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The largest accounting firm AI study just dropped over 500 accounting firms sharing. How are they actually using AI right now? What's working? What isn't working? Are they doing staff training? Probably the most real report of what's actually happening in firms today. We're going to get into it also today. Tremendously excited to share. Last fall we put on events in 14 US cities. Over a thousand accounting firms came out. A great time was had by all most of these folks. Podcast listeners like yourself. Today I'm announcing we're doing it again, buddy. 20 US cities. 14 wasn't enough. 20 US cities. I want to lose more money. I'm going to give you the dates, I'm going to give you the cities, I'm going to tell you what to expect. But also, is there any ceiling to how high you can raise prices on your clients? If you bring a bunch of clients to a firm that you work for, how do you get those clients back out of the firm? If you want to do your own thing? And is it possible to build your own AI agent to bridge data from one app you use to to another app you use? We're going to talk about it. Come on in. An action packed episode. Episode. Episode. We don't call these episodes. Action packed Podcast. Welcome in. If you're new here, this is the Jason on Firms podcast where we talk about all things accounting firms, whether you run one, whether you work in one, whether you're thinking about buying one, or whether you accidentally clicked on this podcast. Listen. That's who this is for. So. So this AI report. So this is an annual report that Carbon puts out. That to my knowledge is the largest roundup of real information from actual accounting firms and how they are using AI. It's the third year that they've done it totally free for anybody to swipe. I'll actually put a link in the show notes Carbon isn't sponsoring us to talk about this. I just think it's probably the best, most complete study that there is each year around where people are at. And now that they've done it three years, you can see some interesting trends year over year on how accountant perception of AI continues to, continues to, to evolve. I mean, importantly, as we go through this, you want to try to pull as much actionable information as you can out of here to see like, who are the firms that feel like they're having the most success and what are they doing to get there. And while this study it's through a lens, I would say it's definitely sort of served up through the carbon lens there, there's some really useful stuff in here. So background of the study, 593 contributions, we'll just call it from across six continents. 53% of responders were in the land of the free, 18% were in Canada. In terms of the firm sizes represented by the submissions, 22% were firms of 1 to 3 people, 27%, 4 to 10, 20% 11 to 20 and 15%, 21 to 50. So this definitely skews smaller firm. Looks like 69% was firms with 20 staff or fewer. That actually probably maps pretty well to our audience. 5% was 200 plus staff, 11% was 51 to 200 staff. And 50%, 51% of submissions were from the partner, slash director, slash owner. The rest was a mishmash of accountants, bookkeepers, managers, and 13% were actually ops or IT folks. Now worth noting, about half of the people who completed this submission were carbon users. Carbon has its own built in AI. So how those people talk about like yeah, I use AI definitely is going to skew to like, well if you're a carbon user and you see the AI stuff in the platform, you probably see yourself then as an AI user. But, but if you think about the accounting industry as a whole carbon users, just because it's a cloud practice management system, they're going to be the accountants that are at the more progressive end of the spectrum. So the folks responding here are in no way representative of the accounting public accounting profession at large. But I would say they're, they're the people I'm most interested in hearing from because they're the folks that are more ahead of the curve and doing interesting things and I want to learn what they're doing and I can kind of steal the best of what might work for me. So eight key findings they called out at the top of the study. I'm going to share them with you. They're kind of interesting, but as we'll see in some of the later data, they sort of frame up how. I think some of the data here is like self serving from carbon. As you might expect, like they went through the work of doing all this study, they're kind of entitled to do it in a self serving way. Right. So key findings. Enthusiasm. Enthusiasm about AI is holding strong, but it's maturing. 83% of accounting professionals are optimistic about AI, but skepticism has risen in the last year. Feels understandable, right? Feels like we're, we're at a different, different point in the hype cycle right now on AI. I say that the whole cloudbot Moltbot stuff the last couple weeks just keeps getting weirder and more amazing. Do I have permission to talk about that more on this podcast? I. I don't do AI stuff more than once a week because I don't want to just come here and like rail and geek on AI every single day because a lot of times when we talk about it's not very actionable. It's like speculative. And it's like, brother, I got an accounting firm right now that I gotta fix and do XYZ with. So I try to not go too overboard on the AI stuff. But man, is the Clodbot Molt bot stuff you're seeing in the news right now strange. Okay, next key finding. People are excited by AI but assume that others aren't. Only 18% believe that their peers are excited about AI. I don't understand what this means. How is it that 83% of folks feel optimistic but they think only 18% of their peers are excited or only 18% of people think their peers are excited? I don't know, maybe folks are just reserved in how they talk about AI. So you just always think that you're the most excited person in the room? Kind of what I'm doing right now. Right. Okay. Everyday tools are winning the AI race. The most used AI tools, Microsoft, Copilot and Gemini, are those that are embedded within the platforms accounting professionals already live in. Put a pin in that. Okay. They said the most used AI tools, Microsoft, Copilot and Gemini. Would that come as a surprise to you? Does to me as well. We're going to circle back to that. Mid sized firms remain the AI power players, I.e. firms of between 21 and 50 staff for a third straight year. This group is the most energized and least fearful about AI. If you're a smaller firm hearing that and you're like, I don't have the resources to learn all this and keep up and all that, gang, this is such a great opportunity to combine forces with other small firms. I've said for a while, like my best recommendation to keep up with this stuff is just have a weekly meeting where folks share use cases and, and kind of what they're trying. Just get everybody into a room and have a conversation about it. And within that room you'll have people who are so amped about AI and eager to share and you'll have other people that are at the other end of the spectrum and like, I can't even spell AI. I don't know what to do with this. When you're a small firm and you don't have that many people to be involved in the meeting, oftentimes that won't end up being a very interesting meeting. But if you find four or five other small firms that are trying to do the same thing and you do that meeting with them, that's infinitely more valuable and probably more mimics what a meeting in a 21 to 50 person accounting firm would look like, right? So make those friends if you don't have them and say like, hey, y' all want to meet every Thursday at 9am and just share what we're doing. Next up, AI is becoming a strategic engine. Communication is still the number one AI use case, but the biggest growth areas signal a shift towards AI as a driver of strategy, clarity and decision making. Success hinges on AI infrastructure. Firms that are investing in AI training, policies and documented strategy are reaping the greatest rewards. Job disruption and data security fears are rising. Man, we just talked about cloud bot bolt bot, right? Like the more AI agents become good, the messier the whole AI conversation becomes. If we're starting to let these things loose in the wild to try to do work for us. Scary in some ways. In other ways. Well, you do that with humans too. And boy, they sure find ways to mess stuff up, right? I mean the, the leading cause of security breaches inside of accounting firms is phishing. Is your team being duped by an email that they thought was real? So while we're afraid of AI agents going and doing things we don't want want them to do, you kind of got that with the humans too. Last, AI is strengthening the human side of accounting. This, I'll say this report's a little too feel good for me. There are a lot of those statements that feel like a nice warm blanket and I have to, I think we have to be very careful about those statements and acknowledge they feel good. But the fact they feel good and feel catchy doesn't mean they're true. Like I It was maybe four or five months after ChatGPT came out, I was on AI CPA's town hall and what did I say? It was something like accounts won't be replaced by AI. You'll be replaced by an accountant using AI. And we've all heard like a million versions of that now, right? And I said that quote and the whole point of saying that quote was when I say that, doesn't that feel good? Like doesn't that feel comfortable? I think we have to. And I, I said I think we have to be careful with and recognize the fact that we're for whatever reason drawn to statements like that that like, make us feel safe and all that, but that doesn't make it true. So, like, we have to do the work of engaging with this stuff and learning it and all of that because oftentimes the folks who will parrot those statements are justifying a lack of effort because they hope that to be true. And then for the next 18 months, AICPACPA.com was like running with slides of me saying that quote. And I'm like, no, no, no, you like, we chopped up all the context of why I said that quote. And I would say there's, there's definitely a bit of that in this report. AI doesn't care if you're worried about losing your job or not. There's still so much trying to prove that we're better than AI. Like social posts where it's like, hey, I made this mistake and I can do this better. When it's like the whole mistake was usually like user error. Like we're trying to prove that we're better than AI when it's like, who, who are you trying to prove this to? And does AI care? And will the answer be the same in 12 months? Like, just forget all that and let's just figure out how to save time with it today. Right? Okay, this is a big data point. How do accounting professionals feel about AI compared to the last two years? That that makes this report actually way better that it's now been ongoing for three years. I'll just give you the percentage of folks who are excited. And excited is kind of one of four levels of enthusiasm. Excited being the top level of enthusiasm. In 2024 it was 40%. Sorry, 41%. In 2025 it was 63%. And 2026 it's 58%. Now that is just among accounting firm leaders. Come from 4163 to 58 dialed back a bit. Right? And I think that's because we're kind of settling into the norm. If you went back and asked folks two or three years ago what they thought we would be doing today. As we sit here talking about this, I think a lot of people would have told you that AI was much further along than it actually is. So it feels like we're sort of settling into reality now. Among non firm leaders, excitement levels are much less. So excitement among leaders was 4163,58 over the last three years. Among non firm leaders, 26, 40 and 40. And among those Non firm leaders skeptical or scared. So not excited. But they said skeptical or scared has gone from 18% to 11% to 18%. So as you might imagine, leaders much less spooked than the folks that work for the leaders. Now, if you look at firms as a whole, everyone within a firm, the only firm size that saw an increase in excitement this last year is in firms that are four to 10 staff. Every other firm size. That metric of how excited are we compared to last year either stayed the same or went down. Now, how firms are actually using AI and what tools are they using? Check this out. I'm going to read you these two paragraphs. Two of the most popular AI tools used by accounting professionals are Microsoft Copilot 53% and Google Gemini 34%. I already can't continue. Are you even an AI user if all you're using is Microsoft Copilot? People you quote unquote using Microsoft Copilot. In my experience, is somebody chucking like five or six prompts in there and going, wow, this thing sucks. And then they stop using it. I don't know that that counts as using AI. In fact, I don't know that. Like I know a single person in the wild who is a power user of Copilot who's actually cranking on that thing every single day. I know lots of people that do that with ChatGPT, but I, I know and I know plenty of people who have tried Copilot and they're like, wow, okay, I thought that would be better. But 53% of people using Copilot, 34% of people using Gemini. That's totally upside down, totally backwards. Gemini is really good. Copilot is not, not saying the data is backwards. I'm just saying it, it should be the opposite. That's just because so many shops are using Microsoft. Anyways, back to the report. Their popularity is likely because these vendors are already deeply embedded in a firm's tech stack. As a result, they're accessible, low fr, low friction, trusted, and already security tested, easy to adopt, and can leverage the context of the rest of the tools in the suite. Yes, of course it's the AI and the tools that you already use. But remember that insight from up top where that said Copilot and Gemini are the most used AI tools. Here's the next line. Unsurprisingly, ChatGPT is the most popular AI tool among accounting professionals at 87%. 80% of people in this study use ChatGPT. By any measure. I'm pretty sure that means that that is the most popular AI tool now Carbon, obviously they've got their own built in AI, right? And this is, this is actually a great commentary on sort of the accounting ecosystem as a whole is practice management systems are kind of stuck between do we want to integrate with all these third party tools that are best to breed or do we want to bring all that stuff internally and you have all these tools just under your umbrella so you look at like a canopy who is a very all in one approach to a pm. That's their take is that we want to build the best single place for everything and that will come at the expense of some integration. So for example, they're one of the only PMs that haven't integrated with other meeting transcript tools. And maybe down the road they ship their own meeting transcript tool and like maybe that's good, maybe it's half baked, I don't know. But if you look at like a, a tax intake tool right now, you know the leaders of my app recommendations are Stanford Tax, Soraban and Trust. They do a, a better version of automated intake than any of the practice management systems do. And so you can understand how the narrative from practice management systems are like no, you want the embedded version of this where all the context is. And to be clear, they're right, we do. Wouldn't it be nice if the very best AI was the AI that was in the systems that I already use and it can see into everything. The trouble is nobody has shipped that and until there's a good enough version of that AI in all of our tools, we'll keep buying off the shelf stuff. But it's that it was really, it was bizarre for like the takeaway at the, at the top of the report to say everyday tools are running the AI race. The most used AI tools, Microsoft Copilot and Gemini are those that are embedded within the platforms accounting professionals already live in. Children, cover your ears. Poppycock. 80% of accountants are using ChatGPT. That is the most used tool. Is that an argument for point solutions? The best of breed actually being the right answer rather than the embedded version? Because it's very hard to do both. I don't know. You get what I mean. Now I'm a little disappointed by this. The most the top AI use case is still communication, composing emails and fine tuning, writing. Now this is skewed by the fact that Carbon does a really good job with email management and they have like AI sort of email drafting functionality within Carbon. So half of the people that responded to the survey, they're carbon users and every single day when they write an email, they have AI tools there to help them write their emails better. So that definitely skews how people are using AI according to this report. But I can tell you what, the very first chatgpt you ever try to, you're trying to talk through a burp and you're like, nobody will know. And then you're like, they know. The very first ChatGPT video that I ever made was about like being able to write emails. And that was every so long ago. And it kind of disappoints me that we're, we're not cranking on much cooler stuff. Second biggest use case was meeting transcripts. 59% on that conversation of practice management systems. And whether they're all in one or ecosystem first. Carbon more than anybody else I think has come out and been very clear that they're like, we want to be ecosystem first. They have very good integrations with meeting transcript tools. They've got, I think they've already got integrations with Abacore and Vinyl and they're working on an integration with Ping. And so among carbon users you probably see then a greater likelihood likelihood of them picking up meeting transcript tools because they have an integration with carbon. Third top use case, 58% of folks are using AI for research, brainstorming and problem solving. How is that number not bigger? Maybe these aren't tax shops. I know only half of them are US firms, but if you do any element of tax in the U.S. oh my gosh, is AI research your best friend? So good? Even just ChatGPT or Gemini is so, so good. Blue Jays almost certainly the leader in the category just for AI tax research. But man, I love how is anybody in your firm not using AI for tax research? Like, it has its failings for sure, but so does the junior that you send off to do a research project. Like you compare my gosh, I mean I started doing tax work when I was 18 and the projects I'd get thrown where they want me to research some deep nuanced thing and all these different sources and I could sink three hours into this and try to come back to my manager with a summary that was vaguely useful. The fact is you can get something better than what I was producing there in 90 seconds. Now like, and then the follow up prompt of go deeper, look more into this source. Like AI, like research will never look the same again. In fact, like more sort of just concrete decision making. Like, like that being done by AI is probably the future that we're headed to. So like man, I this research figure surely needs to be bigger. At least if you're in the US and doing any tax work. If you do any 1040 work, you know you are about to be deluged with client information. My gosh, 1040 intake, the actual intaking of the documents are going to actually consume up to a third of your team's tax season. And that is where this episode sponsors Sorban. It is a big opportunity to save time on your 1040 work. One of the things we've been hammering on most on this on this podcast for the last two years is the really cool tax workflow developments that are happening. I I probably personally know over 100 firms that are very happy Sorban users. Not an exaggeration. We're getting into busy season. It is not too late. You need to look at the new AI 1040 intake automation solutions. If you haven't yet, Sorban, it is at the top of my leaderboards for really good solutions for this. So if you don't have that yet, here's what I want you to do next. Pull over to the side of the road, put the hazards on, get your phone out, go down to the show notes, click the link for Sorban to learn more. Can we talk about a very real problem with most offshore staffing solutions? I actually faced this one myself is the staffing groups that serve as sort of like a middleman, a middles person between you and your staff. Like, you pay the middleman and then they pay part of that to the staff person. Did you know in most setups there's actually no way to get that staff person out of that agreement. If you're like, I'm actually tired of paying half the monthly cost to the middleman. Like, half the money I'm paying is going to this company, not going to the person can just work with that person directly. Most of those contracts, there's actually no way to get that person out of that employment agreement. That is why this episode sponsored Team up exists. They're an offshore staffing solution where you just, you work directly with that person. Team up, they're basically just going to serve as the recruiter and then after that there's no ongoing fees. Half of the money is not going to somebody else. You're just working directly with a talented human being. In the Philippines, the progression, honestly, for most accounting firms is they'll hire, you know, three to five folks offshore, have good luck, and they're like, okay, what does it look like to go to 10 or 20 and they're like I don't want half the money I'm paying to go to this other group anymore. I just want to pay these people directly. That's what Team up will help you do. Finding somebody great for a one time flat recruiting fee. Actually founded by a former bookkeeping owner too, if that's something you want to explore. Learn more about Team up down in the link in the show notes top three emerging AI use cases 53% say SOPs, policies and document process documentation. A big percentage driver of that is in all likelihood Loom, the little kind of video recorder where it records your screen and it records you talking. Really cool feature Loom does now is in addition to that video, it takes your transcript and sort of tries to turn the transcript into this step by step sort of text SOP document. So imagine that's boosting that 43% number. Second emerging AI use case marketing content 29% just heard from Karen Rayburn last week around the really cool ways that her marketing agency for accounting firm uses AI. And then last I love this one 23% data visualization and reporting. The description here is turn complex data into clear visuals and summaries for clients and internal decisions decision making I suspect. I mean the cool version of this is if people are using AI for infographics which by the way Google Gemini, their nano Banana image model which if you just go to Google Gemini, if you ask it to make an image behind the scenes, it's using that nano banana image model. It does infographics really good like it does like visualizations. You can even give it like a reference image and say like make it in this style. But here's the data and what I want you to present. It's pretty darn impressive if you're going to actually put client data into it, either anonymize it so there is no names or no client identities on there. Generally anonymized information is not considered sensitive information. So if you don't have the like paid Gemini plan, know that in all likelihood your inputs are training the model. So if you are going to use it that way, anonymize the information. Otherwise if you're using the paid Google workspace stuff, your business inputs, your prompts aren't trained into the model. But data visual visualizations with AI, that's a pretty cool use case. I suspect the bulk of this 23% though is people using AI to generate executive summaries which is like, I don't know, kind of interesting. But in some Cases like lazy. I'll tell you what, what's more interesting to me than generating a paragraph long executive summary is using AI to generate insights. So generate a whole bunch of insights of what it sees or might see in the data and let me go through that list and tick those off and then like, let me build an executive summary from what I think is interesting. Because the most interesting thing to potentially come out of an AI executive summary is something that you may not have noticed yourself. Otherwise you just write it yourself. Right? So I'm actually more interested use AI to generate insights or even potential insights. And I can be like, yeah, that's cool. Yeah, no, I don't think that's right. And let me cruise through 25 of those. I think that's a much more interesting usage of AI around reporting. Okay. A whopping 98% of accounting professionals are using AI, leaving a slim majority of stragglers. That seems high to me. Almost seems too high now. Around the frequency with, which, with which it is used, over half the industry is now using it several times a day. 55% or daily? 74%. That's wild. 74% of accountants using AI every single day. Firms that use AI have already begun to see the payoff. 70% report improved efficiency and productivity. Again, I think this skews a bit because half these folks are carbon users. And carbon has built in AI in the platform is a quote here. AI allows us to automate and make repetitive tasks more streamlined, which then allows us to focus on more value add services. No, it doesn't. It just, this has been, this is like there's certain things that we all parrot over and over again that are just not true in most cases. Like we can use technology to automate the low value tasks. Like this is what people have been saying for decades. AI right now is automating tasks at all levels. Arguably, AI is actually best at technical review. Not like prep, not like putting documents together and all of that. And human nature, when you automate something, be it with AI or be it with tech, tech vendors have always said, we'll automate this low value stuff so you can focus on higher value work. That is not the, the nature of humans, let alone accountants. If we automate something, we're just going to do one more of that thing. We're going to serve one more client. Like our natural state is not to go, ooh, glad we got more efficient at that tax return. Hey, instead of that one tax return unit of time, instead of doing another tax return, I want to go do something new. Now there are some people who will do that. And that's why around change management, if the goal is to save a specific amount of time and apply it in a better, more valuable way, you have to be really careful about that. You have to measure it and then actually make sure, are we now spending that time on something better? Because the natural state of everyone will just be to do more of the same, not to then go do something different. So aspirationally, sure, you could save time and go do something better, but that's not how most people work. That's not how most accounting firms are. That's why when we talk here about proposal optimization and three tier proposals, my take on a three tier proposal is not selling a gold package where you're doing all these gymnastics and CFO work and all this big brain stuff at the gold package that only you do. My version of the gold package is selling the same thing that we're selling in the bronze package, just with a more premium service delivery, just with easier access to you or a higher level of expertise person that they get to talk to. That's not doing more work, it's doing the same work in a more premium way. Because I would rather sell the heck out of what we already do and what's already in our wheelhouse at a higher price than sell some new, higher ticket thing that we don't even know how to deliver yet and probably requires all of my time. That sounds worse to me than selling a whole bunch of what we're already comfortable with at a better price. Now, one number here that I thought was interesting, 21% of respondents are interest, are excited that I could increase opportunities for mergers and acquisitions and private equity in the next one to two years. What, what does that even mean? 21% of respondents. All right, first of all, why Is it only 21%? Does that mean 79% are not excited for how AI could increase opportunities in M and A? If you talk to M and A and pe, they're like, oh yeah. In fact, I heard one guy that does like big roll ups, like 100, 150 million and up. And he's like, well, what we're looking forward to is in the next two or three years when you have firms that are just sort of AI native firms, the roll ups get much simpler because the hardest part of a roll up right now is getting people into the same systems and doing work the same way and all that. So basically, once we can bypass the humans with the AI, it's going to be Way easier to mush all these accounting firms together, which, if that were possible, that's probably true. But if you don't need any humans to run your accounting firm, you might have bigger issues. But through the lens of like, will this make my accounting firm more profitable? Probably. I don't know if it makes accounting firms more profitable or not. I think the more likely thing to make us more profitable is just more scarcity. They're not being as many accountants and not being as many accounting firms, because the same thing that could make us more profitable could also devalue the perceived value of what we do. So does AI factor into M and A? I don't know. I think the people that are further removed from the actual accounting work think, think AI is going to be more impactful in the immediate term than it will be. And I mean, it's interesting. I talked to people in the tech space. I talked with, like, the people in the ecosystem around that are sort of around accountants. And those folks are always more concerned about AI than I find the actual accountants are. And this, I would say this is true of most professional domains is the people that are most familiar with the nuance and the complexity of what they do are the people who are the least afraid of AI. It's what makes it very easy to go, yeah, that stuff over there, surely we can, we can replace that with AI, Right? But then when it's your own job, you're like, no, no, no, no. AI can never do this. A quote here. To me, AI is a very good junior member of the team who's always available and very well trained. Honestly, I think that's the best, maybe the easiest mental framework we can have around how to use AI is it's imperfect. Just like how, you know, our human employees are imperfect. And you know folks that can get a lot out of human employee employees. But then you also know folks that are like, it will take more time for me to train this person. I may as well just do it myself. And they say that until the end of time. And they never learn how to scale their impact with the help of other humans. AI adoption, I think, is very similar where it's a new skill to learn how do I lean on the best of what AI does and work around sort of the things that it struggles with. You could for sure say right now, well, here's all the things that it sucks at, so I'm not going to use it. But then we're not learning to operate alongside of it and get the most out of it. Last Bit on training. Less than half of firms, 46% are investing in training in their teams. And as you may imagine the firms that invest in training, the excitement level in those firms is much, much higher. Train AI training for small accounting firms I've thought about this a lot. As you can imagine, it's a really tough nut to crack. People point to my YouTube videos of like, oh, if you want to learn ChatGPT for accounts, you need to go watch Jason's stuff. And I appreciate that, but I mean we've only published like three ChatGPT videos in the last six months and that is not enough content to like really get people comfortable with AI. What you need is a steady diet. And honestly, I don't know what the solution to small firm AI training is. One thing that we've batted around for quite a while is maybe like a just a super high production monthly webinar I.e. aI training for small accounting firms. That kind of becomes a standing appointment that you have with your team. You know, I talk about saying you need to meet every single week. And for some firms that's realistic. Other firms, they're just not making that happen. So my mind goes to can I run a version of that meeting for, for you or even give you the resources to let the leader run that meeting themselves? And I could show them a couple use cases they can bring to the meeting and just make that ongoing meeting a little easier. So maybe that looks like me hosting a monthly webinar and you tune into that with your team and then maybe it's weekly resources between those monthly webinars that let you then run a meeting with your team every single week if you want to. Maybe there's a short video, maybe there's just, you know, an explainer of some resources, but just trying to make it easier for you either if you're solo to like get that sort of drip of learning every month, every week. And if you run a team just some like made for you resources to make it easier for you to get in the habit of doing that with your team every single week. Let me know what you think of that. It's something we've thought about a lot. We got a lot going on right now as we're about to talk about workshops. And so that's a hard thing for me to commit to, but that's the closest thing I can get to like what is a industry wide problem right now of how do we train people on AI inside of small accounting firms outside of going out and like hiring a coach for Every single firm, which honestly is very expensive, and there's not an abundance of great ones right now that have a deep understanding of how small firms work. But enough about all that. If you have more thoughts on all that drop, please do drop comments. Shoot me a message. But let's talk about workshops, baby. Now. Last fall, we did these 14 workshops in the U.S. it was a huge roll of the dice. I didn't know if you would come. It was an investment of about a half a million dollars where we didn't know if brands would sponsor, if people would come and buy tickets. And I would say by. By every metric besides those that are financial, I think our first round of events was a really big, big success. We had over a thousand accounting firms that came out. I met so many of you, and most of the people in those rooms are podcast listeners. And it's so cool and so weird in other ways to, to like, turn up to a local event. This is people that live in your town and look around and see 80 other people who are podcast listeners. And you're like, you work. You tell me where you live. Like you were. You're just down the street from me. It's super cool to be able to do that in a local sort of setting. My whole hypothesis for these events is the trouble right now for most accounting leaders is you can go to a couple of conferences a year and get all hyped up and, and, and get all these good ideas, but then you come back to your team and you are like, oh, we're going to change this, we're going to change this, we're going to change this. And everybody in your firm is like, just, just give him a week or two. He'll cool off. He does this every single time. Every time they go to accounting firm conference, she comes back and she's like, oh, we got to do all these things. Just give him a week or two for now, can you please just go respond to the emails we sent you when you were out and let's circle back to this. And then nothing changes until you go out to another conference and you get all hopped up again and then you come back again. Nothing happens if you are change management blocked by your team today. What you don't need is more ideas. In fact, more ideas can just frustrate you even more because you're unable to realize what you now see as possible because you're blocked by your team. So what's the solution? I can tell you what I thought it was when I ran my firm. I thought the solution was, oh, I just got to get my team out to these conferences so they can be subject to the same context that I am and hear all these things, and then they will come back and they will be equally inspired. Problem solved. The trouble is, all accounting conferences right now are made for leaders, and they're all in these destination cities and they cost one to $3,000. And so for me to fly even, you know, four members of my leadership team to Las Vegas and do a three or four day conference there, that is 2400 bucks per head just for the conference ticket. It's a humongous investment. And if I've got 30 more people back at the office, like, that hardly solves the problem, right? So what's the solution? You run local events at a bunch of cities and you make them cheap so you can come out for a half day, you can bring the whole team with you. It won't break the bank, and you're able to have this shared experience together again, it's only a half day. We're only losing a half day of billable hours, right? Like, it's not a huge investment. A guy in Austin, I was actually earlier last year, I was at an event in Austin, something that Canopy hosted, and he came up afterwards. He's like, man, I wish I would have brought my partner. This is really good. I listen to the podcast. I'm kind of just trying to bring him around to your way of thinking about how to run firms. We hosted one of our workshops in Austin and they're in like the front row is this guy, his partner, and like four members of their team comes up afterwards. He's like, they're like, jacked. They're thinking about, like, how to do proposals different. Like, they're doing all this stuff. That's the dream, right? Where they're plugged into it and they're coming up with the exciting ideas. They're coming to you and they're like, oh man, we, we think we could do this. X, Y and Z. Can we go and work on this? And you're like, yeah, I guess. Like, just let me know, Let me know what you got when you're a little further down the path with it. Like, that's the dream is actually like a groundswell of excitement and enthusiasm around what you do. And it's the whole point of these events. And it's why if you run a team, I want you to bring your team as well. Some of the best feedback we got was just, this was such a great opportunity for me. To expose the things I'm excited about to the rest of my team. The format of the events is kind of 5050 programming for me, but then also breakouts that you're doing with other local people. Like 60 to 70% of the folks that went said the highlight of the event was all the people they got to meet, which is really weird for accountants because this is not a natural thing for accountants. And so over the course of doing those 14 events, we worked out how to make this as not awkward as possible. Like we are placing you into groups because we know there's a lot of weird versions of that where it's going to be uncomfortable to introduce yourself to that new person. And so we, we sort of devised the least cringe way to do this so people can just turn up, have a good time, meet cool folks, get to have kind of an in first in person podcast experience as well along the way. And then it ends with a dinner which is optional. There's a, there's a ticket with dinner, a ticket without dinner. Dinner is very good. You get to sort of spend even more time with the people that you want to spend more time with. And then folks leave. But bar was opening, I think the bar last round opened up at like 4:30. And so my last block of programming, the bar had already opened and so the like the vibe was changing before the programming had ever even ended. You could, in fact you could get CPE with a drink in your hand. Something that I had never experienced before myself, but super fun, Only a half day, not a huge time commitment, trying to keep things cheap. Although we'll have to charge more for tickets this time because I mean tickets last time were a hundred bucks without dinner, 200 bucks with the dinner. The dinner was over 100 bucks per head. So like we're basically running the events with ticketing at cost or below cost. And then sponsors were like the only way we could dig ourselves out from that. All that being said, we still lost well over 100 grand on that last round of events. So we're going to do even more this time. Putting up honestly it looks like like a million bucks, which it's probably terrible idea but it is a bet that you all will show up and come out to these events. So let me tell you the cities and the dates. A lot of cities were returning to some brand new cities, which is extra scary because anytime you go to a new city, you don't know like is anybody going to come, come to this city or not? Kicking off on May 4th in Columbus Ohio haven't didn't do Columbus last time. In fact this is. What do they call the, what do they call this part of America? The something belt. I don't know where I think this counts as Midwest. We didn't do anything anywhere near Columbus last year. So most of these events you got a lot of. About half the folks are local people but then the other half are like driving and flying in from all over the place. So we will get some folks to Columbus, a good number from Toronto, we'll get a good number from Pittsburgh which is a few hour drive. Cleveland which is a few hour drive. Probably pull some from Indianapolis as well, some from Detroit. I was shocked the number of folks that drove from Detroit to Chicago last event run. But we're kicking off May 4th in Columbus. Already heard from a number of Columbus folks who wanted to get us out. If you're in any of these cities as I share them, pop a comment down below. Tickets are not up yet. We're about two weeks out from tickets going up. I'll share that on the podcast as soon as they do because there will be a ticket pre sell where it's. Where it's a little discounted. We want you to buy your tickets early so that we have a good idea of how big of a venue we need, how much food we need to buy and all that stuff. The earlier we know that the better. It's that time of year, the time of year where your hosted tax software starts grinding to a just to a halt because everybody's trying to use their computers at the same time. This is because when you host your apps with most providers, like your tax software provider, the servers you're accessing, they're shared servers. Everybody and their mom are logging into those things trying to get stuff done at the same time. The solution is today's sponsor, Verito Man. Verdo is going to give you your own private server where all your tax stuff, even any hosting needs, QuickBooks, desktop, whatever you got, it's hosted on a server that only your access. So it doesn't matter how many people are hammering that server, the only people hammering it are you. It's easier than it sounds to get started. That can actually transition you in just a weekend and especially as we're heading into busy season gang, this is the time to do it. Bardo. Vastly cheaper than the hosting you get from your tax software provider and faster like kind of a no brainer. Now Verito can also do your whisp, the little security thing you gotta do. If you do tax work in the US that can also be your entire IT department. In fact, the cost of hosting your apps and them being your IT department is less than Thomson Reuters Virtual Office. A lot of people are very happy Verito users. In fact, the average response time from Barado Support if you come to them with an issue is now less than 60 seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Like I said, now's the time to do it before we get too far into busy season. To learn more about Verto, check out the link down in the show notes. 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 Maker's 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, we, 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 more. It's like really? Because my job is to do the bills and if there's an extra zero that slips in there, I'm going to 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. 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. Okay. May 4th, we're in Columbus for the first time. May 5th, we're in Chicago, returning to Chicago. Last time we had about 75 folks out in Chicago. Was a super, super fun crowd. The next day, May6, Minneapolis. Buddy. First time we're doing it in Minneapolis. I did an event with Canopy in Minneapolis last year, but we've never done our own workshop. These are our events that we've built from the ground up in Minneapolis. Super excited to have Minneapolis folks out. I know you all are going to show up because for whatever reason, we've got a whole bunch of people around Minneapolis. Okay. The next week, May 11, Miami for the first time. No idea how that one's going to go. I know we've got some folks in Miami, but we'll see the next day on the 12th, we're in Orlando. So if you are, you know, Tampa, West Palm beach, like Jacksonville, that's a little far, right? But everyone sort of south of Jacksonville. I want to try to get you all to either Orlando or Miami. The next day, May 13th, we are in Charlotte, North Carolina for the first time. I know we'll get a good number at Charlotte because a lot of folks Charlotte barely didn't make the cut last time. The next day, May 14th, we're returning to Atlanta. And the day after that, May 15th in Nashville. Had a great turnout in Nashville last time, which surprised me. So that second week is going to be a grind that we did. We're doing five days on that second week. Coming off a three day week the week before. We could do a whole other podcast on the logistics of how do you run events on back to back days. It's wild. We've got 10 or 12 people traveling. It's quite the operation. It's way more expensive to do back to back days. But the reality is I got a family and that's the only way I'm going to do this. I want to be able to hit as many cities as possible so that you can come to something that feels close ish to you. And as soon as you Add a break day between the events. Like it blows up the whole schedule. Okay, we got a week off the tour, then we are back. It's actually the week of Memorial Day. We're back the Tuesday after Memorial Day, May 26th in Austin, Texas. Had an awesome turnout in Austin last year. It's the only Texas event unfortunately. So Houston, San Antonio, Dallas. Folks would love to have you out there. We could only do one in Texas and so Austin, I know it's not perfect for you, but it is the most central. The next day, May 27th, we're in Oklahoma City. Returning to Oklahoma City. We had an amazing event there. It's definitely the smallest market on the tour. Had a good number of Dallas folks that went up for that one. The next day, May 28th in Denver, Colorado for the first time, that was going to be a banger. I got no concerns. I know Denver folks will show up. Then next, May 29th, Phoenix. Phoenix. Last year crushed. Phoenix was so good. Probably 80 people out. The venue was amazing. We're at the Biltmore. Like the weather was perfect. But it's going to be almost June so it might be getting toasty. The next week we're doing a short one. June 2nd, we're in Washington D.C. d.C. Event went great last year. The next day we're in New York city in Manhattan. June 3rd, great New York City turnout last year. Tribeca Film Fest is happening at the same time, unfortunately. Couldn't really avoid that. And then the next day, June 4th, back in Boston. Boston, but we ended the tour with Boston last time and Boston was awesome. Now a couple weeks break after that because we've got scaling new heights in Orlando and then AICPA Engage. We're back for the last week of the tour beginning on June 22nd. Salt Lake City. Haven't done Salt Lake City before. I did a dinner in Salt Lake City last year. That was pretty good. Gang, I want to see you back on June 22nd. Like I said, tickets are going to be out in a couple of weeks. So right now just save the date and drop a comment and once tickets are up, we can. I'll put that out so that you're in on the pre sale. The next day, June 23rd, we're going back to Seattle. Seattle last tour was the biggest turnout we had. 105 people came out for Seattle, an event that was announced with like three weeks notice and scrapped together. And 105 people went out and the vibes. Seattle was probably the most unhinged of all of the events that we did if you're there, you know what I mean? And the dinner and all that, it was just amazing. It was, it was phenomenal. Next day, June 24, we are in Portland again. Day after that, we are back in San Francisco. After that, June 26to the tour ends in Los Angeles, specifically Orange county, because I want to pull up some of you San Diego folks and there's just, there's no good place to run, no good way to run an event in LA that doesn't annoy a bunch of people. You put it downtown and everybody's annoyed. At least running it in Orange county. It's just the people in the Valley that are annoyed. Like I said, come and hang out. Lots of solo folks come hang out too. It's not just folks with team. It's not just folks with teams. Come and hang out. Bring your team and the event feedback. Last time we asked folks to score the event 1 out of 10 average scores across the entire tour of 14 cities was 9.1. Almost everyone said, we cannot wait for you to come back. And we're going to bring even more people. We want more people to see this and experience this. Just like cool, more exciting, positive perspective on the future of small accounting firms. And amazing stories come out of these events and the connections that you make from people going to work for new firms to people launching firms to people finding referral partners, because these are all local folks, like you're meeting local folks who are podcast listeners and those are such incredible, like high context connections to make. Right now, 20 cities in the U.S. outside the U.S. i'll be honest, no plans right now to do our own stuff because it is logistically so much harder. I mean, Toronto, for example, not a quick flight or not a short, what, Not a long flight to Toronto. And we've got tons of people in Toronto. I know we probably get a couple hundred people out for Toronto, but when we're running these events on like back to back days, the logistical headache of doing something outside the U.S. like, that's a lot. Like there's already a tremendous amount of admin and compliance headaches with going on tour in 20 cities. You tax Pro. Yeah, so am I. It's not great. Super excited to be able to share this with you. Obviously it's a huge effort. We've got an amazing team of people that work really, really hard on these events. Want to see you there, want to see you in person. But enough of all that. We got a mailbag to get through. Let's do it. Mailbag, Mailbag, Mailbag. Mailbag. This segment is called Mailbag. These questions come from social media. They come from podcast comments. They come from DMS on social media. They come from email. Send me an email, Jason. On firms.com. they come from text. Send me a text. 1-516-980-4968 My text buddy. They've been popping off the last few days. Do the weird thing. Send me a text. I was catching up on a bunch of old text. Oh, it was funny. I was catching up with some texts that folks had sent me like two or three months ago. Responded to one person and they had been like, hey, is this actually Jason? I had a couple questions I want to bounce past or run bounce off of you. And I respond like three months later. And I just said, yep. And they responded right away and they're like, I'm really sorry, can you remind me, Jason, where did we meet? And then they immediately sent a message and they're like, oh, this is stats. Yeah, it's actually me. I wish I had an AI that could respond to these texts. We'll get there. I've shared before, like, we're trying to open up all these channels just to, like, have more direct access with folks. But as that grows and we're already well beyond the point of like, what? I can just manage myself. But it is a fun challenge to figure out, like, how do you pull the team actually into helping people directly and sort of extending the coaching we can offer to everybody pretty much for free without doing it in a way that sucks, like pretending to be me or something like that. Like, I'm super against that. I've, you know, I've got an assistant that manages my inbox and all that. We never send emails as to look as if they are from me. And we'll never do that on any channels. But that's a fun machine that we're in the process of building right now. Okay, when you coach firms to cut C and D clients, do you usually recommend raising prices first or letting go of low value clients right away? This is such a good question. And the trap here, what most of us do, is we just try to price those people out. We're like, I know I've got C and D clients, but I'm going to raise my prices a bunch and they're going to leave and I'll be fine. If you've ever done this, you probably ran into the same problem that almost everybody does. Nobody leaves, or at least not as many people leave as you think will leave. And now you are Even further up a crick without a paddle, because you've told these people you'll now do their work for a much higher price. And you then have to go back around and be like, oh, hey, no, sorry, we actually can't do your work. So raising prices is never, can never be the only tool that you use to let clients go. And let's be real with ourselves, gang. Oftentimes we do this because. Because it is emotionally easier than you having to be the one to break up with them. You want them to break up with you because that's not as emotionally taxing on you. Don't do that. Here's the solution. If you're going to increase prices across your client base, you just don't do it all at once. So you do it in batches, say, you know, chunks of 20% of clients or something like that. And you start with the clients that you most want to keep. So we're going to do the stinkers, the folks you think are the C and the clients last. But you send out the first batch with those price increases and you see how it goes. If it's a bloodbath, then aren't we glad we only sent that out to 20%? Right? And we adjust from there. If everybody says yes, which is very common, you haven't gone far enough. And for all the people who will do the big price increase and push it out to 100% of clients, and then everybody says yes, think about how much money that just cost us by not actually optimizing this and not actually finding the threshold where people do start to leave. That is the profit optimized threshold. So start by sending this stuff out like 20% at a time. See how it goes. That totally de risks this whole scary price increase thing. And then by the time you're the last 20 or 40% of your clients, you know, has anybody left yet? And if nobody's left yet, well, then you probably should have done the price increase more. But if nobody's left yet, then you can be comfortable in cutting those clients, you know, the last 40%, 20%, 10%, whatever it is, everybody else is already on the bus. So, you know, you can let those people go. And so that's why we leave the C and D clients to the end. This approach totally de risks what is otherwise this huge, like, gambit of can we actually increase prices across the board 30% or will everybody leave? You do it in chunks and you save the worst clients to the end. So that when you make the decision of whether you're going to let them come with you next year or not. You already know how many people have left. Great question. I can tell you I did that wrong. I did what I just described. We did a huge price increase, minimum 30, 40% price increase across everyone. Many people, a number of people got as much as a 300 or 400% price increase and they pretty much all stayed and we made a lot more money, but we were still working too much. All right, next up. This is in reference to another mailbag question that we had. Here's the question said what they said about anyone who can basically do high level work in a firm are capable of running their own firm due to insane demand. They heard this and they're saying, I'm trying to run my own firm and I'm just not seeing the level of demand that everyone else says they're finding. I'm having trouble finding clients at all. Once I get a lead, I can close them, but finding leads has been nearly impossible. I don't know if it's just my advertising budget being so small or what. There's a know that there's people on both ends of this spectrum. You know, yesterday or the last time we did the podcast, a couple days ago, we shared the story of somebody that had grown to like, what was it, 180 grand first year, 240 the next year? Something like that. Recognize that the stories that we're going to see in the wild are going to be the success stories. I didn't do a roast my firm on someone that's like, hey, been trying to build an accounting firm for three years and I only have $20,000 in clients. I haven't done that roast a firm. Maybe we should. We actually haven't had any submissions to that end. Like, but I mean, I met, I met somebody on the workshop tour last year that has grown to like 2.6 million in under three years. Like, there are people out there with wild, wild growth stories. But there's also folks. I remember in Nashville, somebody raised their hand and said the same thing. They're like, I'm hearing all this abundance and they're like, I'm not feeling it. I'm struggling to find these people the truth. There could be a bunch of things like, like, you know, some of this might be, is there something wrong with me? Like, is it something wrong with how I have these conversations? Am I not giving people confidence? That may not be your situation because you're saying once I get a lead, I can close them. But finding leads has been Nearly impossible. We just got to look at what are we doing to find leads. And the North Star here always just needs to be. I need to be visible, as visible as possible. Unless people don't see me and know what I do and hear about what I do, they won't even know that I exist. So step number one is being visible in as many places as possible. Step number two, and this is kind of contradictory to how it may feel when you're first building a client list. Step number two is you have to be speaking to a specific person. If you're shouting into the void and you're like, I do accounting. And you're like, new and all that and maybe not great at how you do that shout, nobody's going to care. If you are saying, I do accounting. For vet clinics that are expanding into multi office, that's actually way easier. The bar is way lower for how good your outreach has to be when it's that specific. And I know we're afraid of saying no to anything and getting specific and that actually throwing out a bunch of work you could potentially get. But believe it or not, that is the easier way to find work, because then you can go direct to the other people that have the same audience and are, you know, sending a newsletter to those people or are consultants for those people. Like, when you're. When your approach is much more targeted, it is way easier to find folks, believe it or not, if you're trying to get a more specific type of person. So why are you not able to get leads? I don't know. Like, I don't have enough context here. But usually the issues are we're trying to go too wide because we won't. We will take anything and everything, but that's actually a very hard way to find people. Or we're just not showing up. Like, we are professionally invisible. We're not on LinkedIn. We're not on social media platforms. We're not on blog. Somebody sent me a text the other day. They just landed a 10 or $20,000 client from a blog post or a social media post or something like that. Like, show up in person at things, do a podcast interview. Like, the more visible we are, the more people know that you exist. You look at somebody like me that does what I do. I've been very visible for like the last four years still every single. And folks like y' all who listen to the podcast will bump into people and be like, how do you not know Jason? Like, you haven't. How have you not seen his stuff? We still, when we published the stuff that we do, we pretend that or assume that this is the first time anyone will ever see you, like even me, after doing this four years. And this is actually true. We have it in the data on the main YouTube channel, which is kind of our biggest funnel where the biggest number of new eyeballs will see us. Half of, on most videos, on average, half of the people that watch that video, that's the first time they've ever seen anything from me. And I've done hundreds of videos over the last four years. Think about that. Every single video, half of the people that tune into that video, that will be the first time they ever see me. It's the reason why every time I kick off the podcast, like after the intro, I say, like, hey, if you're new here, like, welcoming the Jason Firms podcast, we talk about this, talk about that the world is way bigger than our monkey brains can comprehend. And as long as we are just like, perpetually, annoyingly putting ourselves out there, like, why does the world need a one hour accounting firm podcast three days a week? Surely that's too much, right? That's what your brain will be telling you. But the world is so big that if you just keep showing up every single day, you will continue finding new people every single day. And this is a situation where you can win on volume. Like, like so much of my business has just been built on doing more volume than anybody else is willing to do. We did more video volume, so we got good at videos. More social media volume. Like, how many accounting people have you seen that have been on social media every single week the last three or four years? Like, I've been there and it's not fun a lot of times. Podcast, we're closing in on 600 episodes of the podcast, the workshops. We're doing 20 workshops in May and June and probably another 20 in November and December. It's a volume thing. It's not because we're better. It's a volume thing. Quantity has equality all its own. So think about where all the places that I can show up so that I'm unavoidable. I brought a lot of clients into my current firm where I'm a minority partner, but I'm worried if I go independent, my clients will somehow be blocked from coming with me. Great question. I have good referral partners and it's important to maintain those relationships. Any advice? So you are working for an accounting firm and you've brought in a bunch of clients. The sad truth here, that doesn't mean Those clients are yours because you are under the employee of the firm. This is part of your job is to like bring in work and service this work. Now in a perfect world, you can go to the boss and have a frank conversation and be like, here's the deal, I'm going to leave. And I just want to find the least disruptive way that I can do this for both of us. And recognize the first time you have that conversation, they're not going to be happy. And that conversation probably can't and shouldn't go anywhere immediately. They probably need a couple of days to cool off. But one mistake we can make here is we go to like the very dramatic like litigious path straight away when first things first, like we need to approach this and be like, can we be adults about it? Because the best outcome here is if you can leave with those clients and pay for those clients at some sort of discounted rate. You know, so if a full normal rate is 20% of fees for five years, is there a version where you can get to 10 or 15% of fees and they will let you leave with their blessing? Most people are reasonable and will do some version of that. I worked for a guy that's like, you signed a non compete. I mean that wasn't defensive at all. And basically if you left it was like you're hosed. And it was, it was ridiculous. And honestly nobody really took it all that seriously. So not everybody will be that, I don't know amicable about it, but give it a try. That's the place to start. If that doesn't work, like you just need to pull some representation in then and like understand what your options are and understand how to go about that separation and as above board of a way as possible. And like this is where an attorney will be tremendously helpful to you is you know the things to say, you know the things to not say. And like if people are referring you work, in all likelihood they're still going to refer you work. You just got to be really careful how you communicate the fact that you are leaving. Because there are things that you can say that will get you in trouble if you start trying to like pull those clients over to your new thing. So try to go about the above board path and most people will be cool and they can get to something reasonable. Only fall back to the harder path if it's necessary. But most important is if this is a thing that you know you're going to do, most people wait too long to do it. Very commonly they'll say I I wish I would have done it a year earlier, three years earlier. So if you know that this is the path that you're on, all of this stuff that you're struggling with, it's all going to happen. It's all going to go one way or another. But wouldn't you rather it happen now or after tax season than three years from now? So like that's the biggest thing here is just start that path if you know that's what your path is. Hey real quick. Some very cool new updates were just shipped by one of the leading practice management systems in my app Recommendations this episode Sponsor Financial Sense. So if you do bookkeeping work or client accounting work, this is worth checking out. They're building some month end close automation features into the practice management system. So stuff like handling uncategorized transactions, flagging transactions without payees, without class, without location expenses and bills without attachments, inconsistent expense classification, large transactions. It will now flag all of these items inside of a month end Close in Financial Sense because it's syncing the actual Ledger data from QuickBooks Online to Auto flag these items. Really cool. Some stuff that you've only seen to date really in like dedicated workflow tools. Financial Sense now, which is a practice management system, is pulling some of the best of that workflow into the platform so you can do it all in one place. Pretty cool stuff. And I got a discount code for you. If you sign up for their team or scale and annual plans with two or more users, you can use code Jason10 to get 10% off. That is financial sense doing some cool bookkeeping automation stuff. To learn more about them, check out the link down in the show notes. Hey real quick. If you use Microsoft Outlook or Gmail in your accounting firm, pay real close attention to what I'm going to tell you next. This podcast sponsor Missive it is email like you have always wanted. It is a team first approach to managing email. Would you believe me if I told you Microsoft Outlook which came out. I think we worked it out. It was pre middle school for me. Microsoft Outlook it is not the best like email platform for accounting firms. That may come as a shock to you and when we're spending a huge percentage of our time on email. Accountants on average in my polling spend one to two hours a day just managing email. It means the tool you use for email is incredibly important. Missive over 500 accounting firms have moved their email to missive. We did a demo of missive on my YouTube channel a few months back. People freaking flipped. In fact, I made a social post, a sponsored social post. A couple days later, over 50 people opted to hop in on a demo like a little show and tell that we were doing the next week from an accounting firm that's been running all their email on MISV for the last few years. Some practice management systems will manage your email inbox, but most of them, all they do is connect to it, which is great. So I can see the emails associated with my client records, but it's not a like productive place to be composing and managing email by any stretch of the imagination. Missive it is the inbox tool for teams built from the ground up to make you more productive with this stuff and give you a path to like delegating email work for the first time too. I'm a big fan of the tool. To learn more about Missive, check out that Demo on my YouTube channel. Then head on down to the show Notes to learn more. Next up, I watched a lot of your YouTube videos, studied the comparison you prepared last year about practice management systems, and still I hate them all. I'm leaning towards Financial Sense, but plagued by paralysis, fearful of making the wrong choice. Carbon is ugly as sin. Easy now and any time savings I might realize, I'm sure we'll get swallowed up by trying to understand its unnecessary complexity. Should I do Financial Sense or should I wait until next year 20 till 2027? I wouldn't say Carbon's any ugly. Like accounting apps are not super beautiful as it is. I wouldn't say Carbon's any uglier than Financial Sense. I would say they're both. They're both probably 7.5. I would honestly my take this is very subjective. I actually probably say canopies and 8.5. You know, practice CS is like a four tax dome, taxonomics, probably an eight. Now these numbers don't matter all that much. Oh, count. Count is like a three. Great personality though. Count does a lot of things now that doesn't really matter. Like the functionality matters more. Some people can't be helped. Some. Some we got to recognize this about ourselves. Like our bar is so high. We're like I hate everything. None of this is good. As my pad of paper, we actually, we had somebody that said that last episode right. Getting the solution here, as with so many things, is do you know any other firms that use these platforms? You just got to be able to see into their world and understand how they do this stuff. And when you see that and you understand how they use it, kind of if that's what you're chasing, that's what you want. Then your reality become their reality becomes your reality. You're not going to know how to do it until you've done it. So there's a degree of just like you have to commit. And yes, it will be a learning process, but it's very hard to build an accounting firm beyond you if you don't have a practice management system. Like it just becomes a mess very quickly. So go out and build those relationships, come out to a workshop, meet some local people who use all these platforms. Like I can say, who here used uses Financial Sense, who here uses carbon? People raise their hand, you can run off and you'll have 16 people you can talk with who use Financial Sense. Do something like that. If you don't have that, obviously that's what my community helps with realize over 700 accounting firms in their websites, RLZ, IO, we do bimonthly meetups on all these major platforms where people come and they actually share their live setups. Generally the folks in that community are just very open and willing to share with people, even to just hop on a call with you and kind of show you how they do something. So I understand what you're saying. It can be frustrating when you don't see a platform that is exactly what you need. But if you know you need to do it, then you need to do it. And I can say it's much easier if you have buddies that use this where you can like text them and be like, I'm so stuck on this, what do you do for xyz? And they can give you the answer. Like that stuff shaves so much time off the learning process. Next up, is it a good or bad idea to make scheduling, that is scheduling when you will do someone's tax work? Only available on my highest tiers and my proposals, I want to implement tiered proposals as well as scheduling tax returns. So I was thinking it may be worthwhile to give priority to those that opt into higher levels of service. But on the other hand, that might be a disadvantage if the lower tier clients aren't on the actual schedule. So this is a great example of like tax three tier proposals done well, you will have clients that just insist on not extending. Right. And they all have their own reasons. They think they're going to get audited or whatever. Somebody at the Austin workshop last year came up and he's like, how do I get my clients to be more okay with extending? I had one come up to me the other day and they're Like, I can't extend my tax return. I'm a Republican. IRS will be all over me. There's no end to the dumb reasons that your clients will give you for why they cannot extend. This is why we can give them either the, the non extension path or the extension path. Like, this is something that we can gate with tiers. It's a great example of doing the same work just gating how premium the service delivery is. So if your highest tiers let people pick. When you do that work, it sounds like the concern here is like, well, when will the lower tiers get done? The lower tiers just get done whenever you can do them at that point, like, maybe you commit to some disadvantaged time frame. They're just at the bottom of the priorities. And if they want to be higher on the priorities, like they just, they go up to the more premium tiers. It's probably more clear if you bucket that into times of the year, just so they know even if they are in the lower tier, like when that will happen. But they have to happen one way or another. Like if they're not scheduled, they still have to happen. So there's a capacity consideration here where, like, we're not going to let more people come in than we can actually get done. But if you can only help so many people within a desired timeframe, let's help the people who are most willing to pay for that help. I think that seems, seems pretty reasonable. I've been working for the same firm for nine years. Ended up a manager with a corner office. Congrats, you have won the game. You've won accounting, old boy. I'm still strongly considering leaving and starting my own firm because it feels like being an employee has an invisible ceiling that I'm now pressed up against. This is true. This is also not true. It's totally a product of where you work. If you run a firm, many of the people that will go out and run a firm, they do it because of just this situation that you're describing. And then they create a machine and they hire people and they end up putting those people in the exact same situation that they were in. And we're kind of perpetuating that problem. There are some firms that will support your ambition and give you a path to realize an even better version of you. And there are many firms that will not. Ultimately, at the end of the day, if you're building your own firm, your dreams and your ambitions have to be big enough for the people who work for you's dreams to fit inside of stuff. And so if you have sort of this low ceiling, very basic, like, I just want to do this little humble thing. And then you have this unbelievably ambitious person come and work for you. You know, it's just a matter of time before they outgrow you. Right? And that's not even, there's not even anything wrong with that because you got to run the version of the firm that you're most excited about. But just recognize at that point, you're probably a stepping stone for that person. Like, you may even send them out the door with some clients when they're done and then they can go run their own thing. Thing. So I would say the fact that you're at a ceiling in your firm does not mean you should go out and start your own firm. Because that is definitely not for everybody. If you want to do that, which I'm not like even getting those vibes from your question here. It's. This almost sounds begrudging, like, good, I just go start my own firm because I'm stuck. Like, no, go find a better firm to work for with a higher ceiling if you're stuck. But if you want to run a firm, for sure, go run a firm. There's lots of people doing it. There's loads of people that are listening to this podcast that are like, I need a very high level manager. I need someone. I got more and more people doing production based pay, you know, paying W2 accountants higher than ever before. In my accounting firm, it was traditionally a five partner firm. I we consolidated that down to just me and a partner and then built like a middle management layer for the first time. Paid the staff way more than anybody else had ever been paid because we didn't have five partners. So totally depends on the model of the firm. Sounds like you just haven't found the right firm yet. Few more to go here. At what point is an engagement maxed out on pricing and you should stop increasing year over year? Never a price is something that the client agrees to pay. If what you're serving them is not valuable enough, they won't pay for it. Like, it's, it's as simple as that. But you can always sell them more. You can always do even more for them. In fact, growth year over year is a great signal that you're doing a great job for them. But there is no arbitrary ceiling to this. Like for sure, if you're like selling quote unquote bookkeeping or tax prep and what you do is undifferentiated from the Rest of the market, then like, yeah, you can only charge so much. But no, like, don't think of there as being a ceiling. There absolutely isn't. When I started my bookkeeping practice, I was thrilled if we could get somebody to pay US$300 a month to update their QuickBooks. By the end, I had engagements that were 40, 50 grand a month. There is no ceiling. Hi Jason. I recently received my CPA license. Congrats. After 10 plus years working in public accounting and I'm planning to launch a solo firm. I have almost everything but a name. According to ChatGPT, if I'm operating nationwide, my name cannot be similar to any existing business in my space. I wouldn't say that's true. Even if I am XYZ Accounting Advisory and there are XYZ Legal Tax Financial with no existing trademark. I appreciate your guidance on how to secure a name. I'm pulling an attorney. What are they looking for here? A trademark attorney. I know I did this with my attorney. They had a little package where you give them the business name and they'll run off and do some research and tell you if that's going to be problematic or not. Not so do that. But also at the state level in the us, different states have their own rules around how you can name your accounting firm. Like I think it's Texas where if you're a cpa, like your name has to be in the accounting firm, famously Aprio, the big firm. Someone had to change their name to Aprio to for the name of the firm to be able to remain Aprio because in the state's rules a name had to be there. So look at the state rules, but just pull in an attorney. I would say what you're saying doesn't sound right. Maybe it could be problematic, but there's lots of similarly named stuff nationwide. But don't take legal advice from a YouTuber. Okay, last one. Is there a way for me to use Agentic AI to automate tax return prep? From Trust to Tax Slayer Pro Web so you've got two apps and it doesn't really matter what those apps are. Can you use an agent right now to get data from app A to apply app be? The answer is yes. Asterisk. Is it a good idea? So three ways you could do this. First way, ChatGPT's agent mode. If you have any version of Chat GPT, you can enable Agent mode and it will browse the web and you can log it into different websites and ask it to do tasks for you. And it's pretty darn good. Like for basic data entry, it kind of works fine. And what you're describing, I mean it could almost certainly do on this podcast in the past we actually talked about the story of a tax pro who used Chat GPT's agent mode to return one of his clients tax return to prepare one of his clients tax return in TurboTax, which if you're not in the US is like a consumer tax prep platform where people just go out and put their W2 their job earnings in there and they file their own tax return with it. And ChatGPT did it flawlessly, went through the entire process, avoided being upsold by TurboTax several times, and the output of the return was the exact same as the output from that tax pro's professional tax software. So chatgpt agent mode is probably good enough to do what you're describing, but I probably wouldn't use it for that. Mainly because right now I have a hard time letting agents work unsupervised in sensitive contexts like this. And we will over time get more comfortable with this and learn what the boundaries are and where this is okay and where this is not okay. But I myself would probably not be okay cutting that sort of thing loose yet similar. Claude Cowork. It's basically Claude's version of the same thing. It can work locally on your machine, but it can also work the Internet browser. Claude Cowork could probably also do this. Last you've got Multbot, formerly known as claudebot. It's the AI agent that's all over the news right now. Something that can operate fully locally. And people have been saying for years the solution, the solution for security, it's local AI. Local AI this, local AI that's and we kind of have a version of this. Although like the model it uses is web based. So it's an app that runs locally. But it's all driven by a large language model. And that large language model lives on the web. It's Claude's large language model. They make an API call. So all of its reasoning and thinking and how it makes decisions is all driven by a web based model. But the app is working locally. There are local large language models, they're just vastly less powerful. They're very dumb. They're not good enough to like gamungus models can't run on your little local machine. That'll get better over time, they'll get more efficient. But what everybody's afraid of now, and I'm a little bit surprised at the response is we now have this agent that's grabbing headlines all over. I just Google Search, Clodbot or Multbot. It's fascinating all the things that are going on from stuff that's working, stuff that's not working. They created a. I shared this the other day, but they created a social media platform just for the Moltbots to go out and post and talk about humans and they interact with each other and, and that's been pretty hilarious to. To watch. Like, if you don't think we live in a simulation, I mean, how far does this stuff have to have to get? Like how many simulations do we have to create before we start to realize like, okay, you know, we, we're pretty sure we're in a simulation too. But the big fear with this Moldbot has been it is a desktop AI agent that's good enough to actually go out and do stuff. But now we're just terrified of it because we're like, well, I'm not going to trust an AI agent to do anything on my computer. Can access all my apps, my password manager, like that's terrifying. So the tech finally got good enough to do it and now we're just afraid of it to be clear, as we should be. So like, this stuff is close longer term. The versions of this that are exciting are like Windows Copilot that's just built into Windows or Siri that's just built into macOS and it can do that stuff. So this stuff is coming. But today if, if you had to like say like, would you use an AI agent to push data from app A to app B? My accounting firm, I just wouldn't like, I just can't trust it unsupervised with high stakes sensitive client info. Yet specifically for your use case, pushing tax info from trust to attack software, check out Filed. Filed is a company who's kind of zeroing in specifically on the automated input into tax software. And to be clear, the way that they do it is RPA and it's kind of janky. And you have to have like a hosted environment with your tax software and a license for that tax software where it can automate on top of it. Still janky over time that will actually be run increasingly by AI agents. So something breaks, an AI agent will come in and say like, okay, let me figure out how to fix this. What is the right place to put this number in the tax software? But check out Filed. Anybody doing tax software automation will make a lot of claims. And this has been the case for several decades. It's never quite as seamless as you would like it to be. In fact, in your case, you're using the Tax Slayer Pro app. I don't know the Filed even supports Tax Slayer Pro because that's a little bit of a more rare platform for people to use. But if there's anyone working on the problem you're describing, Filed's probably the closest to that. Great question. Any questions you got, man, shoot me a text, drop a comment, send me an email. Appreciate you tuning in, coming and hanging out. I want to see it a workshop, man, if I'm going to drop a comment. If you went to the last workshops, it would make my heart swell if you left a comment so other other people could see. Did you have a good time and what did you like about it? If you're listening to the audio version of this, there'll be a link in your podcast player to take you to the YouTube version. If you've never left a YouTube comment before, this is your first chance, man. Tell people why they should come out to the workshop series. Hope to see you there, but either way, I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks for being here. I'll see you there.