The Accounting Technology Lab Podcast – Trends in Accounting Practice Management – Oct. 2023

Technologists Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, discuss the latest trends in practice management for accounting firms.

Use the podcast player below to listen.

Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors. Also, due to the intro to the podcast, add apx. 10 seconds to the time stamps below.)

SPEAKERS

Randy Johnston, Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA.

Randy Johnston  00:02

Well, welcome to the Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnson with co host, Brian Tankersley. And we’ve got a rather broad topic to talk to you about today on practice management. Now, we don’t know too many people that think their practice management product is perfect for them. But we also know that people are kind of satisfied because you know, how much gain will I have, if I switch practice management products, I’m going to tell you, I think there’s gain to be had out there.

And by my last count, Brian and I are tracking roughly 52 Practice Management products. So we’re clearly not going to talk about 52 different products, we have different technology labs on a variety of products that are out there. But we wanted to first step back and just talk about the trends in practice management, the types of things that we see going on.

And you know, over the last few years, we’ve combined several different things that are practice management, ideal world, which included Time and Billing, scheduling, due date, management, workflow, and even document management, if it can be done. And we’ve been looking for this, you know, ideal type of product in the marketplace. And the you know, there’s lots of vendors who have created a lot of great products.

And the issue is kinda like food tastes. I don’t know what you like, and you don’t know exactly what I like, but we might like the same food, we might like different food here. And, you know, all I’m going to do is try to present a menu today.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  01:46

And I’ll go a different I’ll go a different direction on that. Okay. So as most of you know, that has met me, I am, I am not Mr. super athletic. Okay, and I don’t get really excited about, about yelling on the sideline for sports, although my wife and I were talking the other day, and I remarked at, at how prettier one woman was. And she she questioned me and said, you know, are, you know, are you attracted to her, I said, she’s pretty. But last thing I want to do is spend my life on the edge on the edge of the high school football field yelling up a storm for the next 50 years. That’s not something that sounds exciting to me. Okay. And so just like, just like that, that life and what that objective of what you want, is different from person to person, when they’re picking a mate or buying a home or other zooms like that. At those things changes well, over time. And so I want you to, you know, I think a lot of you are on pre y2k, practice management tools, and you’re in a world now, where email is a significant thing you have to think about an email may have not even been a feature that existed on your practice management product at the time, you’ve implemented it 30 years ago. So I want you to think about what practice management looks like, and how we can how we can automate proposal creation and how we can use electronic signature, and maybe we need to be using an engagement letter generator like Nula, or, or others, you know, who knows, maybe there’ll be a maybe there’ll be one that’s like, chat, GPT that’s created by a generative AI in the future. I think that I think there will be, but I don’t know when it’ll be in. And I don’t know what it’s going to take to get that done. But I was talking to somebody about a product at AICPA engaged this last week. And one of the things they’re doing is for control groups, where you have, let’s say, five companies and three individuals, they’re merging all those things together, merging documents together in with document assembly tools, like lawyers use, on on the big debt agreements that you have that have all these different things that have to be kind of merged together. So so the thing I would say here is that I think you given given the current choices, most of us, most of us might do something different than what we’re what we’re doing. And we’ve seen that in the survey where there’s there’s more discontent in practice management document management today than than we’ve seen in a while. But there’s, we also want you to think about what your firm’s gonna look like in five or 10 years. Mark Edmondson from inflow, wrote a great white paper on the audit technology ecosystem, and even if you don’t do audits, I want you to go download it, okay? Because it breaks down and looks at some of the key things in audit but I Think there’s a need to do the same thing with practice management, document management tax and other things. So, you know, if we’re thinking about practice management, for example, you think about single portals like, like liscio insurer link, when you think about E signature platforms, and you’re just all of these different, all these different things out here. And there are, there are, again, like Randy said, over 50 solutions out there that are being marketed actively. And I would suggest to you, there’s another 200, that you could make work for you, if you wanted to use that that situation. So the the question I think you’ve got to get resolved is, what is it that I want? Okay, you know, do I want to watch football all day, every Sunday? Or is that something that I, you know, I look at that I say, you know, I’m gonna feel guilty for not getting anything done. If that’s all I do on Sunday, you know, other people, other people, you know, think of, you know, the they go to church every Sunday, there’s not a game on, you know, so it’s, it’s a matter of figuring out, figuring out what it is you want. And I think you need to think about what what that is, and and what it needs to be in five or 10 years for your firm to be sustainable.

Randy Johnston  06:20

Yeah. All right. So here we are in practice management, dating and spouse selection. But let’s throw a few titles out here a few functions, because clearly Time and Billing is straightforward. And interesting enough, there are practice management products that do a very poor job at Time and Billing.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  06:40

But But I would suggest to you that if you listen to RON BAKER And Ed class, they would tell you that the timesheet should be dead anyway. So you don’t have to track time. So even the things that you and I look at as being constitution solid, it shouldn’t change. There are people out there that are implementing results only work environments that don’t even track time.

Randy Johnston  07:06

Yep. And I understand not tracking time, but I think you still may want to send a bill, but on that, sometimes not because some people are just doing ACH entries without invoices. And that’s just the way they’re working. But

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  07:19

or they have or they have a contract, or they have an engagement letter. And then they bill monthly throughout the year for the service. And it matches what’s on the engagement letter. And it’s ACH. So there’s no need for an invoice.

Randy Johnston  07:30

Yeah, exactly. But management reporting, where so many of the systems used to have dozens, if not hundreds of reports, and you know what to take or dashboards and KPIs. And we could go off on a bunch of dashboard, KPI tools,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  07:46

and workflow, I mean, think about how how the way we do workflow has changed from the paper slips in the 90s. To the to, again, these online systems, and that’s required now, because a lot of you are thinking about using outsourcing, or you having such a hard time getting staff people you’re being forced to hire to get some of your work done remotely. And so you need those electronic workflow systems so you can manage them, because otherwise you’re going to, you’re going to spend the gross national product of Burma on on overnight shipping, and you’re gonna have a carbon footprint that makes big foot blush.

Randy Johnston  08:24

Yeah, so you know, this, this type of mold, the integration to other systems can be a factor. You know, I just look at a system like TPS that’s integrated QuickBooks Online and Power BI and several other systems. But many of you have the skills to integrate these platforms, but many of you don’t have the skills to integrate these other systems. So you have to weigh that out. And let’s pick something real fundamental, like, how well are you integrated into Microsoft 365, or into Google workspace? Which is a big deal.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  08:59

And by the way, did you know that there’s a tool in Microsoft 365 office 365, called bookings, it’s included with all business plans that you can use to automate exposing your free busy availability to people and you can you can automate the process by which people pick times to get on your calendar. That’s something that is that that should be an absolute game changer for the for the small firm, simply because otherwise, somebody’s going to spend spend all their day answering the phone and setting up appointments instead of solving the problems that the clients really pay us to do.

Randy Johnston  09:38

Yeah, and another thing that I’ve been a proponent of for some time, but many firms are not interested in business development, supporting that with you know, CRM, and many of the practice management systems purport that they have business development in there, but there are clearly tools that integrate with practice management systems to get This done. So the likes of the levitates would be an example. And there’s there’s many more that I should probably step through. But it’s not the sales forces of the world, which many firms have put themselves on thinking that was the way to get the job solved.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  10:18

And by the way, the sales and marketing efforts here are because we’re being held to us to a client contact standard, that is much higher today than it was 30 years ago. Also, we have, we may, we’re trying to get into new practices like advisory where we have to be proactive and have real time calves. And so that means that the, there’s just, we’re solving for completely different things. And so we have to be able to collaborate. And again, we’re using both technology and remote workers to get this done. So, you know, the need for things like the chat you have in carbon, you know, things that we wouldn’t have thought of 30 years ago are now pretty much required. I mean, just about everybody I talked to in their practices using teams or slack or something similar. And in that’s different.

Randy Johnston  11:15

Yeah. And you know, when I’m thinking about this, again, I just happen to enjoy using contact management, software and CRM software, because I can remember my conversations more clearly. And people have been fascinated for years, how I’m able to recall things. And the answer is, I simply do a quick lookup, or I look it up on the fly, while we’re, you know, talking. And you know, there’s very sophisticated systems that are super simple to use, like the symphony or the levitates, that I’ve already mentioned. And the question is, is it inside the system? Or can it track all those conversations for you in email, in text, and in other methodologies, like liscio is with their single portal, but you know, another one, Brian is payment, you know, traditionally, firms just send invoices, and they got checks. Well, now

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  12:11

it’s there, and they got checks whenever they got the check. And it might not be till it was time for next year’s organizer to go out that you would get that check.

Randy Johnston  12:19

But you and I have both tracked the ACH capabilities of multiple platforms and the payment methodologies. So I think we have a list of about 20. And there’s way, way, way more than 20 of these, but like the CPA charges and the quick fees of the world, which in the islands and the islands, and you can potentially, and I’m going to just pick on quick fee. As an example, if you want to do a technology upgrade, they’ll actually pay your vendor bill for you and let you as a firm pay it over time. Now we all know that there’s cost of money that might be involved in this. But instead of either or situation, you might be in a situation where your payment vendor would actually allow you to get paid by your clients, or let you buy technology for your own firm. So how many different payment methodologies are out there? So what I

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  13:13

would suggest here is this is all we’re all saying this, because because when you picked your current practice management application, you may have been on Windows 3.1. Maybe you were living on the edge on Windows 95. If you have a pre y2k application, but texting has come in that didn’t exist then workflow outsourcing. I mean, you know, there’s in real time chat. You know, there’s there’s security laws now. So we can’t email attachments to people. So we need to get into a single portal situation, there are people doing business texting today, using business texting applications, because the texting is now is now getting data from clients. That is that needs to go into the workpapers. So how are we going to make sure that the that those discussions you had with them go. So the thing I want you to see is the practice management has gotten bigger. The ways we communicate have changed radically in the last 30 years. And so just like you don’t smoke in your office, the way was dominant 40 years ago, you shouldn’t be you shouldn’t you know, you need to have a tool that will meet your needs in the modern environment, not one that met your needs when you get when you smoked a pack a day at your desk.

Randy Johnston  14:40

Well and you know, thinking about this friends. The other thing that you got to figure out pretty quickly is how big you are today how big you want to be and what level these various systems work at. Now in the accounting software world. We talked about tier one products like SAP and Oracle versus the low end products like Xero and QuickBooks. Online Zoho books and accounting software. Well, same thing happens here in practice management, there are super high end products, the store practice management or practice pro 365, being some examples up in there, or APS, it would be another one, perhaps AV, down to the very, very simple things, you know, like Adam or other products at the low end.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  15:27

I mean, some people that run tax practices, I’m sure some of you that are listening to me do this are just sending invoices out of the tax software. Or if you send one for something else, maybe you’ll send it in QuickBooks Desktop, but you may not even have an integrated integrated thing in an integrated ledger or an integrated invoice register, because some of the stuffs in tax software, some of the stuffs in QuickBooks, and you know, other stuff may be in Microsoft Word. So, so there it’s a different world today.

Randy Johnston  15:59

Yeah, and you know, I don’t have an issue, personally with Ford, Chevy, or, you know, Chrysler products, I guess we should say. Wolters Kluwer, Thomson Reuters are into it. All right, because they’ve all been around a while. But you do know that there’s, you know, new products like, oh, I don’t know, Tesla, let’s say or Kia. And there’s all sorts of different cars that you see on the road. Well, there’s all sorts of different practice management products. So the traditional cch practice management, or the CCH access practice, or the traditional Thomson Reuters practice, CS or the new on vo firm management, or carbon, which is the Intuit OEM practice management, those are all good products. But you know what, there’s a whole lot of different good products out there as well. And even though, at one point in time, we might have said that this product is the greatest thing for sliced bread. Bread has changed, and I don’t know what’s on your menu, cuz you know, you may like Ezekiel bread and you make white like white bread, and you might like whole wheat bread, or you might like to sit on the bleachers on a weekend.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  17:10

And the thing that I would say to you is that if all you’ve ever had for a vehicle is is an F 150 pickup, then everything looks like you’re looking for a new vehicle and you’re thinking about, I need an F 150. But what if you don’t, you don’t enjoy woodworking anymore. So you don’t need to pick up sheets of plywood, lumber, that kind of stuff. And maybe you maybe your mobility is reduced or something and or you’ve got a child that has some kind of issue. And so you need something lower, that’s easier for folks to get into? Well, the same thing is happening with with client accounting services and payable services and the way things have changed in your practice where you’re adding things like advisory, the tools, the tools that you got, that you that you had, that you used in the past may not get you where you want to go for the future. And so I think just like if you were gonna buy a new car today, you’d have a lot of new options that didn’t exist 2030 years ago. I think the same thing exists today in in practice management. And I think a lot of firms don’t want to work on their processes. But it’s critical that you do work on those processes, so that you figure out what’s going to make things work for the future. Because what you what got you here won’t get you where you’re trying to go.

Randy Johnston  18:41

You know, and as you’re talking about the F 150. Brian, I’m just musing over that because the strangest darn thing I live in a small town Hutchinson, Kansas. And this week alone, I saw a GMC Hummer, EV Of course, son Dave has an ford f 150 Lightning electric truck, and I saw rivian. And it’s like, where did these people get these cars? Because they’re certainly not sold around here.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  19:07

And, and that’s the point. Okay, is that is that you most of you made last made a practice management decision in an era when there was a smoking section in the restaurants you went to. So I think it’s important that you realize that just like that’s changed, and smoking sections pretty much don’t exist outside of Las Vegas. I think you need to acknowledge that what you need is different and you need to figure out what that is. And you need to figure out what it is you may need to go to conferences and network with other attendees about how they’re changing their processes so that you can do things you know, Randy, you and I are going to be speaking at the CPA America tech roundtable here in a few days there. One of the beautiful parts about it is that everybody trades notes and talks to each other about How they’re making these kinds of changes and more. And so an association, maybe something that makes a lot of sense to, so that you can, you can learn more about, about how other people are solving these problems on a non competitive basis.

Randy Johnston  20:17

Yeah, now, we did not specifically name very many products, although you heard a few names dropped here and there. But if you’d like to see the a partial list of these 52 products, you can look at CPA firm tech, and go to the practice management section. And you will see the CCH Thomson Reuters, the iris, the Intuit, the TPS is of the world, the Office tools, and many, many more listed there, my rule of thumb is, if it doesn’t appear on the list, in my last review of it, there were some deficiencies or something that didn’t quite make sense. But remember, I don’t tell you how to pick your spouse or how to pick your meal. Just because I look at it a certain way doesn’t mean you need to look in that same way. If you

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  21:01

like sitting on bleachers seven days a week, God bless you live your life and be happy, okay? But that ain’t me. And so I want you to find out what’s going to make you happen. And we want you to find out what’s going to make you happy and successful, and it’s going to work and make your life better. So we hope you’ll look at some of these things out there. As you’re making decisions, you know, don’t buy the same old pickup just because it’s what you’ve always bought, because there’s a lot of new things, and the world’s gonna be very different in five or 10 years.

Randy Johnston  21:34

So you know, I will. And I will just say that over the last three years, I’ve done extensive consultations on both practice management and document management. And I went through many of these systems on all of their features, and I scored them, you know, and realistically, our tech lab here is to try to give coverage for a lot of different products. But we’re not really reviewers, if you will. But I have done in effect to review and scored these different products. And I found even for me who lives and breathes this stuff every day, that things change enough that my scores have to change over time. So even though there’s I maintain them in a static model, the fact the matter is, when it’s time to do a new analysis, I go through again and update the scores. And most important is I go through the with the client, throwing out the list of all possible features and say you rank your features. And then we’ll talk about the scores and where they fit with other products, because the most important thing is what’s it take to solve your firm’s problem today, five years from now, and I think this is a tenure decision up to 10 years from now. And that’s kind of hard to see sometimes, Brian? Yeah, I

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  22:48

agree. I agree. Nobody can see the future. So again, just stay tuned. We don’t know what the future is going to be like. But we know it’s going to be different. And we look forward to seeing this evolve. And we’ll talk about it on the technology lab every week.

Randy Johnston  23:05

And the best way to to see the future is to create it. That’s what Brian and I are here to do. We’ll be with you in another technology lab. Good day.

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