516 What Accounting Firms Should Prioritize Before 12/31

Oh, I'm sorry. You. You thought that you were going to get vacation in Q4, you sweet, sweet summer child. Q4 is when kingdoms are won and lost, okay? It is the most important three months of the entire year of running your accounting firm. If you are the big boss, if you're a leader, if you are a person of influence within the business, your 2026 will be won or lost based on what you do over the next three months. Today, my friends, we are getting into the very most important of what those things are. What. You know what I mean. And how to triage those things. Because clock's ticking, buddy. Your end's coming up real fast. Before you know, you'll be looking at Thanksgiving. And then the kids say, daddy, why is there no presents under the tree? I didn't get to it. I'm so sorry, children. Okay, that was too much. Let's all take a deep breath. We're just going to make a totally logical plan for what we're going to do between now and year end, right? Reminder, just off the top here, buddy, don't put this stuff all on your own back. In fact, share this episode with your most trusted allies in the firm so that we can divvy up these responsibilities, because there's a. There's a lot to do. And I always came out of October 15th thinking, well, this will be nice. This. I got maybe a month to cruise. But you just don't. There just. There is no space like accounting for the holidays, assuming you're taking a little bit of time in the holidays. There really isn't wiggle room outside of that. And then before you know it, you're just straight back into the gauntlet in January. I got set seven things here that we're going to run through that all need to happen between now and year end. Very important stuff that will genuinely dictate the success of 2026. And number one is something we got to nail down as quickly as we can, and that is tech selection. The best time to choose your tech stack, it's in Q2. That's when you got time to shake everything out and make sure everything works the way you'd like. But the second best time, frankly, it's now, it's October. Getting that stuff locked down so that you know what you got before you ride into battle next year. And this just requires ripping off some band aids. Common traps here, you know, you need to change and you're stuck between two, like, new alternatives, better alternatives. At a certain point, we need to talk with our Peers who have gone through the same decision but then just commit. Oftentimes you'll be on like a 50% solution but then be paralyzed between which of the two 95% solutions you should go with? Buddy, they're both way ahead of the curve from what you got today. And, and I want to like guess what the right one is as much as anybody else. But the one thing that is absolutely the wrong answer is the status quo. And so I can't stress enough where the biggest unblocker of tech decisions is access to your peers. I respond to probably 80 to 100 emails and DMs a week. That's. No, it's more than that. A lot. And you know what I do for most of these questions, if it's not a very obvious one that I have an answer for off the top of my head, I will go to realize my online community. I will search what their question is and I will find real feedback from people. Who are you using for for your Ultra Tax hosting? For your Lacert hosting? Do I go with Soroban or Stanford Tax based on xyz? Do I wait for Taxdome to ship their intake stuff or do I go with this other tool? Has anybody used Juno yet? Here's where I'm at. Do I go with Keeper? Do I go with Client Hub? Do I still need uncat when financial Sense does this version of uncategorized transactions the answer to the questions that you need are in your peers and some people will move very quickly on what what like what are the steps required to get clear answers and other people are not and they'll end up paralyzed by this for months and years and it's like there's just, there's a faster way to get to these decisions. So put those questions out on social media. Put those questions out to those those local groups. Although watch out with local groups because it is a lot of legacy folks. If you need help with this, please go and join what I have built and realize RLZ IO is a website. Even if you plan on coming in for one month just to ask a question, you're like if I get a great answer to this question, it'll be worth it then bounce after a month. I can almost guarantee that you won't. Now I there are other accounting communities out there. What I like about my own pretty progressive group of people, they only found it from this content. So if you are stuck on text selection gang, the answer is in your peers is in the context they can provide. Because what we think we want in text selection is getting to the perfect stack and then stopping. Unfortunately, that is not a reality because you will pick the set of tools that you think are the best, but then on the other side of that you will discover a new problem. That is I still don't have confidence. I'm still not sure if this is the right thing because I keep seeing that new tool and that new tool and this new press release. Is this real or not? And this new AI alternative And you still have fomo. We think we're in the search for the perfect tech stack, where what we are in the search for really is confidence. The ability to decide on my tech stack and then put it out of mind for another 12 months. Imagine how good that would feel. Speaking from experience here, the only way I know how to get that is to have friends that are going through that similar journey. And you see that press release and you see that new tool and you can talk to people who have used it and they're like, how real is this? Does this integration actually work? If you are struggling with those problems, as honestly I, I, I think every single accounting for Ms. Then rip that band aid off. If it means paying for a solution, pay for a solution. If you're going to a new practice management system, don't do it without a paid implementer. Hire the help you need to get it set up properly from day one and you'll shave years off the learning process and it will be immediately more effective for you. This is honestly like on text selection, like I feel like I just gotta give some tough love here because the answers are out there. We gotta stop wasting time. Software on average is 5% now of revenue for small firms. If you've ever made big wrong decisions like I have, you know how much that costs and how much time that wastes. We just gotta rip those band aids off and make some decisions so that we can move on with all the other stuff we gotta do before you're in because there is a lot tax selection that's just number one. And it's probably, probably the thing I would try to fast track most ahead of all these other things. Number two, if you are a tax shop, you're going to live and die by how we begin preparing for busy season now. That means pulling forward as much work as we can possibly do. The most obvious example being tax planning. The biggest upside of doing tax planning with my clients is I didn't then touch that work again until the summer. We already know what they've got to pay. We are then going to give them the privilege of not filing in tax season and waiting until later in the year to see if circumstances in their life or their business have changed in a way that would impact potentially what we include in the filing. If you don't do any tax planning with me and we go into tax season and you need a tax return, then there's no way I can help you. If we do planning now, we will lock down what we think the right answer is. We'll take any decisions by 1231 that we only could have made by 1231. And this is how you get people to take action on this stuff, is, hey, you got 43 days left before this tax year is locked for good. Let's talk about it before we get to Christmas. And that's ultimately the best way to relieve pressure from your busiest season, is obviously pushing work outside of that season. Right. And so the. The folks that I'm doing tax planning for now, I don't touch that stuff in busy season because it is actually better for them for us to be able to wait to revisit and revisit it and be like, should we change the position that we've taken on any of this stuff based on maybe new tax legislation that's coming, or maybe your business is way more profitable or way less profitable, or you lost your job, or all sorts of factors when it comes to do I file in tax season or do I file later? In my opinion, there are oftentimes scenarios where it would have behooved you to file and wait to make that decision until later, while there are practically never situations where it will behoove you to file in March and April. So make the default waiting, in fact, make the privilege waiting. Your most premium clients, you ought to be reserving the capacity for them to wait as long as possible to file so that we can still manipulate that stuff right up to the deadline. And you can only do that with so many people so like that we can frame that as. That is a. Actually a premium thing we can offer you. Now, this is a big thing for tax folks also. But number three, a biggie for bookkeeping firms getting those books cleaned up before 12:31. Whether you're a tax firm, whether you're a bookkeeping firm, you really don't want to be doing months and quarters and an entire year of books in Q1 of next year. You want to get things pretty well caught up so that when we get past 1231, we are like just putting a bow on it. You're asking all the hard questions now you're having the conversations that you need to, particularly for tax shops, if the expectation is that that business return is going to get out in Q1, which, I mean, honestly is like not even advisable in my opinion. But please don't do book cleanup work in Q1. In fact, most a lot of firms now, they're like, we're not even going to touch book cleanup work unless you'll pay us to do it before the end of the year. Then maybe we'll talk about filing in Q1. But all that stuff has got to happen now. Otherwise it all hits as, you know, first quarter next year and you just can't get all that stuff out the door. Like, and we, we bear way too much blame for this unnecessarily. The notion that we're going to be capable of performing this impossibly monumental task of getting all this work done in like the first quarter, when all of your sets of books hitting at the same time, like the reality of getting all that stuff done in January, like, wildly unrealistic, especially when you layer in other compliance requirements like 1099 for tax pros. The notion that you can file accurate tax returns and get all that work out the door by April 15, when you're getting amended brokerage statements clear into April, when all of the company's books have to be up to date. Oftentimes those are books that you don't even do, you don't have any control over. It's not realistic. And we will like sacrifice ourselves and be apologetic and feel like failures for not being able to do the impossible. When it's like the failure was probably not having a plan. And maybe that's where the guilt comes from. I could tell you this as a father, most of the anger that I feel where I look at that thing or that thing happens and I'm like, I'm mad. The real reason that I'm mad about that is a lack of planning, is that it was kind of my fault all along, is that I'm thinking about other things and not willing to give this thing like enough of my attention span to not just give it like a flippant kind of half baked response, right? And this is where, when the clients are checking in on status requests and all of that, like, this is where this stuff just enrages us, is we're like, why are you doing that? Quit doing that. But deep inside we're like, yeah, no, we probably needed a better plan for this, except we can't set ourselves up to handle this impossible situation, but also accept that it's not our fault and clients are only going to expect us to succeed in this impossible situation if we tell them that we will. And this is where communicating capacity constraints, rather than being apologetic about capacity constraints, keeps everybody happier and makes you more money. Like communicating your scarcity in the renewal process, saying like, hey, we got 15 more seats on the bus here. And that's the honest truth, because we are in demand as opposed to not doing that and just saying, as long as you get me your stuff by March 20, we should be good. That's not communicating any scarcity. That is usually setting yourself up for failure. Because everybody that last year got you their stuff on 325 and 331 and 41 and 45 and 4 10. They all just bring it in on 310 now and 320 now, and you've got the same amount of work to do between 3:20 and 4:15. So let's be proactive about what we're willing to take on in our busiest season that starts now. Let's not be afraid to communicate to clients how in demand we are, how scarce we are, and that we can't help an unlimited number of people. And in fact, the people we should be helping are those that are like most valuing what we do. If we can go into the end of the year and next year with that mindset, hopefully we can give ourselves some more grace. Capacity, busy season, all of this stuff. It is always a choice and you are fully in control. There are so many accounting firms who do not work an hour of overtime year round. And it's not because they're different than you. It's not because their clients are different than you. They've simply set a different expectation. And it is the best and the worst part of running your own shop is that level of extreme ownership that you need to take in everything that's happening around you. Because if you don't and stuff goes off the rails, it becomes so easy to start pointing the finger at all these things that are going wrong. We can't find good help and that client and that client. But deep down we know like, dang, I should have had a better plan for this. We should have gotten out ahead of this more. But now, now, right now is when we get out ahead of this. Number four, it's the least sexy one on the list. W nines. Nothing blows up the start of next year like freaking 1099, man. It is the worst. Do everything you can to prepare for this right now, get all the W9s you need. Have your clients rounding that stuff out. If the expectation is that they do it, don't leave W9 chasing until January. Similar to book cleanup. In a perfect world, when we're rolling into January, the only books that we're really doing in January is the December books or even the last week of December. If you do bookkeeping more on a weekly cadence. Similar there W9s. We shouldn't be rounding up an entire year's W9s. Should really only be like the net new people from December trading time now for time in January and February. Man, I would spend five minutes right now if I could take one minute off off January. Jason's plate. Foreign. You know what I was just thinking about? Just how much I accommodated my clients. Crappy old banks that just created so many workflow nightmares for us. This is. This is an ad read for Mercury. Just so you know, literally having clients share their password with you. So you could log into a client's account to a bank, having to have them send you two FA codes, little two FA codes where the text literally says, never share this two FA code with anybody, buddy. So many problems with that. Don't get me wrong. Like, it's an essential part of delivering, like bookkeeping work. But then I would be so apologetic, like, yeah, no, I'm sorry. This is such a headache. I wish it didn't suck like this, gang. There are solutions for this. Like Mercury. I literally ditched a traditional bank and use Mercury now myself. The client gives you firm access and then you assign user access for the people in your firm. And it can get super, super granular, like the way that user management actually should be. So, so next time when you get that stupid situation with a client that is not secure and they're annoyed about two FA Olympics, just remind them, buddy, there's a solution to this. We can help you with this. We'll help you make the switch to Mercury. You'll have a vastly better experience. Get a bunch of razzle dazzle features your traditional bank doesn't have. But then we can lock it down with proper access to whoever needs access to it. So next time they complain, don't apologize. Say, here's the solution. Do you want us to help you through it? Think about it. All right? To learn more about Mercury, check out the link down in the show notes. Hey, something super interesting that I recently learned while I was in Australia. You know how when you flush the toilet, it goes the opposite way? The same thing applies to accounting Actually our debits in Australia are their credits. Like it goes the other way. And this kind of blew my mind when I started talking with people because I don't know, I just, I guess assume, I assumed it was the same everywhere, but it's not. Can you believe that? Do you believe that? No, don't believe that. That is obviously not true. You know why? Because accounting is a universal language. It is like love. It doesn't matter where in the world you are, we all speak it the same way. Which is why incoming sponsor segue which is why services like Cloud Account Staffing are so helpful. Because they can find accountants for you anywhere in the world. And I'm just going to say it, if you are struggling to find us Bolt Snowflake accountants to come and work for you. Like I struggled with finding folks elsewhere in the world that'll come and do the work. Yeah, that might be the move for you. Now. Cloud Account Staffing, it's run by a former accounting firm owner. It's not like a fly by night weirdo dude that's reaching out to you on LinkedIn. They can help you find accountants in the Philippines and Latin America and South Africa. But you could do all three and run a 24. 7 accounting firm. Oh my gosh, she didn't think about that. Got people, people like working 24 hours a day. That'd be kind of fun. It's some logistical challenges to that anyways. Cloud Accountant staffing also has a platform where you can hop in and self service and see applicants and schedule interviews with them directly. Pretty cool stuff. Very legit group. I actually know a large number of firms that are very happy users. You'll see this squad out at all the accounting conferences this year. So if this is something that you're exploring, definitely worth chatting with. Cloud Accountants staffing, you haven't done it before, you're going to have a bunch of ignorant questions like, like I did. Like that's just how it is. That's also the value of a group like this is they can hold your hand through that. Everything from like, how does security work? What are the disclosures I need to put in front of my clients? How do I do it with an international team? Like all very important blockers to work through. But if you want some help, chat with the folks at Cloud Account Staffing, link down in the show notes. Okay, number five, three more to go here. Remember, put somebody in charge of each of these things. If you're the big boss and you put all this stuff on your own back that, you know, that's where that stuff goes to D. Where it gets done in kind of a half baked way because we can't give it the, the, the attention that it needs. And I think often if you listen to my content, it can. Because we get so into the weeds on so many different things, it can feel like, wow, every single one of these things feels like a really big job. And the truth is it is. To do any part of your firm well is more work than it seems like it will be on the surface. And this is why we can never get anything done is because you get into something and you realize, okay, actually to do this right, it's going to take way more time than it looks like from the outside. But all you see when you look all around you are things from the outside. And so everything takes longer than you expect. It's also the trap of putting somebody else in charge of doing that thing and being, being like, why is it taking them so long? It's like, because there's a greater level of depth to doing it right that you don't understand until you get in and do it. And maybe they're not as good as you. That's also a reality of delegating things. Good's not the right framing as capable as you at that thing. And so unfortunately the solution is oftentimes just having more people than you'll think you need, having higher level people than you think you need, and needing your clients to pay you more than you thought you would need them to pay you. Somebody emailed me the other day, they're like, we're spending way too much time on, I think it was like data entry, but we don't have the. They said we're spending way too much time on data entry, but we don't have, we're not to the stage yet where we can be hiring people for it. And you hear that and you're like, it sounds like you are to the stage where you need somebody to do that work. Either we just got a pony up and cut the check for it or we're not charging people enough to be able to afford that. You don't get to a size where all of a sudden there's all this excess profit that you're then excited to pour into extra people. If I can't pay someone to do the work on one engagement and still make money on that engagement, then it's not a profitable engagement. This is where actually waiting to just do like full time hires can kind of be a trap because we think Everything will be made fine by, you know, being able to get time from, from a worker in a more efficient manner by employing them full time. But until then, the problem is you're doing all that work yourself, whereas you could have a contractor where you're going to bring them in, pay them more. But if you can't make that project profitable with a contractor coming and working for you, then the problem is, is the project itself. Yes, an employee is going to be cheaper than that contractor. But it's so often that once people finally get to hiring employees, they're like, I can't afford the level of person that I need to get this work done. And it's like, well, like that. The project and the profitability of it was, was kind of the original sin. Okay, number five, pre communicate communicating expectations to clients. What should they expect from you over the coming months? A lot of the things we were just talking about, right Freaking S Corp. Owners Comp. Health insurance going into box one. We got to clean up your books before the end of the year. How those W9s coming along. We can make the mistake here of sending out like an email blast at the last minute and just, it's just this one communication, then people don't do it. And we're like, why don't you care about this as much as I care about this? Or why can't you be like Kate over there who every time we send her something, she so diligently does it, it's like, well, that's great, but you only got one Kate. We have to kind of prime start priming the pumps for what they should expect to see from us and what things we need them to do and also communicate to them like, here are the time windows where we're going to need your availability. I need you to expect to engage with us to be able to get this stuff done. It will feel like you're over communicating if you're doing it right. And that's just because everybody else isn't as focused on what you're doing as we are. So it will feel like over over communicating. This is particularly important if you're reliant upon other platforms to push some of this stuff out. So if some of these to DOS are pushed out from your practice management system in the portal, then we're reminding them like, hey, here's what these emails look like. These are coming from us. We need you to pay attention to them. These are very important to dos. If you're pushing out renewals, here's what platform that looks like if you're worried about putting multiple platforms in front of them, does that suck? Yes, but we care about that way more than our clients do. Just be sure to tell them, hey, this is coming and it's coming from us. This is what it's going to look like. You're going to get it in this time range. And let us know if you have any questions. And if you only tell them once, that's, that's probably not enough. Number six is a biggie, a real biggie. We gotta decide who we're cutting loose. We gotta decide who we're riding in a battle with next year. This isn't just a client thing, there's also a staff thing. Many of us in the pursuit of scale and success and status will build a monster that we find we don't actually wanna run. And along the way, you make some trade offs on clients that maybe weren't the best fit. Oftentimes staff that weren't the best fit. And the only mental exercise you need to do to figure out if this is you is to think, is there a version of this business that I could cut down to half the size and in the process eliminate 90% of the headaches and probably only eliminate like 10 or 20% of the profit if that's the case? Yeah, I think real hard about doing that. That's clients, that staff, that is the expectations you put on yourself of how much you want to work next year. Really, really, like drill into this. Because there's this notion of like loss. If we cut all that stuff loose, it would be like wasted effort. But this is totally a sunk cost fallacy. The most important thing that is here today is you and what you have learned to get here. It's not the business. In fact, you could argue the business is actually getting in the way of you becoming a better version of you. Right. And so if you see a path in 2026 of running a much more lean shop that makes the same money or hardly any less, really dig into the reasons of why you wouldn't go down that path because most of them are bad reasons. It is letting down some clients. We have this usually misplaced notion that we're the only ones that can help these people, which is, I mean, it's just so wrong. Like there's so many accountants out there and like for some reason we, we always will think that we are the best and the best suited for that client. And the reality is, especially if this is a client that would be cut, if you are shrinking the client base, if that client is already at the bottom of your list in terms of who you're excited to serve, but they're not getting anywhere near your best. We are honestly doing them a service by passing them along down the line to somebody else. Other reasons we don't do this, this attachment to vanity metrics. I run a $1 million firm right now. Well, when you went to the doctor for your annual checkup, they weren't impressed, were they? Is there a half million dollar version of this firm that makes 80% as much money? But you're able to take some time off, maybe go outside, maybe re. Reconnect with little Jimmy and little, little, Little Marigold? Because those people, those are oftentimes the folks that pay the price. This, that is our families for whatever these misplaced ambitions are to keep this bloated thing that we built or something like that. The beauty of cutting back is you can always bloat again in the future if you want, but the next version of growth is almost better than, is almost always better than the old version of growth. Because if you contract right now, are you really going to go straight back out and let the same types of clients on the bus? Like, no, your minimums, your expectations, your qualifier for what is an A client going forward, it's going to be vastly superior. But if you don't cut back, how agile and how capable are you of going after those great clients? I would argue you're not as agile as that more lean firm is to go after great, fit, super profitable clients in the Future. So, number six, deciding who you're cutting loose. Everything about Q4, honestly, should be uncomfortable, you know, pricing and engagement. If it feels great, you probably didn't price it very well. Right? And it's amazing sometimes how our brains struggle to keep up with our new reality. If you look back two years at one of your proposals, you would be appalled. You'd be like, I would never do that right now. But for us to think forward two years, we project that same change forward, we're like, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not. I, I'm, I don't want to get too big for my bridges. That's, that's not how I am. That's not me. Well, like somehow we got here and that's very different than where we were two years ago. Why wouldn't it be very different another two years from now where, where you've continued to grow, the team's continue to grow and you're in a better place. And so the best clients, the best Proposals like they are the ones that are uncomfortably taking you sort of version of your firm and that next sort of realm that a few years ago you didn't realize was even possible, but is now your reality. Last 1, Number 7. This is the biggest one. This is the least sexy one. This is the one I want you to sweat over more than anything else. It is your renewals re upping that annual contract. And by the way, if you don't do annual renewals, do please do. It is so, so, so important. Now renewals look a little bit different for firms who have not yet gotten off of hourly, hourly pricing, hourly billing, and I'll touch on that just a little bit. But renewals, by and large are left till the last minute. We're always like, yeah, we'll do a better version of this next year. And then we never do. And we, we just think of them as this sort of administrative burden and maybe they get pushed off to an admin and it's just sending out an engagement letter or something like that. Like that is the version of lazy renewals, particularly for hourly firms. The. And this is maybe the. It is the greatest argument for getting off of hourly billing is giving clients upfront prices that can then be optimized client by client. And everything about what I'm about to describe is going to feel like a lot of work. But here's the thing. Renewals set the price for the work that you're going to do for the entire next year. And so if we think about the cumulative effort of everything that we do for an entire year, all of the toil that you just did the last 12 months, that your entire team just did the last 12 months, think of the volume of work that is. And then think of our unwillingness to put any effort into renewals and what we will actually get paid for that work. Because the optimized version of renewals are, is not a lazy renewal. So very basic, one on one, I'll cruise through this super fast. If you are still on hourly billing, the best way to move off of this is to in December give your clients prices upfront for next year's work. And all this price is is a bump up over what last year was. Please don't bump it less than 5%, probably not less than 10%. Many of us need to bump it 30, 60%. But the very basic version of moving off of hourly billing is taking whatever you charged them last year, bumping it up, putting this in front of the client and saying this is what we are going to charge you next year to accept the engagement. You need to provide a payment method. And then when we finish the work, we're going to pull that money. No fussing with invoicing, no chasing them for payments. If you want, you could charge them a deposit up front. But the bare minimum, in my opinion, is getting a payment method. Because I just want them to agree to the price and say like, yep, when the work is done, you're good to charge me this. And then I will charge them at the end. Now, as part of that agreement, we're also saying this is assuming the scope next year is, is largely the same as it was this year and you can set parameters around that. What we did in my firm was we're said we're still going to measure track time and Whip and all that stuff the same way we always have. And this project will get billed automatically according to the proposal, as long as whip is, you know, not more than 20% above what we expected and not less than 10% below what we expected. So we just had an agreed upon range in the firm. As long as Whip came in within that range, we're going to auto bill the quoted price and then the portfolio of projects as a whole. We knew exactly where they were going to come in. So that is the most rudimentary version of moving into a more modern renewal approach that I can give you. And the immediate wins are you just saved your, your partners a whole ton of time billing, not going to have any AR anymore. And your clients appreciate knowing the price upfront rather than not giving it to them till the end. And they're like, I don't want to pay this. And they just did a bunch of work that you're only going to get paid like a very discounted rate for. Now that is the gateway to what is the single biggest profit driver for most firms today. Switching to three tier proposals. Because every client that you just give a single price to, it's costing you money. Because not every client has the same ability to pay and willingness to pay. And the core purpose of three tier proposals is to capture the fact that both Jim and Steve pay me $800 for their tax return or $800 a month for their bookkeeping. But Jim drives a Mercedes because he thinks he's a Mercedes guy, while Steve, I don't even remember the other guy's name. Now the other guy, he drives a Camry because he identifies as a Camry guy. They both make the same money, but Jim's willing to pay you twice as much as Steve's. Willing to pay you if we set up this three tier proposal correctly. So this is your bronze, silver and gold packages. The way most people tell you to do this is on scope. So that gold is three times the work as bronze. I don't want you to do that. I want you to sell the same dog food. The only difference between bronze, silver and gold is delivery. So we're selling the same service but we're selling different delivery. That gold package is something that's going to be super premium and attractive to Mercedes guy and we're going to tell him there's actually only 17 of these available because we don't have that much bandwidth to be able to do them all. And that can be real. Like that doesn't have to be. We're not, we're not to make anything up. We're simply communicating our capacity. And you'll find when you put that in front of people creates a lot more urgency and they will actually pay more when they're aware of that. Now what makes this a huge unlock is the first time you do it, by and large, when you put these three tier proposals in front of your clients, what they've done to date, that is going to be the minimum. So they will see last year they had the bronze plan and they will have to decide for themselves do I want to be the buyer of a minimum or do I want something more? And so what are we offer, what do we offer in those, those more packages? This is basically the cabin of an airplane. You've got coach, you've got premium, you got first class. It costs an airline about 20% more to deliver first class service while the ticket costs two or three times more. That's what we're doing with our service offerings. And if, if you're like stuck on, you know, like a, I don't know, a moral high ground or this feels wrong or something like that. Remember, we are giving the customer more control over what they're picking and paying than we've ever given them before. In the past we said no, you have to pay this for this work. We're giving them greater optionality than they've ever had before. I'm not taking their money. They're picking what they want to pay on that gold package. They're presumably getting access to higher level people. They're probably getting faster turnaround times. You can set up a VIP phone line that is just a new phone number that rings to your couple best people. You can give them early access to next year renewals because the president's club, the gold tier. You can only accept so many people into it, but then next year when you roll out renewals, then they have the perk of being able to be among the first people to choose. You can get creative here rolling in low lift stuff like monitoring their transcripts throughout the year, setting up a virtual mailbox where all their tax mailings go to that you can help them manage. Almost like a mini sort of family office set up. We're designing these packages according to the premiumness of delivery. And you'll find there's actually a much greater ceiling for the premiumness they're willing to pay for than we've oftentimes accommodated to date. So part of that could be like in person delivery or just a more hands on experience. But we're talking about the last mile of what is an otherwise big project, the frosting on the cake, dictating what the price for the entire cake is. And this is what turns $1,000 project that you get a 20% margin on into a $2,200 project that is six times as profitable. Meaning if one in six clients say yes to the President's club, you could literally cut five legacy projects at a 20% margin and make the same money. But I'm not going to lie to you, thinking through this for all of your clients, or at least for the clients who there's the greatest likelihood they will opt into the more premium packages. It is work. It is more work than we think it will be. Oftentimes it involves the client wanting to get on the phone or something like that. But again, think of the entire toil of the last 12 months, the collective toil of you, of your team, of every, every single thing that you've done. Name a more important thing we should put effort into than what we're going to, what they're going to pay us for all that toil next year. Most people are closer than they realize to a vastly more profitable firm than they run today. And the quickest way to make that a reality is three tier proposals. Now, if you are the only one drinking the Kool Aid here, that is where this project will go to die. You have to pull in other people at your firm to make this stuff happen. Today's episode, it is brought to you in part by MakerSub. MakerSub is an accounts payable platform. The one that is going like super hard on AI. Really good for large volume, complex accounts payable scenarios. And gang, this is like a real arbitrage opportunity. Right now the clients we have with the messiest accounts payable departments. They're the ones with the most to gain by AI enabled AP stuff. Unfortunately the like the big boys, the traditional bill pay platforms is still relying on like OCR technology rather than AI vision models which just take like the automated extraction so much farther. In a vastly more detailed way too. When you can literally pull anything off a document, even handwritten stuff, the degree to which you can then automate not only entry but also the subsequent approval workflows really really cool. Makers have done some other stuff I like. Like they have a very very good two way sync with qbo so that maker sub doesn't become the entirely separate source of truth if you use a different erp. They've got a really good API for building your own custom stuff even for like customizing how you export data en masse for import into another system. I've said it before, accounts payable. It is the fastest changing part of the accounting profession right now. If you want to help your clients leading the charge into kind of the modernization of their back office. Makers of a great tool to do it with. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. If you've ever seen my tech selection pyramid, it's basically like Maslow's hierarchy of picking out tech in your accounting firm because picking your firm in the right order is very important. You start with the foundational tools and then you layer in the automation stuff on top of it. And wouldn't it be nice if your foundational tools could just do all of that stuff? One of today's sponsors, Client Hub, they're trying to do just this smooshing several of those layers together because they're a practice management system. But they're also doing really cool month end close automation stuff for bookkeeping practices. So you get all the practice management goodies to like manage all aspects of the firm. But it's got a super deep integration with QBO N0 and has like a step by step process for managing every aspect of the close. Even like some cool stuff like pulling in uncategorized transactions and you can push those straight out as a client task. All inside of Client Hub. Core part of Client Hub is kind of having like this two sided task management system where there's the work that you do and anytime you need the client to do something you push that task to them. Because the reality of getting work done in an accounting firm get it work together, we're most often blocked by this stuff that we need from clients. Right? So pulling that all together into One system and doing some cool month end close automation stuff all in one place. Client Hub is doing a really cool version of that now, and if you're a bookkeeping practice, it ought to be on your short list of PMs to look at. Learn more about Client Hub, check out the link down in the show notes. Let me just real quickly run through platforms here on three tier proposals to understand what tech do I need, what tech do I maybe not need? What tech does my system have right now? This is the state of this stuff in late September 2025. I don't expect all that much to change in the in the next three months. And even if it did, I wouldn't recommend you use a platform that somebody just rolled out and bet your entire 2026 on that new platform. I am a super progressive guy on tech, as you know, I'm an early adopter through and through, but that doesn't mean I'm going to run my accounting firm on tech that hasn't already been validated by a bunch of other accounting firms. And that's why I don't get super excited about new product releases because version one usually kind of sucks. It's not until version three or four, like nine months down the road where it's actually usable and it has the fringe features that I need. And so for sure a new feature. It's exciting from the standpoint of here's where they're headed, but it doesn't mean it's something that's going to be particularly useful for me today. So if you are still betting on something that is still unreleased, buddy, pull the rip cord. Let's decide right now on something that actually works and other firms have had good success with. So in a perfect world, three tier proposals, every aspect of your proposals could be handled by your practice management system. Right now you've got a few that have very basic versions of proposals. Canopy has basic proposals, Carbon's rolling out basic proposals. Taxdome now in beta, has three tier proposals, but they can't even be templated yet. So it's not realistic. My understanding is right now it's not realistic that I could understand I could generate these at like a large scale. It's more just like one off sort of stuff. I to date have still not seen a practice management system that does three tier proposals to the level of what I need because again it is a lot of work to set these up. And so those features and bulk creation and, and how those different items all get set up, like that's a very very important part of the process because it is so time. And when you look at that screen and the options the client has and sort of the customization that you're able to do there, any little optimization to that screen makes a very big dollar like real dollars difference to your accounting firm. So this isn't an area where I really want to cut corners. And so if I look at my app recommendation database here, this is Jason on Firms Slash apps. If you listen to this podcast you should have this by now. This is the inside scoop on every tool in the space, whether I recommend them and why I do or not. Seven leading standalone tools for this stuff in the accounting space. The two leaders I think most would agree are Anchor and Ignition. Both do a really good job. Honestly it's hard for me to pick between the two of them. I would say give them both try, see what you like more. Watch out for fees. Also there's scenarios where Anchor will be more expensive and there's scenarios where Ignition will be more expensive. That matters. It is one consideration among many. Again, if one is going to convert more clients to a higher tier, get them to pay you a little bit more. Like that is my North Star now beyond that I think the fastest growing tool in this space in the last 12 months I would probably say is Kohn. Where you're seeing more people having a good experience with Koan. Another really promising one here. They've been around for a while though. Nuala spelled K N U U L A. Theirs is more like mail merge on steroids where it's. It feels more like a document editor. They can have built in payment links and stuff like that and then you can do those kind of at a really big scale in bulk but doesn't have the features I want to see from a three tier proposal sort of thing. Not that. Not the same level of like give me a custom web UI with these three tier proposals I could get from the leaders. That's a really important thing to me. I win does proposals. They're more of a mid market solution. Most of the folks listening to this that's not for you account groove. They've been doing a lot of marketing lately. I still don't see their product being as far along as the leaders though. And then go proposal kind of the OG here but they were acquired by Sage four or five years ago. Hasn't really gone anywhere. Most of the team has left at this point like it's fine but at this point I wouldn't recommend going to go proposal just because it's not really going anywhere. All the other platforms are still getting a lot of investment. Now there's a version of this where you don't use any dedicated proposal platform that is still a possibility. And this could be as simple as just creating a visual template of these three tiers. And honestly, this can be built in like Canva. Canva is a totally free online design tool. A nice thing about Canva is there's templates for everything. So you can literally, you go to canva.com, create an account, it's free, and just search three tier proposal or proposal template. And there will be a whole ton of examples of just graphics that have those three tiers. So if you don't want to go all in on a dedicated proposal platform, I would still really try to push you that direction. But if some, for some reason you're not going to do that. You can just create these visuals, export them to a PDF or an image or something like that to show your clients, here's the three tiers, like kind of the three options I'm giving you. And they just tell you what they want to do and then you go and presumably manually process pro, process that in your practice management system or something like that. That's better than nothing. It's not optimized. But you're going to get paid more even just by putting that visual in front of the client and giving them some optionality. But if I could steer in a direction, it would be to like a dedicated proposal tool for this. Now that bronze, silver, gold package. One more common question here and then we'll wrap up on this. Often times the question is, how much more should the silver, gold, the silver be than the bronze? How much more should the gold be than the silver and the bronze? Lots of different thoughts here and people will give you different advice. One Ron Bakerism that's, that's really good. Is like he likes. I don't think he calls it this, I think I made this up. But he likes the notion of having kind of this YOLO price, like put a price out there that scares you that you're like, nobody will ever say yes to that because someday somebody will. And this is his framing. The only way to ensure that that never happens is to never put that price in front of people. And I've had a few of those moments in my practice, as you probably have, where somebody says yes to a price that I'm shocked by and you're all of a sudden forced to sort of recalibrate your reality and be like, Okay, I didn't realize this was possible, but now it looks like we need to go in this direction. Like this is now something that is important for our firm. We're going to follow this to see where it goes. That's an argument for the gold tier being a reach the way I would recommend to you, if you're just starting out with this stuff still and you want a basic formula to do this, three tier proposals for the first time. Generally I would look for silver. And for reference, bronze is what they paid last year or a minimum bump up from what they paid last year. For most your clients, silver in my opinion, at a minimum ought to be 40% more. And then gold at a bare minimum ought to be 80% more. I would shoot more for like 220% of bronze. And gang, you will put that down and you will say the over, over two times as much for this, for this more premium service delivery, for faster turnaround times, for access to, you know, a CPA instead of a staff person, or an EA instead of a staff person, or the partner instead of a staff person. For us to drive to them, to finish signing the forms and like do all that in person. That only makes sense for some of you, but you'll put that down and you'll be like over two times as much, really. And what people are universally shocked by is how many people go for it. We're not. Again, we're not tricking them. We're letting them self select into the option they identify as. Do they identify as a VIP that gets the best option? Spoiler alert. Many entrepreneurs, many high net wealth people, they do. And they will actually feel that you're now a better option for them because you're giving them a VIP path and they identify as a vip. Our mind anchors to the folks at the other end of the spectrum who are the cheapskates who don't want to pay more. And charging everyone the prices that that cheapskate wants to pay is actually costing you premium clients. Because they will see that price and think, oh, this must not be a firm for me because that's not a price I would pay, or because that's a fifth of the last firm I paid. There's people that live at both ends of that spectrum and oftentimes because we identify more as one than the other, we will serve the one that we identify as. But that's a tough way to run a business, man. You end up hitting a wall. You're limited in what you can pay people, limited what you can pay yourself. You end up having to take on loads of capacity just to support the business. It means you gotta do a whole ton of work, but there's a more premium path. So just in that basic example, if gold is 220% of bronze, look at whatever your margins are. Now, if you're a 30% margin firm and gold costs 220% of bronze, then a gold project is three times as profitable as a bronze project. That's kind of all that matters. What profit are we running from each of these projects? That means if somebody says yes to the gold tier, if you wanted, you could cut three bronze clients and make the same money. Now that gold project, it shouldn't be three times the work. Maybe it's a little bit more work, but that is the path to a vastly different accounting firm. It can happen this year, but the beauty is you do the same exercise every single year. Not that you reset everybody back to bronze, but you reassess, who do we have now? What do they want? You'll find there's an entirely different ceiling that you didn't realize existed. You'll find now that we're living up here, we're actually attracting an entirely different type of person because we made a service offering that is more tailored to them, will learn more about what they want. You will find additional things that you can do that are low cost ways to deliver a more premium delivery of the exact same service. And if you're blocked on this, it's usually because we're thinking too far ahead and this feels too hoity toity and you're thinking of this extreme version of it. The reality is, is it's a baby step thing. It's doing it a little bit each year. And even with some small changes, it can make some really profound huge impacts on the profitability of the business as a whole, which changes everything, changes the number of clients you have to serve, how many staff you have to have, how much you can pay your staff, how much you can pay yourself. If you're feeling like the conviction on all this stuff, it's because this is what I did to take an 80 year old firm to a place that was infinitely more sustainable. You better believe we had every legacy project that you could imagine, at every naysayer in the firm, that you could imagine every reason in the world not to do it. We were an hourly billing firm, had been that way for 80 years, and this is how we got to a vastly better place. You can do it, man. But like remember, with every single one of these things, as you get into it, it will be more work than you thought it was going to be, but you're setting yourself up for an easier and more profitable tomorrow. That, to me, that is why it's worth doing. Like for sure, carve out time. When am I going to take a break? Between now and the end of the year. But it is way too easy to take the foot off the gas and then you don't have time to protect yourself and ensure you're in a better place in 2026. You can do it, man. You got any sage wisdom pop that stuff in the comments? Any things you've done around renewals that have worked particularly well or anything like that? I want you to have a better 2026 this year. This is the worst that it'll ever be, right? You can do it. I believe in you. You're awesome. You're capable.