Michelle and Dan are joined by Jason Richelson from Bookkeep as well as Don Peterson from DAVO to discuss the how these two companies are teaming up to be able to compile online sales data into QuickBooks so that you can automatically file and remit sales tax payments. Put your sales data AND your tax on autopilot.
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/
Michelle and Dan are joined by Jason Richelson from Bookkeep as well as Don Peterson from DAVO to discuss the how these two companies are teaming up to be able to compile online sales data into QuickBooks so that you can automatically file and remit sales tax payments. Put your sales data AND your tax on autopilot.
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/
Wecome to another QB Power Hour. Today is like a, is like a webinar a year in the making. When we first got wind of this this partnership, probably about a year ago between bookkeeping and davo, I was super excited to, to, to really unpack this. But now Jason and, and Don from from Davo are gonna, Jason from bookkeeping, Don from Davo are gonna be joining us here to really kind of unpack on how this, how is gonna play out. So we appreciate you being here today. Michelle. Introduce yourself. Yes, I am Michelle Long. Very glad to have you guys all here. Owner of Long for Success, author of five books. You can check'em out. And very glad to be here, especially since I made it home on crutches, which is very difficult to do if one of the hardest things ever is to walk down a plane with crutches and I did it. Wow. So that's an accomplishment. Did you actually need to go down steps or did you Just the the, the, the, what is that? The ran, not the gang wave, I can't remember. They, they, they wheeled me down, but then getting down the aisle on crutches was very, very challenging. Avoiding arms and legs and feet and toes was very challenging. Ah-huh. Yeah. I'm sure you probably, excuse me. Sorry, excuse me. Yes. Pardon me. Excuse me. Yeah, people saw me, people saw me coming and they were moving son. Anyway. How funny. And my name's Dan De Long owner Danwidth I worked at Intuit for nearly 18 years, co-hosting today also on the co-hosting duties of the workshop, Wednesdays over at School of Bookkeeping. And both Michelle and I are are nominated for the ProAdvisor of the the top 10, no top 100 pro-advisor. So if you haven't voted, I'll put that in the, the chat there. Please do. I think it's about high time that Michelle will be the pro-advisor of the year, right? I, I dunno, what do you think? No, no, no, no, no, no. You have affected so many people's lives. I think this is about time you get the credit that you deserve, so. Oh, no, no. If you haven't, if you haven't voted for Michelle, please do. No. And then we'll get her up on stage. Nope, nope, nope. So let's let's talk about our guests here, Jason. You've been with us friend of the show now. We should call, we should call you now. This is like your fourth time on the, on the power hour. Yeah. But for, for those that don't know. Yeah. We've done a lot of these, that's for sure. So tell, tell us a little bit about about yourself for those that may not, may not have seen you before. Yes, I'll just real quick, I mean, I've been in, essentially, I've been in accounting since I got outta college in different ways. Mostly round building software for accounting at Pricewaterhouse. And then and then I was working on Wall Street doing accounting as well for a trading desk, sort of realtime trade reconciliation, which is very similar to payment reconciliation that we do for retail. I started a grocery store, wine store. I still have a wine store in California which we're gonna show today in the demo. It uses bookkeeping and DAVO for sales tax. And now I'm the founder and CEO of Bookkeep which is doing automated accounting for revenue and sales tax for small businesses, e-commerce businesses, restaurant, retail. And that's, that's me. All right. And new to the show. Don, tell, tell us a little bit, introduce yourself for, for the folks watching. Sure. Hey, everybody. So yeah, my name's Don. I'm the business development and Partnership manager at DAVO by Avalara. I've been with Davo about three and a half years. We were acquired by Avalara about two years ago, and we'll talk a little bit later on about the differences between Avalara and what DAVO does and kind of how, how all the pieces fit together. But yeah, we started working with bookkeep recently and we're excited to dive into that. So, good stuff, man. This is what happens when you click a link while you're, while you're sharing. So let's let's just put that back in there. Yes, it's live folks. One of the things we were gonna have David Joseph join, join us here and, and not to, not to put any shade on, on Don joining us, but we appreciate you joining us. But one of the things that I really love about. Jason for bookkeeping and David Joseph from, from Davo is that they were in, they, they understood their own pain, right? Like they were in businesses and realized, hey, these are this is a problem for me. And, and then you know, ended up coming up with their own solution. And I, I really love that about, about bookkeeping and Davo is that, that's the. The start of these, of these softwares is that they really understood their own pain. Like with the wine shop, with with, with Jason at, at book, he basically created his own solution and the same thing for for davo. So I really applaud you know, the, the route that you've taken to get here because it, it, mm-hmm it really speaks to solving the pain because you really understand what that pain actually is. Mm-hmm. So by the way, I'm sitting in for, I'm sitting in for David who's on vacation in Europe, so that's basically where he's at. But, but to your point, Dan, yeah. Long story short, go ahead. Ended up in sales tax trouble, owned a restaurant, got into sales tax trouble, wasn't, wasn't managing it properly, and said, why can't somebody automate this whole thing? Right. That's really what how Davo began. And he's the DAV in Davo. So David, great guy, but I'll do my best to fill in for him. Right. So I didn't know that. Yeah. Who's the, is there an O? Yeah. Who's the Owen? Yeah, Owen was the other co-founder. Owen. Owen. They combine their names to form the name. Yeah. I didn't know that. That's interesting. There we go. I didn't know that. Our fun fact of the day about top of, yeah. There we go. Whoops. I'm going the wrong way. Okay. There's a few of the details about the QB Power Hour before we get kicked off here today. It's every other Tuesday at noon eastern are upcoming. Webinars are on our website. They aren't eligible for, for cpe. But you can check out the, the upcoming ones on QB power hour com homepage but also PDFs of the slides, recordings of podcasts and And other resources are available@qbpowerhour.com slash resources. A little bit of housekeeping. If you have specific questions for the, the topics that we're talking about here today, especially if it requires some follow up please put that in the q and a. If you have, you know, general things to say about Yes, I agree, Michelle should be Pro-Advisor of the year, please put that in the comments in the chat, right? But but if you have a specific question we, we ask you that, we ask that you put that in the q and a, because we do have some people in the background that could answer those questions. But also if we do need to follow up if there are, if there is a specific maybe you know, a deeper dive question than, than what we can really go into live, please put that in the, the q and a. All right, so our agenda today is, is, we'll, we'll kind of unpack what is Book Keep, what is davo, and then really just kind of talk about. How those two services are, are working together today. So let me go ahead and launch the first poll, which is on this screen here. Here we go. We'll launch that one. So what version of QuickBooks are you currently using today to service your clients? Is it desktop, online, or both? Or something else? And I'll go ahead and stop sharing. And that'll let Jason lead the, lead the lead the discussion here once we're, once we're finished with the, with the poll question. So, so talk to us Don actually a little bit about the, the the beginnings of, of Davo. You were kind of teasing it up there that yeah. That he got himself into, to the sales tax trouble to talk a little bit about the, the, the genesis of of Davo. Sure. So, yeah, the story that David's told is that he owned this restaurant was, I think a hundred and something seat restaurant in Montclair, New Jersey is very popular. And one Saturday night, a tax collector sat outside the restaurant with a copy of the menu, counted the number of people that went into the restaurant. Mm-hmm. And then added up an appetizer. Entree in dessert came in. He was, by the way, I guess a customer of the restaurant as well. Right. Comes into the restaurant the next day and he is like, David, I, I did all this math and you owe$70,000 in sales tax. And David said, first off, that was a Saturday night. Not everybody orders an appetizer on train dessert. So that number's way off. And he said, well, you have to prove it right. You have to show us the records, show us that you know what the numbers should be and, and you still owe this money. So David I guess said, he's like, why, you know, ADP automates payroll. Why can't somebody do the same thing for sales tax? So that's really how the whole idea came together to, to start DAVO techno. That was, I think back in around 99 or 2000. And then over time, technology caught up and he saw the opportunity and, and started this company. That has done quite well. So that's really the genesis of davo. That's, that's, that's, I love, I love the, the, the, the, I love for the, the first. Part of the Marvel movies, like where, where the hu where the superhero gets created, like the, the bite of the spider or the you know, the, the, the, the, the gamma Rays accident. I think that's the most interesting part. So like, finding out like how, how these all, how these companies all came to be is is super fascinating for me. So I appreciate you sharing the, the story of the, the, the, the radioactive spider biting the sales tax in this case, right? The, the biting, the bite of the tax collector. We'll call it that. Right? There we go. Whenever you wanna go. Exactly. So, we'll, we'll flip it over to you to Jason over at Bookkeep. Talk a little bit about what what Bookkeep does and remind people that you know, what where, where, where you began. Right. Well Bookkeep started actually. Similarly, I mean, going back before Bookkeep, I had a company that was a point of sale company and I built that company outta my grocery and wine business because I was just frustrated with point of sales and payment providers that didn't work well together and you couldn't understand the fees. And then when I left that company and, and that company got sold to light speed I started doing the books in my wine store and realized I could automate a lot of the books. But the one part that was not being done by anyone else was getting data outta my point of sale or my e-commerce system into my books properly with proper accrual entries. Everyone has a QuickBooks integration. Every one of these logos you see here probably has a QuickBooks integration. And what do they do? As probably everyone on this call knows they dump every single transaction into QuickBooks and then you have a huge mess. And still to this day, people are afraid to connect book keep cuz they're afraid we're gonna dump every single transaction. QuickBooks and mess up their books, but we don't do that. What we do so from that experience, basically I started bookkeeping. I'll show you in detail what we do. But what we do is we take all those transactions at the end of the day and we create a perfect single summarized journal entry and post that to your books. Love that word. Single. Single one. For for sales channel. Sales channel channel. Yeah. Yep. And and you know, this slide here just shows you, everyone here probably is, has a client that's using one of these sales channels or payment systems and you know, on the left, and there's also hybrids of the two. But it's important to understand in accrual accounting, which is what you're doing for your customers, you're gonna have sales channels, you're gonna make sales. And a sales channel it's important to understand is something that. Is usually a checkout cart or a point of sales system. So it's calculating all the line items, all the sales tax you know, maybe keeping track of the customer and, and basically then choosing a payment method. Whereas a payment method is something that comes in that says, okay, I need to collect$89. I'm gonna use, do that on PayPal. Whereas PayPal as a payment method doesn't know what the sales tax was, doesn't know the breakdown of items you know, doesn't know if it was food versus bar, whatever. And, and so you have sales channels and payment methods, and what we do is make sure that your sales channel's numbers end up getting deposited in your bank account by whatever the payment method is. And so this screen is a kind of a combination of the two. And of course you've also got what are called marketplaces where they act as the sales channel and a payment method together. And as everyone here also knows, you get a deposit that looks nothing like what you expect because they take out their fees, they take out their marketing fees, they take out their payment fees, and you get whatever's left over. So if you wanna provide accurate books for your client that show the actual gross revenue before fees you want to use, and you wanna do it without pulling your hair out, you wanna use a tool that automates and posts that data to your accounting system. So you know when you go for, you know, if you're booking deposits as income which sometimes you have to do because as I know talk, I talk to accountants all day long, I don't have access to Shopify. They won't give you the login. Well, yeah, what are you gonna do? I mean, if you wanna get the books done, you gotta look at the bank deposits, right? But I, but we try and make it very easy for you to ask for that access so that the owner can give it to you. But if you're booking your deposits as income, you're missing a whole chunk, potentially 30%. And when you're going for loans, when you're going for, you know, to show you know how your business is performing, you wanna have accurate financials that, that actually show the gross amount, minus discounts, minus whatever, before you get to that net amount. So, so that is what we help you do. Let's see. Can you, can you go back, would you mind going back to the the slide prior to that? Cuz I do wanna talk a little bit about the, the, the one before that, because you've mm-hmm. You've been on the. You've been on the Power Hour three. Mm-hmm. Three times before that. So you know, if, if people want to really want to get an, a good idea of what actually mm-hmm. Bookkeep does you know, in the slides I, I, I created or, you know, put each of the other ones in there. Mm-hmm. So if people want to go to the prior ones to really try to talk about, you know, managing your multiple payment methods that was an awesome mm-hmm. One where, where Don joined us from the from the plane. Mm-hmm. That's right. Some of, some of the history making Cubi power hours where mm-hmm. Where Don was able to, to join us for to help out with the, from a plane but also integrating report based sales channels. I mean, those are, those are some of the things that, that we've had, you've come on and, and talked about. So, just do wanted to kind of throw that out there if, you know, if people were gonna get a better understanding of what Bookkeep does you know, we, the prior power hours were would be a great, great place to start. Yep. Yep. But continue on to your your next slide there, concise. This, this really kind of encapsulates what it is that where, where Bookkeep fits in with all this. Yeah. So we're essentially booking right in the middle. Is in the middle. Yeah. We're, we're a platform. So we pull in data from these logos or these sales channels and payment methods, whether through a direct integration you know, Shopify, PayPal Square square Space, light speed, Amazon seller. We have direct api I integrations to the, the those and many more big commerce as well. Walmart where we, where you can put in the credentials and once we have the credentials, we can connect and store a key and then we can access that data essentially, technically. And the other way that we can get data though, is what we realized over time is that not every sales channel or payment method has an ability to integrate through an api. So we now also have an every single entity you create on our system, you get a special email address@Bookkeep.com and you can send in the summary reports that you might be downloading already into our platform. And if we recognize that report and we can write these very quickly, we will automatically data parts that and turn it into the same sort of data that we get from a Square or Shopify. And I'll show you an example. So that data comes in to Book Keep, and then we post those journal entries into QuickBooks or Zero. And what we're gonna talk about today is we also can send that data to davo if you opt in for that. And we also do have an API where you can get that summarized data in, in a normalized format. So a standardized format through an api. So that's kind of what, how that works. And let's see next. Can I just click there? Yeah. So we will jump into a demo, but I'll show you here. Essentially with bookkeeping, not only do we do that process of helping you get that data into your accounting system, but we also kind of give you a, a, a view of the client's connections in one screen. There's, there's no system that gives you the ability to be like, I need to connect all these apps. And we're starting to learn. Also when you connect QuickBooks, if, if, if it's possible, sometimes we don't see all of it, but we'll alert you to the fact that, hey, we see Stripe deposits, click here to connect Stripe. Or Hey, we see some PayPal deposits, but you don't have PayPal connected, so we're gonna alert you. Hey, you might wanna connect PayPal cuz we're seeing deposits from PayPal. So we're even gonna help you see you know, into the client's books and say, Hey, we can help automate these deposits. So everything, all your app connections are in one place. And this screen actually shows you that. We're actually really, really strong with Shopify. In Shopify, you happen to have the ability to have point of sale and e-commerce through the one connection to Shopify, and we have the ability to segment your point of sale systems, your each location separately from the e-commerce revenue. As well as a lot of times if you're, if your client's selling on Shopify, they might be selling on Instagram and Facebook, and we can also handle those transactions. And fun fact, we just learned that Instagram and Facebook are withholding a huge amount of fees and they're also paying the sales tax, and Shopify has no reporting on that. We are trying to figure out if we can get our own system to properly account for that because the data's not there. But it's definitely something to look at if, you know your clients are selling on Instagram and PayPal sorry, Instagram and, and. And Facebook through Shopify. They that you don't double pay your sales tax. So, so if they're paying, if they're selling in the metaverse Exactly. Through using Shopify as the, as the portal into selling, cuz Shopify as a connection Ah, gotcha. It, it's it's something that, you know, but that's the thing is we're experts in this stuff and we really, our customer care team yes, we do integrate with Big Commerce as well. Our customer care team know all these systems inside and out. So if you ever have a question, you know, I don't understand what's going on here. You can always chat with our customer care team. We know all these platforms very well. We know the ins and outs and all the weird stuff that they do. So, so you're getting more than just automation. You're also getting a care, a customer care team that really understands what, what's going on. As I said, every system that we connect to, We give you a standardized mapping window. E everyone here has connected some app to QuickBooks, and then once you make the connection, you're like, oh my God, this is such a pain in the butt to map. Or, wait a second, I mapped that a year ago. I can't remember where those settings again, because it's not doing what I want in our system, you're gonna come to one place. If the PayPal entry needs to be remapped, you're gonna come to our system. If the square entry needs to be remapped, you're gonna come to our system. And those mapping screens just look very similar. And, and, and based on what everyone here as accountants understands, you know, gross sales, refunds, discounts, returns, a lot of systems. Call it different things. You know, WooCommerce doesn't even have a summary report. You know uper calls it gross receipts, which includes sales tax, right? So we strip that out and put it into what you expect it to be. And, and that is also a value add, especially, you know, in these times where it's really hard to find staff and train them to understand these in the intricacies of all these different systems that your clients are using. We really help normalize it and make it simple so you're not having to train them. Well, that's how Big Commerce works. That's how Stripe works. And here's where the report is in Square that you need to get. Oh, and if you have loans on Square, then you have to go click three times and get to this report and download it to see what the loan fees were or the loan split was. We take care of all of that automatically in here. So, and we post the data to QuickBooks in Zero. And this is an example of one of those summarized journal entries in Zero We never duplicate postings. We always, once we post something to an accounting platform, we link to that entry and then if there's ever, for whatever reason, an adjustment in our system, we'll repost to that entry. We also have the ability that I, I can show you if we get to it, you know, you can do bulk deletion, you can, you know, you can bulk edit. If you decide you want to reclassify your gross sales and break it out by food, beverage, et cetera, you can do that in our platform. And then repost the last previous month of entries all in just a couple clicks. So we have, you know, a lot of, a lot of bulk entry capability. So, and I think that's that's, that's probably something to, to reiterate is that the avoiding the avoidance of duplication is, is one of the things I think is, you know, really a, a key feature of of, of bookie, because, you know, Changes or changes, right? You're like, you realize, okay, well they, maybe they did have a loan, you know, and, and those types of things. And, and they need to go back to, you know, editing a transaction to, to make sure that the debits and credits are, are, are equal and posted pro properly. But if that happens, they you connect to the, to one transaction. So you're gonna be editing the, the original transaction rather than potentially causing a duplicate by making a change or having to pull it out in order to redo it. So saving valuable seconds of yeah. Of, of, you know, undoing and redoing. Yeah, no, the yeah, we, we always, if you edit it in our system there, there really shouldn't be editing. Ideally, you, you don't edit. The only time sometimes that happens is if, if a, if sometimes we have time zones off and we ran at the wrong time, we might wanna recalculate that summary. But, but, Always will always repost to the same entry. I know some some competitors you know, don't pay attention to the fact that, you know, if you change something, it's gonna repost an entry and you don't, you don't want that in your QuickBooks. So, so that's the system and that's Bookkeep. And at one, at some point we'll show a demo maybe after we talk about the DAVO stuff. And what we're here to talk about today with Don is that we've partnered with davo. Because it's been a two year process of getting, getting that partnership together. But it made so much sense to me cuz I know what DAVO does. I, I use it in my own wine store. I've seen other clients who have been saved by DAVO because they didn't pay their sales tax and they got in trouble. And as part of, actually they're, you know, getting back in the good graces, they, they actually write in their letter and we've set up davo, you know, going forward to make sure that you get accurate payments. You know, because you can get in big trouble by not paying your sales tax. And I've been audited in my wine store for sales tax and I had that same question. I'm like, what about that Chinese restaurant across the street? Like, I'm sure they're not paying their sales tax. He's like, don't worry. We sit outside those restaurants and we count, we count how many times those drivers come in and out and we're making sure, cuz I'm like, I pay every penny of my sales tax in my wine store and I still gotta audit it. And it was a pain in the butt. But anyway, so, so it is a, this is a super important process. And the other thing that I'll say, besides being a business owner who paid sales tax is We Bookkeep started as an accounting firm. And as part of that accounting firm, we actually ha, you know, I had Bookkeeps who had clients and as part of that experience, one of those Bookkeeps was not paying the sales tax that I thought she was, and she was supposed to be paying. And we got in big trouble because she didn't pay the sales tax for that client. And I found this out months later and it was a big problem. And that's part of the re and I didn't even realize that it was what a risk it was for our business to not be on top of if your team was supposed to pay sales tax and did they do it or not. So all of those reasons, it just makes so much sense to automate this process and work with a team. Yeah. You know, Bookkeep does, and, and I'll go through this here. Bookkeep does a great job of calculating and, and capturing all that information. And DAVO really are the experts in filing and paying those sales tax in every single state. In the country. So, so here you can see we, we are already capturing your sales. So if you're connected to Bookkeep, we already cl collect all the data. So we have it for you. Right now we're only doing it with Shopify and Square but we will quickly have Big Commerce, WooCommerce and others up and running. If someone wants, you know, if, if someone wants to use one of those, we can get it going pretty fast. But we're starting with, with Shopify and Square the sales text that we collect and I'll show you a demo then gets Davo then pulls that data from us. So you don't have to connect your apps to multiple systems. Bookkeep is the centralized app connector and you're getting two services out of it. And that's really important because apps do get disconnected. Sometimes it's a pain in the butt to always, you know, have to, oh, I have to connect Square to Davo and I gotta connect Square to sh to Bookkeep. And it's just easier to to connect everything in one place. And we're really trying to be a centralized app connection platform for that. So everything is collected and we send the data to davo and then Davo at the end of the month will actually, I should say we Davo takes the daily sales amount that was collected as well as the sales tax collected, and then they will remove that money from the checking account. So it's called Set Aside. And Don, I, you know, I don't know if Don wants to jump in and explain it, but No, yeah, go ahead. Happy to chime in on that. So, yeah, the, one of the unique things about DAVO is we do move the sales tax money out of the Merchant's Bank account every day. And there's a few reasons for doing that. The biggest one is we don't want that money sitting in an account that a business owner thinks, oh, this is mine. I can spend it on mm-hmm. Whatever I need to spend it on. And then that tax bill comes due and the money's not there. And then you end up in a position where those, those fines that Jason was talking about can show up and fines can be pretty ugly. We, we hear 20 to 30% of what's owed. Those fines are huge. So if you were missing$10,000, you not only owe that 10 grand, you owe possibly 12 or 13 grand, right? So it's a pretty bad position to be in. So we move the money every day. We're setting that aside. And then when it comes time to do the filing and payment part, where I think Jason was going next, we have the funds already in place so we can take care of those filings and payments all in one go. All right. Yeah. My one of my favorite stories one of my favorite stories is a friend of mine used to work at the Arizona Department of Revenue. So, you know, when it came monthly sales tax time, you know, the businesses would. Some businesses would come in and, you know, remit their payment and, and, and form filings. And inevitably there was a business that would say, I can't afford to pay the sales tax. And then, and then she would have this discussion of, what are you doing spending, that's the state's money. And what DAVO does here is, I mean, it's brilliant, right? Like it's a, it, it protects the business from themselves mm-hmm. Of potentially realizing that money in my bank is money that I can spend and not realizing the, the whole idea of what actually a liability is. Mm-hmm. You know, as far as the accounting side of things goes. So it protects'em from themselves. But I do wanna there's, there's a couple questions Don that I want to kind of make sure that we unpack here. You know, cuz there is a by Avalara, you know, on the slide there. Mm-hmm. So we wanna talk about, you know, where, where Davos specialty is, because when you hear this Avalara and there's this nebulous. Company over top of, of Davo. You know, you're part of you're part of Avalara, but you don't do exactly the same things. So that's why you, you are now, you know, sub subsidiary of Avalara mm-hmm. Because of what it is that you do. If you can kind of unpack, you know, where, where on the sales tax liens yeah. Davos really driving here. Sure. Happy to do that, Dan. Yeah, so we were required by Avalara about two years ago. I like to say that, you know, thinking of the various lie in, in the sales tax journey, we talk about the sales tax journey a lot with an Avalara. You have tax rates or figuring out tax content. So what, what are the rates you're supposed to be collecting? And there's a ton of different rates. There's 18,000 different, I think it's 18,000 different tax jurisdictions in the US alone. So trying to stay on top of that, those jurisdictions move. It's crazy. The rates change. That's what Avalara does very well. They, they have a huge team that manages that and stays on top of those rates. There's a product called Aax that essentially helps feed those rates into various products, like, especially in the e-commerce world. So when you think of you're, you're buying something online, you put a bunch of things in your shopping cart, and then that tax, how much tax you're, you're supposed to be charged appears in that shopping cart. That's often Avalara in the background doing that. So that's where Avalara primarily plays is in that tax rate or tax content space. Avalara also does returns, which is where so, so Davos focused on the returns piece. But the way Davo handles returns is a little different. We're, we're traditionally less e-commerce focused and focused more on those brick and mortar retail shops and brick and mortar restaurants, right? So that's the area that that DAVO focuses on. Avalara purchased us to help. Grow the business in those areas, in that restaurant and brick and mortar space. So we want to tie that in with the e-commerce space, which is where the partnership with Bookkeep gets exciting, right? Because we're starting to pull these pieces together, the, the things that Avalara does well, the things that DAVO does well, and bring all those together. So that's really the best way to think of it. Tax rates and content, that's avalara's strength when it comes to restaurants and returns and money, movement and treasury. That's really where DAVO comes in. Got it. That's this, I think it's, it's an important delineation, you know, to make sure that you know, people are aware, you know, Where, who's, who's who in the sales tax zoo. And, and as we've had Avalara on the Cubic Power Hour it's you know, we, we, we've unpacked that, you know, like the weirdest sales tax situations. That's, that's not what Davos gonna help you do is figure out, you know, who you sell, where you sell it, and what, what do you sell, you know, to them as far as calculating the rates, that's, that's Avalara's strong suit. But once you have that figured out and you're able to tell your sales channel that rate and that will feed into bookkeeping, that's where the piece is. Because as David has, has mentioned that there is no value to a business owner to take the time to To pay the sales tax. Right. I mean you know Jason would rather be selling wine, I'm sure in his wine store, rather than figuring out what do I owe the various state jurisdictions of, of mm-hmm. What do I, you know, and, and filing and, and doing that. So we talked a little bit about having to pay a, you know, a sales tax pen penalty, so we'll throw that up as a, as a poll question mm-hmm. Of whether you've, whether you've had to do that or not. Was it just that one time Jason that that, that, that happened to you to you and your firm? Well, I didn't even yeah. In my firm. Yeah. But actually my very first sales tax, when I first opened my first retail business, I, this was in 2003, four, so this was, I had to post market. And put it in the mailbox. And on the day it was due, I was late calculating it in the back of my wine store in Brooklyn and I went to the post the mailbox and I checked it and it said they had already picked up for the day. And I was like, damn. So I went all the way to the post office downtown by M S G in Manhattan and put it in the slot right there. It was still open till 10:00 PM and they didn't postmarket and I got fined$700 and I, that was my very first sales tax. It was a three month payment and it was, you know, 10% fine. So, you know, it must have been, I remember,$700, so it must have been$7,000 in sales tax and, ouch. That was my, that's why I knew this davo, that DAVO makes so much sense because I, I always did pay it myself. So yeah, I had the experience. I mean, it's been so long, but as a, as a business owner, it's just, it's just something that should be automated. It doesn't need, it's not your money. It should come outta your account. And. There is a psychology, I mean, anyone here who knows the Profit first mentality of, of moving money out of your checking account into different accounts this is part of profit first. You, you should remove that money because I, trust me, business owners at every level are always looking at that checking account and, and in a way saying, this is how I'm doing. So if that money is in there, that doesn't belong to you, whether it's money that you have to pay to vendors or money that you have to pay for sales tax, you wanna get it outta that checking account. So this is a really great, great part of profit first. Michelle, you would agree with with that? Oh, definitely. Yeah. Yes. And actually I wanted to add something too. Rich had posted a question in there asking if Davo t Track Nexus and, and Lori said, no, it doesn't track Nexus, but I wanted to add that in QuickBooks. Now in Q B O the sales tax center will track economic nexus. So if you wanna check that out, go into the sample company and turn on the sales tax center. Just say yes and, and set up Arizona and California sales taxes. You just have to answer and set up a couple of them. And you can see the economic nexus. This is under that Wayfair rule where if you have enough sales, In a state, you now have nexus in that state and have to do the sales taxes and QBO O now will track that for you and you can see it in the sample company. It will let you know the sales, the transaction count and when a threshold has been met for that state to where you now have to do sales taxes in that state based on the sales. So that's just something to be aware of is now QuickBooks is tracking that based on sales for you in the sales tax center. So Michelle, if you don't mind, I'd love to give a little plug for an Avalara product called Business Licenses. So let's say you do hit that economic Nexus Uhhuh thing and you need to set up another state. There's a great product that Avalara has called Business Licenses Perfect. Don't quote me on the pricing, but I think it's around$300 a state. This tool will help you get everything set up for that state so that you can file and do what you need to do. So perfect, great product. And I'm not just saying that from Avalara, prior to the acquisition, our, our COO actually signed up for business licenses, tried it out, and he's like, this thing's great. So okay, perfect. To put that on your radar and I can I can vouch for, for that service because we decided not to use it. And it's like, how, how car could it be? And and you know, there are three different states that we had a physical presence in. So, you know, we had to do three different states and of course they were all different. And and one, one state that rhymes with Carolina yeah, decided to put us on monthly filing even though we didn't have any sales. In that, oh geez. In that state yet. And and because they didn't have, you know, their, their theory was, well, there's no precedence to, you know, to put you on annual filing even though, you know, you tell us that you don't have any sales in that state. And so, you know, three months go by, we're thinking, you know, okay, well there's you know, we'll wait until the till the till the year, right? And here comes the letters, right? You know, ask, asking for the minimum of tax, which is$550 a month, right? So like, oh my goodness, wow. Now we have to figure this out. You know, now that$350 that we would've spent is now being spent trying to track this down and those types of things. But, That's not what DAVO does. So, yeah. Sharing the results here looks like one out of three respondents today has actually had to pay a penalty of some sort Mm. Either for them or their clients. So this Davo being able to, to save that save that from the, you know, save the customer from themselves is, is, is a huge win for, for, you know, tracking down those notices and, and dealing with the various states. So, alright, so let's let's continue on here. Okay. So the, so basically to continue on with, and I'll show you a a demo. Maybe we could jump into the demo. Just to finish on bookkeeping. You know, book Keep as compared to others out there that, you know, we have come into this with the real mindset of accountants. We started as accountants. We have more integrations to anyone else. We have all the integrations. We, I really be believe you don't want a partial solution. You know, you might, there are apps out there that will connect to Shopify for you and do the Shopify part, but everyone who uses Shopify also uses PayPal. Well, Bookkeep does PayPal and Shopify, you know, we handle all of that, the entire ecosystem. And we also have the sales tax and we do it with proper daily summaries of your sales. A lot of our competitors did not start out as accountants. They started out as business owners, e-commerce cust, e-commerce vendors, and they just were like, well, there's a deposit in my checking account, so let me back into that deposit and create an entry That's not really a accrual accounting and that doesn't help your clients. And even, even while it still works, and it's fine. But when you're dealing with multiple sales channels, they're Amazon seller, they're on Shopify. You wanna know, how are my sales on the day before Thanksgiving? The only place to look is QuickBooks. And the only way that's gonna work is a assuming you're on, you know, multiple sales channels. And the only way that's gonna work is if you post your sales on the day they happen. And so, you know, we really believe in that and we're actually gonna have some more reporting capabilities to roll up sales across all of the sales channels. So we'll give you a reporting view at some point here this year, I believe. So anyway, that's, that's that's a little bit on about bookkeeping. And so let's just do a quick demo with the DAVO part. So when you log into bookkeeping, you know, one of the thing great things about bookkeeping, and there's a bunch of these are all test accounts, but showing me alerts. But you can have multiple clients in here and you can quickly switch between clients. So this is my wine store in California. It's connected to Square. Here you can see the connection to Square and these are all the different available apps that you can connect to. So we have more apps than any competitor out there. Someone asks who the competitors are, would be an A two X or Shogo or Cinder. I think we compare very well to all of those in terms of the connections we have and the type of postings that we do. And you can see here all, all those different ones So I have Square connected, and it's really simple. We pull every day we pull from square all your orders. We create a perfect summary entry, broken down by sales categories. We give you that mapping screen that allows you to map and subcategorize down to those sales categories as well. And so if I wanted to book, you know, beer to, to a beer account, which I don't have, I could either cr look one up or I could actually create one here, or everything just rolls into sales, however you wanna do it. But you have a lot of options. And we collect all the sales tax. So we used to collect C R V and we did have some shipping for t-shirts. So you can see all the different sales tax rates. We dump all sales tax into one category as far as accounting is concerned. But I'm gonna show you how that data gets over to davo. So this is one of those entries and one of the, one of the new features that we do. Is all of those orders, all of those taxes, all of the detail is available to you as a download file. And very soon, some of our systems are working that way. I don't think Square is yet, though. These will be attached to the journal entry and QuickBooks. So when you go to QuickBooks and you see this perfect journal entry or zero for instance, you're going to see attached to it all the, the, the, the the source data for those, for the, that summary. So if you wanted to drill down just within QuickBooks or Zero, we give you all of that data right there. You don't have to leave QuickBooks or Zero. So that's a quick demo on Bookkeep. But then what I wanna show you is, so take a look here. We have sales tax collected for yesterday. So this data was pulled by davo. So this is your DAVO portal. This is where when we, when you come into Book Keep and you decide you wanna do sales tax, you're going to come here and you're going to. Basically there's a, there'll be another button that'll show up and it'll say, I'd like to turn on sales tax. So then you'll end up with this portal on davo that we were just in. And in this portal is where you're gonna do, and, and, and Don can talk to this too, but basically you're gonna set up your different tax rates depending on the states that you're electing it. Not your rates, but you're connect. You have to put in your logins for the for the tax profiles, right? So like, here's my login and password for for California, yeah, state, California. So this is the login and password. And so you'll end up having to add those, that, that's like the onboarding process for every state you pay. And you need to, you need to have those credentials and you'll need to add your bank account. And once that's done, it's fully automated. So davo, you see here, got the$74 from our sales, and this is pending withdrawal from my bank account. You can see here that from previous day's sales it, this was already taken from the bank account, and we don't do this right now, but we do intend to also create journal entries into your accounting system so you can match those payment deposits and you can basically set a, you know, move it to a set aside account so you know it's outta your tax liability. Well, it, it would be basically an a DAVO holding account, you know, so you can know how much DAVO is holding. And then eventually once we get access to, to the data when they make the filing, that, that's one of the great things about DAVO too. All of my filings are right here. So I have you can't see it when it opened, but I can download all of my filings for every state is right here at my fingertips. And with us, we're also gonna eventually be posting those to your accounting platform as an attachment. So you'll see the check that was paid to the government. You'll see the attached filing and everything is in your books. So, you know, everything's there. And just even think about like, having to download and put that entry into QuickBooks and attach the sheet like that's, you know, we, we save you that time, but, but we also, then you just know everything's at your fingertips within the books that you're living in every day. So it's very simple. It works really well and I, I showed you square, but if you're doing a Shopify customer, you'll probably have more states that they're selling in. You'll have more states. It, it'll be one single withdrawal from your checking account each day. And, but it'll be multiple payments and we, and, and we send them, You know, all the details for each state. So, so that's basically how, how that works together. And what, what do you think as far as, where should we go from there, Dan? So, as far as, yeah, I mean as far as like the, the, the setup is concerned, it really just you know, you provide the, you know, the gateway right to, to, to davo and then it, it really just boils down to, you know, entering in their, their login and password for mm-hmm. For those various states. Mm-hmm. And then once that's, once that's there, I mean, you, you just have to, I mean, what does it take for, you know, that information to get from you to do you know, from, from Bookkeep to davo? Is it just in the mapping of the, the, the settings? Or is it, it just, it just works. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to do anything after that. Yeah, basically our entries, you know, that entry that you saw, the 1 74 or 1, 1 45, whatever it was. That was DAVO pulls the data from us every morning or every night, basically. Mm-hmm. So we collect the data, we organize it, and they pull it from us. So as long as your apps are connected to our platform you know, we will, you know, we're responsible for making sure that data is, is available to davo and, and yeah, it basically just works. Yeah. I mean, the idea, I'll just, I was just gonna say the idea is that this just works in the background. It's not something you have to actively manage. That's really the philosophy behind davo. We want this to be, it just works, right? You have enough going on with your lives. So do your merchants, just, let's take this off your hands. Right? And I think Bookkeep is, is focused on the same thing, right? Try to take the, the manual entries and the various things that you're doing, automate it, have it work in the background, and then when you need the information, it's there. Right? Does that sound fair, Jason? Yeah. And one of the things that, that I really like about, you know, with, with bookkeeping, and Don had mentioned this on our, on a prior, you know, power Hour is those daily sales emails that that Bookkeep sends, right? Those can be like kind of customized and used as a, okay, well this is, this is how my clients are doing and you know, I can see, you know, this, this growing and being like, okay, we've impounded, you know, X amount of dollars, you know, for, for you, for your you know, for your sales tax. So that, you know, they know, you know, the, not just the, the client or the customer, but also the accounting representative. You know, the account accounting professional can see that these things are taking place for them and, and mm-hmm. Knowing, you know, that that way they can manage their clients as opposed to. Managing the data that comes in all the time. And, and, you know, just kind of being the, the Shepherd account accounting is becoming data flow management. And I didn't even say that. I, I, I was on another webinar with Donna Reed and, and Don Brolin, and they said it was their, that was their term. It's, it's data flow management is really what accounting is gonna become and which is great because, you know, we'll, we'll help you manage these data flows and other companies do as well. And then you really just need to check it, you know, make sure it's running, make sure everything's connected, make sure it reconciles at the end of the month and which will save you a lot of time and you won't have to understand the intricacies. So that is where accounting is moving towards. And then of course, a lot of AI tools will eventually be, you know, in those data flows to help make decisions on how things should be routed. And we're already using some of those ourselves. So that's really where I think the industry's going. I, it, I don't even have to think it. That's where the industry's going. Absolutely. Michelle, and any, any thoughts of what you've what you've seen here on, on how this all kind of plays together. I think it's awesome. But Kathy did have a really good question here, and I was just typing an answer to it. Mm-hmm. She, she wants to know if there's a sample company or a sample file, because, you know, this is a quick demo and overview, but Yeah, what she's saying is, unfortunately, it never seems to work as easy as that. And what I was gonna suggest to her is to, to contact you all for a one-on-one demo and then to ask you guys to show not only how it works when everything is working perfectly, but to give you guys some examples. Like, show me what happens when there's a return or when a client has messed something up, how do I fix it to give you guys some some, you know, examples of mistakes that happen and how do we fix those and how, you know, how does that work when things don't work quite right? How do we as accountants, you know, track it down and fix it and things like that, you know, To have a one-on-one demo with us to show us, you know, how does that work and how do we fix it from the accountant's perspective? Mm-hmm. When things don't go right, you know, how do we track it down and how do we fix those things? One of the issues is I wish, I know my sales team, two wishes, wants me to have that. It's very hard for us to have a sample company cuz our right, our app is between your QuickBooks and your Square, or your Shopify. I can't create fake Shopify and I can't create fake orders. So that's why I'm happy to show my demo of my store and see how the data flows. But actually an important point, Michelle, when customers do things wrong, it always comes out in our numbers and, and our numbers are gonna balance, but they can't really do things wrong if they're using a Shopify or a Square. Shopify. Yes, we've definitely, and you're gonna catch them in our platform, which you're not gonna see'em if you're not using our platform. There are capabilities of editing orders in Shopify that will cause misbalance in our numbers. So you'll catch it that way which will actually show up in an un unreconciled account or unbalanced. There's ways in Shopify that you can close an order and not get paid for it, which you're also gonna catch using bookkeeping that you would never know if you didn't. Mm-hmm. Use bookkeeping. Square just works. There's really, it's very hard for them to screw anything up in square, maybe if they're using invoicing, you know? But, but, but it is important. Yes, we catch those errors when you we're, it's daily sales reconciliation. So if the numbers are not matching in our system you're gonna see it when you, when you reconcile your books, if you're, and we reconcile'em for you daily to make sure that your deposits match your sales. Yeah. Well, and, and not throughout the throughout the last poll question so that, you know, people could opt into, you know, learning more about it so that you guys can follow up with with a more in-depth conversation. But go ahead, Michelle. Yeah, I was gonna say, one of the things that I loved is, you know, Don, when you were showing that, you know, not only do you have that entry, but then you have the numbers that go along with it attached to that entry. You know, and I think as accountants, we always love that when it's, it's just right there. Yep. So we, we don't have to go looking for it, it's just right there. Mm-hmm. With that entry. So I, I think that's always awesome. You know, you make it easy for us to see it there. Mm-hmm. You know, so Jason, you've got it where it always reconciles and it always balances. And, and Don, you've got the numbers right there supporting it and stuff. So, I mean, you guys have made it as easy as it possibly can be, you know, for us, the accounting professionals, you know? So that's why, you know, you guys have just taken something that can be. So hard and pull your hair out, and you've just made it so easy for us. And I, I just, I, I love it. Thanks, Michelle. And I, and I would say, I also wanna say, I mean, and it's a partnership. Part of the reason we make this data available is Square changes their APIs. Customers do do things that we've never seen before, so we're in this together. Yeah. You know, sometimes you're, sometimes, you know, people get mad at us, Hey, this entry didn't post because it's unbalanced. Well, here's the detail here. We also have the detail. We will quickly look at that and we'll change our code if it's our code. Or maybe we're gonna identify that customer did something we've never seen before. We're in this together, like the understanding how square Shopify WooCommerce. Big commerce, PayPal, all fit together is not easy. This is all we do all day. But we're, you know, it, you know, I can't say we're perf, we're not perfect, obviously, but it's also because we're dealing with these systems that change. And so we're kind of all in this together. So we kind of think of ourselves as like, we wanna be your, you know, your your team member for this type of, this part of the business, the revenue accounting side. So, but you gotta look at us as team members. Like sometimes things don't post. And, and yes, we will fix it and we do have the ability to make edits. So like, if there was something wrong and our numbers were off for some reason, or there was a, a bug or I don't know, you know, you can come in and change these numbers as needed and it will then repost to accounting. Of course, you can go into your accounting system and directly, we also link directly to the journal entry. I don't have my login set up, but you can go directly into zero. I won't do it, but, and go directly to that entry from our system as well. So, so yes, it is a partnership for sure in this whole journey. Yeah, so there's a couple, couple questions that, that I see people popping up. It's like, do you have to have bookkeeping and davo in order for this to work? So if you wanna pop back over to the, to the slides where, where you talk about, you know, the pricing and, and Oh yeah. And for, for so for bookkeeping and then how it works with with Davo, as Don will tell you, you, you can go directly to Davo. If you just have a client on Square and you're not using bookkeeping, you can connect to DAVO directly. Where, where really I think the value comes is if you're using bookkeeping for all your clients, then you can turn on davo and you can manage, manage it all through bookkeeping. And of course, the other piece of value is that, Davo doesn't work with Shopify directly or some of these e-commerce platforms. So the only way to work with DAVO is through bookkeeping for some of these e-commerce platforms. So the pricing for bookkeeping, the base pricing for bookkeeping is this it's based off of if you become a partner, we have some other lower price plans depending on the sizes of the business. It's basically based off the revenue of the business or how many sales channels they're using. It's not based on orders because you can't, you know, if, if was a coffee shop, they're gonna do, you know, 2, 3, 400 orders a day of, of$5 coffee. Like we can't, we don't wanna base it off orders. And then the sales tax pricing for the Dava, which is an add-on feature, is is basically gonna be more or less$89 per location. That includes three sales tax filings. So, The location, it can get a little complicated, but essentially if you're an e-commerce business, it's gonna be$89. It gives you three states you can file in basically. But if you're s, if you're selling in maybe fif, you know, five more states, it'll be$29 per additional filing. Now, that's only on the filings that get done every month because some states are not every month. So it could change monthly. But it, it's, it's a roundabout, these pricing which is definitely much cheaper than having to do this with hours worked and more accurate. Right. So, so yeah, that's basically, and pricing and your, your billing, your billing is all done through, through bookkeeping, right? So like when you're Yes. Activating, activating davo, you know, through bookkeeping, then it's just all one, one billing through, through bookkeeping. And then that way they don't have like two separate things to manage as far as adding Exactly. Davo and, and, and inclusive of Bookkeep. Right. Exactly. You can if you sign up for DAVO through bookkeeping and it goes through bookkeeping, yeah, the bill, it'll all be on one bill. And bookkeeping has partner p partner pricing. The partner pricing doesn't apply to the DAVO piece but it does apply to the, those first prices, the base prices. If you become a partner, you know, as an accounting firm, you can become a partner. You can earn 20% discounts or you can earn a 20% residual. Once you get to three businesses on bookkeeping, you can can earn those savings as well. So you can have a single rolled up bill for all your clients at a discount, or you can have your clients pay individually and we will send you a residual every month. In fact, I just sent them out just before this call. Got it. All right. Well, you timed that right on the on the top of the hour. So we appreciate appreciate you both joining us here today. Any any closing thoughts that you had Jason or, or Don? Don, you go. I think I've talked the whole time. Yeah, you, you did great. It's, it's always fun to see someone else present. Davo. I, I don't get to do that often. Right. But you did great. Yeah. I think we're, we're very excited about the Bookkeep partnership and it is a tight partnership. Our, our development teams and our support teams work very closely together, and it's been, it's been great so far. We do look at this as, as really the best version of Davo working with Bookkeep. So just trying to get every, you know, the, the most automation you can do. The best way to bring all these pieces together and make your jobs easier by going to one place to get all the data. It's great. So, you know, try it out. Great. Based on any, any final thoughts or Michelle? I think, well, I think that's great. Yeah, I was just gonna say thank you both for, for taking something that can be so complex and challenging and making it easy. And I mean, you know, one of you, I can't remember which one said, you know, about the$700 penalty. I mean, not only c you know, have you taken something complex, but it also, if you mess it up, it can be costly. You know, even just missing the deadline Yeah. By a few seconds or a day can be costly. So Yep. You've taken something complex and costly if you mess it up and you've made it easy for us. So thank you very much, and thanks for joining us today. I thought this was great, so thank you both. Thank you. Thank you. All right, well thanks thanks everyone for, for joining us today and we'll hope to see you next time on the QB Power Hour in a couple weeks. Have a great one. Thanks everybody. Thanks everybody.