The CAS/bookkeeping opportunity

Sponsored by
Complimentary Access Pill
Enjoy complimentary access to top ideas and insights — selected by our editors.

Woodard CAS podcast.jpg

Joe Woodard of Woodard Events lays out the potential size of the market for deeper client accounting/advisory services and bookkeeping — and what firms need to do make the most of it.

Transcription:

Dan Hood: (00:03)

Welcome to On the Air with Accounting Today, I'm editor-in-chief Dan Hood. You know, we've all been talking a lot about CAS and about bookkeeping of late because they represent tremendous opportunities for accountants — although they require some thinking about your business model and your approach to make the most of them. Here to talk about all that is Joe Woodard, he's the CEO of the Woodard Companies, and one of the leading trainers of small business advisors in the country and host of the Scaling New Heights conference. Joe, thanks for joining us again,

Joe Woodard: (00:25)

Always great to be here, Dan.

Dan Hood: (00:26)

Excellent. Let's start by quantifying some things. We've got some numbers. We're accountants. We love that. How big an opportunity or how big are the types of opportunities are we talking about here?

Joe Woodard: (00:35)

Well, massive is the word for it. So when you're talking about CAS and CAS is a term that encompasses more than just the actual record keeping of accounting. So I wanna put that in context, right? And we'll break down the percentages here in a minute. According to the numbers that, uh, per BDOs research, the CAS opportunity is $253 billion, large. That's the total available market. All right. Now I need to qualify that though, because that a lot of that is not what we would traditionally call bookkeeping, and maybe we'll have a chance to delineate that in a minute, corporate strategy makes up the lion share of that that's around 41% of that opportunity. Organizational design is a big slice of that. Um, and then you start getting into the smaller slices, marketing and sales process and operations management, uh, financial advisory, human resource advisory, and it strategy. And surprisingly, what you don't see in any of that breakdown is bookkeeping. So what BDOs telegraphing here is CA the opportunity of CAS is the advisory, a, not the accounting, a but the accounting a is essential to the advisory. A then you're starting to see this really take shape in a lot of weird acronyms. Sometimes people will say CS, and then they'll delineate our a means advisory, right? But now the latest trend is Caz with two, right?

Dan Hood: (02:05)

CA

Joe Woodard: (02:06)

AASS yeah. C right. You've seen that too. And they're what they're saying is client accounting and advisory services. But I, I wanna break down the accounting side of it because we might have some folks in here that aren't interested in, corporate strategy, organizational design, marketing support, operational support technology sport. They just wanna do, you know, really good accounting, maybe even complex accounting, maybe even a very high end account, maybe even full back office outsourcing, right. Full controllership outsourcing. And that opportunity is also massive, but I have to go to a different place than BDO for that. I'm gonna go to, into it for that. And they also use billions in the plural, right? So we're talking about, um, a multibillion dollar opportunity, not as large as 253 million, probably around 10, 15% of that size, but still a double digit billions opportunity just on the record, keeping piece alone. When you combine these two together, you get nearly 300 billion of opportunity.

Dan Hood: (03:05)

Wow. Wow. Well, yeah. And we know Intuit's been working for years, right. To get, to get small businesses attached to accountants because so many small businesses don't have an accountant to do, to do this sort of the basic, they did basic talking

Joe Woodard: (03:16)

Justification to launch QuickBooks live. Right. Right. But we can leverage the research and say, well, that same Tam exists for any firm that wants to reach down market to say maybe the thousand dollars a month accounts.

Dan Hood: (03:28)

Right. Right. Well, and it's interesting cuz there is this overlap between CA and, and basic bookkeeping because the, the, the foundation of CAS, whether even if you're just pure client advisory services, right. You need to be doing that bookkeeping, work that back office work to generate the insights that you build your advice on, right. That you build the advisory services around, you need insights and you need the, the inside look at the company's ins, right. Their books and their, their billings and all that sort of stuff to be able to, uh, advise them properly.

Joe Woodard: (03:56)

Yes, absolutely. And, and the problem Dan is though, it seems like a very easy delineation to make I'm doing bookkeeping or accounting. If you're a CPA firm, you do accounting. And if you're a bookkeeper, you do bookkeeping. Right. But it's the same work. Right. Essentially. Um, so if, if I'm doing accounting slash bookkeeping over here on the other side, I'm doing advisory, which is, again, those things are rattled off. Um, it seems that that line is very clear, very delineated and very hard to get mixed up. You know, if I cross it, I know it. And that's not what I'm finding as we are servicing small CPA firms and we're servicing professional bookkeepers, they end up doing informally a lot of the same things that are in the, a, the advisory side of that, a gotcha. Um, only they're not charging for it because they don't feel formally trained to do it. They don't realize exactly how much they've gone across the line. And they're stretching now into these other areas, but they're, they're calling it all bookkeeping, or they're calling it all accounting and they're leaving a tremendous amount of money on the table.

Dan Hood: (05:06)

Gotcha. Well, let's, you know, let's dive a little bit more into or different if we can get more differentiation between them. Um, because we talked about, there was, uh, the 250 billion opportunity, then we added the roughly roughly 50 billion. I'm just doing some math there to get us to 300, uh, billion or sorry, 50 billion get us to is

Joe Woodard: (05:23)

Rounding up 300 billion. He's around 20, 25 billion on the right keeping side.

Dan Hood: (05:26)

Yeah. Um, so what differentiation can we make between those types of services or, or obviously there's some overlap, as you said, that they, the, even the professional bookkeepers find themselves, um, I'm gonna call ahead and say, offering advice, right. People come to them for advice. Um, is there a differentiation in these opportunities if you're saying, well, I wanna do one, or I wanna do the other, you know, uh, can you find different opportunities for those?

Joe Woodard: (05:48)

Well, yes, you can. And you can find you, you can create the scope and you can sell an engagement that just fits within one or the other. It's actually easier to do just the record keeping and not the advisory and control the scope there, refer it out than it is in the inverse, because you have to have a really trusted in-house bookkeeper or really trusted professional bookkeeper. That's managing those accounts or they tie your hands. Right. But, but the question is not, you know, can those lines be drawn by the professional? The issue is very seldom. Are they drawn? And if they are drawn, very seldom, are they protected? Scope creep is the nemesis of the profession. And that's, that goes across the board to every bit of accountancy, uh, because we're rescuers and we're helpers and we're, we're empowerers, and we love our clients and we wanna, we do right by them. We just, don't always like the lawyers are really good at doing, we, we don't say, well, that's outta scope of giving more money. Um, we actually feel guilty sometimes when we do that. So, so if we can overcome that barrier, then I think more bookkeepers will start formally providing advisory. Let's call it very, very light advisory. And I think more, uh, CAS practices will be able to, to monetize more heavily on their books.

Dan Hood: (07:02)

It's interesting. You know, one of the things in terms of that we see around the profession is, is outside, um, competitors coming in, right. It's one thing for accountants and bookkeepers to compete with each other for business. Um, I don't think they often do. It's more, they all more just hope for referrals, but, um, uh, we're seeing, you know, uh, Jeff Bezo supporting pilot kind of thing. And, uh, companies coming in and offering to do, uh, often tech based solutions for bookkeeping, that kind of thing. Um, we look at that, do firms say, and they're, and when they're doing that, they're generally my understanding, at least since you're going for that sort of basic bookkeeping sort of stuff, is there, is there a reason for firms to say, okay, uh, I wanna just serve that audience, but I also wanna have CAS available for another kind of client base, you know, maybe more sophisticated, larger clients. Is that a differentiation?

Joe Woodard: (07:50)

Well, it's an essential one. So I'll answer your question by saying, and, and the list is quite extensive just to rattle. 'em all for effect is you've got pilot bench, belay, finance, PS, KPMG, spark, QuickBooks live, and H and R block now getting into the bookkeeping business, right in brick and mortar at a location near you, right? Cause you, the face to face used to be our competitive advantage and, and H and R blocks neutralizing that. So we can take a lesson from the way that the tax profession, uh, the tax preparation side of our practices, um, responded H and R block and TurboTax live and, you know, Liberty tax in the past. And it was to go to more complex work, larger accounts, right. And to do more tax advisory services. Now, unfortunately it was mostly larger and more complex returns because, but, and not as much tax advisory, but we did use that too, as, as set of professions in order to, to mitigate the risk bookkeepers must now and CAS departments must now do the same thing. So that list I just gave you, which isn't comprehensive. Right, right. It was just what I can aim off

Dan Hood: (08:58)

Terrifying, but not, not comprehensive. Right.

Joe Woodard: (09:00)

Terrified more terrified when you think about the fact that it's not comprehensive. Right. Right. Um, then, but, but I can tell you there's a common denominator to every single one of the companies. I just mentioned, if you're saying KPMG spark alone, not KPMG, right? None of them do advisory. None of them will do a cash flow projection. None of them do realtime accrual basis financials. None of them capitalize work in process or do budgets for construction or manufacturing projects. None of them do spend analysis. None of them do accounts receivable, analytics with bad debt, expense mitigation. They won't CRA or curate a budget. They won't do any of the things that I mentioned that the CPA firms at the higher end are doing corporate strategy, organizational design, marketing, and sales it, et cetera. So if none of them are doing it, obviously this is the safe space to stay clear of that disruption. But moving up market is as well. So if we only take those clients that need say maybe around $2,000 a month, they're just below where they wanna bring it in house. Then we just do such a great job that they never think about bringing it in house when they do get large enough too. Right. We can stay clear of those, um, those lower end players too.

Dan Hood: (10:11)

Gotcha. Uh, but it, but it is. And I just, I mean, that makes perfect sense. And it makes sense. That's where, as you said with tax, right. That's what happened with, uh, when, when, when the, uh, the low cost players came in, but I'm just thinking it is in theory possible for a small bookkeeping practice to say, I'm just gonna get really good just at bookkeeping. And I'm just gonna focus on that. I'm not gonna move up, but I'm just gonna be so good at it or so efficient or so leveraging technology, et cetera, that I could focus on that audience. Is that a possibility or is that really, really just, its uh, not worth the trouble

Joe Woodard: (10:41)

Or, but the hesitation you hear in my voice is, uh, you got several problems there. Um, one of them is you, you can only outpace commoditization so far. So if you look at efficiency is the, the only driver of increased profits because price can't be not in the world of commodity, right? Then your efficiency is going to eventually even with AI, even with very sophisticated technology stacks and your efficiencies are eventually going to hit a limit, but the price will keep coming down. Or at least if it doesn't keep coming down, it will have compressed margins down so low that it's gonna be very difficult to survive in that very thin gross profit margin. And what, what everybody listing here needs to understand. So that you'll understand that I'm not being chicken little, the sky's not falling, but I will tell your listeners, Dan, that there are things falling from the sky and we just rattled them off.

Joe Woodard: (11:38)

Right? If, if you're, if you're not aware of what's about to happen, you will get put into a gross profit margin, vice it will compress you. And, and if you are thinking well, the other folks are surviving at this level. They're surviving this level cuz they're burning cash for years until they're cash flow positive, cuz they have it right. They're surviving because they're making it up on scale. And that's probably the biggest takeaway, a scale that is in a completely different universe of what even regional size CPA firms can do. Right? You will not survive this disruption and you certainly won't survive, thrive in this disruption listeners. You've got to hear me on this. Um, you've got to move up market and you've got to do more interpretive and consultative layers over the top of what record keeping you offering.

Dan Hood: (12:26)

Gotcha. All right. Uh, well, let's take that as, uh, as that very strong warnings. So we're gonna assume that that's where firms need to go. And I want to talk, uh, more about what firms need to do to take advantage of the opportunity that you've just described in the manager. You just described that move to a, to a move up market or to a, to a higher value proposition. Uh, but we have to take a quick break first. All right. And we're back. And we're talking with Joe Woodard about the tremendous opportunities in both bookkeeping and client advisory slash accounting slash uh, whatever else you can throw in there, whatever other age you can think of, uh, services. Um, we've, we've, we've made it pretty clear. People need to be, um, you're not gonna be able to compete on strictly on a, on a scale efficiency question in terms of just doing basic bookkeeping for everybody, uh there's the big players or, or, uh, uh, have got more, more scope for scale than you do so better to go to move up market to more of advisory service, that client advisory services we're talking about. Um, I wanna dive into what do firms need to do to make the most of these opportunities? You know, what for instance, are they, do they need a new kind of practice model? Do they need to think differently about their structure and their approach?

Joe Woodard: (13:33)

They do need to maybe not have a different one because maybe some of your ERs have nailed it on their practice model. But what I can tell you is they need to embrace a modern, automated, highly efficient practice model. So the elements of that are standardization and the standardization is not just the documentation of a process, but the democratization of the process throughout the organization, which is usually done in a workflow solution and to borrow a Disney Institute term, the over management, not micromanagement, but the over management of the adoption of that process by 100% of your producers. So, um, and, and that can be a really big lift. It can be a multi-year lift if you're talking about a very large accounting firm, but smaller firms can, can roll that out within months, not years. And there are tools that are available where you can get a lot of that front loaded to you.

Joe Woodard: (14:34)

I mean, we have a, we have a kit called the advanced bookkeeping system, but even if you just buy some of the workflow solutions or practice management solutions that exist out there, like canopy, it comes front loaded with processes. All of the essential record keeping processes are loaded into these software solutions. So you're not starting from ground zero on it. The biggest lift is the adaptation of the process is to each individual clients need, that's done over about three or four bookkeeping cycles. Don't try to do it outside of the cycles, do it organically, but then that, that adoption by your people. And I have, I'm gonna use the N word because I can't think of ever a case in any of our clients we've consulted. I have never encountered a client we've directly consulted through this process that hasn't lost. Producers. People have walked away from the firm because of the change, the intensity of the change from the, from the adoption of these standardized processes, um, just expect that's going to happen.

Joe Woodard: (15:35)

If you're in a very large firm, you need to, you need to lean into the headwind of the politics. Especially if somebody on your casting is the daughter-in-law wants removed from a founder, right? I mean all that stuff, right? You have a headwind, just get the buy in from the executive committee and lean into that wind. Because if you let any of these variations creep in or persist in, then you're not going to be able to thrive in this new world. One final comment on standardization though, cuz a lot of people may have said, well, Joe, that sounds great lean into the wind, but you don't understand the politics, my firm. And you understand the amount of entrenchment. What I have found works is tricky, but it works is to create, um, a firm within a firm, create a bubble, your V2 CA practice and take only new clients into your V2, which means that's the second things you have to have the right clientele, right?

Joe Woodard: (16:30)

Process, the right clientele. But you only take these ideal client profiles into this bubble. And then you use the bubble as a cross sell. You try to cross sell the V one into your V2, right? And then you let the people that are entrenched into old processes in old ways and old politics. Maybe you let them maintain their warm spot in V one for a bit. And then just like a software company, you eventually turn your V one from V one to legacy. Then you go from legacy to closing out that book. But that, that can be a bake of years. And you're already building this modern practice in this bubble. And the nice thing about that, Dan is when, when the executive committee or if it's a smaller firm, just the, the owners and the partners, when they start seeing the, the profit margins of the bubble and they start seeing the effectiveness of the bubble and um, and the scalability of the bubble, then they will provide the air cover and the resources you need to move more and more people into that in that bubble.

Joe Woodard: (17:31)

It's, it's like a prototype car before you put it on the assembly line. Right? Um, so yes, standardized, the second thing they need to have is an ideal client profile. And if you don't have one, you need to build one and you, and, and again, I'm not here to promote myself what it has an ideal client profile workshop, but a lot of people, people do go find a really good course that will help you to design out an ideal client profile and then stick to it. Uh, not every client is a good client, maybe not even every healthy client with a paycheck in their hand with a check in their hand and a really good, um, pricing tolerance is a good client. Um, they need to fit your ideal client profile. Sometimes that's broken down by industry. Sometimes it's by size sometimes it's by the nature of their need set.

Joe Woodard: (18:16)

Do they need comprehensive back office outsourcing or not? If that's your stick, right? So, but you gotta know what that is. And then you've got to marry that to the ideal set of services. So it'ss ideal process. It's the ideal client and it's the ideal slate of services. The ideal slate of services is run across the processes in the service of the ideal client. And then the last thing I would say is ideal price. So, um, and you've noticed that all of this, I haven't even said technology yet. I'm about to get there, but those are the four ideal four legs of the ideal stool. Um, and I could go on price maybe on a different podcast, cause I can go for hours on price. Maybe you get Ron baker on or something. if you've had Ron baker on, go listen to it folks, but you gotta get that ideal price.

Joe Woodard: (19:01)

Now the last piece I'll say is the obvious piece is you must be super automated in today's world. If you're doing more than 20% of your work with manual keys strokes, you've gotta think through why. Right? And, and, and one of the things that gets people most are, are Stripe and eCommerce transactions, but you, you get pro products like book keep, or a two X. Those products will automate that now. And a lot of people are thinking, well, my clients have accrual basis financials and they have to accrue payroll and its variable payroll amounts. And they have to accrue expenses in their variable expense amounts. Believe it or not, there are solutions that will even automate that now. Right? Um, like BlackLine in fact.io. So if you will walk the hallways with great intention at shows like a, I CPA a engage, it shows like QuickBooks connect and shows like my show scaling new Heights, uh, zero con you'll find these amazing technologies and you'll get to that 20% manual entry.

Dan Hood: (19:59)

Right. Well, yeah. I mean the thing that this all sounds, uh, makes a lot of sense. Uh, but I would say it also requires an enormous amount of discipline. Um, and, and, and, uh, put it as nicely as possible. Um, and you mentioned earlier, right? Accountants are solvers they're helpers. They wanna make sure things go well. And, and so it's very easy for them to stray from discipline when it comes to trying to serve client needs and trying to, to make sure they're doing right. And this all sounds like it requires them to really be, to stick to the straight and narrow. Um, uh, and maybe we could talk a little bit about what they're, what, what firms need to stop doing, right. We know what they need to do. We know it requires a fair amount of discipline, but what do they need to stop doing, uh, to, to, to, to take advantage of these opportunities?

Joe Woodard: (20:39)

Right. Well, I'll start by saying there are some new things I'll add here, but, but I'm gonna start by saying that there are some other sides of the coin of everything I just mentioned that they should, should do. Right, right. So don't take non-ideal clients, you know, and, and don't not democratize your process. So if you'll just understand the inverse of those things, but there, but, um, to, to drill down a little bit on ideal price, they, they used to stop by billing by the hour. All right. And I know they hear that over and over and over again. Uh, but, but I'm gonna add to that, that they need to stop billing on a flat fee. Now that may shock some of your listeners, cuz you're like, well, wait a minute. That was supposed to be the whole direction, but I'm gonna delineate something here, a flat fee in the way that most, most, um, accountants manage it is to, to do a look back of what we build by the hour on the average, over the last 12 months, flatten that right.

Joe Woodard: (21:30)

And push that ongoing forward. Well, it's better than hourly because as you get faster and faster and better and better and more and more automated, at least you stop punishing yourself. Cuz that's what hourly does. The faster you are, the less money you make, the more experienced you are, the less money you make, the more valuable you add to the client and the faster you turn around the financials for the client to the client's benefit, the less the client pays the whole model's just completely broken, right? well, but if you flatten it, you do stop the bleed, but you don't fix the problem. And a lot of people equate flat fee pricing with value pricing and that's the myth that must be dispelled here. Value pricing begins with the, with the, uh, with the concept of pricing, the customer, which ultimately means I'm pricing the relationship.

Joe Woodard: (22:21)

And that means it's variable. Not based off of how much effort I exert. It's variable based off of how much value I bring. And so, and, and if you're flat fee, you're ultimately doing a cost plus model and you're trying to like most firms achieve 66% gross profit margin. So you're saying, well, it takes me X to generate the books. It, it, Y is Mo I must charge to, to achieve my 66% gross profit margin. Therefore I will dictate this fee upon the client. Well, who says, who says, that's what the client, it is not the client's responsibility to recover your costs or to hit your profit margin. It is the client's responsibility to exchange their hard earned money for some return on investment, some value you bring them greater than what they would have if they didn't engage you an increase in their wealth.

Joe Woodard: (23:14)

Well, Dan, that could be as simple as you avoiding an in-house salary. So if they're gonna spend 90 to a hundred thousand dollars for a really good bookkeeper in house, and you could do the work for 60, you've already generated wealth. You may just start with value pricing of saying, I'm always gonna charge 75% of what an in-house bookkeeper would be. Save the client 25% out of the gate, make that the pricing of the client. Um, some other people say, well, I'm gonna base it off of the client's revenue run rate. I'm not gonna base it off the client's transaction volume, because what if they're low transaction volume and they're really high yield, right? And then other people will say, well, if I'm gonna do the advisory layer, I'm just gonna doing a discovery engagement. I'm gonna project exactly how much wealth I can generate through my advisory services.

Joe Woodard: (23:59)

And I'm gonna ask for 20% of that projected increase in wealth over the next 12 months. Um, and some of those can be intensely tangible. I can predict for example, that I'm gonna save X on bad debt expense with some accounts receivable analytics, which are done through a product called tally street. And I can say, look, I'm gonna save you $50,000, a bad debt expense. You know, I just want 20,000 of it a year over and above my bookkeeping, my record keeping charge. Right. So if they're thinking like this, then flat fee becomes the enemy. They need to stop doing that as well.

Dan Hood: (24:32)

Gotcha. All right. Interesting. It's an interesting wrinkle on, on, uh, um, non billable hour based, uh, paying that. I don't think a lot of firms, I certainly wasn't, uh, wasn't thinking as deeply about it as that. That's definitely worth bearing in mind. Um, I wanna look, look a little bit forward, right? We're talking about this current opportunity in bookkeeping in CAS. Um, do you see these opportunities changing as we go forward and, and you know, what will firms need to do to keep up with those kind of changes if, if they're

Joe Woodard: (24:57)

Already well, I'm so glad you asked that question, cuz it gives me a chance. In our limited time, we have left here to address the elephant in the room and that is staffing. Yeah. So if they're, if they're gonna keep up with this, this process, they're gonna embrace this two point, uh, to a 250 billion opportunity of advisory and, and 20 to 30 billion estimated on bookkeeping, they've gotta find workers. Right, right. And that can't be, that was already hard enough before COVID everybody thinks COVID created the worker crisis. It just accelerated it. It just blew it up. We, you know, and I know it existed before COVID because we had the mass retire off. We already had the, the, uh, the low influx of new workers coming out of the four year university system. Um, accounting. It just doesn't seem cool these days. And it seems like that thing my grandfather did and the 20th century and, and the millennials, the gen Xs, don't like it right now.

Joe Woodard: (25:48)

I'm speaking generally, obviously their exceptions. So, um, so we have a worker shortage that's coming at us from multiple directions. And what I would say is, um, whatever your appetite is to outsourcing, you need to find an appetite for outsourcing because it's essential. Most of the top 100 do it. You need to do it too. Um, even some of the top, even most of the top 10 do it. Uh, if not, I don't have this data point, but I would be surprised if not all of them did I could. I know for a fact over five of them, cuz I know for a fact they do it. So, so if, if you, if you don't outsource, you're not going to be able to scale the workload and you're not gonna be able to do it at the price that you need in order to then staff and support your advisory layer over the top.

Joe Woodard: (26:39)

Now you're never gonna get, um, an outsourcing solution to do, uh, some of the Mo more complex pieces, but the secret sauce is the bots do what the bots can do. The rest of the 20% that can't be done by bots, roughly that gets done by an outsourced company. Okay. Then everybody that's on your payroll is an account manager managing a very large book of business. In this model, they can manage a hundred accounts and they could do advisory services at some level or another for about another, depending on the scope of the advisory, it varies anywhere from 10 to 30 more. So it depends of it's lighter, heavy advisory. You take a person managing a hundred accounts, doing advisory services for 10 to 30 people. And think about what their overall productions are is they manage a team in India or South Africa or the Philippines or wherever.

Joe Woodard: (27:31)

And you've got a model of intense effectiveness and intense scalability. Now all shared service centers are not the same. You need to use extreme discretion of course, and vet them. I'm gonna say this again. What are, we've already got a slate, vetted tech, uh, centers. Because again, this is our world. We live in this world. We consult into this world, but, but you've gotta find those. Um, and it's gotta be a place you trust. If you jump into the wrong place there, it's going to cause serious damage. And my final statement there, uh, if you've gotta outsource in order to brace, the future is, um, is, is don't move your entire book too quickly. I would run an entire quarter with about 10 clients and I would heavily review them almost parallel what the shared service center is doing. So there's no relationship damage and then lean in once they pass the test.

Dan Hood: (28:21)

All right, well that is, uh, that's, that's a lot but it is, it's such a big right. That it's.

Joe Woodard: (28:26)

So I, I could go about this all day. I

Dan Hood: (28:28)

Love this topic. Well, know what, I'm more thinking. It's a lot for accounting firms to do, but the opportunity is, is, is so enormous, um, that it's, uh, and, and so, um, clearly in their wheelhouse, right? I mean, if, if anybody should be taking advantage of an opportunity in, in bookkeeping, a client accounting services, it better be accountants, cuz it'll be weird if they're, you know, they're not, uh, in a leadership position and it, um, and, and it is certainly worth, uh, it will return, uh, reward on, um, the, the amount of effort they need to put in. So,

Joe Woodard: (28:57)

And the tax returns, which I failed to mention tax practice is gonna love a strong cash practice cuz then they can stop doing year annual compilations in March

Dan Hood: (29:07)

mm-hmm excellent. Yes. They will like that. They will appreciate

Joe Woodard: (29:10)

That. Yeah. They will love

Dan Hood: (29:11)

That. Yes. Um, very cool. All right. Um, we, as you say, we could, we could spend a lot more time talking about a lot more aspects of this, cuz it really is, uh, a thing that, um, is gonna reach across the entire profession and across firms, uh, across there a lot of practice areas and touch a lot of accountants, but unfortunately we're, uh, we're out of time. So Joe Woodard, I want to thank you so much for, uh, for sharing all this with us. It's great stuff.

Joe Woodard: (29:31)

It's always great to be here, Dan.

Dan Hood: (29:33)

Cheers. And thank you all for listening. This episode of On the Air was produced by Accounting Today with audio production by Kevin Parise. Rate or review us on your favorite podcast platform and see the rest of our content on accountingtoday.com. Thanks again to our guest, and thank you for listening.