Hey there, happy Friday,

It’s been a long week for me!

We’ve been talking about proactive client services and keeping clients happy on a few of the last newsletters and this is an extension of that. Let’s talk about how you should move towards sharing more real-time data/financials with your clients.

Note - This one is a bit more CAS focused!

I don’t know about you, but I find it embarrassing jumping on a monthly financial call with a client and talking about something that happened 2-4 weeks ago.

It’s happened my whole career and to help counter this feeling, I even started sharing a little bit of the numbers for the current month I’m in.

Things like fraud, mistakes, and opportunities don’t get noticed until weeks later.

Let’s be honest, that doesn’t really cut it anymore. As a business owner, I feel like I want financial data at least weekly.

Where are we vs our budget, how are sales coming in, and has anything hit the bank that was unexpected?

We have the tools and the tech to deliver faster, better financial insights. So why are we still stuck in this monthly groove?

I feel a strong urge to pack as much value as I can into each client engagement.

If I can connect Stripe to Quickbooks and have real-time sales data come in for a client, I’m absolutely going to do that.

Many firms don’t though and I think it’s starting to become a real disadvantage for them.

Clients are going to start seeing other firms can provide visibility now vs. 15+ days post-month and see that the grass is greener.

Things like client dashboards, API connections with our GL systems, and alerts for out-of-the-ordinary items are going to be requirements soon.

Automation isn’t just about saving time anymore. It’s about staying relevant.

In practice, this means actively looking for opportunities to build systems and connections. And not just you, but the entire team.

Some good examples:

Honestly, it’s not a big lift to set most of these things up and it usually helps increase your understanding of a client’s financial data too.

You should absolutely charge for this additional value.

This is where having a tech-savvy team really takes off.

When we hire, we’re only really looking for people who are comfortable with technology/automation and this is exactly why.

The reality is, the firms winning right now aren’t the ones doing more work, they’re the ones building better systems.

Every connection you automate gives you and your clients more clarity, faster. This becomes a new competitive edge for your firm.

Accounting doesn’t always have to live in the past tense anymore.

The future is automatic, but for modern firms, it’s already here.

P.S. Just to clarify, I do think there’s still a lot of value in compliant monthly financial packets, this would be in addition to that.

P.P.S I love thinking about how compliance would look like if we did have real-time financials regularly for our clients. Any ideas?

So this example is something I built and used to hire our latest client accounting lead and I’m very proud of it.

Our current process for interviewing is:

We’re very culture focused at Celerity so what I did was I set up a ChatGPT project and fed it tons of context such as:

Once it had all of that data, I started to feed it resumes to qualify.

After each round, I added more data - the recruiter’s transcript and notes, then my Fireflies transcript from each interview.

With all of that information, ChatGPT was able to compare candidates side by side and highlight the pros and cons of each.

I have never seen more value from a specific AI tool than this use case. It was so incredibly useful for me and gave me a lot of peace of mind with my decision. I was even able to talk through scenarios and see how individual candidates might hold up too.

Sometimes progress is about doing more.

Sometimes it’s about making things move without you.

Which part of your work still needs your push and which could run automatically?

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Tailor

P.S. ChatGPT now is focusing on third party apps! I love the Figma one.