617 5 More AI Use Cases for Accounting Firms [Number three is incredible]

Today on the podcast, 5 more AI use cases that we've sourced from actual accounting firms that will just open your mind to what's possible right now. It's really exciting. But also today, we're looking at an accounting firm that was launched by a non-accountant that's found its way into a really interesting niche. I got the full financials. We're gonna look at how they're running things behind the scenes, and we're gonna dig into whether AI changes the economics of buying a legacy firm, how to build a file naming convention inside your accounting firm for the first time, how to partner with a business broker, to build your firm, gang. We're going to cover so much stuff today. Settle in, my friends. Let's get into it. How do you do, fellow accountants? My name is Jason Staats. Welcome to the Jason on Firms podcast, where we talk accounting firm maxing. Whether you run a firm, whether you work in a firm, by the end of the episode, you're gonna know a little more than you did before about how to run a calm, wicked profitable accounting firm, even in an An era when AI is coming to steal your lunch money. A privilege that I have as someone that helps and supports accounting firms is I can see the cool AI stuff that a lot of actual firms are doing in the wild, and I collect those things. I'm a collector of AI use cases because isn't that what we all want or we think we want? Can somebody actually tell me how accounting firms are using AI? Like, show me the actual stuff. Of course we all want to see that. In fact, in the next couple of weeks, I'm going to send out a list of like 200 AI use cases that I've sourced on this 20-city tour that we're in the middle of. If you're not on my newsletter yet, jasononfirms.com/newsletter. We're sending that out in a couple of weeks because that's what we think we want is more use cases. But you will get like 7 use cases into that list and be like, Boo, I need a nap. It's a lot. It's overwhelming. You end up with more questions than you started with. And so today I'm gonna show you 5 use cases, but I wanna dig into like, how do you actually put this in production? What would it look like to actually live with this aspect of your firm being automated? Because that's the goal, not to sit and have a conversation with an AI all day long, but to find a cool workflow and then like build it into the walls. It's now a thing that just happens. I don't need more people to talk to. I have 3 small children literally kicking on the door of my office as we speak. They're enough. Okay. My kids, my wife, my therapist. I draw the line there. Okay. First use case. We use AI to scan weekly checks for a church, then create a deposit that I can import into QBO. Now, several layers to this that make what is like a humble use case actually really interesting. One, we're scanning checks, that is handwriting, right? And this is something that OCR, ye olde OCR, could never do for us before. At this point, AI vision models are as good at reading handwriting as humans. And so this isn't just a, "Oh cool, it can read checks" thing. This is a, "Oh cool, it can read like any handwritten thing" at this point. So if you think of where this shows its, or where this comes up in the context of running a small business, I know a lot —like tradies—still do sort of the carbon paper stuff where they will handwrite things. Restaurants, oh my gosh, still a ton of handwritten stuff in restaurants. Consider, in the type of people that you serve, where does handwriting come up? Is there an automation opportunity there now that AI is really, really good at handwriting? Handwriting? Handwriting. But the second interesting thing in this use case is the notion of using AI, in this case Claude, to create the import that goes into the accounting ledger. Because any accounting ledger you use has a number of different ways that you can bulk import things into the ledger, be it a single transaction, be it 1,000 transactions. And our AI tools can create those files that we then bulk import. Pretty straightforward. Usually in most cases there's like a, a bulk import template. You pull that into Claude, you maybe point it to the, the webpage that has the instructions for how to build this templated file. Yeah. And then it builds the template for you. Import into the accounting ledger and Bob's your uncle. Use case number 2, this is for tax nerds, but I'm gonna bring this around for the rest of you too because it's really interesting. We use AI to compare source documents, that is tax source documents, to wage and income transcripts from the IRS to see whether all the tax docs were received and input in the tax return. If you don't do taxes in the US, first of all, good for you. All right? A lot of great things about living in America, This is not one of them, our tax system. But you can get from the IRS these transcripts, which is basically a record of everything the IRS knows about your tax situation. And oftentimes you will file a return and the IRS will be like, hey, you're missing this thing that we were expecting in your tax return. And that is because, you know, maybe the client never got a copy of it. More likely, they just never gave you a copy of it. And you don't find out about it until the return is filed and the IRS sends you a nastygram saying, yeah, you're missing this thing. Yeah. And it kind of makes you look dumb as the tax preparer, even though it's not your fault. Meanwhile, everyone else in the world is like, if it, if they already have the information, why are they making you submit the return? We're not going to go down that rabbit hole today. Okay. But one thing we can do to mitigate some of this happening is to pull the IRS transcript and look inside our source documents and say, is everything that's in the transcript reflected in our source documents? Basically, are we missing anything that the IRS already has on file? Now, early in the year, these transcripts aren't that useful. Later in the year, these transcripts are more complete. But this is such a no-brainer to where it's like, yeah, no, this should actually probably be a thing that we do on like every single return. So how do you take this sort of third-party verification and build it into a process? Because AI is good enough to do 100% of this right now for it to go through, you know, a 2 to 8 page transcript, see all the details in there, and then look in a pile of PDFs and make sure that all the details are also there. AI can do that with great accuracy right now. But how do you build that into the process? It's, it's probably something that in practice in your accounting firm now ought to look like its own status. Like, you know, statuses, intake, prep, review, maybe partner review, uh, delivery. Our statuses probably need to be split up in a way that lend themselves better to carving out the parts of the process that AI can now handle for you. So in this case, maybe this is a status that is called like transcript verification, and AI just handles that status. And so in the beginning, when you're first rolling this out, this probably looks like you and your team, you know, going to Claude and maybe you've built a skill for it doing this so you can just summon the skill and you don't have to describe every single time exactly how you want it to do the job, but you give it the transcript, you point it at the folder that has those source documents in it, and it does some sort of verification and then gives you some documentation of the work that it did. Initially, maybe that's you and the team having a conversation with the AI, but eventually you just want that to run on its own, right? We did a whole episode on how to make these workflows more autonomous on the podcast feed. I believe it was called Most Accounting Firms Are Using Claude Wrong, and it walks through this progression from the synchronous, like going back and forth with the AI assistant sort of manual version of that, all the way through to the version that just runs anytime a project hits a certain status. Step 1, to be clear, is always you doing the back and forth with the AI. But I think our goal here needs to be, how do I get this to the point where it runs on its own and actually manages that status for us and even maybe pushes it to the next status when it's done? Now, one other really important call out here when you're trusting an AI to do a job for you is within the firm, we need to have agreement upon how its work ought to be documented. I shouldn't be leaving it up to the AI to document it however it wants to document it every single time. You'll end up in a situation where you'll spend half the day Grading AI's homework. If you've ever had AI create an Excel workbook for something, you're like, wow, this is cool. And then very quickly, like, wow, I really don't want to review like 7 tabs of stuff. And so have a template for like, you know, using this transcript verification example, what does a 1-page PDF look like where that's the output? It visualizes the verification and that is the output of every single time that it does that task. Define that so it's not left up to the AI. Cool use case number 3, completing a lengthy disclosure checklist for an audit. Now, most of us, we don't do audits, but this is a great example of there are umpteen different things that you have to do disclosure checklists for. In fact, someone else told me they have a like 100-page PDF from one of the Big Four firms that used to be their guide for like producing, uh, these disclosures and they literally just give that PDF to Claude and it like helps them draft all their disclosures. But it's really important to remember that right now, literally anything you can build into a checklist, the AI will patiently and like thoughtfully go through and analyze and document for you. And that is such a huge unlock in accounting when humans are really bad at going through checklists, right? But a lot of the things that we do, not everything, we can carve out like, let's say 50% of the common mistakes with a checklist. And this might be a lengthier checklist than you've ever done before. For, because putting an 80-item checklist in front of a human is a great way to, uh, find yourself with some staffing issues. But whether it's audit, whether it's tax prep, whether it's bookkeeping, whether it's meeting prep, whatever it is, can you checklistize your accounting firm? What is that, the book, The Checklist Manifesto? If you've ever read this, it's a great book. And the idea is like they go through very simple examples where in the medical field, just these simple rudimentary checklists greatly increased, um, the likelihood of things going right. They also talk about using checklists with like pilots, and stuff like that. And the balancing act was not making a checklist too involved. It was more like bringing the human brain back to like ensuring they're not going on autopilot so much. Because I mean, a surgeon will literally cut a person open and work on the wrong organ or the wrong knee or something like that. And you're like, how is this even possible? Pilots making very obvious mistakes. The whole idea is a very simple checklist sort of like brings your attention back on the most important things. I actually think that's probably not how you build a checklist for AI because it doesn't have the limitations that we have. We have around our drifting focus, what the AI actually needs is a ton of clarity on exactly what it is that you want. And so it is a different type of checklist that we're talking about. And you could also just call this an SOP, like it is a, a really overbuilt SOP, but it's all the things that you want to be verified before the project goes to the next step. And a really important learning that is very much a, this is the way to use AI right now sort of thing. is the emergence of something called goals. Goals are like a totally different way to use your AI assistant. We're used to normally going back and forth and having this conversation, but oftentimes if you give an AI a really big task, it doesn't always like see it all the way through, or it will kind of take shortcuts. And this is because basically your AI is given like an allowance of compute with which to complete a task. And if it is running out of that allowance of compute, it will kind of start to— Start to cut corners to ensure that it can complete the task in time. But there's an entirely different way now to get your AI assistant to work that is kind of the, the new breed or new version almost of prompt engineering. And that is to give it a goal. Right now, this isn't available in Cloud Cowork. It's only available on Cloud Code, but I've begun using them pretty heavily. You basically say /goal and then you tell it what it is, the work that you want it to do and like what the success state is. And the idea is for it to basically have more control over how long does it need to work to get this thing done and don't stop working until this thing is done. And so if you have a 100-item checklist, this makes way more sense to give it the goal of thoughtfully going through every single one of those items and not stopping until it has gone through all 100 rather than just giving it a giant checklist and watching it speedrun those 100 items. Because it doesn't really know how much time to spend on each. Give this a try. It actually totally makes a difference in the amount of effort that it will put into doing the work. Obviously this impacts your usage limits, but most of us at this point, we are not banging up against those usage limits yet. I'd encourage you to try this. Flip over to Code in the Cloud Desktop app, do /goal, and this works for work where there is a very clear like end goal, like a, a point at which it should stop. For more open-ended work, this isn't as easy to set up, But people now talk about how they use AI as like basically now their job is to write their job in a collection of goals. Like, can you distill what you do or the work that needs to be done down to a distinct list of goals and then give the AI these goals to solve for, to move that project forward? Kind of a, a different mental paradigm, but is the most powerful way to use an AI assistant right now. Codex, OpenAI's sort of desktop AI, has the same thing as well. But where we're, we're bumping into that most right now is in Claude. Flip over to code, go /goal, and give that a play. Uh, it's an interesting way to get it to work longer on a hard problem. Checklists being a great example of that, like a very lengthy checklist. Use case number 4. We now use AI to prepare any work papers that are in spreadsheet format. Dude, AI is a, a spreadsheet wizard. There is something about putting a process in a spreadsheet and cutting AI loose in it where you're like, okay, this thing just feels actually more intelligent in the context of a spreadsheet, maybe it's the structure of the spreadsheet, the fact that maybe there's more training data around spreadsheets and so it knows how to intelligently approach this stuff. I, I think I mentioned on the podcast the other day, I was talking at Engage with a guy that does audit and audit, so much, so much of audit workpapers are spreadsheet-based and he's like, there is so much we can do with AI across all these, these spreadsheets we, we use for our workpapers. It is almost an argument to make your process more spreadsheety. In fact, we talked the other day about even in tax work, like having a giant workbook where all the data that goes into the return is first pulled into a spreadsheet and then pushed to the tax software. You use the spreadsheet to tie out totals to the tax software. But the opportunity here is, is that the AI can prepare that entire spreadsheet for you. You give it a template and then it pulls the data off all the forms and the source documents and completes that for you all on its own. And I hopefully you've seen in our videos at this point, like AI is good enough to do that on its own, but it is honestly an argument for some of our processes maybe coming back to the spreadsheet. Now, one thing you don't want to sleep on is I don't think we talk enough about how good Claude is at building PDF documentation. I mean, it can, it can highlight stuff, it can draw cute little boxes around things, leave comments, like whatever your process is for documenting PDFs, Claude can do that. And in our line of work, What's really important is not the answer. It is the documentation, right? And a lot of people are like amazed by sort of this black box magic machine where you can ask it a question and it gives you a really intelligent answer. But I would argue in our line of work, an answer doesn't get you any closer to the end result. What you need is the proof and the most concise version of the documentation that will get you to a version of the answer that you believe. For the same reason that if you task an intern with doing some research and they just come back with you with an answer, You're like, I don't really care what you think it is. I need to see the documentation. That's your job. And so are we instructing our AI tools to build documentation in a templated way that's actually useful for moving the project forward? Or are we still using it as like our personal sounding board? That, like, we are, we are kind of going through this paradigm shift. What was once an assistant ought to now be the worker, like taking the lead on production. And it means how it documents its work. That's really important. For what we do and also a tough thing to get agreement on inside of your firm. Oftentimes the way that one person does a project is different than the way another person does a project. And when it goes to the next step, maybe the reviewer, they're like, oh yeah, Tracy always does it this way, but Bob always does it this other way. And I just kind of know what to do with that. You really want to get to consensus on that so that the agent can produce that work and that documentation in a way that we all agree is best. As I read this ad, I am feasting my eyes upon talented accountants that you could literally, literally book an interview with right now. Like Ruru, a CPA, a tax pro, $3,500 a month. He's got experience with CCH Access, bless your heart, CCH Engagement, QuickBooks Online. Gang, he is one of many accounting pros that you can peruse at the Cloud Accountant Staffing portal. We'll link it down in the show notes. It is a veritable smorgasbord of accounting talent, folks that they have pre-vetted, where you can go in, you can see their experience, you can literally see an intro video that they've recorded, and you can book an interview with them without ever even having to hop on a call with Cloud Accountant Staffing. Amazing. We got tax pros, bookkeepers, auditors, executive assistants. Oh my gosh, I got a lot of people in here right now. 45 candidates. Because I know you need that next dream hire. You really do. What do you got to lose? Okay? Go check out the portal, book an interview. Feels like a win-win, right? You're only going to move afford if you find somebody you love. Cloud Accountant Staffing, run by folks that used to run an accounting firm, they make it as easy as possible for you. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. Hey, if you're done licking your wounds from tax season, if you run more than a few hundred 1040s a year, you gotta look at this episode sponsor, Sorban. One of my leaders in tax workflow automation can save you a tremendous amount of time right now, specifically on the intake part of 1040 workflows, but they're also working on connecting to your tax software automatically, like pushing data in there. They're working on automating the delivery of the tax return. But this is like the fastest growing category in tax tech. If you're a US tax firm, you absolutely need to have a good tax workflow solution nailed down. We did about 1,800 1040s a year in my accounting firm. This would have saved us so much chasing clients for documents and just tedious organizing of all the these PDFs. Oh my gosh, can't say enough about Sortman. We actually did a full demo of their platform on my YouTube channel not so long ago if you want to see it. But to learn more about Sortman, check out the link down in the show notes. Last use case here, number 5. AI reads my emails every 4 hours to find any new to-dos and posts it in a to-do list artifact where I keep track of all the tasks that get emailed to me. So an artifact, if you haven't played with these yet in Claude, they are pretty darn cool. If you're in the Claude desktop app, under chat you have artifacts, but under Cowork you have, they're called live artifacts and worth knowing live artifacts in Cowork only live on your local machine because all things Cowork only live on your local machine. Inside chat, any artifacts there, you can also see on the web and art— those artifacts in chat can even be shared with members of your team because they don't just live on your computer. But I've heard from a number of people that are now like pulling together all these different sources to build sort of a personal dashboard inside of Artifact and email here. Email is a great place to start because Cloud has very good connectors for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Where it can read your email. It cannot send email yet, but you could build a dashboard just for your email, pulling out the highlights. In this case, they're pulling out to-dos that are extracted from those emails. I mean, a really important thing here is like being able to flag urgent stuff because I know that's why a lot of people leave email up on their 6th monitor just in case something spicy comes through. Let your AI do that. Don't monitor it yourself. But a lot of people now have these personal dashboards they've created in Claude that they swear by that is sort of their custom collection. Of all the things from all the different systems they use that they need to have in one place. 'Cause that is a hard problem. It's hard enough to prioritize within a single channel like email, let alone across all your channels from email to Slack or Microsoft Teams to your practice management system to that text you just got from a client. Prioritizing across all those things, so bloody hard. And I think that's the appeal of pulling this stuff together into a centralized dashboard. I'm seeing cool new stuff that people are doing every day, man. If you've got a use case that you're proud of, put that down in the comments. We are working on some big sort of much more produced proper YouTube videos around how to build these use cases to just help you visually walk through the steps to make this maybe feel more approachable. 'Cause I know a lot of times you hear a use case and you're like, that's cool, but I wouldn't even know where to begin with how to build that. Excited to get more of those videos out in the wild. But if you got a cool use case in the meantime, pop it in the comments, maybe we'll feature it in a video. Next up, we're gonna take a look at a firm that's been built by a non-accountant, stumbled into an interesting niche, and we got all the dirty details. Let's get into it. Roast a firm. Roast a firm. Let's roast a firm on Jason on Firms. Details about this firm have been submitted to us via a little intake form that we've got where you can anonymously give us some details about your firm, get a little bit of free coaching, talk about what you're doing. It's fun for the rest of us too to kind of put the coach hat on and look at somebody else's firm, give them some advice, learn from what they're doing. A little easier than looking at our own firm, right? Okay, let me tell you about this accounting firm. They're projected to do $650,000 top line in 2026. About 85% of that is accounting, 15% is tax. They're in the US in a mid-sized city. Their best client right now is a coffee client, actually multi-location coffee retailers, ideally also with a wholesale business. Maybe they import and roast coffee and sell it to customers. Right now they have probably the two biggest of those companies in their city at the moment. Their second best client, attorneys. They developed a specialty in trust accounting and working out tricky trust recons. You couldn't have two more different specializations, right? This person's story, interestingly enough, they are not a trained accountant, but here they are running a firm. It was a leap of faith to do their own thing, and they're glad that they did. But every day I feel like I'm faking it. Do real accountants that run their firm not feel like they're faking it? I always did. I have an MBA, worked in internal audit, and did a short stint in Big Four before beginning to do bookkeeping on the side for a friend and eventually got too busy and decided to go into work for myself. We've done 2 acquisitions now. One was really good, one was a total disaster. Trying to figure out the next steps so the business supports my life instead of the other way around. Whoo. Okay. The team makeup. They are the full-time owner, the only person doing tax prep right now, plus a bit of accounting work, plus regular owner stuff like relationships, biz dev, firm ops. They have a partner who the employees actually report to. So she manages the team and most of the accounting client relationships. They have 2 full-time bookkeepers. One does a little bit of compliance tax work. They have 2 part-time folks working about half time. But pricing, this is always, this is always where the bodies are buried, right? And everybody starts pointing at the radio. That's what they're doing wrong. All right, here we go. Pricing minimum is $450 a month for bookkeeping, but our clients are all over the place. Some legacy folks are at like $200 a month and some are $5,000 a month. We're doing full-scale bookkeeping, generally monthly closes, payroll, sales tax, etc. Tax pricing is... interesting. Not a great system. Some 1040s are like $400 and some big partnerships are pushing $10K. It is all a work in progress for sure. How many things do you have in your firm right now that you know you just need to do? And you're like, well, I already know, like, I don't need somebody to tell me. In fact, you know, this person, they will take the time to complete this form and roast their own pricing. Uh, I heard a Tony Robbins thing the other day where he is like, yeah, your, your success will basically rise to the level of your willingness of to do uncomfortable things. Ironically, the more you're willing to do those uncomfortable things, the easier your life gets. And at a certain point, entrepreneurship is just a question of your pain tolerance. Honestly, I feel like that is a lot of entrepreneurship is you're able to carry and juggle all these things without being overwhelmed. And over time you're capable of handling more and more, which is cool, which is awesome, but is the biggest trade-off that comes with entrepreneurship, right? Is you are now carrying that load. Pricing? I mean, the answer here, as it is with most of our firms, is trimming the fat. The folks who are like way at the bottom end of that pricing scale, find an amazing referral partner for them to go to. The funny thing with these projects is oftentimes you can trim 40% of your client headcount and you will lose like 5 or 10% of your profitability. And then if you replace that with new, like, A clients, really premium clients, you are as profitable, if not more profitable. doing less work. Now, this isn't— and this is really important— this is not a one-time thing. This is a process that is always ongoing. And the people who are stuck with these legacy client lists, they're like, "Oh, I'm never gonna be able to rip off the Band-Aid." Like, this is business. Like, you gotta figure out how to make this an ongoing evolution that never stops. It's not we're just making this hard cut one time. You have to do that now because the year-over-year stuff that should have happened was not happening before. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yes, you have to rip the bandaid off initially, but how do you build this into the process? We talk about depersonalizing the, the client relationship so it doesn't feel so big and dramatic when you have to let somebody go or refer them to somebody else. It is a business thing. It's not a personal thing. But obviously a lot of the, the low-hanging fruit here is, is cutting the low-dollar projects that are not, presumably not very profitable. Also, a firm specializing in coffee and in, in legal. Hmm. I mean, you're basically running two businesses. It's not to say that you can't run two businesses, but inevitably neither of those businesses are getting your best, right? And so if you were to go to a trade show, what do you go to? How do you decide? Do I go to this trade show or that trade show? In either case, there is a very clear right answer for what is the best type of client for us, be it how rare are the problems we're solving for them, how expensive are the problems that we're solving for them, right? Some clients have cheap problems. Some clients have very expensive problems. What's the better business? Don't be afraid to follow that through. I think oftentimes at this point when you've got two doors, the fear is, well, it's risky to fully commit to the one, but by committing to the one, what you actually find is a bunch more nuance that de-risks that decision. Let's say you only go in on coffee clients. A coffee distributor is very different than a coffee retailer. And so like, like going into either of these specializations and just committing to the one, really at that point, there's still a lot more room for further specialization. Attorneys with trust accounts, that is not a, a very specific subset, right? There's a whole bunch of specificity within that where you can go even further, and that does not necessarily make it more risky. If anything, it makes you more aware of the entire ecosystem and where the opportunities within that ecosystem are. And so don't be afraid to go a little deeper there, especially if you can find a referral partner for the other stuff. Last couple bits here, sales and marketing. They haven't really done any intentional marketing. Pretty much everything has come from, uh, referral and inbound. That is— I mean, that's a symptom of just not having the time, right? And the very obvious next hire here is a tax hire. That could be an offshore tax hire potentially, but you will still end up being the one reviewing the work. You mentioned that you want to begin— get to a point where the business is working for you and not the other way around. That ultimately means bringing in a tax person at a level where you can trust them with the client relationship. That is probably an onshore tax hire. You don't have that person, as many people don't. I own a staffing company now, cloudaccountantsstaffing.com. We are just now beginning to do onshore hiring, and honestly, the website hasn't even been updated to reflect this. But the reason that I bought a staffing company is that I have a really unique way to source amazing candidates for firms. And that is all the content. That is 5 million views on YouTube. That is people that find the podcast that are like, this all sounds really cool, really amazing and progressive, but this is not my reality. I work for a firm that has not bought into this stuff. Stuff. And so I have an abundance of accountants that find my content that are looking for something better. And we can do stuff like what I did less than 24 hours ago, which is put a poll on LinkedIn that says, hey accountants, who's looking for a better accounting firm to work for? If that's you, vote on this poll below. The poll options are, are you junior level, are you staff level, or are you manager level? The last time we did this, we helped over 300 accountants find a better job with a better firm. Uh, this post now is less than 24 hours old and I've got 204 manager level people that have opted in here. Once I clean this list, that's maybe 140, 150 people worth talking to, and they're all looking for a new firm. And so if you are stuck on finding a tax manager, as I know so many accounting firms are, head over to cloudaccountstaffing.com. I run that company with a couple other amazing founders that, that for a number of years did offshore really well, but now we're getting into onshore. The landing page doesn't, doesn't even say that yet, but that can at least get you in touch with the team if you are looking for that hire, because as I record this, we are sitting on a lot of really talented people that are looking for something new. Isn't that wild? Isn't that— I mean, it blows my mind that we're able to do this, but this is the whole reason why I became a co-owner in the staffing company, because getting these people into better firms changes lives. It really does. Last, tech stack. They got a, a banging tech stack. You'll be able to tell why they listen to the podcast. Unfortunately, we spend a lot of money on Intuit. We use QuickBooks Online and ProConnect for tax work. We're on Double for month-end work. Missive for email, parenthesis, awesome tool, exclamation mark. Missive for email. People do not talk enough about how we should not be running our accounting firms on Outlook and on Gmail. Missive, they've been a sponsor of the channel, but it's because I literally use Missive in my business. When I ran my accounting firm, we used TeamworkDesk, which was a kind of team-based email management platform. It's pretty long in the teeth now. Missive is like the cool modern version of that. Uh, the other leader here is Front, but Front is heckin' expensive. Most people would agree that those are the two options to look at is Front and Missive. I'm a Missive user myself. Back to their tech stack, they track time in Double, they do proposals in Ignition, they use Double for their client portal, they use Soraban for tax intake and return and delivery. They use Claude a ton. Nerd alert. Some of the staff is on ChatGPT. I just haven't gotten them moved over to Claude yet. I built out a custom dashboard. Oh, I didn't even plan this. I built out a custom dashboard with firm data via Claude code that I— all caps— love. Trying to figure out how to sell that to clients. Lots of implications there, but I'm tied to— tied into the QuickBooks Online API and the Double API. And man, is it awesome. So they built their own sort of custom reporting dashboard inside of Claude that is connected to the other tools that they use. Super cool. Thanks for sharing your story. I think like if you were sitting across from this person coaching them, where are they trying to get to personally? They're trying to get to a point where they are not so involved in the production, where they're more working on the business and less in the business. I think the logical next step here, as they have a partner that oversees the accounting staff and a lot of the accounting clients, is you need that high-level tax hire. Honestly, that is like being transparent. That is the hardest hire to make inside of a US accounting firm is a high-level tax hire. Hopefully, actually, through my staffing company, we'd make this a little bit easier for people. Obviously, a staffing company is still the last resort. Where Robert Half usually charges like 25% of first-year salary for that placement fee, we're charging 15 to 20%. I spent a lot of money with Robert Half. I did. And mostly what I got was Big Four burnouts, people that were just at a giant firm and tired and wanted to go and work for a smaller firm, and they were fine. But the more interesting version of a placement a staffing agency to me is context. What context are people coming in with? In this case, like even just the LinkedIn pool, like these are my followers. How cool would it be if you listen to the podcast to literally hire an accountant who is a follower of my content? Not that everybody that comes through the system will be that way, but I do think it's a much higher context, higher than going with like a Robert Half or something like that. Okay, just hang on. I hear something. Oh, it's the mailman. Hey, come on in. Mailbag! Mailbag! Mailbag! Mailbag! This segment is called— Mailbag! Questions come from YouTube comments, from social media DMs, from emails, from my cell phone. Text me a question at 1-516-980-4968. Now over 1,500 accountants have gotten in touch with me over cellular telephone. First question: I've been thinking about partnering with a business broker. Would love to hear your thoughts on that. For an accounting firm, honestly, partnering with the right type of business broker I think is really cool, a great idea. If you think about our industry, accounting firms, you've got all these listing sites and brokers that are, uh, buying and selling accounting firms, right? If you're in the market for buying an accounting firm, usually you hire a broker and they are sourcing firms and bringing those to you. And so if you can work with a broker that is working within a very specific space, that could be a great way to make some connections. In all likelihood, you have picked up clients from transactions where you did a great job in a transaction, and after the transaction, the person was like, hey, that person's accountant was really good. I kind of wanna work with them now. Can be a great way to earn some credibility, but it has to be contextual. People. So if I'm trying to do dentistry, uh, look for the person that is selling dental practices. Can't be like too general, but for sure this is a great opportunity to find sort of a choke point where these people collect. And that's always the best way to build a specialization is where do these people collect? Like what is a point in the pipeline at which they all sort of come together and how can I get in front of them there? That is always the best way to build a specialization. Hey, I know you love Claude Cohen. Work as much as I do, but have you heard the news about Canopy Coworker? Subtle. It's a new AI assistant they launched inside of Canopy, one of this episode's sponsors. Canopy, a practice management system that is a feature nerd's dream. They're trying to cover as much of everything you need in an accounting firm in a single place. But as we talk about on this podcast often, it is much easier to roll out an AI agent inside of a system than it is to roll out an AI agent that works across like all of my systems, right? That's the trade-off. I want the AI that works across all my systems, but we're struggling now with like, what's the most secure way to do that? The AI agent that works inside my all-in-one system? Buddy, that is easy. Flip the switch, count me in, strap in, buckle up, I want it. Canopy is so convinced that you're gonna love what they got to show you, they're gonna cut you a check for 75 big ones. They'll give you a $75 gift card. Gift card to Bed Bath Beyond. What's that? What's that? Okay, I'm not sure where the gift card is for, but if you book a demo with Canopy via getcanopy.com/jason, I'll put that link down in the show notes, they give you a $75 gift card just for coming and demoing. Do it, what do you got to lose? Are you still running your accounting firm on a spreadsheet? Puh, don't do that, man. That's gross. Financial Sense, it is the practice management system for small and growing teams. Think 20 employees and under. It is everything you need to get your work done in one place, and they've been shipping some cool stuff lately, like built-in month-end close automation, this deep integration into the accounting ledger to actually pull all the transactions in platform and do that sort of quality assurance pass from inside of Financial Cents. Now, they also recently launched a campaign called Proudly Small, because being small isn't something to apologize for. It's something to be proud of. And just to be clear, we are talking about about your accounting firm. Wouldn't it be nice to have a tool that's actually built for small firms? That's actually a very common complaint right now is tools are increasing in cost. They won't come down to support firms beyond like a certain number of clients. Financial Sense, they are built for you. Plus, if you use code JASON10, it will make the price of Financial Sense even smaller for your small firm. You'll get 10% off the annual team more scale plans with 2 or more users. I'll put the link to claim that, uh, down in the show notes. Check that out, see if Financial Sense might be for you. Next up. So accounting firms, we're all behind on AI. Is it worth going out and buying a legacy firm, or should I rely on organic growth within my existing firm if we wanna grow revenue quickly and can use AI in production? Oh, I think my answer for this has actually changed in the last 6 months. I could tell you 6 months ago I would've told you don't buy a legacy firm because Changing humans is hard and changing humans has not gotten any easier. But you know what? The reality is AI is coming into production now where I genuinely believe the production over the next 3 years will become not trivial, but vastly simplified. And there's a world where you won't need those people as much as you once did. And it doesn't mean that you don't need people. It just means the problem of coming into a firm and not being able to get a team to agree on how to do the work. Work matters less when you literally have an AI do the work. You think about all these arguments we've had inside of our firms of, no, we should do it this way. No, we should do it that way. At this point, in many cases, you'll have an AI that then comes in and just says, well, the AI just did it. So it actually, it doesn't really matter which way you thought it should be done because now it, it's just done. And this is, if this isn't already happening to a small degree inside of your accounting firm, it will be soon. We talked earlier in the episode about the, like the transcript verification example. Where it just tied that out. People could have opinions about what is the right and wrong way to, for a human to do that work. And honestly, taking the best of that and having it inform how the AI does the work, that is helpful. But ultimately that whole debate goes by the wayside when the AI is just doing the work. And so in some ways, the balance of power here is admittedly shifting where running an accounting firm is actually about how do you get the production out and make the client feel somewhat cared for, not a very high bar on the client service. There. Increasingly, the doing of the work will be simplified, which means if you come into an old firm, maybe it's a, a paper firm and it's very hard to bring the staff along to do work in a new way. There's a world where that is made easier because AI is now handling more of production. It still comes with a lot of complication. What do you do with those people? You still need people around the AI. It is not as if the AI just does it. And will those staff that you're buying adapt? If you are blocked by staffing and what you can get a team to do right now, then all buying a firm does is reset the timer on trying to get a team to do things the way you want them to do them. Doesn't solve the, the core issue. Now, one thing they did call out in this question, we need to grow revenue quickly. That is why most people do acquisitions, is you have really fast growth ambitions. Most of the top 100 was built on a bunch of acquisitions. It was not organic growth. And so if you need to get to a bigger number fast, usually that is done via acquisition. I would challenge oftentimes why we want to do that. Uh, and you like, usually this is like trying to speedrun to some revenue threshold where a person thinks they can get a better multiple. A little bit of that is true. A lot of that is not true. Uh, sometimes there's a misplaced thing here where they want to grow to a certain size to enable a certain type of hiring or something like that. And you will hear people say revenue. What you actually need to be looking at though is profit. Revenue really doesn't matter. So make sure you're growing for the right reasons. But I would say as AI actually becomes something that's driving production, and this is new in the last 6 months, Maybe there's a little bit more of an argument for the acquisition of legacy firms. Whew, is that a hot take? I would not have said that 6 months ago. Let me know what you think on that down in the comments. Next up, I saw someone post a screenshot of asking Cowork to redact sensitive client information from files. You grant access to the folder on your computer and then you have it run to redact all the sensitive information from those files. What? Is this safe or are you still sharing the original copy with Claude? Goodness me. Okay, so the solution for AI not accessing sensitive information is to give the AI all the information and have it remove the sensitive information? I do see people doing dumb gymnastics like this online still, and I just don't understand it. You're running all the sensitive stuff through AI. How is that the solution to then have this redacted thing? I shared last episode my thoughts on redaction. I myself do not believe in redaction. Redaction as a strategy to be able to use an AI tool is not realistic because Whether humans are asked to redact it or a computer or a script is relied on to redact it, there will be mistakes. You will miss stuff. And at that point, you have a disclosure. You have a breach that you actually have to tell the client about. Do not rely on redaction. Only use a tool if you're okay putting sensitive information into the tool. And right now, there are way too many people hung up on Claude not being a place where they can put secure things into it. And the Claude organizational settings do still matter, namely disable Claude in Chrome. But 80% of Anthropic's business is enterprise. Surprise. And so the Department of War will get access to the new Mythos model and, and spend an insane amount of money on tokens from Claude. And then a 3-person accounting firm will be like, "It's not ready for me yet. We're not, we're not quite there, I don't think. We're gonna wait and see how Microsoft Copilot develops." Gang, let's get first principles about this, okay? We have some specific rules to our accounting firms that we need to follow, especially if you do tax work in the US. Get your head around all that stuff and ensure that you can like answer that stuff confidently. But a lot of the AI spookies are, are just that. They're sort of these vague things that people just throw out because of the newness of it all. Honestly though, not that new at this point. We've been in it for years and the exact same APIs that these tools use, Anthropic, ChatGPT, it's a user interface behind it is an API that interfaces with the large language models. That is the exact same API that all your other tools are using from your practice management system to your QuickBooks Assist. What are we so afraid of? Like, and that's not to say that there aren't scary things happening right now and that we need to be really mindful of it, but get specific. Really like dig deep into it. These gymnastics over what if I redact this or that or the other thing. Honestly, this feels way more risky to me than just like understanding the tool you're using, where the settings need to be dialed in, and then just setting a super clear expectation for here's what's okay and here's what's not okay in our firm. Next up, you mentioned bringing in an AI coach to teach the team. Any recommendations on where to find such a coach? Right now, my favorite way for you to pull in an AI coach is not to have them run you through some sort of course. Maybe that's useful. The more interesting thing to me is for them to be like your personal trainer, the trainer that you paid for, where you have a standing appointment time with, and for that reason you actually show up. It's an accountability thing, right? That is what most of us need is not more ideas, is not more use cases, is accountability to make sure that you spent 30, 60 minutes, however many minutes it is inside of a week. And if you have a coach that will come and sit with you during that time, either in person or digitally, Great. I love that for the accountability. But how do you find that individual? Gang, I'm gonna sound like a broken record here. The best place to source this stuff is from your peers. Every single accounting firm is asking the same thing right now, and there are great people in every market in all sorts of domains that have nothing to do with accounting. But there's also just a lot of people shilling stuff right now, and they won't actually sit with you. They'll just send you some sort of ebook or something like that, and you're like, that's not what I need. The best place to find the best coach is asking your peers. If you don't have a place that you can do this yet, this is the whole— And this is the reason that 5 years ago I created an online private community for accounting firms and now has over 850 accounting firms in it. It's called Realize. It's linked in every single podcast episode. You need to have a place where you can go and ask a question and get really high quality answers from people who have actually used that tool, whatever it is. To me, my opinion, this is not social media. The community has a paywall because there has to be stakes for people to be there. A lot of our software vendors have free communities. Great, it's better than nothing. You've got stuff like Tax Pros subreddit, Tax Pros Discord, stuff like that. All that stuff has a place. I am interested in a private place where I can get high-quality answers. To me, that is the value of Realize. Literally any tool in our ecosystem, I can go to Realize and search for it and see the stories of real users and what their experience was, and I can do that in seconds. That is so valuable. So, so, so valuable. The alternative is, I don't know, you're banging around on LinkedIn. Who's got the biggest audience on social media? Those things don't map to like like, who will be a great coach? Who will actually show up? Who will you enjoy working with? The best place to get that information is from other people that do what you do. You just need a place to go and ask. I know that sounds like a shill, and, and it is, honestly. But, you know, I've shared before, like, Juno the other day— Juno, the tax automation platform— somebody shared like, hey, what's everybody's experience with Juno? And within 48 hours, you've got like 12 actual accounting firms that have been users for months, if not years, and even went on to use other products. And they're sharing like real experience of like, here's what it did, here's what it didn't do. I go back to when I ran my accounting firm and that sort of thing did not exist. That same decision was a years-long cycle where I could get hosed by making a bad decision, waste a tremendous amount of money, burn out my team, and then a year, 2 years later, go back to square one because I made the wrong decision. That's the cost of not having access to information. I love that the accounting firm world is getting smaller, that we have more connections, that I don't have to rely on a sales rep for information. I can just go ask my peer. Man, that unlocks so many things for you. Next up, Jason Staats: Got to meet you at Bridging the Gap in Chicago. Oh, that's like at least a couple years ago. You helped us dump Onvio. Good. Onvio is Thomson Reuters, like, cloud-based PM. It stinks. We dumped Onvio for Canopy. I have a business use version of ChatGPT, but I see all this content about Claude. Do we need to switch over and dump ChatGPT or wait until the security is better at Claude? What? Appreciate all your helpful videos. Keep them coming. Uh, right now I do think it is worth dumping what you've got with ChatGPT and moving over to Claude. If you've built a bunch of infrastructure in ChatGPT, maybe Maybe there's a world where it makes sense to hang onto that stuff still, but there is just is a really big delta with Claude. They've been ahead by quite a ways for the last 6 months. This new Fable model that we've got from Claude that's available for a very limited time in your Claude potentially is off the charts good. It's so, so good. Go have a play with it because they might take it away in like a week's time. But Claude is actually absolutely the move. Comparing ChatGPT security to Claude security. Claude was built like enterprise first from the beginning. That's how they actually became a profitable company and now have a larger valuation than OpenAI does. ChatGPT really went consumer first with ChatGPT. For a number of years, people said ChatGPT is just a tool for cheating on your homework. And you can actually see this in the usage data where when it gets to the summer, ChatGPT usage just like goes off a cliff. And it's not to say it's useful for business work, but they have had to then back into the business use of it. And you can use ChatGPT very securely, but Claude is by no means less secure than ChatGPT. Thoughts on Double's new AI tools versus just using Claude. Okay, so every tool that we use is going to roll built-in embedded AI stuff, and that unlocks some very specific functionality. Like we're doing a video around a built-in AI assistant that is inside of Canopy, and one of the cool use cases I put together was let's send a message to every client on their birthday that maybe pulls in some context from recent conversations, wishes them a happy birthday, but I have to approve it before it gets sent out. That is super cool. And all that data already lives inside of the practice management system. But if I wanted to do the same thing inside of Claude, I could, but it'd be like, okay, well, where do we have all those birthdays stored? And I'm like, well, it's in this other system. I don't know if you can actually talk to it or not. And then it's like, well, how are we gonna push the message? And I'm like, I don't know, maybe text message, but then it's gonna come from a different number and, and that requires a different system then to be able to send text messages. As opposed to where all that information already is, the portal that the clients already use, there's gonna be situations where embedded AI is really cool, really exciting. Double, this part of, this part of the question, Double's launched some cool stuff. Like they have an AI that will build journal entries for you and you can build that into a recurring monthly process where like you give it sort of the input reports and it will build that journal entry for you just as one of the tasks that goes into the month-end close. They were maybe the first company in our space that launched a really good MC that lets Claude actually connect to Double to not only see what's happening inside of Double, but even like create tasks inside of Double and like write things to Double. So it's not gonna be all one or the other, especially with a tool like Double, which is like kind of a core backbone month-end close management sort of thing that is connected to all of your clients' accounting files. That's a very hard thing to carve out and build inside of Claude. But increasingly the peripheral tools that we use to run our accounting firms, I think will absolutely be replaced by Claude. I think you could probably draw draw a line in terms of the number of apps. You could probably draw a circle around maybe 20%, 30% of the core apps inside of the accounting firm sort of tech vertical. Those I see remaining for the next 3 to 5 years at least. Beyond that, it's hard to predict anything. But outside of that, those companies are going to start trending downwards if they haven't already. I'm, I'm coming up on the end of our 20-city live tour where, uh, something like 1,600 accountants will have come out to all these events that I've hosted all over the US. And when I ask the question, who here has replaced a tool that they used to pay for with AI? Maybe 10% of the room is raising their hand now. And so this is gonna start like hitting software companies if it hasn't already. But the companies least impacted by this are probably gonna be the practice management systems, like more the core tools that house a whole bunch of the data. AI hasn't quite replaced accountants yet, but if there is a part of accounting that is in an endangered state, it is accounts payable. It is the AP department and the company that I think is taking AI the farthest right now, specifically inside of AP, it is Maker's Hub. They have taken automated extraction from invoices and receipts farther than I've ever seen anybody take it, but have followed that through all the way to like complex approval processes, you know, like, uh, when you need a delineator that is more than is bill over X dollars or under Y dollars, when there's a little more complexity to it than that, MakerSub's got you covered. They handle payments as well. They're doing foreign exchange stuff. They are doing Canada stuff. It is an elegant solution to a problem that I think we all wish didn't exist in the first place. When you have ugly bill pay needs, be it from project tracking, inventory management, whatever that is, ideas and the normal tools, they're just not cutting it, not getting the job done. Maker's Hub, worth checking out. Putting AI to work on the most hairy accounts payable workflows. Learn more about Maker's Hub. Check out the link down in the show notes. Hey, real quick, I wanna 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 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. If you're not on my newsletter yet, check that out, jasononferns.com, or I'll put a link to it down in the show notes. Curious if you've done a review of Thomson Reuters Co-Counsel yet. I sure haven't. Co-Counsel is the most— and here's the sad story here. Co-Counsel is the most interesting product that Thomson Reuters has developed in decades. I mean, I, we can pretty much unanimously agree on that, right? This is their tax research offering. But what this actually is, is a startup that they acquired 2 years ago called Materia that was doing some really cool things. They pull in Materia and they continue to invest in Co-Counsel. And this is like, they lead all their marketing with this. I was at AICPA Engaged last week. You walk into the airport and you see Thomson Reuters Counsel. Now, in practice, I talk about like, how do I like getting software advice from your peers? We had a thread inside my community recently that was like, uh, Claude, TaxGPT, Co-Counsel, like, what tax research— uh, BlueJay— what tax research platform are you going with? And there was a whole bunch of responses that almost unanimously ended with BlueJay right now feels like the most performant tax research platform. But you know what Thompson will tell you is like, oh, we can build out Co-Counsel to like see into your client-specific tax situation because we're also the tax software and all this stuff. And you're like, oh, that's all very interesting and very exciting. Trouble is that doesn't exist. It's not real. It is like the way that these companies have always sold you on their products by promising the moon and this connectivity that just doesn't really exist. So right now, BlueJay is the, the most performant tax research platform there is. And this is coming from tens, if not hundreds of firms now that I've talked with that have confirmed this. In terms of like my business, in fact, I'll just pull the next question here. Curious if anyone from TR has ever reached out to you, that being Thomson Reuters. Your endless bashing must get under somebody. Nobody's skin there. I know lots of TR people. I know lots of Intuit people. Intuit probably falls into this camp too. And most of them agree with the things that I say. Like, I wouldn't say I go as far as bashing. Like, I just say like what it is. Thompson acquired SurePrep. That company's totally gone off a cliff. That offering, the team has left. The number of horror stories I've heard about SafeSend in the last 12 months. And it just makes sense. If you run a startup and you build this cool thing with an amazing team and you have an exit, you get acquired. SurePrep was acquired for $500 million cash by Thomson Reuters. It's the whole reason why the AI tax workflow stuff exploded right now is they saw a $500 million cash acquisition and immediately a ton of investment went into the tax space. But as soon as that product was acquired, its, its days were numbered. The integration support with any platforms besides Thomson Reuters, you're like, I gotta kind of make plans to move to a different platform, right? And that's a bummer. That is a, a really sad state of things. If the successful timeline is selling to Thomson Reuters. And so there's just, there's just a lot of bodies on that road. Their TaxCaddy product, a lot of people still like it, still use it. They're killing that because they want people going to the, the SPbinder stuff. Anyways, has anyone from TR ever reached out to me? There's not a brand in the space that has not tried to do partner content with me. Anybody in the space, we've talked with them. I think when it comes to TR, I probably just, unless it was really useful for me to do some sort of demo, I think I probably just wouldn't ever do anything with them. Same thing with Intuit. Like even though Intuit has products that we recommend in our app recommendations. We will talk about it to the extent that it's useful to you all, but like, we wouldn't do like a, a branded thing or a sponsored thing or anything like that because there's so many other cool people in the space doing a better version of it. And so in the case of CodeCounsel, I think BlueJay is a more interesting version of that same product. You know, in the case of Intuit Enterprise Suite, which is the thing they're really pushing right now, we got stuff like Translucent. Like, we've got other alternatives that have been around for a while that are more complete versions of that. Intuit's building its own month-end close automation platform. We just talked about Double. Double's been working on this for like 5 or 6 years. It's the most widely adopted tool inside of bookkeeping firms. I'm not gonna jump to like Intuit's like very half-baked version of this that they still haven't really built out. So I, I honestly like, we talk about stuff on merit is my opinion. And I know people will try to tear that down from like, well, who are your sponsors and stuff like this? Like I, I talk about the coolest stuff that's happening and the best products out there and they just aren't TR products. They aren't Intuit products. And then the only people that we we do sponsorships with are like the brands that we actually recommend. And so hopefully we are pouring gasoline on, on sort of the, the platforms that are helping the most people, that people are having the most success with. And it's why it can also be confusing where like, why do I never hear him talk about XYZ? Usually it's because the product's just not there yet. Not that it sucks, it's that it's not there yet. And I can either not talk about it or I can talk about it and say it's not good because of XYZ. And then somebody listens to this podcast 2 years down the road and that's honestly, that's not fair to the people behind that company. So I try to focus, like I try to be mindful of how we use this platform 'cause it does make a difference. And we focus the conversation on the people that are crushing it and we amplify the things that you say, what's working best for you. That's where all of this comes from. That is the unbelievable unfair advantage that I have running a community with 750 accounting firms in it who are sharing all of the horror stories in a private environment, the stories they wouldn't share online. Yeah. And obviously having conversations with you all and hosting, you know, 20 live events in the last 2 months and people telling me their stories. I feel, I, I feel so privileged to then get to reflect all that stuff out for other people to benefit from. I don't run a firm anymore, and that is like the easiest way to kind of cut down my content is like, he doesn't run a firm. But what I get to do is all the stuff I never had time to do when I did run a firm and then share that with you all. So you don't make the easy to avoid mistakes that I know that I made running my firm because I didn't have that reach. I didn't have that access. Network. What a cool job. All right, two more questions. Jason, is there a guide or commentary you have on naming conventions for SharePoint or some permanent filing system? Bro, this is absolutely a thing that we should crowdsource. What is the naming convention that every accounting firm should use? That is totally a thing that we should build. It doesn't exist yet. And I'm sorry that in the year of our Lord 2026, I have not made this yet. Let's do it. Do you have like strong opinions on what this should look like? I would actually love to hear from you. Shoot me a message or leave a comment or something like that. What should the naming convention B. I would say any naming convention is better than no naming convention because there isn't probably a perfect universally great answer. But if I could give you an answer and you could run with it, that's easier than having to build your own, probably. Thank you for the question. That is a thing that we will build. Last one. Longtime listener, first-time caller. Any particular vendor that you like to help manage a bill pay service for clients? Appreciate the work you do. When they say manage a bill pay service for clients, I'm assuming software to do bill pay, not like a managed service provider. Like you can partner with companies that will do payroll for your clients. I assume they're not talking about that BillPay, like they will do BillPay for your clients, you're talking about actual software platforms. My progression right here on BillPay is you only pull in additional tools when they're necessary. And so the first BillPay tool that everybody has access to in some capacity is what BillPay does their bank support. Old coddrely banks, this is super sucky. Better banks now honestly have a really good built-in BillPay. I use Mercury, they're sponsor of the channel. I used them before they were a sponsor of the channel. Their built-in BillPay is pretty darn good. And in many cases will be enough for simple cash basis businesses. Businesses. Beyond that, step 2 for most firms now is to look at a card management layer like Ramp, which has even beefier bill pay. Ramp also sponsor the channel, but there's really nothing else like them. I mean, they're the fastest growing fintech of all time. At my live events, I ask people to raise their hands if they use Ramp, and now probably 30 to 40% of the accounting firms in the room at my live events are Ramp users. Ramp has a very good, completely free bill pay, but I would still only use it if the banking bill pay was not enough. But that can get you really, really far. The platform I love after that, and they've sponsored the channel for a while too, is MakersHub who have been employing AI and automating complex AP workflows for the last 3, 4 years. They are big time AI nerds in a way that very few companies were early in sort of the AI stuff. They're gonna be overkill for a lot of use cases, but I had clients where we did like receiving and inventory management and stuff like that where this would've probably automated 80% of the work that we did for that client because it just takes the automation and extraction of what you can do from complex invoices and receipts receipts to a whole new level. I don't, if you know a tool that does this better than Maker's Hub, let me know. I haven't found one. You got a lot of, I think, outdated companies in the AP space. Like Bill obviously is very, very long in the teeth and overpriced for what it does. Melio, Melio, the novelty used to be that it's free and then they started charging, they made everybody mad and then Xero acquired them and that felt like it was like 4 years later than it should have been. Used to have this exploding category of all these different bill pay tools and a lot of it is consolidated back to where's the spend already happening? Can my bank do it? Great. If not, can my spend management platform do it? Usually Ramp. Great. Only at that point do I need to pull in a tool for really complex stuff. And the ecosystem as it used to exist, like Melio, Bill, stuff like that, it doesn't do really complex stuff. Like the stuff that Bill does, most people are now just using Ramp for. And beyond that, you want more of a specialist tool that will like really get into the weeds and do really crazy detailed extraction. So my take here, start with the bank. That doesn't work, go to the spend management layer. That's literally free now if you're using Ramp. Ramp's actually going international now too. I, they were US only for a long time. If you're in a different country, see if, if you could still use Ramp. But then third, what I really like right now is, is Maker's Hub, because I haven't seen anybody that goes to the level of automation that they do when it comes to both extraction off of invoices, but also really gnarly approval workflows. Thanks for the question. If you got a question, pop that thing down in the comments, gang. Looking smart today. Great to see y'all. Appreciate you tuning in. We're gonna do this again, all right? And I'm gonna see you there, okay? Take care. Bye.