07.30.24 - MakersHub Platform Updates

The folks from MakersHub.ai joins us to give us some updates on their platform. What they have been working on and a sneak peak into what's in store for the future. It's a new, simple, and very powerfully robust AP and Receipt Management tool that works bi-directionally with QuickBooks Online AND Desktop.

Learn More about MakersHub here: https://discover.makershub.ai/affiliates/qb-power-hour

QB Power Hour is a free, biweekly webinar series for accountants, ProAdvisors, CPAs, bookkeepers and QuickBooks consultants presented by Michelle Long, CPA and Dan DeLong who are very passionate about the industry, QuickBooks and apps that integrate with QuickBooks.

Watch or listen to all of the QB Power Hours at https://www.qbpowerhour.com/blog

Register for upcoming webinars at https://www.qbpowerhour.com/

Transcript

Dan DeLong: 0:30

Welcome everybody to another QB Power Hour. This this day where we're gonna be talking about. The Bill Pay and MakersHub updates. And we've got Charley and Ted from MakersHub joining us. So it's great to have everyone joining us here today. Michelle is fresh off of her baby duties. For Mimi, Michelle, welcome, welcome back. It's good to see you again.

Michelle Long: 0:51

That's right. I've been a Mimi for three weeks now. I'm very happy to have that new position. Little Aurora Bay Long is doing well and growing and I just love my new role as Mimi. She's adorable. I love being a grandma. And

Dan DeLong: 1:12

knowing you for as long as I have and how Allergic you are to early morning.

Michelle Long: 1:19

I am allergic to morning.

Dan DeLong: 1:23

For you to say that you got up at 6 a. m, that it must take a lot for that to happen and I'm sure you did it willingly, right?

Michelle Long: 1:31

All it took was a little cry from Aurora and I was like, I'll do that. Yeah, the first few days when they got home from the hospital, Andrew and Carla just hadn't had any sleep for days and she did not like to be swaddled. Most babies you swaddle them and I'm like, oh, those kids just don't know how to swaddle or tighten them. Let Mimi do it. I'll wrap her up good. No, that little girl kicking and fighting and, She did not want to be swaddled and lay down in her crib and stuff. And so anyway, the first few days She didn't want to sleep in her crib and stuff And so I volunteered to get up early and hold her so they could get a few hours of sleep and everything so first couple of days I did Let them get back to sleep and I got up early and held her and they were able to get several hours of sleep Which felt good and Then she started sleeping, but you still could not swaddle her. Even the nurses in the hospital said, Nope, she doesn't like to be swaddled. So we gave up on that. Of course it could be a little hot too, and she didn't like it. But she's, she just likes to stretch those long arms and legs. She's going to be tall, I think.

Dan DeLong: 2:35

Yeah, I am we call it the baby burrito.

Michelle Long: 2:38

Yeah. Yep. That's what we do. We're

Dan DeLong: 2:39

doing

Michelle Long: 2:41

well. She doesn't like that anymore, So anyway, very glad to be here and be a now

Dan DeLong: 2:49

Alright, that's enough. I appreciate you joining us again and it, it's nice to nice to make sure that Michelle is still around. Yep. I'm still here. Even though you announced your retirement. Appreciate you joining us here today. So again you want to introduce yourself for those that need no introduction to who Michelle is.

Michelle Long: 3:09

Okay. So formerly I did a lot of speaking and training and QuickBooks consultants and all of that, but realized that life's too short and I'm there to let others do it and pass some clients off to my son and things like that, and I may still take on a project here or there. Fun and enticing but life's too short. I'm gonna let the new generation take over from here I'm gonna focus on traveling and being a meanie

Dan DeLong: 3:37

There you go

Michelle Long: 3:38

That's enough about me

Dan DeLong: 3:40

My name of course is dan de long owner of danwith and school of bookkeeping worked out into it for nearly 18 You're co host today as well as over at the school of bookkeeping workshop wednesdays And we have a couple guests joining us here today. Charley and Ted, you want to go around the table and introduce yourself.

Charley Howe: 3:59

Charley, you go first. I need to update these bios that I distribute, but I spent before co founding maker sub in 2022, I spent almost 20 years in the banking industry. Originally on the capital markets business, and then in the FinTech part of Citibank. So dealt with a lot of the payments, counterparties and software counterparties that the bank dealt with. And from there, saw a lot of the shortcomings or opportunities that still existed in that world and met my, now co founder who ran an advanced manufacturing company for many years knew the problem set that we set out to solve very intimately because he lived it. And now we're, well down that path of hopefully bringing some ease and efficiency to the world of bill pay and accounts payable. And Ted kindly joined us about a year ago. We're happy to have him.

Ted McRae: 4:56

So yeah, I've I was a recycled employee at Intuit as well. I don't know, Dan, if you're a recycled employee, but I was a recycled employee at Intuit for about eight, I don't know, about 10 years, I also was employee number 15 at a tiny little company called Zero and worked at accounting suite. Now I'm here at MakersHub helping helping grow the business. So that's a little bit about me. That's it. Mr. Dan.

Dan DeLong: 5:25

All right. Appreciate you both joining us here today as we'll unpack if you haven't joined us for the first time. For the first time that makers have joined us. I'm a big fan of this platform. It is it is something that is a fresh welcome breath of fresh air. That's the word. I was the phrase I was looking for in this space, and especially if there are anyone, if anybody is watching or participating that is in the accounts payable space. It is so unique and and we'll talk about, some of the distinctions about MakersHub, but I am a huge fan of MakersHub. I appreciate you guys joining us here today for a couple reasons. One is that you guys are going to be sponsoring or being our CPE sponsor, which is something that is amazing that you guys have offered to, to help out with that. Because when Hector and Michelle were doing the QB power hour I was talking to Hector and he was like, that is such an administrative headache. And so I appreciate you delegating that for but the plan is that the the 1st the 1st, 1 of the month, it will be eligible for CPE for the QB power hour. Ed was nice enough to let us know that he's got some extras this year. So we might actually have all of the remainder of 2024, but we'll see how many we we can We can weasel out of him for this year, but at least the plan is the first one each month, including this one will is eligible for CP credit. You can always check out the website for upcoming events, but we're every other Tuesday at noon. Eastern wherever we happen to be, if Michelle is on the East Coast with the baby or in central time with a normal house and whoever knows where I'm going to be currently on the Pacific Coast time zone today. But you can always go to qppowerhour. com slash resources for the PDF of slides, recordings, prior podcasts, and also other resources there. A little bit of housekeeping. If you have specific questions about topics that we're going to be talking about here today, please put them in the Q and a, you should see a little button at the bottom of the zoom console or Q and a. And that way we can follow up if need be, if if we can't answer the question live on the webinar. If you have general comments about how great it is to be a grandparent or a great grandparent, I saw somebody, somebody was putting in the chat. Go ahead and put those comments in the chat. And then, of course, we always have links in the slides themselves. It should be The link should be already posted in the chat and in the comments. So you should be able to see that. We are simulcasting on multiple social media channels. So the Facebook page as well as YouTube and LinkedIn. But if you are watching on Facebook, you'll want to access or scan that QR code to give Facebook access to the streaming platform so we can see who you are when you comment and those types of things. And that has reminded me that I did not share it to the Facebook group, so I will do that shortly. And then of course, we also have the QB Power Hour store as well for swag and things like that for all of your QB Power Hour needs. But let's go ahead Ted and I'm gonna stop sharing and I'll launch the first poll question, which will be, do you need CPE credit for this for this webinar? And then Ted can then share the slides and go through the agenda that we're talking about here today.

Ted McRae: 9:02

Look at all the yeses on there. That's a lot of, that's a lot of certificates I'm going to have to produce.

Dan DeLong: 9:08

Yes.

Ted McRae: 9:10

More

Dan DeLong: 9:10

work afterwards.

Ted McRae: 9:13

That's okay. That way I can send you all personalized email messages. All right. So this is while I just want to make sure while this is going on here, the poll that you can see my makers partner update slide. Okay, so I just want to give everyone a little bit of background about what the slide is. And so this is something that I like to do. It's called a partner update and a sneak peek. We're doing it on the QB power hour today, but I normally do this with the partners of MakersHub. This is something we're going to start doing on a quarterly basis. And it really just goes through some of this, some of the feature updates that we've done in the last quarter. And then we're going to talk about either a handful of things that we're going to be releasing in the next quarter that we think are game changers. Or one ginormous thing that we're going to be releasing in the next quarter. So it gets our users and then potential users an idea of what we've been up to and what we're going to be up getting up to, right? So I like to have that little interaction with folks. And speaking of interaction, also if you have questions while Charley and I are doing this, I would love to be able to answer those live as well. So I don't have because I have this PowerPoint up. I don't have access to the questions. So Dan, if there's something like just incredibly outstanding, the question that needs to be answered, just to interrupt me. Okay. Awesome. Okay. So I'm going to end the poll if that's okay, Mr. Dan. And a couple of things. That I'm just going to go through a few slides. Now, I have to say this because this is one of the things that we have to do for CPE. You have to see my license sponsorship number, but it is a 50 minute hour for CPE credit. So in order to receive CPE credit, there is a little bit of housekeeping we have to do here. It's a one hour thing that we're doing here. You have to be here for 50 minutes. You have to participate. There's going to be three polling questions. Guess what? You already did one of them. So you're like a third of the way through and there's there will be two more. So that's the participate. Now we will send out a little evaluation. That's not part of it. You don't have to evaluate to be part of the for the CPA, CPE, but we'd love it if you did. And that's just hey, how do we do? Could we have done better? Did the learning meet your expectations? You've all done this before. Those of you who have taken CPE, you know what this is all about. So we're going to go through quickly what the agenda is. And then we'll get right into the nuts and bolts of this. And Charley's going to do some talking as well. Cause as I told Charley yesterday, when we were going through the PowerPoint, he's much more eloquent than I am. I'm more of a, a nuts and bolts kind of guy. Like my, I wear my emotions on my sleeve. Charley is, can attest to that when I'm excited. I'm like, man, this is going to be the best thing ever. And Charley is just more, he's the guy you wanted to explain things. So we're going to do

Dan DeLong: 12:25

All of the backgrounds that we have here. He has the most books behind it. So he is the most learned all of us here.

Charley Howe: 12:33

I've even read one or two of them,

Ted McRae: 12:35

but my background is a plant. Some Star Wars figures and normally a record or two, but all right we're gonna do a talk a little bit about our learning opportunity. We're going to talk about what some leaders have to say in the industry that you guys have probably heard of. We're going to talk a little bit about our growth over the last three months. And then what we're going to do is look back at what we've done in the last quarter, a sneak peek, and then any questions, Q and A's that we've done. So we've done introductions, so we don't have to do that. We've done our first polling question. Dan, you took care of half my slide presentation. So there you go. Pretty awesome. Okay. So the first learning opportunity and more CPE credits. So for the 48 of you, I think it was. That said that you wanted CPE credit an opportunity if you like what with MakersHub and you wanted to like, even try a 90 day free version of MakersHub and you're like, hey, the best way for me to know even more about it is to get certified. You can take our live certification. We do it two times per month. And you get two CPE credits with it as well. So it is live. It's interactive. Unfortunately, you have to do it with me. So you have to be on there, Dan. I think you've done it, right? Yeah.

Dan DeLong: 13:59

Yeah. It was such an insight into, the iceberg, the tip of the iceberg of what it allows you to do is really a good a good session.

Ted McRae: 14:08

And it's funny. It used to be three hours. And then I go, you know what? Three hours is too much. I'm going to put it down to two hours and now with all these updates, I'm like, holy smokes. It needs to be three hours again because it's there's so much to learn. But what I'm going to do is we're going to break it out and I'm going to probably do a one hour advanced certification and really get into some of the nitty gritty of the craziness that, that the product can do. Okay, so certification is one of the things that I would suggest doing. But let's talk about some of our mentions. I think you guys have probably heard of some of these people, but this is what some industry, some of them are leaders. Some of them are thought leaders. Some of them are like the Dan and the Michelle's thought leaders, but also user thought leaders that actually really do accounting work as well. So Jason stats. Funny guy, right? He's the YouTube sensation. This is, I like this quote the most. Arguably the highest impact application of AI I've seen in an accounting role yet. It's amazing like some of the things that he's done. If you want to go look at some of his videos on MakersHub. Randy Johnson it's funny, we talked with Randy, one of my, one of the biggest things that I wanted to do when I came over here was, it was talked to Randy set Seth David and things like that and get it in front of of people like them to see what they thought. And Randy's man, this is the most, he did a podcast on us just out of the blue, we didn't even know he was going to do it. And he's this is the most stunning technology that he'd seen. And to have Randy Johnson say something like that is a pretty big, it's a pretty big pat on the back. And then you probably know the guy on the bottom there. But

Dan DeLong: 15:55

I see him.

Ted McRae: 15:57

You see him every morning in the mirror, right? Yeah. And then Seth David, the best app he's seen in many years to date, MakersHub. And then every scenario that they can, Dan, that you see right there, every scenario I've come up with they've already thought of and it's easily answered. So like Dan says, he's a big fan and he's and he's said that time and time again, every time Dan and I meet almost once a week. When Ted doesn't flake on him. And Dan's he's got a, he's got a he's got like a scenario or a client that he's you know what, this would be perfect for this client. Does it do this? And the question almost always is yes. So it's pretty he's, or he's already found out about it. He's wow, I didn't even realize it could do that until I talked to so and

Dan DeLong: 16:42

and one thing I want to point out is that you guys support is fantastic. The willingness for, Fong or Sean to just jump on a call and really understand what it is that people need. And then Fong being the type of guy that he is like, Oh. I'll work on it, in a week, he'll make something happen that it didn't do before, which is. It just blows me away that that you guys are so hungry for that feedback and actually willing to do something about it. Yeah, if I could just, if I could

Charley Howe: 17:15

elaborate on that, Dan, because I think it's a really important thing, these I love that people who have the esteemed views that, You do and that your compatriots do that Ted has put up here. I think highly of the platform is obviously very gratifying to us, but we also don't want to make this an infomercial. What we really want is for people to see it, to try it, to make a determination with the fulsomeness of opportunity to try it and to really. Put to task and that whether or not the things that we say and we show are legitimate, first of all, and second of all, are they relevant to you and your practice? And the reason that we do webinars like this, and we always very appreciative of the audience. But the reason that we do it is because. The things that you'll see in this update all came from people like you, Dan, and other users saying, Hey, I love that you guys solve A, B and C, but I really wish you did D and E and D, Bong and I and Ted and the rest of the team like each other and we say, that was a fantastic idea. Dan is not the only one who would want that. A thousand other people would want that. Let's build it fast. Or we say. Listen, E in this case is really kind of niche and bespoke, and it's a good idea, but maybe not that broad an appeal, and we'll put that sort of on the back burner. So we really do this to hear from people. Hey, this seems cool. It could solve me a lot of time save me a lot of time, but I would also love it if you considered X or Y. And so that's really what we're hoping for in having these kind of interactions with everyone who's been kind enough to join tonight.

Ted McRae: 18:52

Yeah. And somebody said, is that enterprise, Dan? Yeah. QuickBooks, desktop, all versions of it. All versions of QuickBooks. Somebody asked, is that QuickBooks Enterprise? Quick maker sub does work with QuickBooks Enterprise. It was actually developed first to work with QuickBooks Enterprise. So somebody asked that in the question panel. Okay. Yeah. So what Charley said is 100 percent true. I showed these mentions just to just so you know that we're not just some run of the mill little company. And Exactly what Charley said about the these updates that we're going to show you weren't just we didn't just come out and say, Oh, here's what we think that we should make these came straight from the users mouths. Just like from Dan from all of our users. So they're updates from the users. And so we wanted to go through a growth. So this is important to us as well, obviously as a company growth. So new accounting partners. Right now we have a very large focus. There's two avenues of where we're focusing growth. One is obviously straight through small business and the other is through accounting partners where I know these are

Charley Howe: 19:56

these are since the last time that we were on this forum, which was three or four months ago and really three months ago. yeah, three months ago. So. People are starting to hear more about us and it's it's one thing to hear about it from us directly, but what's been really gratifying for us is that the vast majority of these new partners have heard about us from an existing. User of ours. So it's colleagues telling other colleagues, which is obviously a huge Testament and the best possible marketing you can do. It's great that this is getting out into the hands of folks and people are finding it valuable and that's why we're here.

Ted McRae: 20:33

Yeah. And scaling new heights. Holy smokes. You would be surprised. And how many people came over to us and said, Oh, yeah, we saw you guys on the QB power hour or we saw you on this webinar and they were bringing like people over to our booth to see us because they saw us either on or heard about us in the QB and the QB power hour group or saw us on the webinar. So we're going to do one more polling question, Dan, if you could launch it and thinking about customer experience. Dan, this is the one thing I wanted to put in here because you're not alone but this is my favorite quote here is building an awesome customer experience doesn't happen by accident, right? It happens by design. And the one thing about that, Charley as well but Fong is like. It's him. It's embedded in his brain that the customer support and he won't do anything or grow the company fast. If it's going to, if it's going to hamper a customer support it's pretty crazy. Okay but but look at that, even Chris Powell is one of our CPAs from another firm. And he has almost the exact same thing is to say, as you do, Dan, it's almost that, that quote could have come from you.

Dan DeLong: 21:53

It's yeah. Yeah. You can just say Chris Powell and Dan.

Ted McRae: 21:56

And Dan. Okay. And then after we're done with this poll I normally do the the 5 second rule. And my 5 second rule is when we get around 90%, I'm going to give them the 5 second rule. It's not like when you drop a cookie on the ground and you have 5 seconds to pick it up. But because not everyone wants CPE credit we're gonna go ahead, Dan, and you can just, I'll give them the five second rule now. Five seconds, and put your vote in, and you can go ahead and close that down, or I can. All right. I got it. We won't share the results. And now, Mr Charley, we're gonna go into our first three. What we've done now. This isn't all that we've done when we're done with all of the demonstrating some of these to you. We're going to talk I'm going to show you a site that you can go to that shows every single one of the updates that we've done. And I'll post it in the chat where people can go and take a look and see all the updates that we've done because it's pretty amazing. But Charley's going to talk about these and then I'm going to show. I'm going to show it.

Charley Howe: 23:09

Yeah. So as we as we mentioned, we're constantly in the process of continuing to enhance and evolve and just grow the platform's capabilities. And so each of these Kind of big picture updates that we've done in the last three months came as a result of user feedback and things that people said they wanted and circumstances we encountered where we felt like we could be better. And so the first one is people wanted a much more integrated. Platform for managing their W 9s and their 1099 contractors. And, it fits so elegant elegantly in the AP process, the way that we designed it, that it made all the sense in the world to build. And Ted's going to walk you through how it works and I can talk over. Or give the voice over it. But but really people wanted a a much more integrated, much smarter and a much more connected W nine management process where really they could build in the constraint to pay vendors by virtue of whether or not those timely tax forms were on file. Within the AP bill pay process. And so the way that we did this is it's pretty straightforward and building in a way where it was. As straightforward as it is, it takes a lot of work, but the result has been a very rapid uptake of usage amongst our customer base for this element of the platform. Ted, if you want to jump in and and show. Can you not see my, sorry.

Ted McRae: 24:43

No, you're still on the slides. Yeah, I'm sorry. I was great. I had my screen up. That's weird. Sorry. Go ahead.

Charley Howe: 24:49

Yeah. So with apologies to folks who make herself is new to this update is really going to presuppose that you've got some familiarity with maker sub, but just, 20 seconds. Make yourself is a full a to Z accounts payable automation platform. That kind of handles all elements of the AP prepayment through payment processing piece. And for anybody who hasn't seen it and gotten the kind of bird's eye view, happy to connect with you and do that after this. But an important element of Maker Sub is the approval workflows that we have built in the system. And the way that we think of approvals is as a two pillared process, and those two pillars are. Number one, bill approval. So is this what we ordered? Did we receive it? Is the pricing correct? Is the accounting coding correct? Et cetera. And then the second question is, do we authorize payment for that bill? Even though it's valid, when are we going to pay it? From what operating account? Et cetera. And so you can build and make yourself approval workloads for each of those questions that differ and are conditional. Based upon what the bill is, who is it from? What does it say, et cetera? What the payment is, who is it for, what are we paying, et cetera. And in that ladder approval workflow of authorizing payments, you can now toggle and make or sub that before a payment can be made, you must require that a valid tax form be on hand. And when we turn that on an admin on the account can override this. So there can be a scenario where. Hey, this person that I just need to pay doesn't have a W9 and I haven't gotten it, but I need to pay them so I can override it. Otherwise, we're going to constrain the ability to pay this vendor until they have a W9 on file. And so let's assume that we do not have one. When we go into the vendor portal, you're going to click on add a W9 form. And at this stage there are two options. Either you have it. And it's, caught it in some folder somewhere and you're just going to upload it here. So it lives attached to this vendor record. Or you don't have it at all and you need to request it from the vendor. And when you request it from the vendor there are again two scenarios. So the first thing is the the system is going to automate a request to the vendor where you can write a note. The system is going to email that request to the vendor. The vendor is going to receive an email like the one that you'll see on the screen in just a second. And when the vendor gets this, there are two scenarios. Either the vendor has that document ready and they can just upload it. Or let's assume they don't have it at all. And if they don't have it at all, then they can fill one out here in this IRS compliant template that the system kind of precasts for you. And then by virtue of what is filled out here, the system is going to make the determination as to whether or not this is somebody that you need to track for 1099 purposes or not. And either turn off or turn on that toggle in QuickBooks for you. And then this soft copy document will be retained both in our system and available in QuickBooks. But now that this W9 is on file, they will satisfy the condition in the payment constraints, and you can now freely pay this vendor. You're going to get a notification when they upload it. You can verify the, information or the submission. And now you are off to the payment races, so to speak.

Dan DeLong: 28:20

This is what I'm talking about with the why I said what I said about what you guys do is you guys thought about this from the end to end process is I just happened to notice that once had clicked on, to send the request that it said right there in the platform. Hey, you already did this. We already sent that. So I can imagine, Nobody does it as fast as what you just said there, closing the loop. You come back in here later. And did I send them a request? What did I do with it? The fact that it's there as a little audit. Is even I'm just so small details. Michelle. What do you think you're muted?

Michelle Long: 29:04

I think it's great. I was just getting ready. It's so easy that almost all of our clients should be able to do it You know, I mean it's just drop dead easy, I mean everybody should be able to do that, it is amazing how easy And seamless it is. I just love it. Yeah. Thank

Charley Howe: 29:23

you. Again these updates are You they're tricky because you go through it and you're like this is very logical. It's very simple. It's also a real engineering challenge to build things that should be easy, but it should be easy. It shouldn't be a it shouldn't be something that you need to think about. It should be integrated. It should be simple This is not rocket science, right? Getting a w9 Should not be rocket science and it should just fit in neatly and elegantly to a pre existing, to the pre existing process, which it is supposed to serve. And that's how we've thought about building this.

Dan DeLong: 29:54

and one of the distinctions that you guys have is that you don't require people to create a login, the, for your suppliers and those types of things. So they can do all this. Without, creating yet another log in

Michelle Long: 30:08

But I have a question about that. So can they create a login so they're self served? So After they get their w9 or you send them the w9 and stuff. So after they get the 1099 And then they lose it or whatever and a month later and they're saying, Hey, I need another 1099 or can you send it to me again or whatever? Can they self serve and log in and retrieve it again so that, we don't have to keep, sending them a duplicate or whatever. So that they had to log in to see their 1099 again for tax purposes or whatever.

Charley Howe: 30:45

Do you mean the vendor?

Michelle Long: 30:47

Yes, the

Charley Howe: 30:47

vendor. So a couple options, either the vendor, and this happens all the time. Either the vendor gets paid. From MakersHub and get these requests from MakersHub finds it very seamless and easy to deal with, and they become customers and request an account in which case they could, have all of the analogous functionality that their customers did or you could, in theory, see it. Add them to, there are circumstances that are pretty edge Casey. So I shouldn't even go into it where people will add them to their account as a constrained user. You make yourself is very strict permissioning options as to what you can and can't see within the system. And so there can be scenarios where you give constrained permission to stakeholders of the business vendors inclusive. There is not. And we do this very purposefully for the reason that Dan talked just talked about. We do not give vendors a login to see their interaction necessarily with the client, because when we were building the platform, we were shocked at the amount of vitriol that we heard about the vendor experience of dealing with other platforms where that was forced upon you. So we didn't even want to go down the road of Hey, this is an option. And this is just, you can be a vendor, you can just get paid for the stuff that you sold, plain and easy. And if you've got other ancillary desires from the system, then there are ways we can accommodate that. But but no, we very conscientiously don't make any kind of vendor opt in.

Michelle Long: 32:23

That makes a lot of sense.

Dan DeLong: 32:27

And the important distinction, I think and Ted mentioned in the chat that somebody had asked, do you do 1099s is that MakersHub does not prepare 1099s, but this will help that preparation. This information will synchronize back to QuickBooks or whatever platform you might be using to actually prepare your 1099.

Charley Howe: 32:46

That's exactly right. So we try to be very conscientious about the lane that we're in and staying in that lane, but being the fastest swimmer in that lane and, the tax prep. You're the

Dan DeLong: 32:57

HOV

Ted McRae: 32:58

lane. Exactly.

Charley Howe: 33:02

We will make it

Ted McRae: 33:03

much,

Charley Howe: 33:07

much simpler for you to do it in QuickBooks, but our, opinion not to speak out of school is that When properly populated and organized the QuickBooks functionality for managing 1099s is Satisfactory, right? Like we don't view it as being, Hey, let's go do something that is a really left turn from our core piece of functionality. When, if you can help with the organization, help with the team. Data population, et cetera, that system can work. So we do not do the preparation as a long winded way of saying, but we'll give you all the information, all the tools to do it in a much easier way.

Ted McRae: 33:46

Cool. Okay. So I am going to, we'll go back to death by PowerPoint here. So we've talked a little bit about the 10 99 module.

Charley Howe: 33:56

Yeah. So

Ted McRae: 33:57

the other

Charley Howe: 33:57

thing. Sorry, Ted. No. Go ahead. Yeah. So this the next piece that we're going to talk about is just show some of the big improvements that we've made to our ability to read and contextualize documents. And again, for somebody who's new, one of the biggest differentiating pieces of what we do is how well Our software can read and contextualize the bills and invoices that you receive. And this is really, when you think about all of the other stuff that we've done. This is the core building block. If you don't have the right data, if you haven't given data from the bill, the appropriate structure and the appropriate context, then it's hard to build these supplemental tools on top of them, right? Because what is it that is on the bill is really the fundamental bedrock of all of this. And so as we've gotten bigger, as we continue to appeal to more industry segments than we initially ever contemplated, we continue to see more and more complex bill structures. Ted has a great line. Ted always says that bills are like snowflakes. They're all different. This is eminently true and a very common request from our users over and above Hey. You read this thing wrong and correct it, which I think we've talked about in the past has been. This isn't wrong necessarily, but I want to utilize different information from the bill. And so what I mean by that is, if we look at this example. The do you have a new balance one, Ted? Maybe let's look at that.

Ted McRae: 35:36

And I can talk about this one if you want. So here's the new balance.

Charley Howe: 35:40

Yeah, do this. So this is yeah. So basically we'll go ahead, Ted. I'll jump in after, but basically. But go ahead on

Ted McRae: 35:48

this new balance one. So if we take a look at something like this new balance invoice, it's gotten everything correct. It's gotten the line items. Correct. It's gotten the total amount. Correct. The skew numbers. Everything is correct. For all purposes here it's correct. The one thing that some people want to to take advantage of is this discount that's already in here and it's already reflective of the price. So there is a 15 percent discount that is in this invoice. And it's already in this total amount right here as well. So we've got everything correct, but we want to be able to put this discount within here, within the actual line items for that pre accounting. So how do we do that in, in, in a case like this? And how do we do it? So we could do it manually, but we'll have to do it manually every single time. That's not very efficient for us. So how do we tell MakersHub, hey, they're inside the original bill, there is a notation here that there's a discount. So for those of you, like Charley's been saying, that haven't seen MakersHub before, you can actually train MakersHub to do things and it will remember the next time you want to do them. So with on, within here, we have the information, the net bill, there is a net bill discount of 15 percent that's already reflected in the price. So let's go in and create that training, which I'm going to do here in this OCR utility, and I'm going to say OCR utility training. And this is where we get into some new extraction training that we've done in these updates. And for this one, it's an adjustment to the invoice discount. So I'm going to hit the plus key, and I'm going to select and search for this value over here, discount of. And So I can select this drop down arrow and just type in discount and look at it because we can scan and contextualize all this information on this bill. I can say the unit price reflects a net bill discount of 15%. And because our system. is smart and it's not just dumb data that is in here. It knows that there's a preset discount. I can say the discount is inclusive of the price and I can update the training with the price already in here of that 15 percent discount. So it already knows Now, the next time this bill comes in from from New Balance, it's already going to look at that area for that, not the discount. It's going to look for this information because that discount may change. It's not going to automatically put in 15 percent because that's too easy, right? These bills, like Charley said, like I like to say, are like snowflakes. Just because it's always in that spot doesn't mean it's always going to be 15%. It's going to look, it's going to see 15, maybe one day it's going to see 9 percent the next day, 10 percent the next. So we can train and teach it that it's, that it knows where to look for that discount that's already included. As you see, it didn't change the price, but now we can do things like. Put in that vendor discount and I've created a, almost like a bank rule and integration mapping that now maps it to the correct chart of account codes as well. Charley, is there anything you wanted to add?

Charley Howe: 39:27

No. This is going down like very deep down a very specific rabbit hole. Oh, we've encountered this a lot as we've started to accommodate a lot more like retail style customer sets. But we go through this example and a little bit more specificity to show number one. The depth of what's been built, but also not that this is a narrow use case. And so there's a bunch of others. And, another similar one would be where, there are multiple columns, for instance, where, they're valid. But I perhaps just want you to consider a different one for my purposes. So do I care about the order? Do I care about the ordered quantity or I don't care about the shipped quantity? There's not, if a AI computer vision model is looking at this and saying, what do I care about from a quantity perspective, it's going to. First of all, it's going to ignore this because it has no idea. Ours was really good, and it's going to make an assumption about which one you care about. But there isn't a categorically wrong or right answer. There's a right answer for one customer, and there is a perhaps different right answer for another customer. Two customers could get the same bill, and one says, I care about the ordered quantity, I care about the shipped quantity, as an example. And for Makersub to be useful to the broadest amount of people, It has to support both of those right answers, despite the fact that they differ. And so we've built the capability to say, Hey, in my, for my purposes, when I get a bill from this vendor, I care about the ordered quantity as the quantity, or for my purposes as customer B, I care about the shift quantity. And so there are ways to train it, to do all sorts of different things.

Ted McRae: 41:09

Yep. Sorry, just really quick. I had to train it to look at the order quality. So right now it's on the shift quantity and just really quickly. Just to Charley's, just to proof of, put the proof in the proofs in the pudding here. line item adjustment. I can just tell it what line I want to look at quantity and then it looks because it scans all this information. It looks at now I wanted to look at the ordered and I update the training and that's it. It just simply looks at a new, It looks at the ordered now and not the shift and vice versa, whatever we want. Sorry, Charley.

Charley Howe: 41:46

No, it's okay. Many people on the phone are probably saying this isn't, necessarily relevant to me, this specific issue. But what we are constantly trying to do is to make. The system's ability to read data, give structure to that data, and then make that data flexible, and make the system flexible for how you need to manipulate it. And another way to do that, that we've recently implemented as part of these updates, is now that we have all these line items, and Ted, I'm putting you on the spot, but we can now highlight individual line items, and we can take actions within this line item. So if you do, control shift over the item, Ted. Yeah. I'm trying over the item number

Ted McRae: 42:28

item. Yeah.

Charley Howe: 42:29

Yeah. So now, you can do all sorts of things like you could delete these out. And if we go to the down arrow on the far right side, this gives you Hey, what do I want? I want to duplicate this line item below. I want to take this item. This mark item is distributable. I want to take this item for whatever reason in the case where if we read that it's shipping or read that it's Tax will give you the option to distribute that tax pro rata across all of the line items and say, I want to have the real like landed cogs, for instance, but we get cases all the time where, hey, this one thing I actually want to spread out. So point being, we've tried to be as thoughtful as we can about, hey. Now that we have this data, how can we make it useful? How can we manipulate it? How can we make it flexible? And so that's what all of these updates are intended to do. And if there are ones that we haven't thought of that you guys would like to see, we would love to hear about it. And Ted, we can go back to the yeah, man.

Ted McRae: 43:25

And so that's the, that's one of the things it's especially thinking these aren't things that maybe that this is something that you can think about now okay, look at all the clients you can get now as well, right? Because it's not just about what you have. It's. These are features that are pretty, yeah. Somebody asked, is there an audit trail for

Charley Howe: 43:44

changes? All of them get timestamped and marked and audited in the chat box. And Tanya, we could show you where that is after the call. And then the last big thing that we did this month and these are big updates. And hopefully it reveals, how quickly we move through these, but still comprehensively and with a lot of depth. But the last one is more flexibility at the payment level. Face the payment processing phase and more direct user control within the dashboard. And so there are two big ones that we'll talk about. The first is you can now attach support documents to checks that you mail. So if you're paying a tax bill or a utility bill, or you want to include a payment voucher or something like that as a printout with the printed check, very simple for you to do you would simply take a screenshot at the time that you're reviewing the bill, add it as a support document, and then at the time that you're paying it, you can select to include this screenshot as a printout attached to the physically printed and mailed check. You also have full control over the memo field now, so if there is something other than our default options, You want to include in the check memo, you can have full control of that at the time that you're paying. And then lastly, and much more, importantly, is we would include as our volumes were growing and we were getting bigger, we were having a ton of different Payment issues and not issues that were a problem of ours or even necessarily our customers. But for instance, there was an ACH remittance account to an account that wasn't valid. So it got sent back because it had the wrong account number or the wrong routing number or something, or a check that was undeliverable or never was received or A customer needed to stop a check for an, for whatever reason. And they wanted to switch it to an ACH payment. They needed to pay somebody really fast. The check was still in the mail or whatever. And so all of these things we could do, but it required you making a request to the payment operations team at Microsoft, and then we would do it. And it still happened fast, but many users had essentially, Hey, I would love to be able to do this. Directly. And I would also love enhanced notifications about where things stand. So we built a series of self serve tools directly in the dashboard. The first is you now get an automated notification when a mailed check is deposited. So you mailed a check. The vendor deposited it, you get a notification that it's been deposited. If the mail check was returned or on deliverable, you now get an email notification. Immediately if an ACH credit or debit is returned along with the error code that the bank. And what that means if an ACH refund gets processed. So all these things you get automated notifications from, and you can also take then the associated action in Makersub. And so you can now directly from the dashboard cancel a scheduled outgoing remittance and request a refund. We. Authorized a payment that debit went through, but I'm not going to cancel it. And I want to refund the debit. You can do directly from the dashboard. You can cancel a debit or credit that's in the queue, but hasn't yet been submitted to the Fed. So the Fed operates on five ACH windows throughout the day. And as long as we're between them, you can still affect a change until it gets submitted and recognized by the Fed. So now up until I think it's 10 minutes before the window closes. To double check that figure, but with enough time that, Hey, I made a mistake. I need to back it out. You can do it directly from the dashboard. You can stop a check anytime before it's deposited and you can, once that check has been stopped or an ACH credit has been canceled you can now change that payment method to the vendor and reschedule it. On a new outgoing remittance, all directly from the dashboard. So this is just making it much, much easier for the user to self correct issues, be notified of issues really not require you as much as we love hearing from you not require you to be in contact with somebody from, our team, unless you want it to be.

Dan DeLong: 48:01

And this kind of speaks to, one of the biggest distinctions of MakersHub. With all of the other platforms is that your transactional fees are non existent because of the platform that you do does this, because i'm thinking stopping check Talking to the bank. There's a Any opportunity for the bank to levy a fee they will

Charley Howe: 48:23

do

Dan DeLong: 48:24

that. Yeah A

Charley Howe: 48:27

question so today this is included we Again, as you rightly identify Those are not fees that We impose. There are fees that are imposed upon us by the bank. And so today it works for us to just include this in the software. I and that is the fact. So today we do not charge for it. I add the caveat that if the bank may not be the case in the future, change it. It may not be the case in the future, but it won't ever be a profit center for us. It'll be a function of, a reflection of basically the fees that are imposed upon us by our bankers.

Dan DeLong: 49:04

If you have somebody cancelling checks more than their platform fee, that might be a cause for a change of payment. That's right.

Charley Howe: 49:14

Yeah. And I know we don't have much time, so Dan, if you've got wrap up stuff, we can skip what's coming next, and we can just show you what's coming next, or I can speak to it quickly. Yeah,

Dan DeLong: 49:22

let's go ahead and do that. I did all my stuff ahead of time. So we can Yeah, so the next,

Charley Howe: 49:27

Yeah, the next big update for us that's in process right now. And the thing that we get asked for most, most commonly by a lot is a full purchase order module. And what we mean by that is really through a matching capability. So we have a lot of customers who are purchase order driven, and they want the ability to interact with the purchase order at the bill review phase. So I have a purchase order. I got a bill and either it all matches up, which is great, or there are discrepancies in the price, or there's a, discrepancy in the quantity, and what do I do about that? Today, this is a really hard and manual challenge to solve that we can add a lot of ease to. So the way that this will work is that you will get a bill. We will, when we get that bill, serve all of the open purchase orders that you have with that vendor allow you to open that purchase order that associates to the bill will identify where there are discrepancies. So let's say there's five line items on that bill, four of them, the prices match one does not well, purchase orders and three way matching are complicated because again, as that. Circumstance that I described earlier, which is correct. Sometimes you're going to say, no, we had a purchase order contract. We're going with the price that I agreed to. The other is going to say I don't want to piss off this vendor. I'm just going to pay, I'm just going to pay the price that they charged me. So you will have full interactivity to select, Hey, which price are we going to use all of the associated record changes, and then Let's say, the purchase order was for a thousand units, but 800 got delivered. What do I want to do with that? Do I want to keep it open as a purchase order for 200? Do I want to close it? All of that will be able to be accomplished directly from the interface in a side by side view where we've highlighted basically where discrepancies are and where things match.

Dan DeLong: 51:23

That's there's a question in there about will the purchase orders come in from. From QuickBooks, or are you creating purchase orders in the in the platform?

Charley Howe: 51:33

So both, we will have a, purchase order origination module is probably step two of this. Step one will be, as long as it exists in QuickBooks, we'll pull it in from QuickBooks, because that's the more customary ask. Hey, I love this project management software that I use over here. But the way that it pushes purchase orders to QuickBooks is annoying. It pushes it as a bill or, whatever. So we will pull it in from QuickBooks to start and also have the option to originate the purchase orders from MakerCell eventually.

Dan DeLong: 52:06

Cause I think I think the purchase order bill linking process, especially in QuickBooks online is Room for improvement, I guess is the nicest way

Michelle Long: 52:18

Yeah, and Charley, i'm sorry I zoned out for a minute there You were saying if you ordered a thousand and you got 800 that you could decide on the 200 If you wanted to leave if it's on back order or something So you can have one purchase order linked to two bills like for the 800 and then the 200 that might come in later Is that correct?

Charley Howe: 52:37

That's correct.

Michelle Long: 52:38

Okay that's great because in that case you would

Charley Howe: 52:42

update the purchase order you would you could close it and say i'm just gonna restart or i'm not going to get them or you could update it right to reflect the new balance, which is 200

Michelle Long: 52:54

Okay. Okay. Gotcha

Ted McRae: 52:56

So so let me there's another question that somebody asked that there's a fee for the partner program So there's no fee for the partner program There is, like I said, certification right now. There's a polling question up if you'd like to learn more and really what the learning more is just a quick a quick appointment with us to, to find out about what you're trying to accomplish and to really just get you set up with your free 90 day trial of makers up. So what happens is you get a 90 day trial of makers up. The minute you put on your first client, then you manage your client through Makersub. So you're, the Makersub product is yours to manage the client, right? There is also a partner program where after I think, Charley, it's your fifth regular version or displayed version, third displayed version of Makersub you get, right? a 15 percent margin. Yeah, and Michelle put up the pricing there. We do also have a pay as you go plan. It's only offered to our partners. That is not included in like the the partner margin or your partner tier, but it's there for people that have a few.

Charley Howe: 54:11

I got to jump through another call. Thank you everybody so much for joining. I'm going to thank you Dan and Michelle for the audience as always. All right.

Dan DeLong: 54:20

Okay. So I'm going

Charley Howe: 54:21

to.

Dan DeLong: 54:22

Go ahead, Dan. Sorry. No, I was just a one other thing that I wanted to mention and it just fleeted out of my head. So I'm gonna toss it over to Michelle because she actually was Gonna say something, too. No, I

Michelle Long: 54:39

was just going to say that this is really awesome. And I just wanted to highlight, earlier you had posted Randy Johnston and his comments. And I just wanted to highlight that because he's been around, he's very experienced. Like I am

Dan DeLong: 54:54

another diplomatic answer.

Michelle Long: 54:57

He is a tech guru in the industry. And he's the one who at all these conferences is giving the tech update on what's new in technology and what to look for. And when you're buying your computers or you're setting up your network, or you're doing this or you're doing that or whatever, he's the one who's always talking about the latest, greatest technology and everything. And so when you're saying. He is doing a podcast on this and he is talking about how awesome it is and everything That really speaks volume. That's like the gold star seal of approval. So I really want to highlight that When he's saying he's very impressed and everything. I mean that really speaks volume not to minimize Dan or seth or jason and their valuable insights On how valuable it is for our clients and in our use as a training professional it all just goes to say how really great and after you guys,

Ted McRae: 55:52

michelle when I was at scaling new heights and Because he has so many, he does a lot of speaking at Scaling New Heights, right? And so, and Randy comes by our booth and, we've developed a working relationship with him but, and just so everyone knows, it's not like he, he's not a he's not a paid influencer for us. I showed him the product. And I'm like, how can we work together? And he looked at it with his partner, Brian. And then all of a sudden, he just started talking about us making content. And when he, during his presentations at Scaling New Heights, he mentioned us many times. And that's why people, half the people came by our booth. They're like, Hey, Randy talked about you. You guys. And it's just like you said, it's wow. Okay. Yeah.

Michelle Long: 56:39

Yeah. So I just think that's awesome. So well done. Love seeing all the new updates and thank you all for sponsoring us for CPE and being here again. And I think it's

Ted McRae: 56:49

awesome. Thank you. And I will be working on for the rest of the week. So by Friday, I promise every, all those 48 people who said yes. As soon as Dan, as soon as Dan gets me all the names of everybody, I'll get those C. I'll start working on them. Oh yeah, you're blaming me. Thank you all. Yeah, so if anyone wonders where they're, ask Dan. No, I'm kidding. Yeah, I'll be sending

Dan DeLong: 57:16

everybody a thank you. And their CPEI remember what I wanted to say. If you needed to get an understanding of the basics of what Microsoft can do we have the original webinar that they did with us three months ago, where they go into, the starting point of that on the same, That we have on the QB Power Hour website. So you get two for one there on, on on Maker Tub's site on our if you haven't had enough already. Exactly. Alright, we appreciate you both joining us today. And, sorry I couldn't say that to Charley Space. I'll let him know. Go. But appreciate that, Michelle. It's always great to see you. Next time we're gonna have. We're going to finish up our QBO updates that we didn't get to last time. So we're going to have we're going to have that that discussion next time on the QB power hour. And we hope you all have a great day and a great week and we'll see you next time