619 The NEW AI Agent Approach for Accounting Firms [An entirely new AI agent platform for firms]

In the last 3 weeks, we have gotten 7 new AI agent platforms built specifically for accounting firms. It has been wild to watch one company after the other. They're shipping the same thing, and it has me thinking, is Cloud the long-term home for where we build our agents or something else? Also today, what should accounting firms be working on this summer? Like in the ebbs and flows of the seasons, what should we be doing right now? We'll also cover what software you should absolutely avoid inside your accounting firm right now. I'll tell you how to tell if a new AI software product is real or not. And what do you do when Claude is making mistakes in the work that you're giving it to do for your firm? I'm gonna tell you all about it. Okay, come on in. Let's do it. How do you do, fellow accountants? My name is Jason Staats. Welcome to the Jason on Firms podcast. Podcast where we talk all things accounting firm running, whether you own one, whether you work at one. Come on in alongside fellow accounting firm maxers. So this new AI agent platform stuff for accounting firms, what am I talking about? You could understand how maybe Claude is not the forever home for us to build agents for our accounting firms. Like, I worked with like around 100 companies managing their month-end close, and you can see a world where it's like connecting Claude to 100 and however many different, like, client QuickBooks files and then building agents for each of those files. Maybe that's not realistic. Maybe not a scalable way to build agents inside of our accounting practices. And that's why we're seeing now almost an entirely new AI agent tech category emerge right before our very eyes. Let me run you through these 7 launches that are very, very similar. Definitely companies following what other companies are doing and think about like, is, is this real? Like, is this the future of where we build our AI agents? I can say the first place that I saw this in the wild was Ramp's launch of what they call Stack. Ramp, if you're not familiar, it's a card management platform. They also do do free bill pay. Uh, I'm a Ramp user myself, solves a bunch of workflow headaches around just kind of bookkeeping stuff. But Stack is like a, a whole new product that they've built just for accounting firms. I did do some sponsored content around it. That's not why we're talking about it today. Why we're talking about it is that now 7 companies have launched something similar to it. But think of it like a place to manage, uh, one-time and recurring tasks for your bookkeeping clients. But then under every single task, you can assign an agent to do the task and build skills for these agents. That can exist either at the firm level or even be customized down to the client level. So imagine, if you will, say you're doing monthly books for a company each month. When that kicks over, you've got all these pre-designed little agents to handle every single task that is involved in the month-end close, or at least as many as possible, so that those tasks contain these sort of micro agents that are going and doing that work. If you've been thinking about where this agent stuff goes for a while, when you hear this, you're like, this was almost inevitable, right? That, that your tasks simply be, uh, assigned to an AI agent rather than a human. Ramp launches this as their answer for like, hey, this isn't just even a way to just get the month-end close done, but it is a platform that you can build any sort of agent on top of that your accounting firm needs to do everything from client onboarding to closing the books. Now, Digits, uh, AI accounting ledger platform, they launched what they call Agentic Close. I will have links to every one of these things we're talking about down in the show notes. The idea is that there is part of— parts of the month-end close process that can simply be assigned out to an agent. In this case, they're giving you these agents that not only can run at month-end but sort of throughout the month to validate the stuff that's happening in the accounting file sort of against your own sort of checklists and instructions. Again, this is built totally for accounting firms and is like agents augmented in the ledger itself. This is really cool and totally the thing where you're like, let you got this stick out, you know, this the meme where you poke in the thing with the stick You're like into it, do something. Looks really interesting. Looks really interesting. It is Digits' take on like what AI agents being part of the close process ought to look like. Pilot, who's like a productized bookkeeping and tax company that's now starting to get into serving accounting firms. They've been around for a while. Pilot launched Meridian. If you Google Pilot Meridian, the first couple of results are the Piper Meridian, a small aircraft, and the Pilot Flying J truck stop in Meridian, Mississippi. I'm not talking about either of those. This is a new thing from Pilot. Scale your practice, not your payroll. Meridian runs the month-end close. Your team reviews finished books, takes on more clients, and gets back to growing the firm. Feels generic, man. The idea is you, you connect everything that you need for the month-end close to Meridian and gives you this sort of step-by-step process where you can pull agents in to sort of verify the different things that need to go into the close. The idea is like Pilot has built some of their own tooling for their own— Pilot is kind of like a more premium version of Bench, if you're familiar with Bench. They built their own tooling for doing bookkeeping and tax work for the folks that they support. And now some of that infrastructure they're exposing to accounting firms for accounting firms to be able to leverage. But all of the copy in here, very similar to the last two solutions we've talked about. Enter Puzzle, another accounting ledger company with Puzzle AI Close, the close at agent speed. AI Close agents execute the close process your accountant's design. You control the system. Your team approves every outcome. Starting to, starting to notice a trend here yet? How about Canopy Coworker? Coworker is like a built-in AI assistant inside of Canopy, the practice management system. And while it's not framed as like a month-end close agent, Canopy is in the process of rolling out like month-end close management inside of Canopy. And the idea behind Coworker is it can work across anything inside of Canopy. This is about 2 weeks old now. You can see a world where it's like, yeah, no, Coworker can work across kind of all the admin stuff in the firm, but also even into month-end tasks. I don't know if it does that specifically. Yet. I don't think it does, but it is another example of kind of like an AI agent canvas firms are building on. Mercury, the banking platform, just a couple days ago they launched— what do they call it? Command. Mercury Command. Orchestrate your finances. AI that drives financial work end-to-end, built directly into your Mercury account. Hand off tasks to Command, review and approve every action, say what you need and the work gets done. Which is when we're talking about like a bank, it's not technically a bank, it's like a neobank, But that is a little— it's high stakes, right? Cutting an agent loose to, I don't know, move money around. Which brings me to Double, who was like kind of the first one maybe 5, 6 years ago to build a dedicated platform for month-end close management at scale. Like, where do I manage 100 month-end closes? Tons of bookkeepers now use Double for this, and Double has historically shied away from the whole like razzle-dazzle AI copy because they're like, We don't want to— like, almost as soon as we start leaning into AI marketing hype, it makes our tool feel maybe less legitimate. Like, they didn't want to sink to that level because they already had kind of the leading tool for month-end close management. Their landing page now: Put AI to work on your month-end close. So nobody can escape the AI vacuum at this point. But they've just— I mean, they've already got a system for automating month-end closes and they've already been pulling like various cool AI elements into that, like using AI creating a task where you can use AI to like generate a journal entry from a bunch of different reports that go into one entry or something like that. And so all of these are like some combination of a place like to manage a month-end close that the agents can support within, or like Ramp Stack is like framed more in a more open-ended way as like this is just the platform for running any sort of agent that your accounting firm needs. And we're going to wire up whatever, whatever connections you need to our platform so that the agents can work across those tools. And it is like a direct shot across the bow of Claude because so many accountants now are just going so hard on, on Claude. In my live workshops that, like the tour that we're just now wrapping up, a third to a half of the people in every room report they're using Claude every day. And that's obviously a pretty nerdy audience. The people that are showing up to my live events and is not representative of the entire profession. But it makes you think, is— I mean, is this the more realistic home for us to start building and managing agents at volume inside of our accounting firms? Quite possibly, especially if you think about what's it look like to do this across an entire team. Right now, Claude doesn't give you a real useful, like, command center for managing all those agents and knowing who's building what, as opposed to this being something that's kind of like layered into that task management. I guess a more traditional task management interface where you can see the 20 things that have to be done to complete the close, particularly as we're in this phase of, well, there's some things the agents can do, but there's many things the human still has to do, either because the agent's bad at it or because the human has to be the one to fetch the information or something like that. For those agent tasks to sit alongside the human tasks, like we still need a place to sort of organize and plan all of that work. But if the agent can happen, can do that work there, awesome. That's great. Now I still think you have the limitation of will it ultimately be as performant as the very coolest, most powerful things that you can build in cloud? Almost certainly not, because a lot of the magic of cloud right now is all of the things that the app is doing that cannot be done just by working with Anthropic's API, which is what all of these tools are doing. It's also further create, like further increasing the divide potentially between the tools that are doing the work and the tools that are managing. The work. So practice management systems, historically, it's like the 10,000-foot view of like high-level project management, maybe time and billing, uh, CRM, stuff like that, client portal. But in the last few years, we got a whole new class of tools that I've historically called workflow tools that are tools that are actually doing the work. And they're so good, you can't ignore them because you already have a tool to manage the work. The tool that manages the work is usually not going to be the one that does the work. And if you had to pick one of those two things, you would probably pick the tool that does the work because then you don't have to do the work, or at least saves you a bunch of time in the doing of the work, right? The only example here of a company that's kind of both is Canopy with Coworkers kind of trying to do both. I guess Double has evolved into a bit more of a practice management system too, and they're like the definition of a workflow tool. They started like at the general ledger line item, like that's where the tool began. But I'm fascinated by these tools. In fact, if you've banged around in any of these yet, would love to hear from you in the comments. I don't think anything here is like to the level of this is life-changing yet. There's a little bit of a cold start problem here as well, where with these platforms, it's admittedly a bit of a lift for you to build the agents to do this stuff close by close. Like, I don't know what your month-end close is. Look like, at least until we had niched more of the business into dental, our closes were very different from company to company. And if it means going in and having to build bespoke agents for every single close, that's quite a bit of work, right? That's not really the platform's fault as much as it is my fault in the positioning of the firm and trying to do too many things. But reality is that's where most firms are right now. But if you've gone deep on this stuff at this point, drop a comment. Would love to see how far you've been able to take this stuff, because it is interesting to think that these could potentially become something like the sort of command station for where all of our agents are working from in the future. I could definitely see an argument for it to be a platform for accounting firms where, like, my team has sort of more selective access to who can create the agents and who manages the agents and can see the agent runs and all of that stuff versus us trying to cobble all that stuff together in Claude and then somehow roll it out to a team. Like a lot of us are struggling with that right now. I'm excited for this. I don't really know what to call this category of tool because most of them are coming at it from a specific angle. Like if you look at Digits or Puzzle, they're accounting ledgers, but then they're saying here are these agents to do the month-end close. And the month-end close historically has been managed in an entirely different tool than the ledger. Like the ledger is for getting to the point of issuing reports, but has not necessarily been an effective platform to manage the month-end close. Like where do I put the documentation that I'm tying out the balance sheet accounts to? How am I requesting information from clients? That's not something historically that the general ledger tool has supported, and so we've had to look to other tools and other systems to manage the actual month-end close. It's really just the posting of the transactions that's happening inside the accounting ledger. So Digits and Puzzle, they are accounting ledgers that are giving you a way to manage the close. Canopy is a practice management system. Mercury is a bank, and that's more oriented around like the management of money, although they actually did say they, they have like a little baby sort of accounting ledger built into Mercury. And so this, this agent will work on transaction classification as well. Pilot is putting forth sort of like a sort of complete platform for how to get month-end closes done. And then Ramp, a lot of the marketing is around like, hey, here's how these agents can, can do the month-end close, but it's a little more open-ended where you can also just use it for like any sort of ongoing agentic stuff you have going on inside your account. Accounting firm. And it's honestly, it's confusing, isn't it? It's like, goodness sakes, do I want this feature from my accounting ledger tool? Do I want it from, you know, say Double, the tool that I use to manage my closes? Do I want it from, you know, Ramp is like the card management layer, but it's also a bill pay system. Like, who do I actually want this functionality from? And oftentimes it's hard in this situation not to sit back and cross your arms and be like, well, I'll wait until this person gives it to me. I will remind you of what people said when ChatGPT came out. They said they were gonna wait and not use ChatGPT until they could get it, you know, in their practice management system or until, you know, the accounting ledger will roll out a version of ChatGPT that will be useful to me. How's that going? How's that? How's it? We are now how many years past the launch of ChatGPT? Still waiting on that. It's been 84 years. There's a version of this where we just sit back and we're like, no, I think I just want this from my practice management system, a good version of it. And you could be waiting. You might be waiting a while. Hard to know what the right thing to do is. But if you had to play with these, let me know in the comments. Maybe this is an argument for a better accounting ledger. The fact that the month-end close has never been a part of the accounting ledger. Maybe this just— maybe we are anchoring too much to QuickBooks' feature set and just assuming that the ledger can only ever be what QuickBooks is. Maybe there's an argument for, like, the AI layer across the top of all of our other apps. We've talked about that a lot. Maybe this is the beginnings of this that we're about to see, but things are hotting up. We're getting agents built into all sorts of the different tools that we use. And probably at the same time, a bigger and bigger delta between the companies that are pushing hard on this stuff and the companies who are not. Will be an interesting one to follow. You know, we'll be here talking about it. Also, keep plugged into my app recommendations. Like, that is where you get the most up-to-date information on what of this stuff is working for people right now and what isn't. Most of that is sourced from my private community, Realize. We got 850 firms in there sharing real stories about what's working, what's not working, and viewers like you telling me in the comments, uh, what you're loving, what you're not having success with yet. Will be a fun one to follow, but let's talk about the seasons of running an accounting firm. Roast a firm. Roast a firm. Let's roast a firm. I'm Jason Staats. I'm Firms. Listener question: Jason, curious what you see the annual cycle of a firm looking like. I'm up to my earballs— up to my earballs in work right now, but what should I be working on in the summer? I will assume this person is in the land of the free. It's summer in America right now. Don't know what season it is anywhere else in the world. 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, 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 forward 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. 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 all 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 FinancialSense. 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 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 or 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. Let me give you 7 things that should be happening in summer because this ought to be the time of the year when you take a break, not over the end of the calendar year. That is a bad time to take a break. Sure, take the holiday and all that, but there is big, expensive, important things happening that time of the year. Summer is when we should be taking a break. All right. Let me give you 7 things I want you to think about doing this summer. Number 1, simply taking a break and touching grass. Getting out from behind the battle station. I know it's hard to do. You step away from the machine and you're like, I don't know if you're like me, you're like a little twitchy, like, like I'm holding my breath until I can get back to my computer. You got to be away from the computer long enough for that to go away because that's not a healthy level of connection. And if you find yourself in a spot where you feel chained to your desk, either because you got a bunch of little baby birds that work for you and you got to feed them every day Or the clients can only talk to you. We got to work through those problems. Like if you're in a situation where you literally can't not work, that's not a great place to find yourself. Second thing to be thinking about is if you have children or a family, if you're going to give them any of your time and attention, this is probably the best time to do it. I tell you what, my— this is the first year my kids have been in school all day. They are so busy, like they've got lives of their own. Like I will— I, I remember I mean, before they were in school, it was like, hey, we can go on a trip, we can go to this fun thing, we go to that fun thing. Nope, not anymore. It's like they're all working full-time jobs. I'll be— I'm— we're just wrapping up this tour, so I've been traveling a lot, but I'll come home. I'll call home. And if I can get them to answer, they'll tell me what they're doing. And they're like, Dad, I got to get back to— I got to— I'm in the middle of something. I'm like, right, right, right. Sorry. Sorry to interrupt. Summer. This is a good time to make those lasting, lasting memories. Right. Third thing to be doing in the summer. Big tech change should be happening now. The big lift stuff, the hard stuff. We should be working through that during the summer. Not after the fall tax deadline, not as we're nearing year-end. Don't be such an accountant and make changes on the calendar year cutoff. That is an arbitrary thing that us accountants love to do. But there are so many other more important client-facing things that need to happen around that time of the year, namely renewals and setting the price at which people will work with you, like very high-stakes stuff for the overall health of the business. If you have big hard tech change, You need to go through that stuff now so that by the time you're running into battle next season, everything is settled on the tech front. And I know it's hard to make a decision, but at a certain point you got to make a decision. I was talking with someone at an event the other night who's just kind of like paralyzed between several different systems. The best way you can make a confident decision is to have peers who've been through the same decision-making process, who are using these different platforms and can give you like the real story about what they do and what they don't do. If you don't have those peers, it's the entire reason my online accounting firm community exists called Realize. 850 firms in there. We run meetups every couple of months on all the major platforms where people come in and share how they're using that stuff. To simply have a place to ask the question and get answers from people who are real users will save you years of headaches, uh, thousands of dollars of not zigzagging onto the wrong solutions. Honestly, you make one bad big tech decision, it will set you back a year plus. But then many people compound that with yet another bad decision after that. There is so much value in having access to really high quality answers. If you don't have that place yet, find it, man, because you need it. Thing number 4 you should be doing in the summer: systems work should be happening now. And this is not the same as tech change. I'm talking what are the systems, the expectations of the human beings for as long as we have them in our accounting firms? Do we have clarity on like how exactly they're supposed to be doing all this work and how does that fit around the tech tools? That we use. We're in a really weird time right now where the paradigm is shifting from all my humans take the lead on the work and then I pull in tech to help the humans. That paradigm is flipping where instead we have to first say, what can an AI agent do? And then it is arguably our humans that are supporting that. We have, uh, AI now that is good enough to take the lead on production work in our accounting firm, not these little side sort of assisting sort of things, but literally driving the production work. How do we lean into that and how do we build systems around those where humans can ensure everything is flowing through correctly and coming out the other side the way it needs to? I can't tell you as I'm recording this how crushed I am that I do not have access to the Fable model in Claude and this whole drama around Claude releasing the model and then the US government saying, no, no, no, no, no, this model is too good. But I will tell you what the, what is it, the G7 summit or something like that that's going on right now. For the three world's three biggest AI leaders to come to the G7 summit and have that conversation with world leaders. What a fascinating dynamic to, to consider where the power in the world is right now. Imagine a world where AI goes the path a lot of us think that it will, and these three people are sharing a stage literally with world leaders. Like, I don't know if it's necessarily that they are peers, but for this whole thing to have gotten to the level of importance where all of those people are talking together and you've got 3 AI leaders that sort of control this stuff. Yikes. Ooh. If I go back to the founding of, of the country that I live in, when we got on the boats and, and we came over and we were tired of sending the tributes back to the motherland. And we made this system of government that said, hey, we're going to have 50 states. It wasn't, it wasn't 50 states at that point, but we're going to have like states that govern themselves and then the country kind of over the top of that. And we got a nice little balance of people looking out for their own interests. Are we really heading to a, to a timeline where 3 companies control like the world's best AI models and they are all, I don't know, for-profit companies that are just about to airdrop server farm in your backyard. Whoo! What a time to be alive. I am getting excited for space stuff again, though. You know, just as soon as, like, space stuff becomes cheap and accessible. I mean, so much cool stuff from tourism to, like, the mining of minerals on asteroids like that is a whole other frontier of commerce and accounting and tax complication to a literal land grab. And we're going to need accountants for that. What a fun podcast that would be, right? I got down this weird rabbit hole of— what's it called? A podcast, The Price of Football. So it's all around like how like player contracts and soccer work and how clubs have to follow these financial rules and all this stuff. And it's all incredibly complex. And as you can imagine, making the most of these financial rules within like the English football pyramid, for example, has a real impact on like being able to buy better players and how you sell your players. And oftentimes there's violations of these rules that lead to like points deductions where the football club literally is being competitively hurt by not following these financial rules. And I'm just going like, man, there are so many accountants propping up these leagues because the rules are so incredibly complex. But I hope I live long enough to do this for space stuff. Oh, man. Ooh, tax compliance with space stuff. But just point of sale, collecting sales tax on Mars. Not just Mars, but this one part of Mars, because there's this county on Mars where there's like a different rate if you're there. But then you layer that in with the Mars rate. But that part of Mars is controlled by Australia. Ooh, that's going to be exciting compliance. We're going to put— we're going to post like a clip of just this segment to YouTube at some point. This whole thing's going to get clipped out. If you're a listener of the podcast, what this is, these are the gifts that you get by being the real ones that will come and hang out for 60 minutes listening to the full thing. So first thing was taking a break, touching grass. Second thing was reconnecting with the humans in your life that are more important than your job. Third thing was big tech changes should be happening right now. Fourth, systems work, how your humans interact with that tech in the process. Fifth, right now is a terrible time to market your accounting firm, but this is the time when we need to be planning marketing efforts. The reality is the rest of the world, the last thing in the world they want to be thinking about right now is you and I, accounting and tax, because there's no pressing deadlines. We're kind of in the middle of the year where it's like, oh, we're not maybe far enough into the year to do much planning yet. This is a really hard time of the year to get people's attention, but we should still be laying the groundwork for when we need to do that. And that might mean making your website not suck. It might mean thinking about messaging for a more specific type of client. There— it's really funny. There are firms— there's such a delta right now between firms that have used Claude to build their website and those who have not. It's a huge step and it's plainly obvious as soon as you get to the website, you're like, wow, yep, they built this site with Claude. And then there's everybody else. If you haven't done it yet, can't recommend it enough. We actually have a video on my main channel around Claude Design, which is what you should use to build your website. It's so bloody good. We made a whole accounting firm website. In like a similar branding theme to Bluey, and the company, the firm's name is called a Crewy, and we do construction stuff. It's as dumb and equal parts dumb and as exciting as that sounds. But your marketing efforts— none of us want to do marketing, okay? We get that. And I usually don't even use the M word. But while many firms don't need more clients, every firm needs better clients. And so once you have understood, here's my A client, here's the type of people I need to find more of, we have to be putting forth some sort of effort to attract those even if your client list is full, because the solution for a firm that's at capacity or for not being able to pay people enough or the firm not being profitable enough or something like that, the solution is always better clients. And most firms today, most accountants today remain professionally invisible because we quote unquote don't do marketing or quote unquote have never had to do marketing. We rely entirely upon referrals. Quit coming after me, Jason Staats. Sorry, that's things we should be doing in summer. 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 you know, 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, MakerSubs 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, inventory management, whatever that is, 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, 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 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 wanna see it. But to learn more about Sortman, check out the link down in the show notes. Number 6, hiring. This is a great time to get, get those humans on board. Uh, hiring during like going into busy season, that is, that's, that's a tough thing to do, but this is a great time to start getting people acclimated and, and knowing who you got. Most frustrating part of hiring is you'll put months into sourcing a hire and then, uh, they come in on your first day and you're like, oof, not sure about this one. And then you'll get like 3 months in and you're like, oof, definitely not sure about this one. And then you're like, do I really have to start the hiring process all over again? That is very common, which is yet another argument to start that process now instead of right before busy season. Last thing, number 7, is going somewhere that's not behind your desk to do some thinking. Work thinking. There's something about like being in the routine of where you normally work and the apps that you normally use and all of that that just lock you into this tunnel vision. And then you go to a different place like a conference or just even like a retreat, a hang with other people that do this stuff, and you just realize how much you limit yourself just based on the systems and the clients you have today. You have these conversations with other people and you're like, we've been doing it this way for 25 years and I have no idea why. And that, that is now such an obvious change that we need to make. For whatever reason, that stuff just doesn't happen when you're sat at your desk. And so for sure, like I would say item number 1, taking a break, touching grass, like that is fully unplugging. Item number 7 is the work unplug, maybe just the desk unplug. Like go somewhere to think about work, but don't be where you normally work. Conferences can help here, but what I'd love to see more of, and we've thought about doing some of these ourselves, are just like retreats, like experiences where you just go and you hang with other firm people. If you'd be into that, I've thought about putting that, that sort of thing together. Um, it'd be fun, and I, I think there would be a market for it. It's very hard to build like an experiential thing where everyone would be into that thing, but just having time with other people that do this stuff, that's really nice. Like, not like sitting and having to watch a bunch of people's slide decks, but just the version where like you just go somewhere nice and just, just kind of I know if you'd be into that, drop a comment. Summer, it's an opportunity. Make the most of it. How many years have you, uh, started getting into busy season and you're like, holy smokes, how am I here again already? I never even came up for air. This is your chance, man. Come up for air. Unless for you right now it's winter, in which case, I don't know what to tell you. Come up for air, go down for air if you're in the Southern Hemisphere. I'm not sure. Let's get into the mailbag. Mailbag. Mailbag. This segment is called Questions are sourced from YouTube comments, from social media DMs, from my emails, from my cellular telephone. My number is 1-516-980-4968. Operators are standing by. First question: any software to completely avoid at this point? Yes. Most, most software should be completely avoided. There's so much software for accounting firms. It's outrageous and it is getting worse by the day. Interesting. Like when I talk about software recommendations, it's mainly for the US North American market. Other markets are very different. The UK market, for example, has even more tools than the US market has for a much, much smaller market, like in terms of total number of accounting firms. So all that is to say, if you feel overwhelmed at the number of apps right now, it's It's more likely to get worse than I think it is to get better. But people, this is why my app recommendations exist. Jasononfirms.com/apps. It's the most viewed thing of anything that I do. That's actually probably not true anymore because a lot of people watch our AI videos. But for folks in accounting firms, that is how a lot of people find me is my app recommendations. And the entire purpose of the app recommendations is to let you filter out like the 95% of apps that you don't need to bother looking at. Not yet. And this is a hard thing to do, to like say like, who are the leaders right now? Because there are, there are platforms that are very obviously the laggards and over the hill and will never be good. But then there's a ton of tools where it's like, they just haven't gotten there yet. Like, no software tool comes out of the womb incredible and ready for everyone on day one. So for me, I have to be careful not to like, I can't really, I shouldn't speak down about those platforms because those like new tools that are still figuring it out are the tools that are the leaders in the future. But the whole point of those app recommendations is to show you what are the trusted tools where firms are having a huge amount of success with them. I am in a position where I feel like I probably have more conversations and more access to accounting firms than maybe anyone else in the world right now. And so I hear things, I see things, I get the stories. I can go to my private community, as you can, and type any software tool you want in the search box and see so much real information from real firm owners. I mean, I can't mention a tool on social media or make a video about a tool without getting a whole ton of unsolicited feedback on everyone's stories of like, this tool worked for me, this tool is great, this tool sucked, which is awesome. And we then like channel all that stuff as best as we can into a concise list of recommendations for you. But it is still very common. I'll meet people in person or they will pose the question of like, I'm so frustrated, like this, this tool isn't any good. And I'm like, yep, nope, that's— I could have told you that's why I don't recommend it. And most of the time they are tools that are cool and exciting, but not there yet. There's a lot of marketing around them, but they're just not yet real. To that end, next question. Jason, your post on Phantom AI products from influencers hit hard. You said that you sell airtime only to the best products. What's the number one software company you refuse to endorse and what changed their approach? What changed their approach? Who's the number one software company I refuse to endorse? I don't know. Who's the number one company in the space? You can guess. I don't know if there's anybody in the space we haven't talked with at this point, but I posted on LinkedIn just about the number of problematic product endorsements that are happening now. And I worry maybe I may have made this problem worse myself to a degree because software companies see the value in working with quote unquote influencers. Accounting firms buy on social trust like it's a huge, huge thing. But I would argue people buy the things I recommend because they can trust my recommendation. Recommendations. Like people that first see my channel and all that stuff, there's an inherent distrust, which anyone ought to have because most online personalities, like they are selling whoever will give them money. Like not unlike the accounting firm stuff that we talk about. Like most accounting firms, your threshold for working with a client is, do you have money? And online creators are the same way. But the reason people will still trust my recommendations is that is never how we've run things around here. In fact, I found a financial model. From the beginning that let me produce content and have a team to help with all this stuff that wasn't reliant upon sponsors. It was the community, realized from the beginning, that funded all this stuff. And that was at a time when the only other people putting out thought leadership content were reliant upon brands, reliant upon, you know, QuickBooks or Xero affiliate money, that sort of thing. But when I would go out and I would watch that stuff, I'm like, I just, I can't trust the independence of this person because it's inherently compromised. I think especially around affiliate revenue stuff where where people get paid when people sign up for that platform. I've never done affiliate revenue for that reason. We sell airtime, we sell ads, we sell commercials, that sort of thing, and only to the platforms that we recommend. So we go out and we recommend platforms, and then we do outbound to those brands to say, do you wanna sponsor our stuff? Everyone else gets turned away. Maybe 40% of the platforms that we recommend now, we do sponsorship stuff with. We have stopped recommending people who are actively advertising with us, and we've bumped all sorts of people up into our leaders category who've never done anything with us. I also say all sorts of bad things about people that sponsor our stuff. Stuff, and that is very clearly spelled out in the agreements. You sponsoring my stuff doesn't make me any more or less likely to not speak badly of you. Now, as a rule, we don't really speak poorly of anyone besides Thomson Reuters, and to a lesser degree Intuit, but there's a lot of other people out there now, like firm owners but also like thought leaders. If you're on social media much, that are like, it's post after post after post about these different brands. And the trouble is a lot of these brands don't have products And I think some of the success of what we've done and you all buying the things that I recommend have increased the market and the belief in like, oh, we just, we gotta get some thought leaders who will talk about our stuff. And then I will not talk about their stuff. So they then go to other people who will happily talk about their stuff. And it's just, I want people to put more thought into this, like recommending, endorsing that thing that people are gonna have a negative experience with. Like, don't, don't do that, man. And I think I am living proof that there are plenty of brands out there doing really cool and amazing things with an abundance of marketing spend to enable whatever silly thing, whatever useful thing it is you want to create for our space. Literally somebody could launch a brand, thought leadership brand, work with all the exact same sponsors I do. Like there's plenty of budget out there to go around. I just don't want people to take money from the platforms that like people shouldn't be using yet. It is hard enough for y'all to understand like what tools are worth using and what tools are not. But then you see somebody that you trust endorse something and you're like, whoa, that complicates things, right? We have, there haven't been many examples of this, but we've dropped platforms when people are like, hey, this actually isn't any good. I literally went out and became a co-owner in one platform when people are like so, so positive about it, the staffing company, Cloud Account Staffing. But anyone endorsing something, as a rule, we should know that doesn't necessarily mean it's any good, right? The best sort of endorsements are from your peers. So if you can see a bunch of people that are happy users of it, that is the endorsement that you need. That's ultimately how I build my recommendations and decide who we're gonna partner with. And as soon as they're not any good, see you later, sucka. That is the great news is there's enough companies in our space where, I mean, I've got a team of 15 people now. And so if you'd wanna do thought leadership stuff in the accounting firm space, if you just wanna do this stuff on the side while you're running an accounting firm, there are plenty of brands. That, that firms are raving fans of that will happily partner with you to make whatever you want to kind of breathe into life happen, which is cool. Obviously, I'm very thankful for that. Hey Jason, do you have any experience or know any firms that use Instead? So Instead, the big thing they're pushing right now is like a whole new tax prep software. We're thinking about trying it out, and I thought I would check with the Oracle of Accounting Tech and see if you've heard anything good or bad about it. I would— all I will say is it's still very, very early. Early. Instead, it's pushing people to like, don't renew your tax software. And I— we all want this to be true so badly, right? We are all just positively frothing for a better tax software option. But it's still early. I would say give it a try and let me know what you think. But it is also way too early to burn the boats, the boats being the traditional tax prep software platforms we've used in the past. Um, instead, they're doing more than tax software. They're doing kind of workflow on either side of the tax software as well. Which I don't know if that's a good thing for the ecosystem or not. If the only way that I can buy my next bit of tax software is to also buy like all the workflow stuff around it, that's almost then becoming like an all-in-one platform, and it's very hard to do all things good. But I don't know, maybe too early to call on that. Once we have like next-generation tax software, that might change the landscape of what tax workflow looks like so much that the current categories that things slot into, that might end up actually looking something totally different. But instead, uh, if you're interested in it, give it a try, let me know what you think. But as you'll see in my app recommendations, right now it is not to the level where I think you can reasonably cut the platforms that we're using today. And I, and I hope that changes. Next up, am I totally missing it? Have you commented on SmartVault? I've looked all over the app recommendations and I can't find it. SmartVault, I don't recommend it because right now I don't recommend at all any sort of document management platform. And there's actually a pretty US specific thing. In other markets, you have these platforms that are like document management is all they do, and then they build these workflows around document management. In the land of the free, this is something that's been taken over by our practice management systems. Document management now is just kind of a feature as part of a larger system. But interestingly, these big practice management systems that we have in the US, like, those, like, don't really exist in other markets, at least not to the same degree. Karbonn is probably the most international practice management system that there is, but Carbon doesn't really have its own file management system. And this is because elsewhere in the world, a lot of firms use a dedicated standalone document management system, but that doesn't really exist in the States. And so in the US, if you're using TaxDome or, or Canopy or Keeper or Financial Sense or something like that, file management is just like, that's just part of the practice management system. Being able to request a file from the client, create a share link of a file, you do all that stuff from your practice management. Management system. So SmartVault, there was a time when that sort of thing was necessary, but anymore it's really just part of the practice management system. Should I put SmartVault in the app recommendations simply to say never use it? Most people listening to this would probably say yes. I don't— I have a hard time going out of my way to try to torpedo something. I maybe feel a little less bad about SmartVault because it is a pretty, like, late in its cycle, like, mature product Ultimately, I work for accountants, not software companies. Like, that is kind of the North Star. So maybe we need to revisit that. The trouble is that is just a, um, Pandora's box of things people never should be using. And very quickly, the app recommendations could just turn into Jason Staats' shit list. And I don't know, I don't want to put that energy into the universe. But to the point of this question, maybe we do need to do that. Hey, I know you love I don't know if you love Cloud Cowork 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 closed 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 give you a $75 gift card. Gift card to Bed Bath Beyond. What's that? Okay, I'm, 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, and demoing. Do it! What do you got to lose? Hey, real quick, I want to invite you to my super excellent weekly newsletter. My newsletter was like the start of my thought leadership journey. It's where I try to collect what I think are the most important things for you to see every single week, sent to you every Wednesday morning. Make sure you don't miss any of the good stuff, right? Increasingly, we're also building into that some, like, of the best evergreen thought leadership I've ever done, kind of make that, like, the most action-packed, highest quality email you get to your inbox each week. Because listen, we're all busy, all right? You're not 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, jasononfirms.com I'll put a link to it down in the show notes. Jason Staats, good day. Good day to you, sir. I completed demos in TaxDome, Canopy, Firm360, and Count. I run a 3-person firm. If you had to lean on the simplest to use with easy setup, which one would you lean on? Stop trying to make me make your decisions for you. Can I add a bit of seasoning to this? I wish, and I wish there was one system that was better than all the others. There just isn't. Like people, it's amazing. The same platform, 4 different accountants will go to it and have 4 wildly different opinions about it because we all approach running firms so differently. And it's why I can't— I mean, we've reduced our practice management system leaders down to only 4 platforms, and I'm very proud of that. But there really is no universal answer here. But I would say don't sleep on using the system that your friends use. If you have other people you're close with that run accounting firms on a specific platform, that might be the right answer for you because you can literally ask those people anytime, hey, what are you doing for this? What are you doing for that? That can pave over a whole bunch of potholes and what might be limitations in the system if you have a network of other folks that use that stuff. Also, I mean, it makes your life so much easier if you can pull in a third-party implementer to get this set up and to also ask questions of that maybe your friends can't answer. And so the most used platforms, have a bit of a little private ecosystem of like these third parties that don't work for the software companies, but will help you do your implementation and have done this for 50 to 100 other accounting firms. That being said, with your list here, TaxDome, Canopy, Firm360, and Qount, there is a more robust ecosystem for TaxDome and Canopy than there are the other two. This is simply because they have a bunch more users, and so there's more support around it. It's easier to find other people that use it. Doesn't mean the platform's any better. But by having that support system, you will be more effective with that tool. And so either of those that you go to, I could connect you with an implementer and that will make a world of difference in the, in your experience of getting onto a tool. The incentives of the first-party implementers at these companies are super messed up. We've all had that experience of salespeople overdelivering, and then it comes to actually getting onto the platform and you're like, boy, this was not what I expected. Like, this is pretty limited. The onboarding team, it's a bunch of idiots. I highly, highly recommend pulling in a third party that does not work for that company to help you do your onboarding, because that third party, they make their money by people having a good experience with you helping them onboard. And they will tell you the good and the bad about the company. They won't try to sugarcoat anything. They can even validate for you before you make that decision what salespeople are telling you, because they've done 50 to 100 of these implementations for other firms that can tell you what is real and what's not And so if there's two systems and one system, you know, you can pull in an implementer to help with and another system where that ecosystem just doesn't exist, then the first system is better simply because you will get more support from actual users, people with experience with the platform. We gotta remember we're not like, there's nothing new under the sun. There's other people doing what we're doing, which kind of hurts our feelings. We feel like we're doing this super unique thing, but I wasted like a decade being like, oh, I'm just like doing all this cool stuff in my garage that nobody else is doing. It's a big wide world out there with a lot of resources. Are really smart people. You're so much better off being connected with other stuff, other people that do this stuff as well, to be able to learn from them. How are you using this tool to do this thing? That's 100% the better path than trying to figure it out yourself. Last question. So occasionally Cloud makes mistakes in the classifications when I'm trying to use it for bookkeeping. In your example of using Bean Count, we did a, we did a video on this, basically how to replace QuickBooks with Cloud on very simple accounting files. In these situations, how do you update those mistakes? Do you just tell the AI to fix it, or can you reassign transactions inside of some sort of app that you create inside of Claude? This is a really big sort of mental framework, uh, mental thing to, to get your head around about how to make the most of AI. You, you just tell it, tell it what you want it to do. This is not unlike managing a team of humans where a really hard thing with, with delegation is maybe you're used to pushing all the buttons and twisting all the knobs yourself. Yourself, and that ultimately stands in the way of you being able to pull in other human beings who can contribute to what the firm is doing. Similarly with AI, don't create buttons for things where there needn't be a button. And misclassifying something, like if AI did that for you, simply tell it what it should change. You could make a button, you can make a dropdown to manually change that classification, but consider then the context that you're not giving to the cool. Like say, no, this should be this other thing because XYZ. And then the next time it encounters the same thing, it will have that valuable context from you. It is not unlike a human doing something wrong. Uh, maybe you're reviewing something for them and you just fixing it and sending it through rather than giving them a review point so they can actually learn from that. This, I mean, we're talking about the same thing with AI here. I can tell you in the world of video editing, Like we put out a huge amount, we put out, I don't know, 3 or 4 hours of video media a week. And the world of video editing is changing really, really fast with AI. And it starts with the simple stuff and, you know, the more complex stuff, uh, is kind of the most safe or slowest to change stuff. But if you look at like editing short-form videos right now, we already use an AI tool to clip Shorts out of this podcast at a really high volume. Not like, not like high volume, but I'm saying like a large number of them. And honestly, these AI clipped Shorts perform just as good as the Shorts, the short-form videos that we manually pull out and have humans edit and all that. But it goes further than that. Like you now have editing tools that Claude can use where non-editors honestly can like feed it a clip of video and be like, hey, turn this into a Short that I can go out and publish online. And so even the future of that style of editing looks like, you know, it will give you, say, a 90-second short back, and there's going to be things that you don't like about it, things just taste-wise that you would change. Like, not even technical errors, like the elements of it that you're just like, I'd rather do this or that. How do you get that fixed? You tell the AI, like you say, like, at 13 seconds, change this or that. At 57 seconds, change this or that. And it's abstracting, like, the whole, like, having to edit from the timeline and all of that stuff, and giving more creative control over for the non-technical person. Now that, that breaks down when it comes to like more technical heavy lifting stuff, like a main channel YouTube video. We're doing a bunch of graphics and explainers and stuff like that. And even this podcast, while there are tools that will like automatically clip like silences and remove duplicate takes and stuff like that, right now I don't— it doesn't quite get to the level of like how a human can dial it in. But editors are dealing with this, accountants are dealing with this. Like if you hear that and you look at the editor and you're like, oh geez, man, those poor editors, Why are they gonna need editors anymore? Realize, accountants, we are staring down the exact same thing where the future of doing the accounting work, it is not, uh, pushing every button and flipping every knob ourselves, is looking at the output and giving the AI the feedback and be like, hey, go change this, go change that. Like that is the future of, of working with AI agents. You look at software development, almost nobody writes code anymore, but you still need software engineers. We're very close to a world where no accountants are classifying transactions anymore, but we still need accountants. In certain contexts, uh, you won't be editing videos from a traditional timeline anymore, but I would say you still need editors because there's like taste that goes into how that thing gets cut together. What's something that will actually perform? Like what is worth making? We've talked about this before on the podcast. We're moving from an era of how to do to what what to do. The how to do, the barrier between like, I don't even know how to use that tool or how to make a tax return be correct or any of that. All of that is getting compressed to nothing, which leaves the what to do. What is worth doing? The fact that you can make a movie with AI right now doesn't mean that I wanna sit down and watch it. The fact that you can take a position on a tax return doesn't make it the right position to take. The fact that you gotta set up PDF financials is great, but that doesn't But without some expertise, that may not get me any closer to understanding how that data can lead to business decisions. And we're, we're gonna struggle with this. The notion that we're not gonna be pushing all those buttons ourselves. If you do a lot of delegation, you run a team and you've removed yourself from the work, you've experienced this already. That pang of like, oh, it'd be so much easier for me to just hop in and do that myself. But AI is, is gonna force us all to really be delegators. Because of the incredible amount of leverage that it gives us to kind of deploy any sort of framework at any scale. Going to be a weird time, man. But you know what? You and I are going to be here having this weird time together, hanging out, talking about space accounting. Oh, I'm so excited about that, though. Really? If that doesn't light you up, I don't know what can. Okay, think about this. All right. Somebody hops onto a rocket. They're going to stay at a Mars hotel. Okay. Beautiful Four Seasons is orbiting Mars. They land on Mars's moon. They go to the hotel. They get some breakfast. There's a Shake Shack. They get some Shake Shack when they land. That moon of Mars. I'm going to assume that the US controls all of Mars. And if you're not in the US, I'm sorry that you're learning this now. Is that moon like a state? Is it part of the United States of the universe? How is sales tax collected on that moon from that planet? How do the tip rules work? It wasn't purchased with USD, by the way. You probably didn't pay for it with the right card because you got some sort of fraud alert from the bank because somebody was trying to use your card on this moon of Mars. Doesn't this just get you all sorts of hot? Whew. This is the timeline. We made a YouTube video a long time ago, like around the darkest timeline. The darkest timeline being everyone else has automated themselves out of the job except for accountants. We're all still working and we're all like, told you, I told you this would never replace accountants. And it's literally just us working and everybody else is having a great time. This is how that happens. Interplanetary trade. Oh my gosh. Oh, gang, I'm excited for it. Okay. 15 years from now, we're going to play this podcast clip back on Jason Staats on interplanetary accounting. And we'll be like, hey, we've been talking about this for the last 15 years. Where's everybody else been? I cannot wait for that day to come. I hope you're still here with me when we do that. I hope I'm still here when that day comes. But until then, thanks for coming and hanging today. I'll catch you in the next one.