Issue #48 - The price is wrong (and how these firm owners fixed it)
Plus: The scoop on the Proudly Small movement + a “fully autonomous” AI bookkeeper
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
Let’s talk about the can every firm owner has kicked down the road at one point or another: adjusting your prices.
Post-tax season is traditionally when firm owners come up for air—and when they start to have the mental space to contemplate hard questions they’ve been avoiding for months:
Which clients are taking more than they’re giving?
What services are you still pricing the same way you did two years ago?
And when did you last look at your minimum and actually defend it?
Pricing is one of those quandaries that feels like a math problem. But under the surface, it’s often a confidence problem. Sound familiar?
We’re going deep into the pricing problem in our upcoming virtual event, “Charge What You’re Worth: Pricing, Positioning, & Onboarding,” happening next Thursday, June 4 at 2:00 PM Eastern.
Moderator Ron Baker, Co-founder of Threshold, will host three firm-owner panelists who have solved the pricing puzzle through hard-won experience. And now, they’re going to teach you how to do the same.
Join Angela Jenkins, owner of Mindfull Money Matters in Philadelphia; Christine Salvatore, owner of In Line Management in Los Angeles; and Dave Kersting, owner of Capovario in Denver, as they break down the logic, strategy, and psychology of pricing your firm’s bookkeeping, accounting, and consulting services.
Come with your awkward pricing questions. Leave with a floor you’ll actually hold.
👉 Register for the June 4 pricing webinar →
Community 🫶
Roundtable Labs: A Community Where Everyone Counts
Roundtable Labs is a community where everyone counts. Regardless of how long you’ve been in business. No matter how many clients you have. Whatever your revenue. You bring value to the table and the table brings value to you. Roundtable Labs is where accountants, bookkeepers, CPAs, EAs, firm owners, and humans can all find their people. Together, they give and receive support, provide accountability, nurture relationships, and solve real-world problems.
Join the Next Level Firm Roundtable
Hosted by Dave Kersting and Richard Roppa-Roberts, this Roundtable Labs session is a lively discussion on all things workflow. Join the next session on June 17 to gain valuable insights for optimizing your firm’s workflow in Financial Cents.
H🔥t today
The Bench Founder Is Back, and He’s Betting on Autonomous AI Bookkeeping
Ian Crosby, whose last venture (Bench Accounting) famously collapsed in 2024, just raised $10 million from Khosla Ventures to try again—this time with zero human bookkeepers in the mix. His new startup, Synthetic, aims to produce accrual-basis financials entirely autonomously for AI and software startups, starting at $49/month.
The kicker? Crosby himself isn’t sure it’s technologically possible yet. “AI is notoriously unreliable,” he told TechCrunch, “And no one wants to entrust their accounting to a system which might get it wrong.” For small firm owners watching this space, it’s worth paying attention—not because Synthetic is coming for your clients tomorrow, but because the conversation about AI-driven bookkeeping is accelerating whether the technology is ready or not. Your value is human judgment, relationships, and accountability. That’s not something Synthetic is building.
Tax Client Confusion Over CP53E Notices: What to Know
The IRS issued over a million CP53E notices this filing season as part of the federal government’s shift away from paper refund checks. The notice means the IRS approved a refund but can’t issue it electronically—and taxpayers have 30 days to log into their IRS Online Account and add banking information or wait up to six weeks for a paper check. The problem: some notices were issued in error, the QR codes on them are now being spoofed by scammers, and many clients have no idea what they’re looking at. This is a genuine client service opportunity: firms that proactively explain the CP53E situation to their clients right now are earning goodwill in real time. The guidance from the Journal of Accountancy: skip the QR code, go directly to IRS.gov, and update bank info manually.
Swipe this workflow template
Swipe this Discovery Onboarding Template from Tonya Schulte
Get more templates from firm owners like you in our community template library.
Meme
Relatable? 😆 (It’s just adding and subtracting, right??)
Firm Spotl💡ght
How Capovario Ditched the Sticky Notes and Built a Firm That Supports Work-Life Balance
From the moment he launched Capovario, Dave Kersting knew he didn’t want to build a conventional accounting firm. The Denver-based firm—founded in 2020 and fully remote from day one—operates as both an accounting and bookkeeping practice and a concierge consulting firm, connecting business owner clients with whatever they need to solve a business problem, accounting-related or not.
“We want to be the first our clients call when they have even a non-accounting business challenge,” Kersting says. What he didn’t anticipate was how quickly the firm’s growth would expose the limits of the system running underneath it: a multi-level folder, a stack of sticky notes, and 90% of the workflow living in his own head.
The transition to Financial Cents wasn’t a top-down initiative. His team actually led the charge, having worked at other firms that used the software. It wasn’t long before Financial Cents became the operational hub of Capovario: projects generate automatically when a client signs a proposal, task assignments make accountability clear without constant check-ins from Dave, and the team starts and ends every day inside the platform. The payoff has been better client service, tighter deadline management, and a firm structure that truly supports the entire team’s work-life balance.
Events
📍 Charge What You’re Worth and Keep Clients: Pricing, Positioning, & Onboarding — Thursday, June 4 (Virtual Webinar, 2:00–3:00 PM ET)
This is the next session in Financial Cents’ Proudly Small webinar series, and it’s focused entirely on pricing—the conversation most firm owners avoid until it becomes a crisis. Real firm owners will walk through how they set their rates, what it took to raise them, and how to hold the line when a prospect pushes back.
📍 From Burnout to Breakthrough: Rethinking Your Tax Workflow — Thursday, June 4 (Virtual Webinar, 3:30–4:30 PM ET)
Tax season may be over, but for many firms the pressure hasn’t let up. Hiring is harder than ever, teams are stretched thin, and inconsistent quality keeps work circling back to you, making it difficult to step away with confidence. In this session, you’ll see how firms are moving from burnout to real control by combining AI-powered document processing and human-reviewed OCR from GruntWorx with structured workflows and collaboration in Financial Cents. More importantly, you’ll see how to turn the time you save into higher-value work, shifting into advisory services, taking on better clients, and growing revenue without adding more hours or headcount.
📍 How We Got Our Name Out There: Marketing for Firms that Hate Marketing — Thursday, June 11 (Virtual Webinar, 2:00–3:00 PM ET)
If pricing is the conversation most firm owners avoid, marketing is a close second. This upcoming Proudly Small webinar session brings together real firm owners to share how they built their reputation and filled their pipeline without a marketing team or a big budget. It’s part of the same series as the June 4 pricing webinar, and it’s aimed squarely at the firm owners who cringe at the word “brand.”
📍 AICPA & CIMA ENGAGE — June 8–11 (Las Vegas)
The largest annual event for CPAs and finance pros, with sessions across tax, A&A, advisory, technology, and practice management. Strong CPE opportunity and one of the best networking weeks of the year for firm owners thinking about what’s next! (P.S. Stop by booth 323 to say hi to the Financial Cents crew and enjoy a cup of coffee or tea. ☕)
📍 Scaling New Heights 2026 — June 15–17 (Orlando)
Woodard’s flagship conference for accounting and bookkeeping professionals—heavy on practical workflow, technology, and firm-growth content. Especially good for owners building or scaling QuickBooks-centric firms, with deep tracks on advisory and team development.
Noteworthy
Small Firms Deserve to Be Seen: Join the #ProudlySmall Movement
Financial Cents just launched something worth paying attention to: a dedicated campaign celebrating small accounting and bookkeeping firms—not as a stepping stone to something bigger, but as a legitimate and intentional way to build a business. The new Proudly Small hub is worth a read on its own, but the real draw is the Wall of Small Firms: a growing collection of firm owners who’ve made the deliberate choice to stay small, stay focused, and build something worthwhile. If that sounds like you, peep the hub below and add your firm to the wall!
Join 130+ firms on the Wall of Small Firms →
That’s it for now. See you in two weeks. 💚