594 6 Recent Can’t Miss AI Agent Updates for Accounting Firms [New releases you must have on your radar]

We just got a hugely important update to an AI agent that absolutely impacts accounting firms, and it comes on the heels of like a month of pretty unbelievable releases, like feature updates that are like the stuff that I feel like we've been dreaming about for years. We're going to get into that big update, but also 5 other updates that kind of got us here that all come together into what is like the golden age of getting a computer to do stuff for you. Such an exciting period we're entering into. Also today on the show, huge news. Ticketing is now up for my 20-city workshop tour happening in May and June across 20 cities in the US. Going to tell you a little bit about that right now. There's a discounted presale going on so that you loyal listeners can get first dibs on those tickets. It's also like a VIP tier there that has a limited number. I'll tell you a bit about that, but also digging into the mailbag, got questions on how to navigate a conversation with a client where you're going to double their price. Ooh, will Google and Microsoft ultimately create a better version of Cloud Cowork? Question from a listener that's got loads of traffic to to their website, but shockingly few conversions, and a few other odds and ends of tactical questions just around running accounting firms. The stuff that we talk about every day on this podcast. Let's get into it. If you're new here, welcome along to the Jason on Firms podcast, where we talk all things accounting firm running, whether you are an owner, whether you work in a firm, whether you aspire to own a firm one day. This is where people come to learn how to do it. Run a better one. Used to run a 40-person firm myself, and in the last few years have had the pleasure of talking with genuinely thousands of accounting firms around the world, and I steal their best ideas and claim them as my own. That's now my business model. But first, AI agent updates. Here's the thing, gang, is Claude Cowork has very quickly emerged as like the tool for accounting firms, I feel like. And it's really exciting, but it's hard because it's in this sort of nebulous place where I don't think Cowork is to the point where, for me at least, I can trust it with client-sensitive information. But as we've shown off in some videos now, what it is currently capable of would absolutely transform your accounting firm. And that is a, a really hard thing that people are grappling with right now, where the capability is there but the security is not. And it's forcing a conversation in a way that the whole AI thing has never has been forced before. Because ChatGPT, like AI assistants, like, yes, like we have been able to save a lot of time from those things, but Cloud Cowork now is doing like meaty, like production, like you you would plug it into your production line and it would do genuine heavy lifting. People can now see it's good enough for that. And so there's part of this sense now that every day that I'm not able to use it is like lost productivity. And so all of a sudden, the security question, which frankly for most accounting firms around the tech that they use, is general— is usually very vague. Like, it's not first principles. Like, we don't have enough of an understanding to really know if it's secure or not. We just see other people using it, and so we use it. But when it comes to cowork now where it's like, boy, I could see a world where that's actually doing a lot of heavy lifting for me. All of a sudden, like people are digging into this more than they ever have before, which frankly is great because we need to be making tech decisions more first principles, like understanding what makes it secure versus not secure, pulling in your IT support. Like a lot of IT companies are very behind on this stuff too, which makes that tricky. I saw a poll on LinkedIn the other day. Over 70% of accountants reported switching from ChatGPT to Claude now. Over 70%. That is shocking. Like, 6 months ago, I never would have expected that to happen. That's where we're at today, and Claude Cowork keeps shipping unbelievably good features while ChatGPT, I'll be honest, feels like it's floundering a little bit right now. Feels a little bit rudderless. In fact, a lot of the features that Claude Cowork shipped were pretty much ripped from OpenClaw. Some really cool, really novel things that OpenClaw was doing. If you saw the OpenClaw video that we published over the weekend, amazingly powerful. OpenClaw. And in the last couple of months, Cowork has, has sort of swiped a lot of those best features. And now people are looking at OpenAI, who went out and hired the creator of OpenClaw, uh, for, for big time money. People are now looking at Anthropic, the company behind Claude, and it's like, they were kind of like, yeah, we see all that cool stuff that we did. We're not gonna hire the guy that did it. We're actually just gonna swipe all those features. And so the big feature that dropped just a couple of days ago, as you are listening to this, that is massive. It's a feature that they didn't even give a name. They just posted a release and are like, hey, Cowork can do this thing now. I'm calling it computer control. And that is the ability to take control of the mouse, to tippy tap on the keyboard, and genuinely control anything that is on your computer. Just that. That's it. Just the ability to use your entire computer the same way a human would. What a sentence to just say, that AI agents are to a point where we're like, yep, nope, here you go. Here's the keys, brother. I'll see you in the morning. Now, the way it works functionally is with Claude Cowork, which is the desktop, is desktop only. You can still work with Claude. So Claude, C-L-A-U-D-E, it is an online AI chat assistant, much like ChatGPT. But the desktop app that you can run on Mac or Windows has an additional functionality that is not just chat. It's called Cowork. And that functionality can work with stuff on your actual machine, be it like the folder structure, or in this case, now like actually controlling your mouse and keyboard and navigating the entire computer. How this actually works is if you give it a job to do, it will first see, do I have any direct connections that will let me do this? So controlling your mouse and keyboard, it's kind of like the last step. Like it's the fallback if it can't find a more efficient way of doing it because it will be slow. It won't be super performant right now. And so it's sort of like the worst case scenario. It will try to get the job done that way. But it first tries direct connections. And so for apps that Claude can have a direct connection with, so your Google Workspace apps, your Microsoft 365 stuff, your Slack, it can have a direct like API connection to those things. And so it will first try to get the job done with that direct connection. And if it can't do it, only then will it fall back to, oh, I don't have a way to work this app, so I will now take control of the computer and work this app. That is very cool, but also scary in the same way that Open Claude is very scary, right? In that video about OpenClaw that we released over the weekend, I shared an example of how at one point I was trying to get 100 clients set up in the practice management system and OpenClaw got stuck on like this upload button that it couldn't click for some reason. And then on its own, I'm watching its reasoning. It didn't ask me if it could do any of this. I'm watching its reasoning and it says, I wonder if this app has an API. And it goes out and searches the web, finds out it has an API on its own, creates an API key, and then uploads all those clients into the practice management system via the API. And it does all this in like 3 or 4 minutes. I didn't even know this practice management system had an API. Evidently it's a new thing. It's in beta, but Open Claw went out and figured that out on its own and did it. And that's kind of the magic of Open Claw is it will just go out and do that stuff. But that's also the danger of it, right? And so Cowork, to trust it with the entirety of your computer, like that, there's just a lot of inherent danger in that, right? And so like, what about somebody's got malware on their machine or they just got an email with some sort of malicious instructions. Cowork can get duped or any AI agent can get duped in the same way that humans can get duped. Now there is a question of like, which of those two are most likely to get duped? Because I've seen some ridiculous like phishing scenarios where it's like, how did you get tricked by this? You really thought that I wanted you to run across the street and buy those Amazon gift cards? You thought that was me, did you? But all that being said, when you've got an agent that has full access to all sorts of sensitive things, it then also being able to interface with the external world like that is kind of the unholy trinity, even though it was just two things of security concerns. Now, the devil's in the details and Claude, the great thing about Claude and Anthropic is 80% of Anthropic's business is enterprise. That is big business. That is not what you and I do in small accounting firms. That is like big old giant contracts. But this means that Anthropic is very incentivized to create versions of this that are secure, that, that people can use responsibly. And it's a greater level of motivation than you see from consumer products. And ChatGPT really initially was more of a consumer product. Initially, the joke was that like ChatGPT was just a tool for high schoolers to cheat on their essays. And there was some truth to that because you could see that ChatGPT usage levels went off a cliff in the summer. And then when school starts back up, it picks up again. But my hope is that Anthropic, like, because they are so enterprise-leaning, will give us a greater amount of control over how exactly these things work. So I want to have the ability to like fully turn off the computer control thing. Like, that's either on or it's off. I want to like be able to control, does it have access to the web or not? Because if it has privileged information but it doesn't have access to the web, like, that, that is more secure. For example, if I just want it to work on these PDFs that I got on my computer, but I want to fully take away its ability to access the web, so that it couldn't accidentally disclose anything. You could see a world where that's a more secure way to get that, that work done. Right. But as soon as you open up computer-like control, then it's like, well, that's got access to my Outlook and access to Chrome and all of that. So like, as we're headed into this really messy period, this tangled web of what's a responsible way to use this for this specific job, I have greater confidence in Anthropic and Claude giving us more granular controls to be able to do that stuff responsibly. Because this is— I mean, this is the next 5 years. It is going to be really messy. There's going to be a lot of never-AIs that very passionately think it's wrong to use this stuff in any way. There's already people that are like just cranking with it. They're running all sorts of production through it and they have no concerns doing that. And it's like just going to become this even more hotly contested thing. It's already, I mean, the last week and it's always Twitter, right? Twitter's like the dive bar of social media platforms. There's always fights breaking out, but you still have people who are like, I trust Claude, man. I don't have a problem with it. I trust Claude. I'm going to use it. At the other extreme, you have people, especially in the tax space in the US, who are like, 7216, man. If I put any sort of client information into an AI tool, this is an unauthorized disclosure of tax information. You got people that still will not use an AI assistant, even will not use tax research tools like BlueJay. They say it's a 7216 violation. My take here specifically on 7216, if it's me, if it's my firm, this feels like a take that pretty quickly goes out of date. How How are these AI tools different than the practice management system that I put copies of the tax return and tax return information into, but I don't disclose the use of the practice management system to my clients. That's my take. And honestly, like, everybody is fully entitled to, like, what's their comfort level with this? It's a big spectrum from still doesn't feel right, actually, to put any client sensitive information into this AI tool to the other end of the spectrum where people are like, I trust it now. Like, it's still our responsibility to be informed. And to like actually seek out expertise and like talk with an expert. Don't just do it because there's a profit opportunity there, but the conversation intensity is dialing up every day because there is so much upside on the table. So very cool release, Computer Control. Now Computer Control, at the moment they released it, they said it is macOS only. And this is actually how most new feature releases, especially on desktop apps across all AI apps, they generally come to Mac first and then at some point down the road they come to Windows as well, but they don't really announce that. So some of the stuff we're talking about, if you're not a Mac user, you may not have it yet, but generally the development of the Windows desktop app closely follows that of the Mac app. Remember I said there were 6 really cool updates? We only talked about the first one. Let's speedrun the next 5. Second really cool update that's happened in the last months is projects. Projects support inside of Claude Cowork. Projects already existed in Claude, the online AI assistant. Basically, it's a way to house like all the context for a specific project or client or something like that. The other really nice thing in Claude is you can actually share projects with other people in your team plan. Cowork, they launched projects as well, and projects can also have like their own. In fact, by, by default, a project in Claude Cowork has its own folder to work out of. So any files it's creating or anything like that, they're all getting stored in this, in this folder where it has sort of free rein to, to work now. Projects at this point in time in Cowork, unlike the online chat assistant, the Cowork projects you can't share with a colleague. And part of me is like, well, yeah, they'll roll that out eventually. But the other part of me is like, no, it's actually— it's dependent on your local computer because it's got a local directory on the machine that it's working out of. So will it ever really be able to be shared? There's some aspects of Cowork that just don't map to traditional security, like best practices, like an app that's just SaaS, like fully cloud-based, like it's just a SaaS app, like security for that looks very different than an app that runs on everybody's local computers where it's in a different IT environment and one person's computer may already have malware on it. And so it's like, I honestly don't even know, like, what would AICPA SOC 2 Type 2 certification for Cowork on your desktop even look like? Is that a thing that's even possible? Because historically that's been reserved for like cloud-based apps. So projects, cool release, not something you can yet share with the rest of your team because it is local on your machine. If that's important to you and you really want to share your projects with the rest of your team, just use chat instead of co-work. That's what Claude calls it. Even in the, in the Claude desktop app, you can toggle back and forth between co-work mode and chat mode. Only downside of chat mode is you don't have all the local to your computer functionality, but you can share projects there. Tax firms are up to their eyeballs in 1040 work right now. You really are. Everybody is sending you all these documents and you're doing the old hokey pokey of like, ah, what do I need? What do I have? Uh, you never sent me number 3, 7, and 9. AI gang can automate honestly all of this at this point. This episode's sponsor, Sorban. They've been at the top of my recommendations for tax workflow since they launched. And they're using AI as effectively as anybody to take the pain out of 1040 work. And as you know, listening to this podcast, it has never been more important than it is right now to make sure that we are making the most of these unbelievably good new AI models. Your clients don't get value from the document gathering process. In fact, it gets away, away from like the, the stuff that you actually want to be doing, right? It, it devalues what you do if they see you as this just document sort of admin gatherer. Software has solved for this. It really, really has. To check out how Sorban is now using AI not only to automate 1040 intake, but also automate the input into your tax software and the delivery of the tax return, check out the link down in the show notes. Super cool product. So this last fall, we did a tour of 13 cities, hosted workshops for over 1,000 accounting firms, and I bumped into a lady at one of these events and she said, said, uh, this week I have 4 new hires starting from this podcast sponsor, Cloud Accountant Staffing. To be clear, she didn't say in the context of that conversation, this episode's sponsor. She just said Cloud Accountant Staffing. 4 people starting at the same— can you imagine? I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. But you know what? Cloud Accountant Staffing makes it possible. Uh, back in my firm, we hired both onshore folks and offshore folks, try to get the best of both worlds because there's problems to just doing one or the other. Cloud Accountant Staffing, they're going to help hold your hand through this stuff. It's actually founded by a former accounting firm owner. And so all the questions around what about security, what about IT, what about do I have to disclose this to my clients, they can help walk you through all that stuff. And one of the coolest new things I've seen in staffing recently, they launched a portal where you can see all of the candidates they've already pre-vetted. And even from that portal, you can book an interview. You literally just have to give them your email address and you get access to the portal. You can see the tax talent, the accounting talent, the executive assistants, all these folks they've sourced. They've done like some personality assessments for them, and you can book an interview with these candidates directly from that portal. Super cool. If you're building out the squad for 2026, it's worth giving it a serious thought. That's Cloud Accountant Staffing. Learn more at the link down in the show notes. Third cool feature, kind of a quality of life improvement. They launched interactive charts. So you can now ask in a conversation, you can ask it to make like a cool visualization of a thing. Kind of cool, not super groundbreaking. Fourth cool update is if you are switching to Cloud, you can import your memories from ChatGPT. They make it super, super easy. It's kind of like, like the, like I ran a, my firm was Xero first. We took every, we took the whole firm off of Intuit products in like 2018. And Xero at the time had a really slick converter where you would upload a QuickBooks Desktop file and it would turn it into a Xero, a working Xero company file. It wasn't perfect. There were always a few things you had to go in and fix. But that Claude kind of like this update reminded me of that. Now, the fact if you're in ChatGPT and you've got all this history in ChatGPT, you're like, man, I don't want to lose this stuff. Your memories specifically can be imported into Claude so that at least you have a little more continuity. Now, your conversations, they're still going to be in ChatGPT. So you do lose all that. But if your memories are important, you can pull that stuff into Claude. Fifth, these last two are bangers. Fifth cool feature release, Cowork scheduled tasks. And that is exactly what it sounds like. If you needed to do something on a recurring basis, you can now schedule tasks to run from Cowork. And there's even a little toggle that will have it keep your computer awake because obviously your computer has to be awake for Cowork to then run that task. But if you've got something you got to do every single day, like if you've got, you know, your tax workflow tool or your month-end close automation tool, and there's files that come in there that need to be pulled over to your practice management system. I mean, how many of us have that problem? Think about scheduling a task to do that every single morning. Or every single hour, something like that. Again, right now, Cowork for me, I'm not trusting it with client-sensitive information, but you can see like just how close we are to just this being unbelievably helpful for us. So scheduled tasks, very cool. Last one, number 6, remote control is another very cool OpenClaw feature that, that Cowork has kind of swiped. Basically, you connect Claude on your desktop to your phone, and now from your phone, you could message and interact with Cowork from anywhere in the world. So as long as your computer is awake, you can interact with it and get it to do work. How flippin' cool is that? Not that I go outside, but if I did, that would be so useful when you're out and you're like, oh, hey, while I'm out, like, go work on XYZ or go look into this, that, and the other thing. And it's on your local machine. It has access to everything there and it can work away even though you're not at your battle station. They even showed examples of it, like sending screenshots back when you ask to that conversation. So you're like, if you're stuck on, like you're stuck on something, like send me a screenshot of what you're looking at. It'll send a screenshot over that text conversation. Now it's all happening inside of like the Claude app, the messaging back and forth on your phone. But how cool is that? Like the amount of leverage that we are getting access to from our fingertips to get work done is so, so exciting. And I think I think the more real this becomes, the more aware we become of the things that we were doing and the parts of our work before that were not adding value to the client relationship. I mean, we talk so much about how we are so heads down in work that the client wanting to talk or sending you an email or asking you a question is just so irritating, right? You're like, don't you realize I'm trying to get this work done? Stop bothering me. I don't want to talk to you right now. But at the end of the day, the entire business is how did the client perceive that service that we just delivered to them? Right. So what's more important than making the client feel heard and understood and valued and all that? And there's just a lot of aspects of the doing of the work from entering stuff into tax software to putting together work papers, all these things that for us were pretty monotonous things that are like, you know, if you think about like the resource manager, the task manager of your computer, like, you know, how much you got, you got 60 Chrome tabs open and you are, your RAM, your memory is just pegged like 100%. There's so many things that are commonplace tasks in the accounting firm right now where we're running at like 20%. Like, you're not pushing that noodle to the max. Like, you're like, it's very repetitive stuff. We're referencing things like, it is not big brain stuff. Occasionally there will be a big brain moment or medium brain moment where you're like, oh, I'm glad I saw that. Like, that's an important thing that I, that I need to note. But that monotony, so much of that monotony it, like, that stuff feels like its life is limited. It's, it's living on borrowed time. And I think, honestly, I think that's good news for us. That's exciting. Let me know your experience with Cowork. In fact, I'm especially interested in what are the ways you're finding where it can help you to be productive without necessarily wading into client-sensitive information yet, right? Because that's the question everybody gives me is like, well, if I can't put client stuff into it, what am I even going to use it for yet? And that's why we've created like a bunch of sort like example dummy bank statements and tax docs and all that that people can swipe and kind of test with. But if you're getting good value out of it, tell me how you're using it because boy, like we've got to dig deeper into this conversation of like, what are the appropriate ways to use it right now and what has to change for the next thing to be, you know, okay for folks to use it for. But man, you could see a world where 12 months from now or next tax season like that, just work looks completely different for us, right? I'd say we called this pretty good 2 years ago. We said 2026 will be the year the AI agent I think it absolutely is, right? And we are just getting started. Like, this stuff will keep, keep getting better. Really exciting. But enough about that because I want to see you in person. I want to see the whites of your eyes, buddy. Let's talk about workshops. We don't, we don't have a transition to talk about workshops. Let's roll the roast my niche transition. Events in some ways are now my niche, my, my moat, my competitive edge. As an internet grifter, you can only get so many people to believe that what you're saying is actually true and that you know what you're doing, right? But I've found the way to break through that is like in-person events. They're like, oh, I went to Jason's event. He's actually a normal person. He's got a huge rattail that you actually never see in his videos because you only see the front perspective. So you can't see that little ponytail about midway down his back. But I went to his event, seemed like a normal dude. The workshops, we first did workshops last fall. We did 14 of them, 14 US cities. They were a ton of fun. We had 50 to 100 people out at each city. I would say the biggest thing we learned doing them, it was a mix of programming for me, but also like throwing people out into sort of curated little groups to chat with each other. And we, we, I do not enjoy networking like, and I know that is for most accountants, that is the, the scariest thing you can imagine. But we basically designed the day to like put people together in the least cringe way possible, make it really comfortable for them and give them things to talk about. So it's not this sort of stranger danger sort of thing. And then we really pushed getting feedback from everybody after these events to keep learning how we can make them better. The biggest surprise that came out of this feedback was it was most commonly people were like, hey, yeah, no, Jason's great. But the highlight of the day, it was actually meeting all the other local accountants that I didn't know. Because if you listen to this podcast, can you imagine walking into a venue and there being 80 other people from your town that listen to the podcast? Like, how cool is that? Like, they get the inside jokes. Like, people are talking beekeeping. Like, it's, it's a really weird event because it is so high context, but people are meeting folks that are literally just down the road from them. A lot of people traveling from a ways away, which breaks that down a little bit. But like, I mean, we have people from 2 to 6 hours driving out to these events. And so the localness of it is a little bit less relevant for those folks. But I would say two-thirds of the room is, you know, within 30 minutes of the event venue. And for you to be able to meet other accountants, other accounting firms that have the same way of thinking about how to, how to run their firms and are aspiring to kind of do the same things. Like there were so many friendships that were made. Um, somebody just shared on social media yesterday that they met somebody and have Taken like $20,000 in referral work from them since then. Like, that was one thing I really pushed in the events was like, hey, if you got clients, you need to move on. There's the entire food chain of accounting firms is represented in this room. Like, you could absolutely make some network, like, referral connections here today, both for people that can refer you work, but also people that you can then refer work to. Like, there's, there's so many opportunities, like, literal, like, mergers have come out of these events just from people meeting each other. And so You meet at these events and the vibes are really good and we, and we put a lot into them. Like these, we do not run these at hotel ballrooms. These are all at really cool venues, like really good food and drink, like just a different level of effort than you get from accounting conferences. But the energy is so high because people are so excited to meet other folks near them that are into the same stuff. And we, this was like the first self-hosted events that we've ever done and I'm, I'm really proud of them. We lost a shocking amount of money on them. So still working on figuring that out. But for me, like, you can only stare down a camera in a room by yourself for so many hours of your life before you're like, I need a little bit of like human, like in-person stuff. And so for me, it scratches that itch too, where it's like, this is a really fun way to get out and just connect with folks and hang. And, uh, for me, it's also, it like reminds you of, of why you do this. You know, like we'll put this out and, you know, about 2,000 people will, will listen to this podcast in the first week. I don't know who most of those people are. It's a really weird one-sided thing, right? So like for me, I really love the live event side of it too. Let me speed run you through the cities and the dates real quick, and then I'll tell you about how to, how to get tickets because these events are made exactly for people like you. Honestly, the listeners of the podcast. Kicking off May 4th in Columbus, Ohio. We didn't do Columbus last time. I think there's going to be a big one. I've heard from a lot of folks that are coming out to Columbus. The next day, May 5th in Chicago, then May 6th in Minneapolis. The following week, it's going to be a 5-day week. That's going to be a sweaty one. May 11th in Miami, May 12th in Orlando, May 13th in Charlotte, May 14th in Atlanta, May 15th in Nashville. 2 weeks later, this is the week following Memorial Day. Memorial Day is on Monday, May 26th. We're in Austin, May 27th in Oklahoma City, May 28th in Denver, May 29th in Phoenix. The following week, June 2nd, we're in D.C. June 3rd, we're in New York City, probably Manhattan. Last time it was like Flatiron. June 4th, we're in Boston. And then a few weeks later, because after that is Scaling New Heights in Orlando and AICPA Engage towards the end of June. June 22nd, we're in Salt Lake City. June 23rd, we're in Seattle. 24th, we're in Portland. June 25th, we're in San Francisco. And June 26th, we end the tour in LA, specifically Orange County, to which Orange County people say, that's not LA. 20 cities, going to be a lot of work. But very excited to see a ton of you. We had over 1,000 people out last tour. We'll probably be pushing like 2,000 accountants coming out to these events, which is just— it's super, super cool. The vibes are so good. People make so many new friends and it is definitely one of those things where you're like, you see it happening and you're like, oh, like this is actually the greatest thing I can enable for people. So it's a ton of fun. Tickets are pretty cheap. Basically the event, it's all in the afternoon. So the half-day event, the first half is a couple hours of programming from me. With kind of a snack break in the middle and the bar opens halfway through that. Right now we're doing a discounted presale where a ticket for that's $120. You get 2 hours of CPE. And honestly, I will spend at least $100 on, on like hard costs for those people. Like we don't really make any money on those tickets. The second part of the event, which I would super encourage you to join in on, is the networking dinner and dessert. That is when we're going to put you into different groups and it is the dedicated time for meeting a bunch of other local people. Super good food. Like, it's shocking how expensive food is. But I know for me, like, that's a big deal in terms of my enjoyment of the whole thing. And so there's, there's two different types of tickets. So if you just want to come to the programming, for me, that's $120. I think— I hope I'm saying this right. And then if you include the networking dinner and all that, it's $240. There is also a VIP tier, and we're selling like only 20 or 30 tickets to each city. That is basically the doors open an hour early, and I'll be hanging out with those folks just chatting if you want some extra time to hang before the event kicks off. You're also going to meet some really cool people there too. Head over to jasononfirms.com/events. You'll see the ticketing for all the different cities there. I think I covered everything. The big question is always where's the venue? Because like if it's in Chicago, well, what part of Chicago? Because some of that might be easy for me. Some of that isn't. The truth here is for safety reasons, we don't share that publicly. And so you get the— you will get the location either immediately upon signup or when we decide on the venue, because some of the later stops in the tour, we will still, we will wait to decide on venues until we've got kind of ticketing presales going and we have a better idea of headcount. The safety thing is real for like somebody like me, but also for the people coming to the event. Like most conferences, like there is an element of security. These were literally just on these venues that are like streetside. Anybody can walk in. There's like registration and all that and you have to be ticketed. But we have to be more mindful of like we're not posting the location anywhere publicly. But I understand that's, that can be a logistical headache, but tickets are refundable. Worst case, if it's in a place that like super doesn't work for you, we can always refund you. Gonna be a ton of fun. Wanna see you there. If you're planning on attending, drop a comment. Tell me what city you're gonna be in. Over 500 people reached out, actually just shy of 500 people reached out before we even started selling tickets saying, tell me as soon as you start selling tickets, which is super encouraging. A lot of people had a great time last time and are excited to come back out. It's also like an event that's designed for your entire team. Last thing I'll say on these, like the reason that I started making these workshops is when I ran a firm, I would go off to conferences and get super inspired and then come back to the firm and be like, hey guys, we got to do all these things. And everybody's like, yeah, no, like give him a couple of weeks and he'll cool off and we'll just be back to normal. So I came back to the firm And I was blocked by the same thing I'd always been blocked by— change management. And so when I go out to conferences and get inspired and get new ideas, I still couldn't execute them. And if anything, those conferences just made me more frustrated because I had this picture in my head of this reality that I could not realize. And so what's the solution? How do I get the rest of my team drinking the same Kool-Aid that I am so we're all working in the same direction? Well, flying the whole team out to Vegas to like some big conference that costs $2,000 a head It's very expensive. Like, I used to do that with my leadership team. Like, I would pull more people into it and that was helpful. But how do I get the whole team on board? The only thing I've been able to figure out is you just— you got to host a bunch of local events. You make them cheap and you make them a half day. So it's not a huge commitment of time. And so that's the idea behind these events. While we do have a lot of like a quarter to a third of attendees last year were solo firms, but most of the rest, it was firm owners bringing their teams. So that you can have this shared experience, like get on the same page with what you're trying to do, but also just like have a really cool night out with your team. Like it's kind of like the social event of the year. And so we had very good feedback last time. It was like 9.2 out of 10, I think was the average from all the feedback we gathered. The vast majority of people saying they're very excited to come back next time and plan to bring even more people. So to the folks that have already bought tickets, thank you so much. If you're on the fence, man, Do it. You're gonna meet some really, really cool people. It's a pretty low-key event and we try to make it like, uh, as safe and comfortable for folks that are not really into traditional conferences and like meeting a bunch of people. Like, that's not my scene either. And so the whole idea is like to try to make that as comfortable as, as possible for folks. Okay. JasononFirms.com/events. If you wanna go learn more about that, but let's get to the mailbag. Let's get tactical. Mailbag. Mailbag. Mailbag questions come from, uh, comments from social media, from people sending me emails, people texting me, DMing me. You got plenty of ways to get in touch. You got a question, send it over one way or another. First question here from, from a podcast listener. Question is, in regards to Cloud Cowork, will Google do it better? That's a great question. I would say from the time that ChatGPT first came out, that's the first thing everybody said was, I'll wait for my Microsoft version. I'll wait for my Google version. Here we are in 2026. Does Google or Microsoft have a cloud cowork? They sure don't. Do they even have something as good as ChatGPT? They absolutely don't. Google is getting better because the models are better, but the Google AI ecosystem is still so fragmented and doesn't really feel useful. Like the models are good, But the Google AI stuff still does not feel as useful as the alternatives. Microsoft is still light years off. And so will they do it better? Potentially, but we can't wait. And so I would say like use the best tool for the job right now, because if we're just on the sideline, then we're not learning about how to put these tools into action. So even if someday Google or Microsoft does ship a great version of this, which I hope they do, because wouldn't that be nice if it's connected to where all of our other stuff is? Like, I think we can all root for that. The reality is it's not there today, and we still need to learn how to get to grips with these tools and make the most of them. And the flip side of that is a lot of people will make the arguments like, okay, well, well, I will still choose to try to learn how to use the inferior version of this in Google or in Microsoft. So many people have gone down this path and like bought Microsoft Copilot licenses and all that. And that is just where that stuff goes to die. Like there's actual, there's like actual data. That shows the number of Copilot subscriptions have gone down, which is just shocking if you consider the amount of effort Microsoft's put into advertising Copilot. But the truth of the matter is, like, you're better than that. It's not worth your time. Like, don't waste your time trying to put that thing to work and get value out of it when there's this vastly better thing sitting on the shelf that can be used. Now, we still have the constraints with Cowork of, like, probably can't put client-sensitive information into this yet. And so the question of what, what is the best place where I can do that, uh, it might be just Cloud Chat. It might be ChatGPT, but we still have that constraint for Cloud Cowork. If you are building an accounting team, you know just what a headache it is to get all of your team doing month-end closes the same way, right? There's that stage where you're all in the same room and you can kind of like keep in sync because it's such a small team. But beyond a certain threshold, you're like, oh my gosh, everybody's choosing their own adventure. These engagements are taking on lives of their own. And it is what makes the latest feature drops from this episode's sponsor Financial Sense ever so important. So they are historically a practice management system for accounting firms, that is Financial Sense, but they're shipping a bunch of month-end close automation features inside of Financial Sense. So it has actually a deep integration into the accounting ledger, and it is pulling all the transactions into the platform to review, like, were there any weird outlier transactions? Like, it actually goes through, like, remember what it was, like 6 to 10 different categories of things that could be wrong, and it's identifying those transactions for you in an automated way. And if there's an issue, you can fix it right from within Financial Sense and it will push that fix back to the accounting ledger. They also do the same with uncategorized transactions. So if you're doing the Amazon purchase hokey pokey with a client and you're like, hey, what is this? Can you gimme a receipt? You can manage all of that from inside Financial Sense as well, giving you sort of like a single place that is everything that you need to run your bookkeeping practice. Some really cool stuff that they've been shipping and I've got a special discount code that you can use. If you are a firm with 2 or more users, use the code JASON10 to get 10% off the annual team or scale plan. Worth checking out. I think you'll like it. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. It's that time of year. It really is when your tax hosting provider absolutely grinds to a halt because everybody's in there hammering on the tax software at the same time and the hosting servers are like, I need a break right now. There's— gang, there's a better approach. That approach is today's sponsor, Verado, who will give you your own private cloud. You don't want to share a cloud with whatever other weirdos are hosting their software in your cloud with you, right? No, I don't know what that guy's doing. You want your own cloud that never slows down. And would you believe me if I told you it is cheaper than you would believe to move to Verado from, say, your Thomson Reuters hosting, Drake hosting, something like that? It is both cheaper, it is faster. What? That's two things. Kind of a no-brainer. They can move you over a weekend. And they can even handle all of your outsourced IT support, like function as your IT department. In fact, the cost to have Verado be your IT department and do all of your hosting is less than the cost of just Thomson Reuters Virtual Office. Buddy, this one is a no-brainer. On the list of to-dos to knock out right after April 15th, buddy, you're going to want to talk to Verado. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. A website question here. Here it is. I'm trying to figure out my website. I get a lot of traffic, very low contact rate for the website visits though. It's just a Google site with a custom URL. What's a good way to go about this? Where do I host it? What client portal do I use, etc.? I'm a single accountant, seasonal tax and bookkeeping. Just need a good landing page and client portal. To pull the client portal bit off of that, that's a whole different ball of wax. Your client portal should be part of your practice management system usually. Maybe if you're a single— if you're a solo accounting firm owner, maybe you get by if you're just doing bookkeeping with a month-end close automation tool like a Double. Or a tax workflow solution like, you know, a Stanford Tax or a Trust or a Soroban. If you're solo, maybe you can get by without a practice management system. But for most people, the portal is just a button in the corner of your website that hands off to the login for your practice management system. So if I use— pick a PM— Canopy. Canopy will give me a branded landing page that is a login to the client portal. So not the firm login to Canopy, but to the client portal. On my website, all I'm then going to have is in the corner there will just be a login button or a client portal button or something like that. You click that and it then takes you to the Canopy login and that, that handles that whole client portal side of it. So the portal itself generally isn't really factoring into your website besides just having that button. Now the questions around like what service do I use for this? What platform do I use for this? Honestly, like I don't— to me it doesn't really matter. There's a whole bunch of ways to skin this cat now from like like just basic website builders to even, even more simplistic landing page builders, which I'm probably more a fan of because what most accounting firms need is not a website with like all these different pages. It's simply a landing page, a single page site to get a client to the next step. And so like the infrastructure, how you do it really doesn't matter to me. Like the fact that in this case the listener is using a Google site with a custom URL, that's not the reason. Why you're getting a bunch of traffic but a very low contact rate. The reason is the subject matter. And so first, like, let's talk about like how you measure is your website or more broadly, is your marketing actually doing its job? Karen Rayburn, who runs probably— is probably the longest running marketing firm owner for accounting firms. We've had her on the podcast lots of times. Their marketing agency, wearepf.com, they do really good work, but they have They talk about like having a set of monthly KPIs for your marketing that's actually measuring what's happening in the same way that you would have a set of financial KPIs. So like, are we measuring what actually matters around our website? And I know the way I'm saying measuring is upsetting to a lot of people, and I can't remember what it was that got called out the other day. Bag? Bag? Bagel? I don't— I can't remember. I grew up in Oregon and my wife grew up in, as far as I can tell, the wilderness in Minnesota. So my dialect is probably just a weird combination of things. Maybe I need a dialect coach. I was watching Deadpool and Wolverine the other day. This is, this is a tangent. One of my favorite lines of any movie. Gambit comes out and he's just hilarious. Channing Tatum's character. And Deadpool's like, who is your— and Deadpool's like, who is your dialect coach? The Minions? Oh, so good. Anyways, so we need to measure like for our marketing, like what's actually working because you could just measure what's happening on the website, like Hits, like number of people that come to the website versus booked calls. But in a vacuum, those metrics only measure one thing, and it is the efficacy of like, did what's on the webpage get people to convert? But what about what's happening outside the website? Did you do a public speaking gig this month? Did you do some social media posts? Like how, why did people find it? Were you doing some, maybe some Google AdSense, like paid acquisition stuff? Why do people find the page? But then how relevant were the people that found the page to the copy on the website and like the sort of folks that you want to actually book calls with. So it's worth like trying to get to some basic metrics for this, like what are the inputs so that you can measure the outputs. But when it comes to what should be on your web page, in my opinion, you really ought to just have two things. One, a lead magnet, something of value for the type of person that you want to work with that builds some trust with them. Because most people, when they get to your website, they're not ready to have a conversation. They just want to learn a little bit more. The lead magnet gives them a way to learn a little bit more, build some more trust so that they are then more likely to book a call. So first thing on your website needs to be a lead magnet. Second thing needs to be ability to book a call. And as part of the booking a call process, there's some sort of options there that they're selecting from that ensures that if they're not a fit for you, they're not able to book a call. Like I'm not just putting my Calendly link up there. I'm making sure like, are you a taxidermist that does over $1 million in revenue? Then you get access to the calendar. So those two things, honestly, are all that most accounting firm sites need. You can certainly have other things, but they shouldn't take away from what are the two most important things. And the overall success and efficacy of that web page will boil down to how specific of a person are you talking to and how valuable of a lead magnet have you put there for that specific type of person. I talk about in my business, the most valuable lead magnet we've gotten to is the app recommendation database. Everybody wants to see what all the different app options are and whether I recommend them or not, because there's so stinking many of them. There's an element of FOMO to it. There's a shiny object element there where it's just kind of fun to look at what the options are. But that for me in my business is still our very best lead magnet. And every, like, you know, little pocket of people that you're trying to get to, there's a version of that that will work for them. It's also what makes it virtually impossible to build an accounting firm for anyone and everyone because there isn't a lead magnet that's useful for anyone and everyone, right? Make a video about how to read a profit and loss and see how many people watch it. Not to say that they won't, It's just not as juicy as something that is like very exciting for a very specific type of person. I would also caution you as you're looking at the number of people that visit your website, a lot of those are not real anymore. They're bots. And so like total traffic to the website kind of doesn't matter. Like I don't even know that it's worth like in terms of KPIs, the folks that are downloading the lead magnet, the folks that are booking calls, that's a vastly more important KPI than the number of people that are coming to the website, right? I would even go a step further to say qualified people that are downloading the lead magnet and qualified people that are booking calls. Those are folks that you would actually want to work with. A lot of people that just stand up web pages and they get form submissions all day long from everybody in town. But that's a heck of a business to build, right? Like, I don't like those vanity metrics of just how many people will come through. Those folks aren't taking you to the business that I think you want to build. Thank you for the question. Next one around raising rates. How do you navigate this conversation with the client? Especially in cases where they're, where they currently have incredibly low pricing and need a large increase over 100% in some cases. Do you just hit them up with one big increase to catch them up or do it gradually over time? Let me split that question into two parts. First, tactically, what is the right amount to increase the price? Second, how do you communicate it? So what is the right amount to increase the price? Most of the people that take the route of dribbling out a price increase over a number of years come to regret it. And this is because your prices aren't going to stop increasing today. And so if someone's at $200 and your new minimum is $700, and you're like, we're going to increase it $150 per year, in 4 years' time— I don't— I didn't even think about the math there, just go with it. Let's say they get caught up to the minimum in 4 years' time. In 4 years' time, your minimum is not going to be $700, it's going to be $1,000, it's going to be $1,200. And you just— you have this rolling resentment of this person where it's like, they're just not paying me enough. The reality is, if you know they got to be in a better place, You just got to do it because until you do, they're not getting your best because you have this sort of resentment. You're like, oh, they won't pay me. They're not a great fit for what we're doing. And we have to be comfortable with the very likely outcome that they will say no and they will go and find somebody else. Now, if they need to be let go, if you can't help them anymore, or if they're not a fit, the solution is not increasing their price because what most people will find is a shocking number of people still say yes. And you're like, oh crap, everybody said yes, but I can't actually help I can't help all of these people. This is too many people. And so first decide, do I want to work with them anymore? And if I don't, the best way we can move them on is not to like take them out back, send them out to pasture. It is to find another firm for whom they would be a great fit. So you can say like, hey man, we're going in this direction. Super appreciate working with you and I've really enjoyed it. But the reality is your, your business's needs don't really map to where you're going. But I've got a friend over here that runs a great firm that you would be perfect for. And most of the time it's like, great, totally understand that. I'll go have a conversation with them and see what I think. This can be a very emotionally taxing thing oftentimes because these can be the folks that maybe first, first, like were our very first clients, right? And you feel like you're letting them down. And we somehow we got to get back to like, this is business. Most people don't employ you to do their taxes or do their books for fun. They do it because they need a job done for their business. They don't come to you for a tax return because they're like, wouldn't it be fun to talk to a tax accountant today? Yet we on the other side of that are like, oh, but they love me. They need me. They've been with me from the beginning. I can tell you, in the case of this person that's paying a shockingly small amount of money, as much as we love to chalk this up to, oh, this person really likes me, the unfortunate truth here is the reason they're usually still with you is they can't get the same deal anywhere else. And that hurts. And I've lived that. Like, I really have. Where it's like, oh, we've got this. This niche. We've got these people that love us that would never leave, and they send all of our friends to us. And then you wake up one day and you're like, oh, it's because we're doing this work at half the price that anyone else will do it. That's a hard business to run. That is, that is a really hard business to run. So if you are going to make that increase, decide, do I even want this person on my client list to begin with? And if you do, just increase it to what it needs to be. Otherwise, you are like holding this thing over them. You're holding this resentment when you've never even given them the opportunity to pay more. And sometimes those people will be perfectly happy to say pay more in a way that may surprise you. But if you got to do it, you got to do it. Don't spread it out over like the next 3 or 4 years, because 3 or 4 years down the road, you're going to be like, I'm literally in the exact same spot because I'm running a totally different firm 4 years from now because I went to Jason's workshop and made all those connections. And now we're doing XYZ, and I still have the exact same resentment for that person. So rip the Band-Aid off. You got to do what you got to do. It's business. We can maintain a relationship with these people personally, be respectful, but your businesses either align and meet a need for each other or they don't. Now, when it comes to how to communicate this, I'm not a fan of dropping the bomb in person live for the same reason that I don't deliver a tax return live or deliver financial statements live. If you do this live and in person, what you're actually doing is watching this person process and have a reaction. What I would rather do is send them the essential information, Give them a chance to go through it and process it and then have a conversation. And maybe, maybe there's a world where this seems cold, like delivering a tax return, delivering a financial statement. Sure. Delivering a proposal even. Sure. That makes sense. Maybe this feels cold in the case of letting a client go or doing this big pricing increase. But the reality is, like, I don't want to be on the phone just to watch them process that. Like, I want to get to the other side of them processing that. Also saves you a tremendous amount of time if I'm pushing out 100 of these. Now, there might be people that rise to the level where you feel like you absolutely have to have that conversation with them. But I would push out that communication. Don't do it in an, oh, woe is me, feel sorry for me, rising prices, like rising costs. Don't do it like that. A great trick from Geraldine Carter: put your letter into ChatGPT and say, make this sound like it's great news for them, or rewrite this in a way that focuses on the benefits to them. Because if you're increasing prices significantly, it's because you're doing more, because you're getting better, it's because you're investing in the team. The firm you were when you were doing that work at rock bottom rates is not the firm you are today. You're doing way better work now, and now you're asking them to pay for that. So let's communicate what's better about the firm now. What are we doing differently? Make that sound like it's good news for them, and they will either opt into it or they won't. But also give them a way to, to get in touch with you. So like, hey, give this stuff a look. It's kind of a hard decision that we've come to, but here's my calendar. Do you want to hop on and talk more and talk more about this? But just calling someone out of the blue when they are waiting in line at a Starbucks drive-thru and being like, hey, I'm doubling my price. In my opinion, that's not the best way. That, that is not the most likely setup that will get you to a constructive conversation. So this is a true story. 7 years ago, I'm talking with this gal that runs an accounting firm, and she's very progressive in many ways, and she's kind of just showing me her model for how she does does a number of different things. And then it just comes up as an afterthought that, oh yeah, most of my staff is offshore. And I'm like, what did you just say? You're— the people that are doing your work are not even in the country? And she's like, well, some of them are, but a lot of them doing the heavy lifting are offshore. She said these folks are easier to find than onshore hires. They are just as productive, if not more, and they are half to a quarter the cost. And I was like, but America and disclosures and all all these things, right? And it wasn't until I saw somebody that I, that I respected for whom this was the norm that I was like, okay, maybe I gotta reassess kind of our position on all this stuff. Now, thankfully these days we have groups that help accounting firms with this, that have done this with loads of firms. Today's sponsor, TeamUp, they will help you do this for the first time if you've never done it before. TeamUp's actually run by a former bookkeeping firm owner who just had a hard time finding good accounting talent offshore. So they went out, they hired a bunch of recruiters in the Philippines, and they pull in the very best people, by the way. I mean, all the, all the top 100 are investing in the Philippines. Like, there's a tremendous amount of account accounting talent in the Philippines. And so they're pulling in bookkeepers, tax folks, executive assistants, whatever you need. And TeamUp specifically has a direct hiring model, which means all you do is you pay TeamUp one time, a recruiting fee, to go and find you your next dream hire. It's, it's as simple as that. But if you haven't done it before, you're gonna have all sorts of questions and blockers and all that, right? Don't just sit with that stuff. Talk with TeamUp because they've helped a load of firms navigate these exact same questions. Learn more about TeamUp. Check out a 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 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, I'm struggling with setting fixed fees for clients. Basically, I've learned that every prospect basically lies and tries to downplay how much work they have. Then we end up in the scenario of having to ask for a big price increase down the line, and then we look like like the bad guys. There's some real truth to that, right? I will say the more specific the type of work you're doing here, the easier. If you are serving every— if you're a generalist firm and every client that walks in the door is something you haven't touched before, that's an exceptionally hard thing to price accurately. If you've done 100 dentists before and the 101st dentist comes in, comes in like, you know exactly what you're getting into. So there is a— there's like an aperture here where the wider the client base you're serving, the harder this is to do. The more specific the client base, the easier this is to do because you know exactly what you're getting into. There's a lot of dials here. There is like, what is the cleanup work? The initial sort of assessment look like? The deeper that goes, the better information you have for what the work will actually look like month over month. There's a bit of a chicken and egg thing there where it's like, well, can I do the initial assessment if I haven't given them an ongoing monthly price yet? Like, which one of those things comes first? And the answer is it's messy. And maybe that initial estimate of a fixed fee is a range, but it doesn't do anybody any good if you get into this thing and it's twice as much work as you expected. And then you tell the client, hey, I got to double your price. And they're like, I wouldn't have had you start this if I would have known it was going to be twice the price. Now, the big brain answer here, which I would try to steer you towards a little more, is a really big realization that is 90% true. There's 10% of reality that can kind of fight against it. But ultimately, our inputs and the amount of work and the amount of time and the amount of effort that goes into a project needn't impact the price. And I know this is like sacrilege and people are like, oh, here we go, here we go on a value pricing run. I won't, I won't use the word value pricing, but basically when folks are buying stuff from us to solve a problem, let's say they complain about the price. Why are they complaining about the price? They're complaining about the price because the problem we're solving for them is not as valuable as the number of dollars we're asking them to spend. Similarly, on the other end of that spectrum, if I save somebody a million bucks, what can I charge them? If I could, if I charge them $100 grand, they're probably like, dang, thanks for that $900 grand, bro. Now, if that thing that I just did for them, anyone could do for them and the guy across the street could have done just as well, then they're going to be like, well, the guy across the street doesn't charge $100 grand. So like, ultimately, how much pricing control we have in addition to like how much value do they perceive to be here ought to be what sets the price. And when it comes to bookkeeping work, which is usually where fixed fees are coming into play, the best way you can do this is with full-time employee replacement framing. So if I'm going into a situation where it would have been half of somebody's time to do this work and, you know, the owner would have had to manage that person and source the person, all that stuff, rather than saying, here's what bookkeeping costs, I'm going to come in and say, here's what it would cost for you to do this in-house. And actually, we can do it at pretty much the same cost. And you don't have to manage us in the same way that you'd have to manage an employee. So that is taking the framing away from how much work is this going to be for you to what is this actually worth for your business? Of the options that the business owner has right now, how can I be the best one and still get paid very well to do this work? Now, the same issue applies, and this is kind of the big limitation with value pricing, is if I save someone $1 million, I charge them $100 grand, but the guy across the street will do the same work for $10, they won't come to me. So you still have the issue of how scarce am I? Am I the best person to do this for taxidermists? If I am, then like they're going to come to me no matter what. In my firm, when I built our cast practice, most of the people that were coming to us were like, you are the shop to do dentists. Like, we know that you do this, you do DSOs. Like, we know that you are the best to do this. And so I could frame it this way to say, hey, do you want this to take like half of your office manager's time or half your practice manager's time who you're paying $100,000 a year? And that's like like $115,000 all in, uh, or do you want us to do this? And they can actually focus on, you know, billing or like revenue-generating activities. It's a no-brainer if you pull us in. Uh, we'll do it at, you know, $3,000 a month, $4,000 a month. It's just under half the cost of this person's time. They're making you more money and you don't have to manage us when we do this work correctly in the way that you had to manage that individual. And for them, they're like, yeah, like total no-brainer. But had that conversation been Well, here's what the average bookkeeping fee is for this and that. And wow, we think this is going to take about 7 hours. That sort of talk is just inviting negotiation around how much effort is put into it. And then down the road, when you get more efficient and it takes you half as much time, the client's going to be like, so am I going to pay you half as much money now? And like, no, I don't, I don't want that. So as much as you can, try to set the conversation around like, what are the options to them and how do we become a no-brainer option? That is superior to any alternatives that might be out there. And I don't want to make that sound easy because there's an element of like internal monologue too there where you're like, I'm not better than anybody else. How am I ever going to make that point? But that is ultimately what we should strive to do. Doesn't mean it's going to be possible day one, but we should strive to get to that point where we are pricing based on like, what are their options and how valuable is this to them? 3 more to go. Hey Jason, had a question around ChatGPT/Cloud for solo firms. You say firms should be using the Teams plan on these platforms due to increased security, but these plans have a minimum number of users. For a solo firm like mine, how do we navigate this? I don't really want to pay for a plan with 5 users when I'm the only one using it. That sucks, man. It does. And I don't have a great solution for you. And this is another example of where software companies have a really hard time serving small and solo businesses. I mean, an example inside of our space, Sorban, a tax workflow solution. I think they have a minimum contract size basically of 200 tax returns. And if you're smaller than that, they won't work with you because there's a threshold beyond which the effort that goes into onboarding and training and all the setup and all that— if a, if a firm is going to bring them 15 tax returns, the cost they have into that is way more than the fees that they will get for your usage of the software. ChatGPT and Claude increasingly are going more enterprise, and there just isn't the same level of enthusiasm to help like solo owner businesses like So like you end up in a really tough spot and I wish I had a better solution for this. There is part of me that's like $120 a month for, yes, you're gonna have some extra seats, but like I still think it's worth $120 a month. I wish I had a better answer for you. That does kind of suck. It doesn't kind of suck. It super sucks. And it, it creates an opportunity for somebody else to come in for sure and be the solution for solo folks. But right now with ChatGPT and Claude, it does put you in a bad spot. Because the consumer plans, even the premium consumer plans, aren't— they're not an option. Like, they don't come with the same business-level security. Even the $100, $200 max plans for cloud, they don't come with the same security. They come with way higher usage limits, but I wouldn't use them for business stuff. Last question from Gregor on the subject of Cloud Cowork. One insight that stood out for me was using Cowork to automate, uh, receipt matching. This is a super tedious thing for us Has anyone explored further how this can be used for large-scale clients? So matching a large volume of receipts with transactions. I think this is probably trying to use the wrong tool to solve that problem. If you have a large client, they need a proper big accounting ledger. And so this is probably a solution where I'm going to look to the ledger first. Like QuickBooks Online has pretty all right receipt matching, but if it's, if it's a good-sized company with a lot of volume, like there isn't enough interoperability between Cloud Cowork and an accounting ledger right now to like do that stuff seamlessly. And we've got dedicated tools for it. Like, if you got a huge volume for this, go grab like Dext. Like, Dext is like the leader for big heavy lifting document processing, and it integrates with your accounting ledgers, so it will push those receipts into the ledger. So while, while Cloud Cowork could do this at a large scale, it'd probably be expensive, honestly, and, and kind of slow. So it's probably not the right tool for the job in this case. I was actually talking with the, the Digits folks about this the other day. Digits, they run a kind of an AI-first accounting ledger. Got a video coming on how their platform works. It should be pretty cool, a sponsored video. But they watched the CoWork video and they're like, hey, this is how we do this. Like, Digits will do bank statement extraction automatically and receipt matching automatically. And they're like, our platform does a lot of these things you're demonstrating over there. So when would you use CoWork for that job versus, you know, the, the accounting ledger, the right tool? For the job. With the Cowork examples, I think oftentimes it's the itty-bitty stuff where I don't want to burn another $20 a month or $60 a month on this accounting ledger subscription. I just want to do the quick and dirty version over here. That's where this all starts. And so Cowork ChatGPT, I think it's, it's always been best at the very simple situations that are kind of unserved by the other tools that are out there, right? Like, my goodness, I don't want another QuickBooks subscription. So that's where it starts. It's not where it ends because there's a world where these things are 100 times as powerful and they can do vastly bigger projects. But today I think they're starting with the small projects. So specifically to this question, for a large client with a large volume of transactions, I probably wouldn't wade into using Cowork for that. I'd probably use like a proper tool that just does that job really, really well. Thank you for the question. You got questions, keep them coming, man. Whether it's AI stuff, whether it's accounting firm strategy, honestly, anything to do with running an accounting firm, or as I'm increasingly calling it, firm maxing. Firm maxing. That's what we're going to call it now. We got proposal maxing. We got accounting firm maxing. That's what we do here. I don't know. It feels a little too sweaty for me. Gang, thanks for being here. I'll see you next time.