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
You already know the things you want more of: clients, revenue, a stronger team, and some hours back in your week—just to name a few. The tougher question is the opposite: what are you willing to do less of? That’s the list leading firms get right.
So, if your firm could get really, really great at one thing next year, what would that thing be?
That’s the entire premise of WorkflowCon 2026, our two-day virtual conference happening November 9–10. This year’s theme is “Focus is the New Flex,” because any firm can do more—but the best firms pick one thing and go all-in. It could be one client type, one service line, or one way of working. The key is committing—holding steady, even when chasing the shiny new thing is oh-so-tempting.
Two days, five tracks, and a lineup of firm owners just like you talking about what they chose, what it cost them, and what it made room for:
Workflow: How work actually moves, where it stalls, and what to stop doing by hand
AI: Which tools and use cases firms are really using, and what they’re steering clear of
Client: Who you serve, how you say no to bad fits, and what changes when your roster gets shorter
Revenue: Pricing, packaging, and the logic behind charging for value over volume
Team: Building a firm that doesn’t need you in every room
Four keynotes anchor the programming, including psychologist and bestselling author Ethan Kross, Little Fish Accounting’s Keila Hill-Trawick, SmartAccountant.ai’s Jan Haugo, and Conscious Accounting’s Nicole Davis—plus a bench of practitioners who’ve embraced the call to get better, not bigger.
WorkflowCon is completely free, 100% virtual, and every session is recorded, so register even if you can only catch half of it live. And stick around Day 2: that’s when the Small & Mighty Awards winners get crowned, live on stage.
This is the big one, friends. If there’s a single thing we’d love you to do before you close this tab, it’s grab your seat!
👉 See the full agenda & register →
Community 🫶
Level up your books and win over the tax pros with Ask a CPA
There’s an unspoken tension between bookkeepers and the CPAs and tax preparers who review their work. Ask a CPA is the community built to ease it—created by Nancy McClelland, the CPA behind The Dancing Accountant, who started out as a bookkeeper herself. The main focus is helping bookkeepers produce tax-ready books and clear workpapers that make tax pros’ jobs easier, earning their respect and increasing the chance that they’ll send referrals back your way. Membership runs $47/month and includes two live Q&A webinars a month, a monthly study hall, a private community, and a searchable library of every recorded answer.
Transcend the machines at Scaling New Heights 2027
For four days each summer, Woodard’s Scaling New Heights gathers 1,000+ accountants and bookkeepers for one of the biggest technology-and-practice-management events in the country, featuring advanced training, a massive tech expo, NASBA-registered CPE, and networking meant to elevate how you run your firm. The 2027 theme, “Transcend the Machines,” leans into the right question for the moment: let AI handle the entry-level work, and double down on the uniquely human skills—judgment, empathy, and advisory—that keep clients coming to you. It’s all happening June 27–30 in Orlando, with former OpenAI go-to-market lead Zack Kass headlining.
H🔥t Today
Your small-business clients are heading into year-end a little jittery
Small-business optimism slipped below its 52-year average in September, with owners pointing to inflation and the ongoing struggle to find good workers as their biggest worries. Translation: the people who sign your engagement letters are feeling cautious about 2027, and cautious clients often hesitate, stall on decisions, and then panic in January. Beat them to it. A short, proactive check-in now—to chat about cash flow, review hiring plans, and take a peek at what next year’s numbers might look like—is exactly the kind of advisory touch that turns nervous clients into loyal ones.
When a client needs a lawyer, swoop in with the referral
Plenty of client questions start as a tax or accounting matter before morphing into legal situations (e.g., a buy-sell agreement, a partnership dissolution, or a shareholder dispute). And no matter how badly you want to help, wandering too far into that territory yourself can put you in liability hot water. The fix? Line up two or three attorneys you trust in the legal areas your clients run into most—employment, corporate, estate, or tax controversy, for example—and have them in your back pocket before the call comes. The bonus? Attorneys need CPAs for financial analysis just as often, so a solid referral bench tends to send work right back your way.
Swipe this workflow template
Swipe this Year End Review template from Malia White.
Get more templates from firm owners like you in our community template library.
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Relatable? 😆
Firm Spotl💡ght
Empty offices, full life: How Crema Bookkeeping grows with purpose
When Cathryn Vidal walked away from a staff bookkeeping job that had turned toxic, she wasn’t planning to start a firm; she just knew she was done being an employee. That “shove,” as she calls it, became Crema Bookkeeping in Nanaimo, British Columbia—a firm she has grown one careful decision at a time ever since.
The twist: Crema recently moved into a bigger, more prominent space on a busy street, and Vidal is in no rush to fill it. She has a maximum size in mind (somewhere around 10 to 15 people), a culture she’s determined to protect, and a horse named Larry who needs her at the barn four to six times a week. The empty offices, then, aren’t a growth problem that needs solving, but a core part of her plan.
It’s a firm built to fit a life, rather than the other way around—and seven-year-old Cathryn, who just wanted to ride horses when she grew up, would probably approve.
Check out Cathryn’s full story →
Events
📍Accountex Canada — November 3–4 (Toronto, ON)
Canada’s biggest accounting and finance gathering takes over Toronto for two days of CPD-verified sessions and a packed expo floor where you can actually put your hands on the software, automation, and AI tools reshaping daily workflows. Expect 31 sessions built for the real pressures on Canadian firms, up to 24 CPD credits, and a thousand-plus peers to swap notes with. If you’re north of the border, this is the one to block off.
📍From Firm Strategy to Execution | November 4 | FREE Webinar
Big plans to grow your firm, your way? But who's making sure they actually happen? Between manual data entry, missed deadlines, work stuck in inboxes, and compliance surprises, even the best growth strategy can fall apart in the day-to-day rigmarole. Join this expert panel, Dyanna Salcedo, Lindsey Denson, Brian Unger, and Frank Tumminello, on Wed, Nov 4 at 1 PM ET to see for yourself how to turn big-picture strategy into real results, they'll walk you through practical software solutions that bring it to life, and leave you with three actionable takeaways you can implement in your firm right away. Plus, bring your questions for the live Q&A!
Hosted by The CFO Project, Financial Cents, GruntWorx, and FileForms.
📍 WorkflowCon 2026 — November 9–10 (Virtual & Free)
Our own two-day virtual conference is back, and this year’s theme says it all: Focus is the New Flex. Most accounting conferences are built for firms trying to get bigger. WorkflowCon is built for firms betting on depth: better-fit clients, sharper services, and systems that hold up. Five tracks with 20-plus sessions spanning AI in practice, workflow automation, pricing, client selection, and team operations. Plus, recordings for every registrant. Did we mention it’s 100% free?
Noteworthy
Your Financial Cents data can answer your most burning questions, right inside the AI tools you already use
You’ve probably caught yourself doing it: asking ChatGPT or Claude a question about your firm, then realizing the answer lives in a different tab entirely, locked inside your practice management system where the chat window can’t reach. That’s the exact problem the new Financial Cents MCP solves.
Connect your account once, and you can ask your assistant plain-English questions—What’s overdue this week? Who still hasn’t uploaded their documents? Which invoices are unpaid?—and have it take action, from logging time to spinning up a client’s recurring tasks, without copy-pasting a thing. It runs on the permissions you’ve already set, confirms before it changes anything, can’t delete your data, and switches off in one click. No developer setup required—your work simply shows up where you already are, and you always get the final say.
See the full launch announcement →
That’s all for now. See you in two weeks. 💚