Giving Accountants Their Time Back with Cosmin Nicolaescu

Hello and welcome to the Unique CPA with your host, Randy Crabtree. Our commitment is to our thriving community of accounting professionals who are physically and mentally healthy, fulfilled, and energized by their work, with the ultimate goal of elevating the reputation of the best profession in the world. The Unique CPA is brought to you by RandyCrabtree.com. Log on to learn more. Support for this episode comes from Bill. Simplify your workflows and accelerate your growth with Bill's Accountant Console. Take a demo today at bill.com/uniquecpa for a $250 gift card, terms apply. Today's guest is Cosmin Nicolascu. Cosmin is CEO and co-founder of a CURL, an AI-powered accounting platform. A CURL automates complex workflows, centralizes client data, and helps firms scale high-quality tax and assurance work without adding operational burden. Previously, Cosmin was CTO at Brex, where he helped scale the company from 40 to over a thousand employees and hundreds of millions in annual revenue. Prior to his leadership at Brex, Cosmin was an early engineer and manager at Strip, building the global payments infrastructure and launching Strip Terminal. Cosmin, welcome to the Unique CPA. Thanks so much for having me, Randy. That's quite the history. Yeah, you got the history. I just got to read it. I can read it all the reading. It's pretty impressive what you've done in the past. Before we even get into that, before we even get into questions, and I think I'm warning about this ahead of time, but I was thinking, we should do a little story of how you and I met. I don't know if you want to do it or I can try. If I say it'll be wrong probably. So maybe you start with the story. I'm happy to start. So for context, for listeners, a crew started a year and a half ago. So towards the end of 2024. And as we started building the product, I started going to some accounting conferences. The first one that I attended was the accounting growth forum in San Diego. And me and one of our team members came in at the news like a Monday morning. I drove. I live in LA. So we drove down from LA to San Diego, got there a little bit early and then went to perhaps on breakfast. I said down at table, ran you as there with another partner from another accounting from that I don't recall the name. I mean, you were just kind of set high and that was kind of it. Then later in the afternoon or evening, there was the happy hour. And so everybody was kind of dangling around. And I noticed that a lot of people were seeing like Randy and so I was like, okay, I should probably get to know this guy a little bit more. I was not the breakfast thing. And so there's an easy intro. I hate networking events and I hate those kind of things. It's very training for me. And I find it very awkward to kind of just jump in when other people are talking. And so spend a little bit of time with Randy. Then got to go to his talk, which was the following day. Very much about like accounting culture and the office culture and how firm culture has evolved over the years and in the current state. And really quite enjoyed kind of learning about those aspects because I've been so focused on the functional aspects of accounting and accounting firms obviously at the technology side. And so it was really nice to get more prescriptive on that. Then fast forward a couple of months, we go to MIT and go to the ICP in Vegas. Obviously largest accounting conference. I think it's the largest accounting conference in the US. And we go to I think it was like the place where you have all the booths and stuff. And I see Randy and not only do I see Randy, but I see like this huge line of people waiting to talk to Randy as if he's the US president. And I was like, okay, I'm not going to stand in line to say hi to him, but I will try to catch him afterwards. So I met the Randy and I was like, hey, I saw you're there. You look really busy. So I didn't want to bother you. Do you want to meet up for coffee? The next day, we went up with a coffee and first building a crew. Like my co-founder and I worked together as a strike. We're both engineers. So we come from a very technology kind of way in the background. We have folks that we've worked with in tech. We have folks that we've worked with in kind of key backgrounds. We have advisors from the industry because we're trying to get the blend of folks with backgrounds in all the different kind of companies and firms and industries that are most valuable to kind of help the industry evolve as much as possible. And so as I hate Randy, like we're just getting started. We're trying to figure out we're kind of building some tax automation. We've kind of been the platformer I told him a lot about the vision for a crew. Now we think of counting firms can actually transform over the coming years with the right technology and the right kind of first principles approach that we've taken. We also have folks in the industry who are advising us. We have very experience with he being interested in getting involved in any kind of way. Honestly, I was expecting it to be like, dude, I get these things like every other day. And so like, absolutely not. But thanks for the coffee. I don't remember if I bought you. No, I didn't even buy a coffee because you had the coffee that the conference had. I think so. But I do owe you two referral dinners. By the way. I'm really really really really really. I'm really not forgetting. And you can either stack them by two separate dinners or fancy or one dinner for a very long context. Randy has referred a couple of people from his network to a crew that we fired that are exceptional. And so we don't do referral bonuses, but I'm very in favor of referral dinners. And yeah, basically like Randy was like, hey, this is really interesting and it touches on a lot of things. So like, how do we make a count in size better? How do we kind of help them focus their time and energy on the things that give them the energy and the love of their experience in judgment and background and so on and so forth and not kind of the mechanical work. So really good mix there. And then start spending more time together over Zoom and calls and I got to need more folks on the team. And it's been really, really good. I think you've certainly made your mark already in less than a year on a cruel both in terms of kind of the help as we needed it. And also again, two folks that we have on the team are in big part thanks to you. Yeah. Well, that was I didn't expect it to be about me, but I appreciate the the context. The one thing that you forgot is you had sent me an email after the firm growth forum event wanting to connect. And I never saw your email until you connected with me at engage. I'm like, oh man, how did I miss this guy's email? I have a lot of emails. I do, but no, but it's been great and I am officially a what strategic advisor is that my title with the girl. Yeah, which was for us some some fancy title for you. So team can advise her recruiting chief. That's true. I guess I am doing recruiting now too, but it's been fun. Your team's been great. I've got to meet so many people on the team already. Every time I jump on a call with anybody there, it's just amazing. You were in a session. I did on culture and I think the culture just from the people you brought in has been awesome. So I'm excited about that and really excited about what you're doing and the things that you're doing and we're going to get into that now in a second here. But the things that you're doing are going to help the profession so much and there's things that we need to do in this profession. One with a lack of people coming in, but two, AI, you hear people say, hey, you're going to be replaced by AI, that's a bunch of, you know what, you're going to be able to do what you love to do because of AI. So let's talk a little bit of what you're doing at a cruel, but let's start with, hey, you came from two accounting tools, MS Stripe and Brex, in the accounting profession. You saw an opportunity. You saw a need for something else, AI being obviously a big part of this, but what was the decision? Now is the time. Hey, I've got this great role at Brex. I'm CTO, but I see this vision. I see this opportunity. And what was that? What did you say? Hey, this needs to be fixed. There is something we can do better and how did that decision came about and then what was the game plan from there? Yeah. I would say both Stripe and Brex had obviously a lot of similarities to your case. I think that's a lot of the same thing. as our first CFO, he kind of like instilled that sense of like product sense strategy and how do we actually think about running the business with a very long term kind of you and make sure we do our best job deploying our capital at Brex. Again, one of the first hours that we had was Michael Tana-Bum, he's now CEO figure, he was the CFO at the time. He again instilled not just kind of like the discipline of running the functions, well I think that's comedy, basically any good company, but what he did and was well were how do we actually ensure that these teams that are traditionally back office reactive teams are in the room to kind of help make better business decisions. The impact was quite substantial just observing that and seeing other other companies always like wow there's something really valuable by having those folks in the room and kind of bring a different perspective that's not shared there and to extend to the content they can actually not prohibit the business and kind of be naysayers but actually help it make better decisions. And so something for both Cid and I that kind of stuck around that and we're like when we're thinking about different industries accounting was constantly towards the top of the list because we had seen that and because the shape of the problem is kind of similar to like hey there's definitely something there that we can do. Clearly application of AI and professional services broadly is pretty obvious. I don't think we rocket scientists or super innovators of like we're the first to see that but I certainly think it was one of the criteria that we looked at. And then from there it was kind of like okay let's understand the domain better because I think working with accounting teams in companies is just very different than working directly with accounting firms and really going really deep and understanding the domain so we did a few things to do that one we did whatever I think founder or sparring founder should do which is go talk to your perspective clients. We went and met a bunch of firm owners CPAs of different firms of different sizes individual business audit tax cash you name it try to understand what their current life is what are the pain points how do they think about the technology landscape. And it was very obvious there's like a consistent pattern between one technology is not very good in this space like it doesn't feel like it's kept up with other industries where there's been so much innovation and a Web 2.0 Web 3.0 have broad new tools and modern tools. And we still kind of are stuck in the world from 30 years ago. Number two very fragmented even if you have some tools are potentially more modern they solve like a little pain point like a very niche pain point and so it is very hard to kind of get the efficiency gain across the workflows and if you just observe what people are spending time on if you think about like the number of billable hours that the CPAs have. If you think about how they spend most of the day it is mostly on mechanical things rather than strategic judgment oriented things which is what they kind of build decades of experience on. Number three you mentioned that I think it's it's really broadly known the shortage of CPAs in this country. So obviously like when we look at that it seemed like I was like okay how does the industry navigate that because that that's kind of a fact and the only outlet seems to have been outsourcing and so what I've seen is a trend in which I assume that sort of the big four will have outsourcing but as you go down the list of firms they just can't afford the infrastructure to do that because it's quite complex is it up. And I was surprised to see that now even firms that have like $10-20 million some of them have or many of them have outsourcing are already as a valve to kind of get more capacity because they just don't have any other way to get the capacity and then keep up with their customer so I was like okay this kind of like a really good opportunity for my technical perspective in terms of the current landscape what AI could do. To sit in ice backgrounds there's clearly a desire from the industry it's not a fear it's not a rejection of technology there's just like a lack of technology for accountants to be able to use it. There are three macro pressures in this market that are if we do a good job are favorable to us are favorable to being able to give more capacity to accountants to kind of not have to rely purely on outsourcing or not sourcing at all we have some of our customers already that are basically moving stuff back in the United States completely as a result of using the cruel which is really exciting. And so as we look at some of those things it just seemed like it checked off a lot of the boxes and I think the final thing for us which I hadn't planned for as a criteria but I think as we explored different areas it became very clear that's important is how much you enjoy spending time with your customers. You see founders all the time that I think founders tend to be in two buckets they're either kind of mission oriented they think their purpose on earth is to solve X cure cancer go to Mars you name it and that is what they will do basically for the rest of their life if you have that kind of clarity. Congratulations and I'm super happy for sit and I it's mostly impact like I think the mission for stride the mission for brex were very positive but it's not like I was growing up and I was like I was. I was growing up and I was like I want to be in vintech and payments and and all that stuff like that's that's my dream I'm very proud of the work done there and I think again very positive sort of mission. I look at what we're building with cool in a similar way which is I think there are a lot of not just direct effects that are close having on the firms and then their clients but there are secondary effects of how those influence kind of the broader economy and tertiary effects even in terms of kind of longer term impacts so I'm very happy about that but. If you're in the bucket of I'm more in fact oriented you get to be very enamored with I think this business could be really big I think I can do this and that and the other and I think that's great it's necessary but not sufficient. The last thing for us to be sufficient I think is how much do I enjoy spending time with folks in that industry where your clients and as a founder if you don't enjoy that you will certainly burn out and there are certainly some ideas that we exploring where I was idea is really good market's good we can build something cool we really. We would enjoy it but I enjoy spending time with folks in that profession as much not so do I enjoy going to those conferences not so much I think the the thing that affects the most is as a founder you lose one thing there's all the downsides to being a partner but the one of the biggest ones are the most underrated once in my opinion is you are stuck in this company for much longer than any other employee as an employee if you don't like it. If you don't like it you can leave and again there might be financial impact but you're fine to go and find another job as a founder of the company is doing really well it's going to be very hard to leave because the company is doing well investors are not going to want to have the founders leave if the company is not doing well well no one really wants that job and take over if the company is doing again quite hard to kind of move away so as a founder you have to plan out spending a decade of more of your life in that business and obviously you can. You can do whatever but that is the business I have no idea what I'm going to want to do in 10 years I think again unless you're that sort of mission oriented I know there's some my life I want to solve problem X right it is very hard to know what you're going to do I couldn't tell you 10 years ago what I'm doing today I doubt that I'll be very good at predicting where I want in 10 years however I can give you signals on what are things that increase or decrease the probability that I'll enjoy doing what I'm doing right now and certainly. Spending time with my customer which is a big part of my role cannot be a draining aspect I can be. I can be treading meeting with accountants and accounting firms I can be treading going to conferences I can be treading speaking at conferences I can be treading kind of understanding the domain of accounting it was really good that both said and I actually really enjoy doing that both when we're at strike but also as we were kind of doing the discovery process and meeting with homeowners and understanding their pain points and appreciating their craft for the work that they're doing and keeping a high bar and trying to build a good job. I'm trying to build a good team in a very hard environment that there's something really really admirable about about that and so when I look at all those criteria there's honestly no downside reason to do it there are no negative reasons of not doing this for us personally and again different founders have different fit and that was the that was the process that was the process that was quite a process but the key things I got out of that is that accounts are party animals and you like to hang out with them. I did not see their party animals that you go to every conference in this world and so you would know best called party animals accountants are I will not talk about your private parties at these conferences because I don't think that's appropriate that's right it is they they are accounts are fun I enjoy it I mean pretty much my customer is account our accounts as well and I love I'm energized going to hang out with the accounting industry it just does something just to do that. Just does something just to see what they're doing just to see the innovation that they're you know trying to integrate into their businesses and the things that they're not afraid for the most part it depends it's weird because different size firms look at things differently but there's many firms out there that are willing to take a risk or try something new they're supporting out there that aren't but they're going to have to or otherwise they're going to be passed by but yeah it's I never looked at like that why I chose accounting I didn't go through that whole process. You did but I'm glad I did because I enjoy being in this profession. Oh I'm glad you did as well for what it's worth. Thank you. I want to back up a second because you mentioned sit a few times we haven't introduced who sit is do you want to give us an introduction to your partner in crime and setting up a cruel said yes. Sid is a close other co-founder and he's our CTO. Sid and I met at Stripe. He was one of the first engineers. He ended up being there for 11, 12 years. I was there for about four and a half. So he basically has been there for the majority of the company's history. He was the most tired person when he left. And basically was leading, was a technical lead for basically everything around payments, financial infrastructure, money movement, all the core kind of pieces of Stripe. Him and I worked together my entire time there. And he is not only objectively both from my perspective and if you ask everybody else, the best engineer that they've ever met. He's also one of the most kind human beings that you can possibly meet. And there's something intoxicated about him and how he's able to build relationships with anybody so quickly and folks end up gravitated towards him and wanting to work with him and trusting him and vice versa. And so Sid is truly a one for one. And I'm deeply fortunate for being able to do this with him. And I don't think we'd be doing this without him to be honest. You just mentioned he's-- and you didn't use these words, Silicon Valley royalty. But I heard that about both of you guys. So someone else said that as well. So you guys have great reputations of what you're doing. Thank you. You'll never hear, still, or I say that. But I appreciate the kind of words. Yep, that's no problem. All right, so let's go. So we just set the stage. Everything that you're-- hey, you were on to do something. You wanted to do something with Sid. You analyzed different industries. I love how you looked at it. Hey, do I spend time with my customers? Now let's talk about what the crew is doing because we haven't even said that. We tease AI and we tease-- it's accounting. But let's get into what is it that you are actually building right now? Of course. So we are basically building a platform that saves accountants, endless amounts of hours, and for firm basically generates accountants as a result of set savings. And especially our view is, again, how do we help accountants focus their time on the things that give them most energy? I love writing code. I love the days I get to write code. And I'm fortunate to be in a position where I get to do that a large part of my job and my career. There are obviously things in any role that don't give you as much energy. And that's just the reality of life. When I talk to accountants, I don't think most of them are spending time on the things that give them energy or that things that they find uniquely valuable. If I talk to folks who just graduated or recent kind of new grads, they will tell me they basically are data entry analysts, paper pushers, and they basically have to go through-- you can call it a apprenticeship model, you can call it hazing, you can call it whatever you want. But it's basically something that clearly does not leverage their intellectual capacity and education. Everybody understands that you need to learn. And there's a lot of experience that I've taken all the CPA credits necessary. You certainly don't come out of college feeling like, OK, great, I can now be a professional accountant and handle any complex situation. However, I think we can all agree also that you probably don't need to do five to 10 years of data entry to get that experience. And so if you talk to folks who are new between the partnership model, where you basically have to stay in a company for many, many years to have a progression and the general leveling up, it's pretty miserable. If you talk to senior people, they believe they've accumulated decades of experience. They know their customers really well. They don't get to spend as much time with their customers, because they have to have bill of hours that basically are mostly done in the form of preparing-- well, there's a talk to you turn and audit, et cetera. They don't find that particularly interesting. They just feel it necessary, which it is. And so they do what's necessary. But they want to be spending time in different ways. And they get most of the energy not from preparing once we turn or preparing to audit, but from spending time with those clients, understanding them and their needs better, and figuring out how to help them. And again, kind of be much more forward-looking and strategic. We believe with the cruel that today's industry is disproportionately spending time on the mechanical work and backwards-looking versus strategic forward-looking, and the goal for a cross to shift that balance and kind of flip it on its head. So to give you some examples, so we primarily focus on individual taxes currently. And now we're building partnership returns and some auto workflows. So we're kind of looking at each kind of workflow and service slide and accounting firm and figuring out how to make the most of the capacity there. And for anything that, if you think about, for us, we work with some of the larger firms and so very complex, Arminino, Creative Finance, for example, ultra-high-n-wealth individuals. In those cases, for them, a simple return will take at least 10 hours, probably more like 15 hours. And that's a very simple return, probably, for someone's kid that they have to prepare returns for their business. Those returns now get done in two, three hours, until I'm including the review, including everything. If you talk about more typical returns for them, or they're 50 to 100 or more hours, those returns now get done in like five to 10 to 15 hours. And so order of magnitude, kind of, savings and impact there that creates this capacity. It's not only the capacity that it creates for the accountants and how that will change the dynamics in industry, but also the expense for their clients. And so we have a client portal. And I've actually had literally several people, investors, founders who have reached out to me because they're customers of some of these firms. And that's how they're like, oh, we're on a cruel, it's a great off-head investors, you know what I know? Never heard of a cruel because we just launched officially last month. But your product was really good when I went through my accountants, so I figured I'd reach out. The experience is much better from both the polished perspective, but also how we think about the questions they get asked for each client. So it's not a typical 200 questions, but it's like very personalized, based on what you've had in the past. It's much more actionable, reminders are actionable, and so on and so forth. And so we see again, kind of if I think about the main efficiency metric for end clients, it's how much do you get to engage with your accountant as quickly as possible and how little time you get to spend with your account? Because you generally want to spend little time on the kind of mechanical work. Normally, I would say when we first were getting started, client portalization, if you think about some of the typical client portals in the accounting space are 20 to 30% with a cruel, we're seeing over 70%, it's about 75% utilization. Firms that are, this is the first. - Let me back up on that for a second. So what do you mean that typically the 20% now, it's okay, I mean usage or data, what's the usage? - Okay, so if you think about the number of clients that they have, so let's say you have 100 clients that you've joined the classes for. 20 to 30 of them, you use to use your client portal, the rest of them would basically email you stuff, email you stuff, send you stuff, it's our time. They just didn't want to engage with another portal for a variety of reasons. And for us, now we're seeing that, if we use the same comparison out of 100, over 70 of those are now using the client portal. - And this has just become so much more user friendly. I mean, what does that increase due to? - I think it's due to three things. Number one, I would say it's polished, it's simple, it's clean, it's modern, so kind of have that. I don't think that's actually the most important thing. I think the delta between what we've built and what someone else could build is not insurmountable. But I do think we kind of bring that polishing experience from that striped padding particular. Our designer, for example, is one of the earliest track designers. The second reason is you would normally get a list of questions from your accountant. And the way that accountant generated those questions was typically in the form of a template that they send all their clients, that they have to fill out. That is kind of only scalable way you can do that through a manual process. And it is not unreasonable. And the result of that is, as a client, I'm like, there's a ton of these questions. I have no idea what they mean, they're not applicable to me. This is just overwhelming, annoying, et cetera. I'm just gonna close this and eventually, I'll figure out all the sense of stuff to my accountant and then they can figure it out. There's very typical kind of experience from what we've heard from both sides, the accountants and the clients. What we do instead is we look at your last year's return and we say, hey, we know that you had these documents. You know, you had these interesting situations. Like we already have all that data from your accountant firm, from the using, 'cause most of these are like over 90% of the businesses is kind of continuing business, not new customers. And so for all those, we can generate a unique binder and a set of intake questions for you that are applicable. And so now the applicability, if you think about out of 200 questions, maybe like 30 of them all applicable to me, now we will send you far fewer questions and the applicability is nearly 100%. Obviously, you might not get a document this year that you had that last year or situation, but it's very minor. Moreover, we also have another kind of philosophical difference here, which is we believe that documents answer a lot of questions that typically you would get in the form of intake questions. And so for example, it is not uncommon on one of these intake questions to say, who's your employer? Like were you employed by it? What was how much income did you have? Well, if I just give you a W2, you can extract all that information. You do not need me to answer that question and then give you the W2 that you obviously need anyways. And so we took the approach of we should buy a significantly more on documents and ask for all these documents and in just any kind of data, have the ability to get as much context as possible, whether it comes from an official document, manual documents, spreadsheets, emails, whatever it is, in just as much as we can from that perspective and kind of build the context around each client. And then for things that are not in documents, ask questions. And so now, the common experience for a client using an end client, using cruel for the Texas this season is they'll get a list of questions for documents. I could please upload these documents from last year. And they will get a very small number of questions that are like, hey, has this situation changed for you, for example? Have you made donations under $500, for example? Like there's some things that like there aren't documents necessarily, so you want to ask some questions. And then of course, we allowed the accounting firms to have other kind of templated questions, but we worked with them to ensure that they don't overwhelm their customer. They're not going to ask another 50 questions because we've given them enough confidence that hey, you are going to get the information that you need. You don't have to ask these questions. We will get these questions answered for you. And the way we came about all this was when we look and kind of take a full step back, the intake kind of process has two sides to it. There is the end client and the accountant. From the account perspective, they have a to-do list of like, I need to have all this kind of checked in order to prepare a return. And that is a very reasonable view. And what we've done in this industry, we're basically ever, is that we took that and pushed it down to the end client. We said, hey, when I have a list of questions, I'm going to give you a spreadsheet with 200 questions. We'll answer those questions from me. And to some extent kind of help me do my job. And then we took those questions and we put them in a portal to make it a little bit more modern. But in practice, we had a single view of that list. And we basically took it from the account and gave it to the end client. Our view is like, the account should have their view and do this instead of follow-up items and all that stuff. That doesn't need to get pushed to the end client. The end client doesn't need to have that complexity. They're not a CPA. They don't need to see how the sausage is made. They're not interested. The client should have a very small actionable list of things. And then the accountant should have their own list, which is much more comprehensive for that because that's partly why they're there. I think that's probably the biggest reason, I would say, why we think our utilization is much higher. The third reason is go and spend and go back to actionability. I think the most important thing when you interact with clients that don't want to spend time on these things, because it is not exciting. I don't want to spend time with my accountant this. I want to spend time with my accountant and how to optimize my taxes and all that, is kind of the level of noise. So a simple example for noise is, and a common example that we used to get feedback from accountants that they would want to see is, hey, what percentage of binder is completed? We should send reminders to customers to be scarce today, accounting firms. And many of them have to send reminders to their clients because of course, people don't spend time on this. And so you get closer to April 15th. And all of a sudden, you're kind of starting to freak out. I think that is a very reasonable ask. And so it makes sense. But the way you implement that is not to say, well, I have a list of 50 questions. You've answered 10, or I've given you 10 documents to upload you've given a two. Let me start nagging you constantly to upload those documents, because now it's just more and more noisy than I'm just going to start ignoring it. And so what we said is, like, okay, I think it is very reasonable to have reminders. Don't do much people. Some people will do things earlier. Some people will do things later. So it makes sense. But those reminders should be actionable. If I send you a reminder as an end client saying, hey, you're still going to fill out something, you're never going to open that, because you don't even know what's asked for it. It's just generic. You're going to probably delete it. The next thing is, well, I'm going to tell you the 10 things I need from you. And you're going to look at that list. If that list is not actionable, you're going to dismiss it. A perfect example is K1s. Most of our clients have K1s, like probably over 90% of them, because we again, kind of work with more complex situations. And so they end up having that. K1s are just starting to roll out. I started getting K1s in the last couple weeks. So call it mid-March is when you start getting some K1s. Obviously, W2s, you start getting towards the end of January, beginning of February, 1099s, start coming in towards the second half of February. If I send you a reminder in beginning of February or middle of February, or even end of February about K1s because you have one uploaded K1s, there's nothing you can do about it. And all of a sudden, now you're going to tell me, well, this is just noise. And even if you were asking for 6K1s at 1, 1099, for example, you're going to ignore the 1099, because it's probably in the sea of K1s. And so again, we were kind of like, hey, the request and the need for accountants is very reasonable in order to kind of nudge their clients to submit data. But how do we make it as actionable as possible? And so if you've given us the information that we think you should have by now, we should have sent you in a reminder. Even if you still have work to do, I think it is reasonable to still have things to upload, but you don't have those yet. And we know you don't have those yet. And so we shouldn't bug you until we need to bug you that we think it's actionable for that. And so when you put all those together, I think is why you end up with a much higher utilization. Because now it's actually helpful for the end client. It is very helpful for the end client to say, hey, this interface is clean. It's very easy to log in. It's very easy to upload files. I don't have to go file by file and line by line. OK, for this line, upload this file, for this line, I think just dump 20 files and the system will take care of it. That's much cleaner. Obviously, it takes so much less time to be able to do. I know that when I'm prompted for something, I need to take some action. And so it's pretty reasonable. And it's not overwhelming. So when we help them in a very specific narrow way, their engagement is much higher. Because they also want to get their taxes done. And they want to help their account. And it's not their malicious or want to make their account in life harder. But they also had tools that were not necessarily helping them do that. Thank you for joining us today for part one of Randy's conversation with Cosmon Nicolescu, the co-founder of a crew. Part two will air April 14. Head to RandyCrabTree.com for links, show notes, and more. And be sure to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss any great content. We'll see you for next week's episode on the unique CPA. ProfessionalProductions.net