Issue #45 - We’re back, baby
And there’s never been a better time to reset how you work
Welcome to “Get Work Done,” where we discuss the complexities of efficiently running accounting and bookkeeping firms. This newsletter is brought to you by Financial Cents and delivered to your inbox every 2 weeks.
Small Change, Big Results
Get Work Done is back after a brief hiatus, and TBH, we kinda hope this send triggers a whole lotta out of office replies—not because we don’t want you to read all of the grade-A goodness we’ve packed into this issue, but because we fully recognize that tax season ended just 48 hours ago (in the U.S., anyway—hold strong, Canadian friends, the finish line is in sight 🤩).
So if you’re one of the many accounting professionals enjoying some well-deserved R&R, we hope you’ll take a moment to scroll through this issue once you’re back in action. Because honestly, the collective post-tax-season exhale is the perfect time to start thinking about how things can be better, smoother, and less “hair-on-fire” through the rest of this year and (especially) into the next tax season. (You know as well as we do that it’ll be here again before we know it!)
On that note, we invite you to check out all the recordings from last month’s Bookkeeping Workflow Summit, where we hosted four jam-packed sessions focused on helping bookkeeping and accounting firms move away from scattered systems and into a single, streamlined workflow.
You’ll learn top tips from pros like Roman Villard, Kellie Parks, and Ryan Lazanis, including:
Why patchwork systems create invisible bottlenecks—and how to diagnose where your firm’s operational patterns are breaking down.
The root causes of owner bottlenecks in small firms—and the first steps for moving knowledge out of your head and into a system your team can follow without constant check-ins.
The “Core 5” workflows every small firm needs—and how to document and structure them so your team can execute without you.
What a patchwork-free, system-led firm actually looks like in practice—from “Human Hub” to real-time visibility without manual status updates.
Throughout the event, our guest speakers dropped tons of “small change” nuggets that have the potential to snowball into big results, but we’ll leave you with one of the most memorable, courtesy of Roman Villard, CPA, Founder of Full Send Accounting:
Remove your phone number from your email signature: While taking calls and solving problems on the spot might feel good in the moment, the reality is that every call or text that bypasses a shared system is a visibility problem. It’s a decision made verbally and off the record—one that your team can’t act on and that you’ll probably forget to log.
🍿 Watch all of the summit session recordings here
🤓 Read the blog recap here
Community 🫶
Counter: The Community for Accounting Firm Revolutionaries
Counter is a community for accounting firm owners who want to build firms that defy traditional public accounting norms, offering relationships, support, and upskilling to help them change their own lives and transform the industry.
Founded by a CPA who needed a scalable way to help others run firms differently, Counter provides members with resources like virtual events, mastermind cohorts, software demos, and referral networks—connecting them with peers, veterans, and experts so small firms can thrive as part of an accounting industry revolution.
Advisory Accountants & Bookkeepers Network
If you’re ready to stop being the best-kept secret in your market and start attracting the premium clients your expertise deserves, this is your community. The Advisory Accountants & Bookkeepers Network is the go-to space for financial professionals who want to build high-value advisory practices—with the strategies, support, and peer relationships to make it real.
And if you want a taste of what group leader Alyssa Ciera brings to the table, she partnered with Financial Cents to create a free 5-day email course—Master the Client Lifecycle—that walks you through streamlining your firm’s entire client journey from onboarding to offboarding. Think: mapping your client journey, turning messy Zoom calls into clean workflows, building onboarding processes your team can actually follow, and creating SOPs from the systems you already have.
Sign up for the free email course →
H🔥t today
Vote for FC in the CPA Practice Advisor Readers’ Choice Awards!
We have a small(ish) favor to ask. Voting is now open for the CPA Practice Advisor Readers’ Choice Awards—and we’d suuuuuuper appreciate your vote for Financial Cents!
This is the annual awards program where readers get to shout out the tools they rely on most to run their firms, and it’s one of the few places where we can really go toe-to-toe with the biggest players in the industry.
We’ve nabbed runner-up honors in the Practice Management Systems and Comprehensive Firm Workflow Solutions categories for a few years running now, and 2026 feels like our year to steal the top spot. But we can’t do it without you!
If Financial Cents has saved you from a chaotic inbox, a missed deadline, or a very stressful tax season (or all of the above), this is your chance to pay it forward.
Voting closes April 20, so drop yours in now!
Revving up Refunds: The Data is in on the 2026 Tax Filing Season
The Bipartisan Policy Center surveyed 1,200 Americans who filed their 2025 taxes, and the results are worth a scan before you close the books on this season.
More than half of respondents reported receiving a federal refund, and of those, 39% said it was larger than last year. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s new deductions—for tips, overtime, auto loan interest, and seniors—were broadly known but unevenly claimed. A majority of filers had at least some awareness of the 2025 law’s tax relief, though more respondents had no awareness at all than “a ton” of awareness.
Perhaps most interesting for your firm’s future: nearly one in five respondents reported using AI this year when preparing their return (11% for the first time), while another 34% said they hadn’t used it yet but would consider it in the future. That’s over half of taxpayers either already experimenting with AI on their taxes or open to it. Food for thought as you map out your advisory strategy for next year.
Read the full story on the BPC website →
Meet the Small Business Owner Using AI as His CFO (Don’t Worry, his CPA Still Gets the Last Word)
Kyle Ray can’t afford a full C-suite for his window cleaning company. So he built one with AI.
“Basically my entire leadership team is AI,” the Geek Window Cleaning founder told Business Insider. At $40/month for Claude and ChatGPT combined, it’s a pretty lean org chart. And this tax season, his “AI CFO” earned its keep.
Ray uses ChatGPT to surface tax strategies he might be missing—things like whether certain sales reps could qualify as 1099 contractors instead of W-2 employees, which can mean real payroll tax savings. He also uses it to prep for conversations with his CPA, asking questions like, “What am I not asking that I should be asking?” (Which is honestly a great question to ask any advisor, human or otherwise.)
He’ll even run his taxes themselves through AI first, then compare the results with his accountant’s work to catch anything that slipped through the cracks.
But he’s not handing over the keys entirely. His CPA still gets final say, and Ray is clear-eyed about AI’s limits: “I wouldn’t trust it 110%.” Because while AI is great for explaining concepts and organizing data, applying that knowledge to a nuanced and specific situation is still a human job.
Read the full story on Business Insider →
Swipe this workflow template
Swipe this 1099 Preparation Template from Jami Doran
Get more templates from firm owners like you in our community template library.
Meme
Relatable? 😆 (if you use FC, we hope not!)
Firm Spotl💡ght
How On Track Accounting Solutions Heads Off 1099 Headaches with Month-End Close in Financial Cents
Greg Scholten founded On Track Accounting Solutions in 2016 with a pretty specific mission: bringing specialized accounting, bookkeeping, and tax services to underserved niches, including adult foster care (AFC) homes and nonprofits.
Running a lean, fully remote team of three, Greg didn’t have room for chaos. But every January, it showed up anyway.
Figuring out which clients needed 1099s, which vendors had crossed the IRS reporting threshold, and whether the right W-9s were even on file—it was the same stressful scramble year after year. Greg knew a basic Excel checklist wasn’t going to cut it forever.
Enter Month-End Close in Financial Cents. By weaving 1099 tracking into his regular monthly workflow, Greg went from last-minute panic to January calm—with all the data already organized and ready to export by the time filing season rolled around. Oh, and he consolidated his tech stack in the process. One portal. No more scrambles.
Here’s how On Track keeps a three-person remote firm running smooth like butter ⬇️
Events
📍 Jason On Firms LIVE National Tour — May 4–June 26, 2026 (20 Cities Across the U.S.)
If you’ve been waiting for a reason to get out of the office, this is it. Jason Staats is bringing his half-day, CPE-eligible workshop to 20 cities this spring:Columbus, Chicago, Minneapolis, Miami, Nashville, Austin, New York, San Francisco, and more. Expect real talk on firm operations, snacks, a bar, and an optional networking dinner to connect you with local firm owners who get it. With over 1,000 accountants joining the 2025 tour, spots go fast. Check to see if he’s coming to your city and grab your ticket.
👉 Check the full schedule here →
📍 GrowCon — May 4–6, 2026 (Salt Lake City, UT)
Hosted by Universal Accounting Center, GrowCon is built for owners of bookkeeping, accounting, and tax businesses who want to scale—not just survive. You’ll learn how to actually grow your firm, build systems that hold up, and stop being the bottleneck in your own business. Industry leaders and tech partners share the tools and strategies that are working right now. If you’re heading into summer wondering how to level up before Q4 hits, this one’s worth the trip.
📍 RightNOW 2026 — May 18–20, 2026 (San Antonio, TX)
Now in its third year, RightNOW has earned a reputation for honest, no-filter conversations about what’s working in modern firms. This mid-year conference is designed for the post-busy-season stretch—when you finally have space to think about automation, capacity, and what you want the next chapter of your firm to look like. Sessions are led by real firm owners, and you’ll walk away with frameworks and templates you can implement immediately. Plus, the Signia by Hilton La Cantera Resort isn’t exactly a bad backdrop for a few days of thinking big.
Noteworthy
We Asked 261 Bookkeeping Firms About Their Tech Stacks, and the Results Were...a Lot
Spoiler: Most firms are using way more tools than they want to—and it’s costing them more than just subscription fees.
We surveyed 261 bookkeeping and accounting professionals to get an honest look at how small firms are managing their software, where things break down, and what they actually wish they had. What we found was a pretty clear disconnect:
9 in 10 firms want to run on 4 tools or fewer, but less than half actually do.
Nearly half aren’t confident that nothing is falling through the cracks.
And 70% are manually re-entering data between tools multiple times a week.
The culprit? Tool sprawl. It starts innocently enough—one app for proposals, another for task management, another for client documents—and before long you’re spending more time managing your software than actually serving clients.
We broke it all down—the data, the real stories, the dropped balls, and the path forward—in our 2026 Bookkeeping Firm Tech Stack Report. It’s free, it’s packed with insights, and it might just make you feel a little less alone.
Which Patchwork Persona Is Running Your Firm?
Be honest: Does your firm run on spreadsheets held together with hope? Do you have a tool for everything—and actually use none of them fully? Is there one person on your team whose entire job is basically just...knowing where everything is?
If any of that sounds familiar, your firm probably has a Patchwork Persona.
Born out of the data from our 2026 Bookkeeping Firm Tech Stack Report, the Patchwork Personas are seven distinct patterns that show up again and again in small accounting and bookkeeping firms when systems get fragmented.
There’s the Spreadsheet Stalwart, the Tool Toggler, the Human Router, the Constant Copy-Paster, the Month-End Magician, the Message Miner, and the Apology Artist. Most firms aren’t just one—but there’s usually a dominant pattern running (and occasionally wrecking) the show.
Of course, knowledge is power—because once you know which persona fits your firm, you can actually do something about it. Our free 1-minute assessment will quickly identify your dominant persona as well as personalized strategies for fixing it. Plus, for a limited time, sharing your result enters you to win $500—so there’s that.
That’s all for this issue. See ya next time! 👋