580 Should Accountants Buy All-In-One Software?

So when you're building out the tech.

Stack in your accounting firm, it can.

Be really hard to know whether you should just bolt on one more tool or whether there's an alternative tool that will do the all in one version.

In a good enough way for you. Right.

The old debate of all in one versus best and breed. Now I recently had a conversation with the co founder of Financial Sense who's one of the leading practice management systems in my recommendations, one of the fastest growing tools in the accounting space. And I specifically wanted to get their take on how do you decide whether we're going to be a platform that is all in one or just really good at a specific thing. Thought it'd be interesting to get the perspective of the software company on this one because they're a company that's kind of bounce back and forth between being the all in one while specializing a little bit more in the bookkeeping and.

The client accounting services firms.

Anyways, turned out to be a really fun conversation.

Hope you enjoy. Co founder of Financial Sense if it wasn't clear Shrom Zarus thanks for being here man.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to hang out folks.

Haven't met you before. What's the 62nd intro?

So Shanus Co founder of Financial Sense what we do is we provide easy to use practice management software for the everyday accounting firm. That's cool. Basically.

That's. That is so nice and concise. If only accountants were able to like not ramble on at length and have that good of an elevator pitch. Right.

It takes a while. A lot of practice.

Yeah. Myself big time tech ecosystem nerd. We've geeked on this stuff before. All in one versus like we, we talked about this stuff before and I know a lot of folks that tune into the channel are like hyper aware of all the different options. Like to a problematic level. Right. Where it's like, it's just. You get paralysis thinking about all the different options.

So today we're going to make that worse.

Okay.

We're going to talk about cool. No cool ecosystem stuff because it is very hard to know like what should we get into?

Yeah.

What do we leave to other solutions providers and different practice management systems are kind of having different takes to this as they should. And then the viewer here, the accountant's got to be like this is the version, this is the messaging that aligns with me. Right?

Yeah.

So let's just like start level setting with the definition of practice management software. How do you define that?

The way we talk about it. Like, and that most High level terms. We like to say the single source of truth for your firm. Everything your team and your clients need in one platform to get work done. And now when I say everything you want as much as possible, that's closely related to the work itself. That's how we look at it.

That now that you say that, I've actually heard you say that a bunch of times.

Yeah.

Everything you need to do to do your work in one platform.

Yeah, everything you or your team would need to be able to get their work done and hit their deadlines is how we look at it.

There's kind of the design of the platform, like you've got the side panels and like all the context there to, to get this stuff done. Should a practice management system like we've had kind of an advent of interesting new workflow tools, like tools that are doing the work in interesting new ways, which wasn't the case when practice management systems first came around like five years ago. Practice management systems talked about what they did. They're like, were workflow, but now you have other tools that are like more in the doing of the work that say their workflow. So right now, like, would you say that the job of the practice management system is to manage the work like kind of above the work or is it to actually also come down into the the doing of the work?

It's funny you bring this up because I think back in the early days when I started Financial Sense, I didn't have a accounting background, right? We leaned heavily on our customers, what should we build? And we've done that the whole way through. And there was a lot of confusion for me in our marketing messaging, should we call ourselves workflow? Should we call ourselves practice management? Because when we looked at everyone else, they would say the practice management, but then they would also say the workflow. And people would ask, what's the difference? And sometimes I'd be like, I don't know. So it was used so interchangeably. And I think for us going back to should it be the work, should it be the mission critical? I think at the end of the day, practice management should help you get your work done. Because when I look at accounting firms, the most important thing in the firm is their work. It's their deliverables. They're very service and work driven. So it's important for practice management to be focused on the work now, whether it should actually be like automating and helping with doing the actual work, or should it be mission critical more be around tracking the work and storing the Information around the work that's like, I think where like the key differences. And for me, I think at first as practice management, where you really want to focus is on that high level, mission critical, give them the visibility. Right. Because when people come to a financial sense, they come to us because I don't know where anything stands, I don't know who's working on what. If we got this work done until my client called me and said I didn't do the work right. That's, I think the biggest problem firms face at first. They're not trying to automate and get product, increase productivity right away. They just want visibility and they want peace of mind. They want to know what's happening in their firm. So for me, I believe solving for the mission critical, give them the visibility, be that place they can go again to have that single source of truth to see who's working on what. Did we get it done on time and do we have the information we need around the work to get the work done? Also what's really interesting is you've seen like a lot of really great tools like Keeper and Zenit, these workflow automation tools that are now like having people question, like, should this be my pm? Like it's so close to the work and I think there's an argument to be made it should be part of the PM platform. But I think you need to be careful, focus on what's your best and then you can bring in that secondary, you're not going to be the best at it. I might be getting ahead of myself. I know there's a lot of stuff we want to talk about. I think we could really go deep on a lot of these points. But to answer your question, the mission critical piece I think is the most important for the practice management where we should focus. But I think there's opportunity also and really good arguments for why you should potentially bring in the workflow automation.

Yeah. Which is where people end up kind of stuck between like, do I go with the PM that says they're working on it or do I do the PM with the workflow tool? And it feels almost wasteful and there's a lot of kind of overlap there. So if we think ahead a little bit, like what's an example right now of a workflow that accountants do outside of the practice management system that you would say in the next 24 months ought to happen inside of practice management?

Personally, from the feedback we've gotten and where we see there's a lot of overlap, the month in close is A bit. I mean, we're more bookkeeping heavy. 60% of firms offer tax services, but 90% offer bookkeeping services. So for us, where we feel like we've done the best given we like to focus on that bookkeeping side, month in close makes the most sense. And I think part of the reason why we've come to that decision is because it's about the client experience. Yeah. We see a lot of firms is they don't want to separate client experiences. They don't want two portals. Clients can get confused and it can cause a lot of friction. And then you're not getting information you need to get the work done. But also internally with your team, if they're already in this platform, marking tasks off from the highest level, if it was right there for them to run that check on, like the transactions or to request this information, there's a lot of value there too. So for us, we've decided that month and close is very important to bring in because it's going to help increase productivity, it's going to create a better client experience. But you have to be careful because you don't want to try to do too much and spread yourself thin.

Yeah.

And I think one thing we've, internally we've said is we're never going to be as good as the point solutions. But if we can get 80% of the way there and then the value of having it in one platform for the team and one platform for the clients, a lot of people will choose that. There will always be people that want it separate and that is okay. But it's just, it comes down to preference and where do they value it the most?

Yeah.

And whether the upside of it being in one place is greater than the 20% you lost.

Exactly.

Not run on the point solution.

And some, some firms need that, like the deeper detail, the deeper functionality. So it's just, it's understanding what your firm needs. At the end of the day, is.

There a downside to going too hard on workflow, like maybe losing sight of kind of the most important management of the work?

Yes. Like with any of this, like, especially for us in the last year, like we've started to add like proposals and billing and some of this other functionality. One thing we constantly have to remind ourselves is why do people come to the platform? And going back to, I need visibility, I want to track this status of work. You don't want to lose the core of why people use a platform. But there's also depending on your icp, like the customers you like to focus on. They do want the consolidated experience for the team and their clients. So it's like a balancing act. So the downside is you spread yourself too thin, you neglect the other parts of the app. People aren't happy with why they came to the platform in the first place and the key value they're trying to get. And then people leave. Right. Or you start to become a jack of all trades. So I think when doing it you had to be very intentional about what do you want to be the best at and make sure you don't lose that focus and accepting you're not going to be the best in these other pieces and make sure you have the resources before you make that commitment. Like you have the resources to focus on both, you know, spread. It's, it's a hard question to answer.

It's kind of wild to think of what all practice management systems do now like five or seven years ago like and this is still a blocker for like you know, somebody's on Thompson Road Practice CS and the, the biggest thing they say is like I just can't get the reporting out of these other systems that I do. Well it's like these other systems do like client facing portal stuff. They do requests, they do billing, they do like there's so many things these systems do now that old systems didn't touch. Old systems were time and billing and a flat project management like a project with a due date that gets passed around the office. Right. And so it's kind of wild like does it ever end? And like now the push is like well PMs they need to do more things because workflows doing X, Y and.

Z. Yeah it is interest because like you do look at the older platforms and it's like really time and billing platform with light work packing functionality tied to it. And it's like as if you look at the evolution with like I feel, I like to say the modern PMs like US carbon and some of these players it got deeper into the workflow piece like actual like you go deeper, you have the detailed processes and you have some of the client facing automation and then now like this new generation with a lot of like stuff that's been going on in the last two years now it's like more deep like actual like the transaction review and it's like it keeps going deeper on the workflow. But I think a lot of that is because when we see what are the biggest challenges firms are having, it's work and again going back to their service driven businesses Their work driven businesses, the better they deliver the work, happier the clients are. The happier the clients are, the more referrals, the more growth they get. Which is like a key driver for a lot of firms.

You actually brought up proposals and billing. That's a great example of where we could do a version of this. But there's off the shelf stuff that does as well. So you, you rolled out a ignition integration.

Yes.

So ignition, they do proposals and billing and payments, but you also rolled out your own version. Do you have a clear framework yet for like when does it make sense for us to say like we're going to do our own version, we're not going to integrate versus doing both or even just fully being like, we actually don't want to touch this, we're just going to integrate.

So when it comes to stuff we want to build. Right. So like proposals, billing, soon, month and close, it takes a lot of consideration. Right. One thing is we lean heavily on our customers. We like to see what organically if what they're asking for. If we start to see why do we not have this? Or like the question, you're probably seeing a lot with like a lot of the month and close tools. There's a lot of overlap with workflow automation and practice management.

Yeah.

And a lot of people are saying, why do I have my client using two portals? This should be in this space, this should be all in one platform. So when we start to see a lot of that, that's when we start to ask ourselves those questions. Now we don't want to do everything right. So we don't want to do like payroll, we don't want to do like actually become a real General Ledger like QuickBooks and there's all like sick leave tracking, like vacation days. We see people request this stuff. But for us it's like I think going back to the root of like, what is the core problem we're trying to solve? And we say we're trying to help firms get work done. Payroll doesn't really help firms get work done. It's help with managing your team, billing and proposals. There is some correlation with like assign an engagement, create the work, but also like the reporting around the work and like the profitability. So that kind of made sense for us the month in close, it's actually the work itself. So for us we try to like, what is the focus and is it related to that focus? So that kind of helps us answer your question of like, what do we build and not build Also it's just like do we have the resources, will it spread us too thin? And the other thing is you asked about like if we build it, do we integrate or not? And our big thing is, even though we had our own proposals and billing, we integrated with Ignition, but also anchor, we said we want to give people the right to choose because at the end of the day, like I said about the month and close piece, we're not solely focused on proposals and billing. We were not solely focused on month and close. We're never going to be as powerful as those platforms. We might be 80% of the way there, which is enough for a lot of firms. So at the end of the day, we don't want to force them to use something that may not be best for their firm and be best for their client. So we like to give them the option to choose. At the end of the day there will be limitations. Like if you use it outside platform, will this it be as seamless as an interface for your client because you're using two portals, but maybe internally with what they can do on their platform it makes more sense. So every firm is different and we like to give them the option to choose what works best for them. And we also believe that's going to be the best for us because more value they get out of our platforms, whether it happens in our platform or with an integration, the more longer they're going to stay with us as a customer and happier they're going to be and the more they're going to tell people about the platform and the more we're going to grow, the more they're going to grow and everyone wins.

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 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. Misiphon 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 freakin 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 Misfit 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.

The whole framing of like what we want to build, what we're excited to build, and what our customers are asking for. That's got to be a moving target. Like, like if you go back 24 months and we were having this conversation, you probably would have had different answers about like what do we want to build? Right?

Yeah.

What? Like do you have an example of something maybe month end close like 24 months ago, you're like that's not us.

12 months ago I'd been like, we're never going to do that.

Really wild.

Also, it was so new.

Yeah.

I didn't fully understand it. It's big, right? It's a huge distraction. But over the last 12 months, the more popular it's gotten and the more everyone has been saying this needs to be in financial sense, there's no reason. And some people say that about certain features. We're like, we still disagree. Like, we're not going to do that. Going back to like the payroll and stuff.

Yeah.

But it made a lot of sense. Right. It's so tied into the work. We realize it does make a lot of sense and it's a huge opportunity. So it is a moving target, especially because there's so much innovation happening in the space. And ask me this again in 12.

Months, you scared, like, what, managing the team and like what you're juggling 12 months from now when there's an entirely new set of expectations.

It's easy, I think too, like, especially with firms like we were talking about this earlier, there's so many tools and there's the analysis paralysis in the space. There's all these shiny objects like, oh, I want this and I want this. Customers are asking for everything and you want to listen all the feedback, but you can't say yes to everything. Going back to what is the vision for the business? What is the problem we're trying to solve and does it help solve that problem? Can help you shift through a lot of the noise on deciding what to build. Yeah, but yeah, month and close is one we realize, like, makes sense.

But at the end of the day, you kind of are what you say no to. Right?

Yeah.

Put that on a cross stitching. We're going to, we're going to drop a pile of cash on you.

Okay.

And you can go out and buy a point solution. Like go out and buy something that does a specific job very, very well. We're going to have to call it actual brands, but like category, a type of tool, even maybe a category that doesn't exist yet. What would you go out and pull in that you think would immediately provide the most value to Financial Sense users?

If you asked me like 12 months ago, I would have said a month in close tool or into AI intake, like the Sorbens or the Stanford taxes of the world or billing and proposals. Right, because I would have thought about that. But the reason I probably still would have said no is because the client experience, we've asked ourselves that question internally. Like, do we build or do we buy it if the client experience is the most important piece of why you want to bring it in by having it still as two separate point solutions, you're integrating it and you can do a little bit more, but it's, it's.

Not going to be buying. Yeah. It's not in your platform.

It's not in the platform. Yeah, yeah. So there's still technically maybe two portals. So that's actually why we said no, let's build. To be honest, my personal opinion on like acquisitions, it's hard. I used to work in M and A and they rarely ever work out. And usually what happens is you're buying these two separate platforms. There's like the culture fit with the team, there's the tech stack fit, there's the user experience fit. You can, like we talked about, you can try to integrate them but it's still just kind of going to be like something's not right about this. And for me personally, I'd rather take that money, invest it in like R and D and try to build that yourself. Unless there was a really, really good reason like domain experience or someone on the team that was like the best at this and they can help take it to that next level. I'd rather organically build the business and grow it and invest versus like growing acquisitively whether it's buying for tech or buying for revenue. But a lot of people like to buy and I'm more build. I think it creates a better experience but I feel like long term it's going to provide more value.

Yeah. Especially if you're trying to do the everything is in one place and yeah, client experience first. You have any like contrarian takes on the job of a practice management system. Like if you look at other platforms out there, like what's something that you guys kind of stand on and say like we're opinionated on this thing and it's sort of a guiding principle of the platform.

I don't know if it's contrary because I know some other people feel this way. But like for us when we say what is practice management? What is the most important piece is the workflow piece. Because going back to the firms, like they're very service driven organizations, they're work driven or due date driven. Like and this is something we've said internally recently, like what do we want to build? We want to be like the best practice management, like the best like workflow, integrated portal, workflow experience in practice management. You know, we may not be the best at time tracking, we may not be the Best at billing. We may not be the best at some of these other pieces, but if we are the best, best at work and that just wows customers, then even if everything is 80% and they want it all in one place, it's going to drive adoption of everything. But they're going to be happy and they're going to stay with us. So the two biggest things is workflow first and ease of use. It's got to be easy to use the thing. The thing about accounts is they're always busy. There's always another deadline looming. There's never a good time to do anything or set something up. They don't have a lot of time to like force their team over and over again to use a new platform. So user experience matters because it helps you onboard faster and get set up, but also helps you get team adoption faster. And even if it's client facing client adoption faster and the more complicated and unuser friendly the platform is, the longer that takes and the longer they wait to implement something, the longer wait they wait to implement something, the harder it is to implement down the road. And a lot of the market is still on spreadsheets, especially on the low end because of that. Yeah, they feel like they haven't found an option that works for them or they have had the time to do it. So team and client is the most important. But workflow for first in terms of functionality, you guys, at least for a.

While, I don't know if you still do. This may have been the only platform that had a free trial.

I think we came in the market around 2020. Carbon was 2014. They had a free trial, I'm pretty sure. But yeah, free trials. I think it's important. I don't know about anyone, everyone else but. Or what your thought is on this, but have you ever gone to a software platform's website and you can't start a trial, you just have to talk to a salesperson. Do you ever do that?

No. And like just even having the free trial to me is a signal that people are trying it and then buying it. Like it's, it's back to like the ease of use sort of thing. Like if I need somebody with a PhD in financial sense to like a migration for me and it's going to take six weeks, I'm like, man, like, does it really have to be that hard?

Yeah, yeah, I agree. One, I think people don't want to talk to a sales rep unless they know it works for them. They don't want to commit to 30 minutes or an hour, but two, like if you have a free trial, you're right. It says like, oh, I can figure this out on my own. That's a testament to it being easy to use and easy to implement. And our thought is we need to spend some more time on this. But one of the things we're really focused on is someone starts a trial and they get the value within 60 seconds. Like they get in our platform. We do a good job of it because a lot of people do self serve and just never talk to a rep. But I think there's a lot of room for improvement. And like they get in, they can instantly see within 60 seconds how it's going to make their client experience better, their team experience better, and it's going to give them the visibility. If you can do that, you're going to win a lot of firms in the market. Like that's what people want to see. They're busy, they want to know what works for them.

Okay, want to geek on AI now?

Yeah, let's do it. Let's talk about AI.

The AI and accounting is over or under hyped right now.

I think it's just the perspective you look at it from. It's going to replace accountants and bookkeepers and it's all going to be done by ChatGPT and robots. Like I think that's way overhyped. I mean I think that's everywhere. Like in all the industries. Everyone's like, oh, it's going to take our jobs. Like we're not going to be needed anymore. I think complete overhype. But in terms of like being like a productivity tool, I think there's so much value there and I don't think we even fully understand that yet. Like my whole analogy is like AI is like the golf caddy. It just helps you be better at your job, but it's not gonna, it's never gonna replace you. I think there's so much opportunity, especially in the accounting industry. We talk about this a lot. Like it's so standardized, there's so many repetitive tasks, there's so much that can be automated. There's also a lot that can't be automated. But like there's so much that can be automated to help you focus on like what really matters.

Almost feels like if AI development stopped right now, we've got like a decade of even just like figuring out how to use what we've got.

Yeah, that's what's so scary about it. I mean I talk to people and it's like it's so hard to keep up the exponential growth curve of, like, the innovation on AI, what it can do. It's crazy. I mean, even in the last 12 months, like, some of the stuff that was available, but you had a custom build now that there's packages out there so you can implement AI faster and products and solutions and, I mean, ChatGPT is just getting better and better and smarter. It's kind of. It's kind of crazy. It's kind of creepy. I asked ChatGPT everything. Now it's like my mental health and physical coach, and I ask it everything.

Yeah, it'll be really interesting. Interesting how, like, evolves human behavior because people will jump to stuff like therapy where it's like, does this replace therapists? And it's like, massively increases the market for therapists because people use it as a therapist and then they're like, maybe I should get a human to do this. And even around, like, advisory, there's a bit of that too, where it's like, why do I need a CFO when ChatGPT is the best, cheapest CFO there's ever been? And then people start having those conversations and they're like, there's probably a human version of this that's a little bit better.

Yeah, like. Like the CFO point. I think ChatGPT is great at giving context and information when you know where to point it. Right? But, like, in terms of like, a CFO or like an, like, advisory services, you have to know what to look for so I can dump in my data, be like, hey, what do you think? But I think there's a certain level of, like, experience and understanding, like, the market and, like, my business and the mechanics of the business, where, I don't know. I would think it would never replace. But again, ask me in 12 months, it could be totally different. I think there will always be, like, in the account space, in the advisory space, in the therapy space, there's always going to be a need for the human element.

I feel like we're almost discovering the value of the human element too. Right? It's like this thing can reasonably accurately, like, simulate a conversation, but then why does that not land? Like, for example, we've had a AI chat assistant for this podcast for years now. And it's crazy. Like, it's definitely an 80% version of me, and nobody uses it. Like, nobody. But we'll, like, host an event in New York city and, like, 50 people will come out on a Friday night.

To ask me questions, which is highest.

Friction way you could possibly ask me a question. Right. So it's almost like through this process, we're finding the human connection parts of it that maybe we didn't even realize were important.

Yeah. I think people, like, especially in the county, people love connection, community. People go to these conferences all the time just to be with people.

Yeah.

Like, when I talk to people, why they go to conferences, I mean, yeah, they can learn some new information, but it's more of like, these people are my friends. Like, I built connections with them, especially during the world of COVID Right. Like, everyone was, like, locked in their places. But the human connection is so important. We're. We're social creatures at the end of the day. And I think people always want that. Like, they want to work with people they like. And ChatGPT is just a robot. But I also think, like, you're right, though. It's really interesting. Like, you download all these podcast episodes, you can ask the AI version of you these questions, and it's going to be able to spit it out in seconds. But I also just think I use this analogy in middle school or like, high school to be like, all right, time to write a paper. Choose whatever topic you want. And I'm just like, this is the hardest thing I've ever done because I don't know where to start. When you're talking with someone, you can kind of get some direction in person versus, like, it's a blank sheet to start with. There's so many opportunities. It's overwhelming. And, like, you get that analysis paralysis. I think there's. There's a lot of dynamics that play into that. I still.

I mean, I still feel like, because we're doing a lot of in person stuff right now.

Yeah.

I still feel like we're recovering from COVID where it's like, you used to meet the clients in person. Now your client will be across the street, and you'll just have a zoom meeting with them. And it's like we've got these itches we're trying to. We somehow still need to scratch. And like, even in the accounting firm, sort of the advisor to your client sort of relationship, that relationship, like the good ones, are almost as much about what you're saying as you're like, the only person in that client's life oftentimes that has full transparency into everything they do. Like, even more than their spouse. Oftentimes. Yeah, we know, like, there's a lot of therapy in the work that we do as accountants, and I'm kind of on the other side of the equation now too, as I don't run a firm and I have like an accounting firm that I work with and you're like, it's actually just kind of not nice to talk with someone who knows all my stuff.

Yeah.

And they're the only one.

Yeah. Your friends, your family, they don't know, but the accountant does. It's, it's very true. I, I see this all the time. People, people like to do business with people they like. The services may be better somewhere else, they may be cheaper somewhere else, the product may be better somewhere else. But if it's going to make them feel better and enjoy the experience more, everything is an experience, I think at the end of the day. So people are going to choose that the human element is an experience. That interaction, some of it can be overwhelming. There can be too much human interaction. Sometimes I think people, we crave it as again social creatures like it holds some value outside of just the pure like logical services that are being provided.

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I actually faced this one myself is.

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What is your take on product AI like AI in the platform versus the AI assistant kind of on the side that helps you. Like, I assume you and your team are probably using AI assistants every day. Like, do you think of it as the responsibility of the platform to pull as much of that in platform as possible? Or do do you think people will always be using both the assistant and the AI platform?

I guess it depends on what it's an assistant for. I think practice management platforms have to implement AI. The thing about practice management that's really powerful is it's the system of record. And when I say that, what I mean is it's the heart of the firm. It's up every day on the screen of an accountant. Like they're, they're going to have financial sense up all day and it's just going to be staring at it on their fifth monitor somewhere. Because of that, it's really hard to disrupt it. But a lot of these point solutions, they're more at risk for disruption. So I'm not saying practice management systems need to implement AI because they're going to get disrupted and displaced, but I feel like they're going to fall behind. I think a lot of firms, they see that they need to use AI. If they don't use AI, they're going to fall behind and they're going to lean on the systems like practice management that they use to help them become better with AI. A lot of these firms aren't going to go out and find AI points. Some of them are, but not a lot of them. They're not going to go out front of these individual AI point solutions. They're gonna wanna lean on their practice management tool that's in their firm and part of the workflows to help them leverage AI. So like, where we see like the biggest needs is the client communication side, whether it's with email or chat. So like summarizing the actual thread of the conversation, you know, creating a response. They're spending a lot of time responding to clients. If you can save a minute or two there, that adds up. You're also seeing it on like the intake side a lot, which is like, I think a really one of the best use cases for AI right now. So like you said again, Storman or Stanford Tax, like they've done a really good job and people love those tools for a really good reason. That's where a lot of time is spent. So I think in like those two areas, there's a lot of opportunities for practice management to lean into. But again, I think there's also areas you don't want to touch. Like, again, it's going back to why does the communication and the intake makes sense? Because it's closely related to the work. But there's AI tools, some really good platforms out there for like the meetings. There's some generic, like otter, which is just AI summary notes, and I think Firefly is another good one. But there's a lot of great tools right now where they're specifically for accountants and they have an edge because they can take the accounting lingo and they can understand it better to generate better outcomes and notes and outputs. So those are really powerful Now, I don't think a PEM tool should build that because it's so far outside.

But I was just gonna say this is an example of where like 12 months from now, Sharon, 24 months from now, you're like, we're super proud of this AI notetaker. There we go.

I would love to see that. And we could go back to this meeting again.

That's a good example though, of where, like, you learn when you have the context. Like, oh, turns out if we have the meeting transcripts, we can do way more intelligent predictive email responses. And you're like, well, now this has to be part of the platform. Right.

You're already starting to change our mind. But no, yeah, I mean, yeah, that's me in 12 months. So right now.

Dude, I think I just got you there. I think we're there.

It is a good point. But like, you, like, I think we should integrate with those, right, because you can bring in the transcripts and still do what you want to do based off that data without having to build the whole Microsoft Teams integrations and everything. Yeah. And like, that gets down to the algorithm. Like, the better the algorithm, the better the outputs. And that takes a lot of time. And it's like, again, like going back to like acquiring if we maybe that would be a place. Because I feel like that takes a lot of experience to do, like optimizing that algorithm to create amazing outputs. It's not just like building the tech piece. There's a lot of more strategic thinking in that and like experience and knowledge and domain experience. Yeah, that's a really where I seen like individual point solutions also, like on the time tracking side, you see some really cool stuff. Yeah, like, it's automatically tracks your time based off what you're in and it can tell like what client it's for. And that's helping a lot of firms, like, capture that, like the leakage that they're having, like, by not tracking time, they're not billing for it. And the most annoying thing to do when you work is to track your time. No one wants to do it. And even if you do it, you forget it and you make mistakes. We see with our time tracker all the time, people are like, I left a timer on or I didn't start it, or like, I want to batch do it afterwards. But then you're just kind of estimating you can have it automatically track all your activities throughout the day. And it just automatically knows what clients was for, what work it was related to. There's a lot of Value there. There's a lot of opportunity for AI in this space. But I think it's, it's again a productivity enhancement. It's not going to replace anyone.

Yeah, that's more on like firm thought leadership. As, as you have kind of a different perspective, like you're seeing accounting firms through an interesting window where you kind of have a different perspective. What's one thing, workflow wise that you wish accounting firms took more seriously? Where like from the outside, it's like, that seems like such an obvious win if you would make that change.

I think one of the biggest things I wish firms did better was spend more time documenting the processes, which kind of can be contrary to what I've said in the past, which I still believe this. You want to start small, you don't want to analyse process, try to create the most perfect process from day one. Start small, build into it. But a lot of firms, they just don't go back to their systems and their processes and their tooling. So one first, documenting your processes and making sure it's pretty streamlined so you can delegate that work and drive consistent deliverables just as good as if you were doing it yourself. But also not overanalyzing on this, but maybe looking at the tools you're currently using and seeing what else they offer that can help optimize what you're currently doing. Because I think if you try to tack on 18 different apps, you're just gonna, it's gonna be a nightmare and you're never gonna have the time to do it. You'd be surprised a lot of times the tools you currently use do a lot of what you need and you didn't even realize it. So like leaning heavier into that, like once you standardize your processes. So that's, that's number one. And then leaning on technology to automate some of those pieces so like have that tooling in place and the systems in place to drive like that optimization. I think a lot of firms, they just kind of build a process, if they ever build a process and they just like, okay, this will work. But also as they grow, like the business becomes more complex, things change. You need to, it's a living and breathing thing. So spending more time like thinking through the processes because it's not always like, let me hire another person that solves a problem. It's ask yourself, can I automate this? Can I streamlight this enough to where I don't need to hire another person. Especially with AI right now, like, there's a lot of incredible tools out there. Ask ChatGPT might give you some advice. I don't know, like, yeah, what's your.

Take right now on like what the proper way to even document is? Like, is that, is that a video, is that a doc? Is that like just the tasks in the practice management system? What does documenting mean now?

For me, step one is just the tasks. Like what we tell people actually is when you start documenting your processes, like don't overthink it, like time. Constrain yourself to five minutes. Document the process in five minutes. The goal is just get the steps out of your head onto a piece of paper. Once you've done that, that's step one. Your team can get value out of that alone. Step two is now each one of those steps, you need to show your team how to do each of those steps. Never create. I know back in the day like it was create a 40 page word document with screenshots and descriptions. You do that great. But the better option, not just because it saves time, but also because it's more detailed, is a loom recording or a video recording. Like record a video of each step. You can do it while you do the work. So it doesn't take that much extra time. But it's like a picture is worth a thousand words, the video is worth a million words. Like they see every little detail, every little step. You can narrate over it. Like everything your team needs to know can be done in like a two or three minute video for each step step potentially depending on how complex the step is. But that for me is documenting. Start high and then get descriptive with the videos for each step. And that's something you can give to someone and with no experience, they could do the processes. If you could do it yourself.

Yeah, cool. I can let you go. Before we do, what's the profile of the firm? That is like the financial sense. Super fan. Like who are the people that are absolutely in love with the platform where you say it and the person who's watching this is like, oh my gosh, that's me, I gotta check it out. Like what type of firm would you say that is?

So we like to say we're purpose built for the everyday firm. When we looked at the market, you know, there were some platforms out there, but we always kind of felt like they're for like more of the bigger firms and makes sense. A lot of platforms want to go for the bigger firms because it's bigger contracts, they're stickier from like a operator software perspective. But for us we felt like where was the underserved market and it was the everyday firm. And if I was like to get really specific on who that is, that is a firm anywhere from just themselves to 20 users. That's how we've done it. And that's where it's like it's so interesting. I'd love to hear your take on this. Actually we're trying to figure out the messaging because we want that to resonate platform resonates. But like does the messaging resonate? And if like is that, is that small firm, is that mid sized firm? Because the market's so long tail, we'll talk to some firms like they'll say small is under 50 employees. They'll say no, mid size is 10 to 20. So this is actually something we've been talking about a lot in terms of like what is the messaging that resonates. I can help some like self identify. Oh, that's me. I don't know how you categorize it but for us like less than 20 employees, that's where people like wow, this works really well for me. This resonates with me again too like on the lower end, especially in that sub 10, the owners and the managers still wearing a lot of hats, they don't have time to just focus on the platform. So they need something that's ease of use. So that's where the ease of use is really resonating. A bigger firm, let's say like 30, 40, 50 employees, they don't care as much about the ease of use. Like it's, it's a nice to have but they care more about the deep detailed functionality and the reporting. So where we feel like we've done well and where we focus is that sub 20 because of our focus of ease of use and, and just creating a great experience, it matters more on that side of the market.

Yeah, my take is, I mean I'm just too meat and potatoes. Like I should like give me the employee number, give me the service mix either and even through the framing of the best way to present your accounting firm on their website, like I would tell an accounting firm tell the story of this person why they like it and they're seven person firm and they do you know, bookkeeping and tax and like I think as long as you're which has other benefits. Right. I think if you're like bringing it back to the story of have you know this is a real user and here's what they say about it and here's what they are then people can identify kind of through that other person that is a fan.

Yeah.

That kind of ticks the box of because I'm totally with you where it's like how do I even find a language that somehow encompasses that what that is that everyone can agree means the same thing. Right?

Yeah. And actually I guess I didn't talk about this but in terms of like service mix and stuff, I talked about this earlier. There's like bookkeeping said 90 do bookkeeping, 60% do tax. So we like to say multisite service because we do well on tax side, we do well on the bookkeeping side and we do well on both. Right. You don't have to have a tax platform practice management. You don't have to have a bookkeeping practice management for this department in that department.

I love that you said multi service because people can't even agree on what full service means.

Yeah, I, I, I would say like it's mainly tax and bookkeeping. That's how we think about it. But in cas. But I also kind of like that's.

Also like well people hate that. Yeah. Big brother aicpa, we're not using that.

But going back to like yeah, multi service sub 20. Pure bookkeeping is great, pure tax is great. But also too it's like where we really like focus is to be like going deep out of where's the problem we're trying to solve workflow. If your problem is I need better processes, I need more visibility, I need more structure, streamline and even automation. But going back, if it's like work visibility and you're like just everything's disorganized, you want it all in one place. That's where like the real ICP sets. So like we could talk about user count. Right. Service mix. But really it comes down to the like you were saying, like the problem they're trying to solve. If you're trying to solve time and billing, you know, and you're a 20 user firm or a 10 user firm, you can get a better pure time and billing platform. But if you want a workflow platform and like you want visibility and you're in that user segment, that's where we're going to win. And that's where it really resonates. You can do the time and billing, but like if that's the priority problem, like because a lot of people come to say the number one thing is workflow and visibility, great, I want these other tools, but these tools don't matter till I get this done. And everyone usually starts with task management and the workflow piece anyways. And that's why we like where we sit, because the 2 or 3 or 4 use it from the. They're starting with that before they're thinking about all these other tools. And once they get this set up, then they start to think about, okay, billing. Let me streamline and automate this and better process for time tracking and the portal and the documents that. That all follows. But you need this, the workflow piece first, I think. Yeah. And when I say workflow, I mean not workflow automation, by the way.

I mean, we just fully tied ourselves in knots now.

Yeah. But the task management side.

Work visibility.

Yeah, Work visibility.

Cool.

Sram.

Thanks for doing this, man.

Yeah, thank you. Awesome.