What the Republican Rout Means for Tax Policy

0:03Blake Oliver: This is an entrepreneur and he tweeted, my accountant I pay a lot of money to every month just reply to a question I sent him with a 100 % AI reply explaining something. The answer was helpful, though I could have just asked AI myself. Of course you know what I'm thinking now. If I can just ask AI everything since he's forwarding everything to AI anyways, why not replace him with AI? I guess he should be doing the opposite of AI. sell premium service for a high price, he already does, and keep answering with humans as accounting is something I prefer to actually get a human in the loop. Anyways, it's interesting.

0:39Blake Oliver: Coming to you weekly in the OnPay Recording Studio.

0:44David Leary: Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the show. This is your weekly roundup of news in the profession, the accounting podcast. And I am your co-host, Blake Oliver. And I'm David Leary. David, where are you at? You're in a hotel room somewhere.

0:57Blake Oliver: I am in Miami, Florida. I am here to attend. Actually, not really attend. I'm helping facilitate. I'm a table facilitator for Hector Garcia and his brother put on a conference, his brother Carlos. They put on a conference called Reframe, which I think maybe we've talked about on the show before. Hector's talked about on the show before. And I think the way I describe it, it's like for sales. It's going to help accountants sell better. And it's based off of a book called exactly what to say. And it's almost like a reframing. Are you familiar with the yes train in sales?

1:31David Leary: No.

1:32Blake Oliver: Okay, Blake. So you work hard for your money, right, Blake?

1:36David Leary: I mean, theoretically, yes. Yes. I work hard for my money. And you like nice things, right, Blake? Yeah. Podcasting is hard. I need to buy nice things to make myself feel better. You deserve this new car, right, Blake?

1:47Blake Oliver: Exactly. So you keep saying yes. You keep saying yes. This almost feels like it's a spin on that where you're basically saying something that they're not really saying no to, but it's putting pressure on them to come up with an answer or to do the action you need them to do. So, for example, Blake, I'm sure you reviewed that proposal I sent you, so now you have to come up with a real answer. You just can't. I'll review it tomorrow, right? Basically, I'm giving a yes, but. I'm not an expert on this, so this would be good about attending this thing. But I think for the attendees here, and it's big.

2:26Blake Oliver: I feel like he's got 350, 400 people attending this event now. It's fairly big. But if you use it for one client, it will pay for itself, right, if it helps you close one client at a higher price point.

2:37David Leary: That's the beauty of going to these things, and that's why it makes sense to spend on that. Like you said, a few thousand dollars to go to a conference, you learn one skill that gives you a new client. It makes sense. That's great, David. Well, say hi to Hector for me. Say hi to everyone there. Let's go ahead and thank our sponsors. Before we do that, though, I just want to talk about what we're going to talk about today, which is the election, the historic Republican defeat. I have to say I wasn't surprised. I knew this was going to happen. I could have called it for you years ago. I mean, hopefully I said it on the podcast at some point so I can prove it, but it all comes down to costs, tariffs, the cost of goods, gas, everything all adds up.

3:21David Leary: But before we talk about that, David, let's go ahead and make our sponsors. And our sponsors this week are Canopy OnPay Pilot and Cloud Account and Staffing.

3:32Blake Oliver: Let me ask you something. How much your day is actually spent doing accounting? If you're like most firm owners, 30 to 40 % of your time is being eaten alive by work around the work. We're talking about chasing client documents, drafting the exact same emails over and over again, manual filing, and trying to remember what a client said on a call last Tuesday. It's an administrative tax and it's killing your profitability. That's where Canopy comes in. Canopy actually delivers on the all-in-one practice management promise. It handles everything from proposal to payment and all the steps in between.

4:04Blake Oliver: Smart client intake, tax workflows, month-end close automation, and billing are all in one unified platform. No more duct taping 10 different apps together. Plus, they have Canopy Coworker. It's a secure AI assistant that lives right inside the platform and actually does real work. It drafts context-aware emails, summarizes client histories, takes meeting notes, and turns them into tasks automatically. Early access firms are already seeing what's possible when AI works inside your workflow instead of alongside it. To see what a truly modern automated practice looks like, head over to accountingpodcast.promo.canopy.

4:39Blake Oliver: That is accountingpodcast.promo forward slash C-A-N-O-P-Y.

4:45David Leary: Thank you, Canopy. Please use those promo links when you go visit our sponsors' websites. It lets them know that you found them through the Accounting Podcast. Helps them track the ROI of their ad spend with us. And we really appreciate that as well because it gets them coming back. All right, David, let's talk about the election results. Brief 60-second overview for anyone who, like me, was actually under a rock because I don't pay attention to the election anymore live because we never know the results usually until the very end. But this time I should have paid attention because I finally opened the news this morning to prepare for the show.

5:22And I was like, what happened?

5:24David Leary: So here's the update. AP, the Associated Press is saying that Democrats have won 247 seats, well over half. Republicans, 153 at this time. U.S. Senate Democrats, they won 20 seats, so they're up to 54. There's two Senate seats that are still in play, Alaska and Mississippi, but that's not going to make a difference. Democrats have the Senate. There's a bunch of House seats available still are open still, but that's also not going to make a difference. The Republicans lost both houses. Democrats control it. Trump's reaction. Trump said, if I was on the ballot, we would have won, which was the case last time, right?

6:17David Leary: And this is the problem, of course, with having a party that can only win when one guy is on the ballot. And he also called it largely true that energy prices from the Iran war cost Republicans. Speaker Johnson isn't going to run for minority leader. It's still a divided government. So Trump still has the veto. So nothing big is going to pass without a bipartisan deal. And that takes us into the tax policy discussion. And it takes us into our coverage of what the election means for tax. There were a bunch of tax bills in this election across all the states. And David, you've got some coverage of that, starting with the California billionaire tax.

7:02We'll talk about Washington, something going on in Colorado as well. And then after that, I want to talk about what the change in the balance of power in

7:11David Leary: our government means for tax policy. So David, let's get into the results.

7:18Blake Oliver: Yeah. So I mean, these are two follow-up stories for us, I think. but we've been talking about and following the California billionaire tax. Well, the California voters said, no, we're not going to tax the billionaires. That's out. But Washington state, so that's just what? You know, just up the coast a little bit. There's just Oregon's in between. So, you know, what's that? One over, you know, skip a state away. The Washington voters said yes to keep their. So they had a bill that passed. They are going to tax higher income individuals in Washington state. And that went in the ballot. and the voters chose to keep that.

7:53Blake Oliver: So this is the tax that basically made Jeff Bezos move to Florida, right? Because he didn't want to be taxed with all his Amazon money when he was living in Seattle. So two different, when it comes to tax the rich, two different results, right, in these two different states. But those are big ones that I think we saw. And then the other thing is I think, I don't know if you have any more state news, but then we probably should talk about the impact on the IRS.

8:17David Leary: Yeah, so a few more state bills. Florida ratified Amendment 3, which provides a$250 ,000 homestead exemption for non-school property taxes. So that means the first$250 ,000 of your primary residence is exempt from any property taxes other than those for schools. And the implication of this is that local governments are going to have to raise taxes on other types of taxable property in order to generate revenue, which means most likely more taxes on businesses, business property, not personal. Or what should I say? Non-business. So Colorado is not decided yet. Amendment 87 is like right at the 50 % mark.

9:16David Leary: and that would replace the 4.4 % single-rate income tax with a graduated set of rates that get to 8.4%. So a 4 % bump, additional 4 % on the top earners in Colorado. That would be a lot. I mean, we're talking getting up to California kind of rates there, right? So it would amend the Constitution's FLAX tax requirement and implement an initiated statute establishing new rates. Other property tax votes, North Carolina approved limits. So the legislature must limit annual growth in aggregate property tax collections from all existing property. That's a revenue limit, not an individual assessment cap.

10:00David Leary: Oklahoma rejected tighter assessment limits. Wyoming rejected a home value exemption. Iowa approved a two-thirds legislative supermajority requirement for income tax increases. So now in Iowa, you want to increase income taxes, you've got to get a two-thirds legislative supermajority. So that'll probably freeze taxes there for, I mean, who can get a supermajority these days, right? North Carolina also capped the income tax rate at 3.5%. And Utah and California rejected measures that would make it harder for voters themselves to approve tax increases through future ballot questions. All right. What was it you wanted to talk about next, David?

10:46Blake Oliver: Oh, so I don't know if you know this. The IRS, I didn't see a story on this, but apparently the IRS has been delaying their report on the tax gap. They've been kind of sitting on it a little bit. It's been delayed. And Elizabeth Warren thinks and is accusing the agency of hiding the scale of tax evasion because obviously enforcement got pulled way back by the IRS. But now that the Democrats won, they're pushing to get this report out the door. They want it right after the midterm. So they want this report here in the next two or three weeks. So this is going to be interesting. The IRS just got gutted, gutted, gutted.

11:23Blake Oliver: They've been beat up. Now the Democrats, in theory, have control. it's going to be interesting to see what else what are impacts we see with the IRS but I mean right away just hey we need this report now the transparency of what's happening at the IRS needs to happen

11:41David Leary: so we have a split government in the sense that Democrats control Congress but Trump's in the White House he can veto anything they do so big changes in terms of tax policy unlikely likely. The one to watch, the bill that could still pass, is the Taxpayer Assistance and Service Act, the TASS Act. We've talked about that on the show before. It contains 65 provisions aimed at improving IRS service and regulating the tax preparation market. The Senate passage was unanimous at the end of September, but the House Ways and Means Committee has not yet taken it up. So hopefully, tax pro groups that support it are lobbying to get it passed before the end of the year during the lame duck session.

12:29David Leary: Hopefully that can happen. And it won't be opposed, you know, now that there's been a change in the balance of power. As a reminder, the proposed changes, they include online dashboards, a callback system, regulation of non-credential preparers, and continuing education and background checks for all paid preparers. The challenge is that the changes are unfunded because it provides no funding amount or implementation budget. So the IRS would have to do all this without any additional funding.

13:06David Leary: I mean, I guess that's pretty much it, right? It's like broad changes, unlikely, maybe small ones that you can get bipartisan support on, possibly. Let's talk about why this happened, if it's not obvious to everybody, right? And let's just talk about tariffs. We spent a lot of time—

13:26Blake Oliver: Well, even before that, like, step way back. It reminds me of the—it was Clinton and Bush, right? Bush Sr. And it was the—what was the famous line? It's the economy, stupid.

13:35David Leary: Yeah.

13:35Blake Oliver: At the end of the day, it's the economy.

13:38David Leary: Yeah, and here is a stat that I spotted that just explains it all. Half of American spending goes to housing and food. That's the most in 15 years. Half, half of U.S. household spending, housing and food. Rising rents, homeowner costs, and beef prices contributed to the pressure. families spent an average of nearly$2 ,000,$1 ,988 more on food and housing combined than in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Oh, by the way, this article appeared in CPA Practice Advisor. It's called Half of American Spending Goes to Housing and Food Most in 15 Years. average pre-tax income rose 6.4 percent in 2025 which outpaced both inflation and expenditures so we had income gains but there's still a lot of anxiety and i think it's because what did we see during the covet era during all those years it was like massive amounts of inflation because of all the money pumped into the economy and you add up all of that and it was like substantial right people really felt it and we still see it in the prices and it's like hard to get used to that and even though incomes rose they didn't raise as fast as inflation and then you had tariffs adding 10 20 to the prices of many goods and then we had the iran war adding a significant increase

15:12Blake Oliver: to the price of gasoline and fuel so it's like the perfect storm gas increased in price plus inflation plus tariffs, it's just too much. It's too much too fast, and people's budgets do not keep up.

15:24David Leary: They didn't. And in the end, if the cost of goods outpaces people's income, they're going to be unhappy, and they vote with their wallets. And so the people who are really excited about Trump and his vision to revitalize American manufacturing and raise middle-class wages were disappointed because that didn't happen. Tariffs did not bring manufacturing back to the United States. It raised prices. Which is exactly what we said was going to happen

16:06Blake Oliver: 50 episodes ago, whatever it was, 100 episodes ago.

16:09David Leary: Well, I mean, anyone who looks at it logically and understands the incentives that businesses have to... Any accountant who looks at it logically could tell you what's going to happen. And the crazy thing is that you could actually use tariffs to bring back manufacturing. But the tariffs would have to be so high that it would destroy more than it creates. And that's a problem because we're such an interconnected economy now. And it was just – it's sort of like all of these price increases, even though they individually wouldn't cause people to notice that much, added up to a lot, to a feeling, along with all the inflation, which is caused by the inability of the Republican Party to rain in the world.

17:02David Leary: in spending and to just give out massive amounts of cash during COVID. You do those two things and people feel their incomes decrease in value and they feel the cost of prices of everything go up. And it's that simple. Does this mean we're not going to get our$5 ,000 now?

17:17Blake Oliver: We're each supposed to get$5 ,000, right? After the midterms. I don't think that's going to happen.

17:22David Leary: Yeah, well, you know, that would be crazy because let's see. Oh, here's another story. What's the deficit at now? the deficit. I lost that story in my queue. But budget deficit? Oh, yeah, it's$2 trillion almost. We closed out the fiscal year with a$1.993 trillion deficit. It's 12 % higher than last year. It's the biggest since 2021.

17:50Blake Oliver: Apparently those doge cuts didn't actually make an impact.

17:53David Leary: So what's amazing about all this too is we're in this situation where the middle class feels squeezed and yet the stock market is booming and we're in the we're in a new gilded age essentially right the promise of ai to just completely change the economy and and turbocharge productivity is there but it's not hitting yet we're not seeing the results yet and so then it always makes me think about what happens if investors lose confidence in these AI companies, if the results do not materialize. And for many, they will not. And what is that going to do to the stock market?

18:38Blake Oliver: Well, I think some people are saying that ultimately, with the way of that happening, because some states like Texas now have a democratic governor, this is going to impact the data center or the AI data center construction. Boom. Because a lot of these Democratic governors at one are pushing back. Right. Right.

18:59David Leary: But here's why that's not going to happen, David. Because a smart governor is going to realize that the way that they stay in power is when their people are economically thriving.

19:11Blake Oliver: Yeah. It's kind of free money.

19:13David Leary: Yeah.

19:13Blake Oliver: Well, it's not free money. It's jobs, right? It's jobs. That's what I mean. It's an investment in your city or community or county or state. Yeah.

19:21David Leary: And so that's why they're going to welcome these projects, even while they cry about the economic – or not the economic, the environmental impact of it. And so the AI investment is going to just keep on going. But the question is, how long can it go without delivering real ROI for businesses? And so far, we've seen that AI costs are skyrocketing for many companies and accounting firms, but they're still not seeing big results, correspondingly big results. I saw a story in accounting today, David, about the surging AI costs at firms, and I want to talk about that. But first, let's go ahead and thank our next sponsor.

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21:16David Leary: That's accountingpodcast.promo.onpay. Oh, and David, before we talk about these surging AI costs, one other thing, one other policy of the Trump administration that led to increased prices, I don't know if you can prove it, but how could it not, the whole immigration thing. You limit immigration into the country, illegal immigration, you tamp down on it, and legal immigration, right, both. And the cost of labor is going to go up for businesses. So there you go. That's another cost that got passed on through to consumers. All right. This is a story I spotted in accounting today called Tokenomics.

21:59David Leary: Firms see surging AI costs. The story is about the spending surge at firms. Accounting firms' AI costs are climbing, driven primarily by a shift from monthly subscriptions to consumption-based pricing. Deloitte in January of this year said that cloud bills are rising nearly 20 % year-over-year. Gartner has forecast that worldwide AI spending will reach$2.7 trillion in 2026. That's up nearly 50 % year-over-year. Inside Public Accounting says that 70 % of firms increased AI budgets over the past year. and Wolters Kluwer said that 87 % of firms plan to increase investment in AI-enabled technology.

22:40David Leary: And there's a few examples of firms in this article that have seen their cost rise. LBMC,

22:52David Leary: Charlie Apigian, apologies Charlie, Charlie Apigian, if I said that right, If I said that wrong, I apologize. He's the AI practice leader at top 50 firm LBMC and attributes substantial increases partly from their moving from standard to enterprise anthropoclod. Standard is$20 a month with token charges added, but heavy users could reach$500 or more monthly. Going from$20 to$500 represents a 25 times increase in cost. It's not a firm-wide average, but that's what their power users are doing, which doesn't surprise me considering that I blew$2 ,500 on tokens last month by accident. Now I've got it under control pretty well.

23:36I think I'm good, but it's so easy to do it

23:39David Leary: because of this new consumption-based pricing. So, I mean, that's basically the issue, right, is that the more you use Claude, and that's what everyone seems to be really focusing on now if they're using a general tool, the more you use it, it becomes very difficult to stay under the cap. And so then your people are spending over it, and controlling that cost as a firm is really difficult because depending on how you use it, especially if you're using scheduled tasks, running prompts all the time, it can be wildly expensive. And I have found actually just by changing how my scheduled tasks work and converting them into skills that I run on demand and trimming them down and just reworking my whole system, I'm now able this week to stay under the usage limit in November.

24:30David Leary: So think about that. I spent$2 ,500 extra last month on tokens, but if I use it smart, if I'm smart about how I use it, I might only spend$100. That's a huge variance.

24:47Blake Oliver: And that's what we might be seeing. So Ramp had an article. They're noticing that the top 1 % of AI spenders across Ramp – so Ramp has data from 85 ,000 U.S. businesses now, right? The top 1 % of AI spenders, they are spending less now on AI than they did in July, which was the peak. So it's probably getting more – some of it could just be like, hey, we're going to spend less. There's budget cuts. Some of it could be more efficient usage, like you're saying. And then what I think it probably really is, if you're spending millions, it's now worth you spinning up your own in-house model, in-house servers, your in-house things.

25:28Blake Oliver: And so you're seeing what's really concerning about this is the top 1 % of AI spenders are driving 80 % of the revenue for OpenAI and Anthropic. So it peaked in July of about – and July's peak was$9 ,800 per employee. And now in September, it was$9 ,568 per employee.

25:49David Leary: Wait, give me those numbers again.

25:51Blake Oliver: In July, the peak was$9 ,873 per employee. And now it's down 3 % to$9 ,568 per employee. So that is the top 1 %? The top 1 % spent.

26:04David Leary: So basically the people using these tools, is this Claude or is this?

26:09Blake Oliver: This is OpenAI or Anthropic, yeah.

26:11David Leary: Okay. So the top 1 % of users are spending close to$10 ,000 a month in tokens. per employee at their company per employee at their company wow okay that makes me feel better uh but and it's gone down so that means let's think about this and you're saying that drives

26:30Blake Oliver: how much of the revenue that drives 80 of the revenue for open ai and anthropic so oh my god david they had in q2 6.8 billion in revenue and now that you know all these companies are going public or trying to go public. Their S1s are revealing these other numbers. So in Q2, they had$6.8 billion in revenue. In Q3,$5.4 billion. So over$1.2 billion less revenue quarter to quarter than Anthropic has.

26:57David Leary: This could be the beginning of the bubble popping. Think about this, right? So if 80 % of your revenue is driven by 1 % of your customers, and those customers are already spending a lot per employee, like$10 ,000 a month, close to it,$9 ,500 a month per employee. If they can figure out how to rein in their spend, which they are motivated to do just like me, and there are plenty of ways to increase efficiency, they're going to figure out how to do it. And then let's say they cut their spend in half, which is totally doable, I believe, based on my experience. Because it's really easy to spend$10 ,000 if you're just really inefficient with how you're using AI.

27:45David Leary: But you apply a few learnings and I'm back down. I'm going to be a few hundred dollars a month maybe. So I've cut my cost by 10x just by being more efficient with my prompts and my usage. Okay, so if these companies do the same thing, then, I mean, what does that do to the profit or the revenue? Not profit, because these companies don't have any revenue, right? What does that do to the revenue? You said it was like$4 billion,$5 billion?

28:16Blake Oliver: Yeah, it dropped by$1.2 billion in one quarter. Yeah, so it could drop another billion or$2 billion.

28:24David Leary: And the only way they make it up is if they can figure out how to get the other 99 % of companies using it to pay more. So that means they would have to raise prices on other users. But that was also a part of this revenue drop.

28:40Blake Oliver: Because of Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic basically cut costs by$600 million because the Claude Opus 5.5 costs customers 40 % less. and you know how there's that um concept of like as electricity got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper over the last 150 years people just use more of it and i think that's the thought with ai like they'll still spend the same amount because they're just going to use more of it but they didn't see that happen so they they released a more efficient model that was 40 cheaper but the usage of that model did not go up by 40 percent well the pro here's the problem

29:18David Leary: I would totally use it more. But in order to, like right now I'm using AI to do specific tasks. Specific things like run a payroll or reconcile a bank account or prep for the show, right? Like research an article or something like that. It's specific tasks. What I've been trying to do over the past month or two is get it to start being an operating system. So like a project manager, I call it my chief of staff. I gave it a name. It's called chief of staff, and it's doing project management for me. But as I've described on the show in past episodes, and I won't go into super detail on it because I don't want to bore our listeners.

30:14David Leary: What has happened is that in order for it to be a good project manager and chief of staff, it has to have massive amounts of context. And I've got it pulling that in itself. It reads my email every few hours. It goes through. It has access to all of my docs. It reads all of my meeting transcripts. And it takes all of that information about all the various projects and it ingests it. It saves it in text files, markdown files in a folder tree. and those files grow as it gets more information. And as it gets more information, it gets better and better and better at being a project manager, but it gets incredibly expensive.

30:53David Leary: And even with Claude Opus 5.5, I was spending thousands of dollars a month and I still couldn't get it to the point where it was good enough to operate without my oversight. So I would totally use it more. I would just let it run all the time, but to do that you know i'd be spending probably tens of thousands of dollars a month and at that point it's it's it's getting paid more than i do yeah right so and then i think about that all the

31:25Blake Oliver: time when hector garcia was on the podcast five ten weeks ago or so and he said token spend is going to be bigger than payroll on your profit and loss and i think i've been thinking about that so

31:35David Leary: much all the time well and that's so that's the thing is they have to somehow for us to use so But here's my point, is that right now AI is great at automating specific tasks, and that can be really useful, but it can't replace headcount if it only does specific tasks. It needs to take on the collection of tasks and responsibilities that represent a job. It needs to take on a job.

32:04Blake Oliver: And it has to come in cheaper than payroll, or nobody's going to spend more to get less work done. And that's where it's at right now.

32:12David Leary: You're spending more to get less work done. Yeah, so for thousands of dollars a month, I got it to the point where I could kind of supervise it, but I have to really supervise it, right? I am sitting next to it. So what is that worth to me? That's like an intern, right?

32:25Blake Oliver: Yeah.

32:26David Leary: And I was basically paying intern prices. And to get it to the point where it could do a real full job, like autonomously, just let it run, I would be spending tens of thousands of dollars a month, I'm sure. So they have to get the cost way, way down before it can do that. And if they can do that, see, that's where then the promise gets delivered. That's what everyone's betting on. If you're buying all this stock, if you're buying AI stocks, you're betting that it's going to figure out, these companies are going to figure out how to get the cost down low enough where we can completely automate jobs.

33:06David Leary: a good chunk of jobs, like millions of jobs. And it's going to take a while to get, I don't know. I mean, maybe it will, maybe it won't. What did that article say? That we've gone down by 3 ,000 times? The cost of tokens have gone down 3 ,000 times?

33:23Blake Oliver: Yeah, just that one Opus 5.5 is 40 % cheaper. Yeah.

33:28David Leary: So I think it would have to basically get 10 times, I don't know, 10 times cheaper? but I think it would need even more context. So it would have to get, I don't know, another, we're happy to go.

33:43Blake Oliver: It's gotta be the point where people stop talking about the costs. Yeah. Right. So you don't notice it. Like, like the cost is just like electricity for most people.

33:52David Leary: Right.

33:52Blake Oliver: You just don't, you don't really pay attention to it. So that article you had was about how accounting firms are just spending tons on AI. Yeah.

34:00David Leary: Their, their costs are expanding and they're not, you know, we're struggling to contain it.

34:04Blake Oliver: Well, this could come back to bite them. So I have a tweet I'm going to bring up here. If you could add it to the display and I'll read it out here.

34:11David Leary: Sure.

34:13Blake Oliver: So this is a tweet. This is an entrepreneur. And he tweeted, I'm going to read it word for word. My accountant I pay a lot of money to every month just replied to a question I sent him with 100 % AI reply explaining something. The answer was helpful, though I could have just asked AI myself. Of course, you know what I'm thinking now. Now, if I can just ask AI everything since he's forwarding everything to AI anyways, why not replace him with AI? I guess he should be doing the opposite of AI. Sell premium service for a high price, he already does, and keep answering with humans as accounting is something I prefer to actually get a human in the loop.

34:49Blake Oliver: Anyways, it's interesting. Now, what's important about this tweet is it has a half a million views. So this person is basically throwing out there, What's the point of my accountant if my accountant is just regurgitating an AI answer back to me? But at the same time, he's also saying, hey, it might be worth a premium if my accountant, I'm getting a human, you know, to actually give me a human answer. Now, I don't know if that scales. He's saying, though, he might be willing to pay for a premium service. But the fact that like half a million people saw this point of view about accountants giving AI replies and what they charge for premium services, that's the story.

35:28Blake Oliver: is the volume of views that this got.

35:31David Leary: If you're just copying and pasting like your chat GPT response or whatever.

35:36Blake Oliver: Which you trained accountants to do at a conference once. You showed them how to reply to it. Yeah, I remember you showed them how to reply to it. I think your example was a text you got about some text question. You used to use chat GPT, reply to the text

35:48David Leary: and how they could do that with emails at their firm.

35:50Blake Oliver: Yeah.

35:50David Leary: Right, but so it's just like with text, right? Well, you can automate the prep. You can totally automate replying to that email question with getting Claude to like go out and do the research, figure it all out, draft the email back in your voice and put the reply into your inbox. But sending the email, like reading the email and making sure that it's right and it sounds like you is the review step, which if you're not doing that, then yeah, what's the point of anyone hiring you? They can just go do the research themselves. So just if you reply to an email and use AI, just don't sound like your AI.

36:26David Leary: Yeah, pass it through a second AI first.

36:29Blake Oliver: That flags it. Yeah, makes it sound like you. Yeah. Does it sound like AI? And if it says yes, don't hit send. Yeah, there's ways to avoid this. But it's kind of crazy because now accounting firms are spending more money to recurgitate crappy answers. You're spending money to give the client an answer the client could have got on their own. Which doesn't, that's not a good business model for an accountant. All right, David, we have one more set of sponsors to thank. And then you've got an interview. Yeah, I interviewed Jessica McKellar. She's the founder and CEO of Pilot to understand. They have this new offering for firms called Meridian, but I really wanted to understand the Pilot journey and what got them to actually launch a product for accounts.

37:21David Leary: Let's go ahead and thank our next two sponsors, and then you can tee up that interview. Thank you to Cloud Accountant Staffing for sponsoring this episode of the Accounting Podcast. Are you tired of the endless search for qualified accounting talent? You're not alone. Growing accounting firms are struggling to find available and affordable team members when they need them most. Cloud Accountant Staffing has the solution with their revolutionary candidate portal. Unlike traditional staffing agencies that waste your time with sales calls, paperwork, and deposits, the Cloud Accountant Staffing Candidate Portal gives you instant access to highly vetted, qualified accounting professionals.

37:57David Leary: No waiting, no hassle, just top talent right now. What makes this different? Speed and simplicity. While other firms make you wait weeks or months, with Cloud Accountant Staffing, you could interview someone as soon as tomorrow. Their boutique support ensures you're getting quality talent that's both available and affordable. That's exactly what growing firms need. The Candidate Portal puts you in control. You can browse live candidates, make selections on your timeline, and build your offshore team without the traditional headaches. To find, review, and book interviews with potential team members all in less than 10 minutes, head over to accountingpodcast.promo.cas.

38:33David Leary: That's accountingpodcast.promo.cas. And now, our last sponsor of this episode, and featured in this interview that you're going to do, David, it's Pilot.

38:46Blake Oliver: If you're running an accounting firm, you know the growth ceiling. Every client that's new means more hours buried in transaction categorization, reconciliations, and financial statement prep. At some point, you either burn your team out or hire more staff just to keep up. That's exactly why Pilot built Meridian. Meridian runs the entire month to end close for you, from client onboarding to transaction categorization and reconciliations. It delivers finished financials every month, ready for your team to review. Not a pile of work, but a finished product. What makes Meridian different is it sits on top of QuickBooks Online so your clients don't need to switch platforms and your workflows stay intact.

39:23Blake Oliver: This isn't some experimental tool either. It's the same production system that Pilot has run since 2017 with over 187 ,000 months of books closed across 8 ,000 plus businesses. In fact, Pilot CEO Jessica McKellar personally manages a$500 ,000 book of business on Meridian while she runs her company. When the CEO is a power user, that tells you something. To see how firm owners and cast leaders are scaling with Meridian head over to accountingpodcast.promo.pilot. That is accountingpodcast.promo.pilot. And I'll let you tee up that interview, Blake. I was able to meet with her. The best part of it, I think, for me is it's an engineer who I think fell in love with bookkeeping.

40:03Blake Oliver: And I think that's a cool story to have.

40:05David Leary: Yes. Any engineer who learns accounting and actually does it is going to build great products. It's like accountants who become engineers, right? Those are the people you want. building stuff. All right. Here's that interview. David, go have a great time at Hector Garcia's Reframe and see you around here next week. Next week.

40:27Blake Oliver: Jessica, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. So Jessica, you're CEO and co-founder of Pilot, which I think now is older than this podcast. I think we started April of 2018 and Pilot started 2017. That's right. 10 years. And what's kind of the journey or the goal? I think people know about Pilot. They've heard about Pilot. Oh, Jeff Bezos invested in Pilot. But I think in general, listeners don't know what Pilot is or what you were setting out to build 10 years ago. Yeah. Okay. Well, think back to 2016, 2017. Life was a little bit different back then. This is pre-all of this recent LLM stuff.

41:03and my co-founders and I had a hypothesis that it was possible to automate the majority of the bookkeeping process and perhaps other accounting processes as well and that if you could do that that would be a really powerful foundational layer that you could build interesting things on top of like you could use that foundation in a number of different ways and so that's what we set out to prove for the first several years of pilot. And the way that we were proving this to ourselves in the early days, there was really no AI, it was good old fashioned software. And then we built out an accounting firm as the test lab for this software, where we felt that the only way to really prove that what we were building was working was to have to use it day in and day out on a wide range of clients.

41:54And so we were building this software system, this sort of operating system for accounting firms that we were then using in the kind of pilot direct sales test lab for the first several years of pilot.

42:07Blake Oliver: So you basically started an accounting firm and you grew it essentially to, I think I saw 8 ,000 clients. Is that correct-ish? So today we're serving about 4 ,000 clients. Okay. And then so over the last 10 years, it's been like eight to 10 ,000 overall clients. Yeah. And then because of that, you're building all these even more internal processes and getting great things, great at things, including the close. And then that's the genesis of Meridian. So now you have the software used internally to do the close. You're now externalized and offering it as a standalone SaaS app for any accountant or accounting firm to use.

42:43Blake Oliver: Exactly. So I guess, how did that jump happen to go from like, hey, we're going to be an accounting firm? because I would think that's a competitive advantage. Like we have the software that makes us super efficient. We could beat anybody. I think I saw a talk where you had, you said an accountant can handle a million dollars in a book of business. One bookkeeper can handle a million dollars in a book of business. So if you have that secret formula, because I've talked to other people where it's maybe one account, it's about$300 ,000 in accountants. So you're, what, three times better than any other accountant I've ever talked to in any other accounting firm.

43:21Blake Oliver: maybe 10 times better than a lot of them. So why give away your secret sauce as a separate app to help people do the clothes? Totally. So I think to truly answer this, I think I do have to speak briefly about why we thought that this was a problem we're solving. And then I'll talk about the evolution of Meridian. So, okay, there's like the head and the heart of this. And I already described this hypothesis that it might be possible to leverage technology to kind of automate the production layer. Why is that potentially desirable? The heart of this, my end goal was I want every business in America, and in particular small businesses, to have access to high quality finance and accounting support.

44:05And that's coming from a place of having small business owners in my family, knowing small business owners. It's like everybody is or knows someone who's just like trying to make it out there right we like pictures on the fridge of me and the baby bouncer in the back room of the gelato store that my mom was running in Fremont in the 80s right my dad was a self-employed musician and it's just like thinking about and caring about how important it is for these I mean all businesses but in particular neighborhood businesses to have a shot at surviving and thriving in the modern economy like I view that as of tremendous this economic and societal consequence.

44:47And I wanted to apply the unique background that I and my co-founder have towards that problem or that opportunity. Because I think if we're being honest, I think a lot of these folks are underserved. It's like hard to give access to some of these businesses at like a price point that works for everybody today.

45:08Blake Oliver: Yeah, it's hard to, yeah, there's way more small businesses than there is people that can provide the services. Yeah, with high quality, for sure. Okay, so that's the heart of why we're in this. So that's the goal. Okay, so we want to build, we want to prove that we are able to build, we want to prove that we've built a system that gives you, I mean, if we're just honestly just like margin leverage on this, it like gives you the option to use your time in different ways, if you are able to automate the majority of the production close, right? And then we can test that internally with the pilot test lab.

45:49The goal was always to get this in front of as many businesses as possible. So then it's like, well, what are the best ways to do that? And one option is to try to ever scale a single accounting firm. And then another option is to equip other accounting firms. And the reason why for us, the clear answer is equip other accounting firms with these capabilities is well there are a couple reasons actually the first is I don't I don't need to I don't personally need to be it's hard to run an accounting firm at scale it is so hard like the p it's a it's a there's a real people and organizational like the people who do this well have like such expertise and we have hey man we've been doing this for 10 years I I feel like I put in my reps on this I don't I don't need to do it anymore.

46:39But then the other really important reason is it's actually the go-to-market of this is best left to the diversity of firms that are out there that have a diversity of specializations. This could be just like regional. A lot of businesses want to work with a firm that's in their city, for example, and is like an expert on them and the dynamics of their city. or you're like a CPG focused firm. You're a boutique firm that focuses on scaling e-commerce brands. That's like your thing, right? Like there are so many ways to specialize by vertical, by geography, or just like the vibes of the firm. And that is the most effective go-to-market kind of way of reaching businesses.

47:32is. I'm not going to be like Pilot HQ is not the right way to try to reach the restaurants in Wichita. I don't have any special capabilities there. And so I think for two reasons, one is I'd rather sell software to accounting firms. Two is I'd rather let you all do the go-to-market given the expertise that you have on client acquisition.

47:59Blake Oliver: Well, yeah, I think you get the multiplication effect much faster. Because if you want to impact 100 ,000 small businesses, you'd have to execute perfectly to grow pilot. Maybe it could take another 25 years. Totally. But now if you can open this up and let an army of accountants use your technology to service 100 ,000 businesses, that seems like a little bit closer time range goal. It makes a lot of sense. So I do understand you had the heart where you're coming from on this. Totally get that. So tell me specifically, like, what does Meridian do? Like, how are you using it? How would I use it if I had my own firm?

48:34Blake Oliver: What would I use Meridian for? Totally. And so Meridian is the public, this is like the public available to accounting firms branding for this AI operating system that we've built and that we've been stress testing internally for a long time at this point. And maybe two things here. First, what has happened in the last, I would say 18 to 24 months that has gotten us to the point where it makes sense to sell Meridian externally, what has happened in the last two years is really the LLMs have gotten good enough that you can, if you imagine like pre-recent LLM advances, what we had built and used internally, it was like the Iron Man suit for accountants.

49:27And so it gets you a ton of leverage with you in the driver's seat executing the month end close or other activities. What's happened in the last two years is the LLMs have gotten good enough that you can actually take the person out of the Iron Man suit and you can put in the LLM. And the LLM can then truly autonomously execute that month end close or that recurring process from beginning to end, and then just like deliver the final draft books and financials to a human reviewer. And so that was important because that lets us provide this abstraction of, hey, Meridian, you know, provide the inputs to the system.

50:03Meridian does the production work, and then you just have to do the review. As opposed to something that is more like babysitting and doing a bunch of back and forth with a system. Like a process checklist. Yeah, which I think is, it's both annoying to have to babysit AI doing stuff. I find it annoying. And it mutes the ability to drive firm level metrics impact. If you're doing a bunch of babysitting, it's actually hard to reclaim a lot of that time and use it for other things. So the fact that we can now just have Meridian execute a close or other process end to end autonomously gives a really clean, simple abstraction that makes it sort of ready for prime time with other firms.

50:52Okay, so that's what's changed recently. That's why we were able to launch Meridian. And then what is it? Okay, well, in one sentence, it's an AI operating system for accounting firms. There is Meridian AI, which is the core purpose-built accounting automation system. And it has a bunch of deterministic sort of capabilities. And it really understands, like, the core accounting primitives natively. And by that, I mean, like, it understands reconciliation and, like, maintains recons in Meridian. It understands supporting schedules and the fact that you need to like inherit, add stuff to and then roll forward supporting schedules.

51:36That happens in Meridian. You don't have to maintain external work papers that can get desynchronized from the books. It understands, you know, like assets and the capitalization and depreciation of assets. It understands accruals. It has a native understanding of a bunch of the core accounting primitives and then has a bunch of deterministic work that it does to do things like roll forward your schedules. You don't need to have AI reason from first principles about that. You can just like execute good old fashioned software that does that deterministically. And that's important because it means you always get the same answer and the right answer every time.

52:12And then it allows you to make it really easy to inspect and audit. So you have a reconciliation surface where you can look at the recons. And if a recon broke because, I don't know, a client went in and posted a bill payment against the bank feed, you could see that. You can see and edit the schedules in like a pane of glass, you know, in the Meridian, like web UI. So it has this Meridian AI layer that is what you delegate the work to. And it leverages a bunch of deterministic tools and then has all the ever improving general AI intelligence from the LLMs on top of that. And then what sits on top of that is you have checklists for recurring work.

52:54So you can articulate a month and close checklist or your, you know, whatever, your weekly AR checklist, your tax, the process by which you draft annual tax returns, your FP &A checklist. You have like the ability to articulate arbitrary checklists of recurring work, or you can use one of Meridian's templates. And then you also have access to that same agent with the same shared context on a client for delegation of ad hoc tasks. So, you know, maybe with a client, you do a couple of things. You have the month end close, you have some monthly FP &A, but then you also have ad hoc projects. There's some ad hoc cleanup during onboarding, you know, they're doing some financing and they want a bunch of custom reporting.

53:41There's like a chat entry point to Meridian AI where you can just delegate honestly pretty complex ad hoc tasks as well. And so that's really important because you get the autonomous execution of the recurring work, and then you can also benefit from delegating the ad hoc work. And it all is sharing the same underlying context, the same access to the ledger, the same work papers and schedules, etc. And then on top of that, it can plug into your client management and your practice management also has facilities for that as well. So if you want Meridian to be client facing and you want to be able to push questions to the client that they then, you know, answer and then let Meridian action their feedback.

54:24You can like have the closed loop with the client via the client management aspects of Meridian. And then you can also do some practice management on Meridian as well, or it can plug into your existing systems.

54:33Blake Oliver: Okay. All right. That makes a lot of sense. So obviously you ate the dog food. So what, what was the big learning, I guess, as you were building this and then obviously building pilot, because you didn't just decide to build Meridian one day, it kind of evolved naturally as AI came and you're dealing with clients. What was the big learning? And maybe what was the big learning, the bad way of like, oh, we tried to do this and that was a bad idea. No firm should ever try to do this. Yeah. So I've learned a lot. I've learned a lot. I've learned so much, David, over the past 10 years. I've done so much bookkeeping too.

55:05So I'm a software engineer by training, but I have managed a bookkeeping portfolio basically continuously for the past 10 years. Even today, I manage a 500K portfolio.

55:15Blake Oliver: You have to eat the dog food. You got to do it. Yeah, to stay close to the tech. And so I feel like I've put in my reps here. I have learned a lot. And then just experiencing... I would say for the first eight years of Pilot, we would experience the same thing that every firm, almost every firm experiences, which is like, it's the major mid-month close deadline and oh my gosh, some people are out sick unexpectedly. And so now we're behind on some clients and some are going to ship late. And it's just like the unrelenting nature of the recurring work and the difficulty of the capacity management and like the variance on the close and trying to manage that.

56:03And, and I will say that after really getting to the kind of final state that Meridian is in now, we did that and it's like, client carryover went to zero. Like nothing's ever late anymore. We have infinite onboarding capacity. It's like the, the team's life improved so dramatically. The stress went way down because it's just much easier to do the capacity planning and management if the production work is delegated to Meridian, both because it drives down the total amount of work necessary and because it reduces the variance and the variance is what kills us. But okay, so sorry, against that backdrop, things that I've learned, I've learned many things, a couple of things that I've learned.

56:48Number one, what are we all, why are we even trying to adopt AI to do anything? We, it's because I talk to a lot of firm owners who are like, we're here to try some AI. And I'm like, great. Tell me why again. What are your goals? It starts with having some clear goals for. And this could be goals around. Improving margin or improving scalability or improving the client experience or improving the day to day experience of your team. But there's some set of goals that you need to be able to clearly articulate. And then you need to align the incentives with your clients. And then you need to align the incentives with your team in the service of those goals.

57:34And I think a lot of the most hard-fought, the most hard-won lessons, hard-fought and hard-won lessons for me from the last 10 years is when we didn't get that alignment right, we would try to make changes. We would try to ship changes to the software and they wouldn't work. We like invest in a bunch of automation and it's like, why are the close times not going down? What have we spent all of our time doing? And so it's like now I feel like I have clarity in my head that I'm very happy to share with other firm owners who when they want to talk with me about this, which is like, first off, like the tech stack evolution and the adoption is honestly the last step in the process.

58:15Step one is you have to have incentives aligned with your clients. And so if you're still doing like hourly billing, any kind of investments that are trying to drive down the time that you spend on the client work, you're going to have misaligned incentives because all that's going to do is drive down your revenue, right? And it's like, I experienced that viscerally with our CFO advisory arm where it's like, we were basically doing our hourly billing. And then it was like pulling teeth to try to get folks to be more efficient. So step one is, and this is really a comment about value based pricing.

58:50It's like you have to have value based pricing for everything is what I would say. Everything other than like literally ad hoc a human being on a phone call, which you maybe you have to bill hourly for that. And value based or fixed, fixed, fixed pricing. So I would describe this as subtly different. I do mean value based pricing in that fixed fee can be a veneer on top of hourly billing where you're like, cool, I have done the math it's going to be eight hours of CFO time every month. And so I'm going to do eight times our hourly rate, and that's going to be the fixed fee. That still produces a misalignment on, like, it still doesn't make sense to invest in streamlining the work or automating the work in that end of that case.

59:36So I do mean value-based pricing. And then, and a lot of firms have done that, which is great. But then the second piece, again, a ton of hard, hard won lessons here, hard-fought lessons here. And this is the second one is where I think a lot of firms are still figuring things out is when I say aligning incentives with the internal team on outcomes, this is like a compensation statement. This is if you have a team where you have a goal for the firm, It's like a strategic priority for the firm to do whatever, to drive up margin, to be able to scale more readily, take on more clients, be able to do more onboardings of more clients in a given month, whatever the goal is.

1:00:27Well, if you're an employee who feels like you have a good way of working already, why would I want to take on more clients? Right. Like, why would I want to why would I want to do more onboardings in a month? Well, the answer has to be because some of the benefit to the firm in terms of improved margin or other economics has to accrue back to me, the employee, like my comp has to go up. And so we had a lot of iterations on what that like what that should look like to effectively align the incentives of the firm and the employees.

1:01:01Blake Oliver: If I'm a firm and I'm thinking about Meridian and I want to make my firm more tech, what does my firm look like in a month? Not a month, but I've implemented everything. My firm is the equivalent of pilot. What is your month? You said you're managing half a million dollars in a client's books. What does your month look like? What do you do? Yeah, totally. First, a couple of things.

1:01:28One, there's a lot of standardization. And I mean, standardization in a good way, not like cookie cutter in a way that is bad for clients. But there's a lot of you can clearly see what work needs to be done for a client every month because it's all encoded in these checklists that are like self updating as as the business needs evolve. It's explicit what the inputs are. No one's wasting a bunch of time, like figuring out what data needs to be acquired for the close. So it's like what work to be done, what data we have, what data we're missing, what's outstanding with clients is all very explicit.

1:02:09And then we have this closed loop with clients where once they give us the data, Meridian can actually, you can configure this in Meridian. So you can do it yourself if you want or like the way that PilotHQ is configured, it just does it automatically. Once the data dependencies have been satisfied, the close just kicks off. And so my experience with a month of month end closes is I wake up on probably usually the second of the month, usually on the first a bunch of statements are still like transactions are settling and the statements are posting. But probably by the second I wake up and a bunch of my clients are in review and I just they're like ready for me to review.

1:02:53And so I, I mean, I have a day job as the CEO, but I like, I basically, I basically do bookkeeping while I'm watching TV after my kids have gone to bed. So I like, you know, it's like, great. The kids finally fell asleep. I'm, you know, I pull up my laptop and I'm like, great. You know, I have four clients where the statements all posted. So everything was imported, reconciled, the clothes was executed. It's like ready. There's a review service that gives me a tidy summary of like Meridian has in it a tidy review surface that's a summary of what work was done, any noteworthy decisions that were made, interesting underlying business activity, like if something has happened in the business that I would want to be aware of because that would equip me for client calls.

1:03:38And then if there are any flags on things that I might want to double check from an accounting perspective, like maybe they did a financing event and I want to double check the way that that was booked. the safe's converted and I want to like double check that or whatever. So I have a tidy review surface and then I just, I, you know, it's like very efficient to do my reviews and I ship the books and I am mostly pretty stoked that I didn't have to do anything besides the review. And then, you know, it's like the clients sort of roll in as the data, as the data settles and, and the, the inputs to the close have been satisfied.

1:04:19And then, you know, probably in the back half of the month, we're doing a bunch of onboardings mostly. And I mean, onboarding, it's like taking on a new client sometimes can be a real problem and source of stress for firms because you potentially are taking on a client with books of an unknown, arbitrarily bad quality. and then what can happen is like pre meridian we there'd be a client who wants to work with us and it's like great we've looked at your books and i we mean this respectfully but your books are garbage so what do you want to like do you want us to clean them up for you and and there would be a it would be hard to align with the client on what work they wanted done and what they were willing to pay for it to get into a good spot for the go forward bookkeeping.

1:05:17And one of the most wonderful things for me about Meridian is it basically makes those problems go away because the onboarding is so much easier. Like I just, you know, I inherited some set of some QuickBooks or zero file. It's like, great. Meridian, do like the hygiene review. Give me a summary of the state of the books as of the theoretical, you know, they want September to be the first month of books. Give me a hydrant review up to that point. And then, you know, depending on what it says, if it's like, wow, there are a bunch of prior period issues, the bank balances are all wrong. They would need huge true ups.

1:05:54Now I can go back to the client and say, Hey, we found these things. Do you want us to fix them? Because we can. And I can just say, yes, I can just say, yes. The client says, yes, I do want you to fix those things. Great. I'm happy to go. I'm just going to feed it to Meridian. It doesn't It's easier to be more responsive. The client sends back their 65 bulleted items that they clearly got out of ChatGPT with these really gnarly questions on the books. And I'm like, I would love nothing more than to answer these questions. And by me answer the questions, I mean, I'm feeding these into Meridian and Meridian is going to answer your questions.

1:06:29Like the client is well attended to. They're getting responsive support. We can say yes to their ad hoc requests. We can say yes to the onboarding experience and timeline. And I love that because I want to do a good job for businesses. I want to do a good job for clients. And Meridian helps that. It just makes it much easier. And so, yeah, I think the month is like, yeah, a bunch of like kind of the reviews pop out of the month and close process that's executed autonomously as mostly as the statements settle. And then the data gets processed. You know, sometimes we're blocked on clients for things.

1:07:05I know you have to ping the clients, but the reviews pop out, I do the reviews. It's all pretty copacetic. Do some onboardings. And then, you know, your reward for a month well executed is that it happens again next month.

1:07:23Blake Oliver: Jessica, this has been great. It's, you know, I know lots of tech founders in this space, accounting founders, but it feels like you fell in love with bookkeeping. So many tech founders fall in love with their tech. And like you fell in love with bookkeeping and accounting. And client service, if you want to think about that later. I could just tell, you love bookkeeping deep down. You really love it. I think I definitely have a deep appreciation for the discipline and the fascinating mix of what has historically been potentially really painful and mind-numbingly boring work that has to be done.

1:08:03to get to the stuff that's fun. The interesting forensics and the client problem solving and helping clients achieve their goals. And the fact that it has had these two very different kinds of work rolled into a single human being. And the fact that now all of the boring stuff can be delegated, I find super fascinating and really fun. Like I think that bookkeeping and accounting has never been more fun because I can delegate the boring stuff to a very capable AI agent. And yeah, I mean, it makes it fun. I do. I enjoy my clothes every month.

1:08:40Blake Oliver: That's great. And on that, we'll wrap things up. So if I want to get Meridian, I think I'll display a link that makes it easier for everybody. It's just our same podcast links we always use. So just accounting podcast promo slash pilot. That'll get you the Meridian page. You can book a, they call it a working session. What are they going to get if I go to that link? The working session. Yeah, I think it ends up, maybe it depends on your situation, but I think we could show a demo. You just like, you're talking to the sales team and the implementation team, but there's like, we can, there's like a demo or, you know, sometimes what firms want to do is they want to kind of take a test run on their clients.

1:09:16And so we can get set up for that. Maybe we can do some historical cleanup for you, get a, get a feel for it. But I think, yeah, just go talk to them and they'll, whatever you're trying to get out of the session, we'll make sure that we do.

1:09:28Blake Oliver: So if I want to test this out with a client, is this a three-week process, two-week process? Is it a, hey, just connect it in and go? What's the process for that? Yeah, we guide the process, but I think folks find it to be a surprisingly low lift. And usually the hard part is just getting everyone's schedules aligned. And like we could, I, this Sunday I was working with, I was, I was helping to onboard three separate firms that all had some urgent client deadlines that they were hoping Meridian would help meet. And I, I got three of these set up on a Sunday afternoon. So I think it speaks to how easy it can be to get set up.

1:10:09Blake Oliver: Amazing. Thank you, Jessica. We'll chat in 2027.

1:10:13David Leary: What a great interview. Thanks, David, for doing that. Hey, everyone. Don't forget that you can earn free continuing professional education credit for listening to this episode and our back catalog, plus many other fine accounting tax and fraud and audit podcasts, all sorts of things on the Earmark app. Go to earmark.app in your web browser or download the free app from the App Store. It's called Earmark CPE. Create a free account and earn one free CPE per week. And if you want to support the work we do and earn unlimited CPE and get access to subscriber-only premium content, it's just$200 a year for unlimited.

1:10:56David Leary: The best deal in CPE. Thanks, everyone, who joined us live today. Boring Accountant, T. Dunn, Melissa, Dre, MMT. We got Ruben here. I think that's everyone who commented. Thank you so much. Oh, Dustin. We got Dustin as well. Thanks for joining us. If you want to check us out live on YouTube, go to YouTube and subscribe to the Accounting Podcast. Hit that notification bell icon. We will see you around here next week. Bye, everyone.

1:11:32We'll be right back.