The Firmlever Weekly Roundup: Issue #43
Things are heating up this week
The End of Sales Calls--Maybe
If you hate sales you might love this. If you love sales you might hate this.
Now you can create interactive avatars that actually run sales calls for you.
Its called Anam AI and I'm currently testing feasibility in my companies (this is not sponsored) but so far so...creepily good:
Oh No, Not Another Botkeeper
If you're trying to shave hours off of your client bookkeeping while improving firm valuation, the OpenAI-backed startup Kick recently raised $20M to automate bookkeeping for businesses and for accountants who want to use it for their client base.
In a nutshell its an AI-driven "self-driving" bookkeeping and accounting software designed to automate much of the manual work that traditional tools like QBO require.
It handles real-time transaction categorization, receipt matching, deduction identification (e.g., home office, vehicle, travel), revenue tracking, spending monitoring, multi-entity support (unlimited at no extra cost), intercompany accounting, and generating tax-ready financials like Profit & Loss statements and balance sheets.
Last week I blasted some big fails by similar companies but this seems to have solved what the others could not. Kick built proprietary ML models for categorization and automation on top of OpenAI's LLM.
I'll be watching this one closely.
Goodbye ChatGPT, Hello Claude Cowork
Two months ago I cancelled my ChatGPT and Gemini memberships and went all-in on Claude. A year ago it was meh but Anthropic just launched Claude Cowor--basically their AI coding tool (Claude Code) rebuilt for non-developers--and it's changing how I work.
Here's why it matters for firm owners: Cowork lets you point Claude at a folder of files and it actually does work on them. Not "here's a summary"--it reads your PDFs, extracts data from messy bank statements, reconciles numbers in spreadsheets, and pushes cleaned files back. I've been running it on client profitability analyses and the speed is absurd.
Two things make it different from ChatGPT or Gemini for accounting work:
Claude's reasoning is legitimately strong on GAAP, tax logic, and financial modeling. I've stress-tested it across dozens of firm scenarios and it rarely hallucinates the way other AIs do. It's not perfect--you still need to review--but it doesn't make the dumb mistakes that make you distrust the whole output.
The connectors now plug into Google Drive, Gmail, DocuSign, and FactSet, with more rolling out. No QuickBooks connector yet (annoying), so you're still exporting and feeding files manually. But once it has your data it moves fast.
This is a 2027 play though--still not ready to hand off to a junior and walk away. But if you're on a paid Claude plan it's worth 30 minutes of testing to see where it's headed.
Marc
p.s.-I'm onboarding the next batch of firms for our new private network platform where you can buy, sell and divest accounting firm clients with no fees, commissions or success fees. Enroll using the instructions here.
