The most powerful skill you can develop is delegation

These 6 strategies got me fully out of client work in my $5M practice: Delegation comes easier to some than others

Nobody rolls out of bed knowing how to do it one day, but it’s a muscle you can develop

It looks like:

Clients are no different than mice in a maze

If they can get the cheese by texting you, calling you directly, they’ll never go through your team again

13 tips build a maze that works FOR you: 1. Communicate a standard turnaround time. Doesn’t matter what it is, it just needs to exist.

2. Not all requests are created equal. Your turnaround time is your *acknowledgment* time. Many requests will take longer to resolve.

Last week's ChatGPT update made it easier to dial in what you want from the model

How it works, swipeable prompts for tax research, emails + more 👇 In this thread I'll run you through how it works

And how to get access to my most popular prompts for bookkeeping, tax & client mgmt tasks

Newly rewritten for custom instructions 🎉

Check this out

I'm using GPT-4 to help me categorized ambiguous accounting transactions

How it works & a swipeable prompt for you to do the same: You paste a list of transactions into ChatGPT

The ugly bank ones where you have to Google it

And it fetches the most likely merchant, links the website, guesses the categorization, and gives a one sentence explainer of what the merchant does

For tax pros, what happened yesterday may be the most significant profession-shifting event in decades

OpenAI created a wave that is bigger than any of us, whether we agree with it or not

Some thoughts on how best to navigate the coming months 👇 GPT-4 was quite possibly the most anticipated product launch of all-time

It was an expansion of GPT3.5, the technology behind ChatGPT the fastest growing app of all time and by some accounts a civilization-altering tool

So the excitement behind GPT-4 was understandable

This one goes out to the real ChatGPT nerds

A reusable framework to turn json menu objects into a text-based menu system

How it works + a swipe file: I have an array of json menu objects with

ID
label
Array of options objects

Each option has a label
And a destination, the id of the menu to nav to if selected

Ready for your mind to be blown? 🤯

Here's an easy way to set up reusable data transformations

🌈With AI🌈 We'll create a reusable workflow for the age-old problem:

- App A exports a CSV in one format
- App B imports a CSV in a different format

Start by loading the App A export CSV into ChatGPT

Last week I generated over a thousand images with AI

I'd never messed with AI art previously

Here's a quick thread about what I learned, and some non-obvious use-cases to consider: Understanding AI art seemed like a great hack so I set myself the goal of generating supporting images for an existing story

Like, something that could be a coffee-table book

Alright let's boil this AI madness down to something concrete:

My 2023 AI predictions for the public accounting profession: 1️⃣ Generative Email Replies

This will be much better than the basic autocomplete we have today

Why? Now we can combine artificial general intelligence (AGI - I know, not that AGI) with *every email you've ever sent*

Spreadsheets are perceived as the *manual* way to do something

But did you know you can automate your sheets?

Buckle up nerds 🤓: 👹 K but why

1️⃣ Build out complicated data manipulation in a SS, add inputs & pull outputs on an automated basis
2️⃣ SS' as a proof of work - generate your documentation automatically
3️⃣ Third party requirements - to complete a prescribed SS/CSV format

3 shortcuts to learn:

Your job as a business owner is to attract the tiny tiny subset of people who MOST value what you do

99.9% of people will say you're too expensive, doesn't matter, you aren't for them!

A quick story of one such example for me this year: I'm a believer in video because it's:
✅Asynchronous
✅Seems high-effort
✅Reminds customers you're human

So in my accounting firm we mandated video on all financial statement deliveries. No financials went out the door without a 3 minute video explainer

Behind every company is a big, ugly, accounting file

It's one of the only things all SMBs have in common

And whether you're an accountant or not, it's a treasure trove of valuable info

Let me show you a way I build passive income around other people's accounting files 👇 I have monthly engagements ranging from $100/mo to thousands/mo built on a simple formula

1️⃣ Sync accounting data to an external service
2️⃣ Build a mobile app on top of that data
3️⃣ Incorporate some custom business logic into the app

Spoiler: I'm not a developer

When you receive a new client inquiry in your service biz

What are the questions you need to ask before letting them in the door?

I'll start, here are two of mine: Why are you changing providers?

I use this to ensure we can actually deliver where the previous group couldn't

And assess whether the client has unreasonable expectations (ie the last personal wouldn't call me back same-day)

The average cost to develop a simple mobile app today is 40k-60k

But I'm going to show you how to build one FOR FREE.. in less than 5 minutes

No really

Get ready to impress your friends 👇 First you need a data source, it could be Excel, Airtable, Google Sheets, CSV

*Things* that you're going to manage with the app

I'll use some credit card transactions I've got in this Google Sheets

But this could be anything.. people, bills, inventory items, whatever

Ok I'll bite, @baldridgecpa

Like it or not, loopholes are alive & well in 2022

A thread of my favorite CAN'T MISS loopholes you should be taking advantage of: Loopholes date back to 200 BC - Archimedes was credited with first using them:

"Archimedes had had the walls pierced with large numbers of loopholes at the height of a man, which were about a palm's breadth wide at the outer surface of the walls"

A little thought experiment to remind you why your capacity problem is actually a pricing problem

And why doing more work to make more money is a fallacy

The $400 1040 minimum
🆚
The $800 1040 minimum

🧵 400 & 800 are interchangeable, the same principals apply regardless of amount

But I think $400 is median non-twitter-woke threshold for small firms today

Assume 400 minimum person operates at a 50% margin

So here's the truth:

You aren't going to change the AICPA
You aren't going to change Big4
You aren't going to change publications like the Journal of Accountancy

You're simply going to move onto something new, something more relevant The sooner we divert our energy away from dunking on old-thymey accounting

And accept it's a machine that was made for a different era

The sooner we can focus on something better, building what's next

Some arithmetic porn to remind you price is 👑

Assume a 40% profit margin

You increase prices 20%... but what if customers leave and my revenue tanks?

🔼In a 20% increase
🔽More than 33% have to leave for PROFIT to go down

It gets better 👇🧵 Run a business 33% smaller and make the same money? 🤔

Retain the top performing 66% of staff/contractors/vendors/projects? 🤔

A bunch more examples 👇

Oh my golly it only took 17 days

Thanks to all you lovely people

Here's a thread of stupid things I've done on my YouTube channel that come up when I search for "@JStaatsCPA YouTube": 🧵

https://twitter.com/JStaatsCPA/status/1478146101320425472

I grew a ponytail

https://twitter.com/JStaatsCPA/status/1448033776936710144?s=20

Bench has worked on productized bookkeeping since 2012, and regardless of how you feel about them

They're the best model we have for what productized bookkeeping can be today once it's past the stage of being propped-up by VC money

Last year they made a big strategic shift 👇 Users now get a Bench business checking account on signup

So when you have a $60M round, and all the data of the largest bookkeeping group in North America, what do you do?

You take control of the banking data

The notion of owning your own data is completely foreign to accounting firms

It has been locked inside proprietary databases, and only accessible as long as you're paying for app X

But this is changing, and opens up an exciting opportunity

A couple thoughts 🧵 SAAS products are now wrapped with APIs, or interfaces to get data in & out of those apps

Whether they make them publicly available or not, all products have them

The same could soon be true of your service business