Kick Resources

Building the accounting firm of the future

Conrad Wadowski — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Just 12 months since our launch last year, we’re excited to share more than 3,000 businesses have switched over to Kick.

Kick — building the accounting firm of the future. →

Kick is built for the Bookkeeper

The goal when we started Kick was to apply AI to automate the boring stuff.

In the process we did something that may seem crazy upfront..

We dedicated one person’s time to the actual service of bookkeeping.

This started with yours truly..heck I’ve even changed my official title at Kick to “Bookkeeper.”

While I came in with the background of starting my own bookkeeping business in high school 20 years ago, I quickly ran into modern limitations — I needed to build Kick in order to handle more clients, without hiring more people.

In the industry, it’s common to see Bookkeeper to business ratio of 1:30.

But after more than 4 years of work I can share that today:

Kick has 1 Bookkeeper closing the books for 311 businesses.

Here’s what it took to go 10X what was possible:

Technical depth — We went deep and built Kick on our own secure multi-book ledger architecture, with direct integrations with the best products including Stripe, Gusto, Ramp, PayPal and others.
Automation — We focused on the core bookkeeping workflows of multi-step categorization and automated document import/reconciliation.
Narrowed scope — We narrowed our focus from a Monthly to an Annual close, and referred Business Owners to Firm partners in our network who wanted more frequent interaction or industry specific adjustments.

The result: a more valuable firm, that offers bookkeeping at half the price.

A glimpse into tomorrow’s firm

If you’re building a firm around traditional bookkeeping margins, these numbers should get your attention.

The dozens of firm owners we work with however are seeing a different trend.

While the traditional accounting firm maintained 20–30% margins and was valued at 1X Revenue, we’re now seeing firms with double these margins and valuation multiples of up to 3X Revenue.

It’s the firms who are embracing advances in AI not only from Kick, but across their technology stack, who will thrive and build more value for their clients.

Some other observations on the firm of the future:

Domain expertise — As automation handles more routine work, specialization in a niche such as SaaS, Ecommerce or Construction becomes even more valuable.
Full service — When you own the client relationship you have the unique ability to cross sell all the right solutions — from advisory to invoicing, tax, payroll, banking and even bookkeeping.
Firm brands — As you introduce higher-margin advisory services, your reputation will become increasingly how you differentiate and justify those higher rates in your niche.
Reviewer > Preparer — Just as we’ve seen at Kick, AI will be there for your first draft, and turn and evolve you and your team into reviewers, instead of preparers.
Build and buy — Along with partnering with technology companies, firms will increasingly build their own products and agents themselves.
Accelerated mastery — It used to take years of work to earn your way up the accounting career ladder. While it may be increasingly difficult to break into accounting for those early in their career, the undersupply of talent and AI tools can be used to accelerate learning time and early exposure to clients.

The future of accounting is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.

Firms using a modern tech stack will command higher multiples, attract better talent, and serve more clients profitably.

Firms that don’t modernize will struggle to compete as client expectations rise and margins compress. We’re building for you.

Thankful for your support

Huge thanks to Echo Zhong and Anthony Sanchez (Zhong & Sanchez), Stephen Pennington (NFS), Scott Hoover (Hoover Financial), Eoin Coney and Andrew Weinhardt (Blubooks), Tapan Ramachandran (Otterz) and Ron Saharyan and Billie Anne Grigg (Profit First Professionals) who have turned to Kick to scale their firms.

Originally released on Medium.

Kick raises $9M to automate the boring stuff

Conrad Wadowski — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

When you own your own business — managing all your necessary accounting work in a spreadsheet or complex software is simply work humans shouldn’t have to do.

Kick raised a $9M Seed round with participation from OpenAI Startup Fund and General Catalyst to automate all the boring stuff.

Along with this, the team introduced a new user experience of ‘Done with you’ software, which has become a new standard for useful agents.

Introducing ‘Done with you’ software

In September of last year, I shared the background behind starting Kick (read the announcement). From the start, Kick is built for the Owner — whether that’s the Entrepreneur or the 3M Accounting and Bookkeeping firms who support them.

I’m excited to share our progress since that announcement, in Kick today serving over 1,000 businesses and hitting an inflection point of 50% monthly growth over the past 3 months.

A significant factor powering this growth has been our freemium pricing model.

Kick is free to start and doesn’t charge you to connect any additional business entities, team members or accounts. This is a dramatic difference compared to existing software or hiring. The end result? Kick is 1/3 the cost of a traditional bookkeeper. This dramatic reduction in price benefits not only the Entrepreneur, but also the Accountants and Bookkeepers who use Kick every day to serve many more clients than before.

Unlike traditional workflow software, Kick runs in the background to handle the busy work, while keeping you in full control.

One example is Kick’s ability to organize personal expenses which are often mixed in a Business Owner’s personal accounts. Properly identifying miscellaneous Software & Subscription, Meals, Travel and Home Office expenses which should be for business save the average user $4k on their taxes. This means even if you’re a paid user, Kick often pays for itself.

Supporters

As we enter this new world of software, we’re proud to have the support of some of forward thinking users like Shaan Puri (My First Million Podcast), Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland (Smart Passive Income), Marina Mogilko (LinguaTrip), and Jason Feifer (Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur) who’ve all turned to Kick to automate their back office.

We’ve also been fortunate to have the support of long-term investors who bought into our product-first approach, including Marc Bhargava (General Catalyst), Ian Hathaway (OpenAI Startup Fund), Lachy Groom (Ex-Stripe), Michael Vaughn (Ex-Venmo), Nick Davidov (DVC), Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh (Founders, Ramp), Sahil Lavingia (CEO, Gumroad), Austen Allred (CEO, Bloomtech), Tikhon Berstram (Co-Founder, Parse), Soleio Cuervo (Ex-Facebook), Scott Belsky (CSO, Adobe), Joshua Browder (CEO, DoNotPay) and 60+ others.

Moving forward

With this funding, Kick scaled up to deliver even more powerful features to help grow the Ownership Economy.

Introducing Kick

Conrad Wadowski — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Kick Early Access — a first look at the self-driving back office. →

When a business owner first becomes profitable, they’re often surprised to find their number one expense isn’t contractors or ads — it’s taxes.

Yet staying on top of your taxes is excruciating. Every day, we see entrepreneurs waste time, overpay or face surprising IRS fines. The bad news is we only see audit risk increasing. The good news is advances in AI offer a completely different future.

While Adrian comes from a family of accountants, I started a bookkeeping business in high school.

We deeply understand the pain that comes from long days of handling receipts, categorization and tax deadlines that put a halt to entrepreneurial momentum.

This made me question: what type of businesses could entrepreneurs create if they never had to worry about their accounting?

So after Teachable’s acquisition, I was in a unique position to go all in to solve a problem I’ve faced for decades. That’s why we’re building Kick.

Because when you’re running your own business, your time should be spent with customers, not on admin work. Knowing your back office is handled gives you the peace of mind to grow your own profitable, sustainable business.

The path to build Kick only became clear when we discovered a new way to build software.

While the 2010s were all about collaborative software to help you get work done, in this new wave the work is all done with you.

To do this Kick is building with 3 product principles:

Craft. Every distraction a business owner faces has an extreme opportunity cost. No matter how complex accounting can get, Kick’s user experience must be obsessively crafted, with unnecessary workflows eliminated whenever possible.
Collaboration. Rather than seek to replace the products or advisors you work with, Kick focuses on deep accountant partnerships and product integration.
Freemium. When you start with Kick, you don’t have to worry about the cost. Kick is the only freemium accounting solution to let you test the product yourself first.

We’re looking forward to building together.