The world has modernized, so is accounting.

Future books is an idea of a two person (+ AI agents) accounting firm, serving (insert very specific niche) businesses based in BC, Canada. This idea was created by Reid Schretlen, you can connect with him on LinkedIn to learn more. The purpose of this landing page is to explain the business model concept and to help find a CPA cofounder / business partner. This land page is not:

  • a business plan.

  • a GTM (go to market) plan.

  • a marketing, sales, or client facing asset.

  • a name or brand that clients will see or interact with.

All of those items will be built out once the partnership is formalized. This landing page also has assumptions, claims, guesses, and other statements that need to be researched and validated. The ideas on this landing page are a starting point, not the final destination.

Why This,Why Now?

Two market forces are reshaping accounting right now. If we can get in the middle of both of them there’s an opportunity to make an impact for us and our clients: 

Outdated Client Experiences
Many BC based SMBs frustrated with the outdated client experiences they receive from their accountant or tax service provider. Business owners use modern tech and modern processes in their personal life, but their accounting systems and their accountant still deliver the same experience as 40 years ago. Keeping with the status quo is leading some accountants to deliver a lacklustre, reactive, experience. There is an opportunity to delver accounting services in a more modern way to win and wow clients.

AI Technology
The COGS (cost of goods sold) of accounting services is plummeting. AI isn’t coming, it’s here. We are at start of what will be a multi year market transition, but modern accountants are already using AI. Work that used to take hours or days now takes minutes. Put another way, the demand for and value of accounting work remains strong, but the cost to deliver that work has been forever changed (greatly reduced). This will lead to strong profit margins for firms who can effectively deploy AI.

I think there is a opportunity to launch an accounting firm that is focused on delivering industry leading client experiences while also leveraging AI technology to keep costs low. The way we win is by combining a high quality client experience with high quality client outcomes, powered by passionate humans and built on an AI optimized workflow. This won’t be easy, but I think it will be worth it. What follows is a high level plan, my attempt to articulate how I think we’ll actually pull this off.

The Playbook

Jason Staats is an accountant to who scaled up a cloud accounting firm, now he teaches accountants how to run more profitable and sustainable accounting firms. This YouTube videos summarize how to start a firm in 2027.

What Will We Sell?

Monthly Accounting services for SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses). The core financial recording and record keeping all businesses need. The accurate financial data that underpins all other accounting, tax, and advisory services.

Tax services for SMBs. Prepare and file all tax things (GST, tax returns, etc) and provide tax planning and tax strategies.

Advisory services for SMBs. This is pretty open ended, and is a really exciting aspect of running a modern accounting firm. This is all of the value added things we can do based on being good at monthly accounting and tax. For example, advanced cashflow modeling, multi-scenario business strategy modeling, predictive analytics, AI training for SMBs (how to start with AI, practical use cases for AI), how to secure grants to help fund the growth of your tech startup, how to secure debt financing, how to secure venture capital, how to expand to the US market, best practices for ecommerce and crypto currency accounting, non profit financial governance, strata corporation accounting, tax credits for hobby farms, managing cashflow for a seasonal tourism business in the Okanagan region. The world is our oyster here, we can specialize in anything we want to, as long as it brings value to our clients and we can deliver it at a profit.

Billing & Payments
We will aim to bill fixed fees, on the first of each month. Our minimum monthly fee will be $1,000 per month. If a client’s can’t afford that they aren’t a good fit. We will also monitor for scope creep and bill ad-hoc as needed to cover out of scope work. Advisory projects that don’t make sense to bill monthly will be billed via a deposit and then at set milestones throughout the project. All payments will be collected online via either credit card or PAD, and if a client pays via credit card we will surcharge the credit card processing fee. Every client will also get a price increase every 12 months if they are paying monthly for services.

Who We’ll Sell It To

We will pick a single industry niche for the first 12 months. For example: 

  • Physiotherapy practices in BC who use Jane app with 2 to 10 practitioners in the firm and annual revenues of $500K to $5M.

  • SaaS companies who are registered in BC with Series A or Series B funded, with $1M to $15M in annual revenue and 5 to 50 employees.

  • SaaS companies who are bootstrapped with $1M to $10M in annual revenue and now need to secure financing or investment to grow to the next level.

  • Residential/Commercial electrical trades businesses based in BC, with 2 to 20 employees, and annual revenues of $500K to $5M. 

  • Photo/Video production companies based in BC with 1-10 employees and $750K to $5M in annual revenue.

  • Interior design firms based in BC with 1-10 employees and $750K to $5M in annual revenue.

  • Traffic control, signage, and equipment companies based in BC with 2 to 50 employees, and $750K to $5M in annual revenue.

  • Music artists based in Canada, with 5M+ monthly listeners on Spotify, with $500K to $5M in annual revenue from streaming, licensing, and ticket sales.

  • Medical device companies based in BC, with 2-25 employees and $1M to $5M in annual revenue.

  • Denture clinics based in BC with 1-20 employees and $750K to $5M in annual revenue.

  • Registered Clinical Counsellor clinics in BC who use Jane App, with 1-20 practitioners and $750K to $5M in annual revenue.

  • Law firms based in BC with 1-10 lawyers, who use Clio, with $1M to $5M in annual revenue.

Open to suggestions here, but you get the idea, we will be focused on just one industry niche and ideally one segment within that niche. This allows us to become industry experts more quickly, making future sales easier. It also allows for stronger profit margins because we sell and deliver the same services in the same way to the same type of client. One thing that kills accounting firm profitability and burns out accounting staff is doing everything just a little bit differently for every client. We’ll aim to avoid that as much as possible by being very discerning on who we take on as clients and what we offer to do for them.

How We’ll Do It

Paperless, remote. We will not accept, process, or deliver anything on paper (unless the client is willing to pay an extra paper processing fee). We will not rent an office, but we will offer to occasionally meet clients at their office when needed and/or rent a coworking space meeting room as needed for in person connections.

This business needs two top tier operators to succeed: 

The CPA - this is you, a licensed CPA in the province of BC. Someone who has a love for accounting, tax, and advisory. Turning data, regulations, accounting principles/practices, and tax law into insights and strategies for our clients. You need to also be a self starter, there are no managers here, just two humans and their little team of AI agents.

The Everything Else - this is me. The receptionist, administrative assistant, junior bookkeeper, junior tax preparer, marketer, sales rep, client success manager, operations manager, billing manager, angry client manager, IT manager, firing bad client’s manager, brand manager, website manager, social media manager, AI skill builder, and AI agent builder. I’ll do everything and anything you don’t need to do or don’t want to do so you can focus on what you do best. And I’ll volunteer to do our internal bookkeeping so that I can learn the human way of doing things before we deploy AI agents to do most of it for us.

We’ll both be there to support each other with friction points and frustrations, and to share ideas and learnings. This is a partnership in every sense of the word. It only works if we both work well on our own and as a team.

Mentors - we’ll look to find a mentor for both of us to meet with together, and it’s encouraged to find our own personal mentors as well.

Some things we’ll do together, such as: 

  • wow our clients with a level of service they’ve never seen before from an accounting firm.

  • delivery high quality accounting, tax, and advisory services to our clients.

  • learn and deploy new technologies (hello AI agents) and new processes based on our launch and learn approach.

  • attend conferences and events to learn from our peers and connect with the accounting community.

  • come up with ideas of advisory services we can sell.

  • attend monthly business review sessions where we review the prior month business activities, review attainment of key metrics, decide what to keep, what to kill, and what to grow in the upcoming month.

We’ll be careful to make sure we don’t do certain things. Such as:

  • take on a client just because they are friends or family.

  • take on a client below our minimum price.

  • let a client abuse us or cause undue stress, we’ll fire them and replace them with someone better.

  • let our clients step outside of our boundaries, for example not giving access to our personal cell phone numbers.

  • work so hard that we burn ourselves out because we’ve bitten off more than we can chew or succumb to scope creep because we said yes to every client request.

  • invest in capital intensive strategies that put stress on our cashflow or profit margins (at least in the first year).

  • hire employees or contractors within the first year. The goal here is to see if we can run a two human (+ AI agents) firm. 

Technology

We will only use cloud based technology, and only commit to apps that have both an open API and MCP server. Which means we’ll also be AI native from day 0. That is, we’ll layer AI into everything we do and all systems/processes.

This will offer two benefits: (1) the ability to deliver a modern and mind blowing client experience, and (2) efficient internal workflows that allows us to get the most out of every hour we put into our work.

In terms of core tech we need to start with, for the first 15 months we’ll aim to keep it as simple as possible with a tech stack such as:

  • Google suite (Gmail, Docs, Drive)

  • A cloud GL with robust app marketplace for our clients and ourselves (QBO, Xero or maybe Digits, Puzzle, Kick?)

  • Zoom (or similar alternative)

  • Vinyl (or similar alternative)

  • Slack

  • Ignition

  • Claude AI

  • laptops (we can each bring our own)

  • phones (we can each bring our own)

How We’ll Start

We’ll start simple and start small. Neither of us will have to make any life changing commitments. To start we’ll just commit to a 12 month partnership and only work with a handful of clients. We’ll take a “launch and learn” approach, adapting as we go based on what works and what doesn’t. The goal is to give us a low stress, low cost, low commitment pathway to pilot the business model. Think of it like a one year trial or one year test drive. Here is what I’m thinking that first year could look like👇

First 15 Months

Oct to Dec 2026

  • Find the two humans who will do this. Well, we found one already (me), so we just need to find you (the CPA).

  • Feel each other out, make sure we both pass the vibes check. Life is too short to work with someone you don’t enjoy working with. 

  • Put together and sign off on a 12 month partnership agreement. We’ll hire a lawyer to assist with this to help mitigate common partnership issues.

  • Explore possible niches to start with. A good niche will be business models that have a monthly/quarterly need for accounting and tax services, and don’t have their financial data locked up in legacy software systems.

  • Create a 12 month business plan including a SWAT analysis, pro forma financial statements, and key targets/milestones.

Jan to Dec 2027

  • We keep our day jobs and side hustle this this idea.

  • Find and serve our first client. Start with monthly accounting and/or tax services (billed monthly). Once one client is up and running and we are happy with how it’s all going, we find one more, then one more, and keep going until we have a handful of clients so we can protect our mental wellness while balancing this new business, our day jobs, and everything else in our personal lives.

  • In Q4 2027, launch and learn advisory. See if we can upsell a few of our clients to buy more from us. Experiment with a couple of advisory services to drive higher profits without the hassle of finding more new clients. 

  • In Dec 2027 have a chat, if we are happy we keep going and renew our partnership agreement. Or, if we are not happy we close out our handful of clients and walk away.

Estimated Revenue & Active Clients

  • January 2027

    • 0 clients

    • $0 revenue

  • February 2027

    • 0 clients

    • $0 revenue

  • March 2027

    • 1 client

    • $1,000 revenue

  • April 2027

    • 2 clients

    • $2,000 revenue

  • May 2027

    • 3 clients

    • $3,000 revenue

  • June 2027

    • 4 clients

    • $4,000 revenue

  • July 2027

    • 5 clients

    • $5,000 revenue

  • September 2027

    • 5 clients

    • $5,000 revenue

  • October 2027

    • 5 clients

    • $5,000 revenue

  • November 2027

    • 5 clients

    • $6,000 revenue

  • December 2027

    • 5 clients

    • $7,000 revenue

Total revenue in 2027 = $38,000. The goal in 2027 will be to break even with $0 paid in owner salaries or distributions to the owners (us). Yes, that means we will be working for free in 2027, that’s the price we pay to slowly grow and test this business model out. But that should be ok, as we can still rely on our day jobs to sustain us financially.

BHAG

BHAG = big hairy audacious goal

If we get to Dec 2027 and decide that we want to continue with this business here is what the next 12 months could look like:

  • grow from 5 to 20 clients.

  • grow revenue per client per month from $1,000 to $5,000 by selling more advisory services.

If we can achieve 20 active clients at $5k per client per month by Dec 2028 we’d have a business with:

  • $100,000 MRR

  • $1,200,000 ARR

If we can also achieve a:

  • 30% profit margin, we each take home $180,000 per year personal income from the business (50% of the annual profit).

  • 40% profit margin, we each take home $240,000 per year personal income from the business (50% of the annual profit).

  • 50% profit margin, we each take home $300,000 per year personal income from the business (50% of the annual profit).

Yes, these are all “ifs” and this won’t be easy to achieve. But this scenario isn’t wildly unrealistic if we can sell high margin services to loyal clients.

What Do I Bring To The Table?

Accounting Industry Experience
I have spent the past nine years working with some of the most modern and most profitable accounting firms in Canada and the US. Everything from one person bookkeeping firms to full service enterprise firms. I’ve spent 9 years learning how to:

  • scope, price, and sell accounting, tax, and advisory services.

  • run an accounting firm with healthy profit margins and $0 in A/R.

  • find and bill for scope creep.

  • say yes to the right clients, say no to the wrong clients, and fire clients who looked like a good fit but turned out to be a nightmare.

  • engage clients with professional proposals.

  • build and manage an end to end tech stack for an accounting firm all the way from marketing to sales to proposal to onboarding to getting the work done to billing.

  • optimize an accounting firm tech stack via Zapier, APIs, and MCP servers.

  • upsell clients during renewals.

  • deploy regular price increases across a large and diverse client base.

Startup Experience
Over the past 20 years I’ve worked at four startups that failed:

  • Oxia (B2C health products)

  • HuStream (B2B Video SaaS)

  • InHouse (B2B Video Production)

  • Biznas (B2B Software Development Services)

and one startup, where I currently work, that has succeeded:

I’ve be founder adjacent and spent time learning from senior leaders, people managers, and individual contributors across these different businesses. I’ve seen first hand why startups fail, learned how to thrive in the chaos, and how to stay grounded in a fast paced environment.

Relationship Builder
In my role as a Key Account Manager at Ignition I have developed relationships with over 500 accounting professionals. My job is to meet new customers on day one of their subscription and work with them to onboard and scale up with Ignition. At any given time I am managing 200+ accounts, providing an AI enabled, white glove, customer experience. Doing this for 9 years now has taught me how to start and grow strong B2B relationships, and will prove to be valuable in our accounting firm as accounting firms live and die by the quality of their clients and the quality of their client relationships.

Sales Negotiation
I have spent multiple years takes sales and negotiation training, and have used those learnings to hone my skills. Skills that I’ve used to help close and renew enterprise contracts, close and renew SMB contracts, drive expansion revenue within enterprise and SMB accounts, and curate long term customer loyalty. I have also come very close to, met, or exceeded my quarterly targets for many years in a row.

AI Enabled
I am an Ignition MCP trainer, heavy AI user in my day job, and AI educator who has helped over 50 accounting professionals deploy AI in their work and firms. I am a go to resource for AI questions and best practices, trusted by my colleagues and customers alike. I will be able help our customers cut through the AI noise and find tangible and approachable ways to use AI. I can also help ensure we use AI effectively inside our firm.

Communication and Content Creation
I’ve spent years working on skills for presenting to senior stakeholders and handling objections without taking feedback personally. I’ve also worked on written skills for building customer-facing documentation, articles, and webinar content that scales beyond one-to-one attention.

Network & Community
I’m connected to the Okanagan tech community in Kelowna, BC. I also have connections to a number of other industries in and around the Okanagan. I have a large number of second level connections to the Vancouver tech community and a number of different industries in and around greater Vancouver. I have 2,000+ connections on LinkedIn and post regularly. I have alumni connections to both BCIT and Okanagan College having graduated with a Diploma of Technology from BCIT (2006) and BBA from Okanagan College (2013). I also have connections to some of the most progressive accounting professionals in Australia, Canada, and the US. Such as:

Michelle Timperley 🇦🇺
As a Senior Key Account Manager at Ignition, my focus is applying my insights as a successful bookkeeper for over 13 years to the role by building and strengthening business relationships with our clients to help them to develop their skills, confidence and application of the Ignition tools to automate their onboarding, proposals, payments and value, pricing models.

Guy Pearson, CA 🇦🇺
I'm an entrepreneurial former accountant that is passionate on removing bottlenecks from business processes in order to achieve scalability. I'm a big believer in technology over outsourcing where possible and suitable. With a background in accounting in public practice and a self taught knowledge of technology, I believe that any business can achieve a single point of truth for their ownership in dashboard form in order to makes decisions on which levers to pull and push.

Twyla Verhelst, CPA 🇨🇦
I work at the intersection of AI strategy and commercial growth in the accounting profession. The technology has come a long way. The harder work is helping firms actually change how they operate, and that’s where I spend my time. I’ve co-founded an advisory-led accounting firm, launched a tech start-up, led accountant partnerships at FreshBooks and Mercury, and built community and education programs from the ground up. That mix of practitioner, builder, and connector shapes everything I do.

Chad Davis, CPA 🇨🇦
Working with some pretty great people at LiveCA trying to improve the way accounting services are delivered to Canadian businesses in the $1M-$15M range. Also started the AutomationTown.io community for people in the accounting industry to learn, share and geek out on AI and automation.

Ryan Lazanis, CPA 🇨🇦
In 2013, I started one of the first cloud accounting firms in North America. And I sucked at running it. Now, with Future Firm, I help modern firm owners unlock freedom and growth in their business without wasting years on trial and error.

Marie Greene, CPA 🇺🇸
Marie Greene is an innovator and recognized leader in the cloud accounting industry, currently serving as a CAS partner at Sorren. She founded Connected Accounting LLC, which later merged with Sorren. With over a decade of experience in accounting services, she provides expert process efficiency consultation, helping clients automate and improve both their businesses and personal lives.

Jason Staats, CPA 🇺🇸
I last ran a $5M accounting firm, then launched and sold a SAAS, worked on AI strategy with many of the coolest brands in our space and even helped put together the AICPA's AI toolkit. These days I spend 100% of my time talking with accounting firms and share what I learn.

Logan Graf, CPA 🇺🇸
Accounting firm: Experienced in tax compliance and consultation for a wide variety of industries, entities, and people. Content creation: I want to help the next generation of accountants (young and old) succeed.

Special Bonus đź‘€
I also bring a mullet and moustache personal UI which is great for breaking the ice on Zoom calls.

FAQs

No. AI is replacing the low complexity accounting, a basic T1 tax return service for example. Business owners who need more complex accounting services are not ready or willing replace their accountant with ChatGPT or Claude. B2B accounting will still be bought and sold based on H2H (human to human) trust.

Won’t AI replace all accounting?

1

Buying a book of clients from a retiring CPA means you’re also buying a book of baggage. Clients who are used to low prices. Clients who are used to getting a friends and family discount. Clients who are used to paying 45 days after their tax return is filed. Clients that Jason Staats would call “D” clients. We don’t want D clients, we want a book full of A and B clients.

Why not just buy a book of clients?

2

Yes, I think so. Many SMBs are really busy during normal working hours running their own businesses and serving their own clients/customers. While we may need to do the odd lunch meeting or breakfast session, if we start client relationships with the expectation that we’re available for clients on evenings and weekends it will likely align well with their availability. Especially considering that our clients will have 24/7 access to their accounting data, financials, and reports with the cloud tech stack we’ll be using.

Can you actually take good care of clients while working evenings and weekends?

3

Mid market and enterprise clients offer everything at a bigger scale. Bigger procurement budgets, bigger revenue earning potential, and multi-year service contracts. But they also come with a much more expensive and longer sales cycle, near endless negotiating to close a sale (looking at you procurement teams), more complex service delivery demands, and an unwillingness to change their A/P process…meaning you get a cheque 30, 60, 90+ days after you submit a purchase order. Moving up market would also mean we’d only have the capacity to serve 1, 2, or 3 clients in the first 1-2 years of our business, putting all our revenue eggs in one basket. That leads to a lot of churn risk, and significantly weakens our negotiation position when renewing clients.

Buy targeting SMBs we can benefit from shorter sales cycles, a de-risked book of clients, faster payment collections, more negotiating power, and most importantly: the ability to walk away from bad clients.

Why target SMBs and not mid market or enterprise customers?

4

Next Steps

If you’re a CPA licensed in BC and you think this idea sounds like fun I'd love to chat. Please connect with me on LinkedIn and send me a message 👋 Thanks!