Demos & Shared Insights: MakersHub | Rightworks | Practice Pro 365

Transcription:

Charley Howe (00:08):

Everybody. My name is Charley Howe. This is my partner Phong Ngo. And together we are the founders of MakersHub where we aim to make AP unbelievably enjoyable. And we know that that is a bold claim. We're just going to introduce for you who we are not going to bore you to deaths with slides standing between the group of you and launches in adverse place to be. So we'll zip through this and then show you the tool with the vast majority of the time that we have. So MakersHub is what we call data enriched AP Automation. AP operations and automation and its pillars are fourfold. The first is what we call our Wise vision technology, and this is a proprietary AI, augmented OCR tool that we built in-House specifically to read your bills and invoices and to drive more context from them. And because we can derive so much context from a bill and invoice, we can then use what we call our rule driven mapping to ensure that what is on the bill gets into the accounting system with a lot of accuracy and granularity.

(01:10):

And we can also use that context to route the bills to the appropriate people at your organization and your customer's organizations for approval and payment authorization. We also put an immense premium on the quality and depth of our integration and the seamlessness with which we embed the payments functionality, all of which you'll see in a moment. So how are we different? If I'm you sitting here, I'm saying I've heard this story a hundred times, it's always fallen a bit short. And one of the core reasons that we're different is that the vast majority of Bill Pay solutions today focus just on that, on the bill pay and they're 10 to 15 years old. And at the time that was an important innovation we can now pay digitally and that was really important. But as you all know, the industry challenges are much broader than simply making payments digital.

(01:58):

And they sent around a couple core questions. First off, did we capture all of the line item information that was available to us on a bill and did we code it correctly? And if we did, did we have to do it manually? Secondly, did all of the right people review and approve this bill for bill validation and for payment authorization? And lastly, did all of this data that was available in this process sink effortlessly into the accounting system? And these are the questions that we aim to solve. And wise vision is what allows us to solve it. And for industry experts and our customers who have seen the technology, they recognize the difference between us and what's come before. And I'm not going to go into a long explanation of how Wise Vision works here in this eight minutes, but I'm happy to tell you everything there is to know about it out at our booth.

(02:47):

But its core, it works in three different ways. We use best in class computer vision to derive a lot more information from a bill and every bill we get 50,000 or upwards data points about the characters on that bill and their relation to one another. And then we validate what we think those characters mean and then we learn from our users who go through the process and say, yes, that is effectively correct. And so we're going to look at three bills in this demo. And these three bills or groups of bills embody some very core frustrations in the AP automation process. And the first one is the one that you see on the screen from a vendor called Belimo. And these are all real bills from our customers purged of the PII. So this looks reasonably straightforward until you look really closely at it and you see that, okay, the SKU number and the description is all lumped together and there are a bunch of different pricing options.

(03:42):

So it's really hard for a computer let alone a human to know exactly what's happening here. The second is a group of bills from Home Depot and this is one PDF, but it's 68 pages and 63 bills, mix of bills and credits. So imagine if it was your job to key this into QuickBooks, for many of you it probably has been. And then lastly is a kind of kitchen sink of scans, right? This is a mix of receipts and handwritten stuff, stuff that's upside down, et cetera. Just a little bit of a mess frankly. So we run these through Maker Sub and you're going to see the interface that you would operate in now. And first we'll look at Belimo. So on the left hand side of the screen is the bill itself, and on the right hand side of the screen is our system's ability to read and interpret what is on the bill.

(04:31):

And so as you can see, all of the rich granular line item of data has been extracted from this bill and implemented in usable form in MakersHub on the right. And at this point we've integrated with QuickBooks and we've taken in all of the AP relevant data like your vendor list, your items list, your chart of account information, and now we can make really flexible reference to that information in the bill review process. So just as an example, this is saying, Hey, you don't have a vendor called Belimo Air Controls USA Inc. So one of two things is true. Either this is a new vendor and you want to create that in QuickBooks, which you can do directly from here. Or we say in all likelihood it's this vendor that you have called Belimo Air Controls, single click to assign that. Now the system knows anytime we encounter this thing over here, I mean this over here and that kind of self-learning is built in across the system and is what allows our users to accrue to a near 100% accurate experience very, very rapidly through just a handful of AP cycles.

(05:31):

On the right hand side is the invoice number, the due date, the payment terms, the PO number. And using that PO number, we perform a similar search in your customer list and say, show me potential customers that this bill could be for. And if any of these customers are in fact who this bill is for, it's a single click to assign that customer to every line item on the list. Any of these fields are individually editable, so very easy to go in and just click in and say, okay, this one thing I ordered for a different job. For instance, you'll also notice that a really kind of critical element or onerous element of the manual entry process is, okay, even if I had the details of what the line items were, now I need to assign them, I need to code them. And you'll see that in our system, the codes, the fact that their expenses coded to the GL account, job expenses, job materials, the accounting class, new installation and being marked as billable have already been done for you.

(06:23):

And so how did the system know to do that? It used what we call our integration mapping tool. And because we can understand and contextualize so much information from a bill, we can now use that to ensure that all of it gets into the accounting system appropriately. This tool is what you use and what our customers use to basically map the logic of when I buy something, how do I account for it? We can answer a series of questions and I won't go into a tremendous amount of detail here, but basically the first question is, do I treat what I buy as items or category details? And then having answered the bifurcation of how we treat that, okay, what category details or if it's a new item, where do you create that item for me? And using factors like who is it from? What does it say?

(07:10):

What's in the description, what was the PO number? We can assure that all of this gets routed or at least precast in a way that applies to your organization's mapping. And again, you're not married to any of this, you can change any of this at any given time. Very simple to take batch actions and things of that nature. The other way that we use all the context from the bill is ensuring that it gets routed to the appropriate people for approval. So using things like total or the vendor or the PO number, we can say in this set of scenarios, send it to this group of people for approval in this different set of scenarios, send it to this group of people for approval, et cetera. And this can get very, very sophisticated and be very conditional. You can say, Hey, if somebody goes in and codes it to accounting class X, then make sure it goes to project management group Y, for instance.

(08:00):

And now we'll kind of skip ahead and go to the payment details. So at this point, let's assume that the bill has been through the review process, it's been approved, scheduled for payment. There's a lot of similarly sophisticated automation in that that we don't have the time to get to today, but we get to the end and the payment has been made. A real problem with payments is just the visibility and that's another big piece of what we solve. And I'm going to wrap this up out of time, but once a payment has been made, we can give you the full contextual data thread of what happened such that this payment now exists. Who is the vendor, what was the invoice? Who approved that invoice? Was there any open balance on the invoice, pay to and pay from instructions? Who authorized the payment separate from who validated the bill?

(08:46):

Two separate questions. And then in this case, it was a vendor who wanted a physical check. Our customer wants to operate on the aach H digital basis. So there's two transactions, the debit information is on the left and the physical check information is on the right complete with the copy of the check that got mailed, the copy of the deposited check when all of these transactions were created with the bank and the Fed. So we would love for all of you to come by, introduce yourselves, we'll tell you more, but thanks for listening and we appreciate your time.

Announcer (09:18):

Alright, thank you for that. I appreciate it. As you say, these are pretty truncated, but they'll be in their booth, recommend that you go and talk to them. There's a lot of exciting things going on there, but for now we're going to turn it over to Wright Works.

TJ Lewis (09:29):

Hey everybody, my name is TJ Lewis. I am with Rightworks specifically the Rightworks Labs team and we are generating, we're developing a product called Spark currently developing have been developing for the last year or so. So I will give you a little bit of a demo on that. But before we do this, the obligatory AI hand raise questions. So curious, who in the room would say they're experimenting with AI specifically? We're talking more the broad-based tools like ChatGPT, Co-pilot, those kinds of things. Who in the room? Alright, good. A fair number of folks. That's good to see. Now, how many of you would say that you have a pretty good idea that maybe more than half or so of your firms are using AI tools as well?

(10:11):

Far fewer hands. Okay. And then I think the last question would be, are you aware those that are using AI tools within your firm, are you aware of the tools that they're using or is it just sort of like nah, whatever they decide to use? Yeah. Alright. So I think one of the reasons that we developed Spark was to address this scenario of AI is very prevalent. Now there's a lot of different tools out there in the space and a lot of them have a trade-off When you use the tool, especially if it's a free tool, they use your data, that's the trade off. They're using your data to train their models at Spark. So we interact with the open AI models currently we are exploring using different models, but currently we're using the Open AI models and the way that we interact with them, that data is not being trained.

(11:00):

So you can feel confident that the data that you enter into Spark stays your data. It doesn't get pulled into those large models for additional training. So we think Spark can be a great product within your firm, gives you a safe place to play. And we also think that this is a really good way of empowering your team to engage with AI and really the benefits that we see with AI are far reaching, but even just to start, we think that it can help you get from zero to 60, 80% in most of your tasks much, much quicker. That's the whole idea behind Spark is it can really spark creativity and spark those tasks to get them kicked off. And so you can really start to lean into automating, removing or minimizing some of those maybe more mundane or menial tasks that we all have.

(11:50):

So I'm going to go ahead and jump in here and really we have a couple of key things that we like to say that we're trying to do here at Spark. And the first thing is we want to create a space for you to learn and explore ai. So a lot of the softwares that you see are implementing AI features and those are great, but they're very point solution, right? Spark is definitely a more broad based tool in that you can kind of jump in and play with AI and create things to meet your needs in a various variety of ways. So learning and exploring is a key piece of that. And the other piece is expanding your expertise. We've heard quotes from folks who say my small firm can now compete with the regional firm up the street or my junior staff is now behaving more like a senior staff member because it's giving you access to the world's knowledge in a way that's a little easier to retrieve than through Google or other means that we're used to.

(12:47):

Okay, so let's jump in and show you a little bit about what we have here. Really the first thing that you'll see here and everybody can go sign up, I'll give you a QR code here in a minute. So get your phones out and have those ready. But you can all sign up for an account and everybody has access to a free personal account. That personal account will give you access to chat and it'll give you access to the latest and greatest GPT model provided by OpenAI for free. So you don't have to pay for the free access to the model. This is basically what you'll see in your free plan. You'll be able to see chat. And the other thing here is you'll see assistance. So we believe that assistance, a lot of things that we're doing are to help you sort of upskill yourself in this new world of ai.

(13:29):

You may have heard the concept of prompt engineering or other things like that. And so we're trying to create tools and features that allow you to sort of maybe not skip by those things, but to at least be able to engage with this in a more meaningful way. And so that's what this assistant is, the assistant here is just a way to help provide the context for the chat. So really simple example, early on before we had assistance or before we had any of this, before we even thought about prompt engineering, I just said, Hey, I'm looking for practice management suggestions, tools, and it came back and it gave me a bunch of examples in the legal space. So even just being able to say, so our assistant here is a firm owner, an accounting firm owner, even just being able to say I'm in the accounting space is enough for it to give me more relevant answers to my question.

(14:15):

So that's the basic idea behind these assistants. Now you can make them extremely robust. So for example, this firm owner, another thing that we're trying to do is help you get past that fear of the blank box. So we've all engaged with something and we walk into the room and we go, what are we even doing here? That's kind of what we get with the blank box. So a few different prompts starters there. And we also have the ability to come down and check out if you browse prompts, you can look at some of the prompt ideas that we've got. So these are based on real examples and I would say probably 70 to 80% of the prompts that we see people using this for are around the use cases of research. So I've got a tax question or a business strategy question, that kind of thing or writing help me compose an email, help me respond to a tax notice, those kinds of things. And I would say while those are really good use cases and honestly for the return on investment, that's enough to save you a little bit of time. There's a much greater opportunity here as we dig deeper, but it's really only in interacting with the interface and with the models that you start to really see what those capabilities are. So I would encourage everybody to jump in if you haven't, jump in, take a look through the prompt ideas, that'll give you some ideas and just play. That's the free plan.

(15:39):

With the paid plan, you can start getting into being able to create your own custom assistance and sharing those out with your team. So if you've got a team of even just a couple of folks, you can really start to build out an assistant, a more robust assistant, share that with them so that they can leverage those tools as well. And so basically I'm just going to walk you through how to create your own assistant. So we've got a number of these, but let's just say we have an estate attorney that's clearly a go-to for me. So estate planning attorney, I've got a question that came in from a client, I can come in here and I can generate that and within a matter of about 10 seconds, it's going to create for me the basics of an estate planning attorney. Now what is that?

(16:15):

It basically the assistant tells 'em what expertise they have, the knowledge that they possess, any important skills, any specific kind of ways that they might interact with me, and then we can also go down here and edit that, right? So I can come in here and I can say, you know what? I also want you to cite your sources and provide links where relevant. I might say, why don't you go ahead and format your responses in a way that's more readable. So use headings and bullets and so you can really kind of tailor these assistance to your liking. Alright, with a little bit of time that I have left here, I'm going to show you a couple of the more advanced, that was sort of the 1 0 1 level stuff. We've got this feature called Sparks. We're continuing to build these out. So you'll start to see a few examples that we've got here.

(17:04):

For those that don't have an AI policy jump into our sparks. You can generate an AI policy there. It'll walk you through the process for doing that. That is super critical and look for more from us in the near term on that. Super critical to give your folks guidelines on how to engage with AI and what tools you can use. And so these are sparks and I have very little time left, so I'm going to jump over and make sure that I get to the QR code that I promised. Sparks are those single use prompts that are, again, in the interest of prompt engineering, we've sort of loaded those full of context so that it can help you accomplish what it is that you're trying to do. So thank you all, appreciate it. Definitely sign up, reach out to me, I'll be walking around for the next couple of days. It definitely hit me up. One

Audience Member 1 (17:51):

Quick question, is publication available

TJ Lewis (17:53):

On IRS publications is part of the paid plan? Yes. Good question. Thank you. Thanks all.

Announcer (18:01):

Thank you. Sorry, I know it feels like we're rushing everybody along, but there's logistical issues and lunches coming, but we've got one more that we think is pretty exciting. We want to bring it up to you. Sorry. And it's Practice Pro 365 General take it away.

Jose Garcia (18:14):

Awesome, thank you. Good Morning everyone. Hope everybody is enjoying sunny San Diego. My name is Jose Garcia and I'm the Director of ERP Services at PracticePro 365. Today we're going to take a tour through our system, but more importantly we want to show you how you can improve your firms, how you can improve productivity. I'm sure many of you are used to working with spreadsheets. You may have hundreds of them with a system like PracticePro 365. You can combine a lot of that functionality into one location. You can also eliminate disparate systems instead of having to export data out of one import data into another no more, we're also going to show you how you can grow revenue with PracticePro 365. You can cut down your billing cycle. I've been in this business for 30 years and the heart of any professional service firm, any CPA practice is that time and billing.

(19:18):

It's the ability to collect time, collect expenses, and get them out the door. So we're going to show you how you can shorten that time. Shorter billing cycles means improved revenue and improved collectability. And the last thing we're going to do is we're going to look at some data analytics. Not only is it important to have data in the system, but how you use that data is just as critical. What's making your firm tick? You can analyze data by department, by revenue stream, line of business, even down to the employee level. So with that, I'm going to introduce my colleague, Zack Jannotta. He's going to give us a little tour of the system. Please take it away.

Zack Jannotta (20:04):

Thanks Jose. Good Afternoon everyone. My name is Zack Jannotta, Senior Technology Consultant at PracticePro 365. For the last few years I've been implementing custom solutions across many different industries, utilizing the vast capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics and the power platform. Last year I had the opportunity to join PracticePro 365 team and I've been helping clients in their transition from their outdated siloed systems into our all-in-one practice management solution. To give you a little background on who we are and what we do at PracticePro 365, we're a scalable, unified cloud-based system that eliminates all the sticking points in your core processes from CRM to data management to project management, even the actionable insights all integrated within the Microsoft office and the power platform PracticePro 365 streamlines the way in which your firm operates. So I know there are many practice management solutions out there as we've heard earlier, but what makes us different?

(21:03):

So I'm going to go through three core points and then we'll dive a little bit deeper into those as I bring up our system. So with PracticePro 365, you're going to be able to grow faster. PracticePro 365 is built within Microsoft Dynamics, so it gives you native enterprise level CRM capabilities. You're going to be able to work smarter. This all-in-one solution will allow you to accelerate and increase the efficiency of all the core functionalities of your business as well. And you're going to be able to see further because it's integrated with Microsoft Dynamics, you're going to have access to Power bi. This is going to increase the line of sight into things such as your engagements, your manager's activity, your employees activity, and much more you have access to analytics and dashboards that are fully customizable. So as I bring up the system, I'm going to go through a little bit deeper into those three core points.

(21:55):

As mentioned before, PracticePro 365 is built within Microsoft Dynamics. So you're going to have access to this enterprise level CRM collecting every source of data and connections that you might want to see throughout your system. This is going to enable you to collaborate on new business opportunities across different service lines, and it's going to allow you to manage client accounts all within this singular system. Prospect accounts will seamlessly become client accounts when businesses won, and you're going to have higher level visibility across your firm and this is going to eliminate duplicate administrative tasks such as not having to create those client accounts within that CRM system and your separate practice management solution. Moving further, we're going to go ahead and click into our engagement record here where you're going to see all the information that you might want to see, including general information delivery, team information, and even planning and much, much more.

(22:53):

PracticePro 365 does many things along with capturing prospect and client data. You're going to have access to enter time and expense entries, quick and powerful billing workflows as well as project management. Again, all in this one singular system managers are going to have access to real-time data, including staff productivity and firm-wide profitability so that they can make strategic decisions and additionally access to critical project information as you see before you. In short, it's going to provide a single source of truth and one system through which to act. As we move on a little bit further, I know a lot of the topics here have discussed data analytics and dashboards. And this is one things that we're very proud of as well. Because this system is built off the Microsoft platform, you're going to have Power BI dashboards embedded in your system. So there are many dashboards that it's going to come with out of box, but based off of your requirements, we are able to build customizable dashboards to really see data points and analytics and insights of really any sort of requirements that you can think of.

(24:00):

Practice Pro 365 provides a variety of business reporting and custom dashboards so that you can make data-driven decisions in real time. We have a unique and powerful forecaster that will illuminate probabilities and possibilities for active projects as well as future projects by engagement and by staff level. These data, these dashboards and analytics are going to enable you to monitor your staff productivity and profitability not only by engagement, but by each singular staff member as well. Armed with real-time, analytics and insights, you're going to be able to make those strategic decisions with greater confidence. So I know we touched on a few topics here and all the things and some of the things that we are able to do within our one all-in-one practice management solution, but as we wrap up here, I wanted to sort of show you and list out all those key functionalities that you'll have access to within this singular solution.

(24:55):

So as we go back over here, I'm just going to pull it down and just as we mentioned before, because this is built within Microsoft Dynamics, you're going to have access to enterprise level CRM capabilities, time entry, billing and collections tax, workflow scheduling, budgeting and forecasting, project management, expense management, powerful and customizable dashboards and analytics, and soon engagement letter automation. Thank you so much for your time. We're going to be here around here so if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us and we'd be happy to answer those questions for you. My name is Zach Jannotta and this is Jose Garcia with Practice Pro through six five. Thank you.