604 Two Incredible Claude Cowork Updates for Accounting Firms [The two best updates of 2026]

Hey, Jason here. Before we get into the episode, we are just 2 weeks from the beginning of my 20-city live tour in-person events. These events we designed from scratch to be just for accounting firms. They are super fun. You'll meet a whole bunch of local accountants who also listen to the podcast. You get some continuing education. It's a bunch of snacks, an optional dinner. It is the only event I've seen where you can get continuing education credits with a drink in your hand. I want to see you there. It's happening in May and June. Did I mention this? Over 750 accountants have already signed up. I want to see you out there. To see the tour dates and get tickets for you and your team, head over to JasonOnFirms.com/events. Enough about your workshops. Let's get on to the actual episode. Today, the two coolest cloud releases of the year for accounting firms. They are actually very relevant to what we do. The AI updates right now are like coming so fast I almost can't keep up. I'm very excited to show you those. Plus how to scale a niche accounting firm, go nationwide. If you run a local firm, we're gonna talk about how to branch out and start pulling in more premium clients outside your local bubble. We're gonna talk about how to change your tech stack when your team is exhausted. Talk about whether your AI agent ought to be living on its own machine, like its own computer. And the story of how I stumbled into something the other day that I'm pretty sure could have completely automated the work paper generation we did inside of our accounting firm. It's another Claude Co-works story that I think is kind of wild that I'm excited to share. Let's get into it. If you're new here, welcome along to the Jason on Firms podcast, one of the only corners of the internet where it is cool to geek on accounting firm stuff while the rest of the world's trying to bring us down. What can AI automate? What's something that we all universally hate? How about my bookkeeping? How about my tax work? While the world is trying to get you down, I am here to prop you up. Not really prop you up, to take your hand and show you a nice time as AI mauls the business model of industry after industry. This first Claude update that I wanna show you, live artifacts. If you haven't played with it yet, I super encourage you to. I'm gonna run you through how to use it as kind of a personal dashboard for you. We're gonna talk about whether your practice management system ought to be worried yet, because Claude, it is starting to step on the toes of what a lot of our other accounting firm tech does. But third, I wanna tell you about a really cool use case I stumbled into for this new live artifacts feature. This is a great example of a small feature launch inside of Cowork where if we're not paying attention to the details, like the new stuff that we can do, we're missing out on a, a really cool opportunity to let AI just help us with sort of the day-to-day tedium that goes into running a successful accounting firm, being a productive member of a firm. And so this live artifacts thing, it is almost like a persistent sort of custom app that you make that lives inside of your cowork to visualize anything you want. A lot of the examples they've been giving have been like, oh, make your own dashboard and connect it up to all these other services. So you have kind of your dream personal dashboard. And it is that, but that almost sells it short because I don't know about how you've felt about dashboards. I've never been a dashboard guy. Like for years, all sorts of software companies have tried to sell accounting firms on dashboards and how this is just a better version of financial reporting. But dashboards to me seem too passive. Like I don't need another thing to monitor. I need software to, you know, tell me when something goes outside the parameters of what I wanna allow for. I don't want a heads-up display to just always be able to look at this thing. Maybe it's useful if I want to check, but I don't need one more thing to monitor. The difference here specifically with the implementation of this live artifacts feature, which is just inside Claude Cowork, Claude, Claude Chat, which is different than Cowork. Cowork is the desktop version that works on your desktop files. Claude Chat, which all happens in the cloud, it syncs across all your devices and all that. Chat had artifacts, which is like cool little custom apps that you can build. The upside there is if you build an artifact inside of chat, you can share it with the rest of your team. Because all of that stuff lives in the cloud, it is then shareable. Whereas live artifacts, they only live on your local workstation. You can't share them with your peers because it relies on like local resources on your machine. But I would argue the best use of live artifacts, it is for very personal to you things. And if I can encourage you to go out and spend 5 minutes with Claude to build your first live artifact, here is what I would recommend is you think of like What makes up the hours in your day? For most accountants, over 50% of accountants spend more than 2 hours a day on email. So email's gotta be a part of this. Meetings, meetings are probably a part of this too, chewing up your day. And then on top of that is probably what is your practice management saying you need to work on today? Like that is probably the task that we are working on outside of email and outside of meetings. So that stack of 3 things to me, if I'm gonna build my dream personal dashboard that actually shows everything I gotta fuss with today, it is a combination of those 3 things. Now, email connectivity with Claude, it's already very good from Microsoft 365. If you are on Google Workspace, you can connect Claude to your email and it will be able to read anything that's there. And so you have to be okay with that. There's still a lot of fear around like, I'm not gonna give an AI tool access to all of that stuff. And, and most of it comes from this misnomer still that there's this inherent sponginess to AI. Like anything the AI sees is gonna end up in the model and then it's gonna regurgitate that I'm gonna send that to somebody else. That's not how that works, especially not on business plans where you have like a commercial agreement that says our models are never trained on your data. And so if you're using Claude on the team or the enterprise plan, which are the only plans we should be using in our accounting firms, that's not an issue. The whole idea of your prompts being trained into the model. But these email connectors, honestly for me, a little bit annoyingly, are still read-only. They can't actually send an email. They can draft an email, but they can't send an email. I've actually gone pretty deep on this with my personal email, which if you are like me, your personal email, it is like the third child of all the things that I have to manage. Like business email, sure, I do my best there. Personal responsibilities, taking care of the kids and all that stuff. But personal email, it's got two things working against it. It's personal, not business, and it's email. The last thing I want to spend time on in my personal life. Sounds like a great use for artificial intelligence, right? So I've gotten really hard on this. Building what is essentially a, uh, like recurring task in my personal cowork that goes through my emails, batches them the way that I want to see them batched, helps me unsubscribe from a whole ton of stuff. It can even do this itself to a degree. And what I've gotten to now is a much better system for surfacing. Here's the stuff from actual humans and like actual kid stuff you need to pay attention to. And it does a reasonably good job. On the business side, I'm unsure if I should try to do the same thing because right now I have humans managing my inbox and my inbox, to be clear, is a mess. People sending me stuff of brands trying to send me stuff to like, hey, I just tried to buy a ticket to one of your events and bumped into this issue. Like my inbox is a whole bunch of different things where those messages are like triaged to kind of all the different people on our team. But to me, email ought to be the core of your like personal dashboard, the thing that you look at at the start of the day to figure out what do I gotta triage? And this is 100% possible with the email connectors that we already have inside of Cloud Cowork. If it's me, assuming I'm on a business plan with Claude, I have no problem connecting my email to Claude right now. The biggest dangers of Claude are new sort of agentic risks. The ability of Claude Cowork to go out and use Claude for Chrome, which right now I'm probably not turning on because as soon as the agent can control Chrome, it could potentially put something that it shouldn't inside of an input field on a website. So for me, Claude for Chrome, I don't have that on yet. Computer use, which still is not available in Claude Cowork on the business plans. It's only available on the like max personal consumer plans. This is the ability of it to take over your computer and use different apps. Again, the problem with that for me right now is it is making inputs into software. The fact that Claude has access to privileged information, and my email inbox is an example of privileged information, means I need to be very, very careful about anything it could potentially put out into the world. And so right now I want it working for me on things internally. As soon as it's going out to the web is as soon as it's Letting information outside of that bubble, I got to think really hard about what should be allowed there. But it being able to see my email, in my opinion, is not a violation of that boundary. We've gotten deeper on cloud security in other past podcasts. If you want to do the deep dive, we talked about 7216, talked about Circular 230, but you could literally start here with a personal artifact to say, hey, you've got a connection to my email inbox now. Create a useful personal artifact that helps me better triage my email every single day. And from there you can kind of iterate on like classification of different types of emails and like start with the very basic version. But each little step you take, you will realize like, oh, I probably don't need to handle this. Like, oh, this could automatically be routed to that. And you will find like this was definitely the case as I did this with my personal inbox. You will find that you, you may create a sort of a system for managing email at scale for the first time, where in the past it has felt like triage, which is one by one, make a decision, make a decision, make a decision. And the real decision fatigue that comes with doing a high volume of that. Like, it's a lot. It's why oftentimes you may start your day with email, burn 3 hours on it, and you're like, brother, I need a nap. That is because we're just making so many decisions. AI can absolutely help here. Now, I would also layer in like calendar event stuff, getting AI to do a bit of meeting prep for you, and it will absolutely have ideas for how it can build that into a helpful live artifact for you. By the way, to build a live artifact, You just start a conversation with CoWork and say, make me a live artifact to do X, Y, Z. It is, it is that simple. Third thing I would recommend pulling in there is data from your other connected services, from the apps that your accounting firm uses, from your practice management system to, you know, your month-end close automation solution. Double recently launched an MCP. So pull the next tasks that I need to work on. Pull maybe the work that my team has recently gotten done. Maybe it's just sort of a heads up display of the status of my clients. That is why it is now so important for the tools we use to have APIs to allow third-party integrations, because agents can bring all this stuff together in a really, really useful way. You can imagine a kind of a personal dashboard for you that is just incredibly useful because the tool Cowork can wire all those things up for you in a way that you couldn't. Which brings me to thought number 2 here. Should your practice management system start being concerned yet? Because if this is the source of truth that I have that I most prefer to use, Am I paying less attention to the dashboards that are surfaced inside of my practice management system? Here's the thing, and this is still not talked about enough because I think software companies are running away and hiding from this problem, is the greatest opportunities. I'm so glad that we are having this conversation. Like, this is such a conversation that only accountants can have, that a brand will never have with you, which, you know, all of the media that you see online, all that stuff, it is all put by brand out by brands with marketing departments. The thing that they are not telling you is the greatest opportunity for accountants when it comes to AI agents is AI agents that are able to work across all of our apps. But none of those apps are going to build the agent that works across all the apps. You notice what they're going to do is they're all going to build the agents that work inside of their app. And that's kind of exciting. The notion that, sure, there's this agent inside the tool that I use and I like that can jump around and do all these different things. But that agent is ultimately not as useful as the agent that can work across that app, but also the app next to it and the app next to it. And especially for accountants, this is so powerful because accountants these days, what external people think we do is like these rote, monotonous, repetitive things. They're like, why has that not been automated yet? And the truth is, and you know this if you're an accountant, this stuff has been automated. What we're doing is all the crap that slips in between the cracks. And what we are ultimately right now is we are integrators. We are integrating all these different systems. We're applying logic and expertise while getting something from A to B, but we're connecting these systems. We are chasing down stakeholders to get the information that we need into these systems. We are these like human integrators that have an understanding of the systems and the expertise to know how all that stuff has to come together. Doesn't that sound like an AI agent that can work across all your apps? That's the opportunity of AI agents for accounting firms that are software companies. They're not going to tell us about because that's like a, entirely new layer of software. Sage or Intuit, none of those people are building the agent that'll work across Intuit products, but also Carbon and also like all these other things that you use, right? And the best version of this that we have today, it's Cloud Cowork. For all the reasons that I just outlined, you build a personal dashboard that is your email inbox, your meetings, but also the stuff in your practice management system. That's a better dashboard than any one of those services can provide you. If I go to my, my inbox, It's just my inbox. If I go to my practice management system, it's just my PM. And this creates a tremendous amount of friction as we're simply just trying to figure out what do I work on today? I could go to my PM and maybe there's a list of priorities. Here's thing 1, thing 2, thing 3, thing 4. But then I go to my inbox. Here's another set of priorities. Thing 1, thing 2, thing 3. Then I go to my Slack or my Microsoft Teams. Here's my priorities. I go to my calendar. How do I then mesh all of those priorities in like amongst each other to even know what to start with? None of these apps can individually do this. Cowork, because it is an agent that works across all of those apps, can bring all that stuff together. And the power of this is why tools within our ecosystem, tools within every ecosystem, are really struggling with the question, do I open it up or not? You look at a platform like TaxDome. TaxDome has historically always been closed. They want to build the best kind of all-in-one thing. But is the trade-off then that like, oh my gosh, my AI agent like can't use this at all? Or honestly, it can. It is just logging into the system and manually using it. That is sort of a tipping point that we have reached recently is if these AI agents are good enough to use an app the same way a human would, then not giving us an MCP, not giving us some sort of automated access to the platform just makes you slow because the agent can still log in and do that stuff manually if we really want it to, but it takes 10 times as long as it doing it via MCP or via API. And so in many ways, it feels like the genie is kind of out of the bottle here. Like, if an agent can use the tool, then why not just give the agent direct access? But if you are these software companies, I don't want to make this sound like it's an easy, trivial decision. Obviously, I come at this from the perspective of the accountant and what I feel like is best for accountants. If you are in the shoes of the software company, that is a hard decision to get to, right? Can't encourage you enough to just go and spend 5 minutes, make a live artifact in CoWork. It's really cool. We got videos on all the cloud stuff that we're, that we're talking about here coming to the main channel soon. If you're watching this on YouTube and you're like, why is he not showing me all the things that he's talking about? I'm amazed that you've made it this far. This is a podcast, but in 2026, people expect your podcast to be on video. I also make videos on different YouTube channels that are like actual software demos and all that. But you know what? You're welcome. Welcome to the club. A lot of cool people here. Tune in every Tuesday, Friday, 3:00 AM Eastern time. Get ready for the transition bits. Those are a bit alarming. Hey, real quick, do you need to hire any humans inside of your accounting firm? I wish you could see what I'm seeing through my own two eyes right now. I'm staring at a portal of qualified, pre-vetted candidates that are champing at the bit to come and work for your accounting firm. These are real human beings. Aubrey, a bookkeeper with 3 years experience, $3,100 a month. Samuel, an executive assistant. With almost 10 years experience, $3,000 a month. Maycol, a bookkeeper with 6 years experience, he's got a CPA experience with, with Bill.com, Accounting CS, Deal, Power BI, QBO, NetSuite. Let's find a tax person. Mia, US tax accountant, experience with CCH Access, Drake, and UltraTax. Bless her heart, $4,000 a month. Gang, these are all super talented accountants that are ready to come and work with your firm through Cloud Accountant Staffing, longtime sponsor of the channel. They have a portal where you can go around and see all the folks that they have pre-vetted and even book an interview directly with those people from the portal. You don't even have to hop on a call with Cloud Accountant Staffing. All these applicants have— they've got resumes, they've got intro videos. Can't tell you how many firms that I know who have been very happy with Cloud Accountant Staffing. Accounting, it is a universal language. Luca Pacioli, buckle up for this one. Not American, Italian. You know why? Because accounting knows no borders. Here accounting, there accounting, everywhere accounting, accounting. Okay, you need some human talent in your accounting firm? Talk to the Cloud Accounting Staffing. Check out the link down in the show notes. If tax season just punched you right in the grief bone, I have good news, my friend. There's a better way. We talk a lot about AI on this podcast and the group that is using AI to automate a whole bunch of the 1040 process. It is, it is one of this episode's sponsors, Soroban. With every like new headline you see around new AI models and new AI this, new AI that, the companies that are moving fastest using AI, they get better with every new AI model. And especially when it comes to the 1040 prep process, like if you're a US tax firm, oh my gosh, is there so much tedium still associated with collecting information from clients, getting it into the tax software, delivering it. It is a nightmare. If you are a firm doing like volume 1040 work, say 300, 500 1040s a year plus, this is a no-brainer. Take a look at Sorban. We've actually done some demos of them on my YouTube channel. You can and see how it works. Definitely worth checking out. More information down in the show notes. But the final thing I wanted to talk with you about when it comes to Live Artifacts is a really, really cool use case that I stumbled into. So we're in the process of scripting this YouTube video that we're putting together that is basically, can I just use AI instead of QuickBooks? Like, are we there yet? Because I would love to not have to have yet another QuickBooks subscription, yet another Xero subscription. Could I just chuck that stuff into QoWork and will it do it good enough? And so we kind of ladder up from there where the answer with just QoWork is like, eh, kind of not, but oh, we can do these things and this makes it better. And we kind of ladder up to like, what is the best basically free accounting ledger we can get out of AI today? Because let's be real, as AI continues to get better, I'm just going to do that stuff better and better. Right now you can chuck a single bank statement with 20 transactions into QoWork and be like, give me a balance sheet, give me profit and loss, Give me a trial balance. And it can turn that around to you within 60 seconds. And you're like, okay, I kind of get it. That's cool. It's cute. But like, feels like a toy. It, it does today. But as it continues to get better, there's a world where this could just kind of potentially become the ledger. And so that's what we're exploring in this video. And one of the steps in that video is basically we pull in some open source, uh, basically double entry accounting, like libraries from the web where they have a structured way to gather the data. And that's the biggest problem with just chucking a pile of information into an AI tool, you still need like a database, you need a backend, you need a persistent memory that is all of the properly booked transactions. And so in the video we do just that. We go out and we find an open source library that is a double entry accounting ledger. We pair that with the AI and you get the best of both worlds. You get an AI that you can just chuck a bank statement into and just say, figure it out. But you also have a persistent backend that is in like a structured file format. The problem is it's kind of weird just talking with an AI and that being the accounting system. Like, I need reports. I need to see stuff. Enter live artifacts. What I found is live artifacts are incredibly good, like reporters of financial data, literally full balance sheet, full P&L, full trial balance. So what we ended up with was a live artifact with multiple tabs. So live artifacts are usually just kind of a single screen, a single surface. They talk about them as dashboards. They can be any number of services, like just organize them into tabs and you can have a whole bunch of screens inside of one live artifact. But we literally built out the balance sheet, the P&L, the trial balance all in one live artifact. And that thing updates every single time you load it to pull in the most recent, like, updates to the accounting system. So you genuinely have like live updating accounting reporting in a live artifact. And obviously you can layer on top of that KPIs and like any other sort of non-financial report data that you want to see. But in a very short amount of time, I had whipped together like all of the reports, the financial reports that I would ever want to see for the underlying data. And it's all presented right there in a live artifact. Honestly, really, really cool. If you wanted, there's even ways you could do the same thing, not in Cowork, but in Claude Chat where the artifacts can be shared with team members. I don't know if they can be shared with external users, like with a client or not, but you can absolutely build a live artifact into a skill that is like, uh, you know, the skill is basically create a live artifact in this format. So you have a repeatable way to make these live artifacts if you're going to set up the same one for different clients. Like, if I'm running a CFO shop and I've got 10 clients, 12 clients that I am super glued to, that would be incredibly useful to have that stuff within arm's reach at any given time. And I would argue like makes AI a much more realistic option as being a proper accounting system. And, and the, the easiest use cases here are when like a client brings you 12 months of stuff once a year and you gotta whip it together into a file real quick. Like those are already the clients where you're like, I don't wanna spin up another like subscription for somebody that just brings me stuff once every 12 months. Let's start with the easy stuff. But the fact that we can have this reporting layer that just creates itself on top of the underlying data, that's really, really interesting. I'm excited. Excited for you to see that video. It's kind of abstract, but in the video we basically get to like, here's 3 prompts to have a totally viable accounting ledger running with reporting on top of it that's backed by a persistent database. And it is all free open source stuff that you can run from the Claude Co-Work subscription that you already have. Really cool stuff, especially for those quick and dirty accounting files that you just kind of throw together once a year. Okay, before we get off the topic of Claude, I got one other new feature release that I am in love with that we're also doing a video about. Let me tell you about it real quick because you may very well have problems today that this could solve for you in like an afternoon. It's Nerd Corner. Nerd Corner. Let's nerd it out. Nerd Corner. If you're new, those are the transitions I was telling you about. Not what you expected, right? Okay. Cloud design. Accounting firms do not sleep on this one. The amount of time and hours I've spent like trying to hire a designer, trying to make a thing look good when I'm an accountant and my eyes and my brain don't know how to make things look good. I have wasted so much time and money on that, and a new Claude update pretty much makes like that whole trying to make a cool visual aesthetic. It just makes it table stakes. I'm talking about Claude Design. It doesn't actually live in Claude Cowork. It's literally— I think it's Claude.ai/design. But it was released last week and as you can imagine, made a whole bunch of creative people very annoyed. And we're going to talk about what happens when an AI company just ships exactly the thing that you do. Like, how should you feel about this? But Claude Design, it is incredibly cool if you haven't played with it yet. Basically, all you have to do is set it up with a quote unquote design system. And I've seen most of your websites and I know from looking at them that you don't have a design system. But the beauty here is you can actually like borrow from different sources. Like you can kind of create a mood board of sorts where you're like, man, I like the look of this. I like the look of that. You can kind of cobble that stuff together into a design system and Claude will do a shockingly good job of making that stuff look appealing. And so even if you don't have a brand book from a design company that you can just chuck in there, just pull together some stuff off the web that you like. That can be enough of a design system for Claude to get working. Now, 5 things that it can build for you that will kind of blow your mind. Number 1 is an entire bloody website. And it is like, to me, these websites look much better than you get from templated website builders. The truth here is they're still fiddly. There's a bit of a— there's a bigger technical barrier to shipping a website that Claude makes than there is to going to like a Wix or a Squarespace or something like that. That being said, the ceiling here is vastly It can make something that is way more powerful for you, and it can make stuff that is visually way cooler than you get from templated website builders. Now, the most impressive thing to me is just how good of a job it does creating something in the visual style of the design system. Like, it, it makes really, really good looking stuff so far beyond what most accounting firm websites are. So it can make websites, by the way, we're just cruising past this. It can also like design full-blown apps, but I'm assuming, uh, you're an accountant and that's not a thing that we're muddling with that much. Second, this is maybe the juiciest one, is it can make the same style of on-brand slide decks. And slide decks are having a renaissance right now in much the same way that I would argue spreadsheets are having a renaissance because AI can use spreadsheets really well. AI can make really good slide decks. And if you actually look around on YouTube right now, a growing number of YouTube videos are simply a person talking over a slide deck. You'll notice this if you watch for it. There's like a picture-in-picture sort of thing going on where you've got a rectangular frame in the video that is something that's just like sort of a basic explainer graphic. And then you've got the person like down in the corner. That is a slide deck that in all likelihood they're talking over because AI made it. That's a vastly simpler way to present a concept on video with a slide deck, especially as AI can make very good slide decks. Than having to like design graphics and like animate them with motion and all that stuff and more the traditional video production sense. And the opportunity here for accountants is I've long been pushing people, deliver your stuff over video. If you got to set up financial statements, you got a tax return, something like that, record a 3-minute video, send that to the client. You will eliminate 80% of delivery meetings unless you still want to do those. And people will get this level of connection with you that I would argue they don't get over the phone. And they definitely don't get when you just send them an email with PDF attachments. And so normally those videos look like, you know, the bubble of you in the corner and you're talking over your screen. This, if you have a slide deck for what you are delivering, is way cooler. And Claude Design can make you some incredibly cool looking slide decks. If you're delivering financial statements, think about what are the key sort of KPIs that you're pulling out. Maybe it's a chunk of a financial statement. What are the things that you want to present every single time? Let's build a slide deck around that. If you're delivering tax returns, what most of us do is like we're walking through the tax return summary, right? Basically recreate that tax return summary inside of a set of slides. And for starters, have Claude do that. Say like, here's an example, build a template for me. And then we can use Claude to generate those templates. And in virtually no time, you've got a really cool looking slide deck that you can use as a companion not only presenting on video, but potentially to even include in the deliverable to the client. I can give them the financials, I can give them the tax return, but I can also give them a PDF of that slide deck that is in all likelihood more digestible for them. This has always been a thing that we could do, but manually creating slide decks takes a long time. I would argue AI slide deck creation to date has been pretty janky, like not all that impressed with the output. Claude Design is the best slide deck maker we have ever had, and it's not even close. They are really, really good looking. Third thing it can do for you, create standalone, like one-off landing pages. We talk about this on the podcast quite a bit. What most firms need is not a website. You need a landing page with a specific purpose where you're trying to get them through a specific path. So if you go out and you do a talk or you do a podcast interview or you're, you're in some situation where people will see you, the ROI of you going out and doing that thing will only be as high as like you make the next step for that person frictionless. If you go and you give a talk, but they don't even know who you are, they don't know how to take the next step. What was the point of that talk? As opposed to you go to a talk, you get them very excited about a specific thing, and then you give them a really easy next step for them to take. Maybe the best example of this that I've done is I'll go to state societies and show them a bunch of really cool razzle dazzle, like new tech. And the audiences at, at CPA State Society conferences are usually not very tech aware. So I show them a bunch of cool stuff that's happening. And in the beginning I say like, I'm going to show you some stuff that's just going to blow your socks off. I don't want you to have to worry about taking notes. Scan a QR code at the end and I will send you a rundown of all of the cool things that I've shown you here today, all of their websites, places for you to learn more. And I've closed As much as 80% of the room with pitches like that. And those are all people that I now have on my email list. That makes that talk incredibly worthwhile, right? As opposed to the talk where it's like you don't give them a next step. That next step is almost always a landing page. You take them into that landing page with a certain sort of a context. Where are they coming to that landing page from? And that landing page has a very clear goal. An outcome that you want to get them to. But most of us, like, taking the time to set this stuff up and think through it, that's very hard. Claude Design, with some prompting from you around like, what are the goals of this landing page, can whip that up for you absolutely in no time. Thing number 4 that Claude Design can make for you: social media assets. It's actually really good at this, just like making really nice looking sort of social media templates. And one of the features of, of Claude Design is you can export these designs to Canva. And if you've never used Canva before, it is the most normie-friendly graphic design tool. Think like Photoshop, but something that anybody could use. Like, uh, what do we— let's go back to like, it seems like on Windows back in the day, we had just all these really basic graphics editors where you're just like dragging shapes and adding text and stuff like that. Canva is basically that, but you can actually make good-looking stuff. Claude Design will export to Canva. So you can make something cool there, export it to Canva, and then you've got these templates you can use for social media. Just update the text and all that. Last one, number 5, which is frankly the most amazing, but probably fewer accountants will use. Claw Design can make really amazing motion graphics, like explainers, like animated explainers. It's really, really impressive the way that this works. You basically give it some prompts for the story you want this animation to tell and kind of what are the different beats of what you want it to visualize, and it will create a full-blown like animated explainer video. Now, really impressive. If you want to go deeper on this, there's some great YouTube videos about it. Obviously, this is right up my alley with all the video production that we do. The kind of wild thing right now is you can, on a, on a, um, 20X Max plan, which is the $200 a month consumer plan, which folks in accounting firms should not be using. We should be on the business plans, but on their very biggest consumer plan at 20X, you can only generate like 60 seconds of this sort of animated explainer videos. You can create about 60 seconds of it in a month before you blow through the entirety of your Claude usage for Claude Design for the entire month, like 60 seconds of animated video. So it's evidently unbelievably resource intensive. So if you look at a Teams plan or an Enterprise plan, that means unless you're paying for overages, you can only make like, uh, 10 to 30 seconds of animated video a month right now, which is kind of wild. So not super useful, but like from a, uh, technical standpoint, the output of it is so good and looks really, really cool, these sort of animated explainer graphics. So I mentioned any of this stuff you can export to, um, Canva for like image design. You can also export this stuff to PDF, to PowerPoint, or to Claude Code. So if you're thinking about like a website or, or an app or something like that, the next step You're going to take it to Claude Code. You're going to figure out how to host that thing on the web so that people can actually come and see it. But maybe, like, but I would say the conversation people were most having online last week around this was, do we need to pour one out for designers? I mean, it's literally in the name Claude Design. How should you feel when an AI company ships the thing that you do? And I would argue accountants, like, we've had a little bit of this already. Like famously, the, the OpenAI GPT-4 model launch, which I would say is probably still the most highly anticipated model launch there's ever been. It was the first one, the first big model update after the release of ChatGPT. Their one more thing at the end of that demo, sort of this razzle-dazzle, like, hey, look at this cool thing that it can do, was to prepare someone's taxes. And so everybody saw this and they're like, oh my gosh, tax accountants are cooked. I'm going to go prepare my taxes with ChatGPT. And with time, that hasn't aged all that well, right? I don't know that AI has gotten normal people any closer to being able to file tax returns themselves, though there's certainly stories of people trying to do that. It's like a huge lift. And at the end of the day, I don't know that you still have a high degree of faith in what you actually put together. But let's be real for like about AI's impact on creative artists. If you look at Fiverr, Fiverr for a long time was a platform where a huge percentage of the work going through there was like like sort of basic, uh, creative work. Fiverr has absolutely tanked since, uh, image generation models have gotten good. And Claude Design is now a big step past what image generation models would do. Like, it's creating templates for you, it's creating your website. And so the creative arts, probably more than anybody else, have already been very, very disrupted by AI. Disney just laid off almost their entire visual graphics team, basically saying like, going forward, we're basically just going to pull in third-party teams for specific jobs, but we'll be internally relying really, uh, significantly on AI and how AI can support special effects. Avengers: Doomsday, so probably be the biggest movie of the year, the special effects are said to be hugely driven by AI. So while we haven't felt this all that intensely in our category yet, I would argue there are people whose livelihoods are, are well and truly being impacted by this stuff right And so if you can imagine a situation where an AI company comes along and they ship that thing that you do, I think we gotta think through that because it, it ultimately gets you to a spot where if that did come to pass, which by the way, it will one day, if we've actually thought through that, like we can have a little more of a plan and I think it makes it a little less scary. If you're a designer right now, I could tell you the thing that you're not doing or you can't do is just crap all over it and be like, ah, that thing sucks. Nobody should use it. This is wrong. Like, the reality is the toothpaste's out of the tube. And I think you have to look at that thing realistically and be like, how do I use this to do my job? It is ultimately probably not going to be as good at me and where the domains that I am best in, like where my expertise lies, is this tool going to be as good as me right now? Probably not. But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't be using it to support the work that I do. It is not unlike, you know, a tax firm when tax software first comes along. If you're not filling out tax forms, what am I paying you to do? Now the computer fills out the tax forms. Or the first time we got, you know, computer accounting ledgers. If you're not running the ledger yourself and the computer is running the ledger, what am I paying you to do? We got to think like really clearly about when we're on the other side of doing and when we're on the other side of how to do, what does your business model look like? We are leaving the how to do era. Entering the what to do era. The doing will become trivial. Anything can be done. AI is headed in a direction where eventually we can see it doing pretty much anything. And so in that era, I think what becomes very important is someone deciding, well, what's worth doing? That's great that it can do that and it can run on a hamster wheel faster than any hamster has ever run. But is that still worth doing? Because right now, if you used AI to generate a 90-minute movie, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to sit down in a theater and watch it. So our roles, they absolutely shift. And if you think about the amount of time— in fact, let's go back to earlier in the podcast episode when we were talking about what does my personal dashboard look like? Looks like email triage, looks like calendar meetings, looks like PM tasks. Which of those things is AI probably going to knock out for us in the next 3 years? Probably the PM tasks, probably like the work production that's happening there. All the human stuff, the calendars, the meetings, all that stuff that probably becomes the business. This, how we're connecting with other people and like helping them to get over their very specific problems, which by the way, are going to be aided by AI. Like we're gonna be advisors. AI has to be part of the conversation of how we advise people. I frankly don't understand why we're still having the debate of like, will AI replace accountants? Like, look at all the industries where AI is replacing people. Of course AI will replace accountants. Will AI replace you? That's something that ultimately you have control over. and we need to plan ahead for. In fact, next podcast episode, we're debating just that. Is now the time to sell your accounting firm? Ooh, should you get out before AI gets all up in your biz? That's gonna be a fun debate. But first, let's bring this one home with the mailbag. Mailbag, mailbag. The segment is called Mailbag. Questions are submitted, uh, via email. My email is jason@jasononfirm.com. Via text message, my number is 1-516-980-4968. Thank you for all the phone calls I've been getting recently. To be clear, I'll always ignore the phone call, but you're welcome to call it as much as you want. A lot of these questions come in via text. Also comments on the YouTube version of the podcast. First up, here's a great question. I want to expand my client base specifically by acquiring clients outside my local area. My clients are in the trades— plumbers, electricians, etc. They've got lots of paperwork. My plumber often says he loves to see me every month because when he passes his paperwork to me, it's like passing all that stress over. How do you recommend I facilitate the exchange of paperwork for a client that is out of state? My current practice involves going to people's houses, their offices each month to return last month's paperwork and pick up the next. This practice has the added benefit of providing face time with my clients, which they love. Gang, I love accounting firms like this. I wish this was still running an accounting firm. There's so many people that look down their noses on this style of firm. You're going out to your client's office? I don't even take client meetings. Clients can't even call me. I wish we could just go back to this. This where you were doing like a tenth of the volume. You were showing up at the, the, the office, picking up all the paperwork. I mean, we're almost tradespeople for documents, right? Like, there is this like sort of journeyman accountant where we're just hustling that stuff. And I have this like romantic attachment with it. And there was even a stage in running my accounting firm— actually, it was before I owned the firm, back when like delivery DVD Netflix was still a thing. So they would mail you DVDs and you would return them. There was a time in that era when I was like, why don't we just build an accounting firm around this? Like, we give people prepaid envelopes and I figured out how to do all this stuff and do custom branded prepaid envelopes. We would give clients a stack of that as part of a welcome package. They get a stack of, you know, 10 of these prepaid envelopes and every single month their job was to just chuck anything they didn't want to deal with into that envelope and mail it to us. All they had to do is pop it in the mail. And around this we would do their accounting. For the person asking this question, there's a version of that that actually might make sense to you. Maybe each month you are mailing back all the stuff they gave you the previous month, but inside of that is another prepaid envelope where they can send you the next month's stuff. Or maybe you just send them a stack of envelopes every 6 months. They get a refill, something like that. That is the one downside of expanding outside of your local area and going national is obviously you can't pop into those people's offices every month. But it just means we have to find another way to sort of manufacture that proximity and those touchpoints. One that we talk about a lot here on the podcast is delivering work over video. So at the very least, they can see your face asynchronously. That is not synchronous. You don't have to be on a live call with them. You can send that video asynchronously. It can happen anytime, so it doesn't bungle up your calendar. And while it's not as good as like the live in-person real-time thing, it is much better than them never seeing your face. And this is exactly the sort of thing that is worth building an accounting firm around. There's so many firms that are like, no, you're not going to mail me paper documents. You're not going to do all these things. I'm not going to fuss with that. There's so many firms who would not allow for this, whereas you can be the one that literally has a system for it. And this is like your preferred way of working. Tradespeople dealing with tons of paper throughout the day, many of them, not probably not all of them. But this is exactly the sort of thing that you lean into to become amazing for a specific type of person. This is creating exclusivity. This is creating scarcity. Do they know any other firms that will aid people this way? Probably not. And if you do it in kind of a fun branded way where it's like, yeah, no, we know that you prefer to work this way. And so we've very obviously got a system for this. These are these branded envelopes. Like, this is how easy we can make this for you. If that is what people are telling you they want, double down on it, whether that's cool, whether that's of the times or not. Go hard on that. I think that's super cool. Thanks for the question. Spring is here. It is spring cleaning season, the perfect time to clean out the dusty corners of your accounting firm and just get rid of the stuff that you don't want to be doing still. And for most of us, one of those cobweb-laden services that is just stuffed into the corner of the garage, it is bill pay. Well, good news, my friends, artificial intelligence is here to help You might have heard of it. The platform that's crushing it right now, this video's sponsor, MakersHub. Listen, nobody likes bill pay, okay? It sucks, but almost every business has to do it, and oftentimes it's high stakes, it's messy, it impacts inventory. You're going after like savings. The details matter. You miss a zero or a comma here or there, oh my gosh, that's a big deal. BillPay, right? We are getting wildly good new AI models seemingly by the week right now. And honestly, MakerSub are the folks that I trust to like put this work. MakerSub have been like arguably making the best use of AI models over the last 3 years to solve a very, very specific problem. The problem of BillPay. Nobody likes it. So if you do this stuff for your clients or you have clients who deal with project tracking, receiving, like construction, people and manufacturing folk, HVACsmen, super recommend you check out Makers Hub, a great example of AI done well. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. Hey, just real quick, if you're using Outlook or Gmail to manage email inside of your accounting firm, brother, those were tools that were built, uh, 20+ years ago and not for accounting firms like yours. If you haven't heard of them, let me introduce you to one of today's sponsors. Sponsors Missive. Missive, M-I-S-S-I-V-E. It is exactly what I needed. I actually used a bunch of like off-the-shelf help desk sort of email tools in my accounting firm. Man, man, do I wish I had Missive. It's a vastly more efficient way to manage email across your entire team, because email is not a hill that anybody should be dying on alone. We did a demo on the main channel of it if you want to see it in action. Just search my name and Missive. Really cool, doing some cool AI stuff as well. Worth checking out to learn more about just what you're missing by using Outlook or Gmail. Check out the missive info down in the show notes. Next up, I've been watching your software videos. At first I found them entertaining and informative but suspected you were a paid influencer. However, you clearly have a great understanding of the bigger picture. When I look at your app recommendations, I realized your negative comments relative to software that I use were spot on about their shortcomings. Bless. Put her there. Thank you. For every one of these messages, I get 100 that are like, "Chill, who's paying you to say this? Get a haircut." I currently use SurePrep and SafeSend with CCH access. Oh, gross. After this season, SurePrep is dead to me. Thompson did not do their homework before buying it. I also 100% agree with your take on SafeSend Gather. My client acceptance of Gather is almost zero. For that reason, I'm willing to walk away from SafeSend for an acceptable alternative. What do you recommend? Uh, if you're leaving SafeSend, so SafeSend was for a long time a solution for automating the delivery of tax returns in the US, uh, which is, is a pain because there's so many to-dos for the client upon delivery from making a payment to this person, this person, or this person to signing this thing, signing that thing. And the tax software produces this transmittal letter. We're, we're going deep. People are like, I don't do US taxes for a reason, Jason. I don't want to hear about it. It, but I'm going to tell you anyways because I lived this life and it hurt. The tax software produces this transmittal letter, which is written in this arcane way that only an accountant can understand. So you do the whole tax return and then give it to the client, and then they don't do the last step. Like, like you ran 25 miles of the marathon and then they didn't run the last mile. Is it 26 miles? I don't know. And so SafeSend, it ingested the entire tax return and then gave the client like an easy-to-understand interface to do the last few steps and e-sign it and all that. It was an elegant solution to a problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place. But that solution was purchased by Thomson Reuters, the Darth Vader of the accounting software ecosystem, where great tech goes to die. And it's messages like this that I get, frankly, every single week that are like, this tool is dead to me. This used to be great. Now this is bad. It is messages like this that drive my recommendations. And when people are like, why are you recommending this instead of that? It's really hard for me to quantify. Like, I get so many of these messages every week, every day. Like all of this is feeding into what are the platforms we recommend and what are the platforms that we don't. But then you get like a SafeSend rep that'll come back and be around and be like, well, I don't, why don't you recommend this or that? Everybody loves us. And I'm like, really? 'Cause I got a whole bunch of people over here saying that it just doesn't work anymore. Anyways, question was, what do I use instead of SafeSend? Look at Trusts or look at Soraban. I would say they're the two best alternatives for a really good automated delivery option for your tax work. That being said, in the, in the broader scope of delivering a 1040 project, I still think the greatest time savings comes in automating intake, not automating delivery. But if you just want a delivery solution, look at Trest, look at Sorban. I started my firm about 12 months ago, focused on bookkeeping. I've been struggling since then to find clients through a reliable intake funnel. All my clients are either cold outreach or partnerships with CPA firms that white label my firm. Interesting. I'm looking to continue building white label partnerships with firms and wanted to get your perspective on whether firm owners you've spoken to would be open to that or not. Arrangement? If so, what's the best way to find those partnerships? Interesting. I see tons of accounting firms that will like refer work between firms. That's incredibly common. It's something that we need to lean into more. I'm about to go on a 20-city tour. In fact, as you're listening to this episode, I am packing my bags and about to head out the door to Columbus. One of the main themes of these in-person events, one of the biggest things that comes out of them is it's a whole bunch of local people oftentimes meeting for the first time, and almost every firm has legacy clients that they need to get rid of. And every city has upstart firms for whom those legacy clients would be tremendous clients to get the business off the ground. And so we bring these people together in these cities and those connections just happen. Like, we try to like sort of grease the skids there and provide a bit of lubrication to make sure that it happens. But firms have a huge appetite for this because if you're sitting on a bunch of legacy clients, it's much easier for you to let them go if you have a good home you can send them to. Rather than simply kicking them to the curb. So here in the question, you're talking about white labeling. This is actually very unusual and maybe not very unusual, but it's much less common than firms just being willing to refer work out. And I mean, if you're a tax shop and you don't touch bookkeeping, you know just how valuable it would be to have a trusted bookkeeper who will do the work correctly so that, you know, when you get the work in to do the, do the tax work, you're not going to have a total mess on your hands. Like every single tax firm wants that. Unless they're now doing their own bookkeeping in-house. And so for you, I would simply say, how do I get in front of the tax shops in town that are either not doing their own bookkeeping or are not only doing tax for bookkeeping clients? Because there's, there's a lot of firms who are doing bookkeeping and tax, but they have 5 times as many tax clients as they have bookkeeping clients. And in a situation like that, usually, and this was the case in my firm, we would do bookkeeping for dental, but we wouldn't do bookkeeping for anything else. And so I had 800 clients that I would still have loved to have a trusted bookkeeper for to get a little more standardization in how that work would come to us when it came time to do the tax return. So it's absolutely worth trying to get in front of, of these firms to build more of these partnerships. You want to try to do it in a trusted setting. Sending cold emails, that's really, really hard. Anything in person can definitely be helpful. Just the fact that you would be able to walk into their office that puts you ahead of anybody that can reach out to them in the office. I would say come with food. Accountants are pretty easy in that way. Put a little note on there, hey, I'm a bookkeeper, would love to take some projects off your hands or, you know, support your clients. You know, there's more where this came from. Get them on like a monthly muffin plan. That's probably the hardest way to do that, you walking into people's offices. Wherever possible, look for events. Once you've got people in the room and you're all at the same event, then you're kind of peers and it feels less scummy for you to have those conversations with people. Obviously, if I've got an event coming up where you are, absolutely join. We're going to be in 20 cities. Check out JasonNonFirms.com/events. Going to have over 1,000 accountants out. Going to be super fun. Looking for advice on tech selection. We're a Vancouver, Washington tax and financial planning office currently using Ultratax, GoFileRoom, Engagement Manager, PracticeCS, NetClient portal. We would like to replace everything except Ultratax. As you should. Can you suggest some programs we could use to make that happen, please? Okay. In your accounting firm tech stack, the most important tool is always the practice management system. It's the backbone. It's the operating system. It's the tool that you want to handle as many jobs as possible in the firm. But it is not always the place to start because if you've got a firm that hasn't changed its tech stack in 20 years, as is the case here, changing the practice management system That's like having a skyscraper and being like, what if we replace the 1st through 4th floors? What do you think, gang? And everybody's like, I don't know. I guess the 1st through 4th floors haven't changed in a while, but that feels like a big project. The truth is, changing your PM, it is a monumental project. And the easier way to get a win is usually with something that's a little smaller lift. And so in a shop like yours where you're doing a bunch of tax, I would say you do want to replace the practice management system at some time. Practice CS Yes, it is tried. It is high time to, to ole yeller that one. But the easier place to get a quick win is probably with an automated tax intake solution. Leaders here right now are Stanford Tax, Sorban, and Tress. This will automate the intake of your 1040 work. It is a very quick plug-and-play way to save a bunch of time on those projects and get greater buy-in from your team before you bite off a bigger project. If you are going to go through the work of changing PMs, be sure to pull in a third-party implementer. That is someone who has gone through that, that transition with a bunch of other firms, who can be the bad guy, who can be sort of a release valve for them to be like, no, you guys really need to do it this way. And when your team stamps your feet and tears their robes, you can be like, sorry, implementation person said we got to do it this way. It is much better than you having to push that through yourself. In a firm like this, I would also say remain very, I guess, aware of any tech changes that require changes in your client's behavior. Those are always the hardest tech changes to make because it's not only your firm's processes changing, but then you need your clients to also change to realize the benefits. In a firm like yours, that's a very, very hard thing to achieve, especially as your team isn't even sure if they're making the right, you know, change. And so when a client comes to them complaining, it's very hard for your, your team member to hold the line and be like, no, this is great, just go back and, and reset your password. In fact, Stanford Tax, kind of one of the leading tax automation platforms, early days they positioned themselves as a portal where clients could just dump all their tax documents and it would sort of automate all the organization of that for the firm. They have since changed their positioning and their messaging to say it is like a, a black hole of documents for your firm, for your staff, so that any way that a client submits documents to you, and one of those ways might be a client portal, but any way that you take in documents, your team, you then put it into Stanford Tax. And on the other side, you get this nicely organized sort of organizer. And so the difference there is someone who's like, I don't know how my clients are going to feel about client portals. They don't feel like they're only going to get the value out of the platform if the client uses the client portal. They know that even if the client doesn't go along with the plan, we're still going to save a bunch of time. And so in your case, in a firm like this making a hard transition, I suspect you got some legacy clients here. Just be careful with tech changes that are going to require behavioral changes from your clients. That's not to say that you can't get clients to change and that you might need to get them to change. Just know it's a hard thing to both change them and change your team at the same time. In most cases, you know, say you're rolling out a PM, you're going to roll the PM out. You're going to use all the internal aspects of the PM and the client portal. The client-facing stuff is the last thing you roll out, kind of for that reason. You got to get your legs underneath you first. A few more here. I've been trying to post more as I see people like you, Chad, and Logan having an impact on small firms, and I feel like I can help the industry from a different angle. Curious if you have any advice on the best way to get more reach. So this is probably posting on social media. I have useful things I can share but haven't yet found my voice. Appreciate any advice you have and love the content you're putting out. Uh, honestly, the secret is volume. I would love to tell you there's a bunch of shortcuts. The reality is the people who are doing this best are the people who have done it most. I've put out a greater volume of videos and social media content, I think, than anybody in the accounting space globally in the last 5 years. You mentioned Chad Davis. He's put out more videos on LinkedIn than anybody in the accounting space, and it's not even close in the last 12 months. And Logan, next to me, he's probably put out the most YouTube videos of anyone in the space. So the people that you're calling out, like, just have more reps. And I think it's easy to look at the people who are doing it and being like, and be like, oh, they've got something that I don't. When the truth is usually much less sexy. When I was running a 40-person accounting firm, I published 2 videos a week to YouTube for 18 months. I also had a child during that time. I was running from something. But at the end of that 18 months, I had— drum roll, please— 500 YouTube subscribers. 5-0-0. Enough to fill 3 moderately sized Chipotles. So why on God's green earth would I keep making videos? I found that I loved doing it. It was something for me that was a creative outlet and honestly didn't feel like work. And that was my competitive advantage. And so now when people look at my stuff now and they're like, wow, you're a natural, I'm like, I appreciate that you say that, but the truth is I put in more hours and more money into this than, than I think anybody else has. And, and so hopefully they're better, right? Hopefully I've developed that skill. I mean, we're 600 episodes into this podcast of me sitting in a room so, so alone talking about accounting firm things, and then you get up on stage and people are like, you're such a great speaker. And I'm like, yeah, I know about all that, but the unsexy answer is it is really just about volume. The hard thing with social media is you can get sucked into vanity metrics that will pull you in the wrong direction. You might fall in love with the idea of like doing numbers, and oftentimes that isn't a direction that will ultimately help you to build your business. I mean, we all have very real issues of like, I'll go home for Christmas and my brother will be like, Yes, dude, still doing the content. How many subscribers on the YouTube channel? I'm like, like 40,000. He's like, oh, okay. YouTube, by definition, 100,000 subscriber YouTube channel is a micro influencer. You don't have to be a man to feel emasculated by someone saying you're not even halfway to being a micro influencer. But at the same time, you'll have people with 3 million subscriber YouTube channels that can't go full time on a YouTube channel. Here we've got I've got like a team of 12 people now. And so the metrics, like going after likes or views or subscribers, all that stuff, it really doesn't matter. I'd say find the thing that doesn't feel like work for you, but feels like work for other people. Maybe that's writing, maybe that's making videos, maybe that's doing interview podcasts. Find the thing that is fun for you because you will do that at a greater volume than anybody else. And it is volume that will get you to the good version of that. Quantity has a quality. All its own. Next up, looks like we're getting to the point where we can use AI in accounting more than just for help with tax research. We're excited to pull agents into specific tasks in our firms. For example, we're doing a lot of real estate entities, and I'm looking into how to build a bot that could look through a 300-page contract and create a journal entry for the closing transaction. This could genuinely save us an hour or two per property. I would really love to find a safe way to use OpenClaw. Should I simply have a dedicated workstation that's not connected to my network to be safe? We took a hard right turn into OpenClaw there. Reading through a 300-page contract to create a journal entry is a tremendous use of, um, what AI can already do. When you're talking about a 300-page contract, you do have to think of what are called context limits. And the context limit of an AI model is basically how much information it can have sort of an active memory, how much information it can take into consideration when generating the next token or the next word or next part of the word. And back in the early days, AI models had very, very small context windows. They were like goldfish. They couldn't remember very much stuff at a time. Now, the biggest models that we have, the biggest kind of mainstream models, are really from Claude. In certain contexts, you can use Claude, their best Opus model, with a 1 million token context limit, which equates to roughly 1,500 to 2,000 pages of text. Now importantly, on the Claude Team plan, and this is the, the case for most of the places where you use Claude's Opus model right now, their best model, it has a 250,000 context limit. That is 250,000 tokens, which gets you down to worst case around 300 pages of text that it can remember at any given point in time, which just so happens to be exactly the size of the document that you're talking about here. So it takes a bit of technical understanding of like, How much can the model actually see at any given point in time? Because you want it to see everything to be able to do that journal entry correctly. But then you brought up OpenClaw, and the question was, should I basically rip the network cable out of the wall, uh, to make OpenClaw safe? That won't work. That'll just make OpenClaw not work because OpenClaw is still driven by an AI model that's in the cloud that works via an internet connection. It's basically, think of it like, its brain, all of the turns that it takes, all the steps that it does, it's bouncing stuff back and forth to an AI model to say, what should I do next? An AI model in the cloud responds and then it takes that action. And so any OpenClaw bot still has to be connected to the internet, but that doesn't mean that you need to let it go bang around and do stuff on the web. And like OpenClaw, honestly, unless you are a big time nerd, that wants to squeeze out the very marginal things that OpenClaw can now do that nothing else can do. For 99% of firms, the answer, at least for the next 6 to 12 months, is going to be Claude. Claude is where we will be automating things. So I would encourage you to turn your focus to Claude rather than OpenClaw. But the same considerations here apply because so many people right now are like, can I use Claude Cowork on sensitive work? And the hard answer is it depends on your organizational settings for how you're using Claude Cowork. I think I, in fact, already even called this out earlier this episode. I would recommend turning off Claude for Chrome, which is the ability of Claude to go out and control this Chrome window and do stuff in the browser. Because if it could control a browser and do stuff on the web, it could potentially give privileged information to somebody via the web. It's basically only 3 ways that Claude can interface with the web. It has a web search tool and it basically does a whole bunch of Google searches at the same time and then gets basically the cached results from the web search engine. So not the full page, but sort of the highlights of a page. That is its web search tool. The second web tool that it has is called WebFetch, and that is when it takes a URL and pulls the entirety of a webpage. So those two, they're both read-only, web search and WebFetch. The only other way that, that Claude can interact with the web is Claude for Chrome, and Claude for Chrome is fundamentally read-write. Because it's navigating the web, it's seeing pages, but it's also putting things into pages. And if it just read my emails, there's a world where it could potentially get tricked and put something into a web page that could be problematic. And so I would encourage you to turn your focus to how do we lock down Claude as much as we can inside of our org, doing things like turning off, um, Claude for Chrome. Uh, when computer use comes out for business accounts, that's probably something that we need to lock down further. But even to just drill into that example, this feature that Claude has that's now only available on the consumer plans where it can literally move the mouse around on your screen and type things in on the keyboard. Let's say you wanted to figure out a safe way to deploy that. That's a situation where I would probably have a separate, totally separate computer where Claude was allowed to have computer use, but the only programs on there were things that I was okay with it using. So like, let's say I want to try to automate something in our tax software or in this specific tool that we use in our accounting firm. I would lock down, down that environment. So that was like the only thing that it could use. So you're on the right track here. Like we have to limit the scope of what it's capable of doing, but OpenClaw almost certainly isn't the answer these days. It's going to be Claude. Hey, real quick, month-end close automation software. It has kind of completely changed what doing bookkeeping work looks like the last few years. And did you hear the news recently that this episode's sponsor Canopy, they are working on their own spin on month-end close automation that is coming soon and will be built directly into the Canopy platform. Canopy, who you may have seen late last year launched their own version of like tax intake built into the practice management system. Now they're going after month-end close automation and it is all, it is all part of Canopy's vision to be the single sort of all-in-one place to not only manage the work of your accounting firm, but to get that stuff done. I almost cursed. You know what I'm saying? Canopy always kind of been like a feature nerd's dream, especially if you are of the mind where you're like, man, I want to consolidate more of my stuff, eliminate some tools. You're leaning maybe more all-in-one. Canopy has been one of my leaders in the practice management system category for as long as my recommendations have existed. Excited to see what they're doing in the bookkeeping automation space now as well. Hey, real quick, I want to invite you to my Super Excellent Weekly Newsletter. My newsletter was like the start of my thought leadership journey. It's where I try to collect what I think are the most important things for you to see every single week, sent to you every Wednesday morning. Make sure you don't miss any of the good stuff, right? Increasingly, we're also building into that some like of the best evergreen thought leadership I've ever done, kind of make that like the most action-packed, highest quality email you get to your inbox each week. Because listen, we're all busy, all right? You're not going to see every single little thing that I put out. Goodness sakes, there's just too much. Mm. If you're not on my newsletter yet, check that out. Jasononfirms.com. I'll put a link to it down in the show notes. Last one. I'm a full-time nonprofit CFO, parentheses, non-CPA. Is that a thing? Are you just trying to make that a thing? Isn't that a thing for Mean Girls? Non-CPA is not a thing. I have a solopreneur consulting company. Where I'm offering CFO advisory services to nonprofits. I didn't want to do accounting and bookkeeping, but very quickly found out I'm gonna need to take over all these people's accounting and bookkeeping. Welcome to working with, with businesses in any capacity. Can't tell you how many VCFOs have told me this: oh, we're a bookkeeping company now. Up until last year, I didn't think I wanted to get into bookkeeping because I didn't think it was profitable. But now, with the advent of new automated platforms— Ramp, Digits, QBO— and using services like TeamUp, I'm genuinely considering starting to offer bookkeeping and accounting services. There have been ways to do bookkeeping work profitably for, for quite a while, but for sure, better technology and offshore staffing, yes, can make it much more profitable. They said the biggest challenge is whether to take the leap and go from solopreneur with a side CFO job to a true nonprofit accounting firm that's offering bookkeeping, grant financial management, and fractional advisory services. Should I bootstrap the first few months and do all the work myself and then hire a bookkeeper? Or should I hire a new employee now once I've got the contract signed so I hit the ground running with that employee? It depends ultimately on like, what is the firm that you want to have long term? A lot of folks are in love with the idea of it always just being them, and there's a certain like purity to that. Definitely comes with some tradeoffs. It sounds like you're totally open to hiring a team. If you have the contracts lined up, I would bring in the team member right away because you will very quickly hit your own capacity. Employee, and rather than your focus being the business, your focus will become the work, the pie making. And it's very hard to dig yourself out of that, especially once the clients become totally reliant on you. So in your situation, if you've got the cash runway, I would recommend pulling in the employee once you have the contracts lined up and you can kind of assure yourself you'll have the cash to be able to do that. And offshore might make sense here. Like if you're building a bookkeeping team, like you really, really seriously need to look at offshore. But as much as like we've got specific tools that are really helping with this stuff, I would say go deep on AI. I mean, the combination of the two, like really good tech has, has given us a big step in how automated accounting firms can be. AI, AI agents are yet another really big step. It's not just how our tools will use AI. As we've talked about, there is a standalone sort of level of AI agent that works across your tools. That is a really, really big unlock for accounting firms. It is worth going deep on how to make the most of that stuff and building a tech stack that your AI agent can talk with. So you don't have all these little isolated bodies of context, all these little apps that can't talk to each other. I shared earlier that we're, we're writing this video around like, can I just use an AI instead of QuickBooks? Can I save myself my next QuickBooks subscription? And along the way, we got to a point where AI was doing like, like a full set of books, like in a very impressive way. And my mind went to like, okay, when I was running my bookkeeping practice, what was like the next step? What was the really time-consuming thing here? And honestly, for us, the documentation was really time-consuming. We had this, this format that was kind of the traditional accounting firm format. It even has like this lettering and numbering index system. I can't remember what it was called, but it has been handed down from like generation after generation of accounting firm where you just, you have a specific, specific lettering and numbering for all of your work papers. That map to like the trial balance accounts. And back in the day when you were doing all this stuff on paper, these were the indexes that you would put on the bottom right of each of those pages. And so in our firm, we had like a cloud-based file storage system, but the naming convention for all the files followed that indexing system. And so it gave us a logical standardized order that we could put together all the workpapers. And then the workpapers, like, you know, the bank statement would have the ending balance highlighted and we would just kind of try to make those as readable as possible. Building the documentation to make that project as efficient to review as possible. Ultimately, it was the preparer's job to make their file as easily reviewable as possible. And I was doing a bit of banging around with Claude figuring out what exactly can Claude Cowork do inside of PDFs? Like how much control does it have over what it can annotate and all that? And it can do pretty much any sort of annotation in a PDF that like Adobe Acrobat can do. And so I'm, And going back and forth with it and I'm like, okay, like, well, normally we would highlight this and we would draw a box around this when we would make this sort of note. I basically explained to it how we do our documentation and very quickly realized that if I give it a few bits of information and like I had an SOP for here's how, here's the file naming convention for every single file that we have. It like, it has to follow these rules. And then here is the SOP for the structure structure of a month-end close. What does the file system need to look like for a month-end close? It needs to be the same in every single file. We add systems for all this. Had I given Cowork those systems and had I pointed it to here's the workpaper file that's signed off on from last month, I, you could literally give Cowork a pile of this year's information. It could rename all the files. It could structure the file the same way. It can make all the annotations in those PDFs. Like it's already there, like it's good enough for that. And that was a process that was very specific to us that not everybody does. But, but I kind of came out of that with two realizations. One, I don't know that we're just still spending enough time with this, going deep enough with it to say, here's our process for doing this thing. Now just do it. Like, I don't think we're spending enough time on it because maybe we don't fully believe it's capable of it, but we haven't actually tested it yet and figured that out. But the second thing it made me realize is it's never been more important than today to standardize how we document all of our projects. For anything going through a specific pipeline, we need like documentation templates, work paper templates. And I don't think this is like a fuddy-duddy, out-of-date way of thinking about this. Even if these work papers and all this like feel unnecessary and are relevant to some projects but not to other projects, without that standardized process for documenting things, you can't put an AI to work in a standardized And so I think the system that's designed to both work for humans and AI might look a little bit different than the system that is just designed for your humans. But, but it really got me thinking that like AI will only be as good as our systems, as we have documented what the correct way of doing things is, and to the degree we've gotten our humans to even agree on the proper process for doing a thing. Because if you have a documented process right now, it's shocking just how far coworking can get you. But I would argue the bigger problem for most of us is that standardization just doesn't exist yet. And until it does, it's going to be really hard to put AI to work. I don't know. What do you think about that? Is that like old fuddy-duddy way of thinking about how AI will help us? I am like clarifying my thinking on agents and going deeper on statuses. Basically, all work in an accounting firm can be distilled down to statuses. And historically, those statuses have been set up based on like what human will do that status. What are the capabilities of a preparer? What are the capabilities of a reviewer? That's sort of how we arrive at what each status is, because when the status changes, usually that file went to a different person in the office. But I think going forward, statuses look a little bit more like a hybrid of like, what does the agent do and what does the human do? And it could end in a reshuffling of what those statuses are, or maybe like exploding some of those statuses out to be like, well, what does prep really mean? It's actually these 4 things. Things. Thing 1 and Thing 3, an agent can do. Thing 2 and Thing 4, a human's still gonna do. And then it still goes to the normal human review process. This is an example, I think, of where AI has already outrun our capability to adopt to what it can already do. And software companies are struggling to build a useful version of this for us because the way that every accounting firm does it is so different from firm to firm. But absolutely a problem worth working on because the more you can align on that stuff and lock that stuff down, you will get way more mileage out of the AI agents that we already have. What a wild time, man, to be in accounting, to be in anything, any sort of knowledge work. And I appreciate you joining in today on our wild time. Got any questions, any stuff you want to discuss? Pop that stuff down in the comments. As always, I appreciate you being here and I'll catch you in the next one.