531 How To Manage TASKS In Your Accounting Firm

Can we just get hyper practical? Because I actually see accounting firms do this in vastly different ways. How in the software tools that you use do you manage your tasks? Do we leave this up to the team, to the staff to do it in a way that makes sense for them? Or does the firm have a standardized approach? But then also how do you shoehorn this into the task management system that your software tools support? Today we're talking just about that, some very practical advice on how to best organize what you do into the tools you use so that every, everybody in your firm's got a clear understanding of exactly what the expectation is. Because once you're able to wire up the things you're selling to your clients and proposals to how the work happens on the back end, buddy, that is, that is the path to like calm to repeatable processes. And it all starts with how these tasks are managed. Let's get into it. First things first. Where are we managing these tasks? The correct answer. It is your practice management system. It is the most important software that you'll buy in an accounting firm besides your tax software, besides the accounting ledger. The practice management system that is the brain, the hub, it's frankly the system that you want to house as much as possible of all things inside of your accounting firm. And not having the right practice management system, it is the leading cause of tech stack bloat. Because if your pm, that is your practice management system doesn't do all the things you want it to do, then you end up like bolting on this here and bolting on that there. And before you know it, you're hustling information across like 15 different tools. And it's why the order in which you select the tech in your accounting firm is so extremely important. We got to start with the foundational apps, but the stuff that we want to do as many jobs as possible. And then only when those apps don't go far enough do we then plug in the accessory apps. More the point solutions that do a specific job very well. But your practice management system, this needs to be the home of the tasks, of the expectations of our clients, the work that we're supposed to be getting done. Even if you are a solo firm owner, I would argue a practice management system is still essential now. Not two or three days go by where somebody doesn't email or text or message me. What is a, you know, what's the best practice management system for folks that are just starting out or for solo firms or something like that, or we don't have the money yet. For system X, Y, Z. So which system should we use? You may not agree with me on what I'm about to say, but here's I think a something that's worth trying to get your head around, especially if you're still early on in the journey and is just how fast $50, boom and a month can disappear. At the top of the practice management system market, you've got platforms where you can pay almost $150 per user per month. At the bottom end, cost wise, you have practice management systems that come down to like maybe $35 per user per month. And in my opinion, like there. And there's exceptions to this, there's exceptions to everything. But in most cases, your practice management system is not a place to be splitting hairs on cost. It's not a place to be shopping on price. Because if we're talking about the difference between an 80amonth and a 40amonth platform, let's keep in perspective like what the effective hourly rate for most accountants is. It is anywhere from, you know, $80 to $380 splitting hairs over another $40 a month man. A platform that is saving you practically anytime that doll appears real quick, right? I mean if you're running a team, you know this, you know just how expensive accountants are. Now this is not an area where you try to like save a few pennies here or there you go at the platform that's best suited for the way that you work because any amount of time savings pays for that cost differential in less than an hour in most cases. Okay, so you got your practice management system going. By the way, There are almost 60 practice management systems now for accounting firms like just in the US and that is far too many. We've got a tool that will give you a personalized to your firm recommendation that'll basically get you down to a top three. I'll drop a link to this in the show notes. It is our practice management system recommender. Is that what we call it? Kind of an awful name that's linked down in the show notes. If you want a tailored to you recommendation. The platforms I recommend are the ones that I see folks having the most success with. Across my work with now thousands of accounting firms. Please don't buy software based on what your sales rep tells you. I unfortunately don't get affiliate revenue or anything from these recommendations. What we do is we actually go out and we recommend specific platforms and then we go to those platforms and say can you pretty please come and sponsor my content? That's. That's like the most independent way I can think to do this. Because associations like just about everybody else out there, when they're recommending these platforms, they get affiliate revenue. But as soon as I start doing that, there's this inherent conflict of interest. Right, because some platforms will do affiliate revenue, others platforms won't. Okay, so you got your practice management system. Many of these systems almost have too many different ways to track tasks. They have like tasks, they have subtasks, they have to dos, they have checklists. So how do you shoehorn what you do into sort of all of these different mediums of managing work? And there isn't a universal right answer to this, but the very first thing that you need before you can figure out how best what you do plus plugs into the software, the first thing you need is a like software agnostic language for the work that you do. Sorry, that was a lot of big words. Basically, you need a language for what work you're willing to do for clients. And you need to figure all that out before you ever put it into the software. And if you want to do a deep dive on this, we've actually developed a bunch of free resources to help you find this internal language for what we do. What we call it is developing your service library. And that's not an external thing that clients ever see. That's your internal library of what are all the things that we're willing to do with clients. I'll link this in the show notes as well, if you haven't seen it yet. If you've been around very long, you're very familiar with the service library concept at this point. But it's basically an internal language for all the different types of work that you do. So it'll probably look like, you know, bookkeeping one, bookkeeping two bookkeeping three bill pay one bill pay two bill pay 1040 tax prep one 1040 tax prep two. And within those labels are a certain set of expectations. So bookkeeping one might be once a year cleanup. Bookkeeping two might be quarterly bookkeeping. Bookkeeping six might be bookkeeping on like a custom ledger of the client's choosing rather than your preferred ledger. The goal is to take all of the different types of work that are happening in in your firm. And the trap here is to see all of these projects that have kind of gone on their own paths and been done by different people, and they now feel like a hundred different projects being done a hundred different ways. The goal is to find the overlap, the things that those engagements share, and that becomes the Starting point for like a simplified service library. So if I'm doing two month end closes, if I have two entirely different staff working on those projects for two entirely different clients. The natural order of things is over time, those two projects will become less the same. They will become more different over time because the staff is going off and figuring out their own way of doing things. The clients are each coming in with their weird special requests. And so those, those projects just become more and more different over time. So how do we stop that? Well, you look at those two projects and you say they're both very different. But here's 30% of those projects that are actually the same. 30% of the work that goes into each of these projects is pretty boilerplate. We do it on maybe, just maybe every project. And so this 30% we can build, you know, SOPs for processes, for a language around exactly what is the approved way to do that 30% that those two projects share. And because we've standardized that 30% now it can actually be pushed to like a centralized team who just cranks on that stuff all day long. And we are starting down the path of greater standardization. Now in a perfect world it would be a hundred percent standardized, right? But that's not going to be the reality for most firms. So it may start at 30%, but the goal is like, how do we get this to like 70%? Maybe if you're going to be a super white glove firm and every project will be sort of one off, ad hoc, maybe that only ever gets to 50% of those projects being the same. Maybe you just want to say crank 1040s or crank a food truck, cash basis, monthly financials. And 90% of those projects are going to be the exact same. And you don't give folks a ton of wiggle room to customize. Great. Now you know, 90% of those projects look the same. You got some operational benefits to that. Maybe it comes with some trade offs around does your service feel turnkey, which can sort of cheapen it and commoditize it a little bit, or does it feel tailored to the individual? I would argue the way that you tailor to the individual is actually in the client experience, not in the doing of the work. Sell the same thing to everyone but customize the delivery. After all, the client doesn't care how you get the work done. The client cares how it impacts them and how you interface with them. That's the place to put the most effort into customization because you can sell the exact same trinket to a hundred different people, but dress up the delivery, put it in a fancy box, put it in a ribbon, hand deliver it to someone, fly everyone in for a summit and they all get their own little things in the fancy box, right? Or send it off and you know, an Amazon prime crinkly plastic mailing diaper. That is the non premium end of the spectrum. There's a premium end of the spectrum too, but the underlying work, it can actually be the same. Let me tell you about an app that perfectly combines three very important things that normally you need a bunch of different tools for the app. It is one of today's sponsors, Klein Hub. Let me tell you the three things they combine. Number one, an amazing client experience. Because the whole portal experience, the client facing stuff in Client Hub it was actually thought out from day one. It wasn't like this bolt on where most practice management systems are like we're going to make the ultimate operating system for your accounting firm. And then later on they're like oh it looks like we all need to have client portals. Let's make that Now Client Hub was built from the ground up to be super easy for the client to use. That is that is trifecta point number one. Trifecta point number two is it is also super easy for you to use because my gosh, do practice management systems now require a PhD in learning how to use a super complex thing? Not Client Hub. They're keeping it simple in like a good way. Third part of that Trifecta deep bookkeeping workflow. Sorry tax people. Sucks to be you. Client Hub very good for bookkeeping, controllership, CAs, stuff like that because it's got super deep integrations with Quickbooks and Xero and even has like some built in month end close automation stuff now so you can sign off on like all the all like each account on the financial statements like right inside of Client Hub. Very cool. They're taking it to a very different level of depth specifically for bookkeeping than most practice management systems are. And you get all that one platform buddy. What more do you want me to do for you? Worth checking out if you're doing accounting bookkeeping stuff. Learn more about Client Hub. See the link down in the show notes. Have you heard the news from one of this episode sponsors? Keeper Introducing Keeper Skill Scale. It is a whole new package of cool razzle dazzle stuff including automated accruals automatically tying out like what that schedule ought to be to the books rolling that forward month over month. AI journal entries hold up. It'll take complex source docs like payroll Reports ulta settlement statements, I don't know what that is and POS exports and turn them into review ready entries you can post straight to the ledger. Buddy, I like what you're cooking. Keeper smells nice. Keeper it is a month end automation platform for bookkeeping firms. It is like a task management had a baby with a ledger. Got a deep integration there. You can see all the transactions inside of Keeper. Sort of one place to manage all of your month end closes. And they've been working on some pretty cool new stuff for your bookkeeping practice. Worth learning more about Keeper. Check out the link down in the show notes. So for you figure out what that 30% is that that that is the same across those projects and in that service library resource I shared I've actually got a whole exercise I'll walk you through for how to do this the first time with your team. Basically take post it notes and I've actually talked with a ton of people who have done this now. Said it was really helpful. You sit the team down, you chuck a bunch of post it notes on the wall of here are all the different things we do for different people and then you start finding those connections and you build a language for kind of the most overlap, the lowest common denominator, the most common ways that you serve clients. And if you're a bookkeeping practice, you know that looks like your different bookkeeping tiers, 1, 2, 3, your different bill pay tiers, payroll tiers and that naming convention, you know, bookkeeping two that's going to house as much of the shared understanding of what the expectation is as possible for you. Maybe that's 50% right now down the road, maybe we can get that to 80%. But as soon as a member of your team sees bookkeeping too now they know exactly what the expectation is. And the benefit when it comes to managing the tedium inside your software, inside the practice management system is we can vastly simplify what we're tracking when we have this language like bookkeeping too. And everybody knows what that means because there's a world where you have none of this language. And the managing of the TO DOS in your practice management system is absurd. You have a hundred task list, long list of things to do and it's different on every single client. That is awful. You may have bumped into this trying to create sops. Everybody says I should create sops processes documents so that somebody else can step into the project, right? But then you go through the work of building entirely custom SOPs for every single client and that is a humongous undertaking that is only up to date one month and then it changes and then you're like, oh no, you guys, you guys have to maintain your SOPs. You're not doing this stuff right. But it's a huge volume of work, right? Instead, if we have this more simplified, like internal language for what it is that we do, then Bookkeeping two in my practice management system, it is either a property of the project, so some platforms will let you have projects that can have like custom fields, custom properties. One way we can track this is to say this project is a bookkeeping 2 project, or you have a task that is simply bookkeeping 2. Now if you wanted under that task, you could have like all of the expectations that apply to bookkeeping 2. You could link that task out to maybe a central centralized doc. That is all the expectations for bookkeeping 2. That would probably be better because then when you have a hundred versions of Bookkeeping 2 engagements, they're all pointing back to the same thing. And so if you make any updates that impacts everywhere that Bookkeeping 2 is referenced. But what this enables is then the list of custom instructions that's inside of every project in your practice management system is then shortened. We want to keep that as short as possible. The TO dos, the actual tasks, the checklists that exist inside of that project, they should only be the tasks that are specific and unique to that project. Coming back to the whole percentage thing, if 30% of these projects are all done the same, then it's the 70% that is defined in the checklist items and in the to dos. If now you've got up to, you know, 60% of your projects being standardized, then that 60% is defined in the project as well. This is bookkeeping to this bill pay one, this payroll three, this is a tax prep two that defines the expectation for your team of, of how to deliver that standardized 60%. And then the to DOS, the checklists, the one off items, they're the other 40%. So we're keeping the tasks in our system as concise as possible because if, if this stuff like gets too big, I think there's a certain like checklist size threshold beyond which humans are really capable of like properly paying attention. And if man, if you ever did tax work and people throw those big like PPC checklists in front of you, you know, by the third time you've done it, you are just absolutely on autopilot, cruising through that thing as fast as you can. And this to me is how we keep the managing of the work as light and concise as possible. I don't want to fire up a project that's got like 70 tasks or subtasks or checklist items or something that's a mess. Because at the end of the day, I want as much of the work in my firm to be done in as standardized and consistent a manner as possible. And then only after the standardized aspects of that project is done does someone need to come in and do the more bespoke aspects of that engagement. I struggled with this quite a bit in my firm, where we went all in on the whole documentation and building processes and make it easier for another person to step into a project. And so we went so hard on building out the tasks and the SOPs and all that stuff. And if you've been down that path, you know just what a bear it is to maintain, which is what ultimately got our firm to. Okay, like we, we were on the grand scheme of things, a pretty white glove firm where people would pay us very well to do very custom to them things. And so I went fully from the end of the spectrum that a lot of modern firms still, still subscribe to, that is we are going to just do this one flavor of things on a very, in a very specific way. And we're not going to let the clients tell us how to do it any other ways. We got one flavor of dog food. This is what we're going to do. I went from the approach that makes sense for a firm like that clear to the other end of the spectrum where I'm like, well, we're not that kind of firm. We're very white glove, like, and people will pay us. Like, there's a world where you're white glove and nobody's paying for that. I would say we were white glove and we were getting paid pretty well for that. And so then I was like, well, you can't standardize in a firm like this because we're doing white glove stuff. The reality is every single firm, you are still entering W2s, reconciling bank statements. Most projects have a big old chunk of them that are the same across all of those projects. And, and once you actually nail this down, you see actually just how little of the project is truly unique to them. Like, when you think about it in the abstract, just at a high level, in my experience, I would generally think they were more different than they actually were when we got down to brass tacks and really carved out only the few things that were unique to that engagement. But this approach was how I married you know, it was, it was. I mean I had a 80 year old tax firm that I launched a cast practice and we had over 1500 clients. Many of these projects we've been rolling forward for over a decade. You better believe it was a hot mess of every imaginable different way you could get the work done. Before I bought out some of the partners, there were like four or five partners. For most of the time. This firm had been around team of anywhere from 20 to 40, all sorts of people doing different things. And there's some of you that maybe like you've launched your own firm from scratch in a more controlled way. And you're like, what he's describing is an absolute mess. I've never really had this problem. I had to start from the other end of the spectrum where it was like, holy smokes, how do I lasso just a big old mess and get us trending in a more similar direction? And it's funny, the natural order of how those projects become more different over time. As soon as you have an internal language and expectation for here's how we're going to do this stuff, here's where all the overlap is, then you actually find projects start trending back toward the standard. Because the next time the client has a special request, you can actually say, well, here's what we recommend and what we do with most people. And usually the client's totally fine with that. Similar the next time a staff person has to figure out how to do X, Y, Z and they've never done that before. Rather than making up some solution, choosing their own adventure, they can see like what's the standard? What are we doing for most people? Oh, we'll just do this. And those projects now start getting more similar over time, which means what you're actually tracking in your practice management system can be simplified. There's less bespoke to that client, to that project stuff to track, which means people have to use their brains a little less because they're doing the same stuff across projects. And then eventually what I did in my firm was we centralized all that common stuff to just a production team, a team of folks who were cranking. This was an offshore team. All they did was just get that stuff out the door. And then we had client facing pods who would do the specific to that engagement part of the work. They were the ones responsible for the, for kind of the last mile and the handling of the client relationship. But man, when you have functional teams that are just cranking on doing the same thing all day, that is vastly more efficient than having a staff accountant hopping around between a bunch of different clients doing them end to end. That was my experience. Anyway, to that end, I actually got a question related to this. Let's do it. Accountant support. Accountant support. Operators are standing by. Welcome to Account Support where you give me your problems and we've maybe we come up with solutions, we at least share some ideas. You got a problem you want to share? Shoot me a text or even better, leave me a voicemail at 1-516-980-4968. Right now pull over the car. Peter, put that stationary bicycle in park. Save my number to your phone. Jason Stats Co. The Internet 1516 980-4968 here's the question from a listener. I've got a great idea. We'll call it Chaos and Company where every client is treated as a special snowflake. No processes, no templates, no workflows. No problem. We'll reinvent the wheel just for you because you're special. You'd like your tax return delivered by a horse and buggy by sunset? We're on it. We love our clients so much that your wish is our command policies are optional. Consistency is overrated. But client driven Chaos is professionally rationalized. I think we found somebody in a, in a hard place, probably right after the tax deadline. Let me talk you away from the ledge a bit. Here's the thing is, without a system like we just talked through, this is inevitable, particularly when you have partners and client managers who have never told a client no in their life and will happily do whatever they ask now. I mean, there's several layers to this meltdown here, one of which, you know the note about would you like a tax return delivered by horse and buggy by sunset? We're on it. There's a. I mean, there's so much of an opportunity. We talked about this on the podcast quite a bit. There's so much of an opportunity in tailoring the delivery of the work. Like the client experience around the work item and the work item can be the exact same across different projects. But there's so much revenue opportunity in tailoring the delivery. You know, what sort of turnaround time should the client expect when they have questions? What's the expertise level of the people that they can interact with? Will you literally show up horse and buggy with the tax return, hand deliver it to them? Again, I said this earlier. There's versions of this where clients won't actually pay for it, but there's a lot of people that will pay for a much more premium delivery on an order of like 2 or 3x for the project. Now, where a lot of us are stuck is accountants, especially in small firms. We are at our core technicians. We came into this profession working for somebody else, doing the work, and then one day decided, like, you know what? I don't actually like building somebody else's kingdom. I'm going to build my own. And so you then go and do that work for yourself. But we're still technicians. We're still just doing the work. And oftentimes anything that can pull our heads out of doing the work can be a huge annoyance. Uh, this is the status check from the client. Hey, how's that project coming along? This is the phone call where it's really hard not to sound super perturbed by the client because you got other stuff to do, man. And their inane questions are just keeping you from getting their work done. But the really bummer thing about this for purists and that most accountants are purists, where we're like, we just want to do the best technical work possible. And that's kind of what we're laser focused on. And we think that is what will drive success. The huge bummer is clients could care less if we're doing their work right. I mean, they will say that, yes, they want us to do their work right, of course. And there's for sure downsides to us not doing it right. But what they are way more zeroed in on is, were you just a total a hole on that phone call? How long does it take you to get back to them? Do they have an understanding of what even the expected turnaround time is what they should expect? And it's very, very hard for the people that do the work that are doing the fulfillment to also be the smiling faces that can conscientiously listen to dumb questions from your client and field their inquiries anytime, you know, and this is a great argument for like a client concierge, like client support layer that is not your technical people because it, it is like two very different sides of your brain. I don't know how the sides of your brain work or how many of them there are, but I mean, it's like I. My office is at home and I can have a really stressful work thing going on. And I walk through a doorway and there's my four, six and eight year old. One of them's only wearing their underwear if that. The other one's got an uncapped marker in their hand. And the third is crying for Lord knows what reason. And like, there's no, there's no way to cross that threshold and instantly flip from one mode of human, like being a human to another mode that is just a. It is a stark contrast going from one world to the next. In a world where there's more just AI over hyper than ever before and you see a new landing page every day that's like, whoa, this sounds exciting. But then you can't actually tell if there's anything real going on there. When all that's going on. It's nice to know what things actually work, what are real, what is tested and firms are big fans of. I'll give you one what firms are like actively using and having success with. I'll give you one tool. Stanford Tax buddy. They were kind of first aboard like the AI tax workflow hype train, but they're now, I don't know, three or four years in. I know probably well over a hundred accounting firms that love Stanford Tax is a really, really good solution for better organizing your 1040 work. It gives you a single place where you can pile all those documents in. It creates this like AI checklist based on the prior year tax work of existing exactly what items we need from the client. Then I can just chuck all those documents into one place regardless of how they come in, and it'll automatically check those items off the checklist and then give me like an actual like work paper in the cloud as an alternative to an Adobe Acrobat PDF. Whether your clients want to work with another portal or not, there's a lot of people that are just now using Stanford Tax internally because it saves you a pile of time on the just the managing of the documents and all that stuff. It's a great company. They've been around an AI accounting solution that's actually really, really good. Worth checking out if you do 1040 work. Learn more about Stanford Tax. Check out the link down in the show notes. Boo. You know what's the worst, man? When you hire somebody and they start working for you and you're like, I thought this person knew stuff. The number of times I've been hoodwinked by somebody that interviews well and they have umpteen years of experience and you pull them in and you're like, what? You didn't. You don't. What? You don't even know your stuff, man. This isn't going to work. Let me tell you what one of this episode sponsors Cloud accountant staffing is doing about that. So cloud account staffing help accounting Firms find talent around the world, be it the Philippines, South Africa, Latin America, and they have an online portal where you can go out and see folks that they have recruited, schedule interviews with those people directly on their platform. And one of the things now that every single one of those people have is a collection of assessments. I'm looking at one right here. Assessments for business tax, for individual tax, for critical thinking, for understanding instructions, their personality type. And so many of these things like individual tax, this person I'm looking at, they're in the 93rd percentile. And so cloud account staffing, they have a huge volume of folks that they have go through these assessments and they hand pick the highest performers and they serve them up for you to make your wildest dreams come true. Cloud account staffing's backstory there. I actually ran an accounting firm, hired some offshore folks, had an amazing experience, and then just started helping other accounting firms firms do the same. Interested? I thought you might be. Check out the link down to cloud accountant staffing in the show Notes. In this day of an age where we have like so little focus time, where people will not distract us and we are at fault here too. Things like leaving up our email all day long so that we can be distracted every time we get a new message, leaving up slack teams, Twitter, like having six monitors and four of those monitors are just things there to distract you. Yeah, I just called you out. It's okay though that I'm on the third monitor. That doesn't count. But it's what makes it feel like oftentimes you're running a quicksand when you're trying to get stuff done. You're already fighting distraction, but then have to be like this conscientious, conscientious person with your clients can feel like a really tall task. It's an argument for honestly separating that role from the people doing the work. And if you don't have that team, if, say if you're solo, it's an argument for time blocking for part of the day, being for this part of the day, being for that for part of the week, being for client facing stuff for part of the week, you are just radio silent, locked in. Like with focus time. Yeah, everybody always says like their favorite time to work is on the weekends because nobody will bother them. That sort of thing. Like how do I lock down and actually be able to get some work done? The people who want their return delivered by horse and buggy. Some of those people, believe it or not, will pay you three times as much money to customize the delivery. And when I say delivery, I'm not just talking about delivery of the finished project, but the whole client experience interaction, how premium that feels. There are people who will pay three times as much for that. Just when you dress it up a different way, that feels more premium. And many of us, like, we do not buy that way, so that feels wrong. So we don't extend the opportunity to, to our clients to be able to buy that way. But if we don't even stop to consider that us just selling the work product at a single price, it's. It's the least profitable way to sell that work. The work product itself, I think we can all agree the more standardized we can make that, the better. And if we are going to customize, I would argue the best type of customization is actually customization of the delivery, not of the work product itself and how that delivery gets customized. We've talked on the podcast a lot about how you build this into three tier proposals, but where you then track that, that is a property of the project as well, is this whole notion of like selling the same trip to everyone. Everybody can go to Maui, but they could, but you could rent them a paddleboard to get there. You can rent them a canoe, you could take them on a cruise ship, you can fly them, you can fly them on a private jet. You could fly them on a private jet with a bunch of other really cool people. Everybody's going to Maui, right? And the hard costs for all those people going to Maui, when they're in Maui, they're the same. But in a service business, oftentimes the place that you can make the most money is in tailoring that delivery to them. Because all they understand about the process really is the client delivery, is their interactions with you. And if you can give them a more premium version of that that they will pay twice as much for, then if we can bring ourselves to just assign a little bit more effort and patience and all that to the client experience, it makes the work we're doing obviously vastly more profitable. And absent a clear system of how to manage this in our firm, absolutely. It is chaos and co. It's a total mess, right. But we got to always be fighting back against that. Like this is a force of the universe, that the, the business will become more messy and folks will ask more different, weird things of us. And this is a situation where we are the only ones that will advocate for it becoming more the same. Like it is our jobs to fight back against that tactically in a way that doesn't make our clients feel like we're putting handcuffs on them, but in a way that ensures that everyone has a crystal clear expectation of exactly what the client expects, that we have options that will capture a client's willingness and ability to pay. I mean, if I've got 10, 10, 40 clients and two of them are horse and buggy people, two of them driving Mercedes, two of them want the premium delivery and they'll pay twice as much for that. Those are great projects. We just need a horse and buggy team now. Right. Like you need a process for how that stuff gets handled. Because I would argue the other end of the spectrum, the firm that is very restrictive and we only sell one, one flavor of dog food. If that's the only thing we'll sell to people, it's going to be harder to make money with that model than if you make one flavor of dog food but sell it different ways. We've got an option for the cost conscious person, but you've got an option for the person with, with the prize trophy dog. Right? They got a $20,000 dog. Yes. They will pay another 50% for the fancier delivery, whatever that looks like. Every practice management system is going to look a little bit different. So their, their methodologies for handling tasks and work and all that will be a little bit different. And that's why the first thing you need is an agreed upon way to manage that stuff inside of your own firm, where it's like, here's what we call these things. Here's kind of the hierarchies. And then you map that to a practice management system that makes sense for you. Too often, like, we get into the software and we're like, oh, here's what it does. Let's build our systems around that. But that's kind of a trap. You really want to decide that on your own. And then these days, most practice management systems, this is not the case five years ago, they're now so flexible that like they will handle just about any sort of structure you can throw at them, at least the leaders. If you don't have a good one yet again, check out the show notes for my practice management system recommendation. If you're into the idea of like formalizing your service library more. Also check out the resource down in the show notes, totally free. Actually, thousands of firms have now gone through that process. It is the exact process I use to bring order to all the various different things that we did at my firm. Got anything to add? Pop a comment in there, man. Anything you're struggling with anything you're blocked on. Leave me a voicemail. 1-516-980-4968 Got some fun stuff coming up this week. I'll catch you in the next one. Hey, real quick podcast friends. I'm coming to a city near you running a bunch of live events before the end of the year. We're going to be at Intuit Connect in Vegas. We're going to be in Toronto, in Atlanta, Austin, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Louisiana, Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, Washington, D.C. philadelphia and Boston. If you are there or anywhere near there within a half tank's gas up there buddy, I want to see you. We've put together some super cool events that I'm very excited about all around getting you and your team aligned. Heading into 2026, the biggest problem I had running a firm was I had an abundance of ideas but was always blocked by trying to get my team bought into those ideas and everybody working in the same direction. And it's why I believe the biggest way I can help you is actually getting your team inspired, getting everyone energized for the year to come. So it's not just you, but also because these are live events, you're going to meet a whole bunch of other local practitioners as well, which can almost certainly unlock some cool things for you. I'm especially looking at you solo firm runners and side hustlers where your team effectively is the people you meet along the way, the relationships that you build, the people you can go to with questions when you get stuck on this or that. Going to be a super fun experience, including for some of these events we're recording like a live interactive version of the podcast where you'll get to be part of the content conversation. Very, very excited for these. I want to see you there. To learn more, head over to jasononfirms.com events and I hope to see you.