Episode 148 | Automation: Work Less, Earn More With Jamie Gruol

Host Michelle Weinstein speaks with Jamie Gruol about using revenue automation to unlock more income while working fewer hours. Jamie, co-founder of Workflows for Tax Pros, shares her expertise on how implementing automation can transform tax and accounting practices by streamlining client experiences and eliminating manual tasks. Tune in to learn how these strategies can reduce your workload, improve cash flow, and increase profitability without sacrificing client satisfaction. This conversation is a game-changer for tax professionals looking to work smarter, not harder!

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Episode 148 | Automation: Work Less, Earn More With Jamie Gruol

Introduction

We have a very special guest. Our special guest is an expert in designing workflows that help people work smarter and not harder. After working as a software implementation project manager for over ten years, she used her talent for workflow management and co-founded Workflows for Tax Pros. She lives in the mountains of Vermont with her husband and her two children. Before we welcome our special guest to the show, if you are an accounting, tax, or bookkeeping firm owner and you crumble at the thought of your next upcoming sales call, or you’re constantly worried you are going to go blank or come across as pushy, I have a system for you.

As a firm owner, I understand that you have a paralyzing feeling of imposter syndrome. Maybe you are new to your niche, or maybe you don’t know what to say, and you are pretending to be an expert. You don’t know what the next step is in your sales process, and the frustration of your sales calls is eating at you. Then, you are constantly getting ghosted by clients after a call.

Here at the Abundant Accountant, I show you a simple, step-by-step sales process so you never wing it again. It will give you the blueprint and the formula for communicating your true value with confidence even if accounting or tax seems boring to talk about to your prospects. When you book a call with me over at TheAbundantCall.com, I will show you exactly how to take back control of every sales conversation, close more clients, and end the second-guessing over what pricing should be for every client. You will finally be able to stop trading hours for dollars and start growing your firm on your terms. Book your complimentary strategy call right now at TheAbundantCall.com and stop procrastinating your potential. Now, let’s welcome Jamie to the show. Welcome, Jamie, to the show.

Thank you, Michelle. I’m so excited to be here.

Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. I’m super excited to talk about this because everyone here wants to work a lot smarter and not harder, and that’s what we are going to talk about but before we dive in, I’d love it if you could share with everyone what it is that you do, what is the business that you started to help firm owners in accounting and tax make their lives a whole lot better, and how you got started.

As the saying goes, “All roads lead to Rome.” I am an accountant by education. I got my undergrad in accounting. I’m from Oregon State University go Beavers. I did that because I knew I wanted to get a business degree. I always thought I wanted to have the corner office. I always loved the idea of being part of operations, and my father was the CFO of a local hospital. When I got into undergrad, I found that accounting was interesting. I went that path and graduated with a degree.

As my senior year was going, the path forward was I could stay a fifth year and work towards my CPA, or I could go out into the world and go into an accounting position. I was burnt out on school, I’ll be honest, so I opted to go into private accounting. I worked as a cost accountant for a small corporation and was on a team of five of us in the accounting group.

I enjoyed the work. I enjoyed the puzzle of the work and the creation of an outcome. I did that for a few years, and then I realized this was not my thing. I went off on my life and ended up in healthcare. I was doing the implementation of software. I have been with a company for ten years. We had grown. I was employee number 80-ish, and we had grown to about 500 people and in those ten years, a lot had changed. We had implemented dozens and dozens of software programs, and I felt the call for something different.

In 2014, I was introduced to the entrepreneurial world through multi-level marketing, which some people may know. I started finding that there were other ways of working to make an income for my family and seeing that there was more possible in the world. I got into personal development and started growing myself in the way I was thinking.

One day I had an epiphany moment. I was listening to a show similar to this one, and a woman was talking about how she had started setting up software for online businesses, working in the online space for her coaches and consultants. She was setting up software for them, and I was like, “I can do that. I have been setting up software for a decade for hospitals and community health centers and I have done 6 and 7-figure large projects. I had the skills to do this for a small business.”

I dove in and started consulting for them. I started building a business in that, and randomly, one day, I was doing a market research situation. A post was put into a female entrepreneurial Facebook group, and this one woman commented on it and said, “Sure. I will get on a call with you.” I was going to give her a Starbucks gift card to go buy a coffee as a thank you, and she and I got on the phone. We hit it off, chatting about being moms who were building businesses. She had set up the software that I was setting up for people, and we connected. I went about my day.

A few months later, I had an opportunity where I wanted to have her share her skills with my community. We jumped on a call, and we were there, but nobody else showed up. It was a live presentation on a platform that was big in 2020, and nobody was there. There’s always at least somebody there. She and I connected again, and we were chatting. She said, “I got this new software, and I’m loving it. I have shared how I’m using it with some of my colleagues. They are loving it, and some of them are asking me to help them set it up. I have no idea how to do that, but you do software, right?”

What software is that? I’m curious.

Starting Workflows For Tax Pros

It’s TaxDome. It was in 2020 when it was coming onto the market, she figured it out. She broke the system to make it work for her. People were loving what she had created. All these folks and her colleagues were like, “I want this too,” and she was like, “I have no idea how to do this.” she asked, “Are you interested in talking more?” I said, “Funny enough, I have an accounting degree, and I would love to learn more about it. I have the software side too.” It was a marriage of all of my backgrounds that created this universal explosion. It was like, “This is your thing now.”

My partner, my co-founder Jessica Smith, started sharing what she was doing in her practice. She and I partnered together to help several people through one-on-one work, and then we started hosting small group work. Then, we created our program, which is now Workflows for Tax Pros. We had this iteration over the last few years and started helping practice owners.

What I quickly found is, that this tool was cool, and there were so many things you could do with it. 2 Tax professionals are tax professionals. They don’t think about systems and workflows often. What we were able to do was take Jessica’s practice mind and the way she had set up her operations, and I was able to take my operations mind and the way I can teach how to set things up. We married those together to make it simple for people.

One thing about this industry is that there is a massive transition. There are a lot of people operating in the old-school way I will call it on paper and through very manual efforts. They hire more people to do more manual effort, but in this day and age, with the way the industry is going, there aren’t as many people to do that work. The things that we are doing are essential for the long-term success of a practice.

It is also more profitable because hiring more people increases your payroll to do stuff in an archaic way. I would say, it’s the same thing on the sales side. The old-school way of having conversations versus the new-school way of having enrollment conversations and not having to sell go hand in hand with upgrading your client experience with automation like this and not doing it yourself. Having people like Jamie and Jessica support you or whoever, whatever but don’t try to figure it out on your own. You help firm owners implement a tool like TaxDome or any software, correct?

We are focused on TaxDome because the thing that is true is that every software is different. The features it offers, the functionality it has, and the way in which you set it up. We have chosen to become experts in TaxDome. However, the things I want to talk about are client experience, eliminating administrative efforts, and how cash flow can be improved. A lot of those things can be done on any tool. Even if you are not using TaxDome, you will still take a lot away from this conversation because it’s a different way of thinking.

That is one of the powerful things about systems and automation. It is, as I like to call it, people stepping into their automation era. It is a new way of operating your small practice that can either be 100% virtual meaning you have a remote lifestyle if you want or partially virtual, meaning you still like connecting with your clients in person. What you’re automating and creating workflows for is the way in which you deliver services.

The powerful thing about that is we get to standardize and ensure that it’s being done effectively and efficiently for every single client. What that does, as we’ve talked about, is reduce the need to hire because you’re working smarter. It also increases your profit because your existing team’s payroll will be reduced. They won’t spend time pushing paper, remembering to email people, or following up on things. We get to leverage automation and systems to handle that for us.

Even if you are not using TaxDome, I would grab a pen and paper and take notes because this is about moving into the automation era. I don’t know how it goes, Jamie, but it’s like if you’re not growing, learning, and making changes which is the scary part, then your firm is done. Other people will speed ahead way faster than you.

I want to talk about the first point because of client experience on the sales side and client experience with automation on the deliverables side. On the sales side, it’s when you don’t have a sales process and you’re paralyzed by not knowing what to say on a phone call or to a client. You freeze. You let the prospects take control. You start negotiating your prices and all that.

When you don’t have a system in place, that leads to a terrible client experience, people will pay premium fees and attract higher-quality clients with a great client experience on the front end. Jamie, you’re here to talk about the client experience once that client has paid and now delivering the work. I’d love it if you could share What does that look like? What would a firm owner need to do, even if they weren’t going to use TaxDome but try to use some tools on their own to upgrade their client experience? Otherwise, they’re not going to be part of the automation era. They’re going to be stuck in the old-school way of doing things, which costs time, and money, and creates headaches. It means missing out on family because you’re working 60 to 80 hours a week and dreading every tax season. It becomes a vicious cycle. How do you get out of this vicious cycle?

Automation: The old school way of doing things costs time, money, and family time.

The first thing to remember is that when you’re talking about the sales cycle and bringing on a new client. I’ve done this in my business. You promise them this amazing experience. You say, “We’re going to support you. We’re going to make sure you have a great experience. We’re going to reduce your taxes to the highest legal point.” You’re selling yourself to this client. I once had a mentor say, “You’re promising a BMW, but you’re delivering a Pinto.” I don’t know how many of you can relate and feel like, “That might be me,” and think I’m talking to you. I’m sorry to call you out like that, but the thing a lot of people forget is they put a lot of effort into the sales process rightly so. You have to tell people why you’re amazing.

Once they move into service delivery, a lot of people get into the weeds of the actual delivery, and they forget about what the client is receiving. For example, tax preparation is, for a lot of practices, the least favorite service that they offer because they feel like their clients are asking them questions all the time, and that the clients don’t get them the documents that they need. They feel like they are not getting paid fairly, and all of that probably comes back to your client experience.

Here’s why when we don’t have a high-quality client experience, and we haven’t looked through the lens of what the client needs in order to deliver to us successfully the documents we need, the information we need, the patience we need, and also the meeting of our deadlines that we have, it’s likely because the client doesn’t know.

April 15th is the date in someone’s head as a client because that’s the date that they know taxes are due. They are not thinking about all the workload that you have and all the other clients you have to serve because humans are selfish, and they are thinking only about their situation. They are not thinking about the other hundreds of clients you also have to prepare by April 15th.

Breadcrumbing Clients To Success

When we don’t think about our client experience and leverage automation to allow us to make sure that we are doing what I like to call breadcrumbing them to success meaning that we are breaking down each step of the process for the client and calling out multiple times for that client deadlines of cutoffs so, say March 15th is your cutoff date. If you know that in your head and you are like, “Why aren’t my clients getting it done? I sent them this letter at the beginning of January that says that everything is due on March 15th. Why aren’t they meeting that?” It’s because your clients maybe didn’t read that message, didn’t read that email, or didn’t read that letter that came in the mail.

I can tell you from my personal experience. I used to receive this big, old, thick packet from my tax accountant, and I would come in. I would see that it was from him, I wouldn’t even open it, and I’d throw it on the pile knowing that I had until April 15th. Then, April 10th would roll around, and I’d be like, hair on fire, got to get my stuff into him, and he would accept it, and he would still get my taxes done. There was no repercussion to me as the client. That was on him because he didn’t have the boundaries. We’ll talk about that another time.

We can talk about that now because without the repercussion, and I have shared this here on a different episode I don’t know which one but it’s like if the police allow people with a DUI to keep on driving, not take their license, not put them in jail, not make them go to all these classes, then people will continue to drink and drive.

If you keep allowing your clients to turn things in very late without a penalty of late documents, or if you keep allowing people to get on extension and you don’t charge for it, and now you are touching the file two times in order to give them their estimated payments, you continue to work for free and then that’s when you get sick and tired of losing money, and you are like, “This has to stop.” Then you say to yourself, “If I don’t do this now, I’m going to continue to spin my wheels, and nothing will ever change.” These are important elements. What I’m hearing from you, Jamie, is once you put these workflows and systems into place in communication, then you’ll have clients where tax prep is maybe the thing you have to do, but it’s now so smooth and easy.

We have clients all the time say after they set up the system, “I’m looking forward to taxes this year.” What they have done is they have built in a client experience from the very start of tax season all the way through the delivery of that finalized return and notification that it has been accepted. What we can do is, because of automation and systems, we can send them little bite-sized information pieces along the way. One, we can remind them that our deadline is March 15th, that our cutoff is March 15th, and if you don’t have, as well, what we need, then we will have to put you on extension or there will be an additional fee whatever that looks like in your practice.

As we are able to send little bite-sized communications and we are able to also send reminders to our clients around these communications, we are ensuring that they are seeing them. There’s no more of this big dump of information at the beginning of the tax season. Instead, it’s bite-sized, breadcrumbing them to ultimate success. That is a big piece.

The other piece is that clients need to hear things, and what did they use to say? The old saying was that people needed to hear things seven times. I have heard the updated versions of 2023 and 2024. They need to hear things like twenty times, and that’s a lot of touchpoints for somebody to have locked into their brain. March 15th is the cutoff date, not April 15th. You don’t have enough time in your day to send every single client seven emails that say, “You must have your stuff to us by March 15th.” You don’t have enough time.

That is a big piece around that. A lot of times, when people are thinking about automation, they think about the juicy stuff, which is creating efficiency for your team but the efficiency for your team comes from your clients not emailing all the time asking, “Did you get my documents? Where’s my return? Has everything been e-filed?”

When we are able to leverage these workflows we can work status updates into the workflows. After all the documents are submitted via the organizer from the client, it sends them an email that says, “We have gotten your documents. We are going to take a look at those. You can expect to hear from us here shortly, in a few days. Until then, know that we have what we need and will be in touch with you.”

It’s a gentle, “Don’t call us we’ll call you” message. The same thing goes for after you’ve completed the e-file. “We’ve completed your e-file. Here’s your next step.” The cool thing about automation is that we can even make it a custom experience. If somebody owes money after the e-filing has been completed, then we can send them detailed information about how to file those payments. If somebody’s getting a refund, we can send them a custom email that says, “You are getting a refund.” Where’s My Refund is the website link to track the status of your refund without us having to do anything.” It all happens automatically. That is where you eliminate the burden of administrative tasks.

Before we jump into that, what I want to know is how did this help Jessica? Let’s say a firm owner wants to make these changes. How did she see a difference from a revenue and profitability standpoint by changing the client experience in what I call an onboarding process? A firm owner probably has a very slow and expensive process, and you are not being compensated for all your wasted time which we won’t even get into but how did this help her in the firm?

Jessica has had massive success with us, but I’m going to talk about a couple of our clients because those are more exciting. We had a firm that came to us. They were sending out paper organizers. They would spend multiple weeks every November preparing the organizers, printing them all from the prep software, getting them organized, packing the packets, putting them in the mailbox, hauling them down, and spending thousands of dollars on postage to send out these paper packets because they were 20 to 30 pages in some cases from those organizers come out with prep software.

With our system, what they found is that it takes them about fifteen minutes to start on January 15th. That includes sending out an automated communication that says, “Tax season is starting.” Also, once clients have said, “Yes, I’m opting to work with you again this year,” it will send them organized emails, their engagement letter, and their deposit. We like to look at it, not as a standard deposit of $100. We want to get some more skin in the game. What we like to talk about is being able to send minimum fees.

Having this happen none of this is a surprise to the client because we have provided communication before tax season starts about, “This is how we are working this year.” That email sent at the beginning says, “Are you still interested in working with us?” It lays out exactly what it’s going to look like for them to work with us this year. We reiterate in each of the steps of the onboarding process “This is what it means to work with us this year. These are the deadlines. This is how you are going to pay us the deposit before we even get started. This is how you are going to deliver your documents before we start working on your return. Here’s the process that’s going to happen.” Removing uncertainty for the client, makes them ask fewer questions. Our clients love to report back that they are getting paid in their sleep because they are starting all these clients with a few clicks of a button, saving hundreds of hours of preparing packets and paper things.

What are the savings like? What did you see with that client that did the paper and packed up all the things, going and using the postage versus the automation? What time savings did you see in that case study?

They were spending three weeks of staff time. I don’t have the exact hours but I would assume it’s probably upwards of 60 to 70 hours preparing those packets, and that didn’t include the postage they were spending on top of that. If you take roughly 75 hours of staff time at $20 an hour or more, even, that’s a lot of money in staff hours. Then you have the thousands of dollars they were spending on postage. Now, it’s all being done in fifteen minutes. That happens on January 15th.

They don’t have to redo all this. What they were able to do in that time from November to January was communicate with their clients via email. I can hear some people right now saying, “Yes, but what about my paper-only clients?” The sweet little couple that they’ve been serving for the last several years. Your grandmas and grandpas. You can still serve those people.

A lot of our clients have found that those people are adopting a heck of a lot better than their 55 to 60-year-old clients because they’re like, “This is how it’s going to be done. This is so slick and easy. I can do this.” Everybody in this day and age is using a portal of some sort. You can’t let “They won’t know how” be an excuse for not doing this because they are using it in their doctor’s offices with electronic medical records. They are using it for their electric bill. Social Security requires it. There are some out there that can’t figure it out, but most people have adopted this with ease.

Some people are like, “My 80-year-old clients, I thought would never figure this out, love it, and they are celebrating it every day.” You see the return on investment because what this does is it takes those hours of preparing the packets, emailing the packets, or moving the engagement letters onto your portal if you are doing it that way, it allows you to click a few buttons and have everything start.

The first four steps of our process are done completely automatically. When the client has submitted their organizer and their documents and the organizers, in the way that we use them, are different it’s like an interview. It’s an asynchronous interview that allows your clients to give you details about their tax year.

Did they buy a house? Did they sell a house? Did they move? Did they have babies? All of those things that your standard organizers are going to pull out are something because it’s asking in a very technical manner. This way, we get to be more human with our people, even if we are using automation. As soon as they finish that, we are invited in as the firm employees to take action, but we are not having to do anything in those first few steps, short of having to do some follow-up as the cutoff dates get closer but it’s so much simpler to identify where your clients are at.

Another thing these systems allow you to do is automated reminders. When one email goes out, it doesn’t mean that your clients are seeing it or reading it. When we are using systems like this, where we have automated reminders, we can continue to ping them and hopefully catch them at a time when they will read it and be like, “This deadline is coming. I need to be aware of this.” That’s the other value to firms you do not have to do that follow-up manually anymore. We get to lean into the automation to do that for us, and we can see that.

Automation: Save your time and sanity by automating reminders. Clients will never miss a deadline again.

You see it, but it’s like instant time savings, instant money to your bottom line because you are not wasting 60 to 70 hours a week of staff time plus postage. This leads us to the second main point about these workflows is that you eliminate your admin and effort. It’s funny because when we have a call with a prospect, I always ask them, “What is the biggest challenge you are having in your firm right now as it relates to your sales process?” Sometimes the answer will be, “Getting good people. Hiring good people. There’s no one good. I can’t grow my sales if I don’t have more people.” It’s like, “You don’t need any more people.” Let’s dive into how this eliminates your admin efforts.

I love to say that TaxDome is your next best hire. I’m speaking to TaxDome because I know the power of it and the impact that it can have on practices. As we talked about, the elimination of having to do follow-ups with your clients is huge. The other administrative effort that having a tool like TaxDome, or a centralized practice management tool, provides you is that everything’s in one place.

There’s a lot of energy that goes into what they call the tech stack. A tech stack is the cumulative list of all the software that you are using. In a very streamlined tech stack for a practice that is using systems and automation, it could be your tax prep software, whatever one you want to use. Your practice management software as we talked about, we love TaxDome, and you’ll need a scheduling platform like something such as Calendly or Acuity. Then you may have an email service provider where your emails are housed.

That’s a very streamlined tech stack. What some of the Frankenstein tech stacks have, which are complicated, is they will have 5 or 10 software programs they are using to accomplish some of the very basic things, like getting your invoicing out, payments received, emailing, or client portals so you have document management for your clients. Communicating with your clients, and getting electronic signatures. There are so many things that are in these new all-in-one practice management tools that allow you to have one tool that you have to know how to use, and that right there reduces a ton of administrative effort.

Even if it’s just you, especially if you have 1, 2, or 3 team members or even a team of 20 when everybody is working out of one place, it allows them to be more efficient in their work. When they have to hunt down details or documents on a specific client, if everybody knows they are in this practice management tool and they are in this specific folder, because you have a system around how you are saving this information say your work papers and it gets saved and done for every client the same way, you dramatically reduce the number of minutes and hours, ultimately, that a team member spends hunting down information.

The old-school way, as we talked about earlier in this show, where people had folders, people literally had to get up and go hunt down a folder, or it maybe even literally fell in a crack. We don’t have to do that anymore. It quickly replaces that time and puts them back into spending their time on service delivery. What that brings is that you find you are able to skill up your team more because they have less admin work to do. They have more time to learn about new opportunities for tax liabilities. They have opportunities for skill improvement. They are able to bring admins into client service manager roles where they can interact with your clients and feel skilled and confident in doing that.

It’s amazing when you can get rid of this admin effort that you are doing in a very manual-based operation. You quickly find efficiencies in day-to-day work. The industry average is 5 to 10 hours per person eliminated when you implement automated operations. That’s with all software combined. You are going to have some that are higher than that, even. We have had some people report 15 to 20 hours of improved reduction in administrative effort.

Is that on a weekly basis?

Yeah. 5 to 10 hours per person per week is a lot.

From the client example that you gave us. What did they end up saving per person on a weekly basis by implementing the work?

They were up in the 10 to 12 hours if I recall correctly. Having everything in one place, they were replacing a very manual process. They were still learning. That was in year 1, and in year 2, they will probably see even higher returns on investment in the number of hours reduced. It continues to get more efficient as time goes on.

The cool thing about that is that people can decide. Do I want to have my team working less? Do we get down to a normal 40-hour workweek year-round or do we want to go through a period of growth and scaling where we work a little bit harder, increase our client capacity, and take on new clients? The other powerful thing in that is, oftentimes, when you do that, you’re bringing on higher-paying clients because you have the opportunity to then replace your lower clients in a longer game reduction of client capacity to get your hours back down but there are so many things you can play with when you have the systems in place to create the practice in the firm that you want and hit those long-term visions.

A lot of people want to get their work weeks to 40 hours, then have your staff. Work like normal, so they can enjoy more time with their family. Time doesn’t have to be sacrificed by all this nuance-type work but the biggest thing, too, is you can reward your team and avoid costly turnover by having them do work that they shouldn’t even be doing.

As you said, when you implement anything of this, you are not only saving time but you are putting the focus on service delivery, and that’s what your staff probably wants to do. They want to do accounting. They want to do the tax work. They don’t want to be paper pushers. We didn’t even get into that but I can imagine that by implementing the workflows and systems and the automation, it’s also reducing turnover and people being resentful of their work saying, “I don’t know why I’m hired to do this. I should be doing X, Y, and Z.”

It’s something that practices and firm owners have to be thinking about because the younger generations don’t know anything about their mobile devices. I was having a conversation with a group at a conference, and they were saying their firm owner wanted to retire. He’s been saying he’s going to retire for ten years. These 2 younger people, who were in their early 30s, had been working for a long time to help get the business built, and he refused to allow automation because he was still the owner.

They were having the thoughts and sharing with me that they don’t know how long they can sustain it because they have this segmentation that’s happening in the firm’s workforce where they have the old-school people who have always known paper, and so they are happy to continue as is. They are a little scared of the change and then you have these younger people who are saying, “I can’t continue this way for much longer. I need you to build me the efficient systems in order to be able to continue doing work and to stay on as a valued employee.”

That’s huge. We are going to be facing more of that in these coming years as firm owners want to bring in younger people to replace them and have somebody to sell to. They need to be thinking about that now because it’s not something you can turn on a dime and have happened. After all, again, you’ve got to change the management of the older crowd and also train the younger crowd on how the systems are going to work. It’s an important thing to be thinking about because people coming out of college won’t go to work for a paper firm. At least, they will come on for a couple of weeks, and then they are going to leave, and all of that effort you’ve put into them is for naught.

That’s the high cost of turnover. It’s a lot less of an investment to change your system and client experience with the automation of whatever you choose than losing employees and starting from scratch. The cost of that is so much greater than the investment of working with someone like you or trying to implement something yourself. That leads us to our third main point, too, which is how have you seen this improve cashflow with these automation and systems?

Cashflow has been a big thing because they don’t have systems. They don’t have the tools that allow them to be efficient in the gathering of money for the services you have delivered. They have come to terms with the fact that they are going to essentially work for free. Depending on their model, they could be working for free until the return is completed, and then the client may or may not pay that invoice at the time of completion.

Improving Cash Flow With Automation

There is a lot of risk in that as a small business and as small business owners, we know cash is the lifeblood of your business. What we can do with this automation is we can remove ourselves emotionally from the process, which is cool. What we can do is we can automate the sending of invoices. We like to look at them as minimum fees. What is the lowest fee that I’m going to charge somebody? That’s what my deposit would be. If all my individuals are going to always pay $350, I don’t have to say, “Everybody’s going to pay upfront” because some people don’t want to do that, but a minimum fee is a low barrier or way of having people be invested in your services. They pay $350. Everybody’s going to pay that, and then on the back end, if they have a more complex return, we can charge. We can automate that deposit. Everybody pays it, and we know everybody’s paying it.

This is huge when you talk about the sales process because I believe, and everything that I teach, that you are going to get paid upfront from every client. The amount of outstanding accounts receivable that firm owners have is ridiculous, and you are not getting paid for being a bank and lending this money to your client. You are not even able to invest that money. You are losing on that part but I have had some firm owners with a few hundred thousand or millions, and getting this minimum deposit. I love that you said that is great because you can always send the supplemental invoice, and you know you are not going to lift a finger and do any work until you are paid 100%.

The amount of AR that I see from firm owners is ridiculous. Chasing people down for payment. Talk about staff time that I have had. Some people say, “What about even the amount of money that you are not even billing your clients right now? It’s because I will do it later. I’m going to do it later when I have time,” and you never have time. This is a vicious cycle that, until you change and make a change like this and I am all about this, Jamie. You are going to continue to feel burnt out all the time and lose the motivation for your firm, instead of living your dream to maybe have a remote firm and pass this on to the team that you have working there and have a hefty, nice retirement, instead of having nothing in the bank.

This is a massive piece because getting these invoices out for the 1040 work, I don’t believe in it for the other stuff because you have to have an enrollment conversation, which we talked about in other episodes here, saying, “What is the minimum I’m going to charge, and how am I going to get this paid?” It is massive, and this is huge.

I will say that a lot of people have feelings and thoughts about deposits. The beauty of setting up automation is you make the decision, and you go. You are not having to send that deposit. We draft everything to inform our clients through that client experience, and when that deposit comes, they are not surprised by it. You may have some people ask some questions about it.

The Impact Of Deposits And Locked Invoices

When you approach it in a completely neutral state of, “This is how we do business now,” and you do not have to physically send that invoice, the people-pleasing that comes out of this industry, it removes that out of it, and you say, “This is our process. This is what we decided we are doing,” and you send it out. It removes that emotional toil that comes from sending money and requests for invoices. To your point, “I’m too busy right now,” that’s a symptom of something larger, which is, “I don’t have to get paid for my services.”

It is and it’s because we don’t have control over our business. We have lost control, and you are terrified that if you ask for your money, you are going to lose clients. People are going to leave you. When you implement these changes for good, then you can capitalize on your profitability, and your cashflow, and enjoy, maybe tax that you send. For the clients I work with Jamie, I tell them to book vacations during tax season. In the beginning, they think that’s a crazy idea, but that’s what they do. The ones who are looking to retire soon can retire because they can start stashing cash instead of having accounts receivable and never getting paid and saying, “I’m going to have to write that off as bad debt.” I’m like, “Not if you work with me. You are not.” That’s going to be money in your bank, that’s going to be traveling the world money.

I have another tool that can help with that avoidance of AR completely which is cool. TaxDome is the only one that does this, but you can lock documents with an invoice.

You better lock documents until you are 100% paid. Tax returns are being filed, and they have access to nothing and any monthly services, I don’t know if you can implement this, but you can let me know real quick, and then all my clients to you. On any monthly accounting, monthly bookkeeping, any monthly subscription, if a payment does not go through, automation of a beautifully written letter approved by me goes out that says, “Unfortunately, we are going to have to stop services until you contact us or you update your credit card or ACH or whatever.”

I’m trying to think through my head quickly how we can do that. I have some ideas, but it is not something that we have done as a set process, but there are some things you could do. There are ways that you can tag things so that they won’t go through. I have a couple of ideas for sure. The power of that locked invoice is huge because so many people, get the 8879 signed and they have the client invoice go out at the same time, and then the client ignores the invoice payment, laying up.

They sign 8879. It starts the three-day timer and then they are feeling pressured to follow along with the compliance they have there, and yet they still need to get paid, and then the client ignores those, and so they file eventually. You can do that, but why? You don’t have to. If it’s only a few clients, a lot of people like to say that aren’t paying, but still your energy is going into the time, and you want to be relaxing or focusing on other things, like going to conferences or spending time with your family, which are much higher value prospects than you chasing down invoices.

The biggest thing I hear from firm owners, and I’m sure many of you can relate, is “How can I stop working for free? How do I handle these scenarios in a different way where I can communicate my values and what I do?” I was like, “What Jamie is talking about is step number one. You are not going to ever do any work without being paid.”

That’s the old-school method. If that’s what you want to do, then continue to use paper organizers and all the other stuff. If you are looking into moving into the automation era, this is the way of doing business. You can’t leave a grocery store with your groceries and say, “I’m going to eat this, but I’m going to get paid later on. I’m going to come back and pay the grocery store weekly later.” No, you can’t leave without it. Why are we letting our clients leave our firm or get something that you’ve completed work on without paying for that service? That doesn’t make any sense and to be honest, if you are doing any free work, that’s a non-revenue-generating activity. That’s where you create a lot of inefficiencies, not only in your sales workflow but in your execution workflow, like what we are talking about. Thank you, Jamie, much. Is there anything else on the cashflow that you want to share that maybe we didn’t cover yet that you are like, “I got to say this?”

No. The one thing I would share is that the people who came to us were very uncertain about implementing things like deposits, the minimum fee deposit that we talked about, or even the locked invoices. They all trusted that they saw others doing this and they said, “I’m going to give it a try.” We have called over 800 clients at this point, but I have only had one come back and say, “I don’t think deposits are the thing for us,” because everyone else massively recognized the value that was brought to them. That meant that they could make payroll for their team members early in the tax season. To your point, they could go on vacation and not be stressed about getting paid. They also didn’t feel that they had to continue taking on more new clients because they needed to have a quick burst of cash to bring people in.

That release of pressure is so massive. When you are in a high-stress period like tax season in your practice. We have talked about it from the lens of tax preparation, but if you are moving into advisory work, these things are even more critical. Like you selling high-ticket advice for any work and not having these three core pieces in place, because you will quickly have people walking away from you because you aren’t providing a good client experience, and you are drowning in the admin tasks that it takes to run the advisory work, and making sure that those year-round relationships are being maintained and supported, and that you are providing the services that you have promised through your scope of work in your letter of engagement. All of those things are amplified when you look at the advisory side of things.

If you don’t fix this on the compliance side or on the lowest service that you offer, you are never going to be able to pay off your debts faster. You are never going to be able to fully fund a retirement fund for yourself. You are never going to be able to increase your staff’s pay and do all those things that you want to do in your firm. Jamie, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us. I know you’ve got a place where a bunch of accounting and tax firm owners hang out and talk about all of this. Can you share that with readers who want to say, “I’m done with the old way. I’m moving into the automation era. I have no idea. I’m terrified of doing this. Let me go hang out with others?”

We would love to welcome you. We have a free Facebook group where we have over 6,500 tax professionals, accountants, and bookkeepers hanging out with us. We are talking about automation and workflow specifically, so we are over on Facebook. You can look for Tax Pros, Accountants, and Bookkeepers: Automation and Workflows.

That is where we are hanging out. We do weekly live training. We are talking about new functionalities that are coming out that can transform your practice. We talk about TaxDome because that’s what we know and love, but if you are on other platforms, come and hang out with us because we also talk about client experience and other things that are valuable for someone on another platform as well and if you want to learn more about me and my partner, Jessica Smith, who’s an enrolled agent, or the work that we are doing, you can check us out on our website at WorkflowsForTaxPros.com. You can find everything about our program and the services we offer there.

Thank you so much for being here with us on the show. If you are an accounting, tax, or bookkeeping firm owner, and you want to work a lot smarter instead of harder, not only is the execution of the workflow to your clients and everything we spoke about important but also your sales process and workflow issues are important. To let go of overly demanding clients, and get paid based on your value and worth. What we have for you here at The Abundant Accountant is the system and showing you how to do that, where you only work with ideal clients, the only work with people who will pay you a deposit on the minimum fee, like Jamie is talking about.

You can catapult your firm to the next level and only work the hours you want to work. Maybe you want to work 20 to 40 hours a week and pay your staff bonuses. Then fill up your retirement account. That’s what’s possible for you, and we’ll show you how to do all that in a way that feels simple, effortless, and automatic. If you want me to show you how, go to TheAbundantCall.com, and you can book a call with me and my team. We look forward to seeing you all in the next episode. Have a beautiful day.

Important Links

• Workflows for Tax Pros
• TaxDome
• Tax Pros, Accountants, and Bookkeepers: Automation and Workflows

About Jamie Gruol

Jamie Gruol (sounds like cruel) is an expert in designing workflows that help tax, accounting, and bookkeeping professionals work smarter, not harder.

After working as a software implementation project manager for 10 years, Jamie used her talent for workflow management to co-found Workflows for Tax Pros. In just 4 years Workflows for Tax Pros has helped over 800 small practices to create more time and financial freedom using automated workflows powered by TaxDome. Jamie and her co-founder Jessica Smith, an enrolled agent, are on a mission to transform this industry from overworked and burnt out to streamlined and stress-free thanks to systems and automation.

Jamie is living her dream life in the mountains of Vermont with her husband and two children.