The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast

114 ⎸ [SYSTEMS] TaxDome for Bookkeepers with Cabot & Main

• Serena Shoup, CPA • Episode 114

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In this interview episode, I chat with Ashley & Katie of Cabot & Main, a company that specializes in helping accountants setup systems, workflows & automations.

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • How Ashley & Katie created their business together
  • What a typical TaxDome Setup looks like
  • Why TaxDome is good for bookkeepers, not just Tax pro’s
  • How to beat overwhelm with systems & workflows

Resources mentioned in this episode:

About our Guests

Katie Toscano & Ashley Meripol are former corporate accountants, turned operations & project managers who found a love for helping the accounting business owner community. After doing their own thing as business owners for a few years in bookkeeping and operations, they decided to partner together to bring their 10+ years each of experience to helping their clients thrive. They were tired of seeing their accounting friends work ridiculous hours, sacrificing time with family, stress & overwhelm just because that’s the way it’s always been. Ashley & Katie have a serious love for all things systems, organization, technology and business, and are passionate about the "anti-hustle" life of working smarter not harder, and taking those Saturdays off.

They are excited to launch their new monthly membership, the Tax Tech Collective as a space for business owners to gain access to their signature TaxDome Accelerator course designed to deliver rapid results, equipping accounting pros with actionable steps, time-saving templates, access to a thriving community of like-minded professionals, and specialized training for their admin support team.

Connect with Cabot & Main:

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it's almost like the click of the button and you can just go through that onboarding process. It's automated. So you don't necessarily have to go in and touch everything. And it's going to keep the process moving along. And then when it comes to monthly bookkeeping, for example, there's a lot of things you need to request from your clients or emails you need to send your clients documents you need questionnaires. All those things can be set up on an ongoing uh, recurring basis. So you have that process, you know, what works for you and your business, and you can basically rinse and repeat. You set it up for each client. You can customize some things for all their different needs. And then it just is going on and on, you know, every month or quarterly or whatever it is so that you can use that same process. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You don't have to type out all their emails. You can, you know, request all the things that you need from your clients. So it's great for you because you have that process that works and you're reusing it every time. For the last two months, if you've been following along on the podcast. You may have been listening to our special niche series where I interviewed. Many accounting firm owners who specialized and niche in a certain industry or a certain software. And hopefully you gained a ton of value and took away lots of ideas that you can implement in your own bookkeeping or accounting business. This month, we are doing a series on systems. Again, I will be interviewing experts on systems as they pertain to bookkeeping and accounting. And this is the first of our systems episodes. I hope you enjoy. If you've been enjoying these special series, please take a screenshot, share them on the socials. Tag me at ambitious bookkeeper. And let me know what has been your biggest takeaway? Another great way to support this is to go ahead and review our podcast and drop a question in there for me, because I have something special dropping, as well around little Q and A's. So if you have a question you'd like answered, please send me a DM. And I will record a short and sweet podcast episode and maybe you'll hear it on the air. Thank you so much for supporting the show. I truly appreciate you tuning in each week. And as does my team, we put a lot of effort into producing these shows, and I hope that you are finding tons of value, inspiration, and learning a thing or two. Alright, now let's get into today's episode. Welcome back to the ambitious bookkeeper podcast. Today I have two special guests on with me, Katie and Ashley of Cabot in Main, who specialize in setting up systems and workflows for accounting firms. So welcome Ashley and Katie. I'm super excited to have you on the podcast. Whoever wants to kind of like intro. themselves first and the business, I'll let you kind of take the lead. So can you give us like a background of your business, how you got there and how you guys came together? Yeah. So I'm Ashley. Thank you so much for having us here. And so Katie and I, like you mentioned we work with accountants to set up workflows and automations. And we didn't always do that. We actually just to share a little bit of our background. We both worked in the corporate world together for, for 10 years. That's where we first met. I remember the first project we worked on creating a training program, and you know, we, we did well in the corporate world. We enjoyed it for a while, and it got to a point, though, that we just kind of burned out. We had started families and we were working late nights and we're both high achievers and just wanted to do well but it got to a point where it just, we kind of had this moment of like I don't know that this is what I want. And so, Katie. She can share her story too. She left a little bit before I did, but we ended up starting our own businesses. We both worked for an accounting and operations firm and did, did that for a long time. So my first thing was, I'm going to be a bookkeeper because I know how to do accounting and that's how I started. So I really loved that kind of got to the point where. I burnt out again. And so I was like, I left, I have all this freedom, but I got, I was working those late nights again, grew pretty quickly, which was amazing, but kind of struggled because burnt out. And so that's the point where Katie and I really, it was actually Katie. Who's like, Ashley, I made a comment of like, maybe I should just go back to the corporate world. And she's like, you cannot do that. You know, we left for a reason. And that was kind of that pivotal moment, I would say, where we really got back to those operations routes from the corporate world and started putting in systems into our business. And we loved it so much that sort of pivoted. And now that is our main focus is setting up those. Systems and workflows and really focusing on the accounting industry since that was kind of near and dear to our heart. I'll let Katie kind of share a little bit too. Yeah. I mean, I think Ashley summed up kind of our story together. Like she said, I worked in corporate world and did it. I was in accounting. I was also worked as a project manager and helping our accounting department set up systems and automation and all of that. And similar to Ashley, when I left, I was burnt out. I wanted to do something on my own and I had absolutely no idea what that was. I just knew I needed something different. So I tried a few different things. And when Ashley and I came together, one of the things that I had always loved was the operations and the systems. And so we still kind of, we're trying to figure out what we wanted to do, but we just kept coming back to, we're accountants, and we also happen to love systems and, creating efficiencies and all of that. And so, you know, like Ashley said, I think we kind of came to this realization of we love doing those things. So let's help other people do them as well. And it's not necessarily like a love for technology and all that. I think it's The benefits of that and getting back to making sure that we have enough time and our clients have enough time to do the things that matter the most to them and technology and systems and automation is the way to do that. So, I think it really just kind of came full circle for us as far as working with accountants, being accountants and loving to give back that time. That's so important to us too. Yeah, that's a. Amazing how you guys came together. I've, I've definitely worked with people in corporate that I'm like, if I ever could, like, I would want to work with them again. So it sounds like you guys had that. Did you work at the same company? Is that where you met? Okay. We did. You both were in the accounting department or like project management or Yep. So we were like basically straight out of college accountants working together. And I think the very first project for me, at least that I ever did at the company was working directly with Ashley. So we were accountants working on projects and trying to come up with a system to help onboard new hires into our team. So. I mean, it was literally one of the very first things we did, and it's something that we actually do with our clients now. So every time we're working on, you know, onboarding or anything like that, we get a little excited. We're like, Oh, this is where we started a long, long time ago. Yeah. So now the two of you have a business together. So Ashley, you said that you started out. With your own bookkeeping business. Is that correct? And then Katie, did you also start out doing that? And then you guys came together, walk me through now. So I, like I said, really didn't know what I wanted to do. So my last role in corporate was a project manager. But I didn't really think that that was something that. I could go do for people. I think at the time I didn't really know the path for what that could look like. So I literally tried a few different things. I did try bookkeeping really briefly. I did some marketing. I had worked in nonprofits doing some marketing. And so I did that for a few clients and then quickly started pivoting to, I was constantly like, let's look at your operations, how the SOP is looking. So I kind of kept finding myself leaning in and doing more of that. And then when Ashley and I joined together, we really, we knew we wanted to work together. We just had always worked so well, we're good friends and we knew we could do more, but we were still trying to figure out. Exactly what that was. I was doing the operations work still and Ashley was doing the bookkeeping still so it took a little while for us to see, you know, oh, these two really met mesh well together doing, you know, the systems and automation for accountants. Yeah. So what was like your first. I guess your first consulting gig with like an accounting firm, like how did that go versus like how you have things set up now, I'm always interested to see like a before and after basically of like, what, what did you struggle through like the most with maybe it was getting your first client or like just organizing the project or like, how did, how did it look back then versus how it looks now? Well, it's funny because when we first started doing operations and we said, okay, let's come in and help small businesses do that. We actually didn't start with accounting first. We were just like help anybody. Yeah. And we helped, you know, a lot of different industries and then had someone that worked with us in a mastermind who was a tax accountant and bookkeeper share that. She needed some help, but she wanted to work in the system, Tax Dome and at the time, we weren't overly familiar with that system. In my bookkeeping practice, I had set up systems in general, and a process using some automation and technology, but hadn't ventured into that. And so, it we decided to take it on. We're like, let's see, let's see how we like that. So the very first time was very much like just diving in and doing lots of research and, and finding ways to do it. And it was a little bit more experimental. So applying some of the concepts we knew, but to this new system, we hadn't worked in and then we ended up loving it and deciding, oh, my gosh. We were meant to work with accountants. That's where we came from. We love this. We know the industry. And from there on, we started focusing, we looked at different accounting systems, but really liked tax domes specifically. So I think where we are now. We have a pretty standard process in terms of how we understand a client's business, how we gather information from them, how we come up with that best system before it was very much like experimental and trying this and that. So now I would say we have our own system for how we help clients. It looks a little bit different now. Awesome. So you guys specialize in setting up tax dome for accountants. Yes, we do. Okay. Are there any other systems that you particularly like specialize in for workflows or like if someone's not a tax firm, they're just doing bookkeeping, they're probably not going to implement tax dome, right? Right. So I was going to say one of the things that we really started with actually with Dubsado, so in our own business, Dubsado and ClickUp are our two main primary systems that we've used for, for years now, and we really like them and they are great, what we've found. And actually a lot of our clients have worked also in Asana, that's another. One as well, but specifically with Dubsado, one of the things we found is it's a really good place to start when you have, you know, a smaller client load. And then we've helped transition our clients as they grow into using tax them because it really is set up to help you scale and as you take on a higher volume of clients. Dubsado is a little bit more challenging to work with. And so we've found that we're really encouraging people to make that transition a little bit sooner because, you know, having great systems from the beginning. A lot of people don't do that, but it's, it's such a game changer because you can set things up right when you have a small pool and it just makes it so much easier as you grow. And it's going to take you a lot less time, you know, on each individual client because you already have everything set up. So we do. We love all of those systems. Really? There's so many good ones out there. I think specifically for us with tax and what we found is it just does a lot more and it helps you again with that bigger volume of clients. And so it's a little more comprehensive takes a little bit more work, you know, and setting it up from the get go, but it's totally worth it as you grow your business too. One thing I would add with TaxDome is the name is a little bit misleading because it has tax in it. So that's a question we get pretty often is, oh, but I don't do taxes. I do bookkeeping, but I don't venture on the tax side. This must not be for me. And it actually is really Bethesda made for any type of accounting firm. So we've actually helped People who are bookkeepers and solely do bookkeeping set it up and set it up in a way that's pretty customized by client. Cause as a bookkeeper, sometimes, you know, the unique needs of each client are a little different. So we've actually set up quite a few bookkeepers in tax dome as well. So not just for tax accountants. Okay. Yeah. That was going to be my question. I was like, would you say that tax dome is a solution for just the. Pure bookkeeping firm. And if so, like, at what point would you suggest, because you mentioned, like, if someone's starting out on Dubsado and they have a lower client load, is there a point where you would say, if you plan on growing past X number of clients, we suggest setting up tax dome or like, what does that look like? I would say it's pretty small. I would say like anything more than a handful of clients, Taxdome could be a good solution. So the Absado is where I started when I put up systems and we use ClickUp, which I know a lot of accountants also use Asana, pretty similar, and it worked pretty well for me. But had I known about TaxStone at the time, I probably would have chosen TaxStone because it's all integrated into one. So even with a small client load, a nice part is you can consolidate your system. So you can get rid of those five different systems that you use to sign contracts, to track your task management, to send out questionnaires for your clients. You can kind of do it in that one place. So It's not so much a cost thing because you can actually consolidate a lot and starting at a little bit smaller place. Actually has its benefits because, you know, if you're, if you're growing and have so many clients, it's a little bit harder to transition to a new system. So a lot of people we've talked to say, I wish I would have done this a little bit earlier on. Yeah. And even for us too. I mean, I think that was our own lesson learned because we grew, like Ashley said earlier, we grew really fast. And even with our operations background, we hadn't spent enough time setting up our systems. And then we're sitting there in this like, Chaos being like, oh my gosh, if only we had done this sooner. So I feel like for us, that was such a big lesson learned of the earlier in the process, you can get those things or the earlier in your business or earlier in your, you know, volume of clients that you can set those things up. You're not going to regret it. You will absolutely not regret setting up your systems and getting everything, you know, set up in a way that you can manage, but you might regret not doing it for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I, it's, that's always the thing. It's like, Oh, I wish I'd have hired sooner. I wish I would've done this sooner. I wish I would've done that sooner. And it's funny because like, I think what ends up holding people back the most is that it usually is like. A money thing initially, it's like, well, I don't want to spend the money on that robust of a system because maybe I don't know how fast I'm going to grow or whatever, but it usually comes back to a money situation. But then in hindsight, you're like, I could have, like, I spent so much money on all these other things. Like I could have just invested in this system from the very beginning and yeah, maybe it was a little pricier than the alternative, but. We would have gotten it set up when we had five clients instead of now we're trying to implement this for 20 or whatever. Right. Right. So, yeah, I always encourage looking at the ROI too, because I know I, I was. An accountant by nature, that's just kind of who I was and worked in accounting for a long time and I was very cost sensitive in the beginning and we were leaving this corporate salary, starting our own business. And that was a little scary. And so it is easy to say, well, I'll do, I'll just make do without that for a while. And, and we did that a lot in the beginning. And but, but I think sometimes that helps to look at, well, wow, what's the trade off If I don't do this or what time can I save that I can invest then and maybe some more sales efforts or maybe just to have time back to have a better work life balance. So kind of looking at that, that helps. And, and another thing with that, it doesn't have to be everything right away. It's not like if you, if you're just starting your bookkeeping business, you don't have to get taxed on right away or else you'll fail, right? It's right. There's a lot of things you can do in the beginning. If you think about systems and, you know, we did a lot with. Google drive in the beginning and click up. Right. So there's a lot you can do, but not waiting too long to make that jump and kind of thinking forward. Yeah. What are some of the, like the biggest benefits of implementing something like tax dome? Like, can you walk us through like, what exact, like kind of. An overall setup of what it looks like. It might be kind of hard without visuals, but like, what are you replacing with tax dome for someone who is piecing together a bunch of systems and Like kind of walk me through like a typical, let's say a bookkeeping firm set up. Yeah. So I would say just kind of out of the gate, one of the biggest things is not reinventing the wheel every time. So let's say you're onboarding your new client. And you're onboarding another one tomorrow and another one the next day. And that's great. Cause you're going right. But you don't have to start from scratch and start thinking about, okay, what do I need to ask them? What information do I need to that from them? What documents do I need to collect? Oh, what, what do I want to put in my proposal? What about my contract? Like all those things that you might be starting just from an onboarding perspective, starting from scratch. Every time you can set every single one of those up. In a system like Dubsado, and then it's almost like the click of the button and you can just go through that onboarding process. It's automated. So you don't necessarily have to go in and touch everything. And it's going to keep the process moving along. And then when it comes to monthly bookkeeping, for example, there's a lot of things you need to request from your clients or emails you need to send your clients documents you need questionnaires. All those things can be set up on an ongoing uh, recurring basis. So you have that process, you know, what works for you and your business, and you can basically rinse and repeat. You set it up for each client. You can customize some things for all their different needs. And then it just is going on and on, you know, every month or quarterly or whatever it is so that you can use that same process. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You don't have to type out all their emails. You can, you know, request all the things that you need from your clients. So it's great for you because you have that process that works and you're reusing it every time. But also for your clients, they, they get to know what to expect the timing, the updates, the requests, all those things for them. It's great from a client perspective, because. They have a simple way to use it. They have a client portal. They can go in and upload secure documents to sign things, all the things they may need to do. From a client perspective, it's really great as well. Ashley, I don't know if you'd add anything onto that too. Yeah. I think just, you know, some of the systems that can replace too. So Katie described that. Onboarding process that you can repeat over and over. So there's unlimited e signatures in there. So if you have a separate e signature program, it can completely replace that. So contracts, things like that you can store in there. Their questionnaire system is really amazing because you can have conditional formatting. So like an onboarding questionnaire where you're gathering information from a client. And one of the best things I do love about it also is it's really secure. So if you're requesting any sensitive information from your client, whether it's bank account numbers or logins, if they're providing this information to you, the system is secure. So that's like one major bonus I would point out. And I know for me, one of the challenges when I started to grow as a bookkeeper is. Keeping track of everything and where it was, and you have clients emailing you this. And like when it was a few clients, it was not so bad. I could just kind of wing it and, you know, make sure everyone's taken care of. But the more clients I added on, it starts to get kind of hard to track everyone and where they're at at every moment, making sure you're getting things on time. And so that's why this workflow is beautiful because you have different kind of places where the client's at and maybe that monthly process, and you can easily see where each one is at. And parts of the process are automated. So if let's say that example where you do have to request a statement from a client, once they give that to you, their job automatically moves on to the next stage. So, you know, okay, now I can go ahead and start on this one. It's not having to manually track all of those things. And that was, that's just huge from an overall client management standpoint. Yeah, I can, I can see the benefit of that, of not having to like, okay, did this client send us what we asked for and you're like spending time checking, Oh, it's not in the folder. Okay. I got to move on to the next, the next client. And it's like, you're constantly like going back and forth. And interrupting your own workflow with that. So, yeah. And the reminders on that point too, because, you know, sometimes it does take a couple prompts. They're busy business owners and they forget sometimes. And so you can have automatic reminders if they didn't provide something yet, you can set whatever frequency you'd like to follow up on that. So that's a big time saver too. Does tax dome have a like feature where like. If you know you're going to need the same thing every month, like it sends automatically sends the thing to them, or do you have to like log in and like at least trigger it? And then after that, the reminders go. Now, that's one of the beautiful things about it is the ability to have recurring workflows, recurring tasks, things like that, that can be set up so that they're automatically happening. And I think, especially in, you know, something where you have a monthly process and bookkeeping is a great example where you, you need to do this every month, you need to request, you know, the. Whatever documents you need to, you know, have them sign something you need to send them an email, whatever it is. You can set it up. So it just recurs every month or quarter or whatever the frequency is for that particular job. Yeah. Wow. That's pretty amazing. Yeah. I'm, I'm one of those people that like thought tax dome was just for tax accountants. Like, Oh, there is no, it's pretty common. You can look at it. Right. Yeah. And actually I feel like one of the areas that we've been getting the most questions lately is specifically around bookkeeping and the customization and you know, each client is. Unique and has unique things that they need. And so I think that's been one of the concerns that we've seen, you know, Oh, can we do that in tax dome? And there are a lot of customization and types of different types of things that you can do within tax them to meet the different needs of your clients. They have custom fields, for example. And like Ashley was mentioning a lot of conditional formatting and conditional questions and things like that, that you can use to really meet the needs of, you know, your unique. Clients and what they really need. Yeah. Yeah. We found bookkeepers tend to have a little bit more nuance with clients. That's what I experienced. Anyway, from a tax perspective, you know, they have different business types, but a 1040 is a 1040 and, you know, it's pretty straightforward. But with businesses, if you work with multiple industries or even within the same industry, it's You might have different needs. One client has to send you their statements. Cause maybe you don't have their login or one client. You have an additional task where they own a piece of equipment that you have to do something with. You know, it's just, there's a lot more nuance in that. And that's the beauty of it. It's like, Hey, these five clients send them this email before the end of the month. But these 10 over here, we don't need that. We just want to kick something off on the first. And let them know we're getting started. And so there's just so much customization. You can do in there, which is really great. That's awesome. As far as the proposal piece. Cause I know we talked about Dubsado. A lot of people use Dubsado for the proposal in the contract. Is that something that TaxDome can replace as well? So that is a feature that is supposed to be coming basically any day now, you know, it actually might even be happening today. I don't know yet, but they have been talking about proposals for a long time. I think that is the one gap that they have had, I would say, is that that piece has been missing. We do have a workaround for that, where you can actually set it up, you can send it out, you can customize it, all the things, but it's not technically a proposal in the system. However, again, that should be coming up anytime now. And we're looking forward to that quite a bit, I would say as well. And that's another thing we have found, you know, we've worked with a ton of different systems and I do feel like Tax Dome is really good at listening to what their users actually need and want. They have a roadmap they put out to say, Hey, here's what we're working on. And there's constantly new features and updates and upgrades and all the things. And they really do invest in their platform, which is one of the things that we've found to be really encouraging. And one of the reasons that we do invest a lot of time into the system is knowing that. You know, some of these issues we may have, or things that pop up, they're working on them and they're, they're listening to feedback and they're implementing the things that people really need. Yeah. That's always important when you are choosing a system or a platform to work with. I know that's like the main reason, I mean, one of the many reasons why I prefer Xero because their support is just so amazing. But yeah, it makes a big difference when you have that support and know their continued development of the program. Yeah, absolutely. As far as like price points go, I mean, you don't have to like mention what their pricing is like, but is it because that's always subject to change, right? Whenever you're listening to this episode, it's probably going to be different, but is it like on a per client pricing or do you buy like a chunk of like, what is the pricing structure like with tax dome? That's the great part is you could have add more and more clients and the price won't change for you. So it is a flat fee. They have different options. They have a lite version and a pro version. We definitely recommend the pro version. It's going to really get you that automation. That's going to save you that time. It's just worth the investment in our opinion. But. As you grow, I know a lot of software is like, okay, cool. This is great for 10 clients, but once you have more, we're going to charge you more fees and that doesn't happen here. So there's unlimited clients, unlimited e signatures and limited storage. So that doesn't change as you, your firm grows. The only thing I would add on that that does is the users so they do charge by the user. So, if you have a, you know, a couple of team members you do need to purchase additional licenses for each of your users to use. Yeah. That makes sense. If they're, if they're not charging per client, it's gotta be one or the other. Right. Right. Yeah. So when do you find like the best point for someone as a bookkeeper or an accounting firm owner to come to you? Obviously it's going to be like as soon as possible, but like, is there a sweet spot of like, when it really makes sense for somebody to come. To you guys to have you start setting these systems up. Yeah, I think there's a, there's a couple of different points, but most of the time, what we find is a lot of people will purchase tax them. They know they want it. They know they need it. And it sits there and they maybe put their clients in there and they say, I'm going to set it up. And then, you know, life gets in the way for all of us and it sits there a little longer than they want it to. And so, you know, there's a recognition that at some point you need help. And so what we've found for the most part is it's typically people who have already purchased tax dome or know they need it. And are realizing they just don't have the time to set it up and they want it done fairly quickly. And a lot of times if they, if they do it themselves, they, it takes months. It does. That's just the reality because, you know, you're juggling a billion things at once. And so I'd say for the most part, it's typically when you recognize you need to do something different, but you also recognize the fact that you don't have the time to invest into it. I don't know if you would add anything else. I think the only other thing is if someone is thinking, okay, I know I want systems. Let's try out this tax dome. I, we, we generally recommend people have at least some clients already. So if they're coming with no clients could set it up. But I find that once you have at least a few clients and you've gone through those monthly cycles and you've seen just kind of how. You want your business to work. That's helpful because we have some information to go off of in terms of your wants and needs. That being said, we're, we're happy to bring best practices and hey, we found it really works well if we set things up this way and. And share ideas and consult. But I think having a few clients under your belt is helpful because then you can also see, put them into the system and see how it works and test it out. Yeah. Yeah. So are there other than tax dome, are there other systems that you guys? Specifically we'll set up for clients and also my part two to that question is if someone does go with you to set up a tax dome, for example, do you have like a certain timeline that you usually complete those in? Like, is it a couple of weeks? Is it a month? Like what does that look like typically? The tax stone is really the main one that we're focusing on. Now. We were doing some Dubsado as well. And a lot of times in a consult call, we talk through kind of the needs and if we felt like tax stone wasn't a good fit, we wouldn't push it. So there are like using a combination of Dubsado or Asana or click up. We have done builds in that area. But with tax domes specifically, it kind of depends. There's a few different ways to do it. Some people just want one workflow set up and not build out the whole thing. I would say that generally takes like a week or so. For the full builds, it really depends on the complexity and what they're looking to do with it. That can take from, you know, two weeks to four weeks, I would say on average. Yeah, that's always good to have an idea of like the time involved and then also like what is required of someone who wants that set up like there's always a time investment on the person, even if you're outsourcing something right you're always going to be required to like I've got to meet with you I need to get things out of your brain like what is that typically look like so that people can kind of be aware of like what's their time commitment. Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So we Have a questionnaire that we have clients fill out and that's going to get a good understanding of what your current processes are like. And not that we can't talk about that and tweak as we fit it into the workflows gathering certain documents from you. So if you have contracts you're using or proposals, you're using Gathering anything that you already do have established is helpful. So there is a process where there's a questionnaire where they put that in. And then we have a series of calls, depending on the build size. Generally, it's going to be a kickoff kind of design call where we go over that information and we really ask the right questions to get underneath. The needs and how we can design a system that really works with that business. Then for larger builds, we typically have an hour check and call just to go over some of our ideas, how it's going, what questions we have, and then we'll have a final delivery call as well. So it's really about three hours of calls, I would say, spread out as well as the time to kind of document. Some of your processing questions as well. The one thing I would add on as well as at the end, we know it's really important to us that our clients are successful when they use taxome and we don't just, you know, drop it off and say, great, you know so we do put together an implementation plan and training as well. And so we have a training ball of videos. And so there's also the time commitment in. We have it set up, but now you have to understand it and run with it. And so there is a series of, of those action items basically that our clients go through to help them get it set up, no, you know, not get it set up, but get used to using it and get trained on it for them, for their team so that they can implement it successfully as well. And so we have. About a two week post build implementation period where we do give them those action items and those those trainings and what not to help them get up to speed so that they can run with it smoothly. Awesome. Yeah. I love the whole process you guys have laid out as a bookkeeper. If you're listening to this, like this is how a sales call should go with your clients, like walk them through your process. Like what time commitment is required of them? Like what kind of systems are you using when, you know, when does. Period start all that kind of stuff. So yeah, beautiful ladies. Do you have any other like tips or suggestions for someone who might be, I know your answer is going to be like implement the system, but like little quick wins that, that someone is, if someone's feeling really overwhelmed and they're like in a position where they're like, okay, I know I need to implement a system. Like, where do I even, um, Where do I even begin? Like, what would you suggest? So I'll throw mine out and then Ashley can tell me a different one. I love the idea of a brain dump. So get it out of your head and onto paper, whatever it is that you're doing, you know, from the kickoff with a client and proposal and sales process and all those things, just start writing down all the things that you do and whatever that process is. And once you have that, I think it's really beneficial to then go back with a fresh set of eyes and say, like, why am I doing that? Or could I, could I automate this or can I create a template for this email and start to just go through each of those things and, and think about how you could improve it. We have this. Continuous my improvement mindset that we learned in the corporate world and I know a lot of the, you know, former corporate people may may have this as well where there's this, you know, ability to look at things and improve just 1% and think about how that 1% can really transform, you know, over time because then you do another 1%. So we like to look at processes and look at workflows and say like, okay, how can I just tweak this one thing just a little bit. Thank you. And so you start to go through and you go through the automate, you know, what can I automate? What can I delegate? What can I eliminate? And you start to get a really good process and then you can take that process and then you can start to put it into some software to start to, you know, do some of that automation and whatnot. Yeah, I love that. That's, that's good. I like the, the brain dump getting it all out of the head. And my, the thing I was thinking of is similar to Katie's. I, so I am guilty of having an all or nothing, nothing mindset. It's like, go big or go home. Like, let's like put everything all into this, but what can happen sometimes is. Yeah. That's impossible. It's impossible to put everything into it up front and then it's easy to get overwhelmed and to give up. So do the brain dump and just pick one thing. Pick one small place to start that you think could make your life easier. Maybe it's, I'm not going to do all these systems yet, but I have Google drive and I can communicate with my clients that way. And I'm going to have a spreadsheet where we can communicate back and forth. Maybe it's just something small to get you a little more organized or a little easier than where you're at today, because you can always add on. We're not going to do everything all at once. So that would be my. Piece of advice. Yeah. That's an, that's an important one. I think a lot of us get stuck in that trap of like, Oh, if I can't implement the whole entire thing and make it perfect, I'm just not even going to try. Right. Right. So, yeah. Well, thank you guys so much for coming on today. If someone wants to learn more about working with you, where's the best place for them to get more information or to connect with you. Yep. So we're on Instagram. You can go to a Cabot in Maine and we hang out there all day long. Awesome. We will definitely link that in the show notes. Thank you guys so much. I appreciate your time today and it's been a pleasure. Yes. Thank you so much for having us on. Appreciate it. Great being here. Bye. Bye.

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