I'm Beth Whitworth, race car driving, quilt making, CPA firm owning, wife, mom, and boss. I'm here to help you build a business you love by sharing all of the good, the bad, the ugly, and the excellent sides of working in this industry. It's not always easy, but after many years, I can finally say it's worth it.
Let me guide you on your journey to accounting with confidence.
Hi, welcome to accounting with confidence. I'm your host, Beth Whitworth. And today we are talking about what my firm is currently using for their tech stack. So what I mean by tech stack is what are all of the applications that we use To keep our firm running. And let me tell you, the list is pretty extensive.
So instead of putting up a bunch of slides and screenshots or anything like that, since some people might still be listening old school on just the podcast apps, I plan on doing a list that you can go to the show notes and you can have a link to go get the list that we are using. And I'll include with that any links to where you can get the, those apps as well.
And I will indicate if any of those are affiliates where maybe I get a little return on that, not a lot, but if I refer people to certain applications and they sign up for it, I could get, you know, a 50 gift card type thing or whatever their affiliate program allows. So, and I will do that and put that in the show notes so that you can get to this and you don't have to worry about writing it all down while you're watching or listening to this now.
So for us, we are a full service CPA firm and we include doing tax preparation. So the first area that I'm going to talk about our tech stack is what we use for tax and what we use to prepare return start to finish. So, we use Drake Tax as our tax return preparation software, and that does all of our e filing for us.
We also use a product that, uh, integrates with that and also integrates with other applications called Gruntworx. And what Gruntworx does is it allows us to take scanned documents or even PDFs of documents that have come in. To our portal that we then combine into a PDF and we send it to Gruntworx.
And what Gruntworx does is it puts it in order, meaning it will take all your W 2s and that's the first line of the return. So they will put W 2s and they will bookmark it into a PDF that we can then use as our tax work papers. So that has been a huge benefit. That is super helpful. If you don't have someone on your team that has.
Time to do admin, or you have an admin who doesn't know anything about tax, so maybe they don't know what order to put things in or what to call them, you know? So this application allows you to have bookmarks that indicate, you know, W2 number one to a b, C company, W2, number two to X, Y, Z company. You know, your K ones, your 10 90 nines.
Your, and then you can add documents to it and bookmark as you go. So, we love GrantWorx. In conjunction with that, we then use Adobe to tickmark our work papers, to indicate, you know, things that went to the tax return, and we use that for reviewing. So we send it to GruntWorx, GruntWorx sends it back with the bookmarks, the preparer gets it, they use Adobe to review the documents, input into the tech software, which is Drake, and make any notes, comments, etc.
inside of the work paper. So we use a paid version of Adobe so that we have the ability. To make some changes and some edits inside of that. Now, what we use for our portal for getting documents to and from clients and also getting signatures from clients is Canopy Tax. And we implemented this strategy and this application this time last year.
We were going live with it. So we are getting ready to enter our second tax season using Canopy. And it is kind of an all inclusive practice management software, but as it relates to tax, it is something that we use for getting documents, sending documents securely, it is encrypted, it is our file storage.
Now, another area of tax that we do work in is we have to prepare those 1099s every year. And we actually use Drake Accounting, which is You could do live accounting, you could do after the fact accounting, you can do payroll inside of it, but we've always used it for doing processing 1099s, and it allows us to e file them.
It prepares the e file so that we can send it through the Fire site, and it's worked for us very well over the last few years, and is great for us. Really not that big of an additional cost on top of the Drake tax and then for our tax research We use the textbook web library. So we do not get any hard books anymore.
I have in the past We've gotten all of the tax library spiral bound and all of those things But now we just use the online version And what's really handy with that is there are links that are used inside of Drake Tax. So if you're on a screen, you need help on figuring out a depreciation question, you can click on the link and it will take you to log in to your textbook web library.
Okay, so that's area one. Area two. We do full service live accounting and payroll, so we use a whole bunch of stuff for that. And right now, we have just recently become a partner with Xero, so we are offering an alternative to Intuit, QuickBooks Desktop, or QuickBooks Online products. By using zero. So for clients, their books are kept either in Q B.
O. Essentials plus advanced. We do not use self employed or zero or QuickBooks desktop or they have their own QuickBooks enterprise solutions software. So where we will log into their their software on their computer. So we also occasionally use WAVE. Now WAVE has recently come up with a paid plan. It used to be free and only paid if you needed to accept credit cards or something or do an invoice.
It's changed a little bit, but we still occasionally use WAVE for those really, really new startups or sometimes for our real estate holding company that just started and we just need to get them a balance sheet and a P& L. And maybe it's short term, maybe it's something that isn't a lot of activity in it, because that is not our go to.
We also use Dext, which used to be Receipt Bank. And Dext is for our receipt management, and it allows us to post, you know, have the bills go to Dext, we code them, and then attaches them inside of whatever app we're using, QBO, Xero, QB Desktop. We use Melio for our bill pay. Now, we're considering making a switch from that, as they have just recently changed from a per transaction fee to a subscription.
So we kind of have to weigh, are we doing enough transactions to warrant a subscription on some of our companies, or does it make sense to look for something else? And so we're currently looking at RAMP. So I haven't done a whole lot of research, but I've heard some things about it, so I'm going to check it out.
And then for our payroll processing, we use Patriot, and then we also are still have a few clients that are in QuickBooks Desktop. Mostly those clients need some job costing, so there is still not a great amount of choices if your client needs job costing, especially relating to project costs and billing for time and all of those things.
So we still have a few QuickBooks desktop payroll accounts, but we are moving away from that and putting almost everybody in Patriot. Now, if there's a handful of oddball type of things that Patriot doesn't do, I would say things like household employees. Or strange stock transfer ownership codes that you need on your W 2, we're trying to move those into the Drake accounting that I mentioned up with TAC.
So it does have a payroll piece that you can process your 941s and W 2s and so we might have some flexibility there to move household employees and just odd things that Patriot does. Can't handle now internally for what a SG uses for keeping track of their own accounting is. We are currently in QBO, we were in QuickBooks Desktop for years and years current.
We moved to QBO this year, and now we are going to move to zero. So now that we're a partner there. We are going to move the internal company file there so that one, I can get some experience in it since I, it's, it's a pretty new product to me and two, because I'm having some issues with some of the things that connect in QBO, kind of making my life a little miserable right now.
So we also use Dext for our receipt management. We also use Patriot for our payroll processing. And then we use Canopy for time tracking for our employees still. So we aren't keeping track of time by client anymore, but all of my employees are still hourly, part time, and so they do need to clock in and clock out so that I know how much to pay them when the pay period rolls around.
For our practice management, this is the last big category of what we do. So specifically, we use products to process tax. We specifically use products. To do accounting, bill pay and payroll. And now we also have a practice management piece. Like I said, we went to Canopy last year. And from that we moved from Jetpack Workflow to Canopy Tax.
And I will say I believe I am happier in Canopy because it eliminated a lot of things. So we had been using QB time to keep track of our time. We had been using QuickBooks desktop to do our billing. We had been using our file storage was over on SharePoint with Microsoft 365. And we've combined all of those things.
And we were using signature, getting signatures. I can't remember how we were getting signatures now, probably the old fashioned way where people were signing and scanning and sending them back to us. So, Canopy eliminated a whole bunch of stuff, and now it manages our task management, so every single job and, and our processes under that.
So we have the task, okay, you have weekly bookkeeping, what do you do? Under that, you're recording deposits, you're entering bills, you're paying approved bills, you're doing, so all the steps are listed there, as well as notes relating to, um, Anything that someone else on the team would need to know in order to do that job if you were sick or you were on vacation.
So we use Canopy for that. We use it for all of our due date management. Now, due date management is something that has always been the most integral part of an accounting firm. You need to know what is due when and where you are. Is it done? Is it not done? Has it been finished? And so Canopy so far has been a very, very good experience with due date management.
Probably in conjunction with the fact that I now have a supervisor, a accounting supervisor who manages the due dates instead of me. So I am not the one looking at the due date list and going, Oh my gosh, is this done? I have someone else doing that. And that's, that's only been for the last three years.
Before that, I was the due date manager. I had a system, but I was the one who was making sure it was kept up to date. Canopy also does all of our file storage, so we're able to save client documents. You're able to archive, you're able to have a retention policy inside of Canopy. We do some billing out of Canopy, one offs, or I have some people who sublease space, and so I'll do the rent invoices out of Canopy.
And it's also our client database. So that is where we are storing their contact information. And we can email, we can do bulk email. We can do individual emails, you can do a whole bunch of stuff in Canopy. So that I live inside of Canopy every day that I work, you know, that is where I start, start my day, open it up, what's on my list.
There's lots of availability inside of that to be able to kind of track things so that you can stay on focus and. It's kind of a game changer for me. We also, inside of the practice, we use Microsoft 365. So most are either Google Suite or Microsoft 365 practice, we are Microsoft. And so we use Outlook for email, we use Teams for our internal chat, and for some meetings.
Now, we used to use Teams for also a whole lot of client, internal client conversations. All of those are now housed inside of Kanopy. So that was another piece we were able to eliminate when we went to Kanopy. We use Zoom for client meetings and our team meeting. I've used it for webinars. So that is kind of our, our go to for our virtual meetings.
And then we have virtual phone system. Nobody has a phone on their desk anymore and nobody is required to use their cell phone for business. They can, they can use the app that we use, which we use 3CX. It's for our voice over IP virtual phone system. What we love and started using this year is we have some lines that are dedicated that we can use to give out to the clients to text us.
So we don't have to give our cell phone. So I've always been a proponent for not sharing my cell phone or the team requiring them to share their cell phone with clients. And because I don't pay for their cell phone, for me, it was a boundary issue. I don't want all my clients to have my cell phone number because they may expect me to respond on a Saturday night.
Well, I'm not, I'm not working on Saturday night. So I have this separate number that they can text that is business and it stays inside of our 3CX phone system. So that's been that's been a nice addition, and I'm actually going to start looking at maybe in a new phone system, something with a little bit easier interface.
So 3CX has been a little painful. The second highest game changer, I would think after canopy for our firm was in 2021. We signed up for ignition at the time. It was called practice ignition It is now just called ignition and that is for our proposals and what I used to call my fixed price agreement system So I went from using Word Adobe Excel and keeping track of all of these inside of QuickBooks desktop and I had a whole bunch of pieces to get a proposal done And it was painful, and I would push it off as often and as long as possible, to the point that I was not renewing proposals or giving price increases, not even annually, sometimes not even every two years, I had one I hadn't increased for ten years.
Because the system was so painful. It was manual. I was going in and updating letters and having to go find the letter and having to, you know, get a manual signature and email. It was a lot. So Ignition handles our proposals. Our subscription agreements and the payments on them. So I am able to very quickly get a proposal out to a new prospect.
I can give choices, you know, option 1, 2 or 3. I can do add ons. Hey, you can do option 1 and add on for hours of coaching. You could do option two and add on payroll, you know, whatever. And it is amazing because in conjunction with that, we used Canopy to keep track of the renewals. So every month some pop up on my list, Oh, time to renew X, Y, and Z.
And I just go into can, or into ignition and hit. Renew and I can review their existing proposal. I can decide if there needs to be any changes to services, changes to pricing, changes to contact information. And it's all right there. So Ignition has been a game changer. I will tell you people say it's on the expensive side.
From someone who, I don't know how many thousands of dollars that I lost by not Renewing my fixed price agreements annually, it is still worth every penny that I pay. It manages, it takes ACHs, it takes credit cards for me. It tells me when somebody's credit card is about to expire so that I can make sure that I get new payment information.
It's got, probably got more things in it than I even use. And I love it, so I'm trying to get a little bit more streamlined with it and set up some templates and things that make life easier. And I think that's going to be something that just continues to pay for itself and pay anything for it, but it is, it's worth it if you factor in how much time any other type of system, how much of your time it's taking.
And for me, it was taking hours or it was taking none, which means. I was not ever getting any type of increases. I wasn't adjusting services. We were probably scope. Creep was happening and we were not adjusting for it because the process was so manual and it was so such a burden to me that I was just like, I'm not doing it.
So Ignition. Can't say enough. I would definitely, if you don't have some sort of proposal and or payment accepting system, I would look into that before your next busy season. The other thing that we use, we use Visory that used to be called Swizznet. And we have used them for hosting. We started out using them for hosting our QuickBooks files.
So we had a whole bunch of QuickBooks desktop files, and back in the day, we had our own QuickBooks servers that our clients would remote into, and I would maintain those servers with the help of my husband. And of course, the server would go down when we would go out of town. I mean, just because that was the way things worked.
And that became one. It was kind of cumbersome to it was kind of very heavy on the tech side and keeping up to date with that. And we ended up going to Swiss net in kind of an emergency. So we ended up having a ransomware attack that we were able to restore all of our backups from. We didn't lose any data.
We didn't have to pay anything. But it took time and it made us say, okay, this is too much of a risk. We don't want to maintain our own servers. So we went to Swizznet and since then we have morphed into, I believe it's more of a managed server process with them. And we have all of our Drake softwares out there as well.
So we have the QuickBooks desktop accounts that we still have. And then we also have Drake tax, Drake, Drake accounting. And this allows us, each person can log in, multi factor authentication, you're getting to your own dashboard that has your own, the softwares that you're able to access. I have a behind the scenes server that I can update and load and, and put things relating to those products on.
But the customer service with visory has been phenomenal. And the reliance, um, the reliability of having that server is, oh my gosh, so much better than us maintaining. Our own internal servers, So we now have nothing that it lives on a server in our office. Our team is 100 percent remote and every system is cloud based and everything is managed.
We use last pass for keeping track of. All of our logins. Each team member has their account to keep track of their logins. But then we also have last past shared accounts that we have for clients. So when we have client specific login information, I will have access to that client last past folder. And only the team members associated with that client would also have access to that.
So we're controlling that personally identifiable information and complying with our WISP by only having the people who need the information to have the information so that last pass is a big piece of keeping everything in compliance and also keeping up and tracking with all of this cloud based stuff that you are constantly having to have.
Multi factor authentication, we have requirements to change passwords every, you know, 30, 60, 90 days. And so there's a lot of that that is managed through LastPass. The last two pieces of kind of tech that we use that I can could think of, I'm sure there's probably others that I'm not thinking of, but I will say they're kind of related to the marketing site.
So we use, we currently use CPAsitesolutions for our Accounting Solutions Group website. And it's a monthly subscription, it includes the website, it includes some content, some newsletters, some calculators, some different types of tools that you can embed inside of your, your website. The price has gradually been going up over the years, I've been with them for several years now.
And I would say I might be considering making a change, but there are so many pieces of it that I do like that I'm not sure it's worth it to me to even get my head around having to think about managing another website, like having to figure out how to make it work. The other piece that I know how to use.
That for websites is the one I use for accounting with confidence, which is Kajabi, K A J A B I, Kajabi. That one was intuitive enough that I could build my own thing. And so if I went anywhere, it would be, if I left CPA site solutions, it would probably be to Kajabi because I'm already familiar with it.
And it would eliminate this next piece I'm going to talk about, which is. Our email service provider, which is we use constant contact and that that's the service I use for sending out marketing and newsletter type emails to my clients and my my prospects and my referral sources and all of those things.
Kajabi has an email service provider built in, which is what Accounting with Confidence uses. So I kind of feel like, you know, if I were to change and move over to Kajabi, I might be able to kind of eliminate that constant contact. We also use Canopy for doing some bulk emails, but those are more when they are very, very client specific where we can say, okay, here's this bulk email we're sending to individual clients.
And it doesn't need a whole bunch of prettiness and fanciness and, you know, things that, you know, with graphics and all those types of things. More informational emails are going out of canopy, less marketing related email. So that's it for the practice management side of things. I think the, the takeaways from, from just hearing about what my tech stack is.
Is that maybe you haven't thought of pieces that are out there that could help you do something. Maybe you have some of those oddball payroll things that come up and you aren't sure where to continue to get, um, service for those. I will say, for things like that, we always use QuickBooks Desktop, but QuickBooks Desktop payroll subscriptions have been priced out of the market for us.
We've been with QuickBooks Desktop Enhanced Payroll for probably 17 years and we will not be renewing it this year because it has been priced so far out of the market for the few clients we still have on it. And so we have been actively converting those. So maybe you have some of those oddball things where you're like, Okay, I'm in desktop and I don't know where I'm going.
Well, Drake Accounting might be a solution for you. And then, of course, having some alternatives. For how you process your clients activity, whether it be in QBO or QB desktop, we realized as a firm that we needed to have an alternative, and that's when we started investigating and ended up landing on zero as our best match right now.
And I'm kind of excited about this partnership. It's like I said, very new, not a lot of providers in our area. So I'm hoping maybe as people become a little disenchanted with QuickBooks and their continuous price increases, or they need something that's QuickBooks did replace QuickBooks desktop as the pro and premier subscriptions begin to be, uh, sunsetted, then we have another option there that has, you know, Some viability and it's been around a long time and it's backed by a really good company and it's continuing to improve all the time So that's what we were looking for.
And that's how we got there. So maybe there's something here that you maybe it's just even a concept Hey receipt management to use for my own business I use Dext, there's others out there. Maybe it's a bill paying solution that's outside of what's provided inside of QBO, whatever. So hopefully something here will trigger you to say, Oh, that's something I didn't think of and maybe I should consider it.
Like I said, I will put together kind of a cheat sheet of what products we use, links to them so that if you wanted to go take a look or do a demo or see what all it can do for you, I will have that in the show notes, so you can have a link and just jump on over there. And if you have any feedback or if you want to share with me what you're using, there's an option where you're listening to this podcast or while you're watching on YouTube, leave me some feedback or let me know what you're using that you love because we are a tech forward firm and we want to know.
We want to know what's out there that we don't know about yet. So, that's all I have for today. I hope you enjoyed the review of my current tech stack. We'll see, as things evolve and things change, something new always comes up. So, I will say that our current tech stack feels pretty strong right now, but we are always willing to investigate and see what else can make us more efficient, or more cost effective, or, you Any of those things to make it a bigger, better, stronger, firm, and be on that, that tech edge, as opposed to being way far behind.
All right. That's all I have for now. I appreciate you listening or watching wherever you are, and I will talk to you. Bye for now.
Thanks for listening to another episode of Accounting with Confidence. My hope is that my experiences can help you navigate the realities of owning and operating your business. Please subscribe or follow the podcast on your favorite podcast listening platform so that you never miss an episode. Feel free to leave me a text by using the send us a text message link in the show description and let me know how I'm doing.