Episode 191 | How Accounting Firms Can Use AI to Save Time, Increase Profits & Become Better Advisors With Manfred Swarovski

Michelle Weinstein welcomes Manfred Swarovski, co-founder of Veltrix, to reveal how AI for Accounting Firms turns routine financial data into high-value advisory insights. If you’re tired of drowning in tedious compliance work and endless onboarding reviews, you don’t have to keep wasting hours on manual data crunching. Manfred breaks down how modern platforms act as a strategic co-pilot by running instant business health checks across client financial files without storing sensitive records. You’ll discover how to spot hidden client risks in minutes so you can step into high-level advisory conversations with complete confidence. Learn why adopting niche technology lets you answer tough financial questions faster and build an abundant firm that commands premium fees.

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Listen to the podcast here

How Accounting Firms Can Use AI to Save Time, Increase Profits & Become Better Advisors With Manfred Swarovski

Welcome to the show. We have a very special guest. Our special guest co-founded Veltrix to make business intelligence something every owner can actually use. For firm owners who lack awareness of their data or their clients’ data, Veltrix is a business co-pilot AI that helps you make strategic decisions. Unlike Claude or ChatGPT, it’s a dedicated small business solution that actually proactively detects your business’s problems or even your client’s business’s problems and guides you to solutions on how to fix them and how to capitalize on your own opportunities in just minutes.

Our special guest studied business at the University of San Diego, has a BBA and an MBA, and brings a global ethics-first view on how companies should be built and run. Before we welcome him to the show, I’m sure you help clients manage their finances, books, taxes, etc., but when it comes to your own cash flow, your pricing, or your profits, you feel stuck or even ashamed. You do not have to face this by yourself. Most firm owners have never learned how to sell, how to position their value, or how to have confident money conversations.

It holds you back. Here at the show, I help you feel empowered, confident, and not awkward on any sales calls. You’ll learn how to convert premium clients, raise your prices, and finally take home the pay you actually deserve. If you’re ready to stop avoiding the financial side of your own firm, head on over to TheAbundantCall.com and book your free strategy session with me and my team. Every new client tells you their business is straightforward. The documents arrive. Veltrix helps you understand what you’re really dealing with in minutes.

Upload financial statements, tax returns, and documents they’ve already shared, or connect their accounting software and instantly get a complete business health check, helping you uncover key risks, opportunities, and the answers you need across all of your clients’ financial information. Instead of spending hours getting up to speed, you’re ready for your first real working session. Start your free business health check at Veltrix.com.

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Welcome, Manfred, to the show.

Michelle, thanks for having me.

It’s awesome to have you here on the show. I’m super excited to dive into what we’re going to talk about because I think it’s a hot topic of different AI tools that accounting firm owners, tax firm owners, maybe could use or need help with. Before we dive in, I have already done your intro, but I always think it’s more powerful to do the intro from the guests. If you could just share 30 seconds on who you are, what you do, and then we’ll dive into it.

Perfect. My path into accounting technology has been a bit unconventional. I completed my MBA at the University of San Diego. If I’m honest, accounting was always one of the fields that I struggled in, but it did give me a strong appreciation for also how difficult it can be to turn financial data into meaningful insights and actionable insights. After university, I joined our family business. Where I use a lot of different enterprise solutions for data and analysis. I realized that a lot of these big companies have access to a lot of data for their decision-making.

Turning Raw Numbers Into Strategic Advisory

Small and medium-sized businesses really do not have that. That’s what inspired Veltrix, our company. Our mission is pretty simple. To help every business better understand its financials through business health checks. As we work more closely with accountants, we realize something even more exciting, that the real opportunity isn’t replacing the work that accountants do, but it’s reducing the time spent gathering information so they can focus on a faster and deeper understanding of the needs of the business they’re working with and helping clients make better decisions. That’s really where our focus is, like, say, MAGA, make accounting great again.

That’s a different MAGA that most people are talking about, but we won’t go into a political conversation here. No, I love that. What you’re doing there at Veltrix is really a powerful and important necessity that many firm owners should take a glance at, take a peek at, and see how much time they can actually save. I’m curious because you created an AI company, and just so everyone knows where they can go. Do you want to give them the website?

The website is Veltrix.com.

When they go there, what can a firm owner really expect? Business owners are already using AI for financial questions. I’ll go on ChatGPT or Claude and ask a question. What role should firm owners in accounting, tax, bookkeeping firm owners, how would they play a role in that with their clients?

One of the pressures that’s really pushing into the market is that businesses and employees are using AI more, and it puts pressure on accountants because you run the risk of a business owner almost trying to play accountant himself. With a firm like ours, because you asked how they get started and so on, we tried to make the process as easy as possible for businesses or accountants, or vice versa, working together to pretty much connect all their different financial sources. It might be QuickBooks, it could be Xero, any of these financial tools, or also certain POS systems.

For accountants, if they connect these tools, it gives them a really pretty easy way of onboarding a new business to quickly see what the pressure points are, but also for continuous work, to always be on top of what is certain work that can be automated. What are some pressure points for firms? What’s going on in their business? To understand more than just their financials, to really help them push into an advisory role as well, to know which products are working, which products aren’t working.

What about the risk and security of something like that? I’m sure many firm owners and I are always wondering that. How does that work with what you do if a firm owner goes and does the business health check and they link up their QuickBooks for all their clients? Let’s say they have 30 or 40 bookkeeping clients.

That’s a question we get quite a lot. Without going into too many details.

No detailed details, but just a high level because I think risk is a huge factor. Maybe you can talk about the difference between when a firm owner might sign up with you or do a free business health check. It’s free, but how is that different from having Claude do the business health check?

Protecting Client Data With Read-Only Co-Pilots

AI For Accounting Firms: Client security comes first. Discover why dedicated financial AI tools keep your client files safe without storing sensitive data.

There are different types of AIs how AIs work. For us, the clear definition is that we are a co-pilot. We do not store the data. If you connect your QuickBooks or Xero, the data lives in QuickBooks or Xero. If you ask a question, our system goes in there, working from their side, their API, without being too technical, and pulls the information out of there. Data is never stored in our system. It’s stored in QuickBooks or Xero.

We do have the ability to upload some files to our system to substitute or to add to the data that’s coming from QuickBooks and Xero. These are stored in our system. We take precautions to keep them very secure. Most of the data is never stored in our system. The only thing is, if you ask a question and the answer is yes, the answer will be in our system for you to read. You can always go in and delete those.

It’s very interesting. The whole AI thing is very new for so many, not only myself, but for firm owners when there are many tools at their disposal.

Even for us, AI is evolving so fast. Every month there’s something new coming out, even for us. For me, being non-tech is not as technical as our development team. It’s exciting because new stuff is coming out, but you have to be careful. I do not know if you heard those reports recently about ChatGPT or Entropic Squad hacking various systems. It’s crazy.

What would you say a firm owner should look out for the most if they are going to use ChatGPT or Claude or some other OpenAI tool? Maybe you could even talk about the difference between what you do at Veltrix versus some open platform.

Without going, again, it’s hard not to go into details here, so to speak, like read-only systems, like ours, that purely only read. There are these things, also with the cloud, depending on what system you use, that could theoretically make changes to your systems. At this point, AI has become, I would say, very secure. I’d be lying. I’ll be honest. Just saying one system is more secure than ours, or ours is more secure than ChatGPT’s, at this point, because they have put a strong emphasis on this.

It also depends on which models you use because if you use paid models, they do not really learn from your data as much. I know with ours, all I can say is that it’s read-only. We leave the data at QuickBooks, we leave it at Xero or wherever it is, and we pretty much just read it when you ask a question. If you do a health check, then we go through the data, and we ask different questions to pretty much display it all to you. Again, we do not store it.

It’s not so interesting. I had no idea about that. There are many firm owners listening who also, we use these tools but do not really think about the implications that they might have. I understand if you’re going to start linking QuickBooks or Xero and client data, then you really start to think through the domino effect. If you think about it, Manfred, which parts of accounting should AI handle, do you think, for firm owners? There are a lot of people using different tax AIs to do tax returns, but where do you think the firm owner has the most value in the AI tools that they have at their disposal?

Automating Repetitive Questionnaires During Busy Season

The hard decisions still need to be made by accountants, and that’s why it’s so important for accounting firms to also start using AI, because if just their clients use it, they’re going to get buzzed all the time by some crazy questions that AI might have spit out. People get tired. They have lapses, and especially when they keep doing very continuous work, if they have to, every once a year, when a company does their tax returns, you ask all these different questions every year has the structure changed, what are some new products you’re selling, and all these kinds of questions.

That’s something I think that AI can really do well in automating that process so that you do not have to go to the firm and ask them to gather information. You can use AI if you connect it with QuickBooks and so on and just say, “Here are all the questions. You can answer what you can answer.” At least, it’s going to narrow down significantly.

That would be amazing because I hate answering all the questions that firm owners need when I have to do my taxes every year.

It’s the one prerequisite whenever it comes to using AI. There are really two big things, and models have become very smart, but they’re only as smart as the data they have access to and the questions that you’re asking. If you have a firm owner who, once a year, drops off stacks and stacks of paper without documents, AI cannot really help there.

There’s a prerequisite of them having digitized their data. A lot of these tasks, also reading income statements and all these things, can really be automated. The accountants can really figure, work on strategies, tax strategies and depreciation strategies and all these kinds of things, focus on these tasks. They can use a product like Veltrix, again, to help them brainstorm as a brainstorming partner. That’s really the important thing for firm owners.

That too, it’s just like the main revenue for a firm owner is in the advisory, is in the thinking. You said the hard decisions need to be made by the accounting or tax firm owner or bookkeeping firm owner because that’s what you’re getting paid for, but how can you speed up maybe some of the backend? As you said, you could use Veltrix as a brainstorming partner. I think that’s a lovely thing because it can help you brainstorm a lot quicker than maybe trying to figure it out on your own. With uploading or linking it to QuickBooks, linking it to Xero, whatever APIs that you have.

Making Human Expertise More Valuable Than Ever

There’s a recent report by MIT that came out. It really showed the importance of AI. It said that AI can either substitute for people or it can make their expertise more valuable. That’s where the important thing is for accounting firms.

I love that. It’s gonna be for the firm owner to make their expertise more valuable. You can use it to substitute for people, but I even met with one of my clients recently, and he’s using something to do tax returns. He said, “We got rid of like three preparers, but now we have two admins and two reviewers.” You got rid of one person, but now you have a lot of double-checking to do. I believe that if you can use it for expertise and make your expertise more valuable, and you can shorten the duration of time to get to a decision or to help your brainstorming, now you’ve increased your firm’s profitability of the firm.

AI For Accounting Firms: AI doesn’t diminish your technical brilliance. It amplifies your expertise so you can command premium fees for strategic advice.

It’s the same thing for accounts, especially when things like spreadsheets came out in the beginning. Everybody was like, “What does this mean for us now?” The industry did not go anywhere. It just made their jobs easier.

When did that happen? I do not even know. My nickname spreadsheet, man, friend, I’m not even an accountant, but that’s how much I love spreadsheets. I do not even know when that came out. It’s a good point. It’s just like AI might be the new spreadsheet of whatever that was when was that? Do you even know?

I have no idea. That’s a good question.

It is. When you think about AI, or maybe even what you created with Veltrix, when you think about it from a standpoint of giving useful answers, you said there were two prerequisites. Number one, the thing is only as smart as the data, so you have to link up good data. Number two, it is the questions you’re asking. When you think about AI being able to give really useful financial answers. What are some of the best questions that you would guide firm owners to ask if they were to get a business health check and try that out with you guys? Just in general, if they were to get on your platform and say, what are some just really good questions that firm owners should be asking if they’re going to use these AI tools?

It really depends on the situation. In terms of the exact question, it’s hard to answer now because there’s such a vast dimension of different situations for a business or accounting. It’s a good point because that’s one of the things that we’re trying to work on is, you have the big companies out there like Entropic with Claude, ChatGPT, or OpenAI with ChatGPT, Gemini, and so on but really, what they’re making their money, they want to have a general AI model that as many people as possible use because that’s how they make money.

They’re not focused on certain niches. That’s why we’re trying to focus on the accounting niche or small business niche to become not like a retrospective tool to say, “What happened in the past,” but also to help them be a proactive tool to, again, have that. As I said, the data is stored in QuickBooks, but running these health checks on a monthly basis, let’s say a weekly basis, as often accounting as a firm wants to really see what issues are out there and then work proactively with them to ask the right questions for them to answer.

They’re like reverse-engineering it for them.

Eliminating Prompt Guesswork With Purpose-Built Prompts

Pretty much. Again, it’s so difficult to ask the right questions, because you just say, “Give me an answer.” My knee hurts and gives an answer versus saying, “I’m a doctor, telling you, I imagine your doctor gives information straight. Do not talk around the bush. Just go straight to the point.” The answer is going to differ. That’s really also the context. That’s why we want to work on proactive answers by saying, if you ask for a certain yearly filing or a tax return, instead of you just asking, give it information. We already write the prompt in the background. When you ask the question, it’s going to be the best possible question for you.

That’s super important because I think that’s one of the biggest things firm owners do not know is what prompt to ask. If you’re already providing that for them, because you’re niching down and working with accounting and tax and bookkeeping firm owners, then you’re ahead of the game. If they went to Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT, they would have to figure this out on their own.

The additional benefit of this is, I’m sure, that much of your audience has used and tried different AI models. For example, if you sign up with ChatGPT, you fall in love with it, you use it a lot, and if you do not want to switch to something else, it’s going to be very tedious because it really has information. It knows you. Also, on top of that, every model is different. For example, for me, I was using OpenAI, but I really started liking Claude. Actually, a lot of the time when I use AI, I do not type any questions.

I use a microphone. I talk with AI, and that’s something that chat is the very best at, but then, for example, Claude is the best for development, whereas Gemini is for image creation, and so on, and so that’s something that, for us also that we do is we do not use one model. We use a range of models. Depending on what task we have AI do, we use Cloud. We use Gemini. We use OpenAI. We use all these different models because the firm owner, if they want to switch somewhere, they have to sign up somewhere else. With us, we always make sure that we use the best models for the best use cases. That’s where you get the most out of AI.

That’s interesting. I did not know that you could. That’s fascinating. Do other pay and this is just a general question, but do other paid niche AI services, like what you provide also use the different models that exist in addition to the technology that you’ve created? How does that work?

There is pretty much, whenever you ask a question, again, there are so many big models, and it’s hard for somebody to really come in and compete with these big companies. They focus on creating a wide range of different models. Some are more expensive, but they’re smarter. Some are simpler, but a lot cheaper. That’s why, for example, many companies and we focus on the niche. Again, as I said, these big companies want to have a model that everybody uses. They do not focus on niches.

They want to create a model that then smaller companies can use in their niches. When you ask, for example, a question that’s more complex, we’re going to use a certain model that’s best at analyzing financials or answering a certain question. If, for example, you upload an income statement, you’re going to use a different model that’s better at analyzing, or taking pictures, for example, analyzing them or PDFs and these things. Whenever you see AI, it’s almost like when you open up the box underneath it. Everybody uses these various companies.

That’s fascinating. I did not know that. With Veltrix, it is safe to upload an income statement, take a picture, and upload it. What’s the difference between doing it with you versus if a firm owner just went to ChatGPT?

Again, that’s before I’m going to say we’re safer than ChatGPT. At this point, everybody has become very good at encrypting the data, securing it properly, and ensuring that it’s safe. We’ve become in an age now where AI has become safe to use. The only thing is there’s also risk with using these, like other firms, and these certain things called MCPs, which some open entities use, that can potentially, it’s meant not to, but make changes. That’s why, for us, it is really important that, again, we want to mention we’re a co-pilot. We’re a co-pilot that the data is never like the data. If you apply, yes, but the vast majority comes from QuickBooks clearance on it. Data will be stored there. We just read it to answer your questions.

That’s really important. That’s one of probably the better benefits because you cannot hook up QuickBooks to ChatGPT.

We’re talking about financial information here. It doesn’t get more important than that.

I know. I have a question for you, Manfred. Let’s just say you’re dealing with an accounting or tax firm owner, a bookkeeping firm owner, and they want to start using AI today. They are totally overwhelmed with everything. The mental chaos, frustration, and anxiety of testing any of this sounds terrible to them. They’ve got enough on their plate, but it’s such a hot topic, and every conference they go to, there are eight million topics on AI. Based on what you’ve experienced, you’ve seen with firm owners, where should a firm owner start? What would be step one?

Overcoming Overwhelm By Starting With Simple Tests

Step one is getting comfortable with AI. To start using it yourself, say, “Let me hop on a product. Preferably, I think Veltrix is the best, but also ChatGPT, whatever it is.” Upload files and see what it can do. Also trying to put yourself in the mind of, “I have a task to do now to analyze something. Let me upload it to AI and see if it can do a task for me.” It is a scary time, and it’s a massive step to take. AI is coming. It’s not a matter of if it’s going to come in this industry. It’s a matter of when. It’s already here.

AI For Accounting Firms: Feeling overwhelmed by the tech wave? Start small by testing one file and see how fast you spot new profit opportunities.

It’s already here.

You can adapt now. The sooner, the better. It goes back to what I said before. The MIT study can either substitute people or make their offerings more valuable.

It’s true. What you’re saying, I literally did this last night. I uploaded a file of my dog’s health insurance, and I asked if it could estimate what it might be in year 10 or 12, because I’m creating a pet estate. I asked it to create the different amounts of money that I would need to set aside if something, God forbid, were to happen. Literally, it did it for me in about one minute where back in the day I would have, I had my spreadsheet open and I was going to figure it all out on my own. I was like, “Shoot, this literally took one minute.” That is fascinating. Not going to lie.

In ChatGPT, it came up with the study and gave a chart of which industries AI can be the strongest in the near future. Pretty much, business and finance were among the top, like one of the highest. It’s clear that it is coming for the financial industry. Again, it’s just important to adapt. That’s why we work with accounting firms to help them get on board, understand how the business and the product work, and how AI works to really work with them. There are accounting firms out there that are going to adapt faster. The other ones are going to take longer. The ones that unfortunately are not something you can really take your time on.

They could take their time. It’s just going to eat into their profits and other things because other people are just going to be able to do so many more tasks.

It’s just quicker onboarding, getting a new client, quicker onboarding, getting a better understanding of their business, not having to spend days or hours and hours trying to figure out how to give the best advice. We’re just going into AI, pressing a button, and it says, “Here’s the business analyst within 30 seconds. Here are their issues, or here are the things they need to fix.” Time is money.

You cannot get any more time back. That’s for sure. I wish. I keep telling all my clients, if they ever figure out a way, please let me know. I know we’ve talked about it a little bit, but maybe you can get more in-depth about it, because I’m sure there are firm owners wondering, because I always wonder. There are all these different AI tools. Step one, you’ve got to get comfortable. Step two, go upload files, see what it can do, give it a task to do, and see how it turns out.

What about firm owners that need AI tools that are specifically built around these financial workflows? As you said, the study that Entropic just did about business and finance being the highest, like what financial workflows would be the best, obviously with Veltrix, but rather than just purpose, general purpose AI? What does an accounting firm need as far as the AI tools built specifically around their financial workflows? What would that look like?

First, if we’re happy to help you go on a website, sign up, and we’ll work with you to teach you how to use it.

Do you work with firm owners one-on-one?

Yes. We work with firm owners. Once they join, we go through them, see what their needs are, and how best to help them. For our whole product, we’ve talked to dozens of accountants now to figure out how to make this product really work for accountants. It’s always a continuous process. We want every account. We understand that it’s one thing to use AI for your personal stuff. It’s your own and also for your own business. It’s a whole other thing when you’re a service provider, like an accountant, and using it for a third party.

There’s, like, there has to be even more trust there. That’s why it’s important for us to work with accounting firms to really build up this trust and to really show them how they can maximize value. Just AI, there’s so much complexity to it. Again, much about asking the right question. If you just jump onto AI today and you ask it questions, you might not get the answer you’re looking for because you asked the wrong question or you did not give enough context. That’s really where we want to work with accountants to help them in this process.

That’s a huge benefit that they can get on a call with you. It’s not like you can probably call someone at ChatGPT. I’m going to assume it’s as difficult as Facebook. Manfred, can you walk me through the process? Let’s say a firm owner’s like, “I want to try this AI out. This sounds like it’s speaking my language.” They go to your website, they sign up for a business health check, and then what? Within a day, they get on a call with someone from your team. Can you walk us through what that looks like and what you’ve done with other firm owners?

The one thing about us is that signing up is very easy. You can go on there, and within two minutes, you have a complete health check of the business.

Of their business.

Depending on which QuickBooks they connect to. If they connect their firm’s QuickBooks or their QuickBooks. Pretty much the process is, either you can go online, request an onboarding session, talk with us, or you just go sign up and try it out. We offer a free trial. The business health check is completely free. You can go in, and I would ask every accountant or firm owner to just go in and try it out. It’s completely free. Your data, as I said, gets stored there. You delete your account, and everything is gone. Just try a free health check. It takes you two minutes.

We’re trying to really point out the power of AI. You go on there, you see it, and you’ll see, for example, how many critical issues we’ve seen in the business, and things that the business does well. It gives you an impression of the power of AI. After that, if you want to sign up, try a free trial for two weeks. We would love you to join. That’s also where we differ from ChatGPT. We do this because AI is one part of the product. The other part is the ecosystem. We really tried to build an ecosystem around firm owners so that you can really, if you have multiple clients, you can have multiple workspaces on our account.

If you have ten clients, twenty clients, 50 clients, you can have different workspaces for all your clients where you can collaborate with them. We have a dashboard to visualize all the data. You can invite a business owner, say, “You look here once a month. We’ll send this report out that’s automatically generated by AI,” where you can go in and say, “Create me a monthly dashboard that shows my clients a quick overview of their finances or if you can afford to buy a truck, whatever it may be.” You can put it in there.

You can edit the charts, everything with AI, and you can shoot it with the party you’re working with, or you can have them join in and collaborate in the workspace so they can also access the data and ask their questions. Having worked in my own personal life, many times with accountants, the one fear that many business owners sometimes have is that if they do not understand something, if it’s an acronym, if it’s some of the data, sometimes they’re scared to ask. The question never gets answered. That’s also something where, if you have a collaborative workspace with the firm owner, if you send them this, they do not have to call you.

This is huge too, though, Manfred, because this is a proactive approach. Many firm owners are waiting until their next client meeting. What if you could set up a report that you created with the help of you guys that’s custom to your client, and this is delivered before your meeting that they can review in advance, and then you have your monthly or quarterly meeting with the client. It’s a really great proactive tool.

I see in 99% of the clients that I work with here at the Abundant Accountant in our eight-week sales mastery course, reactivity is the key. We’re always trying to figure out how to become more proactive. That is a really important element of what you guys are doing. If they can have different workspaces for every client, let’s say if they have 40 bookkeeping clients or 40 tax planning clients, and they each have their own workspace, then that’s a beautiful thing. You just dump it in both of your inboxes.

Accelerating Client Onboarding Before Your First Strategy Call

Even with onboarding a new client, I think what the product is, you can really impress your new clients because you have your first call and you say, “Give me access to your QuickBooks. You give access to your QuickBooks, and you can connect to it.” You can be like, “Actually, let’s have another call in one hour from now.” In this hour, you have the health check, and you can come back to me and be like, “Your business, actually this product, there’s this hot chocolate that is not working in the summer. Why don’t you just do it in the winter?”

If you have too much stock within one hour, or even less, you can instantly analyze the business and come back to the business owner, and they’re going to be like, “How do you know all this information?” You do not have to spend hours and hours for days and days going through all their QuickBooks to understand their business.

This could definitely be a time saver, especially for what I teach and what my motto is for anyone who’s tuned into me for years. I always say you want to get the data up front before you even have a sales meeting because you want to be able to look like a doctor before you go to surgery. You have an X-ray, you have a CT scan, you have an MRI. You have all these things and blood work before the doctor even meets with you before surgery. In the world of firm owners, this is the same thing. We want tax returns up front.

We want access to QuickBooks. We want to see financial statements. We want to see tax returns, depending on whether it’s a resolution case or a tax planning case. There are so many different variables. You want to be able to review all of this before a sales meeting. This can actually help prepare you on the technical side of figuring out what issues there might be within a few minutes, so you do not have to do a lot of that back work.

Exactly. It goes also again, as I said before, the context formation, because you were bringing up an example as a doctor with AI. If I go to a doctor and I say, “I have a terrible stomach flu or stomach pain, my back hurts, and so on.” It’s going to be, it might be a very different answer, saying, “Last week I was in Bali.” Versus saying, “I was back home in San Diego.” That’s the same thing also with AI.

If you analyze a business and you say, for example, you have a supermarket in New York City, and your profit margin is 3.5% doesn’t look great. If it knows the AI is going to know you’re in New York City, you’re going to be like, actually, hold on, that is amazing. That’s an amazing margin. That’s way better than the audit competition. It’s going to be very different advice that you’re going to give. If you also have access to the POS system of a client, you can tell them right away, “Actually, these and these products aren’t working for you.”

This is a huge time saver. Every firm owner, if you’re tuning in, you’ve got nothing to lose. You’ve got only some eyes to gain, opportunities to gain, and hopefully your eyes just open up so big like you’re a kid in a candy store when you get on a call with Manfred’s team, because I think if I owned an accounting firm, I’d be jumping all on this. I’m going to try to figure out the best way. As you said, this is a niche-specific tool for firm owners. That can be a huge differentiator. Your offering of the free week, two-week trial is great.

You can also do a business health check on your own business. Let’s say there’s a tax plan prospect, and they looked at the returns. They figured out what strategies would be good. Maybe they run it through the business health check and see what other, you know, opportunities there may be to reduce the tax liability, or you said the coffee maybe they shouldn’t sell in these months versus in the summer months, like just to see what your brain is finding versus what this brain is finding. You got nothing to lose.

All I would ask a firm owner is, you know, just go on the website, try the free health check on your own business, on a client’s business, whichever you feel comfortable with, and just have the health check. Just look at the information it gets. Click through it. With AI, you can look at all this or just do the health check. Go in the chat and just ask it something. “I’m an accountant at this firm. What should I be aware of?” See what it spits out.

Manfred, thank you so much for being here with us today on the show. It was an honor to have you here. What you guys are creating and doing will definitely have a ripple effect in the industry. As every day changes in this fast-moving world, I think what you’re doing is really great. I just want to say thanks for being here with us.

Thanks for having us. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.

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The most valuable accountants aren’t the ones who prepare the books. They’re the ones clients call before making a business decision. Veltrix helps you become that advisor. It analyzes your client’s financial data in seconds, highlights risks and opportunities, and gives you instant answers across all their financial information. That means less time digging through reports and more time delivering advice clients will happily pay you for. Try the free business health check at Veltrix.com.

Thank you all so much for joining Manfred and me on a very amazing special episode here on the show. Not only are they our sponsor for this quarter, but I just really believe in what they’re doing. Unlike Claude and ChatGPT, they’re made specifically for small firm owners. If I owned an accounting or tax firm, I would be hopping on and trying the business health check within seconds, not only just for my business, but even for my clients to see maybe what mistakes I had.

If you’re tired, overworked, feeling underpaid, you might be making some mistakes, and you might be missing something. It’s worth it to go check it out. You get a two-week free trial. That’s a pretty good deal. I’m sure their free trial is way better than the free ChatGPT that I’ve tried out. Give it a go, give it a try, see how you like it. It doesn’t hurt.

If you’re a small solo firm owner or you have a small team and think I’m too small to charge premium fees or I’m too small to have AI, think again. Just like Manfred said, use AI as your staff person, as your brainstorming partner. For me, pricing isn’t about how big your firm is. Pricing is about positioning, confidence, and having repeatable steps in the sales process that you can follow. If you ever hate selling or freezing up when someone asks you, what do you charge?

Here at The Abundant Accountant, we can help you. We can do that. You can always find us at TheAbundantCall.com. For this, I think each of you should really go try out Veltrix. See if it finds a hard decision that you couldn’t figure out on your own. Maybe it brings up an opportunity where a client can save money, or maybe there are some double expenses in their QuickBooks or Xero files, and see what’s possible. You’ve got nothing to lose, only something to gain. Thank you so much for joining Manfred and me on another amazing episode here at the show. I will see you in the next one.

Important Links

• Manfred Swarovski on LinkedIn
• Veltrix
• Veltrix on LinkedIn
• Veltrix on YouTube
• Veltrix on X
• The Abundant Call

About Manfred Swarovski

Manfred co-founded Veltrix to make business intelligence something every owner can actually use — For firm owners who lack awareness of their data, Veltrix is a business co-pilot AI that helps you make strategic decisions. Unlike Claude or ChatGPT, they are a dedicated small business solution that proactively detects your business’s problems or even your clients’ business problems and guides you to solutions on how to fix them or how to capitalize on your opportunities in just minutes! Manfred studied business at the University of San Diego (BBA and MBA) and brings a global, ethics-first view of how companies should be built and run.