Every firm leader has been faced with the same question: Will you use your clients' tech, or will clients use your tech? Whether a firm pursues a tech-exclusive strategy or a tech-agnostic one, the choice will have major ramifications down the line, so it is important to understand the tradeoffs.
Pursuing an agnostic strategy means that the accountant will adapt to the client's tech stack. Perhaps the firm prefers QuickBooks Online, but the client uses Xero or some other platform. Under this strategy, the professional will work with the client regardless, doing whatever they need to do to successfully migrate data and accommodate different workflows.
Kim Blascoe, senior director of CAS professional services for CPA.com said that this approach can let a firm access a broad set of clients in a variety of sectors, as it involves meeting the client where they are.
"I think if we were going to dive a little bit deeper into that, you think about client-centric flexibility, so you might potentially be more open to work with a variety of clients, and maybe potentially in different industries, so certainly, maybe a broader market when it comes to attracting potentially new clients into your business," she said.
Katherine Bunschoten, founder of North Carolina-based Certum Solutions, emphasized the client-centric aspect as one of the strengths of being a software-agnostic firm. While her firm began as a QBO-only practice, longtime clients would ask about wanting to try a new solution or bring in software of their own. While she did not plan to be a software-agnostic firm at first, "We did have a strong focus on listening to our customers."
"And what does that mean to me? It means moving the focus from myself as a firm owner and more towards seeing through the eyes of my customer, what's going to work for them. … I'm not a manufacturer, and what works best for a manufacturing customer or a construction customer may not be something that I worked with historically, but in order to meet that demand and be the best service provider for my client, it's something my team needs to learn," she said.
Right now her firm works along what she called an "ambassador" program, where individual staff members train on different platforms, whether because a client asked about it or even because the staff member was curious about it. Over time this has developed into a sort of ecosystem where they can find the best software fit for a client's specific needs.
"If it was just me alone, I probably could not have done it as easily. But knowing who your colleagues are and what their strengths are within your firm definitely has been a boon for us," she said.
Pat Camuso, head of digital asset-focused accounting firm Camuso CPA, made a similar point in that, even within the crypto space alone, accountants have literally dozens of solutions to choose from before even considering the dozens more that exist on the enterprise side. There's no one-size-fits-all approach for clients, and so he doesn't want to restrict himself to a single solution.
"And even to this day, I would say there's not one software out there that's going to have perfect data coverage and quality and completeness and the exact reporting that you want. There's not one perfect solution," he said.
Another major advantage he cited was independence. He said there are a lot of firms that will choose just one crypto accounting software platform, then funnel all their clients onto it as a way to get affiliate bonuses for referrals, regardless of whether that platform is the best fit for the client. By being open to different platforms, he said he can give clients options, as well as the peace of mind that he is thinking in terms of their own success.
"If I just put them blindly on one [platform] and don't take them through the whole process [of evaluating different platforms], and then they find out I'm getting a referral fee or something, they'll be like, 'What is this guy doing? Is this the right thing for us?' But taking a transparent approach and really being able to give them through this fragmented software provider landscape is a value add," he said.
Not that there aren't any tradeoffs. Both Camuso and Bunschoten said that this approach is more complex, needs more training, and requires the firm to develop different workflows for different platforms, which tends to eat into efficiency.
Bunschoten added that there's limited time available to learn new platforms, which also affects recruitment, as it can be difficult to find people with the years of experience needed to be an ambassador out the gate. She also mentioned that each of these platforms generally need to be maintained, which eats into capacity.
"Instead of juggling one software platform and the maintenance releases and the IT aspect … we now have to coordinate multiple variables when we're dealing with those IT situations. So there is an element of complexity to it," she said.
Camuso added that it takes time and effort to develop different standard operating procedures, especially considering the complexity of crypto accounting, which also means switching between workflows and closely monitoring their implementation to ensure nothing goes wrong. But at the same time, he said it's allowed them to understand many different platforms and develop standard procedures for ingesting, normalizing, reconciling and categorizing data appropriately using standardized due diligence methodologies "regardless of software."
"That does add complexity … [though] I think it works to our advantage now, and it definitely puts us in a stronger position. But there is that problem," he said.
Tech exclusivity
To be a tech-exclusive firm is to require that clients adapt to the firm's tech stack, or already be on it themselves — and if they object too hard on this point, the firm will calmly say they're not a good fit for each other and refer them to a colleague.
While still a minority, the number of firms pursuing this strategy are growing fast, with
"From a standardization perspective, being able to build consistent processes, reporting, formats and workflow across multiple clients is something that certainly is an advantage when you're working on the same tech stack. … On the efficiency aspect, you have less time learning multiple platforms, which makes it more scalable, easier to train your staff, easier to automate your workflows, build repeatable processes, and even potentially gives you fewer data errors," she said.
Dawn Brolin, leader of Connecticut-based Power Accounting and an accounting technology advisor, knows this well. When she first started her firm, she said she was open to any client on any platform because, bluntly, she needed the money. Over time, however, the drawbacks of this approach began weighing on her, and she realized that the best client service was offered through the software she knew the best, which in her case was QuickBooks Online. Narrowing her focus from dozens of different platforms down to one that she knew top to bottom led to less stress and more money.
"Over many, many years, I realized that the quicker that I was able to laser focus on utilizing the technology I was really good at and stop trying to please everybody, [the quicker we] became more efficient, we became more productive, we became more profitable because we were just really good at the tools we use. So we asked, 'Wait a minute, why are we even entertaining other tools when what we're using is working?' That's where a lot of things changed for us," she said.
With only one platform to learn, training becomes much easier to manage, as people don't need to "learn 80 different things as opposed to the tech stack you're familiar with." They just need to learn one thing: QuickBooks. Yes, there aren't as many new clients, but this isn't as big a deal as one would think, as Brolin said she is able to derive much more value from the ones she already has.
"Our decision together as a team, as a small team, is we don't want to be a firm that grows and has 500 clients. We have about 200 right now between businesses and individuals that we do taxes for, and because of that our work is so under control, we are OK with not growing the team. Where we're at is where we're going to stay," she said, noting that this decision also came with the choice to move away from hours-based billing and into subscription or, for one-off needs, outcome-based pricing.
Keila Hill-Trawick, founder and CEO of Washington, D.C.-based Little Fish Accounting, reported a similar experience. When she started, she was willing to work with both QuickBooks and Xero, but as time went on she found her small firm did not have time to keep up with all the changes and updates of two major platforms at once. They decided they would focus on QuickBooks.
While they at first expected they'd eventually expand back, new solutions they implemented before then needed to integrate with what they were using now. Eventually anything they used had to be able to connect with QuickBooks anyway, so they decided to remain a tech-exclusive firm.
"My expectation is that we would grow to a point where maybe we could have somebody who was an expert in Xero and somebody who was an expert in QuickBooks. What I found, though, as we started integrating more tech at Little Fish, is that those integrations started mattering. And so now everything that we use also talks to QuickBooks. … So many softwares that are talking to QuickBooks require a certain setup that it felt easier to streamline that way than to expose ourselves to additional tech that we needed to learn and keep up with," she said.
Not only is training easier, client onboarding is a lot faster, as everything centers around one platform.
"Because everything is streamlined, and because we have tools that are pulling from one system, it's really easy to get them set up in our other systems, review their information to see whether they're a good fit for us, and then clean up the information, because it always goes exactly the same way … because my team is on QuickBooks, it makes it really simple to bring people in," she said.
Like Brolin, she acknowledged that this has led to a narrowing of her client base but this has not been especially troubling as Hill-Trawick was never as interested in sheer volume. She always preferred a smaller number of higher-value clients. A drawback she did mention, though, was vendor lock-in: When you're exclusive to one platform, you're generally at the mercy of whatever company is behind the platform.
"So when QuickBooks raises their prices or changes their format or does something that I don't like, it is a huge overhaul for us to make a decision, because it would essentially have to be an all or nothing. I don't think we could halfway put some of our clients into this other system and keep some of them over here. And so it means a huge ordeal if and when we decide to change," she said.
The spectrum
Being tech-agnostic or exclusive is not a hard dichotomy, and so even if a firm leans one way or another, they don't necessarily have to go 100% in that direction. A tech-agnostic firm might still have preferred platforms while a tech exclusive firm might have areas of flexibility.
Camuso, for example, requires clients to use ShareFile for cybersecurity reasons, as "we're not going to have a policy to just click any sharing link and create a security risk." Conversely, while Brolin's firm insists the client be on the same GL software, they're more flexible around things like payment solutions, noting that they don't do bill pay or AP services, so it doesn't really matter what the client uses.
Blascoe said she has also seen tech-exclusive firms making concessions for extra fees, sometimes on the spot and other times as official policy.
"We would look at going tech-agnostic with this particular client, but you have to pay for it. So we're going to do it, but there's definitely going to be a premium pricing that comes along with that. And we see firms sometimes do it in the tier model too. So they'll say Tier One and Tier Two, this is our tech stack, you know, this is exactly the services we're going to offer in these different tiers. And then you get to Tier Three, and maybe that's a custom tier, and the pricing on that is significantly different from your more standard model that you're using with your tech stack," she said.
Blascoe agreed that specific circumstances and contexts, as well as long-term vision and goals, will affect what model works best for a firm. For instance, if scaling fast and onboarding lots of new clients is important, it may be better to pursue a tech-exclusive model, especially if the services being offered are more transactional; if the priority, instead, is more focused on providing data-driven insights for advisory clients, and the firm collects information directly from the client's own system, then a tech-agnostic approach may be more appropriate.
Still, based on what CPA.com has been observing over the years, she said that firms are trending more tech-exclusive than agnostic.
"I think definitely the trend is to go towards exclusivity, because all the practices are trying to figure out how they can scale quicker and build their teams faster … there's a lot of advantages to exclusive technology. I think the only time that you probably don't stay in that concept is if you really have a high-level CFO-type of business insights practice, and you're not focused on the back end," she said.
This is the final part of our series on Managing Your Firm's Technology. You can find the other parts linked
