508 Accounting Firm Service Breakdown: Individual Tax Prep

Today we're digging into 1040 work. This one goes out to all you, all you Americans. Individual tax prep, a notoriously difficult service line to systematize. I'm going to share today what I did inside of my firm. I'm going to share the right things to track about the different 1040 projects in your firm. What needs to live in that practice management system, how that can lead to upsell opportunities and renewal season. But as we've been doing on the other episodes in this series, let's talk about ways to make that, that service delivery more premium ways we could present 1040 work in a three tier proposal that will better capture folks willingness and ability to pay to make that 1040 work vastly more profitable without really having to do a ton more legwork for that profit. So Today we're talking 1040 work. It has never been less cool than it is today to do 1040 work in firms. It seems as firms are just cutting 1040s en masse. As the more en vogue way to do this stuff now, at least in the US is you take on the accounting department of a business and you just do the tax work for those owners. The upsides being getting away from tax season and kind of the, the constraint of that but, but a byproduct of that is it's, it's creating more opportunity for the folks that want to do a bunch of 1040s. Biggest issue in, in a 1040 business has always been getting the 1040s done in three months of the year that are tough to justify extending. Many, many like the, the 1040 work that I was totally fine taking were the ones where I could justify doing tax planning for them. And we would do that work in, in November and December and we wouldn't talk again until the summer because I don't. There is no benefit to filing in April. Like I would actually tell them like yeah, we're going to, we're going to make sure we're paid up. But there are no scenarios where it behooves us to file as soon as possible. And there are sometimes scenarios where it does behoove us to file as late as possible, like up to the extended deadline. I mean, but for a certain level of complexity, folks with like government forms and that's it and nothing else going on, pretty hard to make a case for them that we should do tax planning and extend it and all that. Right. And so those are the tough ones to serve. Those are the ones that inevitably go to the tax season mill. And I don't, I Don't say that with like, laced with shame. That is to say, if you are cranking out those simple tax trains during tax season, it, it is like a production pipeline. How do we get through a whole bunch of these now? I said we, you know, we are limited to three months to get that work done. The reality is that has gotten more, more impossible in the last five years as we're getting amended brokerage statements into April. Like there's a world here where it's honestly not even advisable to tell clients to file in March or, or even in February. So I mean, it's almost gotten like unreasonable to expect a firm to be able to do that many of those simple returns actually in tax season. And so it puts you in a really tough spot. And this is why people are shying away from doing this work and, and taking on now a lesser volume of 1040 work. You end up, I mean, you end up becoming a fireworks business in many ways. Like there's just, there's only so much time to get that work done. Now those are all big kind of strategic considerations you need to be thinking about and in your firm. It's one of the biggest changes I made in my firm, which was historically a big volume once a year tax shop, we ended up building a cast practice and the bulk of the work that we ended up letting go. And it was the very simple 1040 work where we couldn't justify doing tax planning for them to be able to smooth that work out, put everybody on auto extension, the folks with more complex needs, that was totally fine. In fact, we recommended that like, that led to better outcomes for them. People with very simple scenarios that didn't, that didn't make sense for. Okay, so in each of these systematization episodes, we're going through my service library template which will always be linked down in the show notes. Your firm's service library is my, this is my language for it basically defines all of the variables for a type of work that need to be defined in order for our team to understand exactly how to get that work done. It is a codification of Sally because normally you can look back to how it was done last year, but that doesn't capture many things like how does the client prefer the return to be delivered, how do they bring the information in? And so this, this, this service library identifies what I call the service items that go into 1040 delivery, for example, or 1040 prep. So that anyone in my team can rock up to a new 1040 project and see in, you know, five or 10 items that are defined right here. Exactly how to get that work done and that, that incorporates what the client has paid for us to do. It incorporates their preferences. It is kind of the variables that go into how we're going to get that 1040 work done. So service library for 1040 stuff, for me it's pretty simplified. I'll walk you through the service items one by one. First up is intake expectation. How will the project be kicked off? So some options here. Email. That is the client emailing you a mail. The client mailing something in in person. Does the client want to meet in person every year? If so, like, let's reach out to them when we want to kick that off. Zoom. Do they do a virtual meeting or, or an app? Do we have like a client portal on a mobile app? And that's how they submit their stuff. For most firms this is like a you sit back and you wait for the client to ask you to do something sort of situation. It's why, I mean, one of the, probably the fastest growing trend here with firms that will still do a lot of 1040 work is moving more towards fully scheduled work. The age old problem here is you're managing tax season is all firms go through the same progression. If you are, if you are building your 1040 firm, you start just happy to take any type of work and then before you know it you're like, oh, geez, there's a lot to get done by April 15th. And so you, you set a deadline, you say, clients, you gotta have your information in by April 1st for us to get it done by April 15th. And then the next year you're like, oh, a lot of people brought stuff in on April 1. That was a little much. So we're gonna change the deadline now. We're gonna say March 20th, you get to the next year, all those same people that brought you their stuff on April 1st last year and they now brought you their stuff on March 20th. And so you've got just as much work to do and you never really fully escape that until you claw back some semblance of control over when people bring you those 1040 projects. Because how can we really promise a delivery turnaround or manage capacity if we don't have control over the intake? Like if you are a manufacturing plant and anybody can bring you orders anytime and say, yes, I would like 100 units of this. And then someone else comes, yes, I would like 1500 units of this. And then the same day somebody comes and says, I want 250 units of this. That thing we do where we say, yeah, it usually takes two to four weeks. That only holds up if work comes in, like, on a nice smooth schedule. Right. And so until we take control of the intake of work, we can't really assure the rate at which we will output work. And I mean, I've been in this situation too, where you say two to four weeks, and then it ends up taking months for many people, and you end up in this awful cascading situation where it gets to the two or four weeks and clients start checking in and they're like, hey, just checking in. How's it going? And you're stuck in this spot where you're like, leave me alone because I got to get this stuff done. But you're mad at yourself because it's taking longer than you thought. But now you have to manage these requests, which is pure waste, because it's not moving the work product forward. Right. But if you can't placate these people and keep them happy, arguably that is more important than anything else, their perception of the experience. And you just end up in this really tough, like, cascading situation where stuff gets delayed, more people bug you more, it makes it even less efficient. That's really hard. I wouldn't say it's for everybody, fully scheduled work, but if it is something that you struggle with. We did a whole week in the podcast was last summer, I don't know, talking with firms that have moved to fully scheduled work. So every single 10, 40 clients, they have a week, a month, something like that, that they're assigned to, that's communicated to the client. They say, here's when you have to bring us your info, and here's when you're. When. When we're going to get it done. And they plan out the entire year. That feels absolutely unthinkable and absurd to many people. There are other people for whom they're like, I don't understand why you would do it any other way. I mean, the CPA firm that I use now, they don't work an hour of overtime all year round. Everything's scheduled through the whole year. And the clients are like, they don't know anything different. They're like, cool, sounds good. And it won't work for everybody. Like, your mind immediately jumps to the client where they're like, well, they'll never be able to go for that. But at the end of the day, you got to make the rules. Like, you build the machine that's going to work best for you, and if that's appealing to you. You have the control to make that change like that. That comes down to you. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Maker's Hub. You know the fastest way into the heart of any company that has inventory or complex purchasing stuff. It is the bill pay process that was our foot in the door to doing all sorts of advisory for these companies and cash planning and stuff that actually paid pretty well. And this is now a juicier opportunity than ever before thanks to how AI is changing accounts payable and Makers Hub, man, they are like right at the forefront of this if you haven't seen them yet. We've done a number of demos on our channel of just how far automated AP has come. In fact, I've talked with firms now in the wild who have successfully automated like big chunks of the accounts payable department and various clients businesses. But the real value of getting into this work to me isn't like the arbitrage opportunity that might be temporary around like just showing them a more automated way to do it. Rather it is having the completeness of all that information, the bill pay info, all the invoices. It unlocks some really cool advisory opportunities. So my firm, I did a lot of bill pay. Not because I liked bill pay, goodness knows I did not, but because of the other types of more valuable work that that actually unlocked the advisory opportunities that we didn't otherwise have access to because we didn't have that really valuable information. If you want to learn more about just how automatable this stuff is now, man, check out the link in the show notes to chat with the folks at Maker's Hub. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Stanford Tax. Do you have a plan for next tax season yet, buddy? It is high time to be using the tech now that you're going to be using next tax season. You don't want to ride into battle in January and February on stuff that you that you're not already comfortable with. And if you're just feeling like overwhelmed at not knowing what tax intake solution to use, buddy, look no further than Stanford Tax. One of the earliest ones in the game. One of still the most widely loved tax workflow solutions. And they're doing some cool new stuff. Stanford Tax. Now it's not just a way to like push a portal to your client for them to submit information though you could certainly do that. Growing number of firms are just using it internally because you can pile whatever source docs you got in there and it will automatically like check off the items from the pro forma checklist to like see, like, do I have all my info in now or not? Like, it does that automatically based on what it sees on the docs. It builds out this like nice indexed sort of workpaper file, auto renames all the files, organizes them like almost like a, like a PDF, like a bookmark PDF but in the cloud. And you can now even like do annotations in that. So you literally just take your big old pile of source docs from the client, chuck it in Stanford Tax, it does all the organizing and then you've got a dynamic checklist that will tell you do I still need more information from them or not. A massive upgrade to traditional methods for gathering 1040 info, which is just kind of a mess. I can put Stanford in front of my clients and they can submit the docs or I can just use it internally. And any old way that docs come in, they just get piled into a single centralized place. Very, very good platform. Check out Stanford Tax. More info down in the show notes. Okay, so first item was intake expectation. Second service item, intake method. This is the method that the client will provide docs to you. The difference between these first two, why I think why we separated these out in my firm, the first intake expectation, this was like, are we going to meet? Like it's capturing. Are we going to do an intake meeting? Is there a conversation that needs to happen? Whereas intake method is how do they normally submit their stuff? So the options I got here are paper, portal, email, fax or app. Better believe we have people that fax this stuff. Third service item here, jurisdictions. This was like a multi select where we had all of the filing jurisdictions we would, we would do for them from federal to states to cities. Right now if you're dependent upon your tax offer to tell you the due dates based on the jurisdictions you're going to file for that client, man, you're going to have a rough time. Because a tax. Your tax software is not a project project management system. And this is something that's notoriously hairy to, to manage in a practice management system where you want the due dates reflected there to be reflect. Well, where does that, where does that client actually file? And it is a pain. But this is why for a 1040 project, your practice management system has to capture what jurisdictions do we file in so that we can make sure when you get that weird thing that is due March 15th instead of April 15th doesn't slip through the cracks. Right. This is also an important driver of like what's this project going to cost for the client, like what are we going to charge them? Who's the right person to work on it? So it dictates how the proposal gets put together, who's going to get assigned the work. That just has to be something that we're tracking for that 1040 project. Fourth service item delivery expectation. So this is the method of delivery at the end of the project. Possible options here. Email, mail, on site, that is going to the clients. No, on site is in office. Let me just say it again. On site that is meaning in office Zoom app. Like if you're pushing it out via, you know, your practice management systems app, or off site, that is going to the clients to deliver it. Every client has a different expectation. These are variables that we need to track and need to be part of the proposal that we put in front of clients as well. So there's clear expectations there. Some of these can be on the more basic end of the spectrum, like pushing it out via the app versus, you know, off site, for example. That's more like a white glove. Somebody will come to you and deliver it. Last service Item Here, a fifth 1 complexity score. Talked about this before and this can just be one to five is what we did, but. But we used a complexity score on all of our 1040s from 1 to 5. One was just like government forms is all that goes into it. I think level two incorporated adjustments to income. Level three incorporated itemized deductions. Four had schedule ease. Five was everything else. It was something like that. I may mess that up, but the basic idea is preparers were approved to prep up to certain levels of difficulty and reviewers were approved to review up to certain levels of difficulty. And importantly, all preparers had to review returns up to the level below what they could prep to. So if someone was approved to prep up to level three, they had to then review up to level two. And it took the fear. I wouldn't say it takes the fear out of it, but it takes the mysticism out of review. And like gatekeeping review work to only, you know, your most scarce experienced people. It made re review more sort of a collective effort from everyone on the team. And teaching people how to review makes them better prepare, as you would imagine. But I'm tracking that complexity score because that that impacts my prep pools what someone can see, what works available to them. It impacts my review pools what returns are available for them to review. And in some cases I can factor that into the pricing and the proposal we put in front of clients. Now, other potential service items Some people will track specific forms like whether there's a schedule E, whether there's a schedule C. If there's like weird one off stuff, that's a bunch of extra work also, and this is one I've increasingly come to love, payments. Who makes tax payments? And this is something that some firms now are doing more for clients as kind of a premium sort of service delivery. So it's funny like we all have different ways that we recommend. You know, say you got a client that's an S corp owner, how are they going to make their tax payments? All sorts of different flavors of this. From just cutting some big checks every quarter to putting it in, you know, say a monthly S corp owner's payroll where the entirety of the payroll gets tucked away to tax and then they just pay in the difference. Or if the payroll is more than the payments need to be, then like you just got big old withholdings in there. They get a small net check. But then maybe that's easier for the business owner because it's just coming out of the bank every single month. You also have other people that will do quarterly estimated payments, but just every month because that monthly poll is easier for the business owner than a big amount coming out every quarter. And we have accounting firms now that are stepping more into managing this for clients. And so let's get to then, like how do we stand up the variables in our service delivery in a proposal? We are barreling down on renewal season. I'm a, you know by now if you've listened at all, I'm a big advocate of three tier proposals. The reality is if you only give a client a single price, it's costing you a bunch of money because not everyone has the same willingness and ability to pay. It's the reason that you have a clients that pay you top dollar with a big old smile on their face and they love it. But you also have D clients who you mark the bill down half every single time. They still complain about how much money it is. They assign different values to what we do. And they have different bank account balances, they have different abilities to pay as well. And the power of three tier proposals is you're letting them self select into what they pay you. And for a long time I thought this was like, I don't know, wrong or, or that I was, you know, stealing people's money or something like that. At the end of the day it's up to them to say yes or no. And three tier proposals give, gives them even more optionality. I'M not grabbing their checkbook and making that check out to myself like they're making this decision. And the best way to set up those three tier proposals is not on the volume of work, where gold's a ton of work and bronze is only a little bit of work, it is on the premiumness of the delivery. The reality is in your client list, you've got Camry drivers and you've got Mercedes drivers. And what I find is the firm owner that drives the Mercedes, they've got one perspective on this. The firm owner that drives the Camry, they've got another perspective on this, right? And we just assume that everybody is the same as us, but they just aren't. That bronze package, it is for that more frugal person, but the gold package, it is for the person who identifies as the one who needs the gold package. Right? Like that is why people make buying decisions. And weirdly enough, they value something more when they pay more for it. And so for those two different types of clients, if we give them a single price, it's costing us money. And in many situations it's devaluing what we do because we're not giving the Mercedes driver. I'm generalizing. It's not to say they actually do. I'm saying the folks that on the spectrum of your clients today are more like looking for the premium path, right? If we don't give them a premium path, then they will actually go as far as thinking you're not for them because there isn't a premium path and it's not a premium firm. So you're actually making them feel like they are better served by giving them that option. So how can we stand up 1040 services in a way that might feel premium? A great way is, is what we just talked about, payments. You know, if you're thinking about what are the line items for any bronze plans, your silver plans and your gold plans. A great way to make what you do more premium is to handle their payments for them. I don't know about you, the amount of hokey pokey you do around quarterly estimate deadlines where you're like, do we need to send these to our clients? Do we need to remind them, did we actually include those with the return copy when it went out? Is that our obligation? Are they going to be annoyed next year when they're like, no, I haven't paid any quarterly estimates because you didn't give me any vouchers. You didn't remind me or something like that. The way easier path for the client hey, here's what you need to pay in which you can do it for you. Now, is that spooky? Do you need to make sure you have a detailed person that is doing that? Does it need a good approval process? For sure. But the clients that want the premium path, that's something they're actually really going to like. And at the end of the day, what we're looking for is the stuff that is taking a, an annoying, an annoyance off of their plate and is very easy to do, very easy to staff making those payments. That's not a hard thing to staff. What else? Other ways to make 1040 delivery feel more premium stuff. You can put more on the gold end of the package. We talked about scheduled work and when the work gets done. This is something that could also be gated based on the plan that they're in. So if clients want to be able to choose when that, when, when you're going to work on their project, that could be something that is, you know, locked down to the Admiral's Club, the gold tier. And presumably there's only so many of those available. This is just a super easy hack to make proposals. Convert better is when you say how many at that plan level are available. Because the reality is you can only offer that Admirals Club package to so many people. And simply by communicating that, you will get better conversions, putting that scarcity in front of your clients. And there's so many examples of this in the wild that are fake, where it's like, oh, only the next 10 people can get this NFT. And you're like, ah, that's lame. The reality is our scarcity is real. Like, we're in demand. We can only serve so many people. But so often we go over capacity, then we apologize. We're like, we're so sorry that we can't help you. Rather than being like, we can help 20 people and the first 20 people that like sign up for this, those are the people we're going to help. You get paid better. And you don't go over capacity. A lot of these things are not things anybody teaches you in your path of being an accountant and then working for somebody else and then someday working for yourself and then someday realizing, dang, I got to like figure out how to be a business owner instead of just like being in the trenches all day long. And a lot of these things feel counter to professional services. There's a lot of people that hate my content because they are like, this just isn't how professional services work. There is definitely like a way to run a professional services firm that is like an old timey professional services firm. There's a way to run it that is like a business that is optimized in the ways that businesses are optimized and that is acknowledging like buyer behavior. How to make the most of that. The reality that the Mercedes driver, if you let them pay another $200, they're actually going to perceive the value of the work you're doing for them as being worth another $200. And that's dumb. And it's weird that it works that way, but that is a force in the universe that I have no control over. But do I want that person to value me more? I do. And that extra couple hundred bucks doesn't hurt either, right? Daddy needs a new pair of diabetes prescription. This episode is sponsored in part by Ignition. Come, come, come, come, come. Here's the thing. Here's the thing about client billing. You can't bill for the time you spend billing. You can't. You can't. It is pure waste. And we're bad at billing because it's, it's icky. You let things slide. You don't get Billy paid. You waste time. Waste time chasing people for money. That's not what I did. I would just, I didn't want to waste time chasing them and so I would just, I just eat it. Don't do that. This is where Ignition comes in. The leading revenue generation platform for accounts and professional services. When I was running my firm, Ignition wiped out our ar, it's true. And significantly reduced the time spent billing clients saving our partners over a thousand hours in the first year. They didn't have to bill all that stuff manually. Man with the condition. We want more business with impressive online proposals. No more hustle and hustle and PDFs and Word docs. We automatically pulled payment upfront or at the end of a job when it was done. No more dialing for dollars. We transitioned our firm to more recurring revenue and better managed scope creep. No more leaving money on the table. Ignition is making thousands of firms more money and genuinely made us more profitable. Check out over 7,000 of the smartest businesses run on ignition@ignitionapp.com I'll put a link in the show notes. Today's episode is brought to you in part by Mercury. Mercury is the FinTech that over 200,000 companies now trust for banking and running their finances. I'm a happy user myself. Long before they sponsor this podcast. My money has been with Mercury because it's just like man, traditional Banks, they don't really seem to be going anywhere or getting any better. And you know all too well that's struggling fact and it's dumb to even say out loud, but the greatest upside of your clients using better banking solutions might just be access. Not having to do two factor authentication Olympics, not having to have clients like forward you codes, you know the codes they get over text, the texts that say never share this code with anyone. And then the process that we communicate to our clients is hey, when you get this, send this to me. That just the text janky things we gotta do to get access to things. Because traditional banks they don't let you handle like micro user stuff. Did I say micro user, multi user stuff. Granular permissions for the different people in your team. And even in the scenario where a client does give you your own login, then your entire team is like sharing your login buddy. There's like so many problems with that and so much risk in that where if you're just a little more opinionated and we're like, hey, hey, just so you know, all this fuss and headache around like getting access to this thing, there's a better way that we recommend come over here and check out Mercury. Sometimes we're like apologetic about what a pain it is to do this banking stuff. Stop apologizing, say client, go use this better alternative. There's a solution to this and it is your fault that you're not on the right platform. I'd encourage you to give Mercury a look. It is, it's genuinely really good. More information about Mercury down in the show notes. Okay, so Q priority, like do they get to pick their spot in the line or not? That can definitely be something available on the Bronze Silver Gold plan. Transcript verification, depending on when in the year you file, are you going to double check the information they've given you versus transcripts, transcript monitoring throughout the year? I'm just, I'm, I'm peppering you now with like different variables. You can build into Bronze, Silver, Gold. By the way, if this feels overwhelming, like how am I going to track all of this work? If you're rolling out three tier proposals for the first time, it is an immediate boost to your bottom line if you set it up right and if you're doing it for the first time, the default, what you've done to date for everyone, everybody's probably sitting at bronze. You say this is what you had last year for the first time. We're giving people a more premium path. I don't know if I Tell the clients for the first time we're giving people a premium path. But their default, what they've known, what's been the norm for them to date is usually the bronze plan. And so we're just giving the option to opt into something more premium. And so if you're trying to figure out how I got to work all this stuff and it feels like a lot of work, a lot of coordination and do less work, that's the thing is across the board a universal truth I hear from folks, it's kind of like how everyone, when they do this dramatic price increase, they think more people will leave than actually do. Another universal truth, just like that, is when they roll out three tier proposals with like, you know, that gold package ought to be like 100 to 150% more than the bronze package. People are universally surprised at how many people opted up to those higher paid plans. And obviously depends on like, do you set it up the right way, communicate it the right way? Is there some scarcity there? Have we dressed up the Admirals Club to be something that's appealing? But when you've opened the door to this, I mean if you're running a 40% margin firm and gold is 120% the price of bronze, which is what you did for them last year, then at BRONZE you're making 40%, at gold you're making three times that. Right. And so if we do this right, like the right answer is cutting back the workload and we've got a more profitable collection of projects left over. I've. I geeked on renewal, if you can't tell. I geeked on renewals hard. We put a lot of work into them, but renewals literally define the profitability of your business the following year. So what else should we be spending more time on? Very, very important. Okay, so transcript monitoring around the year, sometimes you know the methods, you will allow them to submit information to you. If you're trying to lock down systems a little more, maybe the folks on the bronze package, they have to do it in a very prescribed way if they want you to meet them where they're at and do it the way that they want to do, come to their house, gather this stuff, whatever that is, the more hands on version, maybe that's a more premium tier refund or payment tracking confirmations, putting together W4s or estimates when they're allowed to renew next year. So that's another benefit of there only being so many of the gold tier available and there being some scarcity. There is. You can Build in early access to next year's renewals. And the beauty of that, and I know we've talked about this in past weeks, the beauty of that is they're paying more for a perk. A perk that is no extra work for you. Early access to next year's renewals, that doesn't cost you a thing, but people will pay more for that. Like those perks are like the holy grail sort of things to build into your gold tier. Whether that back into other things you can do here. Whether that person works with a pooled team or a named member of your team. So, so the folks that, where you're just doing like volume 1040 work, do you just chuck em into a pool or do they build a persistent relationship with someone? Do they send emails to 1040 at your firm or to Jim at your firm? Another thing here, expertise level of who they work with. So maybe bronze is you're working out of a, out of a pool with a team. Maybe silver is you're working with a specific person. Maybe gold is you're working with a person at X level of expertise. They're an ea, they're a cpa, something like that. VIP access. So a VIP phone line or a VIP calendar link. This one's dumb. Easy. If you have a phone line right now, get another phone number that rings to some of your best people and people will pay more for that. It's, it's not my fault that the world works this way and that people make buying decisions and like we'll pay extra for that. But entrepreneurs, man, like they are snowflakes. And if we don't design our systems in a way that appeals to those snowflakes, they'll think that you're not for them. And they'll, they will look at the other firms who are designing things that way and they'll be like, oh, cool, I finally found the firm for me, right? Faster sla. So just faster. Guaranteed response time. This is another really valuable thing of having very explicit agreed upon response times with clients as part of the engagement is if it's set and in stone and we're not. I'm not just saying. Yeah, generally we get back to people in X to Y time frame that just. That does not work. What will always happen is you'll tell clients, yeah, we usually get back within a couple of days and then your whole team hears that and they all parrot the same thing. Now everybody's getting back within a couple of days. Great. If everyone on the team gets back within two days, who will clients go to every single time you. Why would they ever go to your team if you're just as available as the rest of your team? So you got to have this sort of cascading availability where the admins are most available, you're least available. But a huge benefit of, of locking down what exactly those turnaround times are is they can be manipulated. So on the gold package that can look different than on the bronze package. Again, we're getting the same work out the door. At the end of the day all we're doing is dressing it up a little bit different, requiring a little more coordination and people are paying more for the same work. I think that's all the juicy ones I got here. You can do other stuff like extended availability windows, you know, evenings, weekends. There's certain types of people who maybe are unable to hop on a call with you during business hours where that sort of thing could be, could be valuable. But for 1040 projects I think we hit on the big ones there. Obviously I super geek on the nuances of this stuff. I came from a very traditional background. You just hourly bill stuff at the end and you do the work. If somebody brings you the work to do and the engagement letter that you send over is literally the words template that you got from your liability character carrier. Right? That is, that's the default. Admittedly that is still what 90% of tax firms in the US do. Just know that very basic approach costs a tremendous amount of money. There's so much upside that is missed there versus getting more into the details on this stuff. And you and I can geek on this right now, but if you're the big boss man, usually you've got plenty of stuff to do. So there's a great opportunity to pull somebody in on your team. It's going to be an admin. This doesn't have to be a member of the professional staff and say like man, like we could make these projects way more profitable if we take this seriously. Jump on this immediately after the extended deadline, map all those clients out and figure out for all these different types of clients what are the three tier proposals we'll put in front of them. And this, that may seem like a huge undertaking, but I encourage you to just map out a few of these and whatever you have in your head right now of what you're going to charge somebody for a thousand dollar tax return, thousand dollars, 1040 next year if that's going to be, you know, 1150, go through the work of building out even just in word or Scribbling on a cocktail napkin. All the ideas that you've got right now of that bronze being 1150, that's the floor now. What can I build in the silver? What could I build into gold? That gold ought to be 2450, maybe 2650. What are the things that we could build into that, that the person would appreciate from us? Making monthly tax payments for them, for them, getting to choose the timeframe where we're going to do the work from them, having access to a different phone line from us sending an admin out to, to pick up their docs in person, monitoring their transcripts throughout the year to see if you know, any notices or something like that happen that may get missed in the shuffle. Faster availability, a 24 hour response time instead of 72 hours, you will be surprised. And a lot of these 1040 people, they've got a lot of money. So there are folks that are premium buyers as it is. Even if it's a very simple 1040, like you'll have folks that are, I mean, got loads of money and investments and all that, but still have very simple tax filing needs. And we don't realize that they're premium buyers and everything else that they do in their lives. And when you put that gold tier at 2650, you're like oh my gosh. But when you put that in front of that client, they're like I, I am a gold tier person. That's who I identify as. And they say yes. And you're like holy crap. Like those are those like everybody stop what they're doing sort of moments. And you realize for a 40% margin firm right now, and we were making, you know, 400 bucks on that thousand dollar return last year, it's 2650 now, our costs are still $600 on the return. That $400 profit project just came a 2 became a $2,000 profit project, let's say $1,500 profit because we got to put a little more work into it, right? That is over three times as profitable. All of the problems in the firm, from finding team members to capacity to getting home for dinner, all that stuff that is, that is solved by a not very big number of projects becoming three times as profitable. We spend so much time thinking about workflow and very nuanced little fiddly parts of the process and tech selection and all that stuff. But when it comes to what people pay us, oftentimes that's the last thing we think about, right? Like the renewal process is historically perceived as this admin thing that you're like, yeah, no, we're going to get to that earlier next year. And then you never do because you're playing patty cakes with. With tech and. And all these other things, dude. Dig into that stuff and if you need help with it, please pull somebody from your team into this. Send them this probably YouTube version of this podcast. If you're an audio listener and you're in your player, there will be a link to the YouTube version of this. Send this to them right now, say, let's figure this out. Let's work on this. Pull somebody else in. And it's way more likely it will happen. That may be the most profitable contribution that person makes to your firm this year. And if that's you watching this right now, welcome. Thanks for being here. It's great to meet you. You got any other I know cool ideas on 1040 Step and how you've squeezed a little more out of your 1040 work? Drop that stuff down in the comments. Thanks for being here. I'll catch you in the next one.