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Oh, the year was, was 2018. And you know, Intuit had just kind of done some stinky stuff. No, it's 2019. And we were like, can we run a firm without Intuit products? At that point, we're using all, all the stuff that you would expect that most firms still use from Intuit. And we're like, well, let's give it a try. Let's see what happens. And it took us on a, a journey of self, self discovery that I wasn't quite expecting. And the lessons we learned from that all, they were super valuable, but impacted the business in ways that maybe we didn't expect. So today, interested in dunking on into it so much as telling you like, what our transition was, the benefits we saw, and how that kind of changed my thinking about how we ran our firm. So come on, let's talk about it. Okay. That's right. It was 2019. Intuit at the time was getting sued over the whole free file thing. So they had basically a free version of TurboTax, but through some kind of dodgy marketing funnels, ended up making a lot of people pay for TurboTax that probably should not have. By all accounts, that seemed like a, a totally legitimate lawsuit. They ended up settling a few years later for $141 million. And that same year, in November 2019, they launched QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping. That is, they have their own bookkeepers who will do the books for folks. And that was a, that was probably the single biggest shot across the bow for, to like accounting professionals from this kind of current crop of Intuit leadership. And it was the combination of those two things. And there were, in the beginning there were some issues with advertising of the QuickBooks Live bookkeeping service happening to users like QuickBooks users, client users that were connected to an accountant and were like, you gotta be kidding. Like you're, they've invited us to their QuickBooks file and you're actively advertising to them that you will do their books. Eventually they rolled that back so that those ads wouldn't be displayed blade if the QuickBooks account was connected to an advisor. But they still ran ads on the login screen. So like the easy workaround there was just when you're logging in on the other panel, there were ads for like, hey, we'll do your books for you. So what did we do at the time? At the time we were using Lessert for tax prep. The firm had been on Lucert for over 20 years and this was happening around Tikja, so a whole ton of tax law changes and we were frankly concerned about like the fundamental infrastructure of Lasert and whether it was actually capable of doing some new sort of multi year complex things that were necessary. With Tikja, it didn't seem like it was going in a good direction. Not that any tax software was going in a good direction, but we had some concerns there. So we started shopping around. We ended up changing to Ultra Tax which in many ways is just a different kind of awful. But it had some other stuff like multi monitor support and I, I still believe it's for small firms with the budget for Ultra tax it's, it is probably the best platform for small fir unless you have muscle memory on a different one like, like access tax or something like that if you came from a bigger firm. The biggest thing with tax prep productivity is muscle memory. So I don't want to discount that. And we, I mean we paid for that big time. It took years for a whole bunch of tax pros to get efficient on Ultra Tax. Like in hindsight it sucked, but I think that was the right decision. In fact it was interesting. Mike Sylvester tweeted the other day, shout out to Intuit, the makers of Lacert. We've been using lesser for over 20 years. The number of times per day the partners have to close the cert due to Lacert errors. Just out of control over and over 10 to 20 times a day. Yes, we have local server. The problem is not our server, it is Lacert and into it agrees with us. And this is, this is just this classic Mike into it. Stop advertising on football games and put some money into your gosh darn software. I mean none of these software platforms are really getting any investment. Like they're getting upkeep and maintenance to work correctly and, and change with the rules, but the platforms themselves, like they're not getting any investment. So we made this decision at the end of 2019 and the six months that followed that, that a few months later in the super bowl is when they ran the turbotax all people are tax people ad. Honestly that commercial absolutely slaps. But understandably tax pros weren't super jazzed about that. And so like just from a business standpoint it just seemed kind of risky to be super, super in with Intuit when we didn't quite know where Intuit was headed. And like for context, you know, the, the Brad Smith so former CEO of Intuit. The Brad Smith era of Intuit was very advisor first and that was kind of how QuickBooks began. And this is all very, very North American centric conversation like this is not the case anywhere else in the world. And the rest of the world is kind of like very confused by American fixation with QuickBooks because I've actually got the data right here. This is as of 2021, it's the most up to date data I could find in the US. As of 2021, 65% of small businesses were on QBO, 15% were on QuickBooks Desktop. Then you had a long tail of others. I imagine that QBO has gone up quite a bit since then from 65% to even more. But in the same period 2021, in Australia and New Zealand, QuickBooks only represented 10% of the accounting software market share and in the UK only 20%. So Americans for some reason like to act like there aren't any other alternatives, like nothing else will do. The rest of the world isn't using like archaic accounting systems. There's plenty of other platforms out there. It's just that QuickBooks became synonymous for accounting in the US like it was just what you did. You went to church, you went to Costco, you bought QuickBooks from the little cardboard display and then you went home and you watched the NASCAR race. But Intuit is, has changed from the Brad Smith days. The current Sasan Gidarzi kind of leadership approach. He's their current CEO. He said over and over again that, that Intuit is becoming a quote done for you company. So not just the software platform but like an assisted version of that. And we saw that first in their TurboTax products where when someone is doing this self serve sort of tax preparation, going through the steps and all that, you can like tap a pro to hop on a call with you or get a second set of eyes on something and it's just a really seamless experience. And honestly like it's like they're, they're crushing it. Like they're making tremendous, really, really good consumer products and finding a lot of success with that. And that's the focus of the company, that that's what investors are excited about and like that's what they've doubled down on. And I like, I tell, I always say to US tax pros, like imagine a US tax system without TurboTax. How are all those people getting their taxes done? There's other platforms but they're like far inferior to TurboTax. TurboTax works well and like we don't. The last thing we all need to do is try to like Hungry Hungry Hippos up a whole bunch of W2 tax returns that are incredibly simple, honestly that like the opposite will happen and it's probably a good thing where the productized services continued to come up market, which pushes us up market, which is where we need to be anyways. Not working on you know, $500 tax returns or you know, five years ago $80 tax returns. The software platforms frankly can have that type of work and, and AI will, will absolutely push that productization forward. So that's just the state of Intuit right now. And it's, I mean it's not anybody's fault. They're making really good consumer stuff. And so the accountant channel that like that's just not the focus of the company. It's still part of their business and they're still maintaining a lot of those products. And you still have an entire accountant channel full of great people add into it who are well meaning people, but ultimately not the ones behind the wheel. And so they've got a incredibly challenging job to, I don't know, kind of serve as the buffer there. And you know, there's always, every year there's always, I mean there's always something that Intuit does that, that makes accounting pros upset. We had the Tax Pro breakup commercial this last year. That was a pretty big deal. This one was in pretty poor taste because the Tax Pro, the commercial was kind of made to look like a dummy to me. It was more egregious than the all people are tax people 1. Just because of the framing of the tax professional was like very old fashioned and, and all that. I honestly like right now it's a, it's a sad time for tax bros because you're like who's who can we hitch our wagon to to give us the next awesome suite of professional tax products? Take a pick. Go down the list. Thompson, Reuters, cch, Drake. Not an exciting list, right? I mean the, the thing about this is Intuit is in the driver's seat to deliver the most phenomenal set of professional tools we could possibly have. It doesn't seem like the motivation is there to do it, but imagine Intuit at their best building a super cool pro suite. In fact, I kind of had high hopes that they would develop this almost just for their own uses because they have to use something internally and as Intuit is increasingly kind of becoming a firm in many ways. But at the moment the closest thing we have to this is Intuit Pro Connect, which is a SaaS based tax prep platform that still does not go anywhere near the length of like an ultra tax. And what it's capable of doing. They've got a tax planning product which is a little bit half baked and so they've shipped some stuff. But all the other SKUs into it has from Lacert to what's the one, what's the other desktop based, one Pro Pro series. Why am I thinking Pro Series, whatever the other Intuit tax product is. And these things are all like on life support and an afterthought for Intuit, which is a hard place, scary place for you to set up your business. And that's ultimately where we made the decision to proactively change because it was clear that like this wasn't going to LSERT wasn't going to get any love from Intuit. It was unclear where Intuit was going in regards to their relationship with the kind of accounting category as a whole. And I think like in hindsight, like I think that was the move for my firm. Last year the Verge did an interview with Sasanga Darzee, their CEO that went a little, that went a little bit weird and then into it actually came back and asked for them to remove part of the interview. I think the conversation was around that free file lawsuit and just a disagreement there. But one of the things Hassan said here is that many people actually want somebody else to do their taxes for them because of confidence. They fear getting it wrong. They want to make sure they're getting the largest refund if the IRS comes after them. They want to make sure somebody's there to protect them. So they'll always want to have an expert do their taxes for them. So we believe that over time we'll still have a mix of free, we'll have a mix of paying customers. But I think over time our largest growth will come from disrupting what today is the assisted category. And that was where the interview ended. So their goal is disrupting what what many tax pros do right now. He says the assisted category, which is a little different than the done for you category, that like tax pros, that's more of a done for you sort of thing. And they've kind created the assisted category here. Like if you think about it, they're the user comes in and does a lot of the work themselves in the platform and then kind of gets some help, which is kind of a cool like collaborative way to do it. Tax pros, we don't have the tools. Like there's not a platform that would enable us to do something like that. Maybe you can argue that tax intake tools are a little bit of that because clients are uploading their Documents, but they're not going through, like, a huge exhaustive checklist most times, like you would have to do in a TurboTax to collect every single little detail to complete the tax filings. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Teamup, the folks that help you hire people directly in the Philippines to work for your accounting firm. Tup's put together a killer guide, actually a 2025 salary guide for hiring accountants in the Philippines that you can swipe for free down in the show notes. One thing they called out in this guide that I wanted to cover today, what it means to direct hire. Because a lot of offshore groups, you're actually hiring the company and they have an office and they have kind of this resource pool of people that are getting work done. Team up their approach, you hire those people directly. So Team up pays recruiters on the ground in the Philippines to find those people to come and work for you, which means they're just another member of the team. If you run a distributed team, they are no different than the folks that you got across town. Now, there's sometimes, like, disclosure rules, stuff like that that you got to navigate, but in terms of, like, building a workplace environment, they're just part of the squad. It means there's no, like, middleman that can complicate that relationship or anything like that. It means the culture and the relationship that you have with them. It is not entangled in any other stuff that's going on, you know, in their office or, you know, the aspects of their work experience that you don't have control over. Like, it's just you hiring a person to do work. Simple as that. The salary guide. Super good. Grab that down in the show notes. And thanks to Team up for sponsoring this episode, gang. Today's episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Carbon. Every year, Carbon does a report about AI and its impact on the accounting industry. They survey a whole bunch of accounting firms. You may have heard. We actually did a whole episode of the podcast about it. It's a really, really good report. Bunch of interesting insights, insights from real accounting firms to see how they're using it, what's working, what's not working, and kind of get the commentary on either ends of the spectrum. A lot of really interesting trends that developed just in 2025. A whole lot less fear in 25 than there was in 24. People seeing it more as an opportunity. Still a very big divide in the excitement of leadership versus staff level folks. It means we as leaders need to be doing a better Job communicating and normalizing AI as a part of work so that it's not this amorphous, spooky thing that folks kind of are unsure of. Lots of exciting stuff happening there. I'll link access to that AI report down in the show notes. Totally worth checking out. I think you like it. So we moved off of Intuit stuff back then leaving Lucert, but then also leaving QuickBooks when it comes. When it came to how we got our internal bookkeeping done, not internal like for the firm, but like when we would manage the books for clients, we stopped using QuickBooks for that. And so the background of our firm was it was an 80 year old tax firm. I bought into it. It was either that year or the next year. Bought out a couple of partners. So it was, it was me and a partner. And then I launched a CAST practice and we grew from being a team of about 25 to a team of about 40. So about a third of the business, just over a third of the business by the time I was out of there was the cast practice. So we're doing books and back office stuff for clients and the other 2/3 or so was a tax business. So we ended up running the whole cast business on Xero. We still did a lot of work with QuickBooks because we had maybe 800 once a year tax clients, small business clients, that is who would show up with their books. And the vast majority of the time that was on, on QuickBooks, 75% of the time was on QuickBooks. Other 25, it was on a napkin or a spreadsheet or roll of toilet paper or whatever those people brought. And when we made, I mean we had all this like trepidation about making this switch as I think we sometimes, I don't know, we, we get nervous about changing something that clients may be upset about. Right. First thing that we learned when we did that switch to our in house books being managed on Xero and some of these clients we had already been managing on QuickBooks, we moved them over. First thing we learned, nobody really cared. Like nobody gave a hoot. Like these people who, for who we were doing like done for you books, they were like, yeah, whatever. Like whatever gets it done. I don't really care. Second thing that happened is we ended up with a whole bunch of staff that were like big time zero enthusiasts. Like it would just totally grind their gears to have to use any other accounting platform. But to be totally honest, I think this is also just a muscle memory thing. All the people that use QuickBooks all the time when they have to fire up zero, they're like, oh, that says awful. How do I find and do. Why doesn't it have this feature? I honestly, I think that's just a product of what do you do, what do you use most? Because the people on both sides of that, they say the other thing or they say that about the other platform whenever they have to infrequently use it. Third thing we learned, and this was a big one, is it started actually a mindset shift in the entire firm from we're just going to do whatever people bring to us to we actually know a lot more about the right way to do this. And so we're actually going to tell them here's the, the better way that we think you should do this. So examples of that is like proactively communicating what the better banking platforms were for our clients at the time. That was, that was Relay was the first one in the space there. It was putting them on better bill pay platforms back in 2019 that was probably, that would have been Bill.com and Melio because most of our clients, I mean a huge percentage of them were writing a bunch of paper checks and the ones that were trying to do something cooler, many of them were using the bill pay solution from their banks, which were just awful. So we're trying to get them set up on, on kind of better bill pay platforms, even down to how clients would gather their info to provide it to us for a month end closer for tax prep. We never, I mean this firm had been around for 80 years and they had never gone as far as doing anything more than sending out a paper organizer. Like we don't, we didn't instruct people on the best ways to gather this stuff up. When it's like think of how many tax returns we've done and how just giving them a few pointers on a better way to do this would probably be worth doing. But we were so afraid of telling someone what to do. We were so afraid of pushing the client to do something outside of just what they wanted to do. That like we wouldn't have even considered that previously. And so we ended up giving them much more structured ways to provide info to us. And you still see this in a vast spectrum of this in firms from the people who are like my clients would hate a client portal. And like there's, there's, it is 100% put on the client to come up with how they want to give you that stuff. And sometimes we will frame that as white glove and sometimes it is a more premium service. But sometimes it's just kind of being lazy or being scared to just tell them something that they may not agree with. And so where we landed was, we're going to tell you what we think the best way for you to do this is. You can disagree. And frankly, it's still fine if you want to do it a different way. But simply saying, here's what we recommend. 80% of the people are like, okay, cool. Like, obviously you know this better than me, so I'm just going to go with what you say. And for some reason, and maybe this is more generationally just kind of the. The older way of running a professional services firm, for whatever reason, we had never even thought to be like, hey, here's some recommendations for xyz. We just thought that these people would, I don't know, they would get it. However they would get it and send it over and we could somehow, like, build an efficient workflow around that last kind of the fourth product of this was we just ended up with a more intentionally designed approach to serving clients. As a result of being more opinionated, we felt like we had more agency and how those. Those engagements came together as we were onboarding a new client. We would end up being pretty opinionated then about the platforms that they ought to use as a result. And again, they wouldn't always agree with us, but most of the time they would happily get out of the way because they're like, you're literally the expert. And if I'm not going to lean into that expertise, I'm not going to capture the value of what I'm paying for. We do this for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of companies. Who do you do this for? Like, the entrepreneur has the perspective of one. And I think we can sell ourselves short by. By not sharing that information that would really help them out because we don't realize what valuable perspective we do have. Our firm got comfortable with having a level of selectivity as a result that we had never had before where we could see the clients. You know, when we start putting that information in front of them, it made it more clear what clients were kind of sponges and willing to take that expertise and get value from that expertise versus the clients who weren't. For the clients who weren't. There ended up being this friction of, well, they're not valuing what we give them, which that actually explains why they complain about the bill and we can't charge them as much and all that. So we, we. It kind of shone a light on who our best fit clients were, but then also the opposite. And so we had, I guess, a more clear path and a more clear way to identify clients that weren't a great fit for the firm. And so these, these four things, you know, we learned that, that nobody cared when we changed. It would have been different if we said all of the clients who bring us their books once a year, you have to change to a different platform because in that case, the clients were doing the books. That's very different. That's a much harder hill to climb. We changed the accounting ledger for the books that we were doing for clients. But the first thing we learned was nobody cared when we did change it. Second was our team fell in love with the platform that we used, but that was just a product of comfort level, I think. Third thing we learned was that we were actually doing our clients a service by being a little bit more opinionated and telling them, like, here's a better way to manage banking and bill pay and all these different things. And then fourth, it just led to a fundamentally more intentionally designed service delivery where we're like, hey, here. Here's kind of the best way to get from A to Z. And people were more than happy to plug into that. You'll have a few outliers who will complain, and those people take up too much headspace. But by and large, people were perfectly happy to plug into that four really valuable things for my firm. And honestly, those four things, they have absolutely nothing to do with Intuit. But until we made that change, we didn't really learn those lessons. So whatever that change is for you, I mean, you could be an Australian firm who's making this change to QuickBooks, because QuickBooks is really marketing hard in Australia right now. Whatever that change could be for you. Just remember, like, the most important lesson I took out of that whole exercise was the agency we had that we didn't realize we had because we were afraid to acknowledge that we're the experts and it's okay for us to be opinionated. And there's a super rigid version of that where you slap the client's hand if they don't do things just the way that you want them to. But there's also a version of that where I'm like, I'm going to tell you the way that I would recommend you to do this. It's, you can still go your own path if you want. It's just going to be a little harder to support you. And if it blows up in your face, I frankly, I won't feel bad for you. So I don't, I'm not, I'm not going to like get on my horse in 2025 and say nobody should use into it products. Because the kind of the weird situation we're in right now is if anybody's going to be the savior for building a really good suite of tax products for tax pros, there are a few other groups working on it that are a ways out, but they do not have the horsepower and the connection and the context of Intuit. I'm not going to like get on my horse and tell everybody that they shouldn't use intuit products in 2025. It's definitely complicated. Right? You know, when I talk with the Intuit people, I try to, I try to really communicate what an opportunity it is to, to keep working with pros, how Intuit is really in the driver's seat to do something compelling that, that other companies aren't in a position to do. So you got to decide that for yourself. But I think what stops people from doing anything or they just get mad and do nothing is they don't yet feel that sense of agency. They may not realize that they have. Or you may have a team that's in love with the tool set that you use right now that may lead you to believe that it's fundamentally superior. When it's like, no, that's actually just a comfort level thing. And does it hurt to retrain on a new thing? You be an accounting ledger, a practice management system or whatever it is, like, yeah, that takes time, that costs real money and productive output. But at the end of the day, you're in the driver's seat like you are totally in control. Even in situations where that may create a little bit of friction or confusion with your clients. To say, like, why are we going from this platform to that platform? Why are we not using Bill anymore and using this other kind of more modern platform, A whole bunch of examples of that and how we run our firms. But the speed at which we do that, I think if we're faster to do that, that helps us long term. Because making that change that gets you to a better place, it, it kind of sets you on that improvement timeline sooner. And so if you made that change now that you were thinking about and may push off another six months, if you instead made that change now coming out of tax season or whatever, then the questions and the things you're thinking about six months from now, they're higher level questions, higher level considerations than if this decision gets pushed back. So I think we kind of need to be biased to action, whatever that means for you. Again, not an intuit thing. Could it could be going to, into it could be, could be going to a Pro Connect for your tax stuff because it's the only SaaS based tax software that you could actually use. The big thing I want people to hear is like, I think we have more control than we think we do, what clients think about our workflows. And all of that takes up more headspace than it should because we know best. Like clients not going to tell me how to run my tax business. And so at the end of the day, you're in control. Like, that's like, that's the greatest gift of running your own accounting firm is agency to not be under the thumb of somebody else and not have to take orders from, from your boss. When you're like, no, dude, I totally know a better way to do this. And they're like, well, this is the way we've always done it. You left that, that's why you left so you could do your own thing. So don't let your clients tell you what to do. Like, don't let the allure of being a quote unquote, you know, firm that uses X platform, like, don't let that pin you down. Like, do what you want to do, otherwise what's the point of all this, right? That was like without a doubt the biggest lesson we took out of making that transition. And it kind of changed the mindset of a lot of, a lot of the folks on the team for whom like when we first talked about that, that it was unthinkable. And they were like, how am I ever going to learn another tax system? And the like the very first time they used ultra tax, it was like, okay, be ready for me to take like 10 times as long to prepare a tax return. And we're like, we get it, it's going to take time. But honestly, on the other side of that, like everybody had a different level of belief in their own ability to change. They saw that the clients by and large would kind of get in line and be like, okay, like, tell me what you think is going to be best. And that that scary conversation we built up in our head is just that it's just in our head. And usually when you actually have that conversation, the person, the person's perfectly reasonable. I mean, so many types of conversations are this way, from price increases to changing the scope of an engagement. Like if you just like the moment you make the decision, you need to do that. If you just stopped what you're doing and made that phone call, then you would save yourself so much stress. But it's just one of those things that we build up in our heads. So remember, it's your hands at 10 and 2. You're the one. You're the one at the wheel. And that's kind of the coolest part about running an accounting firm. Right? This is a very, very divisive one. If you got any thoughts, drop down in the comments. Thanks for coming to be here today, Sam.