions based on credentials. We've already lost the battle because there's a lot of CPAs out there. A whole lot. Is that really, quote, unquote specialization? We're not putting ourselves ahead of many folks and it doesn't put us anywhere near as far ahead of folks as we can get when we are perceived as the expert in a specific domain. Oh man. Someone shared on a on a podcast comment the other day. I wish I had it handy. They finally bit the bullet. They were kind of like, I know, I need to get more specific. And in like four or five months time had basically doubled their business in a totally new, much more specific direction. That is how you become premium credential or not. Now, the problem with credentialing right now is the same problem that university education already has and will just get worse. And is the rate at like how we get this work done, the rate at which that changes is going to be so fast that how do you even make testing like for a credential that feels super Relevant, Right. Just think about AI's ability to go out and pull information from like regulations. Like I already talk about, talk with folks that'll do like gap financial statements and they'll have it like generate the disclosure, AI generate the disclosures and all that. And then it's already almost doing that stuff flawlessly if it has access to the right context. And still somebody needs to put the stamp on it and certify that it's right and all that. And that's, that's, I think where there's still validity to credentialing long term is somehow like a human still seems like they need to be the arbiter of this so that there's somebody to stand by it. Like right now, if AI prepares a tax return for someone and then the IRS comes after them and they can't say, well, that's what AI said the answer was like, still need somebody to stand there and represent you. But, but I also talk with people who, oh man. Someone in Texas, they were telling me a client will buy some land and they go to chat GPT and they say based on this zip code, we have to do this allocation for like fencing and wells and all these other words he said that I didn't understand that were specific to buying land in Texas. And you have deep research chatgpt do that. And it pulls all this incredibly good source data and builds out a totally logical response for how to break all this stuff out. And he's like, I've been doing this for 20, 30 years. This is something that absolutely stands up in an audit. Like, it's the same way that we would build it. It's. We've pointed it to the sources for this information that we would use. And so on the other hand, AI can almost generate the things that the arbiter would then use to stand by it. Right. And so that we're definitely grappling with, like on a strong AI timeline where it is very good. Like, I think we're all sort of grappling with what does, what is our place and our role in the things that we're doing down the road versus what AI is doing. But does it ultimately change the value of a credential? I don't know that it does. I actually think my thoughts on credentialing right now are more or less the same in the AI era, where ultimately running a successful small accounting practice boils down to your network, to your connections, and to the perception of you by folks who are looking for a new solutions provider. And in the Same way that a CPA creates credential does not ultimately put you ahead of very many people anymore. Increasingly less so actually, as I would say, more folks are getting expertise from professionals across the country. It was one thing when you were a CPA in a small geography, there's not very many of them. But these days, more and more people are making buying decisions. You know, they live in Missouri and they're going to work with an accountant in Seattle. And for some things that works well, other things like tax compliance wise, that's a little more problematic. But that I would say is actually devaluing the credentials because you have access to more people with credentials now. And so the solution is the same thing we always talk about it is how do I become the default choice for a specific type of entrepreneur where they think that I'm the guru because I'm the visible person in this domain, talking about the pains that they have in a very niche way. And like it's, it's the very best time to run a micro niche firm. And even micro niche firms now can be very big because of how good online platforms are at finding specific types of people. And I know that feels foreign to us because we're not social media experts, but this is really just a product of showing up online, having conversations every day, showing up at trade shows, showing up, you know, in the newsletter that's for this specific type of person. Every category has influencer folks like me. So what are they talking about? Where are they having these conversations? How can we ensure that we are a part of those conversations? That is vastly more important than the credential. And as AI gets into more and more things, those human relationships like those are still going to be super, super important in my mind. People may go direct to AI for some things now, but when AI does everything, what are we going to do? We're going to spend time with each other. We're not going to go back and hang out with our robot girlfriends. I think it actually creates more like hunger for human relationships and spending more time together. I can definitely tell you that has been the consensus at live events and even coming out of COVID when everybody's going stir crazy, right? They're like, oh man, just nice being around people again. That stuff I still think sort of usurps and is a bigger thing than your credential. This episode is brought to you in part by Stanford Tax, one of my favorite new tax like AI Tax Workflow tools. Stanford Tax actually heard from a big number of you very happy users. Stanford continues to evolve. And one of the big shifts in 2025 is that is it is now not just a tool for like serving as a portal for your clients to submit information into, but it's also just an internal tool for your firm now because it does so many useful things with those source docs. So basically you pile in all that info that the client gave you and it will compare those items against the pro forma checklist that it generated and tell you, okay, what do we have now? What do we still need? But it will also bookmark those documents, it will rename the documents, it will warn you about stuff like it being the wrong tax year. It will split bundled documents. So if they give it to you in a single PDF, it'll figure out how that ought to be broken out. The number of years I was putting like divider pages in and sitting in front of that scanner, if you know, you know. And it now rolls, and Stanford now rolls all that up into a binder in the cloud where you can do your PDF annotations right there inside of Stanford Tax. Okay, down with Adobe Acrobat. The world doesn't need us drawing more red squares in Adobe Acrobat. This excites me because it's pulling all this stuff into the cloud where every new AI model makes this whole workflow better. That's super exciting. To learn more about Stanford Tax, check out the link down in the, in the, in the, in the show notes, gang. We're coming down to the wire on a limited series of live events that I'm running in partnership with Canopy. By the way, this episode sponsored in part by Canopy. We're running the events in Austin and Dallas and Minneapolis and, and in Boston, super fun half day events. You're gonna get a pile of cpe, some free lunch, fill that tum tum. I'm gonna be doing a keynote. I'm gonna be doing a Q and A at those. We're gonna have something like 70 firms out hanging out. You're gonna meet some other smart folks, we're gonna get to hang and you're gonna leave with some new local friends. Nothing better than in person stuff. Like online stuff is great, but man, like in person stuff just lands totally different. If you are anywhere near there, I would love to, to see you check out the links down in the show notes for all of those events and let me know if you're gonna make it. Okay, a bit on ChatGPT agent again, if you have a paid ChatGPT plan now under Tools, which is just under the like the field where you put anything into ChatGPT. Under Tools, there's an option to enable agent mode. It will go out and work on a problem for up to 30 minutes. It has a little built in web browser, so it can even like navigate and do stuff on the web. It is like a new high watermark for how powerful this stuff is. All. Although GPT5 is supposed to come out this week, I hope it hasn't come out between the time I recorded this and this episode goes out. But a question in the podcast comments. Do you think ChatGPT agents will replace Zapier in the near future? So Zapier, if you haven't used it, it's an automation platform that like connects different tools. So if you know every time there's an accepted proposal in your proposal platform, you can have it create a task template and the place you manage tasks or something like that. Or every time there's a new meeting transcript ready, you can have it save that document in your Google Drive somewhere, something like that. Kind of. You're building these custom automations and the partnership with Zapier is you can build these with over 5000 different web apps. They have triggers and actions to build out these sort of custom connections. But does Chat GPT Agent, does that actually replace this? And it's worth thinking through like the hierarchy of what are the best type of integrations and like the from the most reliable to the least reliable. And the most reliable way of connecting two systems is still via the API. That is like the backend that these platforms have that give developers ways to get information into the platform and information out of the platform. So for example, your practice management system, some of them have APIs that you can use, others do not give you access to those APIs. They can do things like update the contacts, look for a contact to get the information about them, create work items, look at the status of work items. And the most robust way to make updates to that is like sending code to the API. But we don't have those skills, right? Although increasingly AI like tools like Chat GPT, I can go to Chat GPT and be like, hey, I want to do this thing in this software. Go see if there's an API available and write the code for me to do so. Like at the AI events we did recently, Chad Davis did some examples where it's like the only way to get this thing into this system is via their API. I don't know how to do that. So let's have Chat GPT write the code to do it and then we run that code. So that's kind of wild, the idea that AI is making us capable of doing things with code for the first time. But I don't think Zapier goes away because the, the value that Zapier provides is connections for those 5,000 apps. And in many ways Zapier may actually get more powerful. And Zapier has, this also has like AI agent functionality where Zapier is the connector into all the different services that you use. But then you can give it like more open ended instructions and it can figure out what app to use and what action to use and all that. So I, I think Zapier probably still has a place long term because Chat GPT is not going to build connections for 5,000 different apps. Right? But a funny other thing I think will happen with Chat GPT Agent or where oftentimes chatgpt Agent won't be the quote unquote right tool for the job because it's kind of slow and kind of dumb. It works 80% of the time and not the other 20% of the time. And it's like clunky at like logging into different systems and going from system A to system B. And it's just like things now where it's like, oh, we have a spreadsheet that we've built for this process and then a developer will come along and be like, oh, you don't need to do a spreadsheet for that. I can write some code and do X, Y and Z, but like spreadsheet is the language that we speak and maybe that developer doesn't actually understand the scenarios where that won't work. And so we just stick to the spreadsheet. I think Chat GPT Agent is kind of going to become that where it's maybe a slow, resource intensive way to get something done, but because it's so accessible, we literally just go and tell it what to do. That will probably be used by folks over the more complicated alternatives because they can just go tell it to do it and it'll just do it. So if there's a risk to Zapier, it's probably that it's probably ChatGPT just becoming the default. And folks go to the agent and they say run this thing every single Monday at 8am and it may take 30 minutes to do it, whereas Zapier would be instant and it may break 20% of the time. But because most people still don't know how to use Zapier, they will just chuck the job at ChatGPT agent and have that do it. That's going to be a really interesting thing to follow. It also completely changes when we have a desktop agent, because particularly in the us so much tax work is done with desktop apps now that as soon as an AI app can see those desktop apps and navigate them on its own like that is going to be a whole a whole big old new workflow opportunity for accounting firms. That is very exciting. A couple things folks have shared in the wild since we last talked about ChatGPT agents and in the comments to this podcast. If you've done something cool with Chat GPT Agent, or even if you if you try to do something that didn't work, drop those comments below. Keep sharing ideas One idea someone shared they said this episode got me to try the AI Agent feature for the first time. There's so much promise here. Don't sleep on this. I used it to update some ugly spreadsheets for me and I was blown away gang. This is the worst it will ever be. There's even some skill in learning how to get it to do the things that you want. So your first try may not be successful, but let's keep learning the skill. Another person shared in the comments you used it to automate some parts of ar I connected an email Remember chatgpt agents has has connectors where you can give it read only access to your Outlook mail or your gmail. They said they connected an email and gave it filters for a client that sends a long PDF where we have to locate some info and then it has to go out and get the products and services and then email that information to a team member. They're having agent now do this task every day. So first they pull any emails that meet this filter, they compare it to the products and services and then send this digest to a team member. The member can now get an email and just snip the clean data and drag and drop it into QBO's agent. Oh my gosh. We got agents talking to agents to create the entire invoice without any errors, she said. I'd like to eliminate the step where the team member is involved in dragging and dropping the info in qbo but not sure how to do that yet or or they're not comfortable with it logging into QBO on its own yet. That's so cool. That's actually the first cool use case I've heard for QBO agents as well. The fact they're taking the output from one agent and putting it into QBO's agent and it's builds the invoice. That is very cool. I'm so bullish on ChatGPT agent. I. I feel like AI agents have gotten better faster than I expected. But I would love to keep hearing your cool use cases. We've got a main channel YouTube video coming. Maybe it's, maybe it's out by now. No, they won't be out by now. Probably next week we'll have it on the YouTube channel. Very, very excited about this. So keep sharing your cool use cases and we, we all get a little bit smarter because of it. In fact, those like that AR thing that I just shared, tens of people probably just said, oh crap, I gotta go try xyz. And because this person shared that comment, those folks, they've got a cool new use case, right? So keep sharing that stuff and I'll keep taking credit for it. Gang, thanks for being here. It's a great day to be an accountant. Okay, I'll catch you in the next one.