559 2026 Tech Predictions for BOOKKEEPING Firms
31 Dec 2025 · 34 min
Podcast by Jason Staats (Dec 31, 2025) presenting six predictions for bookkeeping technology in 2026. Major themes: mounting pressure on legacy ledger platforms (QuickBooks Online, Xero) from new ledger entrants and month-end-close automation tools; mid-market migration to modern ledgers (Campfire, Rillet); growth of advisor-first ledger approaches (Digits, Kik); and reward for practice-management systems that embed workflow/month-end close automation (Client Hub, Financial Sense, Double). The host also highlights AI-driven invoice/AP extraction (Maker's Hub), tax workflow automation (Sorban), and hosting/IT sponsors.
Chapters
Okay. Bookkeeping friends and colleagues. It has been a slow couple of years for bookkeeping tech developments. It really has been. If somebody told you two years ago with AI hype at its peak that the tools we use today would pretty much be the same as they were a couple years ago, you'd have been like, boo. Ha. You'd have been pissed, man. As you rightfully should be. But this year for my predictions, I'm going big. I'm talking real big. Because you know what, we're about 15 years into this new era of like cloud ledgers and all that and they have all these app marketplaces and you adorn your ledger with all these different plugins and things that do all different things. It's great, it's a lot of fun. It's like putting charms on your crocs. But you know what's going to change in 2026? Everything. Not an exaggeration. I think. I think we'll see. They're predictions. I got six predictions to get you to noodle on of where I think we might be headed in the near future. And I can tell you we got a lot to be excited. Foreign. Let's get right into it gang. We got ground to cover. Prediction number one, pressure mounts on legacy ledger platforms actually from two different angles. One angle and when I say traditional legacy plat and when I say traditional ledger platforms, I'm really talking about QuickBooks Online and Xero. They're getting pressure increasingly from two angles. One, new solutions. Solutions that are like really good and really legitimate for the first time. I'm not talking about Wave, I'm not talking about FreshBooks. Lord knows I'm not talking about accounting CS. We have got new ledger entrants that are really good and showing signs of getting traction. But the other front of this two front war they're now fighting is tools like Double, formerly known as Keeper, who are now like automating across 20 month end closes or 100 month end closes. Like Double as a platform for managing month end close automation and it sits above the ledger tool and this is putting pressure on the ledger tools to like do more. Like it's not enough to just be a ledger tool. In fact, if you believe that AI is about to automate classifications and so the classifications kind of just happen in large part on their own, then what is the accounting ledger anymore if not the place where you make classifications and reconcile the bank? By the way, another thing that's been fully automated by modern platforms, the bank reconciliation. So if you take out classification, if you Take out, like reconciling the bank statement. What is the accounting ledger? I can tell you it's not this monolith like we have with QuickBooks Online and Xero that's all kind of oriented around classification with sort of all these things bolted around it. For bookkeeping firms, I would argue the next thing looks a lot like what double has or what client hub has an increasingly financial sense has built into their practice management systems. It's more like just quality assurance. Like we're just making sure that everything went through correctly, ticking all the boxes. What I would call month end close automation. I think the accounting software starts just looking more like that. And so we're headed into a time when accountants are just so incredibly frustrated with these platforms for a number of reasons. On the QuickBooks side, it's because Intuit's literally gone into business against professional accountants and bookkeepers. On the Xero side, it's because the product honestly just hasn't gone anywhere of note in the last six or seven years. There was a time, 2016, 2017, 2018, where Xero was a much better cloud accounting platform than QuickBooks Online. Now I would say QBO is probably past it, but it's still like qbo, super bloated and just has all this stuff you don't need. QBO is also like they're increasing prices every single month because you don't have a good alternative to go to zero. At least in the US market, they're not increasing prices all that much. But in the Australian market, other markets where they are the leader, they're absolutely increasing prices, actually doing behaviors that are more similar to what Intuit's doing in the US and until we have legitimate alternatives and they like, until the day they don't totally control the market, that will kind of just keep doing that. And that's a really sucky place for us to find ourselves in. So first prediction here, and maybe this is an obvious one, it is that pressure will continue to mount on these folks, but I would argue in 26 it actually leads to meaningful change in a way that it hasn't in the past. Exhibit number one is prediction number two. Did you follow that? Prediction number two is that this evolution from today's ledgers to the next ledgers, it starts at the mid market and this is happening right now. Netsuite and Intact have controlled the entirety of the cloud accounting mid market. But most would agree right now they're already going out of style in a big way. Two companies, Rillet and Campfire, are getting Huge amounts of traction in the mid market. I saw some data around this and I haven't been able to go back and find it. It's really frustrating. But basically right now you, unless you had a whole team with like intact expertise and NetSuite expertise and all that and you're like, we don't want to learn something new. Like companies right now that are raising money and you know, plan to IPO or something like that, that need a more mid market solution. They're not starting new NetSuite or Intact files. They're going with really or they're going with Campfire. And this is great news to me. This is a great signal that it can be done. Like we can get to an alternative platform that's just better. And really and Campfire are solving for a lot of the things that make NetSuite and Intact just an absolute monster to manage. There's been this kind of question looming. Can you ever really like overcome the ecosystem advantage that incumbents have? You look at the number of apps that work with with QuickBooks and that is one of the costs, arguably the biggest cost of Moving away from QuickBooks is like, what about these other apps that I love that integrate with it? There's a very legitimate question of like, will anybody ever overcome that advantage that they have? Because they just have that whole ecosystem and is like, you know, starting a new smartphone operating system right now you got Android and you got iOS and they both have like super rich ecosystem systems of apps that have been developed on top of them. But if I go out and I launch Beekeep OS and it's a new from scratch operating system for your smartphone, well then that means that like the weather app that I love over here and the flight tracking app and all these things that are on this other ecosystem, I can't use them anymore. And so there's folks that like legitimately said QuickBooks like they're just going to control this until the end of time. And they might believe this. They certainly act as if that's the case with how much they've been increasing prices. But if you want proof for why I think it's possible, look at what's already happening in the mid market with netsuite at intact, who are still the leaders, still the incumbents and lord knows moving a company who's six years into using NetSuite or Intact to something else, oh, God bless the accountants that'll take that project on. But if you're starting a new file right now, that's where we're seeing Inroads a big percentage of people going to new modern solutions and that's, that's a great signal. Hey, if you've got any clients that have to do like ugly project tracking or have any degree of inventory management or big ugly invoices like the type you see from construction companies that are a mile along and have all this item detail, then my brother this episode sponsor Makers Hub, it is for you, even if you don't do the accounting, is a big one to share with your client. Because truly the area of accounting that has been most turned on its head by AI is accounts payable. And it's not even close. We had some big meaty bill pay engagements we did with clients where I truly could have automated 80% of what we were doing. With Makers Hub, the extraction quality is so far beyond what OCR could ever do. And because it can now pull like every little fiddly detail from the invoice in a totally automated way, like, like, by the way, I think we're actually very close to fully automated extraction, which people have been saying for over a decade, you don't have to review the bills anymore. It's like, really? Because, because my job is to do the bills and if there's an extra zero that slips in there, I'm gonna lose my job. Feels like we're actually getting close to fully automated extraction. But because I can pull all those details really well, you can then build all sorts of automated workflows on top of that for like really complex approvals. And we're talking more than just like pull the date and the amount from the invoice. We're talking about every single little fiddly detail in the item, like itemized list. This is crazy. Microsoft, we did some examples on a demo on YouTube where it was even pulling handwritten text accurately. Crazy stuff. Even if this is not something you're doing for your clients, if you have clients that are doing gnarly billing and inventory management, all this stuff, Maker's Hub, a lot of people that are raving fans of it because it just takes the level. This stuff can be automated like just to another level. How many times did I just say level? Okay, you know what to do next. Learn more down at the link in the show notes. If you got a client you want to share this with, I would say either send them the landing page or send them one of the demos we've done on my YouTube channel and in like seven minutes they can get a sense of what it is. That's it. That's the ad read, hey, real quick, are you tired of having to like duct tape a whole bunch of apps together to run your accounting firm? Of course you are. Wouldn't it be nice if you had you had what you needed all in one place? Gang, listen up. This is where today's sponsor Financial Sense can make your life a whole lot easier. It's everything you need to run your firm all in one place. But they recently started shipping some really cool workflow stuff. It has a deep integration into the accounting ledger, will actually pull all the transactions in so you can do more of your month end review from inside a Financial Sense. And it'll even auto flag a bunch of stuff like big transactions, inconsistent transactions. It's got kind of a whole month end review flow that you now go through from inside of Financial Sense. Then you make those changes to the transactions, they all get put back to the ledger like magic, bro. So one of the headaches right now in picking accounting tech is you have practice management systems that oversee the work, then you have workflow tools that do the work. Financial Sense doing a bit of both. Now they've been a practice management system historically, now they're getting more into the bookkeeping workflow, which is great news if you're the type of person that doesn't like juggling a whole bunch of tools. Now Financial Sense, they actually give you a 14 day trial if you use the link down in the show notes. That is the most generous free trial I've actually seen in our space. Absolutely worth kicking the tires on. To learn more, check out that link. Third prediction here is that incumbent ledger players start looking more seriously at month end close automation. We talked a bit about this in the first prediction. How they're, they're seeing pressure from like the double keepers of the world and the practice management systems, which are now sort of the technical word, would probably be obfuscating what the ledger does. So if my practice management system, the two main ones that do this right now are Client Hub and Financial Sense, if they pull in every single transaction from the ledger and I do my whole quality assurance process inside the practice management system and all the changes that I make there get pushed back to the ledger automatically, I'm not even logging into the ledger software to do all of that work, that is a risk to the ledger. In fact, you look at digits, digits, they're now a new like entire accounting ledger. But they weren't originally, originally they were just this thing that sat on top of your QuickBooks and let you automate classifications do a bunch of other stuff. And if you were a digits power user and you loved that, then when digits announced, like, we're going to do the ledger thing now we're going to be a full double entry ledger company. If you were already using digits and they announced that you're like, honestly sweet, like, just turn it on for this file, would you? And let me know when I can kill my QuickBooks subscription because I've already been doing all this stuff in digits right now. One of the biggest things you hear from Double users is, can't you just ship your own accounting ledger? We would love that because we already manage all the month end close inside of double. We'd love to not have to have the QuickBooks subscription double. Could you just become an accounting software and do the full double entry thing? That's a very, very hard thing to do. But it's what the users want because they don't want to do the work in QuickBooks. They want to do the work the place they want to do the work. This means ledger companies, QuickBooks zero. They have to respond to that. And we've already seen this from Intuit, who had Intuit Connect announced like a suite of accounting firm tools to kind of sort of do what? Double is probably the leader in this category. What Double does Double, formerly known as Keeper. And this was just a classic Intuit Connect thing where Double is like a gold tier, biggest sponsor in the exhibit hall. But you walk over to the main stage and Intuit announces, hey, we're launching a thing that does what they do. This is, this is like an Intuit Connect tradition. They love doing this. And honestly, most of the products they announced here end up coming to nothing. And still to this day, go out try to get your hands on this. You can't even, like, it's not real. It may someday be real. And, ooh, how controversial do we want to get here? Here's the thing. I can't go too far on this because I like a lot of the people that are involved, but into its way of doing product launches like this is they will announce it. They will then go to their partner council, which is a bunch of accounting firm owners, and they will create a bunch of media with those partner council people that will go out on social media. Those folks will be sharing it directly on their social accounts. And this is all of the Intuit talk tracks, like talking about the new stuff that Intuit is doing. And the folks in the Intuit partner council, I know a lot of them, very sharp folks, but what they will also Tell you, if you sit down and have a conversation with them. Can I say this? Do I say this? Oh, I can't go too far here. There's trouble in paradise. I'll just say that it is a lot of smoke and mirrors. What you see around being announced, the cool new product stuff we've got coming and kind of getting accounting leaders to sort of be your puppets and talk about what you do. It is unfortunate. There's a version of that where you could argue that I do the same thing. Like, am I not just a puppet for all the stuff that sponsored, like all the brands that sponsor our content? I would argue in the context of an ad read, like, yeah, I probably am being a puppet because that's, I mean, literally what people buy on my channel is they're, they buy airtime. I will do a 60 to 90 second ad read for you. But here's the thing. It's my ad read. I will say what I like about your, your platform. You actually don't get a say in it. Really. And then we only do ads with platforms that I'm already recommending. And you'll see in my recommendations the vast majority of the tools that I recommend, they don't sponsor with us. I would love it if they did. But I could also, I could see the argument that, like, Jason, like, aren't you kind of just a puppet for brands in some ways? Maybe, yes. Because, like, that's ultimately how we fund all of this stuff. But you're seeing this right now with all the new stuff that Intuit has announced. They've kind of got their social media plan. There's a lot of other accountants that are sharing this stuff. The folks in the partner council and everybody else is watching this. Like, you know, Intuit sucks, right? We talking about the same Intuit here? Because, man, I can't get off their stuff fast enough. In fact, I just saw a Super bowl commercial that made me look like an idiot. Their CEO, Sasan Gadarzi was just on Mad Money again and talks about Intuit as a done for you company where, you know, the tech will take it as far as you can, but when the tech can't get you far enough. We'll connect you with a human advisor, by the way, that's a human advisor that's employed by Intuit that's coming in and doing your bookkeeping or doing your tax work or what about me? Like, what about the independent accountants? Like, we're all at a point where we're like, man, I would love to not give Intuit my money anymore. So to bring this back to prediction number three, both Intuit and Xero are going to be pushing more of a month end close solution. Intuit's already announced this. They already say they've got a version of it. It's not out in the wild yet by the way. They did this five or six years ago as well with qboa. The whole idea behind what you see when you log into QuickBooks Online right now was that was going to be a place to manage all your month end closes. They shipped a version one of it and like that was it. So Intuit has said we're going to have something like a double to help with month end close automation. Maybe the bigger prediction here for number three is that zero has to respond with something. And if I had to guess, I'd probably say that's more like an acquisition rather than them building this in house. Because I don't think they've got any version of this right now. And the quicker move is going to be to buy someone that's already doing it, that's probably not a US company right now. Doubles Zero integration is much weaker than their QuickBooks online integration. I think they're probably looking elsewhere in the world where you've got automation solutions like Zenit and Qbert and all that stuff that is more zero first. Wouldn't be surprised if we saw Zero do a, do an acquisition like that just as a response to the whole month end close automation thing. Prediction number four, a new ledger player goes advisor first. There are not a platform for the small business first. They are a platform for the advisor to support small business. By the way, this is how QuickBooks got started. QuickBooks was a tool for the accountant and it is how they got to a crazy level of saturation in the US market was the accountant was like give me your QuickBooks. Like that word was synonymous with accounting. And I think somebody else is going to come along and take the same approach. They're going to build a ledger, they're going to go to the advisor and say how do you want this to work from the early days they'll pull the advisor in and, and I hope this is true, we will have a ledger platform that like puts us first and zero. Honestly a lot of folks at zero would argue this is what zero does. We are the advisor first option. I would just argue right now that I think a lot of folks have like lost their patience with zero. They came to the US market 10 years ago, have been running in quicksand, like not Getting much market share besides the firms that like pride themselves on doing the different thing and being a zero firm. And by the way, this was me in 2018. We took our whole firm off of Intuit products and our cash practice was 0 first. But the product right now, if I hop into it, looks like the same product I was using in 2018. And that's why folks are tiring of what zero is doing. So prediction number four, we're going to have a new ledger entrance here that is like, hey, we're going to be the option for advisors that is super core to what they do. Prediction number five is people will begin rewarding the practice management systems that are beginning to encompass month end close automation. Been around the podcast for long. You know, we talk about this a lot, that there's this practice management layer software in your firm that oversees the work, kind of talks about the work, looks at the work and then you have a workflow layer that does the work. And that workflow layer is new. To be clear, what practice management systems do five, seven years ago we called that workflow. But the new thing we would call workflow is like what Double does. It sinks in every transaction from the ledger. It gives you a quality assurance process where you can go from step one to step 10. And by step 10, the month end close is truly done. Whereas the practice management system, all it does is it's like here's all the work and what the statuses can be and maybe some subtasks. Let me know when it's done and remember to update the status that's not doing the work that's overseeing the work. Workflow tools, they do the work, they get the work done, they push the changes back to the ledger. Double formula keeper kind of created this category for small business in the past. We had more mid market month end close automation tools, stuff like flowcast. But for the small business ledger, I think Double really created this category. But this fifth, fifth prediction is that practice management systems that now start building workflow into their product will be awarded. The first two that have done this I would argue are Client Hub, which has always been a practice management that said that it was kind of for bookkeeping and, and client accounting services firms and then Financial Sense, they announced this at WorkflowCon a couple months ago. They're sinking in all the transactions from the ledger and giving you like a month end quality assurance process to do from straight inside of Financial Sense and to bring this back to the whole conversation at the beginning. That's awesome. We're like Obfuscating the ledger. Like, if I don't have to get into the Ledger app and I can actually do the month end close from here, where I'm already working. That's awesome. That's great news. Now, I should also mention Carbon and their version and their approach to this was they went out and they acquired Ator. ATOR is a tool that's doing. I would say it's more of a reporting first tool, but they're also doing some month and close automation stuff. People will raise the question, okay, so is Ador like double and in terms of like the category they exist within? Yes, in terms of functionality and specifically automation around how to do the month end close. And my take is 8 or is light years off of what double is right now in the closing of the books. Something I super appreciate about Double and what they've done from the beginning that most software companies do not understand about accountants is what accountants want to do is save time on the work that they're already doing. Don't give me some big brain thing where you got to teach me a new way of selling my work and all that to make your product useful. Just save me time on what I already do. It's not that hard, honestly. This is the work that I want to do, the work that I'm already doing. Make me more efficient at it and give me a tool to do it that's not astronomically expensive. I would argue 80% of the accounting ecosystem is trying to convince you to do some new type of work that you don't do right now. And maybe that's worthwhile. And for sure we do that on this podcast. Even, like, quit spending time over here, spend time over there instead. But the most important software you can have in your firm is this software that will just make you more efficient at what you already do. And that should be kind of obvious, right? Double is very good at that. I would say ADIR is more reporting first and then month end close second and reporting. Honestly, reporting to me is a great example. Not in 100% of situations, but in 80% of situations. People are like, I don't need more reporting. My client doesn't need a fancy report to understand what I do for them. We probably just need to hop on a call. Now, I say 80% of the time there's situations where reporting makes a ton of sense. But if you have to educate me on why I need the thing that's a infinitely harder product to sell than the thing that just automates what I already do so that has been Carbon's response as they went out and they acquired a company that will do this. They're kind of being the ecosystem player here, trying to integrate, more so than building their own first party stuff, at least right now. And so prediction number five, here it is that the practice management systems that pull all this stuff in house, the month end close automation, they will be rewarded. Because if I already have to manage where my work's at from the practice management system, then wouldn't it be nice if I could manage the month end close there too? Now, to be clear, building really good month end close automation is tremendously hard and it's unfair to compare what these platforms have just shipped to what double is where. This is all they've been working on for five years. This is a great example of where a practice management system can be like, oh yeah, we're going to have what they do in the next couple of quarters. And you're like, oh, okay, I'll buy this software then, or I'll stick around with you then. The red flag's got to go up anytime that you hear that do not buy software based on something that is not yet released. You just can't buy the thing that already works because that thing that isn't yet released, it certainly won't be what the salesperson wants it to be. By the way, many of them aren't even privy to like the details, but it's not even fair to confer to compare the version one of what might come to the thing that's like the version 10 already and is already here. So the practice management system is doing this. They will be rewarded and it is good news. We do want that stuff, but don't expect it to be as good as the standalone solutions that do that really well. Tax peeps, listen up. Do you have a tax workflow solution yet? I'm not talking about Grandpappy's little auto scan, the awful intake OCR thing that comes with it with our dumpy old tax software. That's not what I'm talking about. There's a new crop of AI tax workflow tools that are doing some really, really cool things. One of the leaders here is this episode sponsor, Sorban. They're one of the first to this. They do a really, really good version of automated 1040 intake. A tremendous amount of the time spent during tax season is just chasing people for docs and like building out the request lists of all the things that we need when the client emails and they're like, what do you need from Me and you go back to the prior year file and you look at what you already have and you just got to do all that stuff. Sorban man, it wipes out all of that complete no brainer Tax workflow tools like this is not an exaggeration. Are honestly like a must buy right now for tax firms. I'd say they have been for the last like two years and they just keep getting better. But Sorban also this. They are working on pushing the data to your tax software. Really hard problem to solve. They're working on it. They're also working on automated delivery. So ingest the tax return and then gives the client like a super smooth signing and sort of to do list experience once the return's actually done. Really good product. Know a lot of happy users. That's Sorban. If you do more than a couple hundred ten forties a year, definitely check out Soroban link down in the show notes. Attention users of Thomson Reuters Virtual Office. Is that you? Listen up, pay attention this episode sponsor Barado no host your Thompson Reuters stuff. You tired of of slowness of stuff breaking. Tired of sharing your cloud with other people? Gross. I don't want anybody else on my cloud. I don't know what that guy's doing. Get faster hosting from Verito but check this out. 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Okay, if you're on Virtual Office, you know what to do. Check out the link to Verito down in the show notes. Okay, number six and this is a prediction that could have been on people's predictions for like the last six to eight years maybe. It feels like a lazy one. I just think like pressure with Intuit just reaches more of a critical boiling point where hopefully like more people are willing to actually do something. And I think that's more likely this year because we have more legitimate alternatives to QuickBooks. Like if you go like go grab my app recommendations, look at the ledgers there. I think that the two ledgers for SMBs that are most likely to find a bunch of traction are digits which is already finding traction. Like digits is one where I will go to an event and people will be like have you tried digits? And I'm like yes, I've known the digits people for a long, long time. And they're like I'm moving a bunch of stuff to it. So digits, it's already there. And then Kik is the other big one. Kicks raised money from OpenAI. It's a second time founder. I met some people on the tour that are happy Kick users and they, their messaging is like we're just going to be great for the SMB. Also they're the most advisor leaning ledger company I've seen yet. We'll see how that pans out because it's still somewhat early for them but they've got a different take where basically all of the companies that belong to a client of yours, they all exist in one workspace and you pay one subscription for those. So the whole problem of having a client that has one main business and then like five more LLC and then being like I don't want to give QuickBooks another 80 bucks a month for each of these Little Rinky Dink LLCs that is solved by Kicks model where it's a single subscription, doesn't matter how many companies for all the companies that belong to a client. But then it also solves like intercompany stuff because it's all in the same environment. To be clear, they're all their distinct, their own distinct double entry ledgers but it's all happening in one workspace. So the client and you can hop into one space and see everything that's happening for all that client's businesses. Like that's what you normally would only get from mid market solutions. And like that's a netsuite, an intact sort of feature. And Intuit now with their, what do they call it, Intuit Enterprise Suite, they've, they announced this like a year ago or something like that. And it's basically just like a consolidator tool that sits across a bunch of QuickBooks files but the framing for this is like well, we're going upmarket with Intuit Enterprise Suite. That's not the problem that I have with my clients. The problem that I have is like going downer market because they get their, they have their one successful business and then that makes them create all these holding companies and LLCs for their rentals that have no activity in them. I don't now want to go to an enterprise product to service all those. Arguably I need something cheaper, more basic to service all those. That's what gets me excited about Kik is they're very well set up to handle that. So digits, you've probably already heard of digits.com, kik, it's Kiko. My understanding is they're doing more of a push on the accounting front at the start of 2026. But those two feel like the best bet for disrupting SMB ledger stuff. Puzzle is around, but to a lesser degree. If you've ever seen Puzzle, it is Puzzle IO. They started out really building for startups but now they're zooming out a little bit to support stuff more widely. I can just tell you what I've heard anecdotally from firms who have tested like puzzle versus digits. It's, it's not as good right now. I want them to get there and if you, if you have startup clients, those are the folks I would probably send a puzzle. Otherwise I'm more excited about the more lean SMB ledgers that aren't trying to do too many things that will just give me a place to run like volume bookkeeping stuff. Now can they overcome the ecosystem advantage of QuickBooks and all the tools that connect with it? How do month end close automation tools factor into these new ledger solutions? The way they actually talk both digits and kick, they talk about building like the most profitable place to run an accounting firm. Not just have the best ledger but also be thinking about the month end close aspects that are involved there as well. Digits for example, Digits is party trick is kind of like automated classification. You can now have firm trained models where it will classify transactions automatically based on all the other classifications that your accounting firm has made. So let's say you got two construction clients, not construction because these like they're good for cash basis but not much beyond that. Let's say I got a dental clinic and then I start a new dental clinic file, a second file. It is going to classify those transactions according to what it sees you've done in other files. That's tremendously valuable for accounting firms. By the way, this is the secret sauce that like Bench the bookkeeping solution was built on top of. They had rules engines that worked across all the different company files. You know how you have bank rules inside of your accounting ledger, but they're all siloed inside of every single accounting file individually. Why is that, why is that still a thing? This is what digits kind of solving for with their firm level classifications is. Now if I've coded something a hundred times a specific way in one file, then across my other hundred files, I don't have to do that ever again. Which isn't that how it should be? Haven't people been promising us that? I mean, I remember like into it talking about like the machine learning opportunities and how they're the only ones that can do this because they have so much transaction data. But it still feels like there's too much manual classification happening right from digits from Kik. I'm hearing a lot of positive things around like we're going to build the platform that the advisor would want from the ground up. And I think we're all kind of ready for that. I'm sick of like duct taping and paperclipping more things onto the core solution because it's so incomplete. What is just an AI first really good version of this look, like, man, this is my, this, this is, this is my prediction Number six is that people finally kind of reach their boiling point. With Intuit combined with there being other solutions, they will now actually make the move to those other solutions. And I hope that is not just like a wish. I hope that is a prediction. Honestly, I can't tell. Like is this just a wish list item or a thing that I actually think will happen? I will say it looks way more realistic than it ever has before that folks will start going to things that are not QuickBooks Online and not zero. And that's great news because if those two companies have total control over that category, that's a bad thing for accountants. I hope. This is the year, man. What do you got? What sort of predictions do you got? You know what we didn't talk about here? AI. Remember that? Boy, I, I, you would have thought that we've gotten much more cool AI stuff for bookkeepers in the last couple of years than we have. But the folks that have crushed the last couple years, honestly, like you look at companies like double just building really good products. I mean there's a little bit of AI in there, but not much. In fact, some of these companies now are afraid to like plaster their websites with AI stuff because they're like, they don't want to sink to the level of all the companies that are like, oh, we do AI xyz. And people are increasingly realizing, oh, that kind of just means you don't have a product and you're still trying to find it. Like the folks that actually have products right now, I've talked to a number of them that are afraid to put AI stuff on their landing page because they don't want to cheat, cheapen what they have that is really good and really useful. And the last couple of years have been won by people that are just making good products. AI or not. I think the, I think the future probably we'll see more of that, right? 2026 predictions. I want to see yours, man. Pop them down in the comments. What do you think we'll see? Or even if it's just a wish list item, what do you want to see? Know that there will be a bunch of developers that tune into this. And if there's one thing that you could tell someone that was about to found a company about, I got this awful problem and I wish somebody would solve it. Put that in the comments, man. You could change our lives just by sharing that comment. Okay, so pull over to the side of the road, put the exercise bike in park. If you're on an audio player, you'll see a link to the YouTube video for this podcast. Pop a comment down there, let me know what you think we're going to see in 2026. I can guarantee you one thing that you're going to see in 2026 is me. I'll be back back in more live events too. So we may even hang out in person. Wouldn't that be fun, gang, thanks for being here, but I'll see you Happy New Year. And I'll catch you in the next one. It.
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