Name: Practice Management for Tax Workflow
Uploaded: 2024-08-27T17:32:41.915Z
Duration: 1 h 4 s
Description: Practice Management for Tax Workflow

Transcript for "Practice Management for Tax Workflow": The Intuit accountant's practice management for tax workflow. Updating your tax practice workflows presentation. Excited to be here today with you. For those of you who may not have seen me speak before, my name is Dawn Brolin. I'm a CPA and a certified fraud examiner. I'm also the designated motivator for accounting professionals because I want all of us to win in this game of accounting. And I'm the CEO of Powerful Accounting Inc. Out of Windham, Connecticut. I am the founder of the team, Brolin, and the author of the designated motivator. I'm a member, as you can see with my jacket on today, member of the Intuit tax council, the ADP advisory board, and the Avalara QuickBooks advisory board. I love trying to help, you know, the companies connect with the with the practitioners and everybody out there. So I'm I'm really honored to be part of those organizations, in a couple awards that I've received. And I'm the president of the newly formed Accounting Cornerstone Foundation, which is a wonderful effort to help and assist people either both financially and, with anxiety or whatever of going to in person learning. So I find that, you know, meeting all of you, all of you that are here today, that I've met as friends and colleagues and how we've all just kinda worked to help each other. And we need to bring more people, people who've never been to in person learning into the fold so that they can meet their best friends as they move forward. So really excited about that as well. Just wanted to mention that real quick. So, let's jump into, of course, the CPE process. We love the CPE process because we need the CPE. Right? So understand that this session is eligible for 1 hour of CPE credit. It is not eligible for IRS CE credit. So let's just make sure we get that clear here. In order to receive credit, you must answer 75% of the random checkpoints that are gonna pop up during your session. We will have some polling questions. Those polling questions are really just for me to see who the audience is out there, learn a little bit about what what's working for you and what's not. Those are not your checkpoints. The checkpoints are the random check points. The ding will go off. The bell will go off, and then people will put in the chat, hey. The bell went off. And everybody just make sure you, do that. So 75% of those random checkpoints are gonna pop up. You must attend a minimum of 50 minutes. So make sure you're here for a minimum of 50 minutes. Don't miss any of those random checkpoints. Also, if you have any technical issues, which, by the way, technology is great, tell it's not. We all know that. Just remember, if you do have those technical issues or audio streaming, you can't hear me or whatever that may be, technical issues or audio streaming, you can't hear me or whatever that may be, just refresh your browser using either. Refresh it through the little circle y thing on your Internet bar. So, refresh the browser, or just go ahead with hit on f5. Hit f5 on your keyboard will also do that. Usually, that's gonna solve any of the streaming issues that you may find out. Alright? And at the end, there'll be a survey to generate after the event. Please complete the survey. Ensure your pop up blocker is set to allow or check for any blocked pages if there if you have any issues there. But a survey is gonna pop up, and I'm I'm hoping that you will enjoy today's session. You'll learn something. Worst case, I'm gonna motivate you to continue working on your processes as you're going through, this session here today. So I hope you have a notebook. You're ready to go, and you're gonna take some notes. And I want you to think about your own firm as we go through this this session today that we're paying attention to us. That means you. This session is for you. Okay? So I'm hoping you grab at least 1 or 2 nuggets, if not 3, that you can take back and work through. So CPE process, one CPE, folks. Okay. What's the agenda today? I'm going to show you my practice management workflow. So I'm going to go through the things that I do in my practice as I onboard new clients or I need to retrieve documents from people. How do I send out my engagement letters, and how do I invoice? We're gonna talk through all of that. We'll talk about document management, which is always a big conversation for people. And, again, this is just mine. They asked me to share kind of what I'm doing in my practice. Hopefully, you can relate to some of the things that I'm showing you. And then just talking about engagement and task management as we know and as we grow. And if we have staff and even if we don't have staff, if you're a solopreneur here today, it still relates to you. How can I help you better organize your workflow so that you can spend more time out of the office or your staff can spend more time out of the office and they're having really good experiences within your firm? So that's the agenda for today. And, and again, I hope you're going to take some notes and be really present here in this hour. Do not multitask. Take this hour to spend on you and your firm. That's my goal for you here today. So, what about practice management for tax workflow? What are we doing here? We want to be automating. We want to be collaborating. We want to have integrations so that we have less administrative work and data management to deal with. And And we wanna be able to do it anytime from anywhere. And that's the key. I wanna fly to California and visit my kid whenever I want to, even if it's in the middle of March. I wanna be able to have that flexibility and be able to do those types of things. So from my practice management workflow, we're just gonna go through some of the things that we and I can't tell you everything that we do. We don't have that kind of time. We'd have to have a full day workshop. But we're gonna talk about invoicing. How do I invoice? Utilizing something called Ignition. It's a great tool for invoicing, for engagement letters, utilizing QuickBooks online accountants. So I have my own QuickBooks data file. I am doing some things within that for, invoicing, and we'll we'll talk through that. We'll get to some of those examples as we move forward. QuickBooks payments, we use QuickBook QuickBooks payments here in addition to Ignition. So I wanna have a little bit of flexibility on how I collect money. And then QuickBooks time, what do we utilize that for? It's a little bit about my practice management workflow there. But what about my documents? What am I doing with documents? And those of you who have heard me speak before, you're like, Brolin, I hear one more thing out of your mouth about Smart Ball. Come on, man. Well, guess what? Smart Ball allows me to access documents from anywhere. It allows my clients to securely access any and all of their documents that they have provided to me anytime, anywhere. It requires a lot less handholding than having to have them call. I need a copy of this. Can you print that out for me? They have anytime, anywhere access. We are utilizing digital organizers in in our practice. So thinking about how does that work if you're a Lacert user or a ProSeries user, how could that benefit you? Obviously, ProConnect people are using Lync, and we're gonna talk more about that as we go through. But how are you storing your documents? And hopefully, you've got a methodology. And we're gonna talk a little bit about file structure, folder structure, and how we kind of what the what the important parts around that and why. Right? That's what's gonna be my whole thing. I'm gonna try to explain to you, at least for me, why. Okay? And as long as you're using some kind of a storage system, that's probably the biggest point and it's not sitting in a file cabinet. And then we want to talk about the practice itself. How are we managing our practice? What are a couple of tools? I've got I've got a couple for you. We've got Carbon that we've used. We've got Financial Sense that we're currently using. We've got QuickBooks online work. So if your QuickBooks online accountant has a work section. So if you're somebody who's like, well, I'm I'm a solopreneur, I don't really need to have any kind of fancy workflow tool, practice management tool, well, then QBOA work is can work for you. It works. It works. Right? So again, so this is kind of just an introduction to some of the things that we're going to talk about as we move forward here. But practice management workflow is critical. Okay? That we have something. I still when I'm doing things and I'm giving these webinars or I'm giving, you know, a live presentation or I'm in my dugout, Dawn's dugout where I'm talking to people, there's still people out there utilizing Excel. I know you would probably be surprised by that or pieces of paper. So how can we work through that? We're gonna start with engagement letters and invoicing, which is always fun. Because you know what? At the end of the day, we have to have engagement letters. And I like to I invoice, and I like to get paid. I like to get paid for what I'm doing. Long gone are the days of chasing payments, and that's just something we've eliminated over the last couple of years in our practice that we're just not doing that. So for before we get started, we're gonna do obviously, we've got polling questions and these are, again, more around. I just want to understand a little bit more about what you guys are up for. So our primary billing methodology for tax is what Do you bill by the tax form? Which I do. I bill by the form. If they're a new client that come in, I bill by the form. I take a copy of their prior year tax return, and I create a bill. I create a a proposal for them. Do you do flat fee or value pricing? K. There's another great methodology there. Time and billing. Do you bill by the hour? Are you doing bundled services subscriptions? You're doing a a bundled service package, and they're paying by subscription, which means they're paying month after month or some other or maybe even a combination of these things. So if you don't mind, just kinda let me know who we have out there, what people are thinking about. Just curious. It's just my curiosity. I like to pull pull and see what the majority is doing. It's good for me and my analytics as I'm, you know, moving forward. But let's just answer this poll, if you guys don't mind. Again, this is not your checkpoint. This is just Dawn Burland's curious what your primary methodology, for billing and specifically for tax. So we're gonna count this down in 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. Alright. So we'll go ahead and show the polling results. Very interesting. I've okay. I see you all out there. Good. Alright. So we have we have some different, billing methodologies. So now as we move on, I wanna just give you an idea of what I have done within my practice to start to change the way my business model operates. And that's something if you take that nugget with you, that's a good one. Because at the end of the day, I think historically for myself and maybe many of you, it's, well, this is how we've always done it. We either bill by the hour. Some people do still bill by the hour for their tax services. I've never billed by the hour for tax service with the exception of IRS resolution tax services such as non filers. And we've kind of changed that methodology as we've gone and moved forward. But how are you billing? So for us, we we were billing by the form. We still bill by the form, but we've kind of changed our our thought process about the value that we're offering. So those pay in advance and we have tax only clients. We still do have tax only clients. We have people who are individuals that come in. They got a tax return for 7.50. Individual that comes in with a Schedule C and they're doing their own books, and they do a pretty good job. And we just have maybe some questions to ask. So we're gonna we're gonna handle that, but we're doing it by the form. But it's tax only. And in order for me to take time away from my subscription, which we'll talk in a little bit about that, before I take away from the subscription clients, they're gonna pay a premium to prepare their tax return. For example, let's just say that we have a schedule c client that comes to us, and we're gonna say, listen, you have to have an annual 1 hour meeting. You have to have meetings. Gone are the days in my firm because my business model had to change. I'm not just gonna prepare anybody that has a business. I'm not just gonna prepare their tax return. We are requiring an annual 1 hour meeting. Obviously, we're doing their annual tax returns and we're going to complete safe harbor tax estimates for them and we're going to have them paid through our system. And we, in particular, use Lacert. I know there's pro connect people and there's pro series people, and you have your own ways to do that. In Lacert, I set those estimated payments up and we require them if they're in business and they're obviously safe harbor, means they owed tax in the prior year. We're gonna require them to have those quarterly estimates, and we're gonna submit those when we submit the filing. So we say, listen, for that, it's a $2,500 fee. We charge a premium because we're gonna give you an hour meeting, and we're gonna calculate those safe harbor tax estimates. We're gonna have a conversation about it. Do you, you know, do we expect that you're gonna earn more money this year? Are we are we looking like it's been a tough first few months? Like, whatever the conversation may be, And we're gonna charge them, and we're gonna make them pay in advance, folks. We changed our methodology. We changed the way we wanted to operate our firm, and we decided if you were gonna be a tax only client, you're paying in advance because everybody else who are on a subscription base with us, a subscription package, they're paying us every month. So, we decided, okay, what about the people who maybe want a little more than just the tax return, the 1 hour meeting, and some safe harbor estimates? Maybe we wanna look at their entity structure. We're gonna do their transcript review. Once a year, we're gonna take a look at their transcripts, see are they in compliance? Do they have any back taxes? Have they been receiving notices? Whatever those types of cases may be, we're going to look at their books on a quarterly basis as opposed to year end. We're going to look at some tax projections. We're going to do maybe a little bit more than safe harbor, and we're going to look at their retirement plan and see where they are because we want to help our clients be successful. So someday, they actually retire. I know that sounds like wicked crazy, but we said, okay, well, we're going to go ahead and put them on a quarterly subscription and they're going to pay, you know, as you can see that in this case, it's $9,000 They're going to pay on a quarterly basis auto debit. They're signing an engagement letter and then on an auto debit. They want a little bit more, but they don't want the full boat with the business planning, tax planning, payroll setup, tax projections. Now we're doing forecasting, looking at their retirement plan. And these numbers don't get hung up on what I'm charging. That's not what this is about. It's just an example of thinking about how your pricing and what you're doing for your tax services. So, again, I don't want to belabor that whole point, but I think it's important for us to understand that there can be different ways that we are setting ourselves up for success. If you are struggling with cash flow, folks, which I did for a long, long time, over 2 decades, which is embarrassing. But I did. I couldn't get my brain wrapped around anything different than billing people on Mondays or billing people for their tax return when I was done with the return. That was just how it always was, like I said before. But then when you realize that that really strains cash flow, puts unnecessary anxiety on you as somebody who's in charge of the firm trying to pay your employees every Friday. And if you're sending invoices out waiting for people to pay the invoice, now you're stressed out. Is there gonna be money on Friday? So, if that's you, I hope that this has helped you think a little differently about what you can and, you know, can do. Again, changing your business model. It's important that you that you catch that piece of it. Okay? Again, really important to to think a little bit different. And I know people are in the chat. I'd love to, you know, put your what you're doing in there. It always helps encourages other people. That's what we're here today to do. Encourage each other to think a little bit different. And if you have a great methodology, my methodology isn't perfect, but I'll tell you what, it's working really great for my bank account these days, and I'm pretty happy. So and, hopefully, I'm giving better service to the clients because I'm working with less clients. Really important. So I want to talk about how do I what do I do about my engagement letters? What do I do about getting paid? So we talked a little bit about what methodologies or what what tools am I using to be able to make this happen? And so for me, the bulk of my clients are we're going to send them well, they're all getting engagement letters through Ignition. Every client, even if they're in a subscription model, they're getting a separate tax engagement letter regardless if they're on a subscription price. When I set those subscriptions up, they're not necessarily set up and say, well, they're typically set up by December, to be honest. They're pretty much ready by December. I may not have the updated engagement letter from my E and O insurance, by the way, folks Get it from your E and O insurance. So I may not have the good tax engagement letter for an S corporation yet in my library of engagement letters. So but I still wanna get them in that subscription model. It describes the services that we're going to provide to them for the following year, but they're still going to get this tax return specific engagement letter. And so think about things that are in those engagement letters, like I'm not responsible for your BOI reporting. I'm not I'm not responsible for x or z or y. Like, these are the things. Like, I'm responsible for this, but you're responsible for that. We've just got to be paying attention. So we utilize Ignition for that. It syncs with QBO. Okay. So which is beautiful. So I have my QBO subscription. And so when my client is is entered, they actually get entered first in Liscio. Liscio then updates QBO. QBO then link is already linked to Ignition. So when I go into Ignition, I'm gonna pull up a proposal, and I can go ahead and search for a client. So that's the integration part that we talked kind of in the beginning, when I showed you some of the workflow and we talked about the agenda. We wanna have integrated tools. So within this integrated tool, what I love about I don't know. I'm not giving you a demo on Ignition. That's not the point. The point is I have a system and a workflow to send engagement letters. I have my clients prepay for their tax returns. If they're in a subscription price, their price is 0 on this engagement, on a tax engagement, specifically. So think about the different payment options. And some of you will be comfortable with this and some of you will not. I will accept credit cards and I will accept ACH. Some people are like, nope. I won't take credit cards because of the fee. Listen. I'm not arguing with that at all. This is, again, Dawn Brolin's way of doing the workflow. I accept credit cards and ACH, and you'll notice at the bottom with the big red big red arrow, I require payment details to accept the proposal. Now, I can choose what's great about it is I can choose to say when I send this engagement letter out and this proposal, I don't want to charge them right away. I want to manually charge them. There's options like that, but there's also the option to make it automatic. So when they sign the engagement letter, they actually the payment is processed when they sign it. And that's what we've chosen to do, because we're just taking payment upfront for those that have to pay. So, we send the Ignition, the Ignition engagement to the client, which is great. And what's nice about it says, hey. Listen. Here it is. Review and sign your proposal. Custom powerful accounting ink. Blah blah blah. Click review and sign sign it and pay. Now what's really cool is when they click on that engagement letter, when they click on that proposal, this is what they're gonna see. Because what I love about my workflow is the tools that I'm utilizing are allowing me to embed a video. Now what's great about video is number 1, I don't really see a lot of my clients. I don't know about you folks. I mean, some of you are probably still meeting with clients doing tax appointments. Nothing wrong with that. What we've chosen to do, and since COVID, my clients got real comfortable with, I'm just going to get you my stuff and you do my return and just, you know, communicate with me however you have to. So I wanna do an introductory video. Again, we're talking about the workflow here. We're not talking necessarily about Ignition. We're talking about the fact that I have a tool that allows me to do an introductory video. Hey, clients. Hey, everybody. That's my first line. Hey, everybody. Dawn Brolin here, your tax preparer. I just wanna say hello. I wanna talk to you about some changes in my business model. We have moved to accepting payment upfront for your tax return, and here's why. It gives me a little skin in the game for you. It lets me know who's coming back. I know who's committed to me, and I know who's not. And I'm okay either way. If this does not work for you, you know, I understand, but this is how I had to change my business model, and this is what I wanna do. Explaining the process to those clients. I do a video for existing clients. That's that that video is gonna be different than But one's for new clients, for existing clients. Hey. Welcome back. Excited to have you here. Getting ready to go. I'm pumped up. Tax season is here. Let's make it happen. For new clients, I'm like, hey. I know I talked to you on the phone, but you probably have not seen me or you maybe just talked to Tracy. This is me, Dawn Brolin. I'm your tax preparer. Welcome to powerful accounting, blah blah blah. Hoping to work with you this year. Here's how you get us your documents. This is how we're gonna do it. And you have that time to communicate with them through video. And my clients have loved it. I've got a lot of text like, Brolin, that was awesome. Oh my goodness. You're so funny. Like this and that and whatever. And some people may say and those of you in the chat may say, well, I'm not comfortable doing a video. I'm nervous about it. Just send me your script and I'll do it for you. I'm just kidding. But at the end of the day, that gives me some personalization to the client, allows me the opportunity to explain to them what we're doing. In this tool, one of my favorite parts is to go to the disbursement screen. This is an actual screenshot of my disbursement screen because I don't I don't want to show you all demo account stuff. I want to show you my stuff. And so, what I love doing in the beginning of January was clicking in here every day. So, I I think I sent my proposals out. So this doesn't show those particular payments, but I think I sent my proposals out. It was like June 11th or June 13th or something like that. I mean, January 13th. So I sent them out. And then every day I would click to see how many people actually, you know, how much money is hitting my account and when is it hitting my account. I really love the disbursement screen because that just meant my bank account was filling up. And now I'm about to put my big girl pants on and get ready to do tax returns and get serious about it. And it was really encouraging to me, which is kind of weird maybe. I don't know if you in the chat think that's weird. But it was encouraging to me to see that I had clients that were actually signing and that I took a risk that I was going to ask for prepayment upfront. And it's risky. I could have had every client say, you're out of your mind, Brolin, which some of them do say that, but they still come back. But you're crazy. I'm not paying upfront for this tax return. And I got a really positive response and I was really encouraged by that. So thinking about, again, workflow, I don't want to have to really do accounting myself. Right. So I don't want to handle accounts receivable. So what's great about the workflow is that once the clients would sign the engagement and put their payment in and they were marked as as, an invoice. So what would happen is when they accepted the proposal and put in their payment information, they knew they were being charged right away, but an invoice would be sent to QBO. Well, wait a minute. Oh, you mean it's doing accounting correctly? Yep. It isn't sending over a journal entry. It's sending over an invoice, an actual invoice, so that when Tracy because she's really stickler on making sure people pay, she can go into QBO and be like, oh, this person didn't pay or whatever the case may be. Maybe their payment rejected or whatever. So she's able to monitor that but not really do anything manually. Then what's great is when I actually have the dispersal screen that you saw in the previous slide, when they're going to disperse it to me and when it's dispersed and hits my bank account that day, the payment is processed against that invoice. That's proper way to do accounts receivable, cash flow, all that stuff. And I that's one of the reasons why I love the tool. So just something to think about. So moving back to the subscription model, I use QBOA, my QBO file, and I create recurring sales receipts for people that are on the subscription pricing. And I do that right within QBOA. So they'll be you know, I go in, I set up a recurring sales receipt. Obviously, I'm not going to put my clients up here. So but I so I use myself as an example as if I was going to charge myself. But it's wonderful because you can put in the payment information. You can put all that in there. And on the 1st of every month or whatever date the client joined the subscription pricing. So some of them are going to be on the first because they've been with me for a while. Some of pricing. So some of them are gonna be on the first because they've been with me for a while. Some of them will be maybe on the 18th of the month because that's when they signed with me. And so I just set up a recurring sales receipt. You know, QBO, obviously, when you log in, it'll tell you if there was an issue with the payment, which has happened. And And I'm like, hey, we need updated payment information. We get that and off we go. So it's another way to set up your tools and your workflow. And here's an actual screenshot. Obviously, we've blurred out the clients' names in here. But you can see this isn't even all of them. You'd have to scroll to get more. How much we were bringing anywhere around $40,000 between $40,041,000 a month for clients that are a subscription model. And that's because we changed our business model that we wanted to move to subscription pricing. Thank you, Ron Baker. Let me just say that. Because really at the end of the day, as we're looking forward to changing I had an I had a pain point. So those of you in the chat, throw up some of your pain not throw up. Put some of your pain points in the chat and, you know, love to love to hear what other people's pain points. If you don't have any pain points, say I'm rocking, bro. And I'm just wanting to come and hang out with you or whatever. That's cool too. But we come over these pain points in our workflow. We have to make a change. We have to make an adjustment. And mine was cash flow. I had a bad cash flow management for years because I was relying on clients to pay me. I was not in control of the relationship. So, I had to change my workflow and that in turn changed my business model. Right? So, we use QBOA for our subscription clients. So, I'm just trying to show you a couple different ways that we kind of handle the workflow. Obviously, this is the QB payments client view if they if you send them an invoice, which in some cases will do. Like, maybe if there's a one off thing, we'll say, hey, listen. I need you to I need you to do this or that or whatever. There's a way I can do it in Ignition. I can do it in QuickBooks. I love the flexibility of making a decision on the way I want to accept that payment at that moment in time. So, obviously, people can go in and they can pay their invoices, through this link. We know that. Right? Because we deal with QuickBooks. That's just what we do. So now we move into the conversation around document management. But before we do that, let's launch another polling question because we're gonna talk about document management. Our and I want you to answer this. Our current remember, this is not a poll this is not like part of your check ins. You've got the ding dings going on for that. Our current document management system is what? Like, what are you using now? Are you using Smart Vault? Are you using Canopy? They've got folder structure. TaxDome, Google Drive, Dropbox, ShareFile Explorer, or something else. Maybe you're using something totally different. I mean, there's all kinds of different apps that are moving in a way that they can have folders and file structures. There's also practice, and we'll talk about the practice management in a little bit, where they're having the ability for you to create folder structure. So maybe if you're a smaller firm, and or maybe you're a big firm and those are working for you. Cool. Don't you know, I want I just want you to have a document management system, folks. I think that's the point. Right? So, we'll go ahead and close this poll down here in 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. Alright. Let's check it out. Let's see what the pull okay. Got a got a mixture of people using different things, but, again, just excited that you're using something. So, again, since this is just this is a session with us together about what Dawn Brolin's using for her document storage, and I always believe regardless of what tool you're using people, you gotta have a structure. So haphazard folder structures cause chaos. Chaos in a firm is not a great workflow. It's not great when people can't find the documents that they need to. So think about in your tax workflow. You have other people preparing taxes in your firm. Right? And so you and you don't have a good folder structure. There's probably either Slack or Teams or some kind of tool that you're using to communicate within your firm. And somebody's like, I can't find the document for x, y, and z. Now that takes 2 people off of what they should be doing because they're trying to find documents. That's my real true belief on document storage and having things where they belong. Clients need structure. They're just like children. We've said that before. They need structure. So the more structured you are, the more structured they're gonna be. So this is a really good example of a client that owns a business. And this is an actual picture of a folder structure for a client. We had one folder named that was related to their name, so we didn't wanna show that. So we've blurred that out for for privacy, reasons, of course. So we have what's called this bookkeeping folder for every business client, and it's in in SmartVault. And we are able to set up bank and credit card statements. Any client uploads, they know that's their folder to upload. What's beautiful about SmartVault is you can you can set permissions within these folders and say, you can upload to this folder. So when they try to go upload to another folder and then you can't find what they uploaded because they uploaded in a random folder, been there, done that. That was really not good where we would just let them go rogue. We could never find anything. We had to lock down where they could upload. They got a client upload folder. We can drag and drop those files into wherever we want them in our consistent folder structure. We have onboarding documents registrations like their CP575. And they we have various things like their state registrations. And all those are all in the same spot. Payroll filings, sales tax, if we deal with sales tax for them, and their year end 10.99 processing. And then underneath those folders, you'll see by year. So payroll tax filings are by year and then by quarter. Sales tax, same thing. It's gonna be by year and then either monthly or quarterly or whatever they are, annual. And then year end 10.99. Same thing. Tax year, whatever. And then underneath that has the 10.90 nines. It has the w nines. It has the, 10.99 report out of QuickBooks that we're utilizing so we can file those 10.90 nines. And so it's just every client has the same folder structure. Obviously, if they don't have sales tax, they don't have a sales tax folder. Then you have a general client upload folder, that we always let them have access to because that's like a catchall for them. We have a permanent file where we have any IRS and notices, correspondence. We have different things underneath that. Their power of attorneys are up there. Their licenses, copies of licenses when necessary. And then you'll see a prior year's data. So what happens is when we onboard our clients, they don't get to be in this section of My Smart Vault yet. They're in a temporary holding folder. When they upload their prior year tax return, I send them engagement you know, proposal engagement letters through Ignition. And if they don't accept it, they stay there. It's a potential client folder. Not even they're not even on team Brolin yet. But once they do, we move though any and all documents that they provided before they became a client go in that folder. Everyone in the firm knows that. Then we have their various tax years. We have their client organizers, their tax returns, the firm filing ones that have the 88.79 that we that we deal with through DocuSign for signature. Really awesome. That's how we do it. And then our firm source documents are our work papers. That's book to tax worksheets, all of our we, you know, we do still print. Right? I just still print. I gotta use a red pencil, man. I just do. And I'm marking things up, and I'm doing things, and then I scan the whole package back up and put it in there. And then we have tax plan reports. So people that we're doing tax planning for or maybe there the the example earlier was there at least a quarterly planning client or on that subscription pricing. That's where the current year planning goes because, obviously, we don't have the next year's stuff yet. So and then the tax upload folder, which is where we direct them if they're a client that wants to utilize Smart Vault to upload their documents. That's where they're going. We allow them to put those there. And as their client after a year or 2, it's easy. They get into a routine with the way they like to upload documents. Most of my his I would say my veteran clients that have been around for over 10 years, they've they're used to uploading the Smart Vault, and we're gonna get into another tool that I'm utilizing also in a minute, to gather documents. And so and and handle organizers and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, your folder structure, again, which regardless of what folder whatever tool you're using, as we had in this last polling question, regardless of what you're using, make sure you think through the folder structure. It will help your staff be less frustrated trying to find things. And, same thing with your clients. It will give them consistency which is what they're going to need. Okay? Now, this is just an example just to show you. This is what the Smart Ball client portal is. This where they see it. They can upload documents. They can go view all their documents and all their stuff really easy through a portal. They can do it on their phone. They can do it on the computer, however they wanna do it. And, again, meeting the client where they are is also very important. So we try to do that. That's really important for us that we we don't want frustrated clients. We want clients that are like, bro, and that was easy. The easy button from Staples. They wanna bang that easy button and say, yep. That was easy. So, again, just an example of kind of what that looks like. So, one of the tools that we're utilizing to collect that data and give tax organizers by the way, we've never printed tax organizers and mailed them and I would love to see there's some of you maybe in the chat that still mail organizers. I've I've given presentations even in the most recent year or 2 where people are still mailing lots of organizers and clients, you know, maybe they're filling them out, maybe they're not. But I I wanna meet my client where they are. And I have a question for you. It's not a polling question, but just a question. Where do you think your clients are living? They're living in the same spot you are on this thing on their phones. This is where they live. We need to meet them where they are and hopefully you can get them to at least be able to scan documents. So I love this because, for anybody that's utilizing, that needs, organizers. So I would say specifically, listserv and pro series users because we're we're we're the people who may need to get these tax organizers an easier way to the clients. You can export all of your organizers out of your software. And it, again, doesn't matter if it's ProSeries or Lacert. Export them and you can upload them into Liscio. The client is gonna it's number 1, it's secure. It's a secure way for them to handle the organizer. It's easy for them to complete. So they're just yes, no's, yes, no's. It's conditional. So it's conditional questioning. So did you move? Yes. Okay. Now we've got 5 more questions to ask. When did you what is the date you moved? What is the new address? You know, was it due to work reasons? Blah blah blah. All the things. Instead of a static document that is gonna end up being 7,000 pages long because you're gonna put all of the conditions in there. If yes, go move to question 2.1. Like, we gotta we gotta do better. We gotta do better and helping it be much less painful for the client to deal with the tax organizer. It works on your phone, on your again, I'm not trying to sell Lizzie. I'm just telling you this is why the reason these were the reasons why I wanted to to implement Lizzie for the tax organizers. It works on your phones, tablets, and computers. Again, meeting them where they are so they don't have to have a login. If they want to if they want to have the LISEO app on their phone, they can, but it's not necessary. They can just fill out that organizer. It'll bring them right back because they're gonna get a text. Hey. Time to fill out your organizer. Automatically sends reminders on the organizer who loves to be like, oh, how is it going with the organizer? Automatically tells the clients that they've missed a question. It has a phone automatic phone scanner so it's not taking pictures, folks, where you try to zoom in on a JPEG. You're like, yep. Can't read that number. Is that a 0 or an 8? Like, I can't see it. And I I would love to hear in the chat if you guys are finding finding the JPEGs making you crazy because they're making me crazy. It includes the phone scanner and includes a copy of the listserv organizer. So there will be a full PDF of the when I say listserv because that's what I use. But if you're pro series, it'll be a pro series organizer. It includes a copy of the organizer, okay, in the in in the tool. So they'll be able to if they wanna. If you're used to giving them the full organizer, they can get a full PDF. It's gonna be right there at their fingertips for them. Again, it's secure, and that's key. So that's why we do it. And what I also want you to say for ProConnect, for those of you here that are ProConnect you, users, you have link for your organizers. And so I want to like say to the listserv and pro series people, Pro Connect link organizers are fantastic. It shows like what's the status, how are these how are things going, are they is it complete, Getting notifications. Well, that's what Liscio does for Lacert users and ProSeries users so that we have the same functionality. We can view the request. We can see if they've uploaded everything. What's their status? And what Tracy does, she just monitors the status. Oh, so and so just finished their organizer. Now she knows, okay, time free. We got and we got the documents. Gonna create a PDF for us. Awesome. So that's our workflow. That's the way we look at it. So just making sure the ProConnect people know you already have the link organizers now that listsert and pro series people have something as well. So we're all winning. We want everyone who's using it into a product to win. Period. So now we'll move on to engagement and task management. I told you earlier some people are still using Excel. It's terrifying. So that's not good full transparency. That's maybe there might be some amazing Excel users out there who can do toggling and filters and macros and micros and whatever else they got going on. And and good for you if you've got that figured out. And you and and there maybe there's a lot of options. We're just gonna talk up again about what powerful accounting is using to track their engagement and task management. But before we do that, let me hear from you guys. So the primary way we track tax return engagements is how? Maybe you're using the tax pro again, this is a polling question for Dawn Brolin's use. You're still getting your beep, your ding dings to get yourself your credit for your CPE. So, are you using the tax program status? So, we know, of course, and we can have that column, we have a way to look to see what the tax status is. Is it e filed? Is it ready to go? What is it doing? Are you using something like Carbon? That's another great tool. Kanopy or TaxDome, maybe one of those 2. Are you using spreadsheets? Are you using Financial Cents or something other? Something like that. I'm just curious at what the mix of of tools that you are all using out there. And if you did mark other for whatever reason, please put in the chat what you're using. Again, I we'd have I'd have to put 20 things up here, if I was to make you choose between them because there's so many management tools that you're utilizing. And, again, I'm just gonna show you what I do and and kinda how I use it, just for your your use. So we're gonna close this polling question again just down in 54, 3, 2, and 1. And here are our results. Awesome. Okay. Well, we got we got a little bit of a mix, but good. You know, again, throw in the chat if you feel like it that you wanna, you know, kinda chime in on something else that you're using. Again, this is all just up us as a designated motivator for accounting professionals. I just wanna help you all make some decisions. If you didn't if you're not using one now, you should be using one. That's the point. Right? So we've used Carbon to track engagements, tasks, and emails and things like that. And this is an example of, a a status view that I have. It gives me the ability to customize and filter the report how I want. So I have my work specifically that I have here. And you'll notice there's there's somebody I need to send a quote to And, you know, just examples ready to call the client. I need to call the client for a specific situation. There's notes likely in there to tell me what I'm supposed to call them about. I have somebody that's ready to start because my whole thing is productivity, folks. The whole point about the workflow, when I come into the office, the first thing I wanna look at is what's ready to start. You see, because ready to start means, Brolin, somebody's paid you. You need to do the work and that I take very seriously. What's in progress and what's waiting on the client? What if I'm waiting on the client, you know, why have I been waiting on the client for x, y, and z long? Whatever it may be. And these are just examples of of kinda what you can do. So it's a great tool to use, and it allows you to have what's called work within Carbon. And so we have here just an example of the tasks associated. So reassign tasks to certain things, like all the administrative work in the beginning is all assigned to Tracy. I don't handle any of that. I don't help collect documents. I don't help handle the organizers. I don't do that. Tracy handles all of that for me. But, you know, when I step in, when it's time to prepare a tax return, when it's ready to start, or if I have to send a quote so she sets me up and my my workflow is she'll talk to the client, get some notes, they'll upload the prior year return. She'll put a calendar in my in my, you know, to put an appointment in my calendar to send a quote. And she marks that in Carbon as well or in Financial Sense. So we've moved kind of moved over to Financial Sense at this point. But this is just an example. Carbon does a great job of doing that. And so they also allow you to to track those engagements and do some insights, give you some insights on what may be happening and things like that. So there's just examples of the way that we utilize a workflow tool so that everyone on the firm knows what's going on. If Nicole knows where we have a a a I call it a tag in financial sense. But in in Carbon, it's a status. And what I do is I put the status waiting on SBD, small business division, which is which is Nicole. The whole business division small business division is Nicole. So she that's her. And so she'll know if and it's assigned to her. So when she goes in to to monitor and say, oh, what do I have to work today? She knows she's waiting on me. And when it's when it's tax season, she knows she doesn't wanna be holding me up on tax returns. I wanna be getting stuff done. So if I have somebody that's on the subscription model and she's wrapping up the books at the year end or she's doing the quarterly person or whatever, She knows Brolin's waiting to get that tax return done. That's most important to her. Just like tax ready to start is important to me. And so we can all have insights. We can all look around to see what is going on, who has what work, and Tracy's kinda like the boss of it. She'll keep an eye on what's supposed to happen and not supposed to happen and even put tax returns as appointments in my calendar. Like, Brolin, this one's been ready to start. Get it done, and she'll block my calendar. Calendar blocking is another great workflow, folks. Setting expectations and being productive. I don't wanna be busy during tax season. When it's always busy season, no one isn't. It's productivity season. It's time to make some money, get returns done, and get out of the office. That's my that's my workflow right there. That's what I focus on. So now we've been moving towards financial sense, and we're and we've set this up and we're we've been utilizing it. Not that there was necessarily anything wrong with Carbon. There were just some things in financial sense I like better. Not no judgment whatsoever. And whatever tool you're using is good for you. That's what matters. Right? So we're doing this. We've got it similarly set up. It's not the same, but the some of the customizations that you can do in Financial Cents was really attracted me to it. So we have similar things where we have a list of okay. We have views where you can save different views just like you can in Carbon, where I say, okay. Don Brolin's work. I wanna see, alright, who's ready to start? Who do I need to send a quote to? And I can save different views to say, well, who has to still get quotes? And I can just go and say, you know what? I'm gonna spend a couple hours sending out quotes this morning, and I can go in and I can just look at the report of just the clients that need to send a quote. I have ADHD. If you do too, put it in the chat. Like, I feel like I got to do I got to take things 1 step at a time. One client file on my desk at a time. And so, again, those habits and behaviors and boundaries that you set for yourself are important in order to be productive. So here you'll be able to see I've got some clients that needed to have quotes sent to them. Okay, great. So we've got that got that ready to go. And it gives us I can do a calendar view. I can do a bunch of different things, but I want to assign tasks to certain people and I'm the send quote girl. So then when it's time after the quote's been sent, everything gets that particular project, which they're projects, okay, in in financial sense. That particular project is then gonna be assigned to Tracy because she handles all the administrative stuff until it's again time for the tag that says the tag, which is a status that says tax ready to start. And she assigns it to me. And I know when I come in in the morning, I can grab those. Just, again, a couple of examples of how you can utilize these types of tools to help you be productive, to allow you to have those insights. Similar again to Carbon, they have the task list. So we set up the task and we have templates. We have a template. So every individual tax return goes through the same process. It's all about consistency with workflow. It's all about consistency. I'll give you a just kind of a funny example. I think you guys appreciate the stories within the chat. You love the stories. Great. Go ahead and say that. But I love the stories because it makes it real. It shows it shows the reality of what happens in our practices, mine and yours. You've got great stories I know as well. When I'm out to dinner or something and somebody's like, oh, Brolin. Hey. I want to move to you for taxes. Can you do my taxes? And I'll say to them historically, I would say to them before I had good workflow, you know, took a while to figure that out. Oh, yeah. No problem. You know, here's my cell phone number and, you know, shoot me a text, and I'll, you know, get you get me a copy of your tax return. And what I did was I jammed the process by getting involved in it. That's not my role. That's Tracy's role. So when I defined my workflow and stuck to that workflow, that's the hard part. Being disciplined to not go outside and go, I would say, off the rails and start messing with your workflow. So now when someone sees me at dinner, I know the workflow. You're looking at the task workflow right here. Tracy, they say, hey, Brolin. I wanna, you know, come to you for taxes. Alright. No problem. Here. Let me give you a phone number to call. 860-359-9185. Call Tracy, and she'll get you onboarded. Everybody gets onboarded the same way even if you're my best friend, my worst enemy. I don't care. You're all getting onboarded the same way. That's what that's what defining workflow does for you folks. Okay? So now we have the tasks in order. They're assigned to certain people. I'm not gonna ask Nicole to prepare a tax return, and I'm not gonna ask Tracy to prepare a tax return. Just like Tracy is not gonna ask me to add them to Lacert. That's her job in order to set up the Smart Ball folders. Again, workflow. How do we have the workflow set up and then we stick to it? This is a financial sense dashboard. It's one of my favorite parts about the dashboard where you can see a list of projects. So I can just go into the client and see kinda what's going on. Maybe I'm gonna have a call with them the next day, and I wanna be able to see, okay, what kind of things are going on in Nicole's world for this client? Alright. Great. I see she's working on some payroll tax returns. Oh, I see. Okay. There's some issues. I can click in the project. I can see her notes specific to the project. If there's any general notes that we need to know about the client, we have the ability to put those there in the face of the dashboard where I can view the notes. We also have all the contact information. Are they an s corp? Are they a schedule c? What you know, QuickBooks version. What are they in QBO Essentials? Are they in QBO or in the desktop? Where are they? Those kind of things that that data, I want at my fingertips. They also have the client vault where I can put all the passwords. So when I'm going to log in maybe to their sales tax, maybe I need to just jump in there and pull something because we got a notice and I wanna check it out. I can go ahead and and look at the client vault. Maybe Nicole forgot to put a copy of the sales tax return in Smart Vault. I don't know. But I want the flexibility to be able to define some of the fields for what's important to me. What are the things that I am tracking for that client specifically? Again, having a tax workflow tool is gonna allow you to do that. So inbox is just to show you what I loved about both of these tools is they have client inbox. What I loved about Financial Cents is it has client emails, specifically only emails from clients. And how does Financial Cents know that? Because they are entered as a client. If they're not a client, there's all other emails, other emails. That means coming from not my clients. So I want to be productive when I come in the office and maybe I'm waiting on an email from a client. I don't want to be searching all over the place. I can go into the inbox or I can go to the client. Whatever I wanna do, I have flexibility. And in Carbon, they have the triage where you can make things low priority, which means, alright, if I get another copy of the Adobe subscription payment that comes into my inbox, that's not very helpful. Let me just put that in a low priority. It's not gonna ever hit my triage again, my main email. Love that feature and things like that. So, again, how is that tax work tax workflow tool working for you to be productive during tax season? That's the goal. Now, of course, like I said before, if you don't have 1, you don't have a tool, you can be in your QBOA, subscription, be in in your accountant version. And there is a work, there's a work in the tab to the left. And you can go in there and you can put in it can connect to your calendar. You can do certain things. You can have filter. You can talk about different types, projects, tasks. So there is something for you that is free right within your QBO subscription. QBOA subscription. So you have the opportunity to do those things. And I think that at the end of the day, what I'm just trying to show you is that there are options and that you need to clearly define them. You need to have yourself something that works for you. My way isn't the only way I know that and I'm okay with that. I'm just hoping that as we went through kind of these examples that you pulled something out of it and it's giving you the opportunity to make some changes within within everything that's happening. So again, as we just take a quick review, as we start to get towards the end of today's in the end of today's session, thinking about invoicing, how are you? And, again, this is this is what I'm doing. That doesn't mean it's the only way, But have you clearly defined how you're invoicing and how you're getting paid? Do you have a system? Do you have a workflow so that you're getting paid timely under your terms? I think that's one of my biggest points. It's under your terms, not what the client wants. And and, you know, just to take a step back, identifying that ideal client. My ideal client is some is not someone who's like, well, I don't wanna pay that way unless there's an there are always small exceptions. You gotta be careful about the exceptions. You don't wanna get those let those go rogue. But I do have clients that don't have the money to pay for the return upfront. They rely on their refund. I can work with those people. That's where I can make a strategic choice. You know what? I really like that client. They're they're a great client. They've never not paid me. They've been with me for 12 years or however long it's been. I wanna keep that client, and you have the right as the firm owner to make those decisions. Okay? So just just keep that in mind as we're going through this. Again, invoicing, different ways that you can do that. Documents, securely obtaining documents. The client that emails you documents bad. No. You can't do it this way. But if you don't have a clearly defined workflow and then stick to your guns on it, like stick to your process, stick to your workflow. Okay? We can get into some issues with security, and you don't want that. I promise you. You do not wanna be out of business. I'm pretty sure you're here because you wanna make money and you wanna make a living and you wanna employ people and you wanna take care of clients. I'm with you. Make sure your whatever storage system you're using is secure. K? We know that from publication 4557. We talked about that last year, and and how and or a couple whatever it was when pub 4557 came out. And we wanna just make sure we'll be in compliance with the IRS guidelines and the SEC. Right? Just as much as the tax law, we wanna be as much in compliance of the other things that they're recommending for us to do. And then, of course, we're thinking about our practice. What do you have? I showed you three examples of of good tools that you can use. Just make sure again that you're thinking about what is your process, how are you doing it. And so just thinking about what I wanted to say, thank you for your time, of course. I I'm really passionate about helping you improve your processes. And I'm not saying that my process is the only way in any way, shape, or form. But what I'm asking you to do is take from today. Hopefully, you took notes. Hopefully, you took this hour seriously of your extremely valuable time, might I also add, because I know you're all out there. You're all doing the best you can to run your firms. And I'm hoping that at least you took 1 or 2 things through this session today that will help you accelerate the profitability and productivity of your firm because I am passionate about that. I wish there, you know, there were people that came with me or before me that helped me through the process. Sometimes I didn't listen very well when Ron Baker came out with value pricing, his book about value pricing. This time, I listened to him. I listened to him about subscription pricing, and my life is so much better for it. I probably took 10 years off my life by doing it the Don Brolin way, which was horrible. And so hopefully, you've picked up a few tools, and I hope that you enjoy the session. And I hope that you take the next steps to continue to improve your workflow. I'm doing that. I'm not perfect. I'm still trying to work through it. There's things I still need to change, and I will continue to work on perfection, which is never gonna happen. But I will never give up, and I will keep on fighting. I will fight for myself, and I will fight for you. So thank everybody for being here and listening to me today. I wish you all the best. Thanks so much.