24. CFO Tech Stack

4,296. That's the total number of tech platforms that you could use in your fractional CFO firm. And I know firsthand it can be overwhelming figuring out which of those platforms are winners and which ones should be avoided at all cost. Today I'm going to share with you the 10 tech platforms that are absolute necessities in my fractional CFO firm. And I'm going to share with you why I love those platforms so you can hopefully figure out which ones are right for your firm. Let's dive in.

Hey there. Welcome to the Connected Accountant. My name is Michael King. I'm the creator of the Connected Accountant. But I'm also the CEO of KFE Solutions, a top rated fractional CFO firm in Dallas, Texas. And over the last six years, I can tell you that I have built this arsenal of absolutely must have essential technology platforms that I couldn't live without as the CEO of a firm. Today, I'm going to share those top 10 most essential platforms with you in hopes that you can pick out a few that you can apply to your firm to increase your operational effectiveness and efficiency. Now, make sure you stick around until the end because I'm going to share the number one must have piece of technology we use that literally saves us 25 hours each and every month. So let's go ahead and start off. I want to talk to you a little bit about Practice Ignition. I've been using Practice Ignition for about a year and a half now. And what Practice Ignition does is it creates a very seamless way for you to create proposals, terms and conditions. NDAs. It packages everything together in this really nice professional looking platform that you can send to leads. The other thing that I love about Practice Ignition is it automatically creates invoices inside of QuickBooks. And so when Practice Ignition sends the bills every month to your clients, your clients pay it through Practice Ignition. It automatically syncs with QuickBooks to show that those invoices have been paid. It solves a lot of problems for me because now you're not having to worry about DocuSign and a bunch of other platforms to manage these things. Now, all of that said, I do really like Practice Ignition. But there's one big downside. Practice Ignition takes an inordinate amount of time for you to get your money. Sometimes it takes as long as seven or eight business days for you to get paid, particularly when your clients pay through ach. Now, despite what Practice Ignition will tell you, this is not in line with what a lot of the other big platforms do so for example QuickBooks. Typically I get those ACH payments in as few as three business days. So there's a lot of benefits to using Practice Ignition. The fees associated with payments are in line, pretty competitive with QuickBooks. But you do have to consider the fact that they're going hold on to your ACH payments for six to eight business days. Keep that in mind. So all of that said, I still do use Practice Ignition and I think the benefits do outweigh the downsides. The second technology platform that we love at KFE Solutions is called Profit Sense. Profit Sense is our go to source for industry benchmarks, which our clients absolutely love. We also use Profit Sense to help with business valuations and some compliance work that comes our way occasionally. Now, I'm not going to lie to you, Profit Sense is expensive. So you'll want to take a look at the features that Profit Sense has and make sure that your firm can leverage those or else it's probably not going to be worth your money. The next platform is absolutely essential if your services include tax planning and tax strategy, which some of our tiers do. And the platform is called Corvi. And the reason Corvi is so important is because it literally has thousands of tax strategies and tax laws built right into the platform. So you simply input information about your clients from previous tax years, the P and L balance sheet, yada yada yada. And Corvi goes through and does the hard work, all the math on calculating which tax strategies are applicable to your client. And it calculates exactly how much those savings are going to be. This makes it an absolute no brainer if you're working in the world of tax strategy and tax planning, because the amount of time it would take and the amount of knowledge it would take for one person to walk through all of those strategies and all of those laws and calculate them, it wouldn't even make sense. So Corvi, absolutely essential if you do tax planning and tax strategy. Now I will say this once again, Corvi is not inexpensive, but what I have found is that one tax strategy client a year more than pays for Corvi. So again, I think while it is expensive, it's a no brainer. Now the next one I'm going to recommend is pretty basic, but I'm going to just go ahead and throw it out there. We absolutely love G Suite. I'm not apologetic about it. I do not like Microsoft. I don't like the Microsoft Office suite. We are 100% on G Suite as a firm and we Use G Suite for literally everything except for one thing, and that is chat. I don't like Google Chat. So the next platform that I'll share with you is our preferred chat platform and that is Slack. And we use Slack for internal communications as well as external communications. So we've got a workspace for KFE Solutions and our entire team is in there. We're talking about our various clients and all the things that we have going on inside our firm. And then we have separate workspaces. So not channels, but we have separate workspaces for each of our clients. And we've worked out with our clients that that's our preferred method of communication. So we'll have a workspace for each individual client and then inside that workspace, we typically just have one channel for CFO services and that's where we talk to our clients most of the time. It works out great. And honestly, you really don't even need to pay for Slack in order to get all of the functionality. I just described all this next tech so important, and I've learned it the hard way like 10 different times. You've absolutely got to have some type of a VoiceOver IP phone service in your firm. Now, if you're not familiar with Voiceover IP or voip as some people will call it, it's basically taking all the functionality of a cell phone, like phone calls, voicemails and text messages, and putting them into an app that you can access again on your cell phone or from your desktop. Now, the reason that having a VoIP service is so important is because sometimes you want to go on vacation or people on your team want to go on vacation, but your clients maybe still call or leave voice messages or text, and you don't want those calls and texts to go unanswered. The beauty of a voiceover IP service is that you can easily transfer those phone calls and text messages from one person to another so that they don't go unanswered while somebody is unavailable. Now, our favorite platform for VoiceOver IP services, hands down, is OpenPhone. OpenPhone's user interface is super easy to use, and honestly, for the amount of value that it provides, the price is absolutely a no brainer. With just a couple of clicks, you can transfer phone calls and text messages, you can delete phone lines, you can add phone lines. It's super easy. And it's honestly, like I said, one of the biggest values for the price of any of the platforms that we use. Next up on the list is ClickUp. ClickUp is the project management platform that we've chosen to use at the Connected Accountant and at KFE Solutions. Honestly, there's a million competitors out there and you've probably heard of some of them, like Asana Reich, Monday.com or Microsoft Project. The reason that ClickUp is the clear winner for us is because it strikes the perfect balance between simplicity but also functionality. And at only $5 per user per month, you're not going to beat the price anywhere. I highly recommend you check out ClickUp if you're looking for a new project management platform. 8th on my list is Kajabi. And I cannot overstate how reliant I am on Kajabi. And that's because I do like a million different things on there that would normally require six or seven or eight different platforms. For example, I host both of my websites on Kajabi, I host my podcast on Kajabi, I do all of my email marketing on Kajabi, and my CRM lives inside of Kajabi as well. And the benefit to that is I only have to learn one platform. If I was using different platforms for all of those services, it would take me a ton more time to figure out how they all work. And honestly, I just don't have time for that. And while Kajabi might feel like it's a little bit expensive, it's actually not. If you add up the prices for all of those different functionalities, if you had to use them from different platforms, you're definitely saving time and money in the long run by using Kajabi. I highly recommend it. Ninth on the list is the small but mighty platform known as descript. Descript is the go to platform that my team and I use for creating short form videos off of our YouTube videos. So if you see any of our Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook videos, we made those in descript. And the cool thing about descript is that it's super, super easy to use, but you can make absolutely stunning short form videos with it in it. Only $20 a month. It's an absolute no brainer. If you're thinking about creating short form videos for use on social media, you have to check out descript. All right, drumroll please. Number 10. The most valuable, the most effective, the highest ROI we have on any of our tech platforms is called G Accon. GHAN automates the process of pulling data out of the accounting software and updating it in our customized CFO reports that live inside of Google Sheets. As you might imagine, this is a very time consuming process and we used to do it manually Every single month, for every single client, we would have to export data from QuickBooks or Xero into a CSV. Then we would have to manually upload it into Google Sheets into our customized fractional CFO reports. Then we'd have to go through and make sure all the data was correct. We'd have to do validations. It was an extremely time consuming process. But once we found GCON and we set up a few templates, that process has become fully automated. And I tell you this without exaggeration, it saves us literally 20 to 30, sometimes even 40 hours a month, depending on how many clients we have at a given time. I highly recommend if you are using customized CFO reports inside of Google Sheets, I highly recommend you check out G Acc Just works and the price is right. And like I said, it is the most important piece of tech because of how much time it saves every month. And it also reduces the likelihood of errors in those CFO reports. And when you have errors in your CFO reports, you kind of look like a chump to your clients. Definitely. Go check out GCON. All right, that's it. The 10 most essential tech platforms that we use in my firm. I would love to hear what are the platforms that are most essential to you in your firm. Please drop those in the comments below. In the meantime, I look forward to seeing you back right here next week. Same bat time, same bat channel. See you then my friends.