Managing PHONE Calls In An Accounting Firm

Today, we are getting into ye old telephones. Is that a thing that you should still have in an accounting firm? But what we're actually going to get into is more broadly communications in a firm. How do we set clear expectations with our clients, and does the phone still have a place in whatever that plan is?

But also today, a fascinating story of someone who, uh, worked with an accounting firm and the support they got was so bad that it led them to go out and use the AI agent OpenClaw to try to do all their tax filings. Just totally replace the accounting firm with AI. Did it work? And how should we feel about this? Plus, whether AI impacts my advice for whether people should go out and start their own accounting firm. How to ensure your accounting firm systems are ready for AI, and how to trust what you're hearing from software companies when these days there's never been as much hyperbole as there is now. Even, even that statement itself is hyperbolic. How do you know when you can trust a platform that it can actually do what they are promising? We're covering all those things today.

People, hurry up, let's get going. Come on, take a seat. If you're new here, welcome along to the Jason on Firms podcast, where we talk accounting firm stuff. It's pretty cool. Today, we thought, how could we raise the bar even more? Let's talk about phones. It actually came from this question from a listener: "How do you keep track of clients calling with a question and someone else needs to call them back? Should we be making a task in the practice management system every time? What's the best way to manage that? Uh, we're using Teams, if that matters."

So, Teams, Microsoft Teams, they have a voiceover IP phone system. As you may imagine, it depends on the phone system that you're using, but it also depends on the operating system you're using for your firm where you manage all of your tasks. I'm going to assume you're using a practice management system because everyone should be. But when it comes to the phones themselves, this is why like traditional phones are a pretty big liability these days. There's no like interconnectivity to be able to push stuff from A to B. And if you're starting to record more of your virtual meetings and get these transcripts, you know just how valuable that connectivity can be. And so if you are still using like traditional phones, in, in my mind, there's no way around still being reliant upon a human being to go and like make a note in a system for someone to follow up.

The better alternative is a, a VoIP system or voice over IP phone system. That is basically an internet phone, which, by the way, many of these can also be connected to like physical phone handsets, headsets. I think they call them headsets, which, which is always weird to me because I hold it in my hand. I do hold it to my head, but when I hear headset, I think like the thing I wear on my head that lets me talk to the phone. Anyways, the best way that this can work is you have a voiceover IP phone system that says, "Ah, I've seen this phone number before. This is Mike." And it looks at your practice management system and it says, "Mike, Mike. Oh, here he is." And then depending on what happens with the phone call, did it get answered? Did it not get answered? Did somebody leave a voicemail? A record is made in your practice management system that is assigned to whoever owns that client. And that's, that's another, uh, place where this can fall down for folks is many firms don't have very clear ownership over the clients themselves. Maybe because there's a partner that's still like, eh, kind of sort of in the mix. Generally, any client needs an owner who is not the big boss, and the owner is like the default person that any sort of inquiries need to go to.

So when I, when I sort of transitioned from working in the firm and doing a bunch of client work to working on the firm and being fully out of client work, I still had all those clients that still wanted to talk to me, right? But the process of, uh, peeling them away from me started with, well, if not me, then who? Do I have somebody on the team that's capable enough to be able to get them what they need? And if I do, then over time, we start transitioning that stuff automatically to the right person. And sometimes that would look like, I get an email and they were like, "Hey, let me pull Tim in on this." And then Tim solves the problem. Sometimes it looks like I get a phone call, they leave a voicemail, Tim calls him back. Tim's able to say like, "Hey, I heard you were looking for XYZ. Jason's, uh, doing whatever else today, so I want to get back to you right away." Like, it, it kind of matters how you manage that, right? To do it tactfully. But every client needs an owner. And if you're the big boss, that's presumably not you. And that is then the person that needs to be flagged when the phone call happens if they need to follow up and give them a call or something like that.

But let's zoom out from the phone because there's a lot of people right now that are going, "Wow, phones. That's so like 1998." I'm raising children right now that I, I'm pretty sure won't even know what a phone is, 'cause they look at a smartphone and they're like, "Hey, you got games on that thing, right?" And I'm like, "No, this is a device for connecting with other human beings and talking to them verbally." And they're like, "Wow, that's so cringe, man."

If you're in more of a traditional accounting firm, it may shock you to learn there are many firms that refuse to even have a phone. And that, and for many firms, that is just, that's unthinkable because that is how business gets done, you know. Oh my gosh. I saw, I got an Instagram reel over the weekend that was just incredible. So, if you're familiar with, uh, Sam Parr, he's one of the hosts of My First Million. Like, real, in my mind, real sort of like sweaty, uh, entrepreneur think boy culture. He, he does some other stuff. He's founded, uh, Hampton's, like an online community, very of the times, sort of online personality for all this stuff. But he was at his dad's house and the short was basically, "Check out how my dad sells like tens of millions of dollars of onions." And, uh, he had a laptop and he's like, "Here's his laptop. The only thing that he uses it for is watching YouTube videos between phone calls." And then he had like several telephones, like physical phones, not like cell phones, like physical landline phones. And then he had this like one sheet of paper and he's like, "Here is his CRM." And I loved it. It was so quaint, just so simple. You look at that and you're like, "Boy, there's days where that sounds nice, doesn't it?"

But the reality is, like, there's so many different ways to run a business, to run an accounting firm. Um, it ought to sort of map to like, what are the preferences of the person that I want to work with? That usually ought to inform what's the right answer for us. But also a reminder that like, everybody's normal is a product of their preferences and sort of how they came up in understanding accounting firm running and all that. And so you take somebody like, you know, Logan Graph, who I don't, I actually don't know that he does any phone calls. But then you got other people like slightly further down the spectrum that are like, "Well, we'll do phone calls, but they all have to be scheduled ahead of time." For some folks, uh, that is just like actual telephone calls, they won't do. For other folks, you have to do virtual meetings instead. Some folks, they will do neither. It's, they don't do any synchronous conversation. That is live conversation. Everything is asynchronous, transactional, an email, a text, just the back and forth, even a Loom video that you can send them.

And the channel that it happens through, in my opinion, doesn't really matter. Like, there is an argument for, like, knowledge workers simply being more productive in an asynchronous work environment. And so my company, we tell everybody, like, before they come and work with us, like, we are an asynchronous company. It's a big bonus if they've worked with an asynchronous company before. An asynchronous company basically means like, we're not going to get on a live meeting and hammer it out. Like, that's exceedingly rare. We're hiring you to do a job. We'll create the expectations for, here's what the job is. You have to have very good written communication to be able to coordinate stuff with people on your team, but it ultimately gives folks better freedom and flexibility and time to focus rather than having to be pulled into these calls and all that all day long. And in my opinion, if you're going to run a virtual company, which is what mine is in most cases, the best way to do so is to run it asynchronously. It affords everyone the ability to work on a more flexible schedule on whatever is going to work best for them. And as we talked about a week or two ago, the whole concept of like makers' minutes versus managers' minutes, the last thing that an editor needs is a whole bunch of meetings clogging up their day, right? Like, they need to be able to focus and do deep work. And I think work in many ways today is not designed to give people the space to do deep work.

So I do think there's an argument for the sort of asynchronous business. But we have to consider, does that make sense for kind of where our industry is headed and the type of support that my clientele will want? There are certain people who, when they just need to get something done, they're going to pick up the phone and call the person and get it done. And if that's the type of person you're going to work with, you have to be available. Your availability is actually a huge asset. Now, that doesn't mean that your entire team has to be available. It means the communication layer, the folks that are doing the relationship management, they ought to be available. But the production folks, they still need their focus. Like, we have to protect them from being distracted every 20 minutes. You can think of it as like, my firm can have this sort of candy candy coating that is how we talk with clients and make them feel heard and understood and respond quickly and all that. But often times that and the doing of the work are too muddled together. And if you have people who are perpetual, perpetually frustrated at, "I wish I could just get my work done, but all these clients keep bothering me," that is usually a signal that there's an opportunity there to better separate the relationship management from the production because it's very hard to be productive at both. And you run the risk of then being like the person doing production that's responsible for the client relationship, and you just end up being a total jerk 'cause like the last thing that you want to do is talk to another person because you know every time you talk with someone, it ends up creating more work, but you already got too much on your plate.

So how do we ultimately escape this? We need a firm-wide communication plan that is sort of applicable across any channels that clients are allowed to reach you at. And the most common mistake that we make is that the big bosses, the most scarce people, are equally available as the people who you want actually fielding those inquiries. How many times is this more, maybe more of a traditional firm example, but how many times do you get a client that calls the front desk and you got an admin person that takes the call, and their job is basically just to run dispatch and they pass them through to the big boss. The client, they pass the client through to the big boss, and the big boss picks up the phone. The client's like, "Hey, I need a copy of, uh, those financial statements or my tax return or something like that." Or even worse, the admin passes the person through and they leave the client leaves the big b, the client leaves the big boss a voicemail to say, "Hey, uh, we're doing a mortgage refinance. Could you send me a copy of our tax return last year?" That's not something the admin could have done. In your communication system with your clients, unless there is friction to get the answer from the biggest brain in the room, they will always go straight to the biggest brain in the room. Your clients are like mice in a maze. You are the cheese. They want the cheese. And until we, and if we don't want them coming straight to you, then we have to make it easier for them to access the other folks in your firm.

So in my firm, what it ultimately looked like was there was admin availability, which was pretty much real-time. They could pick up and call them anytime. There was staff-level productivity, and we had staff-level people that owned every client and took care of 80% of things. And then you had big boss, like partner-level availability. The turnaround time on, on getting in touch with a partner was slowest. Now, what most people do, what most firms look like is the client actually has the phone number of the big boss. So, they can often times bypass that whole system or send them a text or something like that. I had somebody that I worked with that was this way who was perpetually behind but prided themselves on answering every phone call and responding to every text right away. Meanwhile, there's hundreds of email messages that are all stacked up. But as soon as a client figures out that they can jump the queue, jump the line by going direct to them, they're going to do that every single time, right? Like, we are training a behavior that ultimately is not sustainable, and it's why so many, uh, folks end up like chained to their cell phone and they don't know how to get themselves out from under that.

So while I do think there's definitely a place for the phone still, first principles has to be like, what is our plan for how and who will triage these client messages? I think it really helps to have an admin layer that is like immediate and can do a lot of stuff, like their availability being near round-the-clock and their skills and their access being so much that they can handle a lot of stuff for you. That takes so much stress out of the client sort of relationship management and a client's unhappiness with how quickly you can respond to them. But it also reinforces the behavior that like, hey, we've actually got these really good, really high-touch people that can just handle a lot of things for you immediately. It's kind of like standing up a free offer to give you more permission to charge a premium price for your paid offer. If I give you 24/7 or, you know, 8 hours a day, uh, immediate access to a really good admin team, in many ways, I'm giving myself a little more permission to be less responsive. But what most firms do is those are all rolled up under like one universal expectation because at one point the business owner said like, "Yeah, we usually get back to you in a day or two." And then the staff hears that and when the client asks the question, they just parrot that and they say, "Yeah, we usually get back to you in a day or two." It's like, no, like that needs to be different throughout the hierarchy of the firm.

In my firm, we used a combination of like, uh, the admins could be called anytime, but I think by the end, everybody above that, by and large, you had, and then above that, you had a mix of someone will call you back or you have to use like a scheduling link. And so, for me, they had to use a scheduling link that was, you know, at least three days out or something like that. And by the end, we kind of just took it away because people weren't supposed to be talking to me. But you can tear this availability, and there can't be any channel that can cut the line. So, if a client one day is like, "Hey, it'd be easier for us to work with you if we could just pull you into our Slack or pull you into our Microsoft Teams." And you're like, "No, that's a great idea." Like, yeah, then we're really going to be collaborating. Often times, that's effectively a way of cutting the line because there's more of an expectation of an immediate response in a chat app like that. It's also the justification many people use for using text instead of calling or emailing is, you know, there's that statistic of how many, what percentage of Americans will respond to a text right away. There's no channel that can be allowed to bypass what is sort of the bigger picture system.

And this can be handled like, really on a spectrum, like how hands-on are your comms teams versus hands-off. I talked with a firm owner who had a whole bunch of like Gen Z clients, and their expectation is near-immediate responses. And there's a world where you can definitely build around that, and it is more like building like a high-volume support team. That's not the answer for most firms, but again, the right answer for you needs to map back to what are the expectations of the type of people that we're trying to serve.

Few other odds and ends on phones specifically because having a good, like, voiceover IP phone system, this is very important. Uh, I'll, I'll give you five providers that are all good in their own way, and I'll link all these in the show notes. Dialpad, very good, very cheap. Gives you SMS, phone trees, everything you need. Uh, you can use either with physical phones or soft phones. Softphone just being it's just software on your computer. Second option, uh, Quo, Q-U-O, formerly OpenPhone. This is a very good one for micro teams, like teams of even five or less, if you basically just want a personal number for you and an SMS line. You can't do physical phones with Quo. That's not a lot, that's not a big deal for a lot of people. One nice thing about most of these apps is they also have a mobile app that you can optionally install on your phone and then set availability hours. And so this, this is what makes a voiceover IP system way better than just giving someone your actual phone number because you can set the availability of when it will actually ring through. You can also delegate access to your phone number to other members of your team so they can see who's called you. They can see what messages that you've received, as opposed to just giving them your actual cell phone number. And that's a very hard thing to delegate.

So this is a true story. Seven years ago, I'm talking with this gal that runs an accounting firm, and she's very progressive in many ways. And she's kind of just showing me her model for how she does a number of different things. And then it just comes up as an afterthought that, "Oh yeah, most of my staff is offshore." And I'm like, "What did you just say? You're the people that are doing your work are not even in the country?" And she's like, "Well, some of them are, but a lot of them doing the heavy lifting are offshore." She said, "These folks are easier to find than onshore hires. They are just as productive, if not more, and they are a half to a quarter the cost." And I was like, "But America and, and disclosures and all these things, right?" And it wasn't until I saw somebody that I, that I respected for whom this was the norm that I was like, "Okay, maybe I got to reassess kind of our position on all this stuff." Now, thankfully, these days, we have groups that help accounting firms with this that have done this with loads of firms. Today's sponsor, TeamUp. They will help you do this for the first time. If you've never done it before, TeamUp is run by a former bookkeeping firm owner who just had a hard time finding good accounting talent offshore. So, they went out, they hired a bunch of recruiters in the Philippines, and they pull in the very best people, by the way. I mean, all the, all the top 100 are investing in the Philippines. Like, there's a tremendous amount of accounting talent in the Philippines. And so, they're pulling in bookkeepers, tax folks, executive assistants, whatever you need. And TeamUp specifically has a direct hiring model, which means all you do is you pay TeamUp one time a recruiting fee to go and find you your next dream hire. It's, it's as simple as that. But if you haven't done it before, you're going to have all sorts of questions and blockers and all that, right? Don't just sit with that stuff. Talk with TeamUp 'cause they've helped a load of firms navigate these exact same questions. Learn more about TeamUp. Check out a link down in the show notes.

Spring is here. It is spring cleaning season. The perfect time to clean out the dusty corners of your accounting firm and just get rid of the stuff that you don't want to be doing. Still. And for most of us, one of those cobweb-laden services that is just stuffed into the corner of the garage, it is bill pay. Well, good news, my friends. Artificial intelligence is here to help. You might have heard of it. The platform that's crushing it right now, this video's sponsor, Maker's Hub. Listen, nobody likes bill pay. K. It sucks, but almost every business has to do it. And often times it's high stakes. It's messy. It, it impacts inventory. You're going after, like, savings. The details matter. You miss a, you miss a zero or a comma here or there. Oh my. Oh my. Oh my gosh. That's a big deal on bill pay, right? We are getting wildly good new AI models seemingly by the week right now. And honestly, Maker's Hub are the folks that I trust to like put this work. Maker's Hub have been like, arguably making the best use of AI models over the last three years to solve a very, very specific problem. The problem of bill pay. Nobody likes it. So if you do this stuff for your clients, or you have clients who deal with project tracking, receiving construction people, manufacturing folk, HVAC men, super recommend you check out Maker's Hub. A great example of AI done well. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes.

Third option here, Alo, A-L-O. This is like the skinny jean AI sort of newcomer here. Very focused on recording and like syncing those conversations back to your CRM. Issue here is that syncing is only going to be as good as the integrations that are allowed by the system receiving that data. In our case, probably our practice management system. Uh, it's also more expensive, $45 per user per month, whereas Dialpad's $15 per user per month. Fourth option here, Nextiva. This one comes with, uh, a lot more hardware support. And then last one, Uma. O-M-A. Similar to Nextiva. Uma's, Uma is a little bit more like a traditional phone system company that comes with some software. So, so there's kind of a spectrum here of like, how comfortable are you with a soft phone? If you're very comfortable with that, go more the Dialpad end of the spectrum. If you're still really connected to that physical phone on your desk, maybe look more at Nextiva or Uma. Links for all those down in the show notes.

But what, on, on the practice management side, equally important is what software platforms that we, uh, use will allow you to push that call information into the practice management system. To get back to the, to get back to the original question at the top here, what do I do when somebody calls and I got to like, tell a colleague that they need to call them back? If we look at my four leading practice management systems in my app recommendations right now, Carbon. Carbon actually has a phone system that they have a native integration with called VXT. The problem is it is expensive AF, $45 per user per month. And I, I don't think I would choose my phone system based on what my practice management system integrated with. But Carbon has an API where you can post a note, and that note can be assigned to a team member. If you've never made an API call before, buddy, 2026 is the year to figure that out. And AI can do that for you, no problem. Literally just sit down with an AI assistant, go talk to Cloud, and be like, "Here's what I'm trying to do with Carbon. Here's the API documentation. Walk me through how to set this up to make it work automatically and connect it to this other service." Totally worth going through the exercise of figuring that out because once you've unlocked the API of your practice management system and you realize the ways that you can automate it, it unlocks all sorts of other cool possibilities.

Uh, TaxDome. To my knowledge, TaxDome still hasn't exposed a public API that anybody can use, but they do have a Zapier connector that will let you add a note. I don't know if that note can be assigned to anyone, but most of these voiceover IP systems have a Zapier trigger that can run anytime there's like a missed call or something like that. And then you just connect that trigger to the TaxDome connector and it creates a note in the system. There's probably an intermediary step there where you have to look up who is the owner of that client because you have to know who to assign it to. Uh, if you're not familiar with Zapier, it's like a sort of no-code connect tool, A to connect tool B sort of platform, spelled Z-A-P-I-E-R. If these little custom connections feel like a lot for you, ask around a bit. There's a lot of accounting firm folks that are comfortable with this now, especially now that AI will just like hold your hand and walk you through every step.

So, we've talked about Carbon, talked about TaxDome. Canopy. Canopy has an open API now, and you could push a call to Canopy via tasks or via notes. And then, Financial Sense now has an API in beta. Um, in the process of doing our OpenClaw video, OpenClaw, the AI agent, Tick, who's the assistant that we created for doing accounting firm stuff. At one point, I wanted Tick to load in a bunch of new clients to Financial Sense, and he was trying to do like a bulk upload of a CSV, CSV, and for some reason, he couldn't push a certain button in Financial Sense. And he goes out on his own and figures out that Financial Sense has an API in beta. He creates an API key inside of Financial Sense and then imports all the clients via API instead of via like the user interface in the program. Does all of this himself, figures it out in three or four minutes. And if we, if we think about kind of the software era that we're heading into, and a lot of people describe it as these days, if you're building software, you are either building agents or you're building for agents. Because I think we can all see a very near future where these AI agents like Cloud, Co-work, OpenClaw, that are very good, these these agents will be the primary users of the software that we use today. 'Cause the day that it's good enough for me to tell it, "Go and do this thing in a software," I'm never going to go do that thing in the software myself again. And so the tools that we're choosing, their suitability and interoperability with agents, it really matters now. Because you could have two tools that do largely the same job, one works very nicely with agents, and the other doesn't. It's never been more important than it is now that an agent can actually work with that platform. That's an argument for really good APIs because the weakest part of AI agents is computer use is an agent having to navigate a browser. It's very slow, very clunky, stuff breaks. But if that same program has an API, that stuff is, that work is often times near instantaneous.

The devil's really in the details of how you set up this communication plan and how much you enable everyone involved. You get like, to a basic example, the admin that answers the phone. You can see a version of that where they are very enabled, and a version of that where they're not, and they're basically just a human phone tree. So much of the friction in our client relationships comes from communications and a misalignment of the client's expectations of how you'll be, how available you'll be, and your ability to actually deliver on that availability. Getting the work done. We're pretty good at that stuff, and that's normally the thing that we default to and comes naturally to us. Serving the client, being available, them clearly understanding how available you and your team will be. That's the trickier thing. And it all starts with building a concrete plan that our clients can understand and we recommunicate to them over and over and over again, so they know the best way to get, so they know the best way to get what they need out of your firm. And phones, for many of us, still a big part of the equation.

Okay. I want to share the story of a person who fired their accounting firm and went all-in on an AI agent. Did it work? How should we feel about this? Let's get into it.

>> It's Nerd Corner. Nerd Corner. Let's nerd it out. Nerd Corner.

>> Daniel Valo. If you're on Twitter much, you may have seen him before. He has no problem poking. He has no problem poking the professional accountant bear. He's been known to dunk on the, uh, dunk on big accounting firms. Dunk on the accounting firm industrial complex and how it is not efficient and how it is not as efficient as he would like it to be. Let me, let me, let me skim you through this Twitter post, uh, so you can get the sense of, of what he shared. He said, "I just filed my taxes with OpenClaw." Here's how it went. OpenClaw, if you're not familiar, it's an AI agent that can run locally on your machine and kind of do anything a human user could do on your machine. He outlined some of the technical stuff that happened this year. He sold a stake in a business. He's got a single-member LLC, brokerage income, HSA distributions, three rentals, foreign income tax credits, a few kids. He's got a decent amount of stuff going on. He said, "I usually pay a CPA. Last year, it cost me $8,000 for personal and business returns, and every question took weeks to get answered, so I didn't ask much. This year, I decided to see how far I could get with OpenClaw instead. Here's what actually happened."

Phase one, research on Monday. Had a pile of documents: the purchase agreement, LLC operating agreements, old K1s, prior tax returns going back to 2012, bank statements, balance sheets. Fed everything into OpenClaw and said, "Read everything in chronological order and figure out my 2025 tax situation." It kind of reconstructed his full sort of business history. So it had all that context. He said, "Having all the prior year returns was huge. It worked out his cost basis through every transaction. Verified how the previous CPA had handled things. Even caught an error that he had made the previous year submitting information to his accountant." But he said, "By the end of that day one, he felt like it actually had its head around sort of his history."

Second day, to actually filing the return. So this started on Monday, it ended on Tuesday. He said, "OpenClaw researched TurboTax's current plans." So in the US, TurboTax is kind of the biggest, like, consumer DIY tax filing platform. OpenClaw researched TurboTax's plans and saved me $500 by unburying the $129 plan that I actually needed, and it was trying to sell me a $639 package via a recommendation quiz and said there's no other option for the situation. Turned out there was. This was a four-plus hour session where I went screen by screen through TurboTax with OpenGl, OpenClaw guiding every field." So he runs through the detail of like, here's all the different odds and ends on his tax return. He said, "At the end, OpenClaw reviewed the final 137-page tax return line by line, and that is what got filed." He said, "What worked well was document analysis, giving it all the old stuff. Also answering questions in real time instead of emailing a CPA and waiting days. I asked, 'What are recourse versus non-recourse liabilities?' and got an answer in 5 seconds." He said, "It did a good job of catching optimizations and of cross, and of cross-referencing prior years to see how things had been handled previously and inform how it should be done going forward." He said, "What didn't work well, driving TurboTax directly. OpenClaw, and is the case with all AI agents, incredibly slow at navigating stuff on the web." He said, "He ran into an issue with TurboTax's handling of the installment sale." He does say, "It is important you, it is still ultimately your responsibility to understand your own finances. There's no element of like delegating your personal responsibility to the AI agent." But in the end, he spent about 6 hours less time than he said he spent with his CPA last year. It was obviously much cheaper, but he said the greatest value to him was the speed of answers. Every question he had during the process was answered in seconds. And there's a very real-time loop of, "What does this mean?" to a clear explanation. He said, "Next year, I will without a doubt use OpenClaw for my taxes."

Lot of emotions, right? We're all feeling that. Whether it's taxes, whether it's a month, like anything, even professional services more broadly, you have so many feelings when you hear that. From, "Brother, you don't know what you don't know," to, "How in the world are you going to get to a correct tax return when you don't even know like what the correct inputs to it are?" These AIs have been trained to make you feel good and convince you into thinking that they did it right, but that doesn't mean that it was right. Right? So, I'll see you back here next year when you engage a CPA and I'll charge you for all the cleanup work. Right? Like, that is our gut reaction anytime we see somebody say like, "Hey, I used an AI to do that thing that your identity is fully staked in." And I think this is the problem, and this is what stands between us seeing this and making an action plan versus seeing this and reacting. And I mean, this is all going down on Twitter, so you know there is an abundance of reactions.

Now, that story is interesting. Let me table that to share another story that might make this feel a little bit more real for you. And this, I, my background is a tax pro. I was a 15-year tax pro. The firm that I bought was an 80-year-old tax firm that I ultimately rolled out a bookkeeping practice in. But whether you do tax, whether you do bookkeeping, CFO stuff, doesn't really matter. I think the same applies to all. Another interesting headline, somewhat related. It's a company called Column Tax, who's maybe the most recent example of a company building a tax prep engine from scratch, but it built it for consumer taxes. So like more like a TurboTax type product. Column Tax was built to be an embedded tax solution. So if you have a larger solution like, uh, Square, or I don't know, an investment platform or something like that, you can take Column Tax and you can embed their tax prep product into your larger offering. And they actually did it, and there were millions of personal tax returns that were filed through Column. Now, last year, Column was acquired by IWIN, who is a company that's been in the accounting firm space for a while, historically just doing like invoicing and payment collection for more mid-market accounting firms. Now they're getting into practice management. IWIN also acquired Taxa. Taxa was a company that was working exclusively on building a new cloud-native tax prep platform for accountants. So Taxa goes into IWIN. IWIN also acquires Column Tax, who like actually has some chops because they've built a consumer tax platform that has filed a bunch of returns. Last week, they released an MCP server for Column Tax. That's a lot of letters, I know. An MCP server, which you can largely build around like any software product. It's basically a conversational interface to get data in and out of that software platform. We talked last week about Double, formerly Keeper, the month-end close automation platform that's really hot right now. They released an MCP server, meaning you could connect, say, your Cloud Co-work to Double and just talk with it through Cloud Co-work and have it even potentially do tasks inside of Double for you. So on the Double side, you can enable the MCP server and say, "I actually want it to have read access to this part, write access to this part, read access to this part of Double." And then over on the Cloud Co-work side, you can be like, "Hey, go do XYZ." And it can see the data inside of Double and actually make those updates. And it's, it's doing it via that MCP connection, not have, not by having to navigate the program, which, as we've talked about, and as Daniel said with TurboTax, is wildly inefficient. And so there's a much more efficient interface for an AI tool to interact with the data that is in a software platform. So that is kind of the job of an MCP server is bridging an AI sort of conversational agent or assistant to a more traditional software application.

So back to Column Tax, they released an MCP connector for their entire tax prep platform, which means anybody from their Cloud Co-work can now, via MCP connection to Column Tax prep, and file a 1040. That is a personal tax return in the US. That's a big deal. Like, this is not like a, a kids, like, "Let's go out and see if Co-work can make the form" sort of thing. This is like a platform that's already filed millions of tax returns releasing an MCP so that you can now do that inside of your AI assistant of choice. Now, how well does it work? Well, we know the, the underlying platform works for filing. I would assume fairly basic consumer tax returns. That doesn't mean that like it will be as good through the Co-work experience or, or whatever AI assistant you're using. Doesn't necess, like, if someone went to Column Tax and they filed a perfect tax return, that doesn't mean that going through the same experience in an AI assistant would yield a perfect tax return. That's something I'm actually very excited to test. There's a world where it could even yield a better tax return, honestly, but that's going to require more testing. But what it led to was people on Twitter and elsewhere saying, "Just filed my tax return from Cloud Co-work." And that is not Co-work going out and finding the forms and doing all the work itself. That is Co-work connecting via MCP server to a more traditional platform that does tax filing. To me, that's a little more spooky, a little more real than some random internet stranger being like, "Just filed my tax return with AI."

And if we're thinking about the professional application of, how could we ever do something like that? What would it look like for you or I, like a tax pro, an accounting pro, a bookkeeping pro, to actually produce the entirety of the work product with an AI, an AI agent? It probably looks something like this: You have a trusted platform that maybe you already used previously that now has an MCP server to be able to talk to your AI agent of choice, and you work directly with that AI agent, do the back and forth, provide it with the information, answer the questions. The agent then works with the platform that you trust, and you get kind of the best of both worlds. Right? Now, you can look more closely at our ecosystem like in the US of tax platforms, like who's actually going to be able to ship an MCP because all the traditional tax prep platforms, you, you just can't. But this is an argument for, like, Lacerte, ProConnect is a SaaS-based full tax prep platform, they could build an MCP around. Uh, I like, they're working on a tax prep suite for tax professionals. Drake is working on a new tax prep suite. And so all of this, I think, is to say that this is becoming real. And like, to, for our reaction to an internet stranger saying, "Look at this thing I just did." For us to be dismissive of that, I think misses the point of where we are headed. That, that this is happening in some way or another. And it's, and it's messy, right? It's tremendously messy. By the way, good thing that it's messy, because it is probably you and I's job to ultimately be able to navigate that mess and find the best of it to enable good outcomes for our clients. But it means we got kind of got to open our eyes to the reality of just kind of the shifting landscape to be able to confidently communicate with clients, like, here's what it can do and here's what it can't do. But also on our side to understand, man, how do I lean into this for my own benefit to make my accounting firm more efficient? And man, is that like a, things are going to change in the next six months sort of thing, or are we still a few years out? Like, that's the really hard thing to say right now.

Um, a quote that I actually saw Vince Porter, listener of the pod, shared online. It is a quote that I believe was attributed to, to Brandon Hall, a multiple-time guest of the podcast and a pretty big-brain accounting firm guy. He said, "If tax and accounting were free, fast, and 100% accurate, why would a client choose you?" I'll say that again. "If tax and accounting were free, fast, and 100% accurate, why would a client choose you?" Now, if you're like me, your instinctual reaction to that quote is, "Well, it can never be free, fast, and 100% accurate." That's not the point. The point is, we all know it will get closer to free. It will get closer to fast. It will get closer to 100% accurate. And so the last part of that is is really, really important. Why would a client choose us? That's a hard one, right? Because for a lot of us, our identity is staked in, like, I don't know, I do the financials correctly. I don't know, I do the tax return correctly. If AI just does that, how do I communicate my value? What am I adding on top of that? Like, I know there's something there because I meet with them and I make them feel good, but how do I communicate that in a way that feels a little more tangible? Is a really hard question. And I actually, I don't do this very often. I actually put this question to our Jasonbot, who has access to every podcast that we've ever done, all of my thought leadership. I put this to Jason AI to say, "How do you answer this question?"

If you are building an accounting team, you know just what a headache it is to get all of your team doing month-end closes the same way, right? There's that stage where you're all in the same room and you can kind of like keep in sync because it's such a small team. But beyond a certain threshold, you're like, "Oh my gosh, everybody's choosing their own adventure. These engagements are taking on lives of their own." And it is what makes the latest feature drops from this episode's sponsor, Financial Sense, ever so important. So they are historically a practice management system for accounting firms, that is Financial Sense, but they're shipping a bunch of month-end close automation features inside of Financial Sense. So it has actually a deep integration into the accounting ledger, and it is pulling all the transactions into the platform to review, like, were there any weird outlier transactions? Like, it actually goes through, like, you remember what it was like, six to 10 different categories of things that could be wrong, and it's identifying those transactions for you in an automated way. And if there's an issue, you can fix it right from within Financial Sense, and it will push that fix back to the accounting ledger. They also do the same with uncategorized transactions. So, if you're doing the, uh, Amazon purchase hokey-pokey with a client and you're like, "Hey, what is this? Can you give me a receipt?" You can manage all of that from inside Financial Sense as well, giving you sort of like a single place that is everything that you need to.

run your bookkeeping practice. Some really cool stuff that they've been shipping. And I've got a special discount code that you can use. If you are a firm with two or more users, use the code Jason10 to get 10% off the annual team or scale plan. Worth checking out. I think you'll like it. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes.

Tax firms are up to their eyeballs in 1040 work right now. You really are. Everybody is sending you all these documents and you're doing the old hokeyp pokei of like, "Ah, what do I need? What do I have?" Uh, you never sent me number three, seven, and nine. AI gang can automate honestly all of this at this point.

This episode sponsor Sorban. They've been at the top of my recommendations for tax workflow since they launched and they're using AI as effectively as anybody to take the pain out of 1040 work. And as you know listening to this podcast, it has never been more important than it is right now to make sure that we are making the most of these unbelievably good new AI models. Your clients don't get value from the document gathering process. In fact, it gets away away from like the stuff that you actually want to be doing, right? It it devalues what you do if they see you as this just document sort of admin gatherer. Software has solved for this. It really really has.

To check out how Sorban is now using AI not only to automate 1040 intake but also automate the input into your tax software and and the delivery of the tax return. Check out the link down in the show notes. Super cool product.

Let me actually play this for you because I think its response was interesting. Here's my honest take. If tax and accounting were free, fast, and 100% accurate, we'd lose maybe 60% of the market commodity stuff, the returns that are mostly just forms. The bookkeeping that's all data entry and categorization. Yeah, that goes away. But here's what doesn't. Relationships.

"Does this guy sound like me?" And the ability to see around corners. Think about what actually happens when a business owner sits down with you. They're not really asking you to do their taxes. They're asking you to help them make better decisions. They want to know if they're paying too much in taxes. They want to understand what their numbers actually mean. They want to know what happens if they hire this person or make that investment. That's the stuff AI can't touch. Or at least it can't touch it the way a human who knows them, understands their situation, and cares about the outcome can. The real thing clients choose us for isn't accuracy or speed. It's confidence. It's knowing that someone who understands their world is looking out for them. It's the conversation where you say, "Hey, I noticed this thing. Have you thought about it?" That moment. That's where the value actually lives.

So if AI handles the grunt work, and it will. It absolutely will. Then the question becomes, what's your job now? How do we feel about that answer? I mean, it kind of feels good, but it feels a little light, doesn't it? I don't know. I don't know how I don't know what your reaction to that response is. I want that to be true. That feels like a great LinkedIn answer, but like it feels maybe like it's lacking just a bit of substance. It brought up the point of like your value is ultimately that thing that you call out that you found that they couldn't see. But be honest with me, when's the last time you did that? And this I mean I'm saying this at a time when people are like it's freaking right before the April deadline. A lot of people are very busy right now. And so we're not in a place where we're necessarily putting like big brain things in front of our clients. But that whole question of well your job is to find the things that your client can't find. For many of us, we don't do that as often as we would like because maybe we're a little too focused on production and just getting the stuff off the door. Off the door, out the door. And so early in that in that response, it said it wipes out probably 60% of the market, which is a pretty um I mean, we're talking about like near asteroid dinosaur level, like almost extinction event. That's a pretty big percentage to then go on and say everything will be fine. What they actually want you for is XYZ. Well, then why did 60% of firms just bite the dust?

I don't think I disagree. Like, oh yeah, for sure. Like all the transactional stuff almost certainly that goes away, right? I I think that maybe the more realistic framing is 60% of work as we know it might go away. I don't think that that is like onetoone to firms going away because I think what we do then changes. There's net new stuff. There's different stuff that we're doing. That doesn't mean that 60% of people go away.

Now, I think the two more meaty arguments here than well they're looking for you to figure out the thing that they can't see. There there's for sure some truth to that, but I think the two meteor arguments I can make here are are uh one, they're engaging you for you to stress about this stressful thing for them. They really are. Taxes. Uh most entrepreneurs will spend more money on taxes than anything else in their lifetime. How much head space and time should they be allocating to tax optimization? In all likelihood, not enough. And there's probably never a point where they're going to be like, "Oh, okay. Now I feel like I'm spending adequate time and attention thinking about this." In many ways, what they're doing is delegating the anxiety to an expert to trust that they are stressing about it for you so that you don't have to because because there is no right answer for how much should I stress about this and try to optimize it. I know it's going to cost me a lot of money, but what should I do? Uh similar for like BCFO sort of more business coaching type of stuff. Their time with you is a dedicated time and a forcing function for them to think about how to make the business better. And so there's an accountability angle there. There's certainly like your your perspective and and raising the quality of the conversation, but there are many things in my life that I can have anxiety about and stress about where if I delegated that to an AI, I would not like that stress would not go away. At least not as much as delegating it to a very capable person.

um in my business now at partnerships with software companies it's a big part of what our business is the community uh realize that I talk about it's a big part of what my business is both of those things create a huge amount of stress and anxiety for me because I want them to be done well and they take work it's a tremendous amount of work to do that stuff as well as you can and the reason why I'm able to distance myself a bit from that anxiety is I have really talented people where it's their job to stress about it both of them are things where you get out of it however much you put into it. And I mean, they're all standalone businesses where there it's a literally a bottomless pit of things you could do. There's not enough hours in the day to ever exhaust all the things that you could do. And that is kind of one of the hardest aspects of entrepreneurship is like there is no turning it off or there there is no end to it. 5:00 p.m. doesn't mean there's nothing more you could do. There's no world where I could delegate that stress and anxiety to an AI agent as opposed to a talented person. So that's my first argument for the long-term relevance of you and me.

Second is using more of an opportunity framing. What shortcuts can you provide to an entrepreneur on a specific journey? Do we really think AI is going to like replace all of that knowledge that you have and the context that you have working with other similar entrepreneurs to be able to share like no don't do this do that for your specific circumstances this is the better path. If I look at what I do in helping accounting firm owners, what makes me good at what I do is is um connections and all the people that I know and all the conversations that I've had, I've just got this sort of like extension of my own experiences that is like I can tell you the folks that I've talked with who have tried XYZ, here's what worked about it and here's what didn't work about it. And you can still make your own decision, but you're making it from a much more informed place, right? I think I'm capable of doing that in a way that AI is not. And for whatever reason, at least for now, delivery from me is probably more meaningful and easier to connect with than delivery from an AI. So, I can offer you shortcuts. It's why people listen to this podcast, not because they enjoy the tone of my my ready voice or my golf jokes, but because there's an element of I want to get better at the game, but also be nice if if I picked up something today that like made my life a little bit easier. I think that's a very tangible thing that we can still offer to people in any environment if we're exposed to a bunch of people who are trying to do something. And right now for us that is we know a whole bunch of business owners. Most business owners don't know as many business owners as you do. CFOs like they know very few business owners. They see the context of very few companies. We see the context of a ton of companies. And that gives us a unique perspective that the entrepreneur themselves cannot possibly have. It's not too dissimilar to what I do now where I do not run an accounting firm anymore, but I talk with thousands of accounting firms. And so I have the context of all of those firms and there's certain things to you that I can provide that are valuable, but then there's certain things that I'm ignorant to, right? But then there's certain things that I'm ignorant to also because I don't run a firm anymore, right? So as long as you have a level of access that other people don't, there's going to be insights that like only you can provide because you are helping those people navigate the journey. And you better believe that AI will be part of that conversation. Even down to how do I make the most out of AI in this type of business. Well, like here's what I've seen other people do and here's what seems to be working, what doesn't seem to be working. That'll be a big part of the conversation. And so for me, that whole kind of debate, let's say it were free, fast, and 100% accurate. Why would somebody still choose you? The two biggest things for me, I need someone else to stress about this so I don't have to, but also I need someone to show me the shortcuts. What's everybody else doing? Like, give me a window to to what's working for everybody else so I don't waste my time on this stuff.

I think it's a fun debate. I think it's a little bit like um the advent of I would in the US I would say QuickBooks. I would say Turboax when you could walk into a Costco and for the first time buy offtheshelf software that would promise to do your taxes for you. That's a big moment when you have consumer tax software that people are buying by the millions and it changes the lines in the market of here's who the professionals are going to serve and here's what DIY is. AI is going to change this again and we've been saying this for years. In all likelihood AI just pushes productized solutions further up market. They all get better. They can serve a more complex sort of client. And our job then is to continue to get more premium and more nuanced and more specific in the folks that we're serving. So I don't think like the solution there has changed. And it's another reason why I encourage people to push your prices to get more specific in the type of person that you're going to serve because both of those things lead you in a more premium, more specific path that AI will have a harder time eating into. And so the path, what do you do next? It remains the same. But I do think like to the point of this whole story with Daniel Valo, I do think the boundaries are definitely changing around what can consumers DIY versus what are you going to need a professional for. I love debates like that if you can't tell because it's messy and there isn't one right answer, right?

Okay, enough of that. Let's get into the mailbag.

>> MAIL. >> MAIL. These questions are collected from email, from social media DMs, from my telephone. I have one. The number, it's 1516-980-4968. That's right. You're listening to this podcast for free. And I just gave you my phone number. Send me a text. Leave me a voicemail. Listen to my voicemail message on that number. You're going to love it. I worked way too hard on it. Got a few questions here. Few AI questions, few more general accounting firm strategy questions. But first, do me a solid in the YouTube comments to this podcast. And if you're listening to the audio feed, there will be a link in your player to take you to the YouTube version of the podcast. In the comments of this podcast, please tell me, Jason, let's talk more AI, less AI or same AI because I can tell you 80% of the questions that I get right now are on AI stuff, but I don't really want this to be an AI podcast. It is sort of unavoidable if we're talking about how to run a better firm. like 12 months from now, we may be all doing like this work completely different ways. So, it's important to talk about, but tell me your appetite. Where are you at right now? Are we does does this feel about right? We need to dial it back.

First question, does AI change your calculus for when to start a firm versus when to go to work for someone else's firm? So, you got some people who are just wired. They know one day they're going to take the jump. They want to run their own thing. And there's like a certain point in your career journey when it's the right time to do that. A certain time before which it's really hard to do that yourself. Depends on if you're doing tax work and if you're doing bookkeeping work as well. But does AI change the jumping off point at all?

There's an argument you could make here that what you learn in the early years of working in an accounting firm is exactly the same thing that AI is coming in to disrupt. And that is the production, the putting out of the financials correctly, the putting together a tax return. I mean, I can tell you I prep tax returns for probably seven years before anybody really let me out to like talk to anyone. They're like, "This guy doesn't know a thing. He's not going to talk to the clients." It was a little bit the technical stuff. It was a little bit like, "Does this guy even have to shave yet?" Because I started doing taxes at like 19. But there there's multiple arguments you could make on this of like when is the right time to start your firm in an age of AI. Some could argue that you actually may need more experience now to be able to start a firm because what's going to remain after AI is some of the big brain more technical stuff of like how you advise clients. It's all the stuff that sits on top of knowing how to do the technical things. That's what remains. So if I'm like on this journey of learning the technical stuff and then I I bail out before I even get to the big brain stuff, how am I going to run a firm when AI just like sort of replaces all the stuff that I knew how to do?

Now, that is one version of the argument, but I think part of this like slips into the fallacy in any era of change that says like, well, if they don't have to go down the same journey that I did, then how will they ever know what I know? You can imagine the first time we had software that could fill out tax forms. All the people who had spent 20 years filling out tax forms on paper were like, "Well, these these whippers snappers never going to be as good as me because they didn't have to do it the old way." And there are things like that where you're like, how could they ever hope to do this thing if they don't have to learn this other fundamental thing, this experience that we all had? These are all going to be awful accountants. But there's been a version of that like every 10 years back to living in caves and somehow like the world keeps turning. I let my tax software calculate the numbers that go in the boxes. I trust the accounting software to correctly calculate what goes like what should show up on the financial statements. For some reason with each new generation of accountants, there are things they just don't have to do anymore and we manage to get by. I would say offshore even comes into this conversation. If they offshore the entire junior department, where's your pipeline of talented people going to come from? It is very hard to predict how AI is going to change accounting firms and what stuff will remain.

If we look at other domains like software development where those domains are being most directly impacted at least initially seemed to be juniors the entry level but at the same time the most capable AI engineers often times are the juniors too and we're we're already seeing this in accounting where like I can speak to a room full of accounting firm leaders and be like AI this AI that this is like a civilization altering change and they're like yeah no yeah we get it and then I'm like so what are you going to do about when you get back to the office and they're like So, I'm pretty busy. Um, I don't know if it'll I'll get to it next week, but and then meanwhile, we got this whole generation of Zoomers coming out of school. Are they even Zoomers still? I don't know what they are. Whole generation of kids that just chat GPT their way through school and like they don't know how to operate without AI. So, you got Leader over here that's like, I I get it, but I don't have the time. Then you got Zoomer over here that's like, um, I just take a picture of my refrigerator in the morning and it tells me what to eat. That one of those things can help the other. Like that's an argument for pulling in more junior people who are sort of like AI native folks. Are there issues there? Are there trade-offs? For sure, but there's also issues on the other end of the spectrum where we don't make the time for it and we aren't learning. So where do I stand on the question of like does AI change the calculus for when to start your firm? I think it's kind of a wash. There's some arguments that would support the idea that no, your job is actually more to be a connector now and an adviser. And if you have the connections and if you're having conversations, you can be that at any age. There is the other argument that says like, well, you got to know the technical stuff to be able to do the advising on top of that. I can see some truth in that, but I don't know. I don't I don't think either argument pulls me so hard as to say like, oh, it's definitely easier to do earlier now or it's definitely easier to do later.

I do think we will have a crop of accountants who get the work done in a very different way, who are like, I mean, they've got six open claws running right now and they just live for this stuff. Those people will have more personal leverage at their disposal than any human beings have ever had before, which is great for getting work done. What you ultimately run into are the exact same problems we always talk about on this podcast. How do I find the next client that'll pay me more? How do I get away from just having this total production mindset and I can turn out work all day long, but I'm not actually building a healthy business? But I myself, like I'm a nerd at my core, you know that. And so I'm very excited for just like us to have more power, bigger sticks at our disposal as AI keeps getting better and better.

Hey, real quick. Monthendlo automation software, it has kind of completely changed what doing bookkeeping work looks like the last few years. And did you hear the news recently that this episode sponsor Canopy, they are working on their own spin on month-end close automation that is coming soon and will be built directly into the Canopy platform. Canopy who you may have seen late last year launched their own version of like tax intake built into the practice management system. Now they're going after month and close automation. And it is all it is all part of Canopy's vision to be the single sort of all-in-one place to not only manage the work of your accounting firm. But to get that stuff done, I almost cursed. You know what I'm saying? Canopy always kind of been like a feature nerd's dream. Especially if you are of the mind where you're like, man, I want to consolidate more of my stuff, eliminate some tools, you're leaning maybe more allin-one. Canopy has been one of my leaders in the practice management system category for as long as my recommendations have existed. excited to see what they're doing in the bookkeeping automation space now as well. But to learn more but to learn more about Canopy, check out the link down in the show notes.

So this last fall, we did a a tour of 13 cities, host of workshops for over a thousand accounting firms, and I bumped into a lady at one of these events, and she said, uh, this week I have four new hires starting from this podcast sponsor, Cloud Accountant Staffing. To be clear, she didn't say in the context of that conversation, this episode sponsor. She just said Cloud Accountant Staffing. Four people starting at the same. Can you imagine? I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. But you know what? Cloud accountant staffing makes it possible. Uh back in my firm, we hired both onshore folks and offshore folks. Try to get the best of both worlds cuz there's problems to just doing one or the other. Cloud accountant staffing, they're going to help hold your hand through this stuff. It's actually founded by a former accounting firm owner. And so all the questions around what about security? What about it? What about do I have to disclose this to my clients? They can help walk you through all that stuff. And one of the coolest new things I've seen in staffing recently, they launched a portal where you can see all of the candidates they've already prevetted. And even from that portal, you can book an interview. You literally just have to give them your email address and you get access to the portal. You can see the tax talent, the accounting talent, the executive assistants, all these folks. They've sourced. They've done like some personality assessments for them. And you can book an interview with these candidates directly from that portal. Super cool. If you're building out the squad for 2026, it's worth giving it a serious thought. That's cloud accountant staffing. Learn more at the link down in the show notes.

Next question. I watched your openclaw and cloud co-work videos. Any suggestions on how we can prepare our accounting firm systems to make use of these AI agents when they are safe and secure. Number one, have your data and all your context, your meetings, all that stuff. Have that stuff as organized as possible. AI can only use what you AI can only use what you've captured and what actually exists. Number two, rather than thinking about how can I let an AI agent loose to just go wild, that's that's in all likelihood that's not what we're going to do. Think instead about what are the tasks that I can give to an AI and trust it to do responsibly. Adoption is probably going to look much more granular. So to give you a really bad example, let's say I got I got a laptop. I go buy a laptop like this from the store and I say this is where my new AI agent is going to run on this machine. It is just like this isolated sort of hermetically sealed environment where the AI agent has access to the least information possible. And on this computer all I put are two folders. In the first folder, files go into it throughout the day. But I need those files moved over to the second folder. And so the AI agent's job is to sit there and just watch just watch that folder all day long. And as soon as a file gets there, oh, I'm here, and they move the file over to the second folder. That could be a job that you give to an AI agent on a computer. Now, are there better ways to skin that cat? Absolutely. But the reason why right now you have these big brain nerds with a stack of nine Mac minis that are like, "Oh, I'm the most productive person in the universe." And their mom hollers down the stairs, "What kind of sandwich you want for lunch?" And he's like, "I don't know, peanut butter jelly." The reason why these people have like nine different environments stacked up is deploying agents securely very much comes down to what do they have access to? What do they know about me? If things went off the rails, just how bad could it be? And so the less they have access to, the less sort of the risk profile of them going off the rails. And it's like in navigating that nuance that I think we will find the very specific tasks that it makes sense to hand over to an AI agent. Simply plopping it down in an office chair and giving it access to everything. The governance rules of that are just astronomically complex, right? And so that still feels a ways off.

Can I give you a bonus third suggestion on how to get your systems ready for uh this stuff? Make sure that the tools that you're using an AI agent can use. If you're using a platform right now that has all of your data in it and it doesn't have an API and it doesn't have any automated way to get information in or out of the system, when you try to get an AI agent to be helpful to you, it'll be like, great, I'll get to work on that. Where do I find all the information? And you're like, oh, it's this black box in here. Uh, you're not going to be able to see any of you're not going to be able to see any of it, though. It's going to be like, cool. Um, I don't really know how to help you. I guess I can try to log into it and bang around, but it's going to take a little while. a platform being suited for an AI agent to use looks like. Do they have a good API? Have they have they created an MCP server? We talked about how Double uh just launched an MCP server. That's great. Is it just a straight up legacy system that isn't even cloud-based like US tax software? But think about if you had an all-knowing, all powerful agent on your machine right now and you said go and do this job. If it's having to log into all these different softwares, those aren't systems then that will work nicely with an agent. You want your agent to have a more efficient way to like navigate and use that program than having to actually like log in and use it as a human user. That's the worst case scenario because it's just so inefficient and just gets stuck on basic like clicking and dragging things. That is like the weakest part of AI agents still.

Next up, I'm doing a cleanup project for an HVAC business who hasn't kept up with books for two years. Recommend me an AI agent to help with this. They're on QBO. No, you're not. You're a guy that owns an HVAC business, and you just want me to tell you how to do your last two years bookkeeping. It's early April. I know what you're doing, but I'll answer the question anyways. An AI agent to do cleanup in QuickBooks Online. Uh, first things first, it doesn't really exist. If I had to point you to a single tool to navigate you through this process, absent uh 20 years hard-earned experience of looking at stinkers in QBO and knowing how to fix all that stuff, like a tool to walk you through it, like double, it's probably the fastest growing bookkeeping tool right now. You connect it to an accounting file and then you choose how many months you want it to go back and it will literally walk you through month by month doing a like full month end close. So like if I'm handing this work off to a staff person, that's probably the best way to do it right now. But hypothetically, let's say we wanted to cut an AI agent loose to just start banging around in there, which by the way, right now I don't recommend you do this with OpenClaw with with Co-work. Trusting an AI agent to just go bang around in QuickBooks Online. Uh 0 out of 10. Do not recommend, but if you did it, OpenClaw would be the most powerful platform for this right now. Uh getting API access to QuickBooks Online, which is not actually straightforward to do. That would be the best way if you can navigate that to speed up the work happening in QuickBooks Online. Uh if you saw the OpenClaw video that we did on YouTube, we had it like review a set of financial statements. It's very good just out of the box knowing what's wrong and like it it sees that like brother this is not how you're supposed to use opening balance equity. Like it it fixes a lot of stuff that non-accountants will get wrong in QuickBooks Online. So, straight out of the box, honestly, an AI agent could do this stuff pretty good right now. I just wouldn't recommend it. It's also a very abstract thing to trust an AI agent to do because when it comes to cleanup work, there's so many different ways that people do it. Like, some accountants just do big plug journal entries. Other bookkeepers are like, "How dare you? That is not the proper way to use QuickBooks." And then if it's trying to use the API, QuickBooks Online's API only works for like certain very specific parts of the product. And so it may just try to do whatever the API will allow for and maybe not which may not really map to the way that an accountant would actually do it in the program. So I wish there was a way to do this a great AI agent for this right now. Unfortunately there is not. Uh in it is working on it and the day that it's available I'm sure they will sell it to you for top dollar. Let me do that again. But I'm sure that the day that it's available they will sell it to you for top dollar.

Next up I ran a poll on the internet. I pulled accounting firms. I said, "How does the current like changing AI landscape have you feel about hiring this year?" So, like hiring, remember humans? Hiring humans this year. The options were uh AI is not impacting my hiring plans at all. Uh I h plan to hire less or I plan to not hire at all due to AI. 50% of accounting firms reported they will be hiring less or not at all due to AI. 50% of accounting firms. That's a big deal if you do the math. That's half. That is half of firms. Really interesting. A number of people though said, "What about hiring more due to AI?" And to be clear, these people were in the minority. But a number of folks commented, is there a world where AI actually like increases the argument for no, I actually need to staff up for certain roles potentially? Like what what's the if we had a crystal ball and we knew exactly what's there going to be a huge demand for on the other side of AI? Yes, I wish we could be hiring those people right now. Unfortunately, we just don't know enough yet to say, "Here's definitely what we're going to want a whole bunch of bodies for on the other side of this." I mean, right now, what we all need is proximity to good AI people. Do you have that in your firm right now? How do you scoop those people up? Because those people are going to become so valuable so fast. I don't think we're thinking about this enough yet. If you go to like Chat GPT's explosion and how OpenAI is now nearly a1 trillion dollar company, whereas five years ago it was a nonprofit, the cost of talent in like being able to create the next state-of-the-art large language model, the cost of talent in that space, it is the most expensive arms race for human talent that there has ever been. It's astronomical. like tens of millions of dollars insiders, the people that are really good at this stuff can get for going from OpenAI to say Meta, it's unthinkable. And so if you consider, are we really on the tipping point of something really really substantial in how we run our accounting firms? Like if you believe there's a possibility of that, consider how many people are there out there that know how to run an accounting firm and know how to do AI stuff or even just are familiar with like accounting production like month end closes, tax returns, just have a basic familiarity of that but also have AI skills. They are unbelievably scarce. If you have anybody in your network that you think can help you with this, get your fingers into them now. Lock them in a room where they can't solicit LinkedIn orders. Lock them in a room where they can't solicit LinkedIn offers from anybody else and start putting them to work. Like start thinking about like what are the like little parts of our workflow that we could start like carving out to an AI agent because those people are going to be so in demand if they're not already.

All right, one more generally on software selection. Jason, I know Ultraax is up there on your list of tax prep platforms. I also know you are a big fan of Juno. Juno is a tax workflow solution, not the movie. However, we're wondering if the stories we're hearing of of miracles from other Juno users are a result of some strange phenomenon known as you're dancing with the wrong partner. Is Juno plus Ultrax the right combo or is there a better one I should pair Juno with? I'm actually considering ditching Ultraax to find a better integration to Juno. Boy, this is like such a great example of why you need other trusted users of a platform to give you the real information. Um, I don't I don't know that I've ever been like a big I no that um I don't know that I'd ever say I was like a a big fan of Juno. I'm a big fan of the people at Juno and what they're trying to do. Maybe the better framing is like a big fan of the functionality of the product, right? Dave, the founder of Juno, super cool guy. We've hung out on a number of occasions, a tax firm runner, like exactly the type of person that you would want to build software for you. But Juno's never been in like in my leaders. Like they've never been that high on my recommendations. They're touching a whole bunch of different things and and doing really interesting things in each place, but right now to be a leader in my recommendations, the folks that are up there have nailed one specific part of the workflow and are crushing it and saving you a bunch of time. And still right now in tax, the greatest time savings is in the intake process, the gathering of documents in bulk from clients when you're doing a whole bunch of 1040s. And so the leaders right now are the people that are nailing that. Now a lot of other people in the space doing interesting things though like filed is I think further down the line of like automated pushing of data into tax software uh compared to any other platform we've ever had and now they're building integrations with all the other platforms and being like hey we'll just be the part of the process where you got to push data into the tax software because that's a really hard thing for other companies to build themselves. So we got people automating uh importing into the tax software. We got other people working on more of the review side. You've got like, you know, Blue Jay and a bunch of other folks working on tax research. The in the question they're saying, I'm hearing of miracles from other users. And I mean, we all know we're going to hear miracles from the software platform, right? And and we know like we you're probably kind of cherry-picking like the best stories. I can also tell you there's a lot of comments that I get on and I'm not calling out Juno or anyone specifically here. There's a lot of comments I will get on my LinkedIn posts of folks seeming to sing the praises of a specific software platform. And when you get those, it's worth going to that person's profile and seeing their posts and seeing their comments. Many of them, the last 15 comments they've made have been endorsing a specific product. I don't know if these are not real people. Uh I don't know what the deal is. But if you're hearing stuff that's hard to believe, maybe it's because it's not believable. This is where like having trusted people that you can go to and get real answers from is invaluable. The place to get that is not from user groups of a specific platform that are managed by the software company. I mean this is like this is entire reason that I run realize a private community for 700 accounting firms. Like my obvious answer here is like you need a space like that that is like vetted where the only people in there are like legitimate practicing firms but also it's a space where no one can be um punished for sharing a real story. like the things that are posted in there, people cannot post to social media and so you just need like access to like higher quality information because the big mistake is lead this leading to like some really big change that kind of undermines the workflow in your accounting firm.

I I'll be honest with you, I took a firm of at the time we had about 20 tax staff. I took them from Lassert, which they'd been using for over 20 years, to Ultax based on some promises of some things that were better with Ultax. And some of them held up and many of them didn't. But it took probably 3 years for us to get back to the same level of productivity on a different tax prep platform. And this is a great example of where limited information or information that you're like, h yeah, no, that does seem exciting, but you're not totally sure can lead you to making a really big decision for your accounting firm that you then may come to realize, ah, this wasn't the right move. And in this case, Ultraax, your tax prep software, this is the biggest, hardest thing to change in a tax firm. It will take years for people to rebuild that muscle memory. In that time, the tax workflow leaders will have changed a hundred different times. Like, so like we don't know who's ultimately going to crush tax workflow, but I can tell you right now, if you change your Ultraax, your tax software, you are starting a years'sl long journey of getting comfortable with a new platform. And probably as soon as you do, we will get a good cloud-based tax prep platform that will integrate with everything infinitely better than Ultraax ever could. So I would say like no, don't change from Ultra Tax for now. If you're hearing good things, talk with the people that are saying the good things and be like, can you show me like show me what's working about this? Help me figure out why it's not working for me. The more access you have to other people who are doing this stuff, the better. One way to get access to these people, buddy, my live workshops that are coming up next month, May and June. Thank you to the 500 plus people who took advantage of the pre-sale. We're over 25% capacity on the events already. Podcast people, like you're the best type of people to come out to these live events. We're doing them in 20 cities in the US. Almost every corner of the US is within a 3 to 4 hour drive of them. The event doesn't start until like 2:00 in the afternoon because a lot of people drive quite a ways to get to them. But you're going to come into a room of 50 to 150 people who are podcast listeners who are into the same stuff. You're going to make some unbelievably cool connections in a afternoon and night that is kind of just designed to be a fun hang. Like I'll be there some programming from me, a little bit of CPE, but like it's just like the most fun night you can have with a bunch of other really like-minded people. Do it. Sign up if you haven't yet. jasononfirms.com/events podcast people I especially I want to get you on the list before we hit capacity on those it's a ton of fun gang thanks for being here man if you are staring down the deadline hang in there you can do it any questions any thoughts on we should we talk more or less AI pop that stuff down in the comments I'll catch you in the next