605 6 Steps To Workflow Your Way Into A Better Accounting Firm [Let’s get more work out the door]

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. We all want to workflow our way into a better accounting firm, right? Wouldn't that be nice? We just pick up an efficiency there, pick up an efficiency here. All of a sudden everybody's got less to do and it's super chill. We all want that, right? Lock the door. Okay, come on out. Okay, listen, this is an intervention. We've all come today because we think that you need some help. We're going to talk about the C word, not that C word, capacity, because most firms have capacity constraints that are absolutely destroying your workflows, our ability to work efficiently, and we are burning out our our staff, angering our spouses, and leading the children to think, is the landscaper Papa? Because at least I see him once a week. Also, today we are playing This or That. It is peak tech selection season. We're going to go through a whole bunch of apps, put them side by side, help you decide whether App A or App B is the right pick for you. Got a whole bunch of this or that questions from listeners. You ready for some fun, friends? Buckle up. Seatbelts on. Okay, let's go. My firm's on fire. I'm all burned out. Clients are calling. I'm pulling my hair out. Welcome to the Dirty Dozen. Uh-oh. Tremendous feedback we've gotten so far on that Dirty Dozen intro. If you are listening to the audio-only version, you are missing out on a line dancing AI Jason. And if you're new here, I'm sorry that you just had to watch that. Welcome to the Jason on Firms podcast, where we talk about accounting firm stuff because my wife, she doesn't want to hear about it. She frankly couldn't care less. So I've got a podcast and we are midway through the series we call the Dirty Dozen. We put this together based on the submissions of over 1,000 accountants that came out to in-person events that I hosted last year. And I asked them, what are the biggest things you're working on in your firm, the biggest pains? And it basically boiled down to 12 things that were the, the biggest common trends among accounting firm. Did I say accounting firm? Accounting firms. In this episode, we've bundled up a whole bunch of different capacity-related issues to unpack them one by one because they have solutions. Capacity constraints create humongous workflow limitations inside of your firm. It is a very hard thing to keep out ahead of, and if you get it wrong, you run the risk of ticking off a whole bunch of clients. I know this all too well because I've done it myself, and so many firms right now are living the same versions of this. You can have capacity constraints, but it can happen due to a whole bunch of different reasons. Today I want to round up the most common versions of this that I see and the, the quickest, most actionable tips to get back on top of this and ensure you don't end up in the same spot again. Basically got 6 versions of this that I've identified. I suspect a few of them are going to resonate for you, and I want to give you some practical advice here. So number 1, let's talk about simply the visibility problem. The fact that you may not even know what your capacity is. You might just be guessing. The folks who spoke to this specifically that came to this event, here's how they describe this. This is what it sounds like. Capacity planning, really struggling with understanding my team's bandwidth and if I should be looking to hire or get more efficient through process improvement. I do a poor job of time tracking currently, so estimating my bandwidth and capacity ahead of what's expected is a really daunting thing for me. And gang, this gets worse with every new service that you offer and every additional person that you hire. Now let's just like zoom out and, and put that business coach hat on. Imagine you don't run an accounting firm. Oh, oh, just take a minute. Oh, imagine you're not at an accounting firm, but you're a consultant that can sit down with you and look at your business objectively. Capacity. The measuring of capacity. Honestly, gang, it's actually not really that hard of a thing to do. I would argue we just don't take the time to do it and we don't afford our business the management resources that are required to follow through on tracking that capacity. You may have worked at a firm that had a sort of project manager, like back in the day. This was a person that ran around the office with a little clipboard, said, how's this one coming? How's that one coming? And they go down the list to make sure that all the projects are on track. But to roll something like this out inside of your firm, it feels like pure waste, right? Like there's so many forms of quote unquote management where you're like, well, if only this worked. How it was supposed to, and if people would pay attention to their projects in the practice management system and update this field and that field, then we wouldn't need any of this. The sad truth is most processes take more management than we would like them to, and the lack of visibility into even knowing where our capacity is, it usually simply stems from, one, has anybody actually sat down and mathed it out? And two, is anybody following up on this, like keeping an eye on it, seeing are we on track, are we falling further behind? Both of those things take time. And as with all good things, to do something well just takes more time and money than you think it will. So let's not make this out to really be any harder than it is. To actually have visibility into this is simply a matter of doing the work and then putting somebody in charge of the ongoing maintenance of the capacity plan. And for sure, there are tech solutions that will do a version of this, but I actually think it's, it's kind of hard to go to a practice management system if you've never done capacity planning before and be like, okay, software wizards, tell me if I have capacity. The way into this that makes way more sense to me is to literally math this out in Excel and, and kind of have a process for how you manage this, get to a version that actually works, and then see if you can map that into your software. That is the only way I've been able to figure out how to do this myself. Now there are two schools of thought on capacity management. One, that you should be measuring inputs, that is time, and that's ultimately how we plan our capacity. The second is that we should be measuring output. And this is usually done based on production. There are pros and cons to each approach, the time approach and the production approach. The cons to the time approach is the very simple fact that inputs don't equal outputs. Time is not a standardized unit of measurement. If you're trying to make that association to like money or like work that went out the door that we can bill for, hence you start layering in other things like realization percentage and all that. It also can sometimes fail to reward the folks who are efficient. You will have people who are twice as efficient as other members of your team, but if their contribution is measured based on number of hours they sat in the chair and did this work, that's not a very good yardstick. Now, the production yardstick also has its own set of kind of pros and cons because production is ultimately based on the price of the work. Oftentimes the people do the work— doing the work don't have control over how that project was priced. Maybe it's an underpriced project. Maybe it's this sweetheart project. And when that one gets plopped on your desk, you're like, sweet, I can just cruise because this project's like twice as profitable as the others that we have. Neither the time approach or the production approach are perfect. If I had to pick one, I lean more towards the production approach because ultimately that's how the company makes money, not on like input hours, but on output dollars. And if there's a project that is, for example, underpriced, I want somebody raising their hand and being like, hey, this sucks. This is way too much work for what we're going to charge. Can somebody do something about this? Rather than what happens when time is the yardstick everyone's sort of measured by and the project gets to the end and the partner goes to bill it and they're like, how in the world am I going to get all this time? So visibility into capacity, it's simply a matter of like landing on a metric, a way that we're going to measure it, knowing that no way of measuring it is going to be perfect. How am I saying measure? Am I going to get made fun of? For how I'm saying major again. How do you say major? Measure? Got smoked in the comments last time I said that word, I feel like. Okay, on to capacity problem number 2 here, the busy season crush. And even if you are not a tax firm, you have a version of this. Every single accounting firm does, be it January, February, be it March, April, be it Canadians at the end of May. Here's what this sounds like from folks in the wild. I have a tremendous backlog of work since last busy season that I'm trying to get through now by the end of the year, but it doesn't leave any time for planning/ implementing changes, let alone getting a break. Another person: Heading into tax season prepared and strategically rolling out new services is what we're trying to prioritize, but are struggling to do so without overloading ourselves. The workload requirements of almost every accounting firm are a roller coaster throughout the year, and you end up in this situation where kind of the whole goal of the business is to, to flatten the proverbial curve. Basically, any minute you can spend in your slowest time, you would happily trade for a minute in your busy time. In fact, you could spend 10 minutes in your slow time and that would still be a worthwhile tradeoff if it reduced 1 minute in your busiest time. Because most accounting firms, you're not staffed by a bunch of part-time seasonal people. Wouldn't that be nice? I mean, seasonal employees that are good are like kind of the dream employee that you could pull into an accounting firm. A few common traps here. We have to acknowledge that some clients will make our existing constraints worse while other clients will not. In US tax, I mean, the easy example is like simple 1040 work where it's very hard to justify an extension. That just makes your constraint worse. And oftentimes those small projects are taking up space that could be filled in by better, more premium projects. So be real about like the value of a client to you is very much dependent upon when you have to do their work. If you've got downtime and there's a new client coming in the door that you can serve during your downtime, that is a vastly more profitable project to the client, especially if you're dealing with fixed labor costs and struggling to keep the team busy that time of the year. This is kind of the biggest argument for firms going hard on bookkeeping and that monthly cadence, which is less cyclical, at least on an annual basis, than a tax-heavy business. There are situations where we have to dig into the legitimacy of the constraint, particularly in the US when it comes to tax filing. There is still way too much pressure put on that first part of the year and arbitrarily trying to get work out the door by April. What I would always tell my clients is there's almost never a benefit to filing earlier, but there is very often a benefit to filing later. We can defer certain decisions until we're further into the next year. We know more about what the next year looks like. If there isn't a benefit to filing earlier, why are we not waiting as long as possible to file? And for sure, you've got the OCD clients who are like, no, I need to get that stuff out the door. And honestly, a lot of accountants are that way where they're like, ah, ugh, I don't care if it's perfectly fine if we don't file until September or October, but I just want to have it done. To be clear, you can have it done. Doesn't mean you push the button though until later in the year. But that being said, like, dig into like, does this work really need to happen right now? Another really hard thing here is a lot of firms, we're still giving complete control over the timing of the project to the client. We are kind of the order takers. Maybe that's all we had modeled to us when we worked in other people's firms. And now we are just happy to do their work when the client brings it in the door. But we got to be realistic. Think about the fact that if we don't have control over when they bring us the work, then we ultimately don't have control over how quickly we can deliver it. Because if everybody makes a run on the bank on the same day— I mean, the analogy I always come back to is if it took you until October 15th to get all your tax returns out the door this year, and every single client brings you their tax return on February 1st next year, it's still going to take you until October 15th next year to get all the work out. Maybe not. Maybe that's an exaggeration. But you know what I mean? If a whole bunch of people bring you their stuff at the same time, you can't still get that work out the door in 2 weeks, in 3 weeks, whatever the normal expected sort of turnaround time is. The same thing applies for bookkeeping businesses when everybody wants their month-end close done by the 8th of the month, right? The fact that it takes you until the 8th of the month to get one out the door doesn't mean that everybody can come in at that same date and go out just as quickly. And so getting proactive about, hey, here's the timeframe when you're going to bring me my stuff and here's the timeframe when I'm going to deliver your stuff, has tremendous benefits to the cyclicality of the business and gives you much greater control over scheduling the work throughout the year or throughout the month. But we have no way of doing that if we sit back and we just let people bring us their stuff with the expectation that like, yeah, we'll get it done in a couple of weeks' time, right? This is something that a lot of firms, they just don't feel like they have this level of agency. They don't feel like they can tell the clients that and hold them accountable to that. But then you talk to another accounting firm and they're like, oh yeah, this is all we've ever done. Like, what? There's another way to do it? It's one of those things where the normal is just very different for different accounting firms. Capacity issue number 3: outselling your capacity. That is selling work faster than you can deliver it. Basically, you commit to the work and then you're like, oh crap, now we got to figure out how to deliver on all this work. And this ought to go without saying, but the fix here is pretty simple. Sell the capacity you have today, not the capacity that you hope you have next year or next quarter. Now, I will say the one exception I would make here is if you have a willingness to let clients go, then I think you can get away with this. If you are letting in more premium clients than you are then cutting, that is a good cycle to phase in premium clients, to phase out less premium clients. But let's be real, that's not what most of us do. We let that next client in and we're like, Ooh, we got to hire quick. And now everything gets super high stakes because we don't have a way to get that work out the door. Right. Issue number 4. Let's talk about how sustainable 100% capacity actually is, because if you burn out at 100% capacity, we need to rethink what 100% should be. A few folks have spoke to this in the wild. They're struggling to organize the firm in a way that helps everyone manage the workload while not simultaneously getting burnt out. I'm taking on too much as the owner. I'm training my staff to help with my own limited time and always feel underwater. I'm completely I know I need to hire, but I'm losing my mind at the same time. Oftentimes we can get into this like buckle-down mode and kind of do these temporary all-out like overtime work bursts. But before you know it, that stuff becomes the norm and you end up conditioning yourself and the team and even, even the team back home to expect like, okay, this is, this is life now. This is particularly problematic for owners who see themselves as free labor. Like, oh, I don't have to hire another person if I just work a little bit harder, if I just get one more project done. Let me tell you from experience, that does have a cost. And before you know it, now all these clients are like your own little baby birds that will only eat out of your mouth and not out of anybody else's. That was disgusting. I'm sorry. Now, nightmare scenario, your overworked staff gets stuck with too much work and then they leave because they're overworked. And now the entire problem has gotten worse. I know firms who have had this cascading thermal runaway meltdown sort of thing and had 10 to 20 people leave at a given time because an important person leaves and the next person's like, well, I don't want to do their stuff. They leave. Next person's like, oh, I don't want to do both of their stuff. I know, I know. It's terrifying. Gives me heart palpitations still thinking about it. And I'm sure you are now uncomfortable. Now, the solution here, this whole idea of needing to be at 100%, but 100% isn't sustainable. We got to get back to fundamentals. Here. So the fundamentals being pricing, being letting go of legacy clients, spending more effort on curating that client list and figuring out how can I find the next client who will pay me 30% more because that's a twice as profitable project. This solves everything. And so if you have to be running at the ragged edge to get by, the fault— and this is, this is, this is the tough love here— the fault is not that of your teams, not that of the systems or the software that didn't deliver for you. It's that we don't have work that is paying us enough to be able to run this shop at a more sustainable level. And the hard thing is the inputs that fix those problems are completely different than the inputs that we often focus on. Like all the things people are calling out here, I need better workflow, I need to hire. That doesn't solve a business where you're not getting paid enough to be able to do that work sustainably. Like we talk about a lot on this podcast, how close you are to a wildly different accounting firm. If you're running at a 40% margin and someone's paying you $100 to do some work, if you can find somebody who will pay you $140 to do the same work, that project is twice as profitable. It's not 40% more profitable. It is 100% more profitable. Again, this assumes a 40% margin firm, and it doesn't take many of those projects that are twice as profitable to change your life. You want to talk about a solution to capacity constraints? There it is right there. If you're at 100%, you're like, ooh, that would be nice. Like, I'm basically then at 50% if that's all I'm doing. Spoiler alert: if you actually do that, you won't end up at 50%. You'll be at 50% for like a day and then you'll be at like 60% and then 70%. You're like, oh, there's all this other stuff I probably should have been doing before that now I am doing. Oh, I'm calling my clients back. But the solution, it is the fundamentals. It's what are the inputs that will ensure I attract a more premium customer? Not how do I fiddle with my practice management system a little more to just squeeze a little out of it? Those distractions can oftentimes keep us from getting back to the important thing, which is the client list. An accounting firm is only ever as good as its client list. 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. Oh, 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 with Cloud Accountant 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 one of this episode's sponsors, Soraban. 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 Swordman. We've actually done some demos of them on my YouTube channel. You can even see how it works. Definitely worth checking out. More information down in the show notes. Capacity headache number 5. I'm calling this out because it just came up so many times. The should I hire Or should I work on my workflow? Like, stuck point. People end up paralyzed there and they don't know which to do, so they do neither, or they do both, but they do them poorly. This sounds like capacity planning. Really struggling right now with understanding my team's bandwidth and if I should look to hire or find more efficiency through process improvement. I'm trying to increase my capacity via increased efficiency with workflow automation. They actually said automization, which I love. I could— that's something I could get behind saying more. Trying to use AI to be more efficient. We need to decide what to do about a team. Will we hire, outsource, remain just a small team? And I should call out the reminder again, don't take on work that you don't have the capacity for yet. That's kind of a recipe for disaster unless you've accepted that if we take that next project in, these are the projects that are going to leave. That, after all, is the goal. How do I bring in one more twice as profitable project and cut two legacy projects so we're making the same money in half the time? That is running an accounting firm in 20 seconds. Do that on repeat and buddy, it's a, it's a pretty good gig. Maybe a bit of a simplification, but you know what I mean? If you find yourself at this crossroads of do I go higher or do I just need better tech or better workflow? I think you can separate those two issues from each other because the question of how big of a team do I want, that should be a question that kind of stands on its own. There's a lot of people that want to have no team. There's a lot of people that want to build a big team. I think your North Star on whether I should make that next hire or not should more be led by ultimately what is the business that we're trying to build here than do we need that next person? Like, obviously if you're gonna add to the team, you wanna make sure that you got the work to pay for that team member. But if you don't want a bigger business, we shouldn't be considering hiring another person just because we have that work, which is the trap that most of us fall into. We start taking any work that we will take to kind of get the thing off the ground, but then we just keep saying yes and keep saying yes and keep saying yes. And every time we hit the capacity, we're like, make another hire, make another hire. You're hiring for the work that your staff does, but you never hire for the work that you do. And before you know it, you've got all these clients to manage, all of these humans to manage, and you're like, how do I dig myself out from this? That sound familiar? Why are you crying? This is just a podcast. Decide what you want your team to be. Big team, little team. Let that be the North Star. And then the lever that we pull to control, like, am I overcapacity, am I undercapacity? That ought to be how many clients we are letting stay on the bus. This is only hard if we refuse to fire clients. And we can't do that because there's never a world where your growth doesn't lead to some clients no longer being a fit for you, where your ability to better frame your services and command more premium prices because you're solving more painful problems. All that stuff leads to clients coming to you with an entirely different pricing expectation, and it makes the projects you used to do honestly just not as juicy as the new stuff. And I don't want to make it sound like that's not a hard thing to navigate, but that is the solution. Treat hiring volume as one thing. What sort of team are we trying to build here? But treat capacity as a different thing. Capacity needs to, like, live in service of the team you're trying to build for sure. But hiring to cover that next client ought to be secondary to the conversation of should we be letting some clients go now that we brought that new client in? Last consideration here, uh, number 6. This is maybe the riskiest thing when it comes to capacity management is getting into the responsiveness death spiral. Before you know it, your capacity problem has become your client's problem because they can't get a hold of you. And you end up in this situation where people are like asking for all these status checks and you're like, brother, you haven't heard from me because I don't have it done yet. I'm overwhelmed. Leave me alone. And then they all just start asking like, hey, you done yet? You done yet? And it just makes the problem worse. And nothing is worse for your business than a client feeling like they've been forgotten. Or not feeling heard. That is the worst thing for someone in a service business. I always talk about the, the no update update. Even if you don't have anything to tell a client, if they're expecting to hear from you, send them an update that says, hey, want to know, we haven't forgotten about you. We're still working on it. Don't really have any updates right now, but I'll get back to you X, another date, a week down the road. They need to know when they're going to hear from you next. But what we more often do is we're like, okay, got your stuff. We'll work on it. There's zero expectation. And then we end up annoyed when they can't like somehow mind read and figure out like, oh, I'm busy. It's going to take a while. You may have had those clients where they're like, they will follow up like 2 days later and be like, is it done yet? And you're like, do you know what I do here? I'll talk to you in a month. Unless we have that conversation, there's no way our expectations are going to be in alignment. As opposed to, hey, we got your stuff in. You're going to hear from me next on this date. Imagine being that on top of it. Like that is helping your clients feel heard and understood and keeping them in the loop. I much prefer that even to like, you know, the pizza tracker. Like, if you want to see the status, log into the portal and you'll see it right here. For what we're trying to build, which is like more human firms, not really productized firms, I much prefer communicating with them the expectation of timeline and then just like following up and making sure that they know we are working our little buns off to try to get this thing done. This is the biggest risk of not properly managing capacity. Is it? I would say this is the second biggest risk. The biggest risk is your team bailing on you. Because it is harder, at least in this day and age, to build a really good team than it is to build a really good client list. Is that a hot take? That was definitely my experience. Now, there are ways that you can sort of like create human connection in a more efficient way. One of the ways I've shared that we did this in my team was anytime we were delivering work to a client, if we weren't hopping on a live call, we had to send them a video delivery. And this was a video that was usually about 3 minutes in length. Of a human person face on camera walking through their tax return, walking through the financial statements. You wouldn't believe how much people loved these dumb, simple little videos. They're like, wow, you went through all this effort for me? And it's like, no, it's not hard to record a 3-minute Loom. But they raved about this stuff and they love getting to see that person's face. Like there is something about the human connection of that where that is vastly better than sending an email with a file attachment. Particularly with everything that's going on with AI right now, like the whole relational aspect of our business, we need to be much more mindful of like, do we have the capacity to have conversations with people and maintain that connection? It like, if you think about what you thought accounting was and we do, we came into this with sort of different expectations. A lot of folks came in just for the technical. They want to be the back of house people. They enjoyed almost the OCD nature of accounting where there's rules and everything ought to be just so. But for a lot of folks that got into accounting firms because they love, like, supporting entrepreneurs and having those conversations, would you rather be the accountant that remembers a kid's birthday, like a client's kid's birthday, the one who, like, is excited to answer the phone when a client calls because you enjoy talking to them? Like, would you rather be that accountant that kind of dazzles them with the level of connection that you have? Or would you rather be the accountant that's impossible to get a hold of where the client's like emailing like, hey, where are we at with this? Where are we at with this? Like, That is code for they feel like they've been forgotten. I think we all aspire to be like the accountant, almost tradesperson that is on top of things, that is answering the phone, that is, that is being the hero. But you can only do that for so many, so many clients. And there's this natural, like, progression of a firm where we just keep saying yes and it keeps compressing and compressing the clients that we have to where there's only so much time we can serve them all. And the thing that ought to be the most important thing, the relationship building, the interactions with the client becomes this annoyance. And it's the last thing you want to do because you're overcapacity, right? You get overcapacity. That's the first thing that goes out the window, like taking time. And as my wife tells me, that is the most important thing. Would you chill the heck out and just spend some— I thought I heard her coming in. That wasn't— never mind. Maybe you've got kids like I do. If you are wired the way that I am, sitting there and being like, hmm, This is quality time. We're connecting right now as you're like gluing a macaroni noodle to it. I don't know, the top of a Hot Wheel. And they are just, you know, you're watching them do it and nobody tells you just how slow kids are. They're so slow. It takes them so long to do anything. I'm like, buddy, you put pants on every single day. It's, it's almost been 5 minutes. But isn't that like, I don't know, isn't that kind of how you be? Successful parents, you get to a place in life where you can spend, like you have the time to spend with them. That is, that is the hard thing is everything in life is pulling at the limited hours that you have in the day. But it is an argument for getting back to the fundamentals. How can I get to a place where I have to help fewer people who value me most, who are happy to pay for it so that I can then deliver the type of service to them that I can be proud of? So few of us can say with a straight face that we are proud of the level of service that we are providing right now, but we We can't get there until we double down on the people that we are best for, move along everything else as hard as that is, and then give those clients your all. Like actually be able to pour everything that you got into those clients, have the time, spend the time with them. Doesn't that just sound fun? Like that's why we got— most of us got into this to begin with, to be able to have that time. Somehow along the way and like squeezing out realization and trying to pack more projects in, we totally lost touch of this. And gang, in an age of AI, that is so, so dangerous when the doing of the work is becoming trivial and it is the connection in our advice and their willingness to come to us with that question that is going to keep us with our firm long term. I think it all stems from it being hard to say no. You think that next opportunity that comes in might be the last one. And so surely we can't turn that away. But for one reason or another, those people keep coming in the door and before you know it, Oh, we got to hire again. It's hard. I had a really hard time with this in my firm. Hiring in many ways are like using pharmaceuticals to like fix the symptom. Like, are we fixing the underlying issue? Are we even acknowledging the underlying issue, which is usually underpricing, not firing clients? Or are we just medicating? Like we just, we whack-a-mole all these different issues. Like, tell me how to fix employee retention. Okay, let me get out my MBA. Are we paying them very well? Are we working them too hard? Do we have the flexibility to treat them well? Because the work that we're actually doing can like pay the bills and afford for all that, right? Very hard. Easier said than done. But enough of the woo stuff. Enough line dancing. Let's talk tech because it is that time of year, buddy. Roll the transition. Anybody remember the website Hot or Not? It came around when I was in high school, and it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It would show you a picture of a person, and there were two big buttons. One said hot, one said not. You'd click a button, and before you knew it, the next person's there. I think I was maybe 16 years old when I was at a friend's house and he showed me this website. And as I describe this, this may be sounding a little more seedy than it actually was, because people could like upload pictures and it's somebody like upload a picture of their like uncle. And so it's kind of funny what we're doing today. It's basically accounting firm tech hot or not. On my newsletter recently— are you on my newsletter? Because 16,000 accountants are. Jasononfirms.com/newsletter. Get on it if you're not. It is a, a weekly digest from my desk to yours of what I think the most important stuff is, the highlights of what I see going on in the industry and kind of the best of my content, the stuff I think you need to plug into. But I put out the call. Everybody's kind of like picking new tech right now, but you end up stuck between a couple of apps. Shoot me an email, this or that. Let me break it down for you. And we got 11 of those to speedrun through here today. One way or another, you're going to learn about like who these tools are best for and who they're not great for, because your sales rep, they're always going to tell you that they're great, right? What I'm more interested in and what I push them on is specifically, okay, who are you great for? Because no tool can be great for everybody. First up, this is a big one. Two leaders in my practice management recommendations, Financial Sense versus TaxDome. This one I think has a pretty simple answer. Does your firm identify as being a tax-first firm or a bookkeeping-first firm? If you're a tax firm that's doing, say, a high volume of 1040 work, Financial Sense not going to be great for that. On the other hand, if you are a bookkeeping firm and that is your primary focus, even if you do a little bit of tax, Financial Sense got more horsepower when it comes to month-end close stuff, bookkeeping-specific workflows, than TaxDome does. Now, in all of these this or that examples, each company in most cases will tell you, oh no, we do that stuff too. And there's so many examples of like follow-on features where one company will ship a thing and another company will be like, we got that now too. But as you know, if you've ever gone down that road, the level of depth in those products is not always going to be the same. So my recommendations come from what I talk with people about, like where they're having success in the wild. And so on Financial Cents versus TaxDome, if you are bookkeeping first, go Financial Cents. Not a big deal if you're doing some tax, that'll still be fine. But if you are tax first, go TaxDome. Next up, someone trying to decide between starting their firm with either a practice management app or a bookkeeping app. They said they're starting from scratch, want to work with SMBs between $1 and $10 million in annual revenue and ultimately upsell them into CFO work. Am I looking for a practice management app or a bookkeeping app or even like an FP&A tool, like a dashboard builder? Thank you for the question. FP&A tool, I'm historically, I'm not a huge fan of those because it is pretty hard to beat the almighty spreadsheet. And the only scenario where I go and look at FP&A tools and reporting tools is if I've got a nailed down, like structured way of presenting things on spreadsheets that I'm not tinkering with, then maybe a reporting tool to do a fancier version of that may make sense. Otherwise, keep it in the sheets. Keep it in the sheets, baby. There's, there's a lot of good spreadsheet connectors out there as well that will automatically sync data from the accounting ledger to the spreadsheet. But the real question here, practice management app versus bookkeeping management, like month-end close automation. For a solo firm, for a small firm, a month-end close automation app will save you more time than a practice management app. Because when it's just you, every— you got everything up in your own noodle, like you're tracking that all in your head. Now that breaks down as you start to build a team, but practice management apps won't save you time on a month-end close in the same way that a month-end close automation solution will. Leading month-end close automation solution right now is pretty clearly Double. On the practice management system side, my leaders right now are TaxDome, Financial Sense, Carbon, and Canopy. That being said, you do have ClientHub, which right now is kind of a hybrid between a practice management system and a month-end close automation solution. They kind of sit in the middle. But if you just had to pick one category to, like, start your bookkeeping firm with, I would 100% start with a month-end close automation solution, not a practice management system. 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, it impacts Inventory you're going after, like savings. The details matter. You miss a, you miss a zero or a comma here or there. Oh my, oh my, oh my gosh, that's a big deal on bill pay, right? We are getting wildly good new AI models seemingly by the week right now. And honestly, Maker's Hub are the folks that I trust to like put this work. Maker's Hub have been like arguably making the best use of AI models over the last 3 years to solve a very, very specific specific problem. The problem of bill pay. 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 MakersHub. A great example of AI done well. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. Hey, real quick, month-end close automation software. It has kind of completely changed what doing bookkeeping work looks like the last few 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. Up next, TaxGPT or ChatGPT? I would say depends on the job that you want to use that tool for. TaxGPT started as a tax research tool, and if you're primarily thinking tax research, I would actually probably send you in the direction of BlueJay. BlueJay has emerged, I think, pretty clearly right now as the tax research leader. But TaxGPT is now getting more into like end-to-end tax automation workflow. But that's still very, very early for them. And when you look at tax workflow, there are other players that have been in the game working on that for years. The really tricky thing with buying tax automation software right now is there's a number of people that are now saying they do this Agentic end-to-end thing, and that's a very, very hard thing to build. Basically, the tax prep process right now breaks down into intake, into workpaper preparation, to input into the tax software, to review, then to delivery. These are all distinct parts of the tax process that can be automated. Some tools are good at some parts of this. Some tools are good at others, but not all parts of the process will yield for you the same time savings. Famously, importing things into US tax software is incredibly difficult. Companies have struggled to do this for years, but I would argue right now, if there's one part of that tax workflow process where there's the biggest time savings opportunity, it is actually on tax intake. I ran a firm where we did 1,800 1040s a year, individual tax returns. And it meant chasing down people, hounding people for docs across 1,800 tax returns. Any one of them had 10 to 80 details that we had to track down. And so somebody coming to market— and if you want an example of this, Juno, I would say Juno came to market with a tool that was trying to touch every part of the process from intake to extraction from documents to workpapers to a degree to review to pushing the data into the tax software. That's a really, really hard thing to build as opposed to say Stanford Tax came in just working on the tax intake part and they crushed that and they've grown really quickly. Stanford is one of my leaders in that category. And so if you're talking with a tax vendor, they need to be able to have the language to say what part of the process specifically are they automating right now? I don't think there's a company that really can make a credible argument that they've automated it end to end. Thus, that makes them the platform to use. Unfortunately, in practice, it is not that simple. Maybe that changes one day. Maybe all the companies companies that are working on the end-to-end thing will be the leaders down the road. But right now I see firms like getting the most time savings from the platforms that are specifically solving one part of the tax workflow really, really well. And I still think intake is the part of the process that will save a firm the most time. So to bring it back to the question, TaxGPT or ChatGPT depends what you're trying to automate, but the answer might be neither. And that's not a dig at TaxGPT as much as My opinion right now is you find the part of the tax workflow where you will yield the greatest savings and pick the best tool for that. And that hasn't really been TaxGPT's approach to date. They're kind of trying to do the end-to-end thing. Next question: Do you roll a niche general ledger like an industry-specific accounting platform, or do you keep it simple and keep your clients on QuickBooks? Here's the long version of that. I'm looking to focus on the construction niche. I see a lot of folks talking about builder trends. Do you have any experience with it? Would you recommend a general ledger that also supports estimating, job costing, other construction-specific stuff? Thanks for your help. So accountants usually approach this debate through the lens of what is better for an accountant. Is QuickBooks better for the accountant or is the industry ledger better for the accountant? I think that completely misses the point. The opportunity here is to become rare because how many people, how many accountants are comfortable with Buildertrend? Ultimately to protect the business as a whole. I want to be different than the guy across the street. And if I can achieve that, then I can command more premium prices. I can speak the client's language in a more direct, more nuanced way, as opposed to being just yet another accountant that uses QuickBooks. So when I see this question, I don't think which is better, A or B. To be clear, like the niche, the vertical ledger needs to be good enough for me to still do my job. But this is an opportunity. In fact, at one point in my firm, we somehow got in with this franchise of like retail flooring stores and there was this unbelievably archaic platform that they all use and they all swore by. And it was such a nightmare to use. It was a terrible accounting platform, but it did a whole bunch of other jobs for them, including, you know, point of sale and inventory management and all that. But we figured it out. We became one of the only firms in the country that was an expert in this platform, and that made us us super sought after. It let us charge really premium rates for using this god-awful platform. And isn't that what we're all trying to find? Like, that's a gift when you can stumble into that thing. And if you can layer into it the opportunity where that software company has a big ol' marketing budget that they need to burn on something, and it could potentially be spent on putting you on blast, on you helping them with thought leadership, you going and speaking at a conference for being able to partner with the software companies that have budgets that can get you in front of more folks. Oh my gosh, that's an amazing way to build an accounting firm. So I would say 9 times out of 10, my answer here is going to be Niche Ledger over QuickBooks because it's a great opportunity to find greater specificity in the folks that you're serving. Next up, MakersHub versus Ramp. MakersHub is an accounts payable platform. Ramp is a really a— they say a spend management platform that started with like card management. But then they rolled out a totally free bill pay solution. Here's my take here, and I should say I've done sponsorships with both of these brands in the past. They don't ultimately impact how I recommend what tools people should use. And so let me start by telling you why you would need neither— neither MakerSub nor Ramp. The first step is you should look at the banking and be like, is there a problem here that's not solved by the banking platform that they use? Because if people are using modern banks now, like they actually come with a lot of pretty cool features, like pretty decent bill pay, pretty decent card management app. The unfortunate reality is most companies are not on a cool modern bank. And so the fallback then becomes first Ramp. Ramp is a tremendous card management platform. It does so many things really, really well. It's kind of like the perfect product, and especially for accounting nerds, it just does so many amazingly helpful things. Like, I mean, it basically unlocks the ability for everybody in the team to have their own card and their own spend limits and all that. But it makes it simple to do receipt capture at the time of transaction. So anybody in the company that has a card, when they buy something, they have to provide that documentation based on thresholds that you set up. Maybe there's a dollar limitation. Maybe the big boss doesn't have to do the same thing that everybody else does. But there's amazing features in there, like if they go 2 weeks without providing the documentation that they need to, the card gets shut off like that. The platform just does that. They've got a really cool AI agent that will apply the company policy to expense reimbursements. So like if somebody sends in an expense reimbursement to Ramp, you can upload your company policy doc to the platform and it will literally pull up the relevant section in the policy doc, show it to the user, and tell them whether that thing is inbound or not. I love the idea of tech being the jerk, being the one that has to say no, or the one that hounds the person for the information rather than me having to do it. That is what Ramp is really, really good at. It solves a problem that I wish didn't exist in the first place, and that is that banks are incredibly archaic and don't come with any of these features. But Ramp is step 2. Step 1 is the bank. Does the bank have the stuff that I need, be it bill pay, be it card management? That's step 1. If it doesn't, I fall back to Ramp. Step 3, I fall back to Maker's Hub if my bill pay needs are more complicated than the free bill pay on Ramp will handle. And the free bill pay on Ramp is very good. It is genuinely free. Like they used to require underwriting in the same way that you had to with the card management stuff. Now you literally don't even have to have underwriting on the company to get that free bill pay product, but it only goes so far. And where Maker's Hub has set up camp is with the really, really ugly detailed invoices that have all sorts of different tracking that's required. Like they're getting into international stuff now. They're doing foreign exchange. They've got an insanely deep integration with not only QuickBooks and Xero, but like more mid-market tools. And all of it is done with like really good AI and high-quality extraction of all of the details on these bills. But at the same time, you would only go to a makers hub when you're trying to do it, say, in Ramp, and you're like, ah, dang, it doesn't do this thing or that thing that I need. That's when you fall back to the more complicated, more expensive solution. And from everything that I've heard and, uh, talking with folks that like do a lot of construction stuff, manufacturing, that sort of thing. Maker's Hub right now is the bar. Like there's kind of nothing that can touch it. But then if you go to the other end of the spectrum and you think about just how good free bill pay has gotten, my gosh, like free bill pay from Ramp is really, really good. So to the question of Maker's Hub versus Ramp, that's not the progression that I would actually use. I would start with the bank. If that's not good enough, then I probably go Ramp. That's still not good enough, then I go Maker's Hub. There's actually a lot of like escalation sequences like that that I think make sense. Where we always like ought to try to keep it as simple as possible. Next here, what is your recommendation on staffing offshore versus onshore, in-office versus onshore remote, and how do you make those different models work together? Let me, let me split that into a two-parter. Let's tackle in-office versus remote first. I love working in office with people. Maybe I'm just an old fart. Maybe it's because I sit in a room so, so alone and record podcasts every day now. I know, but from every day from like before I graduated college, pretty much until I sold my firm, I went into an office every single day. And I like, I enjoyed that. Like I enjoyed being shoulder to shoulder with those folks. It just comes with a bunch of trade-offs. Obviously hiring is much difficult because you only have, you only have the local hiring pool. And I know, I know that I said much difficult, don't worry about it. And so then on the remote side, like there's upsides where you can hire anybody in the world, arguably the globalization of work. I think like working, like running a remote team unlocks that, the notion that like, oh, they don't even need to be in the country. But I can tell you what is really hard to do is mix those two things. Having a team where some folks are remote and some folks are in office, that's really, really hard because the in-office people seem to forget about the remote people and the remote people are like their own tribe. The only way I got this to work in my firm is my in-office folks did the tax work. And then when I built a bookkeeping practice, a CAS practice, All those folks were remote, and that worked because they were both doing very different jobs. They were using different software, and there definitely was like a this team versus that team sort of energy. But to do both in-person and remote inside of the same team, folks doing the same work, that's a really, really hard thing to do. But either one can be done very successfully. So I'd say the right answer there is like, what is the company that you want to build? What feels more comfortable to you? There is not a right or wrong answer there. Onshore versus offshore. Offshore is absolutely a no-brainer if you run a distributed team, in my opinion, because they're literally just another member of the team. It frankly doesn't matter if they're in the Philippines or if they're, you know, across town. There are situations where you're required to disclose that, but that's a reason to disclose, not a reason to not do it. And we have to be really careful setting up Camp, not doing those things that we know other accounting firms are doing and recognizing like we're running a much higher cost shop by choice. Usually some sort of like patriotism or something like that. But there's absolutely responsible ways to do this, and it is increasingly becoming the norm. Now, if you run an in-office team, it is then a little bit harder to go offshore because you're having to figure out the remote thing for the first time as well. And that's a whole other skill set. Doesn't mean that it's not worth doing, but for the same reason that having an in-office team and then starting a remote, even onshore team is hard because those are such different things. For the same reason, having an in-office team and having an offshore remote team like that, that's hard. They're just very different skill sets. Hard to make those people feel like they're an integrated team. One risk with offshore teams is you create this environment where your offshore team feels like second-class citizens and that like if you're not careful, that can absolutely happen. It can kind of be reinforced as well by some of the folks that you hire almost subjugating themselves and being like, well, this is how it was the last time I worked with a Western company. So I come here, I'm not going to ask questions, I'm not going to stick my nose in. It's like you don't want to create a work environment like that in a remote team. This is why offshore is like so easy. Like they're literally just another member of the team. It's easier to make them feel included. If you have an in-office team, it is then harder when you have a remote team to not make those folks feel like second-class citizens. Even with an onshore remote team, I've experienced this. That being said, all models can, can work here. The one major risk is like offshore is a very real thing. And so if you choose not to go the offshore route, it intentionally makes it a bit of an uphill battle compared to what other firms are doing. 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, Missive. Missive, M-I-S-S-I-V-E. It is exactly what I needed. I, 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. 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 where I select 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 gonna 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. Next up, acquire firms or build a sales team? It seems we've escaped tech selection this or that. Given all the departures from the profession, is it better to grow by acquiring a firm or by building out a sales team? Let's take a closer look at all those firms that are owned by the people that are leaving the profession. And I think that you will find that they're not quite what they're cracked up to be. And this isn't the case with all firms. But if you got a 70-year-old dude who's been unwilling to change for the last 15 years, that is clocking out for the last time. Most of those firms are not worth the mountains of paper that their file cabinets contain. Changing an accounting firm is harder than most people expect when they come in and make an acquisition. And the hardest change of all to make is to take a paper firm— that is, a firm where all the staff are producing things on paper rather than in a computer— and transitioning that firm to being a digital firm. Incredibly hard for those accountants to learn how to do the same thing on a computer. Takes years to get to the same level of productivity. If you compare the, the really difficult lift that is making that transition to how easy it is to do organic acquisition of customers right now, that sort of firm, in my opinion, I'm not touching with a 10-foot pole. And the framing of this question was, with all the people departing the profession, most of those firms I have no interest in. The firms I'm increasingly interested in are the firms from really sharp, like, modern firm-running folk that are now beginning to sort of centralize around best practices and around common modern tech stacks where you can make a friend at an event that runs a very similar firm to you. That is an extremely interesting acquisition target in a way that a firm on a listing site is not. And I do think the accounting world is getting smaller, and I hope that me and the efforts of my team are playing some role in this, where hopefully I've enabled something for you where you have made some friendships and met some people who do this stuff as well. That is the most interesting form of M&A happening inside of the profession right now. That is vastly more interesting to me than PE. The fact that you now know somebody that does this stuff too, and one day they may be looking for a new plan, that sort of acquisition I'm super into. Otherwise, I would much sooner look at organic acquisition, build a sales team rather than buy the firm of, of some dude that's aging out of the profession. 3 more to go. Digits or Qik. So Digits or Qik, these are like the 2 sort of avocado toast, new, like cool AI-first accounting ledgers on the market. In my app recommendations, they are, I think, the 2 in the new crop of ledgers that are most likely to become a really big deal. If I had to pick one right now, it's a little bit of an unfair fight because Digits has been around quite a bit longer than Kick. For that reason, if you're going to throw a bunch of stuff onto one of these today and like everything stopped right now, I think Digits is probably a little bit more complete. That being said, the excitement around Kick is that they're doing some fundamentally different things. Like it doesn't matter how many companies your client has, you basically pay per client. So like client opens up another business that doesn't cost you any more money and all that client's businesses exist exist inside of a single workspace. And so there's actually an intelligent connection between these different businesses' ledgers in a way that we've never had from an accounting ledger before, because every single company is this distinct file and distinct subscription, right? So they're doing some really cool novel stuff like that that map nicely to how accounting firms serve, uh, clients. They've raised money from OpenAI. They are saying that we are accounting firm first from the beginning, and that's really, really exciting. So Digits, I think, is a little bit further down the road right now, but Kick kind of has its own set of interesting things that they're doing. Digits, the other day they announced that they're doing this, uh, oh, what did they call it? The idea is basically they think that they are past now 95% auto-classification of transactions, but they've basically done this pricing guarantee where if you have to touch more than 5% of the transactions in a company in a given month, it's free that month. Like you don't have to pay the subscription that month. I don't know what the fine print is on there. Like, is there a process to claim that? Does it do it automatically? I don't know what that actually looks like, but they are like putting their money where their mouth is, saying we have the best auto, auto classification engine out there. And people all have opinions about that. What I love about it is we're talking about an accounting ledger that is not QuickBooks or Xero, right? Isn't that the goal? Isn't that great news? To that point, next question is: Digits or Double? Which is a very different question because Double is not an accounting ledger. Double sits sits on top of your accounting ledgers and is like this sort of automation layer that lives above the ledger. But it's— Double's at the end of the day, Double's like a Band-Aid for all the stuff we don't like about QuickBooks and Xero and what makes it hard to do 100 month-end closes. But is it a Band-Aid for problems that like a better ledger like Digits has solved? And this is kind of the hard thing that people are, are stuck on right now. Is Double a solution to a problem that doesn't even need to exist that another accounting ledger can solve? Like, if we just have a good ledger, do you even need double this kind of like two-ply, one app above the other app sort of thing? I think the new crop of ledgers are making this argument to where it's like, well, like, we don't even have the problems that that solves for, so come and just use our tool and you only have to use one tool instead of two. I think in practice it comes down to your client base. So like Digits right now, like, it's good for cash basis stuff, but like not very complex things. In my firm, we were doing dental, which is very simple, all cash basis, like pretty much driven by the bank statement. And that is Digits' bread and butter right now. So similar to the conversation of like choosing a bill pay platform, starting with the bank, only going to Ramp if you need it, and then only going to Maker's Hub if you need it. My take here is you actually, you start with the ledger and then you only really layer in like a double if that's a thing that is still necessary, rather than starting with the complexity of using two apps. Straight out of the gate, and that is going to be very client list dependent. If you have very, very simple stuff, Digits is going to be really good. You have anything beyond that, you're going to need QuickBooks. But then like, Double is peanut butter to the QuickBooks jelly. So it kind of depends on your client base. Last one, with AI changing the profession and fewer young people entering accounting, who's actually going to come in and do the work as older accountants age out is a big question right now. Should we be betting on the youths or the olds? You also have a whole other angle to this right now of people saying, well, AI is going to make it so that we don't have to hire juniors, but we got to have somebody in the feeder, right? The reality is I think we're actually going to have a— AI will have a balancing effect of age and talent inside of accounting firms because you got all these old farts that I go and I'll give an AI talk to and they're like, when I say old farts, I mean people that are older than 25. I'll give an AI talk to them and they're like, this is all great, but I don't have time for this. I came to this half-day event and I'm going to have 300 emails when I get back. What am I going to play with Claude? And then you have the youths who are coming out of school and literally cannot operate in society without an AI assistant. Now, both of those ends of the spectrum are problematic in different ways, but is there a world where we can bring those, those two things together, right? I need some of the youths to come into the firm and let a little bit of that rub off on the old farts. Gosh, this has gotten graphic, but you know what I mean? So I actually think the way you modernize a young firm right now is, is like you have an integration of folks that are AI native with folks folks that have the experience and you hopefully get the best of both worlds. And to the question of like, how does all the work get done when the older accountants age out? I think there will be fewer accountants. I don't know why we're pretending that there won't be. In the age of AI, we will need fewer accountants. And the good news for us who are still in the profession, myself included, is there's just, there's way fewer accountants out there right now than we actually need. And so we have to be more capable. We have to spend less time on the doing more time on the conversations and the deciding what is worth doing. But there's such a vast shortage right now of, of what's needed versus what accounting talent is out there that hopefully AI solves that problem and we come out on the other side of this running a better version of an accounting firm. Like all the stuff that we were just talking about, we actually have the time and space to go deep with a smaller number of clients rather than so many people needing our help. We feel like we have to say yes to everybody and then we turn into this volume mill and stop answering the phone. Like, if AI can, can get us there, the combination of AI and Zoomers not thinking that accounting is cool, the combination of those things can get us to a place where we got a smaller number of accountants, but there's less work to do so we can go deeper with our clients. Like, that sounds pretty good to me. Is that a pipe dream? I don't know. Time will tell. But I'm not that worried about young folks coming into accounting because I have so many firms. We are like, I will take. Any warm body that wants to learn, bring them in because we need the help. How you doing? You need help? If you do, pop a comment down in the YouTube podcast comments. Shoot me a text at 1516-980-4968 as you listen to this. From my mouth to your ears, I am presenting onstage on my live workshop tour, having the time of my life, just plowing snacks and drinks into accountants. That wasn't the right word, but I want to see you there. We're coming to 20 cities. Go to JasonNonFirms.com/events. We're shaping up to have like 1,500 accountants at these things, which is amazing to come out and meet a whole bunch of local people that listen to the podcast that are either running a firm or a part of a firm to meet those local people. Amazing. Like, honestly, like the best thing that I think that I can enable for people if you're able to make some of those connections. So come out and hang in person. But I appreciate you lending me your ears today. We're gonna come back, we're gonna do this again in a few days, and I'll see you there. Okay, take care.