622 Accounting Firms: Watch This Before Selling Advisory [What The Industry Isn’t Saying About The Future]

Today on the podcast, everybody's telling accounting firms to get into the business of advisory. You got to sell advisory work. This is how we make ourselves future safe. But my take here, I don't know that it is as future safe as we're led to believe. I've actually got a different take on the whole advisory angle inside of accounting firms. Also, have you heard the news? Claude Fable, the best AI model we've ever had for accounting firms, it is back after being taken away from us for 3 weeks by the US government. You've now got it inside your Claude. Here's what that means. And what to look out for actually in the new fee structure around this model. Also today, if I were starting a bookkeeping practice tomorrow, what accounting ledger would I build around? I could tell you it wouldn't be QuickBooks. We'll dig into how to use AI for review and accounting grads. Are they going out of style if AI's taking the junior level work? We're gonna talk about both sides of the equation. If you're a grad and if you're a firm, how do you, how do you put new grads to work? Is there still value in doing so? The short answer is yes. The long answer, we're gonna get to it, man. Come on in. Let's do it. How do you do, fellow accountants? My name is Jason Staats. Welcome to Jason on Firms, where we talk all things accounting firm strategy, accounting firm maxing. That really cringe transition you just saw, it's the Dirty Dozen. We are on the penultimate installment. You are so close to never having to see me line dance again. Talking about the 12 biggest things ailing accounting firms, as sourced from from the over 1,000 accountants that came out to my live events last year. These are the big meta problems for accounting firms, and today it is the struggle: how do I get into advisory work? Everybody is telling accountants, and honestly they have been for decades, you need to rise above the transactional, the compliance stuff, and become an advisor. Is this real? We've actually talked quite a bit on the podcast before about, is this like the software industry's greatest ever grift? Because I think the whole advisory conversation reached peak heights around the reporting bubble of like 2018 when everyone and their mom was launching a reporting tool that was selling to accounting firms. And I, I think the temperature has kind of cooled on these. Like, reporting tools have their place, but when the people telling you you need to get into advisory are reporting software platforms, then we need to be aware of like the advisory mind virus that is being put in front of us with VC money right now. All that being said, there's also a world where AI comes in and it just does the bookkeeping. It just does the tax preparation. And I think we can kind of see that now and we're like, whoa, okay, now what? What do we do after that? And this is the most common framing of advisory is that it like ambiguous kind of catch-all framing for harder stuff, the more nuanced stuff, the next thing. And honestly, this is where it kind of falls flat for me is we've always been evolving. We've always been moving to the next thing. When we got bank feeds, we didn't have to enter transactions anymore. When the computers prepared the tax forms, we didn't have to manually prep tax forms anymore. And so in many ways, I feel like advisory is just like evolution. But the fact remains that many accounting firms sell the transactional stuff, sell form preparation, while other firms sell something that is more premium. And they use words like strategist or a V CFO. And then the people who sell the basic stuff look at those people and they're like, wait a minute, what are they doing? Well, I already, I already do all that stuff and what are they charging? Oh my gosh. And then you're like, you have this existential dread of like, is that wrong that they're charging that much? Or am I just a numpty for not charging for all this premium stuff that I do? But I call it bookkeeping. I call it tax preparation, right? Let me run you through what I think are kind of the 5 biggest problems or traps around this framing of like, do I do advisory work and how, how do I position a more premium offering that goes beyond the basic transactional stuff as an opportunity to sell a more profitable service for my firm? A reminder, anything we're getting into in our firms, the goal is not to do more. The goal is to do better. This is the biggest trap when people are like, you know, roll out 3-tier proposals for the first time is if in the past they only sold bronze, they start selling silver, they start selling gold, and silver's twice as much money and twice as much work, and gold is 3 times as much money and 3 times as much, much work. That's not better. That's just more. The goal is better. Today in our firms, how do we frame a new offering around this notion of better, whether you want to call it advisory or whatever else? Blocker number 1 to doing this, and this is just fundamentally the biggest problem for most accountants, is the imposter syndrome block. Who am I to be able to command 3 to 10x the fees of what I charge right now? Uh, for some of us, and it's, it's interesting, the same blockers dressed up in different ways that land kind of for different psyches. For some of us, we, we would say we don't have the confidence to do so. For others, we say it's wrong to do so, but I actually think those two responses are kind of coming from the same place. At its core, it is this self-belief that on the one hand, I'm worth that, but on the other hand, that there are people who will happily pay that. We almost can't believe that. There's so much framing around sports where, like, you know, the whole idea of having people on the team that, like, have that quote unquote self-belief, belief in the ability to win. We're in the middle of the World Cup right now, and there's a lot of conversation around, you know, England's team. And England has, talent-wise, the best club that they've had in a really long time. But there's a lot of people that will like ask questions around like, you know, do they have that passion, that fire, that self-belief? But there's another— I grew up a big Portland Trail Blazers fan. I grew up in Oregon, and one of the most iconic Trail Blazers players ever was Brandon Roy. And Brandon Roy had this ability in the last few minutes of a basketball game to just be completely unstoppable. Like you would just give him the ball and get out of the way and he would get a basket. And it was just like magic. And I remember a reporter asking him the question that was like, how do you have just this like ungodly amount of confidence at the end of games to just be able to do this stuff? And he was like, because it's just what I've always done. Like I've just every, whenever I've played basketball, this has always been my job. I get it over the line at the end and I, pretty much always do. And this framing for confidence, this makes— it makes way more sense to me that people either have confidence because they're good enough and they've put in the work to do it, or they don't have the confidence because they aren't good enough and they haven't had that success in the past and maybe they haven't put in the work. To me, that makes way more sense than a group of people, you know, not having that mamba mentality, not having that, uh, self-belief. Isn't a prerequisite to self-belief like a track record of, of success? And so if I'm going to believe that there's a client out there that's willing to pay me 5 times more than I've ever been paid before, I'm gonna have a hard time believing that until somebody actually does. And in the way that many of us run our accounting practices, oftentimes the way we price projects and the way we put ourselves out there ensures that no one will ever prove to you that you're worth more than you think you are today. I think this is a— I don't know if Ron Baker originated this. It's where I first heard it. But the quote was something like, the only way to ensure that you never get premium prices like that YOLO price, that price you can't believe that someone would say yes to, is by never putting it in front of a client. We have to give our clients the opportunity to prove to us that we're worth that much. And oftentimes for most of us, We will not believe that we are until there's a large volume of people telling us that we are. So this whole identity, uh, this, this whole sort of human issue of our internal identity, who we see ourselves as, what we see ourselves being worth, perpetually lagging behind our external reality. Other people have to tell you that you're worth this. You have to see it in, in how other folks are interacting with you before eventually you start to believe in this and you're like kind of in yourself. But if we never give ourselves the opportunity to let clients prove to us we are worth that, then we ourselves will never believe that we are worth that. Honestly, a lot of this is as simple as giving people the opportunity to pay you more. This isn't wrong. This isn't immoral. This is people opting in, people saying yes. What you think you're worth is a lot less important than what your customer thinks you're worth. And if you want proof of this, look in the rearview mirror. Look at what you were charging a year ago, 5 years ago. If that person could see what you're charging now, they wouldn't believe what you're charging, right? So why is it that we think that's not gonna be the case again 12 months from now, 5 years from now, 10 years from now? The way we systematize this and make this a part of our business is by systematically putting more premium prices in front of our clients to see, will people say yes? And many of them won't, but the ones who will are who are ultimately building the business around. So how do you overcome this whole imposter syndrome block It's by giving people the opportunity to convince yourself that you are worth more than you think you are. And for the 1% of you that don't have a problem with this, that are just like maniacs, keep showboating, keep doing your thing. Okay. Blocker number 2 around standing up a more premium, high-value service in your firm is giving it away for free. You're already doing all this premium work. You're just not naming it, not packaging it, not charging for it. Where I see this come up the most in, in, in US firms, is you have this new category of accounting firm that frames themselves as like tax strategists, and they win a lot of their clients by dunking on your current tax preparer. Is your tax preparer just preparing tax forms after the fact? That's not what we do here at Jason and Co Tax Strategists. Bookkeeping has its— arguably like VCFO is the same thing for bookkeeping. A lot of bookkeepers will look at VCFO shops and you're like, what are they actually doing? Like, oh, VCFO, like they're actually doing bookkeeping too, and then just having a meeting about it. Well, I have a meeting with my clients every month. How is it that they're charging 5 times as much as I am? This is— this is— I am speaking from a place of experience. I had tax clients who left me to go to Strategists. I also had stuff come in the other direction where we would pride ourselves on bringing clients in the door and seeing what they were being charged in prior years from much bigger firms. And it's like 5 to 10 times our fees. And we would look at the quality of the work and we're like, holy cow, this firm's sucks. What a just absolute highway robbery. And then I would get paid 10% as much to do better work. And here's the real hard truth that I got to is it's me that's the sucker. We're talking about running a business here. We're not talking about right or wrong. Customers have full agency to choose. Do they want to work with you or not? Are they okay with paying the price or not? In a world where someone else is better framing a lesser version of the work and charging more money for it, then I am the sucker, then I'm the one that has to, has to do work. Let's say that it turns out that Toblerone, the chocolate company, is actually making worse, like lower quality chocolate than Hershey's. But Toblerone is charging 5 times as much. You put the business consultant hat on or you're going to buy one of those companies. You're going to look at Toblerone and be like, what is your secret? You guys have got it figured out. You're charging 5 times as much and selling worse. Chocolate? Incredible. Many of us are running the Hershey's shop. We haven't figured out how to frame what we do. Maybe it's, we're hiding behind this sort of virtue signaling of, oh, no, no, no, no, no. I think my work is only worth this much. And so this is all that we're going to charge. We see these other shops using like these catchy phrases for things that are commonplace for us, but our clients don't know anything about. And you're like, that's not a loophole. That's literally just a tax rule. And they do these things that get attention in a way that the way we communicate what we do does not. And that's annoying. But it's one of those things that's annoying because a little bit of it is coming from a place of like, yeah, no, I do know that that's actually a more interesting way than I have to talk about the same thing. I still remember the first time I heard the phrase backdoor Roth, and I'm like, hang on, Tim, I don't know what a backdoor Roth is. Tell me what that is. And somebody tells me what that is and I'm like, What do you mean that? We've been doing that forever. And I explain what we're doing and they're like, yeah, that's a backdoor Roth. And I'm like, whoa, backdoor. That just, that sounds oof. I want, everybody wants to know about like the backdoor Roth. There's a catchy phrasing for almost anything, a bit of salesmanship that most of us don't have. But if we're allergic to all that stuff, like at the end of the day, it ends up costing us money. Toblerone, like that is a better business to run than Hershey's. We're covering the gamut today, man. Sports ball analogies. Investing in chocolate companies. A lot of this just stems from not always communicating the value of the work that we're doing. A lot of times we will do all this work behind the scenes, and if nothing comes of it, we will never even say anything to the client. Or you will do this monumental project and it will be a 2-sentence email to the client. And this is because, like, it can be actually more work to communicate the value of what we're doing. But if we don't, We can't expect clients to understand the value of everything that we did. When the client doesn't understand what we do, their perception becomes their reality. And if all they see on the outside is somebody that's hard to reach and slightly grumpy every time they get them on the phone, then how are they going to know all the gymnastics, the triple sow cow you just did to stick this cool tax planning thing for them when literally all they saw is an email that said, Here are your quarterly estimates. It, and to be clear, it takes work. Like, it takes systems, it takes more effort to communicate our value. But if we don't, who will? 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 Financial Sense. 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 Cents might be for you. 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's 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 U.S. 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 want to see it. But to learn more about Sortman, check out the link down in the show notes. Okay, struggle number 3 here: death by deadline. The entire firm being focused on production, on triage, on just like the bare minimum of the work that we have to get out the door so that this highfalutin, uh, more premium, more technical work, it just falls by the wayside because we have more fundamental concerns than any of that. And this is a capacity thing. It is carving up the business to ensure that the business has the headspace to focus on the more premium thing. Uh, when I first built a Kass practice, a bookkeeping practice, we had a huge volume of tax clients that wanted to come over and have us do like super cheap bookkeeping for them. And so we had this huge volume of like $300 a month bookkeeping projects when what we were trying to attract was $1,000 to $2,000 a month. Projects, and we got a few of these premium projects, but they would oftentimes get pushed out of the way by this huge volume of low-value work. And so the collective headspace of our department was spent on just this trivial, low-money stuff at the expense of the people that we actually wanted to be focused on. And I do think there's this sort of like element of collective mental inertia inside of a business or inside of a department. Where if the thing that everybody is doing is not the thing that you want the business to be focused on, like, that's a problem that you have to fix. Even if you don't work in office, there's an element of like, what is the water cooler discussion in any business? If 80% of people are working on the stuff that you don't want them focused on, it's hard to expect them to be capable of focusing on something else. And so my whole cast department was consumed with this high volume of low value closes. And I ultimately made the decision to, at the time, actually pull in Bench, which was the largest, uh, like productized bookkeeping solution there was as our back office for these small trivial projects. And I basically outsourced a huge percentage of our closes, all the low dollar value stuff to Bench so that my team's focus could be on the clients that we actually wanted to build around. And it worked. Instead of 80% of the, the sort of efforts of the team going into these trivial closes, 20% of the effort just went into finalizing these closes so that 80% of the headspace could be filled up by the stuff we actually wanted to work on. And so if you are running a firm that is already on fire and already struggling to keep up with deadlines, and one day you say, hey everybody, I got a great idea, is we're actually going to start selling this really hard thing that's higher stakes because we're going to charge more for it. And I want you to now think about that going forward when the team's underlying tasks and expectations have not changed at all. Then that sort of more premium thing, that new thing never gets the mental, uh, attention that it needs because we are just focused on the triage, right? Two more to go here. Pain point number 4 around standing up a more premium offer is our struggles in framing planning, proactive stuff, the premium thing as a product rather than a favor. For most firms, this is like an extra step that sometimes the client will ask us to do and then we do it. Whereas the better way of doing this is framing this as like a repeatable, more bolted-on offer for a specific person that is an incremental service level. So that if a person asks about this, like, hey, I heard about the Augusta Rule, I heard about this or that, or hey, I'd like to do an analysis on kind of the cost, a cost per menu item, stuff like that. You can be like, yeah, we totally do this for people. Here's what that engagement looks like because your engagement right now doesn't include that. And the whole like human paywall conversation is just like yucky. It's uncomfortable, right? And especially if you're coming from a world of hourly billing and that's all you've ever known where you just, you take orders and you do the work. That's a hard thing to get our head around, but a big thing it unlocks besides being a win for the business and just a better way to sell that service is we can proactively push this out where it makes sense rather than leaving it up to the client to prompt this work to happen. The client doesn't know the situations where this makes sense or not. This has always been the conflict between, for example, tax planning and hourly billing is if we only leave it up to the clients to ask us to do tax planning for them, they never have any sense of when that will be worthwhile and when it won't be worthwhile, as opposed to you, the expert, being able to say like, hey, with what I know about your tax situation, it is almost Certainly worthwhile for us to put some extra cycles, extra effort into this stuff. Here's what that's going to look like. That should be led by us. That shouldn't be led by the client. Same thing applies for any sort of more premium advisory offering. As you've seen the situations where this worked and where it didn't, know in that client, like whether or not this is something that would be worthwhile for them and then lead with that recommendation rather than it simply feeling like, well, they're just trying to sell me as many things as possible. This is the problem with like putting a 3-tier proposal in front of a client where scope increases with each additional tier. Like, if I'm the client on the other side of this, I'm like, well, tell me if this is going to be beneficial to me or not, because it looks like you're just trying to get me to buy as much stuff as possible, regardless of whether that stuff is necessary. And so we as the advisors, we need to build our service offerings in a way that will ensure that we can do outbound where it is appropriate, where it makes sense, where the client will get value out of it. Rather than just sitting back with a menu of offerings and being like, no client, you choose. It's like, no, the client's not the expert. You're the expert. So how do we package this more premium offering in a way that lets us go to market with it, go to the client and be like, hey, this makes sense for you in this situation. I'm not just going to do it when people ask me for it. I need to come to you and have the confidence to say what this is, is actually really valuable for people specifically in your situation. And we should do it. Take my recommendation, let's do it. Even though it costs you more money, it's worthwhile. And if you, if you have a product where you can't confidently say that, that it's worth the money, then like, what are we doing here? Like, that's not a good business. Like, we gotta rethink what that offering is so that there are clear circumstances where it will totally be a no-brainer for them. Last pain around this, problem number 5, is building advisory or a premium offer around coaches rather than outcomes. If you ever run a VCFO practice, the biggest pain in a VCFO practice is finding really good people that can do the VCFO thing. But then once you do, that problem quickly evolves into, well, if they're going to manage their own client relationships and their own clients, it becomes very hard to keep them here, to keep them with you. Why will they not just go out and do their own thing with that client? It's an incredibly difficult business model to run around coaches. But the better business fundamentally is one that is not built around coaches, but is instead built around outcomes. Selling outcomes comes with like no price anchoring, no limitations. If I can sell you the opportunity to make $100 and I'll charge you $50 for it right now, you would take that deal, right? You're like, you telling me you're gonna gimme $100 in exchange for 50 bucks? Like, sure, why would I not do it? Now, if there's a guy across the street that will give you $100 in exchange for $25, you'll go to that guy. But if I'm coming to you truly with a unique offer for your circumstances, you would take that deal whether it was $100 or whether it was $1 million. Arguably, it just gets sweeter the bigger the opportunity is, right? But if you're selling CFO work or bookkeeping or tax preparation, that's the thing for which there's a very mature marketplace of other people that do the same thing and sort of an agreed-upon sense of what the market price for that service ought to be. And so oftentimes, like coaching, like CFO advisory work can just be yet another service that we're selling when the very best thing that you can sell in a business is not a service but an outcome. This is escaping the fundamental limitation of a service business. Why we can't have— what's, what's the Apple headquarters UFO thing? It's why we cannot run an accounting firm in the way that a Silicon Valley company can run a software company. That has insane, like, limitless margins because it is selling software with, like, no incremental cost. In a service business, I still need a person to do the work. If I'm running a pest control business, I need people to go out to the property and do that stuff, right? If I'm selling outcomes, outcomes can scale in a way that someone hands-on delivering a service cannot. And what this looks like is building an offer for a specific type of individual who finds themself in a situation where, you know, everyone kind of coming through this pipeline hits this same problem, and I have the solution for that problem. That solution will make them more money, and so I can charge premium prices for it. This is simply building an offer, and this is not an accounting firm thing. This is just a business thing. Where can I find an expensive, rare problem that I can build a solution for that can be turnkey, thus executed by other members of the team and not reliant upon a unicorn, These are like the golden nuggets that we need to be looking out for. They can attract net new people to your accounting firm, but they can also be an opportunity to upsell like existing clients into sort of a more premium track. Now think of the best version of this offer as sort of needing to have two things. First, there has to be an attraction offer here. What's going to get them in the door? What's going to get them started? This doesn't need to be the same thing as what keeps them in that offering forever. But what is the thing that gets them over the hump and gets them started? Maybe this is a solution to the first problem most people have when they get here. Maybe it is a solution to the first problem that a dentist has the first time they hire an associate in a clinic, or a vet clinic owner has the first time they go to multi-location, or the first time they switch to a specific practice management system in the vet clinic. That attraction offer can be built around what is the first problem that they have here. But that attraction offer can be completely different from the continuity offer. And the continuity offer is what keeps them around for the long term and paying you month over month. You use the attraction offer to get them in the door and give them an immediate win. You use the continuity offer to continue providing them value over time. And those two things don't have to be the same thing. But the continuity offer, that is, that is the big longer-term opportunity, right, where they're paying you month over month. So if that is tax planning for a specific type of entrepreneur, that attraction offer is kind of the initial diagnostic, the initial thing that gets them in the door and provides them some immediate value. The continuity offer is the quarterly check-in that is following up with new strategies and measuring the savings, measuring the savings that you've yielded them over the past years and past quarters. It is the thing that keeps them coming back and ensures that they're sort of on track. This is how you build an actual scalable, really profitable business. Not to say you can't build a profitable CFO practice around unicorns, around people that can do the coaching thing, but one of those businesses is more attractive to build than the other and is at that point not about like an accounting firm thing. Like that is just how you build a business that prints money. And the really cool thing about doing what we do is that we have unique access to very expensive problems. You compare this to somebody that's going out and like selling a weight loss solution on, on Facebook ads. Think about the conversations that you have with entrepreneurs every single day. And the fact that you're just, say you're working with taxidermists, you know, they all have this one very specific problem and you're only privy to what that problem is because you're in the thick of it because you know that space so well. What a cool opportunity to build novel solutions for problems that these people have to attract more clients, and to get the clients that you have on a more premium continuity offer so that they're paying you big bucks month over month. You can take your advisory business, you can take your coaching business and blow it out your ear hole because that, the business built around an outcome, which can for sure have an element of coaching and might even look like the CFO or like a coaching business, the business built around these sort of repeatable outcomes that your team can execute on, that is super exciting. That survives AI. Like, there will always be problems. In fact, AI will create net new problems, right? That is how I think about how we build a really profitable business long term. Now, I just said the word AI. Is that two words or one word? Not sure. You may have heard the news. The best model, best AI model we have ever had for accounting firm work, Fable. It is back. If you go to your cloud right now, you now have access to Fable. But if you're listening to this the day the podcast comes out, that access is only for a few more days, after which it gets really expensive to use. Let's get our nerd on and talk about it. It's Nerd Corner. Nerd Corner. Let's nerd it out. Nerd Corner. Probably the biggest headline we've ever had in this whole sort of era of generative AI is Claude launching this insanely powerful model, Fable, and then the US government doing the rug pull and saying, uh, we actually don't want you to let people have this stuff. And that Oh my gosh, was so sad because Fable was so good at accounting firm stuff, man. We had videos in the pipeline of doing all these wildly powerful things. But from the day Fable was first launched, Claude said from the beginning, hey, we're gonna give you access to this for now, like in your Claude subscription, but just know we might actually charge you more for it down the road. And I mean, it was like Anthropic's turning into like a drug dealer, man. They're like giving you the first hit for free and then they want you to pay for it after that. Now, Fable model has come back and we've got more details around what that, like, long-term financial setup looks like for how to use Fable. Now, Fable usage, like, if you're just going to the API, like, if you're a software developer, Fable usage costs roughly about 3 times as much as Opus, the previous best model that we've been working with. And until July 7th, in your Claude, you can now use Fable. It can consume up to half of your Claude usage. And it is part of that subscription. But after July 7th, you have to pay out of pocket for any Fable usage. And that just makes me incredibly sad because it's freaking expensive. And so if you have like additional credits that you've bought as part of your monthly plan, like with Claude, the Claude Team plan, for example, there's a cost per user seat, but then you can allocate additional buckaroos that are then used if any of your team bumps into usage limits. So if you got a team member that's going really hard on cloud usage, it will start dipping into your sort of pooled spending at that point if they're beyond their usage limits. And it is from those pooled credits that any Fable usage will, will come out of in the future. And you will absolutely burn through cash so fast doing that, which is a bummer and ultimately means most accounting firms probably not going to be using Fable all that much in the near term. One, because it is so expensive, but two, because there's so much that we can do with the existing models that you have access to without paying out of pocket. Now, longer term, and by longer term, I mean like next 30 to 60 days, we're probably going to have another generation of models from Claude. They've already talking about the next version of Fable. And every time this happens, the, the level of model at the previous level of capability gets vastly cheaper. And so the Fable thing, it's exciting, but in all likelihood is really just a signal towards how good everything will be for us in the near future. Because right now most accounting firms are probably not going to be forking out for Fable. Definitely in the next few days as you have access to it, do some testing with it. It will get you very excited for where low-cost models will probably be in 3 to 6 months. Like, and that's, that's really important. And probably the biggest thing we learned from Fable when we initially had it was, oh geez, like, this is just how good AI is going to be in the very, very near term. So much more capable of doing like long complex tasks, which has always been like the most useful type of AI for accounting firms. For years, people would throw big, long complex things at ChatGPT and it just couldn't work. It wasn't allowed to work long enough on the problem to get to a useful solution. But my, has that changed. 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 abstraction 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, 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 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. Tax election season is upon us, accounting friends. This is the time of the year if you're going to do any big Pulling up of the carpet. Big fundamental changes in core tech in your accounting firm. You want to do it right now in these next couple of months. And the most important carpet you pick in your accounting firm, it is your practice management system. Today's sponsor, Canopy, they have been sitting at the tippy top of my PM recommendations ever since I have been recommending apps. Always kind of been a feature nerd's dream, Canopy. But if you haven't seen it in the last 12 months, they've launched a bunch of new stuff from AI tax intake to built-in month-end close automation to now recently they launched Canopy Coworker, a built-in AI assistant, uh, to make your wildest dreams come true. And they're going to give you $75 just for popping by for a demo to see what's changed. Head over to getcanopy.com/jason, book a demo just to see the new stuff. They'll send you a $75 gift card afterwards. Okay, that's all you gotta do. You just got paid for listening to an ad read, man. Go do it. I'll put that link down in the show notes. Now, a reminder that even like the Haiku model, which is the cheapest, uh, and quote unquote least intelligent model we have right now, is almost at the level of the previous generation Opus model. Like even the Haiku model, which right now just feels so far down the spectrum of intelligence of like, whoa, I would never even bother. You think that my work can be done by a model this small and simple? Like 3 months ago, that was as good as the top models were. And the usage cost for Haiku and the usage volume you get of Haiku inside of a Cloudix subscription is humongous. Like you can hammer on Haiku until the end of time. I almost said until the end of days. Close one. That's not going to happen. AI is not going to bring about end of days, right? So the Fable return, very exciting. But if anything, it's just a window into like, here's how good everything will be. Even low-cost things will be in the next 3 to 6 months. And probably not something that we are using all that much inside of small accounting firms. It is bringing about more thoughts on like cost optimization though. Like this is gonna get very real as we're using AI heavier. What does it look like to move tasks to lower-cost models where the lower-cost model is good enough to get the work done? Even right now in your basic Claude team usage, if you're bumping up against usage limits consistently, be thinking about things like how to schedule big tasks to run overnight where you're not making use of all of your usage limits that reset every single, like every 5 hours. And there's, there's still a bigger question of like, is Claude where all of my AI agents are gonna live long-term in my accounting firm? Almost certainly not, right? Like I'm, there's no world where I'm gonna be connecting Claude to all 200 client QuickBooks files and like setting up 20 tasks to run for every single client every single month. Like Claude, at least in its current form today, it's not a place to schedule and load up a huge volume of tasks. We have like a growing number of tools in the accounting space. We did a whole episode on this last week that are kind of trying to become that canvas for running hundreds of agents for your accounting firm. And so those are the more likely homes for like volume agents. But Claude, as it has always been, as ChatGPT was, remains this like stopgap for, I don't have a great off-the-shelf solution to do this thing, so I can build it in Claude. Claude can do it for me. It's kind of like this insanely powerful bandaid where we can build what we need in Claude. And unlike in the past with say Zapier or more basic automation tools, that thing you need can literally be like, reviewing every tax return, reviewing every month-end close, like things that required a huge volume of human hours to work through in the past. Excited to see Fable back. Like, we need a system for how to launch more frontier models in a way where, like, the government isn't shaking in its boots and withholding the release of those models. OpenAI launched a new model last week, and the most powerful version that the US is sitting on now too and won't let them fully release. So I don't really like that becoming something that's like happening with every single new model, but I'm very excited to see Anthropic has made another big step on the quality of their models. And it just means that we're going to have even more capable AI coming very, very soon. Now, the mailbag overfloweth with AI questions, all sorts of stuff. Let's get that bag out. Mailbag! Mailbag! This segment is called Mailbag. Questions are submitted via YouTube comments. Via email, via my cellular telephone. Text me 1516-980-4968. First question. What meeting transcript tools do you like right now? Okay. This is a whole category in my app recommendations, jasononfirms.com/apps. You will always see my most up-to-date recommendations for what apps to use and what apps to steer clear of. Spoiler alert, about 90% of apps marketed to accounting firms, I don't think you should touch. Right now, the leaders in the meeting transcript category are Vyntl, are Ping, and are Abacor. No L, not the tuna. Now, right now, right now, I still recommend buying a meeting transcript tool that's specific for accounting firms because these tools are coming with a growing number of integrations so that they will push those transcripts directly to your practice management system and your workflow tools, but also are beginning to get more into the business of them not just being meeting note-takers, and instead becoming a home for practice intelligence, like a home for context where I can go to it and be like, did we ever talk about XYZ with Becky? Uh, my team member had a meeting with this client the other day. Did this come up? That context of those meetings, like that's a tremendous asset in an accounting firm and being able to efficiently access all that context and do stuff with it is becoming a bigger and bigger deal. One example is some of these platforms are starting to roll out like the identification of revenue opportunities from those meetings. So you can even connect your proposal tool or load it up with the different service offerings that your firm provides, even mapping those service offerings to clients so that it can automatically flag, hey, this client brought this thing up. This might be a new revenue opportunity. And that stuff just happening automatically. That is a huge opportunity. We did an interview with Dan Luthi maybe a year ago. Guy that runs a practice, they do tax work, they do CAS work, and they also do CFO work. And so they have sort of different delineations for what is like compliance work and when does it cross the threshold into, say, advisory work. And how powerful is it to have a meeting transcript tool that will like identify those moments automatically when a conversation like kind of crosses the line into like, hey, What they may actually be looking for here is actually more hands-on help, this different level of service. These tools are now beginning to also integrate email as well. So it's not just your meeting transcripts, it is the entirety of the different ways that you communicate with clients, getting that all into one place. Now off the shelf, like non-accounting firm meeting transcript tools like your Fathoms, your Fireflies, stuff like that, they're very good, they're very cheap is probably the reason why most people are choosing them. But they will ultimately have a lower ceiling for how much they specifically speak to the needs of accounting firms. Next up, what accounting ledger would you build a CAS practice on today? Okay. Alternate timeline. I give up this internet grift. I go launch an accounting firm tomorrow. What accounting ledger are we going to build on? I can tell you it's not going to be QuickBooks. It's not going to be Xero. You may have seen we did a video recently around like, how can you use cloud to replace QuickBooks? I talked with someone at an event, one of my live events a couple of weeks ago. Who, after watching that video, their cast team went like all in on just using Claude on the simple bookkeeping files. And he's like, yeah, like it's kind of working. Like, like they're doing it. We're still paying for all these QuickBooks subscriptions, though. And he's like, I don't actually feel like I can turn this off because this feels like cheating and I almost can't believe it. But like, we're doing it. And so my approach starting a cast practice right now would be Start with Claude, which kind of has to be the answer for literally any work inside of our accounting firm, literally any software decisions. If Claude can do it, then we start there and we only go past that if other tools give us fundamentally sort of different capabilities. And still Claude is not at a level where it's going to handle your most complex accounting files, right? But a huge volume of simple stuff, of cash basis stuff, even high volume stuff. I mean, we, in that video we did like, a 7,000-transaction file off of 12 months of bank statements in like 5 or 6 minutes. But so many of our bookkeeping files are like dumb little rental LLCs and just like these very basic little things. So I genuinely, I would be starting with Claude right now. After that, I'd be looking at, uh, Digits or Kick probably. I'm most interested in the platforms that will give me like AI interoperability between my, my AI assistant and my accounting ledger. And so my, my AI assistant needs to be able to see into the ledger, needs to even be able to do work in the ledger directly. And this is not stuff that we're going to get from incumbent people like QuickBooks or like Xero because there's too much value for them to lose when it is my AI agent using their platform and it removes 80% of me logging into it. At that point, I'm going to be looking at that subscription and be like, I don't really want to pay $85 a month per client for this platform that I hardly ever log into anymore because my agent does most of the work. New entrants to the space, they have to be more open to that. They have to be more willing to integrate with AI, and we're already seeing this. And so I want an accounting ledger that will work hand in hand with my AI assistant, and that's definitely not the incumbent folks. Next up, I'm trying to navigate practice management software, AI integrations, and tax research tools without increasing costs beyond efficiency gains. My concern is if I purchase, for example, TaxDome and also use Juno, we may end up paying staff to review, correct, and manage, uh, client input in a way that takes longer than if our staff had simply entered all the information themselves from the beginning. How do I make sure before adding another system that it will actually save time in practice, not in theory? Um, only add one thing at a time. Don't change a whole bunch of tech at the same time. It's got to be incremental. Only add what other accounting firms are swearing by, because the reality is, like, you don't have a crystal ball to know, like, is this going to save me time or not? But the best crystal ball we have access to is other firms who have done the same thing. And third, Probably just don't add Juno right now because it's not in my recommendations. TaxDome is a leader in practice management. Uh, Juno in my, uh, tax workflow category is just not a leader right now. It might be someday. It's in the watching category, which usually means it's a newish company that's still trying to figure out, figured out, but not quite there yet. But only add one thing at a time. Only add stuff that other accounting firms swear by and only add stuff that are in my leaders in my app recommendations. Tough thing specifically around tax workflow right now is when someone asks, like, what, what's the best tax automation tool for XYZ? The reality is there's a whole bunch of tools in that space doing different parts of the process, from intake to workpaper preparation to integrating with the tax software to automating delivery. And different tools are better at different parts of that process. But importantly, different parts of that process lend themselves to automation better than others. So for example, it's very, very hard to integrate anything with US tax software. That's an incredibly hard problem to solve. But automating the intake of 1040 information, that is a— has proven to be an easier thing to automate and is where across the whole process people are yielding the most time savings. But that doesn't mean that every tool is working on that specific part of the process. So when it comes to tax workflow, it's really hard to, to make a good recommendation. It's why right now my leaders are the ones that do tax intake really well, because that is where there's the biggest time savings opportunity in that whole tax prep process. But how do you know you're actually going to reap the benefit of that tool before getting into it? You've talked with other people who did. Honestly, there's no replacement for that. Now, uh, watch out for influencers who are doing brand deals with these companies and just plugging those companies. The way we approach this stuff on my channels is we recommend platforms that we see people are raving fans of, and then we do outbound to those platforms and ask them to sponsor our content. Some of them do, many of them don't. We'll oftentimes bump people down out of our recommendations and stop doing partnerships with them. There were 7 of those brands the last time we updated the recommendations last month that we bumped out of the leader category, many of which have, have done partnership stuff with us. But there's increasingly, um, promotion that is kind of disguised online, and a lot of it's coming from accounting firm owners where they make this huge endorsement of a tool. But it's literally a paid endorsement and that isn't always clear. That, that is not ultimately an endorsement that is worth anything in my mind, as opposed to being able to ask people like, this is why I have a private community, Realize, with 850 firms in it where you can literally go and ask a question. Literally, I, there's a whole thread on Juno just in the last month where 10 to 20 people have shared their real experience of having been users of it. This is why you gotta have a private place like that, like to be able to ask people's opinion on, on what works and what doesn't work. That is the best crystal ball you can have. Have you heard about Kai? Kai is the new AI coworker built into this episode sponsor Carbon. Carbon's a practice management system, a brain, the backbone of your firm. But Kai, let me tell you about Kai. Kai's like, the cute new guy in the office. Did you hear about Kai? Oh my gosh, what can Kai do? Kai can pull from client history, from your actual workflows, from client communications. Kai will handle repetitive tasks, surface client insights, help you plan and prioritize your day. What a multi-thread! Kai will include a mobile app. What? And with Carbon, there's even more cool AI functionality coming just around the corner, including an AI meeting note-taker and MCP, an MCP. Rejoice, Karbonn is cranking on AI stuff. You love to see it, man. Can't wait to see more about that MCP as well. To learn more about Karbonn and their new AI assistant Kai, check out the link down in the show notes. Listen, I wanna talk to you about your IT. Okay? Do you have IT help that really understands you? Understands what accounting firms do, the, the rules specific to firms, or are you trying to do it yourself? 'Cause you're an IT expert. You're not. You did not. Or maybe you hired the guy down the street. How are you enjoying paying him to learn how these awful— are you paying the IT guy down the street? How's that going? Paying him to learn about the software you use in an accounting firm? Gang, there's a better way, okay? That better way? B-E-R-I-T-O. Berito. I talk a lot about like my private community Realize and how you need a place to go to just ask questions. True story, if you go to my community right now and you search the word Verado, you will see a long list of people that are like, this is a no-brainer, it's really good. Verado will do your hosting, Verado will be your entire IT department, and get this, Verado will now help you deploy Claude inside of your Verado hosted environment. That's right, buddy. Afraid about like what's okay to use AI with and what isn't? Imagine your IT company taking the lead and being like, hey, this is the right way to do this. Here you go. Here's an environment where you can cut loose and, and make your wildest dreams come true. That is the sort of proactivity I want out of my IT company. Verado, they only work with accounting firms, so they know the rules. They know the right way to do this, brother. Stop fist fighting your IT help and go with the obvious answer. That is Verado. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. Next up, do you actually use all the tools regularly? You clearly like Claude, but don't seem to understand some of the advances in other AI tools. Do I actually use all the tools? I don't actually use almost any software in the accounting firm space. The way we do our recommendations is not by like some, uh, buddy giving me access to the platform and getting in and pushing all the buttons and all that stuff, because that's just not a realistic way to be able to test software. What I do is talk with literally thousands of accounting firms that all have different perspective and client bases and context and all this stuff. And ask them what is like crushing for them right now. Like, what are they in love with? That's what informs our recommendations because that's actually a much more complete snapshot than me forming my own personal opinion of what I think about something. Now, when it comes to AI tools, I do use a lot of AI tools, many tools that I don't ever talk about in the content. We mainly focus on Claude because ultimately, as I help people decide what to do, accounting firm leaders are extremely busy. And it is pulling teeth to get them to even open Claude and make time for learning AI. And so the last thing I should be doing is putting like 10 or 20 tools in front of folks. If anything, I try to reduce the number of tools you need to consider so that you can focus just on the best tools. And a huge percentage of the questions that we get are things like, have you ever heard of this app? Have you, what do you think of this app? Do you like, do you like this one or that one? And the answer is almost always like, yes, I've heard of it. We just don't recommend it. That's why we don't talk about it. There's a real risk in my content, and we already do this, we create this problem, of giving people too many things to think about, too many things to focus on, distracting them with X, Y, and Z. And if I keep talking about more and more different things and give you even more, uh, decision paralysis, to me that is not doing a service to the audience. So I focus our content and our conversations on the stuff that I most recommend you use right now. If I expanded that out to literally everything, I don't know how you would ever make a decision. Like, it would just be way too much to consume. But yes, I do personally use a ton of other AI stuff that I don't talk about that oftentimes doesn't make sense for accounting firms. It's, man, it's a great time to be a nerd. It really is. Do you have suggestions for using Microsoft Copilot given our firm has chosen it for the AI strategy? And does it matter that I can now use the Claude Opus models inside of Copilot? My main suggestion for firms using Copilot is to use Claude. I don't care that it's easier for you to roll out Copilot. It's actually not any more expensive than rolling out Cloud. Obviously Cloud, you gotta do some more due diligence 'cause it's yet another tool, but Cloud is a tool that was built for enterprise first. It's absolutely something that can be rolled out securely in a small accounting firm. And your time is too valuable than to use anything but the best. It is like choosing between two employees and picking the dumb one and being like, you know, you come work with me. I know you no do work good, but you're, you're the choice for us. Don't do that, man. Claude is very obviously light years ahead of Copilot right now. It's true that many of those Claude models can now be used inside of Copilot, but you know what? Copilot still bad. And this is not a new development. Back when Microsoft took 50% ownership in OpenAI, they were like, look, we got all the cool models from ChatGPT and Copilot now. Copilot good. No, Copilot no good. Copilot never been good. Copilot still not good. This is why I say, you know, use Copilot, use Claude. Okay, don't know what happened there. How good is AI at reviewing a tax return or a set of books? Very good. Honestly, very good. You got to give it the context to be able to do the review work correctly, but give it a bunch of information, you will be impressed at the quality of the review that it can do. Now, importantly, there's not a day in the near term where review is fully the job of AI, right? So like, we are still accountable for the output and So the normal framing of review being the last check before something goes out the door, it's a little bit risky to say AI's doing the review, but what is— it is absolutely good enough for today is helping preparers to do a self-review. And so give them a tool, give them a Claude Skill, something like that where they can do this review and it will catch so many things before it goes across the desk of a reviewer. This is also a tool that you could have reviewers use, but I would rather have the preparers fix that stuff before it gets to the review and, and To a degree, we have to kind of protect what the human review process has always been to make sure that the quality filter remains the same. But yes, it's very good at review. The more instructions you can give it for your expectation of how you want it to review, the better. But it will blow your mind, like with very little explanation, how high quality of a review it can do for you. Um, one thing on review, look out for the effort level of the model because review is usually more of a long-form task. Turn that effort level up. So, so use probably the OPUS model, but set the effort level, which by default is at high, to max, or I think it's extras between high and max. You probably want a higher effort level for review work. 3 to go. What are the benefits of having a standardized firm-wide naming convention for individual files? Why do I need this? I'm happy with just a standardized folder structure. All right. So why do you need a naming convention? Well, inside of those folders are files and you still need to know what those files are without opening them. So I would say, like, everyone have an agreement on how those files, even within a folder structure, ought to be named. That is useful. But you do have situations where this kind of breaks down. Like, even if you have a 2026 and a 2025 and a 2024 folder, if inside each of those is a tax return or is a, uh, July month-end close, are you really just gonna call it tax return because it's in the 2025 folder? And you're like, well, I don't need to clarify that because it's in the 2025 folder. I think you still have to say it's a 2025 tax return because if somehow that file gets loose, you attach to an email and ends up somewhere else, you want the context of that in the file name. And so if it's me, I probably have both. I've got the folder structure, but I've also got the naming convention. You've got the value as well of being able to search across folders for specific things. And that's really useful. But the biggest thing is like, even inside of a folder, you want those things to be named a specific way. I'm questioning whether you work with other human beings. Maybe they're just well-behaved human beings because the level of effort that most people will put into naming files is shockingly low. And if you've had to wade through people's stupid file namings more than a few times, you very quickly are like, we need a file naming convention. But I don't know if it's just you, like if you're not doing this with other humans, like maybe it's not as big of a deal. Imagine going into like trying to buy a firm that's got like 2 or 3 people in it and there's just no file naming convention and you just see one like Untitled document parenthesis 3, and you're like, nope, I'm out of here, man. This firm sucks. New accounting grads won't be doing taxes manually. I assume that's because of AI. What happens when they're 5 years in and replacing the current seniors but don't have the experience and knowledge that we have? Is there a plan for that knowledge gap, or will it even matter? I think that people have always been saying versions of this. Imagine, to use a tax example, imagine when we first got computers that could fill out tax forms. Imagine what the old farts were saying then. Like, you don't know how to— the youths these days will never know how to fill out a paper tax form. How can they even call themselves tax professionals? Now we don't touch— I mean, nobody's filling out forms on paper unless they're just trying to impress somebody. So there's some truth for this. And I think this has historically been solved by the fact that people spend decades in the profession. And so that knowledge transfer as much as it's necessary, just kind of happens over time. So the, the old farts, they had to fill out forms on paper. They were still around for another 20 years after we got computers. And the important aspects of maybe anything that was missed once it was done on a computer got transitioned to the youth sort of across that period of time. Right now, this change is happening faster. Like that's the wild thing about AI is just how quickly computers are becoming capable of net new things. But I would argue because humans don't move through the profession quite as fast, we probably still have that knowledge transfer. Like the olds like me can still season in the context that may not be captured by the youths that didn't have to bang rocks together in the way that I did. Now, a lot of people use this as an argument for like, we won't need We won't need the youths, we won't need the grads. And you can point to signals like in software development, junior hiring was down for a while, though it has come back up quite a bit. There's a whole other framing of this too. Like I've, a number of times I've quoted the, it's Paul Graham, a software guy, shared a story a couple years ago talking with a founder around software development specifically and saying that like at the time, you know, 22-year-olds were capable of what you know, 28-year-olds were doing in the past because the 22-year-olds were more comfortable with AI. And in a world where we are struggling to get to grips with AI and get our teams up to speed with AI, you have an entire generation of kids that are coming out of school that just ChatGPT'd their way through college. I mean, imagine if ChatGPT was a thing when you were in school. You would be a freaking wizard, man. And wouldn't it be nice to have one of these children in my firm? Who can't hold an in-person conversation with an actual human being or complete a sentence. But you know what they're really good at? Using AI. Somehow the old farts need to meld with the youths, and that is a delta that's maybe bigger than the delta has ever been between the way the old farts work and the youths work. But surely there is some fusion of the two that actually helps bring our firms forward. Obviously, there's some gaps then in like, the skills that new grads have. But us old farts should be happy about that because that is the value that we're still continuing to contribute to the whole potpourri of talent inside of the accounting firm. So honestly, I think in the future, I think you need both. You do. I mean, how, I mean, people are struggling so much with getting up to speed with AI right now. Surrounding yourself with like the AI native generation can surely help. You can leave that whole rephrase thing in. That was a joke. Last one. How are you dealing with the current amount of innovation? It seems like every day my integrations are breaking with Intuit products, banks, payroll, sales, banks, payroll, sales tax stuff. Is Cloud able to offer solutions for the downtime this creates? So I believe the question is my Intuit stuff keeps breaking. How can Cloud help? Funny enough, I have a story about this yesterday. I'm trying to shoot a video. It's like just like an AI use case roundup for accounting firms. Video that's coming to the YouTube channel soon. I'm excited for it, but I'm testing a bunch of stuff in the QuickBooks demo environment. So QuickBooks has this sample company, Craig's Design and Landscaping, right? Like everybody can access it from QuickBooks, but I have this problem where I can't import a CSV into this QuickBooks file because I click File Upload, it opens the little file thing, I select a file, and then when it goes back to QuickBooks every single time, The tab goes black and it says, oh, sorry, you have QuickBooks open in another tab, refresh this. And so you refresh it and you're back on the same screen and you click the button to select the file to upload and you select the file and then the screen goes black and the loop repeats. And I could not find any way to fix this. I'm trying it on different browsers, incognito mode. Nothing is fixing it. What do I do? I go to Claude. I say, I'm having this stupid problem. And you know what? In like 5 minutes, Cloud figured out the problem. Cloud pulls this like totally different URL out of its butt and is like, hey, go use actually the QBO sample file at this URL. And I'm like, what is this? And it takes me to this janky looking Intuit page that has like a robot captcha. And I complete that after a few tries and it logs me into this sample file and it just works. Like I don't really know what happened, but it solved the problem. And all of this is to say, I don't, I mean, has Intuit stuff ever just been as busted as it is right now? It's so frustrating. And I don't even actually do the work like all of you do. Makes you miss the better days, right? Yo, QuickBooks Desktop, baby, come back. What do you miss about Desktop? I miss closing all the pop-up windows. You know, when you open a company file, there's like 13 different pop-up things that you got to close every single time. I miss Simple things like, like having two companies open at the same time. Oh, if the children could experience that these days. I miss the little sound when you enter a register transaction. Ba-doop, ba-doop. You know that? Boy, some people hate that. Other people, it just lights them up. It was like the digital version of like the tactile feedback on the adding machine. But Intuit products these days, I don't know, man. What can you say about Intuit? They're just an old, I don't know. Dusty fart of a company. I don't know that there's any big company that's cool. Is there? I mean, companies just get big and then they get slow and then they're lame. And I'm almost 40. So I don't know. This is just kind of the way of the world. I don't know that we can expect anything more of them. And QuickBooks Online now is like a 15-year-old product. So no, like Cloud is not the fix for Intuit. Cloud can definitely replace some things that you use Intuit for, But the solution here is like, let's look, let's look around. There's more in the world than Intuit products. There's probably a better alternative that we could go to. Unlike this podcast. Okay. That is not a dusty old fart of a podcast. It is the place where people come to get better at running an accounting firm. All right. And I appreciate you came and joined today. To be clear, what I meant there is there are no alternatives. It's not like Intuit where you go find something better. This is it. Okay. This is the only shop in town, but it's a great shop. It's the best shop. It is a shop that we have built together. Okay. Can't wait to see you back here for the next one. Until then, take care.