587 The Best Accounting Firm Workflows for DEADLINES [How bookkeeping and tax firms solve for bottlenecks]

A lot of us, we are going through it right now. You are in the thick of it. The heat, the peak. What? You are in a busy, busy time and before we know it, people will start knocking down your door and being like, hey, how's that coming? We just about done with this yet. Didn't you say it had this last week? And you're like, leave me alone, I'm busy. I'm working on it. How do we get out ahead of that stuff? What are the best ways to manage that in a bookkeeping firm and a tax firm? Plus, today we are roasting an accounting firm's clean up bookkeeping strategy. Clean up bookkeeping, you know, when the client brings you a big old stanky mess. Do you have any business touching that in your bookkeeping practice, in your tax practice? Huge thing for tax shops because the bulk of small business tax prep actually book cleanup. Also, bunch of really smart questions I've gotten from listeners lately. What are sort of the breaking points in terms of headcount, where workflows and accounting firms change? How would you niche into solopreneur businesses? How to get rid of glasses, reflections on video, and how to test test every single person before they join your team. I'll share with you the actual tests that we did in our trial days. Anytime we hired anybody, gang. This is gonna be a great, this is gonna be a great one. Come on in, let's do it. If you're new here, welcome along to the Jason on Firms podcast where we talk about accounting firm stuff. Wow, a YouTuber that talks about accounting firms. You've seen it all now, haven't you? I know. Okay, hold the jokes. If my, if my 13 year old self could see me now. If you are new here, we just, we talk about running better accounting firms. Whether you run one, whether you're part of one. Tune in and you will learn from other accounting firms what stuff's working, what isn't working. And we're going to start with how to take hopefully just a little bit of this little bit of sting out of kind of the bottleneck times in your accounting firm. And every accounting firm literally lives and dies by those choke points that are tax season that when the month end close hits all of these things hitting at the same time a year or a month. And most bookkeeping shops and most tax shops go through the exact same progression of how they handle these bottlenecks. And I want to show you exactly what those are because I can save you like a decade of being like, ah, this will probably work. And Then you're onto the next one and you're like, well, maybe this will work. I'm just going to cut to the chase for you and show you the progression that I see most folks going through now. Really hard thing when we are in our busiest time. By the way, if you're watching this on video, I. I'm holding an iPad with my notes for this episode while there's also a laptop to my left. And if I can be honest with you, if I can let my hair down for a minute, I got a real tech mess nightmare on my hands right now because I wiped my MacBook Pro and put open claw on it and it's. It's doing all sorts of things for a video that we're putting together right now, but for very good reason. I can't put anything like personal on the laptop that has OpenClaw on it. That would be madness. And where I keep my episode notes in notion. I can't put notion on my laptop, but I need my laptop to power some of the AV gear that's making all this happen. Hence why I'm holding a humongous iPad Pro and I have a MacBook Pro next to me. It's a mess, gang. I've officially become one of the nerds that have bought a Mac Mini to put open claw onto because I need to have my laptop back. And $500 Mac mini is a lot cheaper than like dropping another several thousand bucks on a new MacBook Pro. Anyways, accounting firms live and die, but by these deadlines and if you're not careful, you can end up in this situation where you get behind on things. And so all of your clients start asking, right? They're doing the status checkup, hey, we getting close? And it's usually because they thought it would be done by then. And then dealing with those status requests takes more time and thus makes everything take longer because you're fielding these requests and before you know it, you've got this cascading problem of everybody's stuff getting further and further behind because you have having to deal with the requests. And it's worth being super clear here that those sort of problematic communications, they all stem from simply a disconnect in expectations. Because if the client thinks they're going to have it done two weeks from now, usually when they're asking is maybe two weeks from now, definitely three weeks from now, four weeks from now. Right. If you've already told them it's going to be done two weeks from now, 95% of clients will not be asking you if it's done before you told them that it would be done. And so the biggest, like the biggest, most common scenario where this becomes problematic is when you just, you don't give any expectation or your firm just has this sort of boilerplate thing that you tell everybody of like yeah, it usually takes a few weeks to get it out or yeah, usually we get our clients financials out by the 12th of the month. But like no thought goes into does that apply to this project? In this case, do we actually have enough control over our workflow to ensure that it can go out over that time frame? Because if 30 people bring me work today, that's gonna be awful hard to maintain that. So the solution to this is having some sort of expectation upfront so they don't have to bug you until then. It is obviously then delivering to that expectation. And if you can't like the real enemy, the worst thing for the client to feel is forgotten. Like that is, that's, that is ultimately what they're usually asking is actually hey, just making sure that my stuff is kind of still on your list. And it makes matters even worse when we're so busy and we don't even resp to those people because like it's annoying, right? And, and you're like you'll hear from me when you hear from me. But the really unfortunate truth here is because clients make buying decisions based on the client experience, not the technical stuff then like the easier firm to run, the more profitable firm to run is the one where we are stopping the work and dealing with the client because those people will pay more for the better client experience. If we are the heads down firm where we put no attention into client experience, you're going to see more client churn and it's going to be least attractive to the people who want like the premium client delivery. And that's really frustrating because all we want to do is get the work done right. Last thing we want to do is fill these dumb questions. One hack here is called the no update update. Proactively getting out ahead of people asking you where things are at is always the move. It makes you look like you're on top of things. Even if that email simply says hey, want to let you know we're still working on it. Nothing new to report yet. You sending that email before they have to send you an email asking is vastly better than them wondering have I been forgotten? So let me run you through both for we'll do bookkeeping first and then tax shops after that. The Progression that most firms go through to manage deadlines. Because every accounting firm has a bottleneck that's a constraint of the entire business. For bookkeeping firms you've got a big one at year end because everything's hitting at once. You've got the added work that comes with just year end stuff. And so January, February is always a mess. But the bigger thing for a bookkeeping business on the whole is how do I solve for my monthly bottleneck? Wouldn't it be nice if I was delivering a set of financials on the first and the second and the third and the fourth, all the way down to the 31st? Most of us can't get there. But even then, like that's not the quite the right solution. But here's what the progression usually looks like is when you're starting out, you're doing what the client's going to tell you to do. And, and, and for me that was like the client saying like, oh yeah, we usually have it by X day of the month. And in the sales process I'm like oh yeah, we can do that. And so it goes into, you know, task management with a due date of that date. And usually these are going to be pretty aggressive. In fact, many times the business owner pretty much makes up a date or maybe they think that date is true. They'll say something like yeah, no, we usually have the books done within a couple days a month end. And then you go and you talk to the accountant on their team and they're like oh gosh no. Like there's some sales reports that I run for them on the third, but like I don't even have this bill or that thing or I'm still waiting on the owner for X, Y, Z. Uh, in fact, I haven't closed the last three months books. And so where you end up really quickly here is you've got a whole bunch of clients that have to be done very early in the month. And that's a really hard business to manage. Like if your entire team has to have all these closes done by the 10th or sooner or the 12th or sooner, how's everybody keeping busy the rest of the week? Like that's a, that's a really hard thing to build around. And so the second step where people then go next is they're like okay. Actually the secret to running profitable bookkeeping practice is having a bunch of clients that will like wait forever for their month end close. You look at like Bench, which is, it's actually one of the biggest bookkeeping companies of all Time, like, they do a huge number of books. I want to say it was like 6 or 8,000 a couple years ago. SMB's books every month. And their expected turnaround time is, is. Was it the 20th business day of the month, the 25th of the month, something like that? Very late in the month. And so for the folks who have been like, just nose to the grindstone, shipping all the client books in the first 10 days of the month, they're like, this is the solution is by default now we're going to be the 20th or the 25th or something like that. But then you get there and you're like, well, this actually kind of sucks because most people aren't okay with this. In fact, the only people that are okay with getting their books on the 25th of the month are the people who probably aren't going to look at the reports that they're. That you're sending them anyway. So you start with an aggressive date, probably just because we're taking dates from the client. Like, we don't have enough leverage in the conversation to really give them a date. Then you go to lazy dates because you're like, well, wouldn't it be nice if we could spread this workout across the whole month? Where most firms go third then is, oh, we, we got to keep the books up all the time. We're gonna do the books weekly now. And so rather than like batching all the work at the end of the month, now they're in there doing the work every single week. At step one, you were like, no, it's much more efficient to batch it and do it all a month at a time. I'm not gonna do it every single week. Because the total time it takes to do it every single week that the total time that goes into that is more. By step three, you're saying, oh, it's actually worth it to do it weekly, even though the total time is more. Because in the business, the only thing that matters is the bottleneck is the constraint. And so any time that you can spend outside of that constrained time window is time well spent. So, for example, in a tax firm, the firms I came up with in the summer, people had nothing to do. People were just spinning in their chairs. And so literally anything that you could do to spend time that would save time during the times that were like the peak hourly seasons was worthwhile. Like, if you had to spend 10 hours in July to save 10 minutes in April, that was a worthwhile trade off. The only thing that matters at that point is what is like the greatest bottleneck of the firm, if we are measuring success simply by getting more work out the door. Now, there's a whole bunch of other ways that we can like, help that bottleneck problem, right? But in a bookkeeping firm, this is the realization that many people get to is even though it takes more time to do the books every single week, that is worthwhile because it's solving for our biggest bottleneck, which is the month end close last. The fourth step that I've seen some people get to, and I think if it's me, this is probably what I'd be trying to push to, though I wouldn't say it's super common yet, is to actually, like, get away. There's been this, like, conversation around, like the rolling close and the real time close. And you see it a lot in thought leadership. And most accountants kind of roll their eyes at it and they're like, well, I only get this bill once a month, or I only get this or that once a month. Like, it's not possible to do that week over week. The version of this that resonates with me is the one that starts with, what's the information from the close that the client actually needs? Because when you send them a balance sheet and a P and L, what they're probably going to do is speed run to like two or three numbers in there that are the only numbers that they actually want. They're not going through the entire thing. They don't know what most of it means. But usually there's just a couple specific things they want to get into, and they want to get that number as soon as they can. But in most cases, there are much easier ways to get them that number on a rolling basis much closer to real time. Because if they're getting their financials on the 10th or the 15th of the month, like, those numbers are already at worst, 45 days old. Right. And so if you're able to get the decision maker the information that they need even before month end, like more on an ongoing basis. And you can even sort of automate a lot of this if you look at like the tools that will automatically sync accounting ledger activity out to a spreadsheet or something like that, for example, set up a custom dashboard for them so that every week when you update the bookkeeping, if it can't be done in real time, they've got those figures on a much more speedy basis. If you can get them that data, you'll find it actually takes a lot of pressure off of the month. End close itself because they're not really holding out for the financials when they've already got the data that they need on a more frequent basis. Now you still have to do the month end close. But what this achieves is it depressurizes anybody needing the month end close super fast. So the month end close then becomes more of an accounting function that takes more time, but like the important critical decision making data, it's being delivered on more of a real time basis. And so the upshot of this is we're solving more for the constraint of the month end close, having to be done really, really fast for that information to be worthwhile. So that's the progression that I most commonly see in bookkeeping firms. You start with really aggressive dates and you pride yourself in them and then eventually you're like, this is exhausting, this is hard to build a business around. So our dates get lazier. Then you're like, no, we just get, we gotta get to doing the books weekly, even though it takes more. And then by step four, people are like, how can we actually kind of just not even talk about the month end close? Like we'll do it. But the information that the decision makers actually need, they're getting it more real time. Now, tax firms, managing deadlines, and this is really any kind of deadline, like tax or not, stuff that is like big drop dead deadlines where something has to be done by a certain date. Step one here, first thing that happens is you're going to take whatever you can get because you're just happy to have the work, right? If you're not bumping up against capacity constraints, then it's like you tell me, client, when do you want it done? And we'll make it happen. So in the beginning you have no leverage and you're just taking what you can get. But step two, like once you start hitting capacity, you're like, oh, okay, geez. Like we can only get so many of these things done by X date. Be it March 30, be it April 15, whatever deadline it is. And so you set a cutoff and we tell the clients, you got to have your stuff in by. If it's April 15, maybe you start with April 5, April 1, it's March 30, maybe you tell them March 15, you got to have everything into me. American people are super angry that I'm saying March, March. Have I been saying 30th? 31st is what I meant. You set a cutoff date and you're like, well, if we think Back to this last year, had, you know, anybody, anybody that had got us their info by that date, we got the work done on time. So if we just set the deadline of that date, you have to have your stuff in by then, then we'll get everybody out on time. Great plan, right? Wrong. Step number three, you decide you got to go to an earlier date, because what happens in the next year? Just to give you actual dates, as an example of this, if the deadline was 415 and you set the cutoff at 4:1, because this last year, everything that was in by 4:1 got done. Then when you've got this new cutoff of 4:1, everybody that last year brought you their stuff between 4:1 and 4:10, now they're bringing it to you on 4:1. So now you've got twice as much work to do beginning on 4:1 because of this cutoff. So then you're like, okay, we got to go back to 320. And then again, now you've got all the people that before were between 320 and four one clear through to 410 are now bringing you their stuff on 320. And that is the same volume of work that you have to get done by 415 as when you had no cutoff deadline. And so this doesn't actually solve the problem. So that is progression. Step number three is just going to an even earlier date. And some firms will step this up five or six times before eventually giving in. There's also a half step here. Let's call it step 3.5, where firms actually start respecting the date cutoff that they give clients. Because what a lot of firms do here is they'll be like, oh, the cutoff's going to be April 1st. And then clients bring them their stuff on April 3rd, and you're like, no big deal. We'll see what we can do. And then on April 9, you deliver their tax return. This is kind of like the trap of responding to client emails immediately. If you're sitting there with your email up on your six monitor and you, you love that just endorphin rush of responding to an email right away. And isn't that incredible? Customer service? Until you can't because you're busy and the client has the expectation that you'll respond to them right away, and now they're disappointed anytime you don't. Training yourself off of doing that, that's really hard. Similar to like actually not handing over a tax return if it comes in after the deadline that you set. Even if you could. There's a lot of people that will say that's wrong. If we have the time to do it, why would we not do it? For those people, I could go buy my children candy bars. Why do I not? Because they've already taken enough from me. We don't like stick to that deadline that you set, then next year they're probably not going to like respect the deadline. Right? So that was progression step 3.5, step number four. And this is where most accounting firms stop, is just with like some version of that and they try to do the best that they can with that cutoff date. Progression number four, what, what some firms are now moving to is scheduling their tax work throughout the year. So either the clients opt in to the date that they want or the firm just sets the dates and they say, here's when we're going to file your return. You know, the two or the three weeks before this. You have to have your information in by this deadline and they literally schedule out the entire year. And like this is increasingly becoming the norm. And tax firms, because it's truly the only way to take full control over your workflow. If all you do is you set a drop dead date, you don't have any control on how many people bring you your stuff before that drop dead date. And so have you really? Can you really control the outflow? How long it takes for things to go out until you've controlled the inflow, like the volume of stuff that's coming in. And there's a bunch of different flavors we've done of that. There's on YouTube, there's actually a whole playlist of podcast episodes around moving to scheduled tax work. We did kind of an entire week on it and a bunch of interviews with firms that, that happily do that. But I mean people run tax firms and don't work an hour of overtime all year round. Like you can really plan your whole year that way. Last I would say the biggest brain step here, step number five is doing scheduling, but doing it through the lens of three tier proposals and folks paying a premium to be able to opt into the time range that they want. And it's almost, I mean it's almost a no brainer, right? Like we can only help so many people within this time range. So who should we help? The people that actually need it in that time range, but also the people who are like willing to pay to go into that time range if that's super important to them. Because clients will always have a reason why their stuff needs to be done first, it can't be extended X, Y, Z. Well, then, like have a price for that. Now, is there another step after that when you have X number of people that have opted into this higher ticket earlier filing, presumably? Almost certainly. But the upside then is you have levers that you can pull. And so when they sign an engagement letter, when they opt into one of the tiers of the proposal, that's just for that year. So next year, the pricing, the system, all that stuff can look different. You haven't committed yourself to this perpetual obligation of, you can always bring me your stuff on April 7th and I'll get it done by April 15th. Like, we're not setting the expectation, we're setting the rules of the game every single year. And then they opt into it. They make the decisions for themselves based on what makes the most sense in their circumstances. Foreign you doing tax work right now? You got a lot of 1040s you're trying to get out the door, buddy. Have I got the app for you. Is this episode sponsor Soroban? If you do 150 or more 1040s a year, you need an AI 1040 intake automation solution. Vastly better than Cognito Forms or the paper organizer or anything that a practice management system has on offer. Right now with Sorban, you just dump all all the docs that your clients are giving you into Sorban. It goes through a checklist of all the things that you should have for that 1040 based on pro forma data, automatically checks off all the items that are in those documents and gives you like an intelligent portal you can feel good about putting in front of your clients. That will save you a tremendous amount of time in organizing all the information that you're getting in and figuring out what you have and what you still need and following up with clients, automates, all of that stuff. A tremendous tax season time savings. We are in the thick of it. And this is where Sorband's gonna save you a tremendous amount of time. I know tens, if not 100 plus firms now that are very, very happy users. To learn more about Sorban, check out the link down in the show notes. 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't just work with that person directly. Most of those contracts, there's actually no way to get that person out of that employment group. That is why this episode sponsor 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's 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. Really smart thing I heard from a bookkeeping practice one time is they just send updates to their clients every single week. Like they have an admin, kind of a project manager that will send updates to clients every single week. It includes a list of anything that they may need from the client. It doesn't always. They send the update no matter what, of like, hey, here's what's happened in the last week, here's what we're working on. But if that update goes out several weeks in a row with items on it that they need from the client and they don't hear back, as a bookkeeping firm that does this, they will charge them what they call a catch up fee. And so if the client misses that email, it doesn't get them the stuff in two or three weeks time, they literally have to pay a fee. And it ensures that every single week, like the trains are moving, everything's happening and we're not falling behind. And the solution to most of these problems is just a greater amount of effort going into admin, unfortunately. And we all wish that admin just wasn't even a thing and that we don't need to manage people because there's a system, unfortunately, the really good version of this, as is the case with with most things, just requires more effort and more forethought than we've ever put into it before. And when it comes to making clients feel understood and heard and all that, like, that's kind of the best thing to invest in. Tell you. What I'm understanding right now is dayquil never had a better understanding of it than I do just in the last week or so. And I'm on a lot of it right now. I don't want to get too graphic, but I've already taken several nose blow breaks. And speaking of breaks, here's a break to get us into a Roast Affirm segment. Roast affirm. Roast affirm. Let's roast Firm on Jason on Firm. They're good, right? The transitions, Very good. Maybe one day we'll do an Oops all transitions episode where that's all it is because we've actually got a whole bunch of different ones. And if you're audio only, you're missing out because the visuals to go with these transitions are tremendous. All right. What we are roasting today is this firm's cleanup pricing strategy. I think it was last episode somebody posed the question, could I build an accounting firm just doing cleanup work? That'd be tricky, right? Because 100% project work. Also, it is the hardest work in all of accounting them to price because you don't know what you're getting into until you get into it. So here was the original question. Would love to hear your thoughts on cleanup pricing. I can't seem to sort out how to do the work at a price clients will actually pay for. And so many people go back and forth on this from like, man, I tried to fix price it. And I get smoked so often because I don't. I just don't know what is hiding under the surface. And so then they always go hourly, but then they end up doing all this work and they get to the end of the project and the client's like, yikes, I'm not going to pay you to do all this stuff. This was so much work. My take here, honestly. And both bookkeeping firms and tax firms have this because small business tax work, it is at least 50% book cleanup, not entry into tax software. My take here is, honestly, I think cleanup work is the worst work in an accounting firm. And if you're going to refer out any type of work, this is one of the first types that I'm, that I'm going to refer out now. This is not factoring in like oh, but I really enjoy cleanup work. And it's, it, I, it's, I know it's satisfying, it scratches sort of like an OCD itch. But through purely like the business lens of, you know, recurring revenue is, wouldn't that be nice? You know, like tax work year over year, monthly bookkeeping work. That's all recurring revenue. Cleanup work is not only that, it is this huge financial barrier to somebody committing to giving you money on an ongoing basis. So like it's actively standing in the way of what I actually want, which is recurring revenue. And on the one hand it's like a worthwhile filter, right? Like if somebody doesn't have the money to pay to fix it, then is that a client that you want to begin with? Now, as is the case with anything in accounting firm running one person's crappy work is another person's great business. Like most people will say the same about like 1040 individual tax work in the US that it's the worst type of client that you can have. Especially the simple stuff where you can't justify doing tax planning year round because all those projects generally hit during tax season. And they're right. Like if you look at kind of purely through the business lens of like, what is the best way to optimize for an accounting firm that is working year round? I'm not running a pop up fireworks store and just want to work really hard a few days a year. How do I optimize for bringing in cash 12 months a year? It's probably not 1040 work. But at the same time, that business force then makes running a volume 1040 shop really profitable, right? Because right now all sorts of folks are dumping this type of work that they don't want, which is making it an even bigger opportunity for the folks who are willing to do it. So one firm's trash is another firm's treasure. It's yet another argument for building really good referral relationships. Imagine having a bookkeeper you could chuck cleanup work to like before you start ongoing work with a bookkeeping client or before you start doing their tax work. That would be great, right? But when it comes to pricing this stuff, you gotta get really specific about what's the work that we're actually doing, what's included as part of what we're calling the cleanup bookkeeping. And what like methodology makes the most sense then to price what's left. But let's first talk about like what do you include in cleanup bookkeeping? Because people's definitions here are actually different. It's worth Noting in no world should we be going back to the dawn of time and reviewing their books like clear back to the founding of the universe. You gotta be really, really clear. Like here's what I'm going back to. I'm not touching anything before that because that's a slippery slope into then rebuilding their entire accounting file. And that might be fun for you, it might feel good. It's just really hard to do profitably. So the best trade off here is usually like, what was the last tax filing year? And we are just plugging the heck out of that. That is our starting point. And that doesn't solve for everything like down to, you know, journal entrying. Everything can create a mess of, of a different kind. Right. But to the best of our ability, we need to limit the scope of what we're actually going to dig into. To what can I actually get to dig into? This. This was also a really big unlock for me that the first time you deliver a month end set of financials to a client, they don't need to be perfect. And this for me, this was me with a CPA and a review like assurance, sort of background, thinking if somebody's going to bring their bookkeeping to me as cpa, like it has to go out the door. Perfect. I would argue in a preparation engagement that's not the case. And if you're not a cpa, like this doesn't even apply to you. The way I would communicate this to the client is that there's a lot of stuff here to fix, from systems things to issues in the past. And we're going to fix that over sort of the next three to six months. But make sure that you've got really good information in your hands month over month to make whatever decisions that you need to make. The other approach of doing a big old cleanup project means you're not going to have like good numbers in your hand for a while. So this is a process that takes, you know, three to six months. On my team, we had dedicated onboarding folks who were kind of like the, the best wizards to get a file to a place where it was ready for handoff. And then it would go into kind of the, the pod that handled all that work on an ongoing basis. But it made my life tremendously easier when we stopped talking about this as if we had to do this humongous project to get it to just a day one state that was okay and instead moved to like, there's a little bit of stuff we're going to do in the very Beginning just to make the file usable. But this is going to be about a three to six month transition. And by and large, like clients, they're totally fine with that. It also, from a practical standpoint, like, gave us the opportunity to sort of like spread the incremental work of that across a number of months. And so we really heavily used like temporary additional monthly fees to make that easier for folks to swallow. Now we, as maybe a month or two ago, we talked about how, who was it? I think it was maybe decimal. It was some, it was some bookkeeping firm who actually begun delivering the first set of monthly financials before doing any cleanup work. Because the cleanup work is like the worst experience you're ever going to have with the accounting firm. And you really want to make a good first impression. So what they will do is they will actually just do a normal month's bookkeeping and deliver a month standalone financial statements without doing the bookkeeping work or the cleanup work. And I know you're like, like, what about the balance sheet? What are there so many holes in that? And I get that. But I can also totally understand like the attraction of, let's start out with a really smooth experience and something that's actually more representative of what the long term relationship will look like month over month, which is not this humongous archeological dig that's just going to be frustrating for everybody. And there's a lot of scaries around how much this is going to cost. Now, in terms of how you then price, that, I would say hourly only is risky because like you can't do half a cleanup and get paid for it. On the other hand, oftentimes you'll get to the end of a cleanup and somebody will say, I'm not willing to pay for that. So, like, what do you do? Like, you don't wait to give them a price until the very end, otherwise you can get smoked. That can be like, I'm not going to pay to do that work. But at the same time, even if you're like, okay, I'll give you updates then as we're going through it, like, you're not going to get halfway through it and then be like, oh, let's hit pause or I'm going to take my work somewhere else, like that doesn't really make sense either right now. Fixed pricing is risky for obvious reasons. And the hard thing here is you feel this urge to discount the work, at least relative to what the normal monthly rate would be. You know, let's say you were going to charge this person $800 a month and you've got eight months of catch up. Had they been a client on a monthly engagement, that would have been 60$400, right. They would have paid for you to do those eight months. But so often a firm will come in and be like, yeah, we'll do this for four, we'll do this for five. Some sort of discount. The trouble is, and we dealt with this a lot with tax clients is they're like, when you come back around and you're like, hey, want us to do your monthly bookkeeping? And they're like, no, because it's cheaper to have you do it like once a year. Now, I think the answer there is different if it is part of a commitment to the ongoing work. And I would actually go as far as to say I and tax works a different thing. But at least on the bookkeeping side, I'm not going to touch cleanup work unless it's part of a contract for the next 12 months or something like that. Right. So if I know I'm getting the ongoing work, there's a little bit more of an argument that you can make for discounting and you can frame this as like, hey, this is a one time promotional offer for new clients. We will knock 20%, 40%, whatever it is off of that. You call it a setup fee, you know, whatever the cleanup is going to be. But really the anchor point, how we should talk about that cleanup rate is basically, what would it have cost for you to do their bookkeeping all these months? And it would have been correct at the end. Like that kind of needs to be where the conversation starts. Otherwise you're creating these really complicated incentives for the client to then just always keep coming back to you for cleanup work. Right. Now I keep saying this, there's a lot of arguments here for being able to refer out this cleanup work, finding a partner that can handle this stuff for you. Most bookkeepers, they're excited about like the ongoing recurring work. So the notion of them just taking on the cleanup work, they're not as excited. But you will find some bookkeepers who like they have their ongoing clients and they can take some volume of cleanup stuff. Depends. Also, if your ultimate goal then is to get clients into your own bookkeeping services, their risk and sending them to a bookkeeper. But it is notoriously hard work to do. And what makes it worse is that we usually give it away for really cheap. Now if we zoom out and we consider who are the clients that are filtered out by having bad books that are really expensive to clean up. Are those triple A clients? Are they AAA business owners that are coming to you with a gamungus mess? Probably not. It. I mean, it's kind of like how I would argue the best clients are not looking for an accounting firm based on Google reviews. In fact, like the best clients out there, they already have professional help. Like, they don't find themselves in a place where they don't have professional help because they are both probably loyal to a degree, but also they have a plan for what they're doing next before they ditch the previous plan. And so when people come in with this fire and you have to be the hero for them, and oftentimes this leads to us discounting because you can see that they're in a real pinch, Consider whether that is a person that like, looks like long term they're going to be a great partner for, for your firm and is the type of person that you want to work with, like, for years. And it can be easy to think back to like folks that we brought in and they were in a tough spot and now they're great. And for, for most of us, there's a time in our firm where those are the only people that we will get in the door. But does that mean that that is the next best client for your firm? Maybe not, because that is always a moving target. And we also Forget about the 20 other clients who came in with similar sob story that went sideways. Tough, right? Like, like, there's not a perfect answer for, for managing cleanup work. If I could push you to do one thing, it would be to make the starting of a new client relationship less about the cleanup work and more about the month over month. Like there is some real truth to that. Like if they have an awful cleanup experience and if we're like, okay, we want you to come work with us on an ongoing basis, but first we have to do this impossibly hard and expensive thing that's just a really high wall to build for people to get over and like, yes, it may be their fault, but just the way that we present that can probably be a little softer so that their first experience with the firm isn't the hardest thing that we ever do and is instead a little bit more representative of what the regular month over month work ought to look like. Okay, enough about cleanup work. We got a mailbag to get to. Mailbag. Mailbag. This segment is called. Questions are submitted via podcast comments DMs. Email people. Text me, send me a text, leave me a voicemail. I don't Have a way to pull the phone number up because openclaw's taken over my computer and doesn't have the normal stuff on it. Hang on. Talk amongst yourselves. Okay? Text me at 51 6. Hang on. Country code 1 516-980-4968 or leave me a voicemail. Voicemails are fun. Got a few voicemails lately. Thank you, gang. Gotta keep them tight, K. Gotta keep them 30 seconds or lesser. I can't use them on the. On the pod. You go longer than that. I'm just telling you that transcript's going straight into AI. All right, first question. Curious at what headcount you see standardized systems usually starting to fracture the most. That is a great question. Pretty much every point. It is very hard to get humans to follow standardized systems, very hard to get them to document those systems and then maintain that documentation without going too deep. The biggest problem with documentation inside of accounting firms is that most firms document client engagements in their entirety. As in, if I serve five clients, I have five SOPs, each being totally unique to that client instead of only the client specific aspects of that engagement engagement being documented. So if 40 of that engagement is unique to that client, I'm going to document the 40 that is unique. And to a degree, the prerequisite to this being able to work is having what I call a service library. That is a standardized vernacular for how we help people. And every, every engagement has a chunk of it that's unique to that client and then a whole bunch of it that isn't. And we like to think that every engagement is unique, but that's only because the last 50 to 5% of it is unique to that client. The opportunity is identifying all the rest of it that is the same across clients. And so when it comes to developing documentation, you start with documentation for like, what is a bookkeeping? One, what is a payroll Two, you develop the documentation for like the standardized aspects of these engagements. That is step one. And then you only build the client specific SOP for the part of the engagement that is then unique to that client. Because maintaining documentation, it is really, really hard. And building documentation for every, every single client for everything you do for that client, it's so much work that most people just don't do it. And if they ever invest the time in doing it, like a really good version of it, then it's so big that it's a huge project to maintain. Now in terms of just like systems and org charts and all of that and where that usually changes the big break points are first when the, when the first employee, the owner outgrows themselves. So how do I actually start pulling other human beings in to support me when everything's living in my head? Next point where things break is when the owner outgrows a single room, either either physical or virtual. There's a certain size of business that's very small, where everybody always knows what everybody else is doing and the tracking that's required and all of that. When, when everybody's just passively in sync with everybody else. Those requirements totally change once you grow beyond that being possible. So first breaks when you hire for the first time. Next it breaks when you get beyond like what one small room or maybe one pizza meeting worth of people in terms of the size of your firm. It next breaks when you outgrow the single partner model. So you have one fiefdom and a whole bunch of people just serving your clients. What if you then add, you know, a second person that's going to manage clients? How does that structure work then? I would say the next breaking point then is when the firm moves away from staff working for specific partners and staff instead working across functional domains. So the same thing I just described, where either the last 5 to 50% of an engagement may be unique to that client. Everything below that, and obviously the more standardized it is, the better. Everything below that, your payroll to your bookkeeping one, tax prep three those services, you then start building functional teams that just crank on doing that service all day long. That's the, the highest output like most machined version of an accounting firm. And then the client relationship managers are then closer to the work that is unique to that client. That would probably be the fourth big point at which kind of the structure and the workflows all change inside of an accounting firm. Um, I saw a webinar recently and by saw it I mean I scrolled past it. There was something along the lines of like will your. Will your tech stack scale, yes or no. And it just like that whole talk like conversation has the feeling of one of those unlearnable lessons where I don't know that you can really like paint a picture for somebody of that until they get into it themselves. Because every firm is so different and the needs of each firmans are so unique. But also if you look back the last three years, the last five years, the tech we have to run our firms has changed a ton. If you are a bookkeeping firm, month and close automation platforms have changed what you do hugely. If you're a tax shop like the 1040 intake stuff is really changing what it looks like to get 1040 work done. And over the next three years, surely I don't, I won't go on another AI rant on you, but over the next three years, let alone over the next 18 months, the tools man are going to look so different. Like, people aren't talking enough. Here comes an AI rant. People aren't talking enough about how we have like AI agents now, which by the way, are not, are not okay to use insensitive contexts yet. But that's a temporary problem. They're good enough to use the software that we use, which is the biggest existential threat there's ever been to software in general. Like, a lot of people believe that the software ecosystem, 80% of it will disappear. Because if an AI agent is capable of using all of these different apps, then like, they're coming between me and the app itself. And at a certain point, the agent probably just kind of does what that app does. I mean, there's tremendous financial incentive for the companies who have the AI agents to just be able to build software kind of behind the scenes as you need it. Like just in time software say I need a CRM and like my agent just like spins up a little database and I tell it whatever I want my CRM. Like, you could see a version of that where for like very basic needs, it's good enough, even more customizable because like, you've got this sort of like thing that can write code and sort of do some custom development on it for you for sure downsides to that approach. But if you're picking a tech stack right now and the concern is like, am I going to outgrow this tech stack in five years? If we look at what our tech stacks are today, there's a very good likelihood that a big percentage of those companies are not here in five years time. And which is a bummer. Like it really is. But this whole AI agent thing, this is a new layer of software. Like, nobody's going to use QuickBooks's AI agent. We're going to use the AI agent that works in QuickBooks but also in Drake Tax and also in Adobe Acrobat and can see into my Microsoft Outlook. Like, this is a new layer of software that works across all of the apps that we use. And the incumbent software companies, they're building agents for their own platforms, but those will always be inferior to the agent that can see across all the tools that I use. Right. And so as soon as you have layer of software that's above all of those tools, then for a lot of the tools under that layer, their days are numbered. And this is kind of a cold take. But I so frequently come back to like stop trying to build the tech, stack the system or anything for the firm that is five times the size of yours right now. Like build for what you need right now. Like that's a balancing act for sure. Like don't build something that's going to be outdated in six months. But there is no system that works for firms of any size. And that's that's one of the most common questions that I get. I've just started my firm plan is to grow to 20 million in five years. How do I build my systems now so that they're ready for the future? You don't. You have no idea what you need yet. Right now I would say focus on how to get clients to pay you as much as possible. That's the North Star. Then you got an abundance of time and money to figure out. Like what should my systems be? 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 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, quick word from one of today's sponsors. Me. Me. Yes, I run a community realize that is for accounting firm owners and realize is kind of the secret behind how I've done all of my content and been able to like financially turn thought leadership into a business. About 100 firm owners in there realize is a Systematic way to build connections with other peer firm owners. It's not a framework for how to run a firm. It's a way to introduce you to other super cool firm owners. Right now we're putting together small groups so you can have a group of like 5, 6, 7 other firm owners just like you that you meet with every single month run very similar firms. Having this for me, totally transformed firm running my North Star like my goal for you coming into this group is to make a new best friend, somebody that runs a firm because that was what I needed in my journey. The whole community is built around that. It's called Realize. Link down in the show notes if you want to learn more. Next up, how would you niche price and design services for stable solopreneurs, usually s Corps doing 150 to 200 grand a year who are often too small for larger firms? That's a tough business. It is hard going into business like serving the client that nobody else is willing to serve. Presumably in businesses this side you're just doing tax work. Really hard to do bookkeeping work for companies this small. And it's just a question of what percentage of their revenue are you able to take and that be that still be worthwhile for you. Somebody give me a calculator. When we were going hard on our dental niche, we were generally billing clinics. 2% of collections. I know I've heard someone that runs a vet clinic firm that charges 3% of collections. But if you look at a $150,000 a year business, 2% of collections, $3,000. If you're doing monthly bookkeeping work, that's $250 a month. I think if you're trying to go this low, this is getting down into the territory where DIY and done with you services might make more sense. So most firms are built around done for you services. You just give me all your stuff and I'm going to do it all for you. Sometimes it's worthwhile to build further down the value ladder if those folks will one day come up into your done for you services. So the next step down is usually done with you. In some work this works and other types of work, it's the headache isn't worth it. But this could be like you coming in and reviewing something for them. Somebody diying their books and then bringing you their tax return. That's an example of done with you bookkeeping because you're coming in and reviewing and fixing it at the end of the year and then clear the bottom of that spectrum is DIY where you give them resources for them to figure it out themselves. You can also do this just around specific types of work. Like for 1099 work, for example. That's a great place to have a good DIY resource to help more clients figure that stuff out on their own so that you're not getting these like 11099 projects. So building a done for you firm around companies that small, really, really challenging. If you're just talking about doing tax work, for example, TurboTax full service in the US charging it was like 1750 for federal only S Corp. Returns with no bookkeeping cleanup. If we can only charge people like a few grand a year, like if you add book cleanup into doing the tax work, like that's probably three grand a year, if not more at TurboTax prices. So there's potentially like an augmented model of this where you have referral partners that you send that stuff to. By the way, TurboTax full service accounting firms can refer work to them and get paid for that work. You then get the great double dip of when they come back around and have you do all their work and you amend all their past returns and fix stuff. You get paid again. It's a great business model, but I'm not going to lie to you, that's a tricky business to run. There are like some small accounting firm setups that are almost like little creator businesses. Like almost like what I do where you know, some of our company, some of our money that we make is kind of as a media business and sponsorships and some is from speaking and kind of all these different things. Right. There's a version of an accounting firm you could run around that where you are sort of an influencer in that space and you make money from brands, but you also make money from client work. Maybe there's a community there. Even that sort of setup might make sense for smaller businesses like that. But if you're looking for a thing to differentiate you, by the way, got to go more specific than small tiny businesses like that's not, that's not a niche or that's. I shouldn't say that that's not as specialized as I would try to go to be able to effectively attract people. If it's any solopreneur doing 150 to 200k a year, you're serving so many different types of businesses and you have so little margin to learn about what they're doing and really adequately help them that it almost increases the necessity to get specific and you know, industry or demographic or something like that, but if that's who you're passionate about, find a way to do it. It won't look like a traditional accounting firm model in all likelihood, but there's probably sort of a hybrid approach of some like done with you, done for you, maybe even other revenue streams that that could make sense. I'm that people at that size because there's a large number of them. Like there's a. There's an interesting community play there as well and communities like inside of an accounting firm, if you're serving a very specific niche, communities are still a great opportunity. I've listened to your podcast on hiring as well and wondered if you or anyone that you know if there's any creators or resources to talk about managing and developing employees from the same lens as you discuss hiring man, nobody comes to mind like folks in the accounting space that are really going deep on managing and developing employees. There is one person, she's in the uk. Let me track her down. This is such a pain not having my laptop open. Claw. You're really cramping my style. Her name is Heather Elkington. Spelled just like it sounds. E L K Elkington. She's written a book. She's got some really good stuff that is just more general on like running and training teams. She her background is more in accounting tech than in accounting firms otherwise like most of the thought leadership I'm looking at for this sort of thing is outside of the accounting space. There are, you know, there is one company, Royal Wise, all one word, Royal Wise, that has like QuickBooks training for your team. That's very good but that's more like around specific software. Otherwise creators, there's, there's not that many creators in the accounting space. But if anybody's got any good recommendations for this, please drop that stuff down in the comments. I'd love to see it. I love this question. Three more to go. How do you get rid of the reflection on your in your glasses on camera? Okay, you either couldn't care less about what I'm about to say or you are glued to your television set. Here is how you get rid of glasses Reflections on camera. The problem for most is that the light that they're using, which could be an actual light, could be a window, could be the monitor itself. The problem is that that light is on the same horizontal plane relative to the camera as your glasses. Some pretty big words there. I know if my webcam is directly in front of me at the same elevation, let's say as my glasses and then there's also a light that's at the same elevation as my glasses. Then they are both on the same plane, both the camera and the light. All you got to do is get that light up high enough to where it's not reflecting in your glasses. So right now, if you're on video looking at the video version of the podcast, if I tilt my glasses up, you can see the reflection of the light source that I have here. Now, another big thing here is the larger the light source you have, the more diffused that light will be, the less noticeable it will be on your glasses. If you have, like a small, like a single bulb sort of light, it will look like this one very intense sort of reflection on your glasses. So generally, the bigger the light source, in general, the bigger the light source, the better a video looks, too. I have this is. If you could see my setup right now, you. It's madness. But, like, we have. This is all, like, very professional cinema cameras, and it's like, so far beyond what I recommend anybody do in, like, an accounting firm. But I'm literally to my left right here, just out of shot, is a 6 foot by 6 foot square of, like, diffused material with then a big 48 inch dome light behind it. So the goal is to get, like, the biggest, most diffused light source possible that makes video look really nice. When there's this big, humongous diffused light on you, the smaller the light that's shining on you, generally, the worse it looks. The very worst type of light is ceiling lights shining down on you because they cast really unappealing shadows over your eyebrows, over your glasses. In fact, if you look really bad in your webcam setup, but you have some natural light, maybe from a window on your face, or even if you're using an actual light on your face, most of the time, if you turn off the overhead lights in the room when you get on camera, it will actually look a lot better. Give that a try. If you look like crap on video right now, try to orient yourself towards a window and turn off the overhead lights. Makes a big difference. But glasses specifically, the only thing you need to do is get the light on a different kind of horizontal plane than the camera and your glasses. And that usually means lifting it up so it's kind of shining like, not directly down, but, like 30, 45 degrees down at an angle toward you. All right, two to go around, like, testing employees before you hire them. You speak a lot about trial days. I'd love to crowdsource 10 to 20 examples of tasks we can assign people during trial days. Looking for some strong examples. If you've done trial days, you do any of this, pop that stuff in the comments. What are the exact tests that you run clients through? I can run you through the four things that we did anytime we made a bookkeeping hire. And on the tax side, it was something very similar to this first thing we did. Devil's also in the details of how you run all these. Because like the. Actually the very first thing we did with these folks was we would send them basically a link to like the Slack download page and be like, get this set up, then hop on Zoom with us. And there were a couple just like computer setup things that we expected them to do. And then the package of files that we sent them were in a zipped folder. And so when we first got on with them, we would have them share their screen and then we would give them a zipped folder and we're like, what happens next? Just like, you learn some very basic computer skill stuff about these people, but you need to know that before hiring them. But the first thing that we did was we gave them a bookkeeping file. We had a staged 0 or QuickBooks online company file. And then we gave them all the, all the statements, everything that they needed to complete the file. And, you know, a certain amount of time to be able to do it. It wasn't always enough time to complete it. We would tell them to get as far as they could, do their best. And this took some work to stage the file. We had like an example set of documents that we used every single time. But first it was a bookkeeping task. Second, they would meet with some folks that would ultimately be on their team to discuss some sort of article. So we would share an article, be like, hey, let's meet at X time. And it'd be three or four of them. And they would just sort of chat through it. It kind of be a vibe check as low pressure as possible because things are always weird, right? So like, we're not setting the bar super high on this. We just want to see like, do they have anything to add to the conversation? Third thing we did was we had a staged sticky situation with a client. And it was basically a sort of angry client email and a bunch of information to give that person sort of the facts of the situation. And then they would draft a response to the client. So how do you sort of tactfully navigate this and. And get back to the client in a way to not make me more mad, but also effectively Communicate what happened. Last thing number four was we gave them a set of financials to review. And so this was sort of a finished file with all the supporting documents. And they were responsible for writing review notes for a junior team member. But then also, once they had done that, recording a recording a quick loom going through those review notes to send to the junior. And so we're looking at, not only from a technical standpoint, are they identifying the things you would expect them to identify, but then can they communicate it in a conscientious, conscientious, positive way? And so over the course of the entire day, we assessed, you know, in a vacuum, technical skills. We did sort of a vibe check and they got to meet some of the people that would be on their team, which was great for them. We did a bit on sort of soft skills with clients and client communications, but also how they would work with juniors. Like, can they be supportive of their teammates and are they communicating things clearly and in a human way? Now this is. We always are very, very clear about this with trial day folks. This is a lot. This can be a very stressful thing. The joke we always made was it was like the Hunger Games. And so actually everything in the trial day was themed around the Hunger Games. And the joke from the beginning was like, this is this crazy, intense, sort of sweaty gauntlet thing because, like, we don't want it to feel that way. And we would say that over and over again in a lead up and during the day, like, this is just for us to learn about you and you to learn about us. Like, do your best. Nobody's perfect in this environment and we're not expecting you to be perfect. Just be yourself. And so you try to. You try to depressure it as much as you can so that these folks can be at their best. Because I think about these four tests and how much more you know about a person and understand a person than you do if you just ran some interviews. I mean, it is night and day. You know so much more about this person. Now, you still have to keep in mind this is not perfect information. This is not perfectly representative of a normal workday. Right. But we've all hired somebody and gotten to the end of the first day and been like, there were some surprises there. Like, this is pulling that first day forward in my mind. And are they going to perform this way every single day? They're going to be at work? No. Are we going to act this way with them when they are, like, on board and part of the team? Probably not like it's for sure imperfect, but it's information. And one of the big pushbacks I get on this is like, well, it's hard to hire accountants right now. Who's going to be willing to do this? Like, we did it over half day. We were super flexible with their schedule. We have people in different time zones, so we could do it early mornings, we could do it evenings. We could split it over two days. Whatever worked best for them. And the big thing we got from folks was they appreciated getting a window into what we do and getting to meet more of the team. Especially in this case, they were joining us as, like a virtual distributed team member. And they got such a better connection with the vibe and all the folks involved by going through this process. So it really is all in the details and how you communicate it. And don't treat this like this really hardcore scary thing, but you can learn a tremendous amount about somebody and like, your mind, if you never tell. Done this before, your mind will tell you, boy, that's a lot of work. Like, that's a really. Go through all that with all these people, you build all these resources, you stage a bookkeeping file. Like, this is a lot of work. Consider how much work it is to hire the wrong person. And most of us have been there where you work on hiring this person for three to six months. You finally get to the person, you get six months into working with them, and you realize this isn't the right person. Or they leave and you're back to flipping square one. How much work is that? That is why trial days are worthwhile. One of the best things that I ever did. Absolutely worth the effort, as evidenced by. I mean, there were a lot of folks who we thought we were thrilled with, and we're so excited to get started with. And then we did a trial day, and we're like, oh, these are some red flags. And again, the devil's in the details. And there's an unfair version of that that you have to be careful not to wade into. But it's information, both information for us and information for them to understand if this is the sort of Hunger Games environment that they want to come into. Last question. Somewhat related. Getting fake documents for robust testing for, like, training, internally testing new employees, that sort of thing is no small feat. Would you consider sharing the docs that you talked about in the Cloud Cowork podcast somewhere where we could swipe them? I've tried getting AI to generate docs previously, but was not impressed with the results. Redacting real Documents is a nightmare. Sammy May Q ask and ye shall receive. Down in the Show Notes I've put a couple of things. Another twist with this whole open cloth thing is I had to wipe my MacBook forgot that was where I put all the test files that I used for the cloud Cowork video that I already shot. Gosh H darn it. I've got some AI stuff set up where I can generate more test files both for bookkeeping, tax docs, all that stuff. At some point I'm going to just generate a big library of that stuff that people can swipe. In the meantime, I've put in Google Drive three months of bank statements that I have a total of 67 transactions. Also a subfolder there with 41 receipts that I'm also using AI to generate that tie back to 41 of those 67 transactions. So you can grab that in Google Drive link for all this is in the Show Notes and then one other folder that has 12 months, actually 11 months of bank statements because I can't find one of the months it was supposed to be 12 months that have 670 transactions in them in total across 12 months. And in that folder are 11 of those 12 months. So that's unfortunately the best that I can do right now. But we have the technology to generate more of these sample documents if that would be helpful for you. Let me know what you would like to see. And we can make a whole bunch of these just open source. Some people can grab them, use them for training for anything that you want. Because having a library of example stuff is actually useful in a whole bunch of contexts. I'm very example that was a big nut to crack for our videos because the hard thing is always showing as real as possible of examples in the videos, right? Like actual work. And this is a problem everywhere. Like even our software vendors can't really show stuff because they can't show real documents. We're making effectively real documents. Like you'll be impressed by the quality. They're like you can pick them apart a little bit but like to be able to generate a 14 page brokerage statement with like the two page summary and all the detail pages all like tie out to the summary pages to like in the, in the cowork video we generated 12 months of bank statements that had a total of 6700 transactions in them. And all, I mean beginning balance, month end balance, everything footed across all of that. And that was no small feat to generate and to build and it was several sort of cloud cowork skills tied together but this was never possible before and now we can use AI to make this stuff and it's a super useful resource for training and testing and all that stuff. So if there's more of that that would be helpful to you to have to drop me a comment about what the best version of that for you would look like. In the meantime I put some of those resources down in the show notes today. Just a Google Drive link so you can grab grab what's there gang. Thanks for being here. You got questions you want to toss in the mailbag? Leave a comment if you're on the audio version of this podcast there will be a link to the YouTube version where you can come in. Leave your first YouTube comment probably get absolutely smoked by weirdos. That's just YouTube man. Shoot me a DM. Shoot me a text. We'd love to hear from you and I'll catch you in the video next. Next one.