Table of contents
Thank you for joining BILL for our third annual Bookkeeper Appreciation Week, a week of celebration and education for bookkeepers just like you. Learn about how to automate your daily and weekly manual tasks, and how you can use the extra time to take your business to the next level.
Mar 30: Welcome
Mar 31: Advisory
Apr 1: Pricing
Apr 2: AI
Apr 3: Wrap-up
Day 4: AI
The real value of AI isn't in the noise of the headlines, but in how it shows up in your day-to-day tasks, from automating data entry to protecting your clients from fraud. Today, we explore how to move your firm toward a highly automated future.
Explore these resources to understand where AI creates real leverage and how you can enter the playing field ahead of the game by automating the most repetitive parts of your workflow.
What a Highly Automated Firm Looks Like
A highly automated firm is where humans supported by technology can focus on higher-order challenges. By moving away from manual workarounds and toward a standardized, AI-enabled workflow, firms can reclaim the capacity needed to focus on high-value advisory and critical thinking. This guide provides a blueprint for leveraging different classes of AI to improve your revenue margins and strengthen client relationships.
Key Takeaways:
- Human-Centric Automation: High-performing firms use technology to support people, not the other way around, allowing staff to shift from mundane processing to solving higher-order client challenges.
- Standardized Tech Stack: Efficiency is built on a narrow foundation; 88% of top-performing CAS leaders limit their core G/L software to three or fewer programs to simplify training and accelerate onboarding.
- The Automation Curve: Success follows a disciplined three-phase roadmap that outlines a clear strategy: Plan, Pilot, and Pivot.
- A Competitive Edge for Talent: Beyond efficiency, highly automated firms are perceived as more innovative and desirable places to work, making it easier to recruit top-tier talent in a tight market.
How AI from BILL helps you Bypass the Busy Work
Artificial Intelligence is at its best when it is handling the high-volume, repetitive tasks that usually stall your firm’s momentum. By integrating AI software like BILL directly into your financial operations, you can shift your team’s focus from chasing documents to delivering the strategic insights your clients value most. Explore how to offload manual work without sacrificing accuracy or control.
Key Takeaways:
- Total Elimination of Data Entry Friction: By automatically reading, extracting, and coding invoice and expense data, the platform removes the manual bottleneck of hand-keying information, saving firms up to 50% of the time usually spent on accounts payable.
- Proactive Risk Management as a Service: BILL scans every transaction for duplicates, anomalies, or potential fraud, allowing you to protect client funds before they ever leave the building.
- Immediate Scalability Without Headcount: Leveraging AI allows you to take on more complex clients and higher transaction volumes while keeping your existing team focused on interpretation and strategy rather than administrative processing.
Bringing AI to Accounting: Improve efficiency and control
The accounting profession has reached a historical tipping point where manual, repetitive tasks are no longer just a nuisance—they are a barrier to growth. By leveraging AI, your firm can move beyond the limitations of manual spreadsheets, reclaiming the creative bandwidth needed to serve clients with more insight and empathy. This article explores how AI serves as a revolutionary tool for firms by tackling the high-volume data processing that requires absolute accuracy but often leads to staff burnout.
Key Takeaways:
- Massive Efficiency Gains: Surveyed firms report reclaiming significant portions of their workweek, specifically saving an average of 50% of the time previously spent on accounts payable and roughly 12 hours per month on expense management.
- Hyper-Accelerated Innovation: AI processing power has been doubling every 3.4 months on average for over a decade, meaning the tools available to bookkeepers are becoming more sophisticated and reliable at a pace far faster than previous technological shifts.
- High Client Demand for Tech-Forward Partners: 85% of business financial leaders are enthusiastic about adopting AI and are looking for firms that can help them use these tools to drive better strategic planning and day-to-day operations.
- Scaling Accuracy and Security: Beyond just speed, AI provides an extra layer of protection by scanning for duplicate invoices and unusual transaction patterns in real-time, ensuring data integrity while the firm scales.
Day 3: Pricing
Pricing is often the point where advisory conversations move from theory to reality. Today’s resources are designed to help you take the guesswork out of the transition, move past the billable hour, and frame your services in a way that reflects the true value you bring to your clients' businesses. You will walk away with the talking points to lead the conversation with confidence.
Pricing Models for AP and AR Services
As you incorporate technology to increase accuracy, your pricing model must evolve to ensure your firm remains profitable. The more you automate your AP and AR workflows, the faster you get. If you are still billing by the hour, you are effectively giving yourself a pay cut for being good at your job. This article highlights three primary pricing models through the lens of growth.
Explore the risks and reality of Hourly Billing, Flat Rates, and Value Pricing and how they could work for your firm. Or, develop a hybrid approach, and align your prices with the value you provide, not the effort you exert.
The 7 Foundations of Value Pricing
Moving to value pricing is a journey that requires a total shift in mindset. This guide, written by expert (and today’s webinar speaker!) Mark Wickersham, provides the foundational tenets to start that transition and ensure you are being compensated for your impact, not your clock. Learn the framework that will help you lead your next pricing meeting with total authority.
Key Takeaways:
- 7 foundations of value pricing: A framework that moves you beyond hourly rates and one-size-fits-all fees so your prices reflect the real value you deliver.
- The psychology of the “Yes”: Pricing isn't just math; it’s about reducing the friction that keeps a client from saying "yes". You can move from defending your fees to demonstrating your worth by mastering these three shifts: Risk reversal, Choice over Ultimatum, and the power of Anchoring.
- Stop Penalizing Your Own Efficiency: The biggest flaw in hourly billing is that the better you get at your job, the less you get paid. Value pricing turns that logic on its head by focusing on: outcomes over hours, translating features into benefits, and pricing the result.
A Roadmap for CAS Pricing: The Three Levels
Every client has different needs, but you can simplify your firm's pricing structure by establishing defined service levels. This worksheet from CPA.com and BILL will help you understand the pricing consideration and questions you and your clients need to answer.
Key Takeaways:
- The Three Levels: Establishing service levels enables you to categorize your involvement with clients into a specific package. Learn about the Transactional, Controller, and CFO pricing packages to see what might work for you.
- Questions to consider: A shift into CAS requires getting specific about the difference between accounting, advisory, and tax work. Reflect on your current workflow and answer questions about technology requirements, payroll administration, bill pay, invoicing, and tax returns to assess the needs of your clients.
- The Worksheet: Download the ready-to-go worksheet that you can fill out while onboarding new clients to decide what pricing level best compliments their service requests.
Expert Tip: Jody Grunden of Summit Virtual CFO by Anders shared that their model “forces our staff to innovate to complete more in 40 hours. They are incentivized with variable compensation to make clients as efficient as possible, so they can take on more clients.”
Day 2: Advisory
For many bookkeepers, advisory services don’t require a dramatic workflow overhaul. You're already providing advisory value every time you explain a cash flow dip or suggest a better way to track expenses. You can start simply by reframing the guidance you are already providing and using data more intentionally in your client conversations. Today’s resources are designed to help you formalize those organic conversations into a structured, scalable service.
How to grow CAS with existing clients
Your clients already trust you— now it’s time to shift the conversation from current performance to the next strategic steps. Your existing financial data acts as a roadmap, helping you identify high-potential clients and educate them on how advisory services move their business forward. This guide, brought to you from CPA.com and BILL, discusses scalable CAS growth with existing clients.
Key Takeaways:
- Create a Roadmap: Identify which in-demand services fit your clients, such as CFO/Controller advisory (88% demand) or spend management.
- Perform a Client Inventory: Use your current data to identify traditional bookkeeping clients who would benefit from cash flow forecasting or automated accounts payable.
- Internal Education: Use quick, stand-up meetings to train your staff on identifying upsell opportunities and communicate the ROI of advisory services.
The Foundation: 5 Guiding Principles for CAS
Standardization is the secret to a sustainable advisory practice. This guide, created with CPA.com, offers insight on the client accounting services model as well as provides peer perspective to help you implement this model in your own work.
Key Takeaways:
- Structure & Pricing: Move toward value pricing and coordinated service levels, from basic bookkeeping to full CFO advisory.
- Standardized Tech Stack: Don't let clients dictate the software. A firm-driven tech stack ensures your team becomes experts in the tools they use every day, giving your clients the data they want, faster.
- Team-Based Approach: Assign dedicated associates and managers to each client to ensure redundancy; if one person leaves, the client's internal accounting department remains intact.
- Business Development: Invest in referral networks and community events to build a pipeline of qualified leads.
- Specialization: Vertical focus—such as nonprofits or tech startups—allows you to apply standard processes across an entire niche.
AI and the future of CAS
Traditional automation handles predictable, rule-based tasks. Agentic AI represents a leap forward because it can interpret context and take action within firm-defined boundaries. Unlike traditional automation that stops at the threshold of judgment, these systems can navigate multi-step workflows autonomously. This resource explores how shifting to 'automation that executes' can reclaim your team's capacity for higher-value advisory work.
Key Takeaways:
- Autonomous Execution: AI agents can proactively retrieve missing documents, correct coding inconsistencies, and flag anomalies in vendor spend.
- Immediate Impact: CAS teams can use agents for complex vendor onboarding—validating W-9 data against IRS records and tracking approval statuses automatically.
- The Goal: By reducing the "human surface area" required for routine operations, your team can focus exclusively on high-level interpretation and strategy.
Day 1: Welcome
The books are the heartbeat of every business, but we know it’s the bookkeepers who keep that heart beating steady. This week, we’re moving beyond simple thanks to provide you with a toolkit for the future. Our goal is to share actionable insights that help you build a practice that is not just profitable, but sustainable and fulfilling.
Today, we are kicking things off with three core themes: Advisory, Pricing, and AI. Here is an extended look at the resources we’ve curated for you to kick-start the week.
Finance leaders speak: hear what they want and how your firm can deliver
Modern finance leaders are increasingly looking for partners who don't just report on the past, but actively help shape the future.This resource explores the gap between traditional compliance and high-value advisory.
Key Takeaways:
- The Expectation Gap: While clients can easily articulate their needs, they often struggle to articulate their wants.
- Defining True Value: Clients assign the highest value to services that help them improve scalability and meet long-term profit goals.
- From Processing to Proactive: Clients are looking for a shift in energy—moving from closing the books to opening the conversation about what is possible next month.
- Strategic Storytelling: High-value partners move beyond data entry to deliver financial storytelling, interpreting what the numbers mean for real people and mission-driven goals.
- The Desire for Transformation: Clients want to know what transformative changes will occur in their business as a direct result of working with you.
Pricing on value
If you’re still billing by the hour, you’ve hit a revenue ceiling. This guide, featuring expert Jason Blumer, CPA, breaks down why you should price based on value, not the service..
Key takeaways:
- Defining Value: Financial statements have no inherent value on their own; value is assigned by the client based on the profit, growth, and transformation your firm enables.
- The Discovery Process: Learn how to ask future-oriented questions, like "Where do you see your business in three years?" to uncover what your clients value.
- The "Slow" Onboarding: Discover why a methodical, 1–2 month onboarding process leads to better client alignment and higher price tags.
- Strategic Options: Why you should always offer three pricing tiers and present your highest-value "anchor" price first.
AI in action: Real stories, real wins from leading accounting firms
Stop wondering if AI is a threat and start seeing it as a partner. This guide highlights three firms that are using AI to reclaim their time.
Key Takeaways:
- Efficiency Gains: Firms like Hiline report a 40% increase in efficiency by using AI for complex tasks like building Excel formulas and writing code.
- Automating the Mundane: Learn how Ledgerly reduced reconciliation time by 60% and how some clients saved the equivalent of a half-time employee through AI-driven workflows.
- Proactive Security: Discover how anomaly detection helps firms like Sorren catch out-of-the-norm payments or address changes before cash even leaves the building.
- W-9 Management: See how AI agents now automate the tedious process of chasing down and validating vendor W-9 forms.
