Ultimate Check-List for Year-End (Year-End Series)

Welcome to Accountants LawPod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Lynda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Steven Libhart.

Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. I'm happy to be here with my 2 friends, Lynda and Steve.

How are you?

Good. Yeah? That's not convincing.

No?

Is it the time of year?

I was like, I was waiting for good and.

Yeah, good. It's Monday. I, you know, we record on Mondays, so it's Monday.

Yeah, it's the start of the week. We're in November, close to Thanksgiving, which— do you guys have big plans for Thanksgiving, or—

Well, I have an idea for a plan, but I have— it hasn't been approved formally at this house.

Do we get to know?

Oh, it's nothing big. We have the— we have the condos, right? Um, and I said to Mike, Why don't we go stay in one of our own beach condos? Because you love travel. I think we'll pack up all the pets and go Wednesday through Sunday.

Great idea.

And we actually are having dinner at the beach club, which, Sarah, as you know, is just like, yeah, walk to it, right?

Really nice.

He said, I have to think about it. And so I asked last night, did you think about it? And he's like, nope. So I might just go by myself and pull a Sarah, be alone by yourself.

I do a lot of that. Do what I need to.

I like to travel alone and do things alone. I think it's kind of fun.

I do too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I have no idea how to segue into this one, but ultimate year-end checklist is what we're gonna talk about. It's famous checklist for Thanksgiving.

Yeah, well, you know, we're recording this right before Thanksgiving, and year-end for us accounting types is right around the corner.

Oh yeah. And so we thought, you know, I thought it'd be a good time to talk about what are your ear—

year-end— what are your year-end tips and tricks?

You've got year-end, you've got year-end, right?

Yeah.

I mean, it's such an important time to, to really sit down, stop, breathe. If you have to go to another room with your team or whatever you have to do and talk about how are we going to plan out this year-end and, and make it less painful than last year, because every year needs to get better.

Well, and, and so many changes obviously this year and planning ahead for 2026 too. So you're planning for the close of '25, but you're also— you, you have some updates for '26 because what you set up now is going to look different for the, the next year as well.

Exactly.

You're kind of bridging a, a chapter close on one side and opening the door for the other.

Um, and you need to— I think it's so important to time it all out, you know, write it down, time, time it out, get buy-in from the team on who who's responsible for what and hold them accountable for it so that it really happens. And you're not suddenly on January 1st, New Year's weekend going, uh-oh.

With the exception of 1099s, but even with them included, everything that we're going to probably talk about should be done monthly. Yeah.

Yeah.

If you're doing it right, it should be done monthly. But I have to say with the caveat that if you own an accounting firm and, you know, have one like mine where You know, the older clients that I have are just these little dinky tiny clients that you just fly through and you don't charge them a lot, and they're just not even law firms or whatever. They're just simple clients. I don't have the time to go through them all and do all that. So now is a good time.

I agree.

Because come January, we're usually straight out, not only straight out with work trying to get things finalized and 1099s, but also Trying to— and trying to button up the year for everybody. But then you also get an influx of new work. So you get new clients, and that adds to the extra layer. So we just get stressed out. I'm not looking forward to it. I am so over January being the most stressful month of the year.

I agree with you, Linda. I agree. And, and that's why this, this, this subject today is so crucial. I think that we can take a lot of the pain out of it. You know, instead of this time of year, a lot of accountants like to slow down and go, okay, it's the holidays, the clients are going to leave me alone. The attorneys slow down. This is usually a little bit quieter for them. I can just, you know, breathe. But this is the time to really hunker down and save yourself so much pain in January.

Yeah, going through everything. And I think too, like, for one thing, and I just did this for a client, was going through their profit and loss, going through their balance sheet, comparing it to last year, kind of seeing where they're at, how they're doing. Because especially if you don't see them or talk to them much during the year, you want to see how they're doing now because the end of the year is really close and maybe they need to kind of address if they've got a big profit or if they don't, you know, have maybe a discussion with them about what's going on because there's usually a story behind it. And I think that's part of it. Also just making sure everything's in the right categories. I mean, even when you do bank feeds and even when you put rules or whatever, they can go awry and you can— I don't care if you're using the AI, good luck to you. Right now, it doesn't really work well. I mean, especially when it can't even put the name of the software in the right category for the software. That should be like the first thing they coded in the AI is—

Just for clarity, she's referencing QuickBooks.

I'm talking about Intuit QuickBooks.

Linda's hot on this one.

She's hot on this topic. Steve, it blew my mind. You turn the AI on and Intuit QuickBooks software subscription that comes in monthly should go to the right category.

Okay, Linda.

Linda.

Lynda, let's—

oh, um, well, no, I mean, I mean, yeah, I totally hear you.

Yeah, yeah, we're talking a lot about accounting, so this is accounting-focused for the accounting, um, bookkeeping firms out there. But really, you know, the law firms— well, on the law firm side, there are some planning situations that are really important, and part of that is talk about your year-end bonuses and making sure that those—

yes.

Are not just checks written out the door, that they're included in the payroll before the 12/31. And, and I don't want to interject right there. Well, I was going to say, I don't want to find out about those 12/31 bonuses on 12/31.

That's right.

Or worse, when they cash the check and it's next year and they didn't do it through the payroll, right?

Can't go back and fix it. Sorry.

And I also have that, that I just did this with one of our clients on Friday or whatever day it was last week. Clarify to them that bonuses are taxed higher than regular wages. And no, you can't run them through regular wages. You should not do that.

Yeah.

You know, that's a really important thing at your end to do so that they're, they're staging it correctly within the law firm to, to the recipients. Because—

You've got that, you've got W-2 wages that need to have the S corp health insurance included. So that—

And tying those back against the books, tying those numbers back.

Yeah.

And just running the distributions and giving them to the attorneys and saying, are all these not business related? Just to make sure that they are, that they are. In fact, I mean, you know, we see some things and we're like, I just saw something today and I'm like, oh, they bought sneakers at the, you know, they're not a sneaker guy. And it's like, okay, so they bought it through, did they use the wrong credit card? And obviously put that into distributions. But you want to do that because sometimes that's going to warrant a conversation. Better to have it now. Find out, like, you know, you might hear later, oh, that's a gift.

January.

Yeah, but you'd rather know now. And I think that because they're going to get taxed on that. So, um, another big conversation, which Sarah and I kind of talked about last week with one of my clients, is if they're paying partnership taxes, the taxes on the partnership, and where does that go? And, or, or even paying their IRS bill and they're a partnership and they took money out of the company. To pay the bill that was due to the IRS for each person that went into their individual S corps. If they took money out of the business, that becomes a distribution because they took money out of the business. That's not— it's a pass-through. So you need to put it as a distribution. And I know I had a conversation. They're like, why am I taxed twice on them? You know, I'm being taxed twice. Yes, you are.

So to recap, then we've talked about distributions as an over— see, we've talked about bonuses, we've talked about S corp health wages that need to be shown on—

in—

onto the W-2s for S corp owners above 2%. We also have the 1099 planning. We did have a little bit of that conversation just moments ago, um, in preparation for that, which 1099s for 2025 are very different than what they'll look like for 2026. So what we'll have this year as a conversation is going to look differently.

Totally different.

But, you know, I always hold my breath. Lynda knows this. Every year we hear something's going to shift for 1099s, and then we don't see it come to fruition. So I have always operated on the same status that I've known, which it's always maintained itself in that status. And I'm just hoping and praying that nothing shifts for next year and that what we heard is going to be true, what it's true. Yeah.

So, you know, Sarah, you even said it this year because we planned for it and we have We have the girls of our staff looking at this every month. It's a part of the checklist. It's a part of the practice management that they have to check off that they're doing this because it's such a big sticky area when you work with law firms, especially if— do they use trust funds? Is it something to do with— do they have a doctor bill that they pay? All of that's a factor. And it's better to stay on top of that because it's one actually topic that's brought up in the Law Lab all the time. Like, help me understand.

Just last week.

Yeah, it's so confusing. It really is confusing. And you want to get on top of it because the window to do that work is small. And if you've got a lot of law firm clients, you want to make sure that that's been processed. You don't want to be making phone calls and gathering that information in January when you're up against the deadline.

Well, then for a lot of times, what's going to happen too is we're going to see an increase in bar dues, right? So we're going to have a lot of bar dues paid out. We're going to have PLF stuff paid out or professional liability paid out. Uh, we see an increase of items that are annual subscriptions now in the law firms. So in planning that out, and part of the cash flow conversation that Steve always has is all of this planning, what does this look like?

Mm-hmm.

And then Lynda and I love to say, okay, don't drain everything out, please, because we need it for January and a little bit of February while you're still catching up and rebilling. So, um, so you have to plan Pretty much right now going forward, a more succinct roadmap of what the financial outlay will be for a law firm right now. But on the accounting side, there's a lot of other stuff that we have to do. To your point, like Lynda was saying, the monthlies, what does it all look like? Have you looked at everything through that lens, that comparative lens of this year to last year? How are we doing? Those are all big things.

Look at the AR. Maybe the client hasn't looked at their own AR for a really long time, and maybe it's a good time to look at your AR.

Mm-hmm.

Maybe you can collect on some of it. I mean, it's just a lot of times they put their head down, they work, they don't look at it, and it grows and it grows. We see this all the time. And then you're like, wow, there's a lot there and nobody's collecting on it. And it can depend on the firm. Sometimes the, the firm will let that job be the attorneys that work there's job, and sometimes it's a person that does it in the firm. So you might want want to look at that and see how can we collect on some of that? How do we increase the revenue and get that cleaned up? And your accounts payable, we don't see a lot with accounts payable with law firms being a big problem, but other clients you do, you know, that they've got a large accounts payable balance.

Well, I feel like something we need to talk about too is health insurance because that's changing dramatically. And so if you're a firm that might not have the luxury of a great cash flow right now, but you've got this benefit for your employees. As painful as it might be, you might be faced with this coming year, um, having to have a shared premium where some of it flows to the employees and they have to take on a responsibility.

Mm-hmm.

Or you explore FSAs and HSAs and ways that they can get medical supplies and things like that as a tax deduction, you know, ways that you can come out looking like the employer, and you are the employer, that actually cares to do something like this on behalf of your employees and save money wherever you can. Because I feel like that's going to be a huge subject for all of us that get those questions from the law firms saying, can I do this? Can I do that? How can— you know, we're not, we're not the health insurance experts, but we get those questions. You know, what is it going to do?

And they've dramatically gone up. Dramatically.

They have.

So, um, we're in a significant amount of dollars out the door. So, and then I think sometimes, and I don't know if this is the case all the way, but I think a lot of times because maybe you're a great employer and you're covering it, um, you might have to have that conversation, which is not an easy one, but they have to understand that the price went way up and that the expense for the business owner is really high. And, you know, when you're talking like a leap, I'm not talking like 5 or 10%. This is way more than than that. So, and then you, like you said, Steve, you want to look at other options, but sometimes there aren't other options.

Yeah, sometimes there aren't.

It's hard. Non-law firm for me was 120% increase, and it came to the question of, do we even want this? Um, would we rather do a stipend? Now, I'm not saying that's the best plan either, but that's the question that we had to face, and We're talking about firms that offer 100% coverage.

Mm-hmm.

But even if you don't offer 100% coverage and you're offering a percentage, which at minimum is 50%. So in that situation, if the increase is high enough and you have to explore other plans, depending on the size of your firm, if it's an intimate size, it's a, it's a great time to reengage and have the conversation, to be very forthright about, hey, look, this is what we're looking at. We have to make a decision on these types of plans, or The other, like Lynda's saying, there's no way out, right? You have, you have no other options. So now you really have to look at potentially what increases are affordable. And it lays back into compensation too, probably. It's gonna—

I was just gonna say the labor costs.

Yeah.

You know, calculate that into the labor cost and, you know, maybe, you know, as unfortunate as it feels and is, the employee may not get as big of a salary increase the next year, but We've still got you insured because you have that kid at home or whatever.

Well, and we're taking on, like, say, 50%, 60% of the employer's side of it. So that's part of your compensation package.

It is.

That's the hardest thing.

It doesn't feel like it, though, when you don't get the money in your pocket.

Exactly. Yeah.

That's the hard part.

It doesn't feel like it. Because if you go out and buy it, it's expensive.

It is expensive.

Yeah. I mean, myself included.

I mean, again, I was— I wrote it down privately. And you get older, it's even more.

And I was like, oh my God, Linda, I don't— I, I just— it's well more than a mortgage for 3 people.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Mine's like $2,400 a month, and it doesn't cover anything.

Yeah. I know.

That's the other thing. I go to the doctor, and I got a copay, and I got a, you know, matching thing. I'm like, what the heck is all this? You know, it's— it doesn't cover anything.

It's a problem. It's a good point. I appreciate you bringing it up, Steve, because I kind of did forget, like, I feel like that's the elephant.

It's the elephant in the room right now because not everybody knows what the rates are going to be yet. We're just now crossing that threshold and it's going to be, it's going to be a big subject in January.

Well, renewals are happening now and so you got to—

They're happening now. The sting is going to be felt in mid to late December into January.

Yeah.

And you may want to just go into each file and I'm going to use QuickBooks as an example. You go in and you go to report options. Just take a glance, especially if you have a team. Take a glance and make sure everything's been reconciled. You might find that some of the loans, maybe you just do it at the end of the year because it's not worth the effort to go every month and beg and borrow for, you know, please give me the statement at the end of the year. But you might want to start to think about maybe set it up in your practice management to ask for the statements. You want to have like a little list of things that are like year-end tasks.

True.

How about this one, Sarah? Did you buy a vehicle this year? Because Sarah's got a serial vehicle buyer.

Did you catch my— did you catch my note to you one day? Because it did happen.

Oh, yeah, you told me that.

I mean, yeah, it did.

Yeah, he buys a vehicle every year, and, and, and I have a client the same way. It's like, all right, what'd you buy this year? But it's kind of like, I need the document. I need the purchase and sales agreement. I need to know what you purchased. I need to know if you put a down payment. So down payment's in there somewhere. You know, sometimes we just do these clients.

Yeah, where did that come from?

You know, and then I like to put the document on as an attachment because I know I'm going to hear from the tax person saying, Um, I need this document because I got to figure out the depreciation. They need the details. So I just attach it and say it's in there. You know, you can find it. It's in the, it's in the transaction. And by now we've been doing a lot of these clients for a while. They know that. But just basically, if you're a business owner and you've got a bookkeeper and you're just like, I wonder how my books are, go in, take a look at your balance sheet, compare it, make sure the trust matches the, the bank account balance. They should, they should at least align, maybe not the current month, but the prior months. Anything's been reconciled.

Mm-hmm.

You should be getting the 3-way bank reconciliation. You go look inside to see what accounts have been reconciled. Are they all reconciled? You know, sometimes we have these weirdo cash accounts people create.

Yeah.

And then you want to look at those and then see, is this something they did on their own? Or, you know, and just maybe get them off the books, get them inactivated if they're zero. That's another great tip too. At the end of the year, you want to go through your list All the clients you had that you're all done with, you're never going to see again, get them off the list.

Close them out.

And there's a process there, but you want to make sure you follow that process and document the process, put it in your practice management to follow through and get that done. We've had clients that they've got monstrous lists that they've never closed it down. And that even includes going through the list and saying, oh, this person has 35 cents left over. I need to address that. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, on the trust side, looking through the trust ledgers to see the trust ledgers.

Yeah, what's not cleared the bank? Take a look at that.

Exactly. Non-cash checks. That's, that's one that always just kind of sits out there and hides.

Yeah, my favorite are the non— the ones that I see in the books, like with the accounting team, and I'll be like, oh, how does an ACH not clear? Yeah, February, you know. Yeah, and guaranteed you go look and it's a duplicated entry, right? And you got to get it off the books, but You want to clean all this up now. It's a lot easier to clean up now than have to go back after the close of the business, you know, the close of the year and the tax return's been prepared. It's just simpler to clean it up and get it addressed, get it looked at. And those are just the things that we kind of have to be sticklers on.

That came into my mind. I was going to ask Steve about that you said, and I was like, oh, Steve, do you do this? And do I? You do?

I do. It's on my checklist.

What is on—

out of curiosity, what is on your I don't have it in front of me because it's a little bit different for every law firm.

Okay, okay.

Um, you know, I customize— they're also customized. I mean, there's the law firm that just doesn't pay attention at all and you beg for everything, up to the ones that are really on top of their numbers that are hungry for the meeting every month and love what we do, you know. So there's all kinds of different hybrids out there that are going on, and, and they're each different, but the basics You know, double-checking at the end of the year from the payroll processor. Pull those reports, pull those year-to-date reports and go back and look in the books. And, you know, if you have to journal entry, whatever you need to do to tie those numbers and have the backup attached, if you use a journal entry method, um, you know, to attach that report from the payroll service to the journal entry so you can prove to the tax preparer that you tied it back. You know, all those sorts of things need to be done at the end of the year. Um, being in touch, I think this goes across the board for every client. I like to reach out to the CPA/tax preparer and say, just please take a look. It's the middle of November. I know that this is your quieter time. Would you just look? And anything that, that needs, you know, piques your interest, reach out to me and reach out to the owner of the firm and let us know.

Well, you know, you're hitting on something I, I just thought about. A lot of tax professionals are doing their CPE sometimes in December.

Correct.

Their availability is actually— it's not disclosed, but it's the time that to them is quieter, right? But it's also the time that we're doing a lot of the planning and deploying of this plan. And I will say what you just said earlier about each firm is different. It's true. I have a very succinct annual year-end plan that happens around October, November. With one firm, and it's very—

I just did that with one last week, and it— I was like, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Yeah. And every year— and I got to the point where I just copied the— I look at the prior emails to ensure, and I copy it, and I look at the information. Like Lynda said, go look at the books, and I look at the books, and I look at everything. And especially if you have multiple partners, you want to make sure that all those distributions, like you were saying, Lynda, are cleanly concisely laid out. They're not mis— because we have a lot of people, ACH contractors, we have a lot of people that ACH. So to your point, Steve, you firmly like have these tailored worksheets, but overall the overarching worksheet, yearly worksheet, is to kind of in at a high level review backwards what happened the last 10, 11 months, 12 months depending on what month you're in. And then where do you look from comparative to prior year, even a couple years back? And And then what stands out to you? And get that done now so that when you're preparing things, 'cause as soon as the IRS opens the door for filings, there are some people that are literally, they're at your door before that happens, right?

I've been cautioning people on that. Our largest client last year, their tax preparer said, I want everything on January 31st. I want it boom, boom, done. And that was their first year of business and it was rough. I, I honored it. It was extremely rough trying to pull all that together. And I said, I kind of guess that the reason they did that is they thought, okay, you're a new firm, you'll probably be smaller revenues your first year. Well, they went gangbusters their first year.

Yeah.

And it was rough getting that done. So this year on the checklist, I said, please make it clear that it's not going to be available until February 15th at the earliest.

You know, that's a good point to bring up. And, and just saying to accounting firms and to law firms, right, if you've increased in volume, our prices don't stay the same because our workload has shifted.

I'm glad you mentioned that.

Other demands, like you want reporting at a certain period of time that's above everybody else, we've got to prioritize it differently. So pricing structures will shift in the new year for accounting firms like they do for yourselves as law firms. And if you haven't revisited your pricing, That would probably be a good time to have that conversation.

Right.

On all sides.

Keep a list throughout the year of all the extra projects you've done.

Yeah.

For the law firm.

I love that tip, Steve.

Yeah.

You know, just keep that checklist because that's good customer service. That's not, that's not saying I'm going to raise your rates because you gave me this to do and that to do.

Exactly. It's not punitive.

You know, we, we as a team together, client and us, this is what we did. This is what you added. These are the results of it. Yeah, you know, that sort of thing. And because of that, we're not within the ratio of the accounting cost to revenue or whatever you're basing it on. And this is what it needs to be for this coming year. And that just helps keep that dialogue going and it's healthy and it, it, yeah. Oh, it just creates other ownership and partnership.

It's a partnership.

Partnership.

Absolutely. Yeah.

And guess what? They'll, they'll send you— this morning I received a, uh, a tax document from, um, Gusto that this one client, that their 941 is going to be accelerated because they've done this kind of revenue now. And, you know, on their payroll— excuse me, this time of year, dollar amount of expense. And I was grateful to them. I'm like, thank you for sharing that with me instead of a surprise later.

Oh, they get the letter from the IRS asking—

From the IRS. Yeah. And I can share it with Gusto. And I'll follow up with gusto and say, did you get it? Do you acknowledge it? You know, that sort of thing. And so it's proactive.

Yeah, it's taken a while to get here. I will say from our level of years of experience in having done this, I feel like we've all learned kind of the tips and tricks ourselves. And so it's been a self-reliance thing that we've sort of taught ourselves these things. I feel like this is This is probably the first year I've received a multitude of emails asking, hey, do you want to see my year-end checklist? I've not seen that in the past. I've had one or two.

I wonder what's causing this.

But not the volume.

Yeah. And so I want to— even with payroll, Steve just mentioned payroll, but payroll also, you might want to have the employees check to make sure their address is correct, that their email is correct, because W-2s are going to go out and usually they're done by email message, you know, they're, they're secure, but you want to ensure that they get what they're expecting. Maybe they should all review their W-4s right now. If they know that they had to pay, you know, they might want to change their exemptions on their, on their W-4s. Just little simple things, but they kind of get missed and you forget about them, and then all of a sudden the year ends here and there's not a lot you can do to change it.

Yeah.

So it's just something you might want to look at. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff that you might want to look at. And then also Did you meet your goals? Like, did you set goals in the beginning of the year? Did you meet your goals? Did you, you know, put them up against each other and see, are you on point or, or were you way off now that the end of the year is coming? And if you're way off, you know, you gotta set new goals for next year. You know, what do you feel? What does it feel like in your gut that you're gonna need for next year? Are you gonna need to increase your— are you gonna increase your revenue? You're gonna stay status quo? Are you gonna hire? Those are things you want to really look at as you start to, you know, move forward into 2026, which I can't believe. I can remember looking at that paperwork when I was a kid going, wow, that's going to be so weird being in that year. And oh my goodness, it's here. Like, it's right here already. It's like hard to believe, right?

You know, Lynda, I'm glad you brought up the goals because I like to train clients to start budgeting in October for the next year. And so to your point, now that we're talking about the end of the year client, Um, and you, you missed this goal, it's okay to go ahead and tweak that budget right now. We're not in the next year. Let's tweak that line. You thought about this, so I love that you brought that up.

Yeah, I mean, even look through, look through those accounts where you can cut some of the fat. Like maybe you bought all these subscriptions and you're still paying for it. You can do that personally too. Like there's stuff that I sign up for that I'm like, okay, I just need to stop this. I mean, it's the same thing in the business, the same thing. You might have thought this was amazing software and then And lo and behold, you're not using it, or maybe you are using it, but you're paying for 70 users and you only have 5. I mean, those are places where you can save money.

Yeah.

Find out from the staff, are you using it? Is there something better out there? And if, and if there isn't, or if there is, you might want to look into it. And it's a great time. It's kind of quieter at the end of the year. The courts close and everything else. You might want to start to look into, because it costs money to train into new software. Also, you have the buy-in in the new software because nobody likes change. So you want to make sure that you can demonstrate why you want to make the change or the shift. If you're in something that's not working, now's a great time to start to put all your ducks in a row to get ready for next year.

Here's another little tip for the end of the year. If you're a firm that does a lot of filings on behalf of your clients with the court systems, a lot of times their December bill won't come out until January. And, you know, I try to teach people, um, bill these as they happen. You have access to the portal.

Yeah.

You can go in and see your filings. You can see what they cost. Get all of your December stuff posted and done so you don't have a surprise on your bills in January for last year's books that you've got the accounting people working on. You know, that, that little thing right there for a firm that has a lot of filing fees can snag things up so bad and delay things in January.

Well, that's part of the planning because if some firms, like part of my planning for some of them is they close. So what are the dates that you're closed at end of year?

Right.

Because they're physically closed. So there's no one going in depositing checks. There's nothing happening. So what does that look like? And part of that is that what is the work happening? What, who's doing what? Where, when is payroll going to occur? So there's quite a bit of those pieces that happen. Yeah.

As receiving—

Don't wipe out your bank account and payroll happens on January 2nd.

Right.

That's a problem.

Yeah. Or plan accordingly. Sometimes what we do is we plan ahead, we pay the payroll in December, and we skip that one that's supposed to happen on a different due date because they're going ahead and just, just putting it in the thing. But I, I do feel like part of this planning that we were just talking about, like going through, um, if you're gonna write your budgets, if you're gonna set new goals, I, I feel like just looking at it holistically and saying, am I going to redo my budget or am I going to sustain? That's okay too. Do the tools I'm— I use, are we using them to their maximum like you're saying, Lynda? Or are we at the stage where we need to just make the change? What does that— what does that look like? Write that into the budget and plan that out rather than we just made a decision, we're just going to make this change and that's it.

And typically the change will happen over time and then you'll actually won't feel the benefit of it maybe a few months till everybody gets used to using the software and Make sure if you do invest in software, take real good analysis of it and realize that maybe you're not using— we see this a lot with Clio, that people aren't using the things that are in there that would save them time. They're just jumping in, doing the work, jumping out, and they're not realizing there's a lot of things that can save them time that may be templated or things like that. They just don't realize that they're there. And if you take a good hard look or assign someone in the office to take a good hard look and see what it does, and you'd be surprised. And then you're empowering a staff member to kind of Really analyze it from the deep inside. I like that. And then they'll be like, guess what I found? That we, we do this all the time, repetitive. And even talk to your employees because they might be doing their work the way they were told, knowing that they know that there's a better way, but they're afraid to step forward and maybe make the change or speak up. Give them the power and let, you know, find out and give them, have a conversation about it and say, what is it that you wanna do that maybe will improve your job? You'd be surprised. at what you get from a staff member that's just sitting down doing their work the way they were taught. And then there's other ways. Encourage that conversation because it'll help with growth and it'll help with your staff really being happy with where they work.

I love that. You know, to your point that we talked about, that you two talked about a while ago, one of Sarah's favorite subjects— did you buy a new car this year? Has your operating agreement changed? Do you anticipate changes with that? And what are the impacts of that on distributions and different things?

You know, and if you have a firm where, you know, a partner's leaving, another partner's coming in, or partners, tell your accounting team about it. We should be the first to know. You should be like, hey, want you to know this is what's happening, because I can't tell you how many times they're like, oh, didn't we tell you that? Like, no.

You know, if you can get that partnership with them, if they'll call you and say, this is confidential between us, but this is going to happen. Oh my gosh. Clients, we're so happy when you do that because we can help you through that and save so much pain.

Wow. We've just imploded a lot of information in this series in this, in this moment. Um, I will have to have like a, a bullet point of things or something.

It's— oh, maybe Tierra can make a checklist out of the—

Checklist. Yeah, that's a good—

I—

and it's, it's going to be dual purpose, of course, because we have accounting firms and law firms.

Um, so You know what would be fun is when we record in January, we should keep a little ticker list of roadblocks we're running into and bring them up.

And, you know, then everybody can put those on their checklist for next year.

I love his 5 spreadsheets one because it does— things happen that you save them money, and then when you go to raise their rate because their workload increased, they're always like, why are you raising my price? And, um, well, the bookkeeper that works for you is getting a raise every year, and You know, we try to make sure that we're trying to maintain good staff. You like your bookkeeper? Yes. And then, oh, by the way, didn't she fix this or that? Or it's hard to remember every single thing. But if you keep a little side spreadsheet, it is really gold. If you're a bookkeeping firm or bookkeeping person that runs a bookkeeping firm, Steve's side spreadsheet, very valuable.

That's what we call it. We call that internally, by the way.

We should start offering that out with pictures of us on it or something.

Did you ask about this? I love it. Can be a Google Sheet.

Sarah says. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, thank you both. This was a good topic.

This was good.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you.

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Well, thank you everyone. This was good.

Can we say Happy New Year now? Happy New Year. Bye everybody. Bye.

Later.