Hello and welcome to The Unique CPA with your host, Randy Crabtree. We're committed to creating a thriving community of accounting professionals who are physically and mentally healthy, fulfilled, and energized by their work. Our ultimate goal is to elevate the reputation of the accounting profession and vastly improve the lives of those in it. The Unique CPA is brought to you by Tri Merit, the specialty tax professionals. Today, our guest is Dan Barenholtz.
Dan is co founder and CEO of StanfordTax. I like the name, by the way. StanfordTax actually, helps automate the data collection of tax, for, to try to make your tax season easier and more efficient and spend less time. And he can probably explain it better than me, but Dan, welcome to The Unique CPA. Thank you. Thank you for having me Randy. Yeah, it's my pleasure. You and I got to meet a month and a half ago or so, and I was very intrigued to hear what you're doing.
A friend we have in common, Gaynor Melke, introduced us. And Gaynor always has good insights on what's going on in the profession. So I was very excited to talk back then. So before we get into wherever we go today, which could be We're going to, we're going to wing this. We'll see where we go, but wherever we go today, before we do that, why don't you give us some background on you and then StanfordTax as well? Sure. So I grew up in Queens, New York, lived there my whole life until I was 18.
Went to college at Cornell for undergrad, did a year. Afterwards working for the IRS in Washington, DC. It's a long story how that, how I chose the IRS. We can eventually get into that, but, and then I went to graduate school at Stanford the following year, discovered that I like tech entrepreneurship, you know, fast forward 10 years from that point. And I'm working on StanfordTax and at StanfordTax, our main goal is to save accountants and tax repairs.
A whole lot of time and to take inefficient processes and to automate them. And I would be happy to go over how exactly, you know, I stumbled upon the world of tax and why I, you know, why I chose to focus my professional career on. Yeah, we'll definitely talk about that. But first off, you intrigued me. All right, Cornell first. What was your undergrad degree in? So. I did a major in what's called industrial and labor relations with a minor in economics.
And I remember my last year at Cornell, I was trying to figure out, you know, where do I take things from here? And there was a question mark for me at the time. And so I was thinking about law school and the way I got to work at the IRS actually was, There was a paralegal position, there. And, you know, a part of me was like, Dan, you should just go straight to law school. You know, you'll get good scores on your LSATs. You'll go to like a top 10 law school and your life will be set.
You'll make a lot of money and your path will be set for you. But a part of me was also like, Dan, you should really make sure you want to do this, you know, three years of law school and you're basically, your whole life is going to be practicing law. So do you want to do this? That took me to a paralegal position where I discovered that law is not for me. No. Yeah. Well, that was probably a smart way to do it.
You know, spending three years to find out that this is not something you're going to spend your life doing is probably a lot of time and money involved there. You did say that then you found this passion for technology. I think that's how you said it. Was that while you were at Stanford or is that how you chose Stanford or where did this come into play? So when I was in DC that year, I realized that law is not the path that I wanted to take, and I started exploring other directions.
And then I started regretting not doing engineering for, at Cornell for my undergrad. I stumbled upon a master's program at Stanford, which. Was within the engineering school, but it was more of like a technical business degree. So there were only two prerequisites that I didn't have as an economics minor. I took all my calculus and all my, you know, math classes, but there were only two classes that I needed to take in order to be able to get accepted to Stanford.
And so while I was at the IRS, I took, I signed up for a couple of classes and then got into Stanford. Then it was at Stanford that I found myself being gravitated towards. All the entrepreneurship related activities that were going on campus, you know, and Mark Zuckerberg came to speak. I wanted to be there. Jack Dorsey. I remember Peter Thiel. I don't know if it was just the year that I was there, but it seemed like every week there was the founder of Airbnb, Brian Chesky.
I mean, like every week there was someone, the Instagram founders, they came to speak while I was there. That was before they had sold to Facebook, actually. A lot of them actually were Stanford students before they had started their companies. And so I was sitting in these classrooms, listening to these founders, and it was a really empowering feeling knowing that they were where I was a few years prior, because I was like, maybe I could do that as well.
I didn't appreciate back then how challenging I think, and how long of a road it is to get to a place where you build a successful product. But that's definitely the time of my life where I realized, okay, this is what I want to be doing. This is for me. So entrepreneurship in general, but technology or, you know, building some kind of tech company as well.
Was that combination, you know, Immediately there, or was it, okay, entrepreneurship, these great leaders that have built these companies that I've been able to follow and watch, but they're all tech based that you mentioned that as far as I know. So was that tech, I mean, I guess being at Stanford too in that area, but tech part of it from day one? I think it was because I think one of the amazing things about technology is that it allows for scalability.
I think if I was born a hundred years ago or 200 years ago, I think my path would still be a path of entrepreneurship. So I think it starts with entrepreneurship, but I think taking that entrepreneurship in a scalable direction is what makes it even more exciting. Technology is the way to do that. So I think that's why I like the mix of entrepreneurship and technology. So a few things you've said that really resonate with me is one, you know, finding your passion.
I talk about this all the time, especially if you can find your, you know, the way I say it, and I'm sure I stole this from someone else, but the intersection between your passions and your skills, if you can live in that intersection, which I feel I do, it's just an amazing place to be because no day feels like work. It just feels like you're doing what you love to do. I see you're nodding your head. Is that someplace you feel you've gotten to? I do.
I, don't take it for granted because, you know, when I was at Cornell, you know, I think I just chose my major. It was just like kind of process of elimination type of thing. And so I, you know, after Cornell, I was feeling a bit lost. You know, where do I take things? As I mentioned before, I think now I have brought myself to a place where. My skills and my passions connect because, so when I was at Stanford, I didn't know how to code.
I didn't have like a software engineering background and my passion for technology actually got me to teach myself how to code. And today I'm, I have the skills of, Software development. And I'm combining that with my passions of building things to improve people's workflows and people's lives. And that's another passion of mine is those efficiencies, especially in our profession.
And, so I think we'll talk about that a little bit, but I mean, one of my passions is figuring out anything we can do to help make this a better profession.
Not better, like, hey, look how good we are, but better for the people that work in it, as well as the people that we serve, because if the people that work in the accounting profession are spending all this excess time doing things that they don't need to, that don't allow them to concentrate on the things that they're good at, the high value, you know, advisory type items, you know, that's where we run the risk of burnout.
And so, one of the things that StanfordTax does, a big thing, is saves time. And so let's get a little into the, when did Stanford start and how long did it take from idea to where you had a product? Sure. So I think it was about four years ago when I was working with my own accountant on my own taxes and I experienced the process from the client perspective. And I was unhappy with the client experience, especially given the amount of money that I was paying the accountant.
And so my accountant, the way that he worked with me, he just told me to send him all the documents that I have. There wasn't much guidance or there wasn't really a personalized checklist. Dan, don't forget this. Don't forget that. I think after I had sent him all my documents, I then discovered later on that I had a document for my student loan interest that he never told me about.
And then I was like, wow, I'm paying him, you know, all this money and he didn't even remember to ask me if I'm paying any student loans. From there, I started talking to friends to see what their experience was like. And one of my friends, he connected me with his accountant and told me, you know, you should talk to this accountant, like learn more about his workflow. And I went to this accountant's office and that's when my eyes opened to how much manual work accountants do.
And I realized that if my experience was poor as a client. Accountant's experience is actually much worse. And I actually started having a bit more, I think empathy or sympathy for my accountant who didn't tell me about my student loans. Cause I'm like, I realized how overwhelmed he must've been during that time period of tax season.
And, you know, being the software engineer, entrepreneur, you know, the type of person that likes to make processes more efficient, I decided that I wanted to dig further into this industry and that, that was the start. So four years ago, basically seeing a problem on your end and then realizing it was a problem on the accountant's end too and figure out if there's a solution you could come up with. So did you jump into that? I mean, how, I mean, were you dabbling? Were you researching?
How long, I guess, from this point in time that you saw the problem, did you actually say, all right, boom, we're going to make this a business? I assume it was on the side while you were doing other things as well. Yeah, it was on the side.
It started out as a side project that, you know, I said to myself, you know, if only my accountant had some sort of form, easy to use, you know, step by step form that guided me through the different sources of income I could have had, the different sources of deductions that might've been relevant, you know, did you purchase, you know, an electric vehicle this year? Did you pay student loans? If there was a simple form like that, that could have made my experience much better.
And so the initial project was building a form that was really good for the client experience, but on the accountant's side, it would be really good for them because they would get it in a format that was optimized for them, right? The client would get an optimal experience for themselves and then the accountant would get a better experience. Optimize experience for them.
So I, I started building this and I got in touch with a good friend of mine from Stanford, who's also a software engineer and a good friend of mine. We decided to work on this together. We built this thing and then, you know, we were excited about having accountants try it out with their clients. And then what we found.
Is that accountants were hesitant to use this thing because something about it felt impersonal because it was a form that was guiding that, that was asking them, you know, who's your spouse or your dependents. It was even asking them, you know, basic info, like what's your occupation and information that the accountant should know of their client who's been with them for five, 10 years. And at that point we realized.
That if we are going to automate this experience, you know, the collection of the tax information, we needed to do it in a way that was personalized. We knew that if we can't find a way to make it personalized, we don't have something that's going to work here. And that was kind of like the first. You know, bumping the road that we then have to figure out, okay, so how do we take this form and personalize it? By personalize it, I mean pre populate all the basic information.
But more than just pre populating it, you know, last year, if there were certain expenses, if someone had a schedule E or schedule C, you know, show what those expenses were. There's many different ways of personalizing it. We could get into the details, but that's, I feel like I'm being a bit verbose. So please, you can go as long as you want, cause I'm entranced with this conversation, but I will, let me ask this.
So, so we're talking about, I mean, and we already teased it, but that, and we talked about it, but just so everybody understands, we are basically, Automating the organizer. We're going from this paper or PDF organizer that somebody has to fill out to an automated process that's going to be pre populated with data from prior year taxes and only then ask the questions that are relevant to this client, which I think is key. And, you can correct me where I'm wrong here, if I am wrong at all.
But in order to get clients to use something that's going to make our, lives, the accountant's lives easier, it also has to be easy for them. And so you've got these 30, 40 page organizers that me as a client, I am never going to want to go through that because why would I want to spend all my time filling out this data? And so what you've done is you got that first aha moment. Okay, we do have a business. If we can. Personalize this and make the experience easier on the client end.
And so you did that by basically integrating with different tech softwares and pulling out that. So go through that process then or how that works. And I just want to say what you said is exactly correct. You know, accountants. They saw what we had built in terms of the step by step form. And they said, this is wonderful. This is much better than this 30 page PDF that a client, you know, is most likely not going to fill out.
But the PDF that is being exported from my tax software, it's pre populated. It has the prior year numbers, and I would rather. Send them something that's very cumbersome, that's personalized, then to send them something that's a much easier experience, that's not personalized.
So, so then, you know, my co founder and I, you know, we assumed that the tax filing softwares that accountants use would just have APIs and be very simple to work with because in most industries, that's the case, you know, you just hook into an API. We quickly realized that integrating with these tax filing software was not going to be easy. But we knew that this was the only way to personalize it because where else are we going to get the prior year expense? Is there a prior year?
I mean, it's all in the tax filing software. It's the only way to do it. And so, you know, my co founder and I, you know, the engineers that we are, we figured out how to integrate with the tax filing software in a way that works very well, even without having APIs available. All right, that seems key. And so let's talk about the client experience then.
We no longer have the 30 40 page PDF that maybe is fillable, maybe you have to hand write, maybe you have to hand deliver, maybe you can upload, whatever it is, the process now for the client is. I assume it's an online portal where they're prompted for the data that was last year and there's an ease of maybe uploading that document. How does it work on the client side? Yeah, so the client gets an email with a link or a button to enter their organizer.
And once they go in, the first thing that they see before they even enter the questionnaire 1099 is a checklist that was auto generated for them by StanfordTax based on their prior year information. So if they had rental property at address XYZ, you know, that would be part of their checklist. Or if they had a 1099-DIV from Bank of America, that would be part of the checklist.
So they would see that checklist and that checklist automatically gets, Mark completed as they go through the questionnaire, because the questionnaire goes over all of these items that are relevant to them from the prior year. And the questionnaire has three sections, basic info, income, then the deductions and credits. For the basic info section, it's just going to ask them to review the information that's already on file. It's pre populated.
If there's a new dependent or if there's a marital status change, obviously they can indicate that. Otherwise they just review and go next. Once they get to the income section. It shows them what was relevant in the prior year and prompts them to provide that information. And it also gives them an opportunity to let the accountant know about anything new which came up, right? If they went to Las Vegas and had a big winning, they could indicate that there's a W-2 G this year or so forth.
And then the other, way that it's personalized. It shows the prior year numbers where relevant. So if someone has a Schedule C business, for example, it'll show them, you know, all the expenses that were in the tax return in the prior year, same with Schedule E or if someone has a Schedule F. What if there's, let's look at a Schedule E real quick, just as an example. Okay. I got Schedule E, I've got my, All my prior year numbers have been, I think I saw it on a demo, listed on the side, right?
Okay, here's the boxes to put the current year number in. What if I didn't have any repairs and maintenance last year, but this year I do have repairs and maintenance? How do I, would a repair and maintenance box not show up unless I had it last year? Or is there a button just say, hey, I have additional expenses? That's a good question. So the boxes would all be there for all the different expense types.
If it wasn't an expense you had last year, it just wouldn't show up as one of the prior year expenses, but you'd still be able to write it in. Yeah. Okay. So it prompts you that, hey, you know, this, what you had last year is not necessarily everything this year. There is options. Did you have any of these additional expenses? Yeah. What about, you know, You know, uploading the actual source documents, W-2s and 1099s and anything else. How does that work?
So when you begin the, the income section, it'll show you the different, you know, categories and we'll prompt you to the ones that are relevant based on last year and then for each category. It'll take you through a line of questioning. And for some of those categories, documents would be relevant. For example, if you indicated that you had a job, then the W-2 would be relevant in that case.
So as you're going through the questionnaire, it asks you for those documents in the section where it's asking you about that particular source of income. For example, with Schedule E. You know, it would ask you if you had a 1099-MISC associated with that Schedule E, and if you said yes, it would ask you to upload it, or it would ask you if you're paying mortgage interest on that property. If you say yes, you would then have a place to upload the 1098. So you're asked to upload the documents.
The relevant section within the questionnaire. Okay. And so for these and, sorry to interrupt one more thing. No, you're good. As you're uploading the documents, it'll mark the item as completed from the checklist from the prior year. So for example, like let's say you upload a W2, let's say last year you had a W2 from Amazon and you upload that W2. StanfordTax will know that the W2 you uploaded is the W2. That was. The one that was from Amazon, which is the one from last year.
It does that because Sanford Tax OCRs the data from the W-2 and it'll use the EIN to match the data that was imported from the tax filing software in order to have maximum accuracy. Alright, so it's not going to just say, hey, you have a 1099 and then you upload the wrong one and it'll check it off. It actually verifies that the Bank of America 1099 is the one you uploaded and that's where it's, okay. All right. That makes a lot of sense. I don't know.
Before I go into the accountant experience, anything else on the taxpayer side that you want to highlight? Yeah, I'll just say, you know, we're hearing very good feedback, you know, from accountants about things that their clients are telling them. You know, the completion rates are a lot higher than what they were when, you know, when they were sending out the PDF organizers. I was wondering if you had data on that.
So, so you're hearing it anecdotally, at least I've said the word wrong, I think, but you guys all know what I meant. you're hearing this. Are you able to track that at all? Or are you, have you attempted to, or will you attempt to like come up with this? Hey, we have a 92 percent completion rate, which would be a nice, at least marketing tool to have as well. yeah, we are tracking it. So we don't know what the completion rates were with the PDF organizer. Obviously that's just anecdotally.
I'm not sure if I said it correctly, but we're hearing, I mean, believe it or not, we're hearing that the completion rates with the PDF organizers were under 25 percent in a lot of cases and with StanfordTax, You know, we're coming close to 75%.
Nice. So, and I, and the completion rate depends on, you know, with some firms, what we're seeing is that they're being selective about who they send the StanfordTax questionnaire to, if there are clients that are older, that they know are less technologically savvy, then they'll be more selective about who they send it to and the completion rates, obviously. We'll depend on, you know, who you send it to. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. And also just the service level you're providing as well.
You know, you know, some people are just, Hey, let's get data in. Let's get the taxes out. If it's a client that you are doing advisory on all year long, you know, and they like more touch points, you may not. You use it as much. It's still very useful, but it just depends on what you're doing specifically to your client. But overall, I think it's a great option. Let's talk about the accountant experience then, because, you know, it's often just like, okay, where's this data?
It's in five different places. How do I track it? Did I get everything? And so how have we made the accountant experience more efficient through this? Yeah. And this is the part that I'm really excited about. And I think the part that will really separate us from everything else out there. I did get into this space through the client experience. Right. However, I think that the big impact here really is what we're providing accountants with on their end.
So what we do is, you know, the client will complete this questionnaire and we will create a PDF work paper for accountants automatically. I mean, the accountant doesn't need to do anything in terms of organization. And as you know, some of the data that comes into an accountant are documents like a W-2 or a 1099, but other pieces of information are just random pieces of information, like if there's childcare information or. You know, it's not in any particular 1099 or any particular document.
So what we do is all of the information that is like random pieces of information that's not in a 1099 or an IRS form, we actually put that into a PDF organizer. The client will never have to interact with the PDF organizer, but the accountant, every PDF work paper that StanfordTax creates starts off with an organizer at the very top. And that organizer will contain in it the dependents and the, basically everything that's not in the form.
And then the rest of the PDF work paper will have all the supporting documents that the client uploaded. And it'll be bookmarked so that it will be very easy for accountants to work with and jump places within the PDF. I feel like it's hard to do it justice, you know, just explaining it and talking about it, the feedback that we're getting from accountants, we're, you know, cutting the time that they spend.
By more than half, according to what they're telling us, because this organization piece is something that they've been struggling with and something that they've been doing manually. So it comes into a folder and that folder is organized by the types of documents. And you know, probably the, Hey, when I'm going to look at the schedule, see, here's all the information for that. Here's all the W-2s, here's all the, Div statements, the interest statements, but it's all in one spot.
So I don't have to be picking and choosing all over the place. So when I've used organizers in the past or any kind of data collection, it's like, well, it goes one spot, then I have to go grab it from there. And then I gotta, you know, have multiple screens to be able to read it here.
Or, you know, because I got multiple places and which is fine, but then it's, just, I have to do all these steps to get it into then maybe a different folder where then I can go up and it sounds like it's, you know, it's An automated process, client puts it in, boom. It getss up to you. It's all automated in one spot. So you just open that folder and I can start data entry. Yeah. And you can export the data from StanfordTax as a folder or as an actual concatenated PDF. We give you both options.
Oh, okay. And if you export it as a folder, you'll have all the documents. that folder, including the tax organizer PDF that we put together for you. And it's all in order in that folder. We prefix each file name with the number so that it may, you know, it has, it's in order for you. But we're finding that most accountants, they'll prefer to work with our PDF. And just download the PDF, because that's what a lot of them are, have been doing anyway, is concatenating PDFs.
Which is, I mean, the organizer that you just, is that the PDF you're talking about, creating the own organizer? Okay. So the PDF I'm talking about is the organizer plus the 1099s and the W-2s and the, it takes all of the documents and merges it. It merges it into one PDF. Yep. With bookmarks in it. So if in Adobe, you can open up the bookmarks and see a whole table of contents of that PDF. Got it.
You know, if you have a client with a lot of sources of income, a lot of documents, this PDF will end up being like 50 or 60 pages, but it'll be, it'll have a table of contents. You'll be able to easily locate things. You'll be able bookmarks. Okay, and I always, personally, whether I'm right or wrong, I always like to see the source document, but that source document's right there, easy to click over to, you know, like the W-2, you know. Yeah, of course. okay.
And just so everybody knows, I mean, I know you have, you do demos on, you know, your website, I saw, you know, schedule a demo, but a friend of mine that, You know, Jason Staats did a, a demo of this on his YouTube channel too. So if anybody wants to go watch the Jason Staats demo, I assume he did justice to the software when he did that. He did. He did. I wish I, had his speaking abilities, but, no, he, he made it entertaining.
I think if you would like to really get a deep dive into the features, I think it would be worth, you know, scheduling a demo with a member of our team, because, you know, obviously Jason's video, it's just five minutes. It's very service level, but, he, I think he did a good job with that. Yeah, he always does. I hope he doesn't listen to this. Cause I don't want him to hear that I said good things about him. So, all right.
So I don't want to go through the accountant experience, you know, too quick, but. But the bottom line is it's, they've become a lot more efficient, but let me give you a minute here to kind of wrap up that accountant experience and what you're most proud of on that end of things.
Yeah, I think, you know, what makes me most proud is that the accountant can get a PDF work paper from their client with all the information that they need to prepare that return without spending Almost anytime, StanfordTax, we'll take all the information that the client provides, the documents, the random piece of information, and we'll put that into a bookmarked PDF.
All an accountant has to do is click a button, download PDF work paper, And they have everything that they need organized, you know, for them to prepare the tax return for the client. Yep. Efficiency is huge. One thing that I've seen in the past, cause I go out and talk about, you know, how we be more efficient, spend less time, you know, charge more, all these kinds of things. One thing that I see often is that tax preparers too often.
Ignore the efficiencies that are out there because, Hey, we've always done it this way. So we're going to keep doing it this way. And so from a standpoint of integrating new softwares, I don't think they nearly look at it as much as they should have. It sounds like this is a very simple integration. You already tie in with probably the software they're using. Is there anything special you're doing to overcome that?
Challenge maybe of just the, Hey, I don't have time to implement a new software, or is it just so easy plug and play that the efficiencies are easy to explain? Yeah. Yeah. So it's so easy and fast to get started with StanfordTax. I think a lot of accountants, you know, they're used to all the other software out there, which you need training and there's, you know, you have to pay a thousand dollars just for the implementation fee.
And the nice thing about StanfordTax is that you can literally get up and running in under three minutes. And the reason you can get up and running in under three minutes, and I know it sounds like I'm just making this up, but you create an account yourself. You don't need to book a demo to, you know, we encourage you to book a demo, but you don't have to. Takes 30 seconds.
Now, once you create your account, all you have to do is add clients from your tax software and StanfordTax guides you as to how to do that. You know, you, there's an add clients button. You can't miss it. It's literally the only, you know, the only button on the page. Once you create an account and you choose your software, we integrate right now with. Six tax software. You go through the steps for getting the backup file from your tax software, drop it into StanfordTax.
And, you know, it's like magic. The questionnaires and the checklists for each client are just, they'll be right there in front of you. So, you know, it really literally takes under three minutes to get started and it's really different than anything else. That's out there. That's key. Industry. That's key for sure. We don't have a lot of time left, but I want to ask a few things before we, we wrap up.
I mean, obviously, you know, you're getting this going, started four years ago, implementation starting, you're getting users out there. I assume that you're on an ongoing basis. You're looking for more, you know, Functionality, more efficiencies built in, especially with AI and things out there like that now. Are you looking at being able to take that source document and auto populate right into a tax return? That is. That's the next part of our product roadmap. We are looking into doing that.
Right now, Gruntworks does it, SurePrep does it, but there's not a whole lot of other players out there in the market that do it. And we feel that we're in a good position. To do it, we know that we can make accountants, we can make their lives even more efficient if we do that, so that's the next step. And how about, is it possible at some point to go even just grab the documents from, you know, Hey, I get my, W-2 from ADP.
And so, you know, as a tax preparer now, I know somehow I can go grab the ADP W-2 for this guy. And I'm guessing that's not at this point yet or the Merrill Lynch statement or the mortgage statement or all these, is that something that even would be possible? Do you mean the client logging into their bank? Yeah, I would, that's why I was thinking is it possible because the client still would have to be part of that.
They'd have to log in or they'd have to give us access and they probably shouldn't give us access to their Merrill Lynch login account and those type of things. So, is there a way around that we can still go grab data? In the future, maybe. I'm guessing not now. So if you're talking about documents that are sitting in someone's, you know, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank. Right.
We are working on making it so that clients will be able to log in and then it would pull the documents there because there are ways to do that, but the accountant would need the client's Great. So log in. Okay. So that's something though, just adding more efficiencies to the, on the taxpayer side and on the client side. All right. Before I ask you a couple of final questions, I, this is very exciting, it is efficiencies, organizers.
I was a generalist in accounting for many years and organizers, data gathering was always the worst thing because you never got everything and it was hard to get and you always had to follow up with clients and you know, it's, these are the types of efficiencies are what get. Me excited about the future of accountants able to spend less time on the, things that don't make them money and more times on the things they enjoy doing.
But before I go to these final couple of questions, any final thoughts you have on the industry, on what you're doing in a sentence or two? I'll just say, you know, a lot of accountants are talking about AI. They're wondering how AI is going to impact their jobs or impact the industry. And I just want to say that I think AI is actually Going to be very positive for accountants. And I think that accountants are ultimately going to make more money and are going to, work, you know, less hours.
I know that those don't usually go together. Work less hours, make more money. I actually think when I look at the industry and I see where it's headed and I see, you know, the labor shortages that are happening and I see what AI is able to accomplish, I'm very excited. For accountants. And I just want to say that because I know a lot of accountants are looking at the technology and, you know, some accountants are nervous. What does this mean for me?
Right. And I just want to say, you know, coming from someone that is from a tech background, I see a very positive outlook for the accounting industry. I agree completely. Alright, so final two questions. This is a question everybody gets. We just talked about all kinds of tech stuff, getting me excited about the software and how it can make clients efficient, but you don't spend all your time, I'm hoping, just sitting and programming and coming up with new ideas.
I hope you have some outside of work passions. What do you enjoy doing when you're not making accountants lives more efficient? Yeah, I do. So I love to travel and in the winter. I love to snowboard. I'm actually going to flying to Austria next month. Oh, wow. Doing a ski vacation with my siblings. Nice. My, parents usually don't join for our sibling trips, but this year they decided that they're going to be tagging along. So that's, I'm excited about that. But I just love to travel.
The other summer, I, you know, we went to Alaska. Every year, make sure to go to at least several destinations. Nice, and sounds like family is a big part of that as well, which is very nice too. And then last question, if anybody wants to find out more info on you and or StanfordTax, what's best places for them to look? Sure, so you can go to stanfordtax. com, a lot of people spell that wrong, s t a n f o r d t a x. com.
Awesome. Well, Dan, I appreciate you being on the show today and, explaining the, the work that you're doing. And again, just thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today on The Unique CPA. You can find the show notes for today's episode. And learn more about Tri Merit at TheUniqueCPA. com. Remember to subscribe and leave a five star rating on your favorite podcasting app and join us next time for more expertise and insights on The Unique CPA.
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