Michelle and Dan are joined by Nilesh Surana from Fyle to discuss the many challenges that come from managing credit reconciliation and bank feeds for small business and will demonstrate a phenomenal option that is looking at this age old problem with a fresh new look.
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 Nilesh Surana from Fyle to discuss the many challenges that come from managing credit reconciliation and bank feeds for small business and will demonstrate a phenomenal option that is looking at this age old problem with a fresh new look.
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/
Welcome to another QB Power Hour. Today we're gonna be talking about simplifying expense management with Fyle, which has a tie in of a, of a nifty story about the top 100 that we were just talking about. They last year, I believe, yeah, last year sent out a little congratulatory thing to the, to the top 100. And they had the inter, the most interesting a thing, right? I mean, a lot, lot of lot of companies will just like send you stuff like swag or cookies or, you know, things like that. But, but they sent out this thing called an EVA bot, and it was very, it was unique in that it was basically a chat bot that started to learn some things about you. And then, you know, the little g gift or swag that that sent was, was tailored to you. So that was a really neat a neat way to you know, to, to, to do that. And you know, which meant like, you, you got something that you, that interested you, right? And I, I got a little wifi. Plug. Right? Because I'm all about gadgets and, and coffee. Right? Because I I need my coffee. Right. What did, what did you get though, Michelle? I'm not
Nilesh Surano:gonna say now.
Michelle Long:Uhhuh. I got some, I got some whiskey glasses.
Dan DeLong:Oh, okay. Well, and that's a lovely shade of red you're wearing now.
Michelle Long:Well, it was really cool though. And that's where I first learned about Fyle and I loved it because it was tailored to us. It asked you about your interests and what kind of things you like because they, people always send coffee and stuff, and I'm not a coffee drinker, so my husband always gets the gifts. So Fyle, you guys were fabulous. Because I loved it because I don't have to give my gifts away, you know, because it asks, you know, what, what do you like and what are your interests? And then it tailored the gift to you and you get to a couple of things. Cause I got, I got the whiskey glasses and something else. So I thought that was really cool that you get something that's a surprise based on your interest. Yeah. And it's tailored to what you like. So I thought that was really cool. And I didn't have to give my gift away because it's not, wasn't to. I thought that was great. So, and that's when I first investigated Fyle because of that gift. Yeah. And I thought it was, it was fabulous.
Dan DeLong:Yeah. So, at, Orlando I just happened to be standing at the coffee line, you know and, and Vikram from Fyle is standing, just happened to be standing next to me. And because of that tie in, I was like, I, I knew I, I recognized Fyle. I was like, oh, you're the guys with this really awesome way to, you know, congratulate us as a, as a top 100. And so I, he's, he's standing there and, and telling me about, you know what? Because I'm like, well, what is Fyle? Right? And he's showing me, you know, right, right there in the in, in the line. So you know, from then that just kind of born a conversation. And, and we're, we're really glad to have have the folks at Fyle joining us today because, For what you offer. It's really, it's, it's a, it's an out of the box type of thing. I, I don't think there's any, anything that that kind of compares. I mean, maybe there is, I mean, there's just so many different options. But it, it's, it's really unique, you know, some of the, some of the things that, that Fyle actually does for simplifying the expense management. So, Michelle, let's let's kick off the, the power hour with some housekeeping and introductions.
Michelle Long:Welcome everybody. My name is Michelle Long. I'm a CPA with an MBA in Entrepreneurship owner of Long for Success. Been a speaker for Intuit Forever, and author of five different folks. Check those out. And That's enough about me. Go ahead, Dan.
Dan DeLong:All right. My name's Danwidth Dan, owner of Danwidth worked at Intuit for nearly 18 years co-hosting today, as well as the co-hosting duties over at the workshop Wednesdays, which Fyle joined us for for several several webinars over at the, the workshop. And there is a link in the, in the slides today to, to be able to review those. If you need more, more information over at school of bookkeeping.com. And joining us is Nilesh go ahead and introduce yourself.
Nilesh Surano:Hey everyone. So I'm Nilesh, I lead partner marketing and Demand Generation at Fyle. I've been there in the bus SaaS business for about like 11, 12 years now, selling to the US audiences and yeah, mostly been in SaaS marketing all my life.
Dan DeLong:All right. Well, thanks for joining us today, Nilesh. We look forward to, to hearing what what we have to, to discuss about expense management. So a little de details about the QB Power Hour. It's every other Tuesday at noon Eastern. They aren't eligible for C p E credit, but as you as, as Michelle pointed out, they are eligible for the top 100 ProAdvisor application. So do keep track of those. You can always look on the website for upcoming events. We have we're gonna be talking about QB commerce next time. And we'll be having some practice protect joining us as well in July to talk about this FFC FTC deadline that's looming. June, June 9th, three days. Oh my goodness. 12. Yeah. Talk about that for for what that means. And then The PDF of the slides, recordings, the podcasts, other resources. We have that@qbpowerhour.com slash resources. A little bit of the the housekeeping. If you have specific questions about about what the topic that we're talking about today, please put them in the q and a because that will certainly. Help us, especially with a follow up if we do need to follow up, if we can't answer it, you know, live in the, in the webinar today, please put that in the q and a. If you have comments about anything that we're talking about just kind of side comments, that would be a good use for in the, in the chat. But, so please put questions about what we're talking about in the q and a so that we can properly address them. And then of course, there's links there for the, for the handouts as, as well as the webinar archive. So today we're gonna, here's our agenda today. We'll talk about credit card reconciliation some of those challenges that, that are, that are, that we're faced with in, in QuickBooks with with come, coming with that that, that kind of comes with that the cost that's associated with that and what solutions are out there and what to look for in an expense management solution when it comes to that point of like, okay, QuickBooks does so much, but I need more than that. And then we'll talk a little bit specifically about Fyle and Will will do a demo for us which is, which is Phen pretty phenomenal. So and if you wanna, let's talk about the, the need for, for credit card reconciliation. What let's, let's kick it off there.
Nilesh Surano:Sure. Thank you so much Dan and Michelle for having me here. So, I mean, this should be self-explanatory for most people on here, but just to set the ball roll, get the ball rolling. The main reason that you need a credit card reconciliation is because at the end of your closing books time, you want to make sure that all your card expenses are counted for and compliant with your credit card statement. If you want to eliminate any fraud, error, any duplicate expenses, and obviously you want to keep track of your employee spending point at the lower site and as you keep scaling your business. It really boils down to how you want to control your spend, how you control, want to set up your budget based on your expense data. Lot of our customers and partners, one way they use expense data is to figure out where are they spending the most. And as you scale your business, that becomes a key part of your reconciliation process. So the need for credit card reconciliation is majorly there. I mean, I would say 80% people use it for audit and tax purposes and for oversight. But as you keep scaling, you would realize that it's a much larger use case where you are actually managing your company budgets and figuring out how to actually, you know, manage your spend better, maybe even reduce spend.
Dan DeLong:Now have you seen that? You know, so it, it, it just makes, makes sense, right? I mean, we're kind of like preaching to the choir when it comes to, you know, accountants and bookkeeping professionals that, you know, yeah, we need to, we need to make sure that what we're, what we're spending. Are you seeing that it's been a shift from, you know, from you know, the way that people pay for expenses, right? Like the writing of checks versus, you know, electronic funds, transfers or, or, or credit cards. Have you, have you seen that in, in Fyle as far as the, the, the shift of how, how business or how business expenses are, are handling are being handled?
Nilesh Surano:Yes. So see, I've been, I mean, I've been there for almost three years at Fyle now, and when we started, we used to get a lot more customers who were talking about reimbursable expenses and, you know, cash expenses. They used to. Spending cash or they spend by their own card and get a receipt, and they were getting reimbursed for that. From there to now, where people are shifting more and more to corporate cards, or let's say a company provided credit card or even the personal credit card to make those expenses so that your reimbursable expenses keep reducing so that the com, you know, at the end of your closing book cycle use mapping statements, you're not figuring out how much do you need to pay that employee at the end of the cycle. So we are definitely seeing that shift. I mean, and you can see the same shift in the industry as well. A lot of the, and we'll talk about it later, a lot of the solutions out there have started dishing their own cards, which means people are more and more shifting to that. Got it.
Dan DeLong:So let's let's kick off with our first poll here. Normally we ask, you know, what, what kind of QuickBooks are you using? So we're, we're throwing a curve here. What's the biggest challenge that you face when it comes to expense management? Is it, you know, in QuickBooks? Is it the broken bank feeds or the connect, you know, disconnecting the, the bank feeds? Is it collecting receipts from users, or is it the manual coding? Or maybe it's, maybe it's something else. Michelle, we, we were kind of having a discussion you know, la I think last week where, you know, we, we were talking about how in the, in the certification course material, the recommended setup for when you're u when you're dealing with corporate credit cards and, and those types where you have one account and then you know, multiple card holders of that there's, there's been a, there's been a, a change in the suggestion. Right. What was what was that with With the certification course material,
Michelle Long:right? And that's feeling where you have, you know, one card and then you have multiple card holders where you've got the parent account, and then you have like, each employee has their own card and you're trying to track, you know, how much did Dan charge? How much did the alleged charge? You can keep track of each card, but yet you have the one main account. And so you're trying to keep track of each person and their individual card, but you've got the parent account and so you're setting each one up separately. And then, you know, that's where sometimes things aren't, you know, working quite properly. And so you're reconciling the parent account, but you're downloading it to each individual account. And so sometimes things don't work, right? And sometimes, you know, It just can cause problems. And that's where things kind of get messy. And that's where Les was saying, Hey, we don't have to worry about this. You know? So that's where I was like, oh my gosh, this is fabulous. When I was learning about
Dan DeLong:their, and Casey is agreeing the barking that you hear is Michelle's talk, so Yes, it's live. We can't edit. Well, maybe we'll edit that out post-production. But this is kind of like how the, how it looks for most organizations, right? You know, there's never a straight line, you know, from the time that you know, the employee spends to the time that you're, you're manually, you're re reminding, you know, talk a little bit about this Nola, about what this what this convoluted slide means.
Nilesh Surano:Yeah. So internally, like, you know, when we discuss about this, like internally, you know, the problem that you're trying to solve, We call it a lost GPS tracker, right? It is just lost its way in going in circles and circles and all of a sudden you are like, did I go into the lake next? So, yeah, I mean, this is how it looks in Mo. I mean, the biggest problem, like, you know, if you look at the Pearl, a lot of people agree that two of the biggest problems is broken bank feeds and chasing employees for receipts. And then you obviously have the manual coding of entries into the software because most solutions either don't have a very good two-way integration, or you are, or something gets broken while you are trying to fill in the entries. And then when it comes to the receipt itself, I mean, how many of us have, you know, lost receipts or just forgotten about them? And you know, I mean, I had receipts, which, which got what in my Denis.
Dan DeLong:Right. So Yeah. Or their, or their thermal, their thermal paper, and you put it on the dash and now it's all black, right?
Nilesh Surano:Yeah. So, yeah, and like, and at the end of the month, all the account, I mean, the finance team has a real hot time when the accountants have to go through the detailed credit card statements, matching line items, and you are checking line items for, you know, either duplicates or errors or fraudulent activities, because at the end of the day, you don't want to audit coming back to you. So that, and then, you know, the accounting system itself, you don't, you spend a ton of time coding, importing, exporting data into your accounting system. And what all these, me, what all this boils down to is that you waste as and as of productive time on manual efforts, which could be, you know, shifted to a lot more critical client advisory services or other, other services that you provide to your clients.
Dan DeLong:Right. Like you have to wait you know, for that transaction to even post sometimes before you actually can, you know, that's the, the, the starting gate actually opens for the, the transaction actually to, to show up. And when we had Ted Callahan a couple weeks ago or maybe a month or so ago that was one of the things that, that he kinda mentioned is that, you know, having realtime access to, to the data, you know, is as, as close to realtime as you can get, is gonna make. Businesses a lot more nimble. And, and you know, those accountants, bookkeepers that are providing, you know, some kind of advisory service they'll, they'll be able to, you know, read the tea leaves a lot faster and, and be able to, to make changes faster than, than, than waiting for month end or, you know, the close of the statement, you know, to, to make sure that everything is, is, is reconciled. So let's go ahead and launch our second poll. Go ahead. No, go
Nilesh Surano:ahead and launch poll.
Dan DeLong:Yeah. So how much time would you say that it, it takes you to manually reconcile business credit cards, you know, 50% of your time? You know, with all that. You know, all that stuff in the prior, you know, how much time is that? Is that equating equating to you? But go ahead, Michelle. Well, I was
Michelle Long:just gonna say over and above, you know, the accounting side of things, on the tax side of things, so many tax professionals say, you know, I don't wanna be responsible. You know, I'm not the IRS enforcement person who, you know, is looking for these receipts. You know, they don't wanna be responsible for ensuring that the client is maintaining their receipts. You know, they don't wanna be, you know, chasing the clients to get the receipts and all this stuff, you know, so I love, you know, how Fyle ensures that we get those receipts by reminding the client. And I, I don't wanna steal thunder with what's coming up. You know, but just the ability to those quickly and easily just takes a huge burden off of tax professionals shoulders by getting those quickly and.
Dan DeLong:So kind of giving an idea of, of what how much time, how much time this, this this equates to you. So it looks like we have about 80% of those folks re responded. Let me go ahead and share the results. So it looks like it keeps popping up in different places on my screen, so I keep losing where the results are. You know, the less than 20% of the time is over 50, 56%, but then 20 to 50% of your time, you know, 30, 34% of the folks here. That is a significant time stuck, I think is the the technical term for it. So let's talk about what that, you know, time is money these days, so let's, let's go ahead and talk about the Yeah. Cost of
Nilesh Surano:reconciling. So, yeah, I mean, and so you're right from the time you start filing an expense report an employee, and it takes about 20 minutes for an employee to fill an expense vote manually. To the time it gets approved and it goes to the finance team, gets re gets reconciled. On an average, it's about$58 to cost is the cost of manually exp processing an expense report? And more than that, as we already see in the poll itself, you know, 30% of the time an accountant's time is spent on manual reconciliation. And these are like, and this is data, probably like a little old, but very much up there with what's going on even now. So how can we solve it? And you know, the one thing that we keep hearing about is how can we automate everything? Can we automate the manual processes? Can we automate receipt submission? And yes, you can you can automate your receipt submission, you can automate the extraction of receipt fields. And the most importantly, you don't need to store off receipts physically, which I'll come to later in the webinar. That you don't really need to store your receipts anymore if you're using the right tool. And on the other side of when you're closing books, you'll be closing books faster, you will have pre-approval checks. The system is matching the receipts to car transactions, and there'll be a two-way seamless integration. And that's what automation can do for you if you are trying to solve for expense management. So before you know, we get into expense management software, what are the solutions out there? So I mean, one solution that I didn't even mention here, and which a lot of people still use our spreadsheets, and I'm assuming a lot of people still do that. But on the tech side of things, the two main solutions out there, one is a bank provided software, which is basically, you can collect a receipt, you can match the transaction, but it's only offered by select few banks. So not all banks will give you that. There are no way to track all types of expenses. So you might be able to track multicard expenses. You can't set up approvals, you can't do realtime policy checks because the drawback with the bank software is they're really legacy softwares. So the interface is not easy to use. The functionality is limited and you will still not get realtime visibility into class. Cause most banks, when it comes to especially small business and corporate credit cards don't provide you the realtime feed. I mean, we have paid, I mean, that's one of the problems we faced when we were building Fyle, and that's when we decided to build a tech to solve the problem of broken bank feeds because banks would not give you access.
Dan DeLong:Yeah. And, and another drawback is that, you know, from, from an accountant or bookkeeper's perspective, I have a client on Chase, I have a client on Wells Fargo. I've got a client using American Express. All of those things are different. And then, okay, well where do I gotta go to, you know, to do this if I have, if, if they've given me access to the financial institution. Mm-hmm. Right. So it's, it's, it's it's a, you know, I'm going back to, it's still going back to that swirly line, right? It's, it's just a, it's a maddening and the maddening thing. So,
Nilesh Surano:yeah. And the funny thing there is, it's not real time, even after they give you access, right? It takes about 48 hours for the feed to hit you. Sometimes it can take up to 48 hours. The, I mean, it still won't be instant. It's not like you Fyle, you know, using the card and you're getting a expense statement. So you still need to wait for it. And at the end of the month, you'll still be reconciling manually because you'll still be matching it. And so to solve that problem, a lot of FinTech solutions out there started issuing their own cards. Because I mean, if you're issuing your own cards and you have the right software, it solves the problem. You could match the card transaction with receipts. You would get visibility into spend data, you would've the right accounting integrations, but you would've to switch to their cards. Right. And that's the catch. That's That's the catch. And if we can move quickly to the next slide, Dan. Oh sure. The main catch there. Switching cards. Does it work? I know a lot of people have switched cards, but what they call credit cards, are they really true credit and they're not? Because in the fine print, you will see that you need to maintain a high cash balance, the credit cycle. Can be as less as one day depending on your cash balance. Whoa,
Dan DeLong:that's not much credit cycle.
Nilesh Surano:Oh yeah. I mean we, there are terms which like depending on, you know, how much a cash balance is, you will have to the short, the, let's say your cash balance, the shorter the repayment cycle. So it's not true credit and businesses that use corporate credit cards to manage their cash flow take a big hit. So, you know, it's good for, I would say, well-funded startups who have enough money lying in the bank, but for small businesses and the midmarket who use credit as a cash flow management exercise, and you know, on top of that, you lose all the rewards and the loyalty points you've accumulated so far because you're switching cards. There's no way to transfer them. Trying,
Dan DeLong:trying to get somebody who loves their American Express card to to switch just to solve for this solution. You know, is is a, is a tough style. Yeah.
Nilesh Surano:And the resistance. And that'll have a resistance to change. I mean, we anyways have problems when getting people to adopt a software. Imagine trying to adopt a new card, right. So yeah, I mean there's a lot of intersection and then there's expense management software where you have dedicated expense management platforms that will automate the expense tracking. They will collect receipts in real time, automatically reconcile card spend. Do you have AI enabled OCR and expense coding so that you don't have to manually code? And I saw that was the biggest challenge ever mentioned that you don't want to manually code entries and you allow for compliance checks, fraud detection, and approvals. At any customization level you want, that should be the ideal solution because it should not be that, oh, an approval came, but I'm probably not authorized to do this, so what do I do now? There should be that option that you have multi-tiered approvals and you are able to get another approval external or internal to approve it. And you know you want the, you want your analytics and reporting because at the end of the day, if you are going to have a software, it should be able to help you manage the expense. Not only for now, but for the long run. You should be able to reduce your overheads and you know, you might be wasting, there must be wasted Spend somewhere, which you can probably manage. Like for one example, we have had, we have had clients who have used this, used the analytics to go back to vendors and say, Hey, we are spending a lot with you. Let's have a fresh deal. But if you don't have the data in one place, you would never know where you are spending the most. And obviously your two way accounting integrations, because you do want all your data to be reflecting in new QuickBooks. At the same time, whatever changes you make in QuickBooks should be reflecting in your account expense management software to avoid for any errors in the future. Got it.
Dan DeLong:All right, so let's let's talk about those that are using an expense management software to currently. So what are you using? Are you using Expensify Divvy Concur? So those are those, those are, that's the place, or that's the, the solution where, where Fyle is is kind of li lying. Correct. Is is that, you know, when you think of, well, what is Fyle where is it? Right, it'd be in, it'd be in that that, that category right in the last Yep. And then there's the option of spreadsheets or maybe I just rely on the bank feed or, or, you know, or some tools that are already in inside of QuickBook,
Michelle Long:you know, and, and while we're doing this question here, you know, I was thinking about this Fyle has come so far beyond just expense management. Oops. You know, it's just so much beyond that. When you look at all the capabilities that we have now versus just taking a picture of your receipt, I mean, there's just so much more. And I can't wait for you to show that. But if you haven't looked at an extensive management, you know, application or, or whatever lately where do you see what he's gonna share with you? I mean, it's just light years ahead of what it used to be. So it's come so
Dan DeLong:far. Michelle, what at what point does does an accountant bookkeeper, someone in the accounting profession want to, like, when, when do they start to step into, okay, well I need something, something else. Is it the size of the client? Is it size of the firm? Is it is it the Sure.
Michelle Long:Yeah. It's really more, it's dependent upon the small business and how many expenses they have to keep track of. You know, for example, it, it could be one person who's got a lot of travel expenses. Like myself, you know, when I was traveling a lot when we were on the road and I had a lot of, you know, hotel, airline meals. You know, if you've got somebody who's on the road and has a lot of expenses to keep track of, they're gonna want an, an app like this. You know, they don't have to have a lot of employees or a lot of. Of sales. They don't have to be huge. They have to have a lot of expenses to keep track of. So it's more about the volume of activity that they need to track, not necessarily the size of sales revenue or the size of employees just if they've got a lot of expenses and receipts that they need to be tracking. In my opinion anyway.
Dan DeLong:What's a good good, good. Yeah,
Nilesh Surano:I mean, I would, I would agree with that. So, I mean, we have had customers who have just five users and yeah, in fact, most of the small businesses start with that. They would start with probably, let's say two or three cards. And as you keep scaling, you leave adopting that more. But I mean, then that's where, you know, the whole concept of users, users like pricing came into place for us that, and like, you know, you learn more about it as we go forward, but. The one thing that we do care about is that people should be able to easily solve for expense management. They should not have to learn a new app again. And that can, it should solve for all use cases. For example, like if you're traveling and let's say if you're traveling for a particular project, the app should be able to help that, that, you know, you can Fyle an expense into a particular project or a co or a cost center. And when you do the integration with the, with QuickBooks, it should reflect in the same way. And that's one major piece we tried to solve when we are building Fyle that hey, we want to address all possible use cases.
Dan DeLong:All right, so let's talk about what to look for in, in the in expense management solution.
Nilesh Surano:Yeah. Yeah. And like the first point is my, you know, my favorite point and like, I'll, and I'll later in the, later during the course office, I'll show you how, what I mean by ease of use, but. One thing that we really want everyone to look for when you're looking for a software, in fact, not even expense management, any e software, is that it should be easy for both employees or the end user and the team that is managing the software, which means you should be able, able to submit receipts in a few clicks from multiple places, not just, you know, learning a new app. To do that, there should be real time receipt collection, especially for your credit card spend. You should have an automated extraction and you know, expense coding from both digital and physical receipts, and have the user friendly mobile app that you know allows your receipt tracking, mileage tracking approvals. And like I said earlier, you should have multiple ways to approve expenses because the more you scale your business, the complexity increases. You might need multi-tiered approval, so you might need different types of approvals for different expenses. For example, what happens. If it's an emergency expense and you violated a policy, you had search pricing on the Uber and you're not allowed the transportation expense, you should be able to bill for those cases. You should have, you should have the option right there in the app for the employee to declare, okay, why did he Fyle that expense even though it was above the policy, like, you know, it was violating a policy. So those things really matter. And then the second most important part is the card agnostic solution. You don't want to secure cards. That's what most people I've met have told me. I was recently in San Diego as the firm growth forum and most accounting forms I met there, they kept, they, the reason they kept coming to our booth is because they saw that you don't need to switch cards. We added right on a banner that we work on cards your clients have. You don't need to switch your cards. And like I said, you need to utilize the true credit. What's the point if you have a 10 day cycle? I mean, would you really want a credit card with 10 day cycles? And then, you know, you have your existing bank relationships, which you don't want to lose. That is really important when it comes to small businesses and mid-market businesses, because they have probably built it over the years. You switch cards, all of that is gone. And obviously keep the rewards is just like, you know, as you said, Dan, people really care about the reward points. A lot of people do, and they have collected the air miles from the rewards.
Dan DeLong:Yeah. Over here. Once, once you've been in that American Express lounge at the airport it's, it's, it's not gonna be you know, easily removed from their from their travel experiences.
Nilesh Surano:Yeah. And then, you know, you want that realtime visibility into the fend data because at the end of the month, if you're getting a statement at the end of the month, you have probably forgotten about a lot of the expenses. And then you are again, manually checking. Even though you're getting the bank feed, you're still doing a lot of manual activity, but if it was real time and you had direct bank feeds, you don't have to do anything. You just have to verify the expense in real time. Right? Yeah. And you know, automated credit card reconciliation, you have your automated expense coding, get the reconciliation along with the card transactions and then push it into the accounting software. It should be as simple as that. There should not be an option where, I mean, in an IT scenario, all software should work like that, and your expense data gets reflected into the accounting software in real time so that you don't have to later go to the accounting software and then keep editing your expense on your categories and your chart of account. Then it's not really automated Exactly if that's happening, which is why you need my next point too. We are accounting integrations. You need self-serve bidirectional integrations and my focus there is on self-serve because. If you can't set up your own integration easily with your accounting software, that basically means you need a managed service. That'll only increase the price of the software. And if you're getting into an automation software, you actually want it to be self-serve as much as possible because one thing that we have noticed is that the lower the self self capability, the lower is the adoption. People don't want to adopt a software which they can't understand easily because it's just too much time then, and then you need training, and then you need guides and tutorials and certifications, and that should not be the case. You should not need a certification to learn a simple expert running in software, so it should be self-served bidirectional. You should have the ability to automatically map everything, including your. Start of accounts, employees, projects, even custom fields, because a lot of time you might create custom fields in QuickBooks and if they don't reflect back in your expense management software, the integration is not worth it. And then, you know, coming to the finance and like, yeah, I, to export the expenses, you want to have a customizable format where you can export your reimbursable and credit card expenses right into your accounting software from the software, from the expense management side. So yeah. And then coming to the finance side of things, you want automated control and compliance because if you can't do a real-time policy check, you're going to spend a ton of time at the end of the month just figuring out which policies have been validated. But if you had a realtime check, you would be able to do that. And then you obviously need the support and implementation because even with the best of software, you will run into some, or you might, you might be facing difficulty with. A certain piece of the part, piece of the software. So you need a good support team, quick implementation. And the third one, which is near zero learning curve for employees. Your employees should not have to learn a new app. They should be able to do this without almost zero learning curve. And that is what will help you increase your adoption
Dan DeLong:rates. And that, and that's one of the things that I think that stands apart from from Fyle than, than than other ones that are, that are out there, is that, yeah, it's nice when, you know an app, you know does all these, does all these things, but there's a learning curve, right? It's like, okay, well, all right, everybody, today we're using these cards and we're using, and we're using this app to be able to submit your receipts. When, when, when I was having that initial conversation in the coffee line with, with Vikram, like it was. It was, it was just kind of like, really, you could just do this in text. This is amazing because I can, I can just envision, you know, the guys, you know, going to Home Depot or whatever, you know, buying some job material with their card, and I could just see this playing out. Like, oh, okay, everybody knows how to take a high, a low quality pic picture of their, of their dessert, right? And, and text it to somebody. I mean, I don't think there's anybody that does not know how to do that. You know, it's sending a picture via text. I mean, this is, you know, this is pretty that was, that was just like, why didn't somebody think about that sooner? Was, was just a, an amazing experience for me. So let's talk about, let's talk about Fyle, right? Let's, now they're starting to meet some questions about what is Fyle. You know, what, how does it work? What does it, what does it do? Sure.
Nilesh Surano:So I mean, Fyle says, you know, 30% of you said that you use an expense management app. So yes, Fyle is an expense management software. The difference is that we work on any card that you have and we work within everyday app. So like Dan said, you don't need to learn a new app to submit your expenses. We work within app everyday applications like X messaging, Gmail, outlook, slack teams, email forwarding. We work out of those tools and you can submit and approve on the go. So we don't want people to learn a new software just because you know, you want to make life simpler. What I want is what we actually, in fact, one thing that we have been quickly measuring is how many people don't use the Fyle app out out of our customers, because that's it. True story. You know, that's a true indicator of that people are using text Gmail Outlook to submit their expenses, and that means they are doing it on a more regular basis. In fact, for a lack of better word, we don't want your employees to have discipline. We want them to do it on the go wherever they want it to. And that's one major differentiator that we are trying to build. And we are the only ones with the realtime integration with both Visa and MasterCard, which means most of the cards that you have and with Amex coming soon, we will cover almost all use cases where you swipe a card and you would get an instant notification to submit a receipt. And that's on the reimbursement flow that you know you could, you have automatic policy checks, you can check for duplicates, fraud, you can directly reimburse your employer accounts using a p h for the reimbursable expenses. And we have the two sync with QuickBooks. On the card reconciliation flow because you get an instant notification. Everything gets coded and mastered in real time. You will not have to wait till end of the week or end of the month to do that. It's all real time. It reflects in the, at both your card statement and your Fyle dashboard in real time, which means from an accountant side, the moment your employer user Fyled an expense, like swipe the card and they submitted the receipt via text, you see it in the Fyle dashboard and it gets pushed into QuickBooks immediately. Point out, out,
Dan DeLong:just kinda point out a question that that came up. Mm-hmm. Cause you, you did, you did kind of slide in there, Amex coming soon. But it doesn't mean that it doesn't work with Amex. It just means as we're talking about Yeah, the real time. Access to, to that notification is, is that's coming soon. And, and we'll
Nilesh Surano:kinda get this, we still have Amex speeds. Yeah. We still have bank feeds from Amex, but Yeah, we don't have the text option yet. Right.
Dan DeLong:So let's, let's kind of go into, into that. Oh, actually, you, you have another slide here about that. Yeah. I just wanted to
Nilesh Surano:take two-way integration. Yeah. The two-way integration because, you know, for this audience, I wanted to just, just, you know, reiterate how powerful a two-way integration with QuickBooks is a, it is no code. You will not have to do any coding or any manual effort. It's a self, self setup in 10 minutes. Within 10 minutes, you can automatically set up the whole thing with just your simple QuickBooks login and Fyle automatically exports your reimbursable expenses as checks, expenses, your entries of bills. You get to decide that when you are setting up the integration. And your credit card expenses as bills, credit card purchases or debit card expenses depending on which cards you're using. And all of this get gets automatically exploded. So when you're setting up the system, you won't have to do much, you just have to log in with your QuickBooks and you'll have to just map the right fields once for once and it's done. And then if you can move to the next site quickly. Yep. Yeah. Like I said, automated sync of all dimensions, all your chart of accounts, categories filing posts, expense accounts by default, but you can also import other accounts. You get vendors as merchants, you get the projects, classes, departments. You get a real-time coding of all expense data against the start of accounts and Fyle auto things. The payment status is for reimbursements if you pay via your own system. So what I'm really trying to say is you don't really do anything manually. Right.
Dan DeLong:So that, that
Nilesh Surano:scenario two automation
Dan DeLong:looks like that's that scenario that, that Michelle was talking about with, you know, you set up your parent account and then all of the card holders as, as part underneath that, and then the, the madness that ensues because the bank balance does not match the, the individual card holders, because you're making the payment out of the parent account or, or maybe a sub account that is just for payments, they'll never match. Right. Because that, that's part of the maddening part, part of, you know, connecting the bank, the these card, multiple card holders to the bank feeds. That doesn't exist at all, right? Because you're just, you're just sending all the transactions to one to one account and then when it comes time to, to reconcile easy peasy, right?
Nilesh Surano:Yep. They're already, I mean, they already reconcile, like matched in real time, so all you're doing is just maybe doing a quick verification. Yeah, let's quickly move on to, all right. Yeah. All. So I'll
Dan DeLong:stop sharing. Yep. I, I realized I was supposed to toss this over to you, slide thousands of slides ago. But lemme stop sharing so that you can that's alright. You can show your screen. Sorry about that.
Nilesh Surano:That's alright. So I'll quickly jump into, since you know I've been talking about real time, I mean, I don't have a credit card machine here to show you a swipe, but we did record this to show you what happens when you swipe a credit card and you have Fyled, you get a realtime notification on your phone. You just click the receipt,
Dan DeLong:submit it, and that's a poor and that's a poor photo because you've got, yeah, you've got some you've got the angle, you've got and
Nilesh Surano:we have, yeah, we have. The time to collect receipts have reduced by 48% and look at the dashboard and Fyle the same expense shows up instantly. So there's one way when you are using that's phenomenal card. When you're using your card, everything happens instantly. The second option you have is, let's say you have a paper receipt and you want to Fyle it for your expense. Let me quickly minimize this. So this is my phone that you see and there's a Fyle app. All I need to do, as you can see, this was in my pocket, the receipt. Yep. It's, and you said, Dan, you don't want your, you don't want your hands and you know things to show up. We have a crop option. You can just crop everything out. So that you don't, if let's say you're taking it on your car dashboard or anywhere where you're sitting, you could just drop out everything and when you click finish, there you go. I mean,
Dan DeLong:that was instantaneously where, whereas normally it's like with, with with other solution providers, it's you know, give us, give us five minutes to process this. Yeah, this receipt, and you get the
Nilesh Surano:category, you've got the tax group, the merchant, everything is self filled. And in the expense report side, if you notice this, it says automatic submission. So if you don't add it to a report, Fyle has the option where you can automate your report submissions for your employees that, hey, if you don't submit an expense report by the first of the month, All your expenses will just get submitted on its own.
Dan DeLong:The question from the from the chat, where is Fyle getting the data from? Is it the, the merchant or the credit card or the actual receipt?
Nilesh Surano:So we have a partnership with both Visa and MasterCard. So it comes directly from them, the cart data, the issuing network, it comes directly from the issuing network. So
Vikram Pothnis:Fyle again, I just wanna step in on, on this front if I may so the data about the transactions come from the card network. The data around coding is extracted by our AI engine from the receipt, and we do a three-way match between the transaction from the card network to the content of the receipt and match it with the chart of accounts from QuickBooks, which is also linked. In real time at all times. Right? So so we do a three-way match of that, and that's how the automating automated coding
Dan DeLong:works and those and those things. Thank you Vic, for the, for the for the clarification there, is that is that something that you can do inside of Fyle to, to help it learn, learn the process, or be, be more explicit in the, in the coding? Yes.
Vikram Pothnis:So over the years our machine learning system has picked up the various combinations of vendors and merchants that are out there already. And based on the the type of expenses as well. But there are rules that we can apply to train the system as we go along. So every time you make a change or every time you make a specific coding change the system learns it over a period of time and from the next time you're able to the
Dan DeLong:system takes over. Got it. Okay. So you're gonna show us these are, these are some of the things that are phenomenal about Fyle again. Yeah. So the main, the, the out of the box thing, thinking that you guys have with regards to don't use our app, right? Use technology that you're already using flow flows into your other integrations that you have with, with things that, that businesses are already already using. Yep. So here you are in Gmail. So
Nilesh Surano:yeah, so what I'm about to show is like this, the same thing we have for Outlook as well. So this is Gmail plugin, and let's say you made an expense and you got a digital receipt with the Gmail plugin. All you need to do is click on our expense. Same thing as like with the Fyle app. It automatically scans everything. There you go. So you get
Dan DeLong:the merchant. So is is a, all this is is a plug category plug in inside of Gmail. Yeah. To be able to, to do that right. Rather than you know, go, go into some someplace else to, to do this categorization or send it, you know, forward it to to, to a platform and then manage it there. Yep. This is all just Right, right. Directly within the, the, the technology and, and, and applications that they're already using.
Nilesh Surano:Yeah. And when you click on our expense, I've violated a good policy limit of$25 per day. So I can type a reason. So let's say it was a client meeting and I click on continue. So now when I go to the Fyle side of things, This is what it looks like. You have the receipt, you have the date of spend permit mode. You even have the comment that I put the client meeting. So it comes with a complete audit trail. So if someone had to look it from the plan team side, it has been flagged, the expense was created. And how long is this the,
Dan DeLong:to post into meeting post into QuickBooks? Yeah, that
Nilesh Surano:about that. Gimme a second. I didn't want to switch on switch, switch out from this view right now. So who lives,
Dan DeLong:I guess, I guess the question I have is who lives in the app? If you're, if you're not needing to use the app
Nilesh Surano:a lot of time. Yeah, so there's the expense. This is the spender dashboard is basically for the users and the employees, if they still want to see what the reports look like, or if, you know, if someone is medical us about managing all the expenses and submitting the report on their own rather than anything auto Fyle automated or letting the financing automate it. So for them, it'll look like something like this where they can see all their spends. You could either select all of them and add, you know, so submit, submit it for a report.
Vikram Pothnis:Naia Uhk here again. Sorry. Yeah. So I think, to answer your question, Dan who lives in the app, imagine this workflow, right? An employee walks into a cafe, swipes a card, purchases coffee, gets a text message in real time, and takes a photograph of the receipt, responds to that message, and as far as the employee is concerned, they're done. That's all they need to do. It then goes to the verifier, which can be the bookkeeper or the accountant who then locks into the application. Of course, we have a partner dashboard where you can manage multiple of your clients all at once. The verifier can then come into the application and check for whether the coding is all right, whether the chart of accounts has show properly or not, whether the employee is getting the requisite you know have made the requisite you know, have put in the requisite comments or not, and so on and so forth. And then once they verify it, it then flows into Q B O, right? So that's the workflow end-to-end. If that answers your
Dan DeLong:question, not Got it. So it's the, whoever the verifier is in the situation, you know, in the business chain of command, so to speak. But but now my, my question, Tosh, is, How long does this take, you know, it goes into the dashboard. When does it show up into QuickBooks? Because there may be, you know, that may be somebody else in the whole chain of you know, of, of command in this ca for lack of a better word. Where, how does, when does it show up into QuickBooks and does the attachment, the receipt go along with the go along for the ride? Like where, you know, cause I know some applications were like, we want to be the source of truth. And, and, and your, your, your document management as well. What does what does that look
Nilesh Surano:like? Yeah, so it flows into QuickBooks, the receipt plus your, I mean, all the information that you're gathering into Fyle. It's a two-way sync. So everything flows into QuickBooks. Like said, once it gets very, once it gets approved from here, so it's, right now it's an in the one. Which I Fyled was an incomplete expense because it's just been Fyled as an expense. It's not been sent for, committed for a report, but with the card statement, it'll still get matched. So the card statement is still flow in real time. So yeah, so
Vikram Pothnis:it really depends on the configuration. Then yeah, we have options of scheduling the push or it can be done once the workflow is complete. Right? So both the options exist. It's, it's all dependent on how we wanna configure it and how we want to configure it for specific clients.
Dan DeLong:Got it. Got it. And then the, the question that, that came up in, in the, in the q and a, so what do you do with the bank feed at that point in inside of QuickBooks? Do you, do you even need to connect the, the credit card you know, inside of QuickBooks? Or is it really just not necessary? And what does that, what does that look like? After that, you know, so once you, in QuickBooks right? You gotta go into one account. You don't have this parent child shenanigans. It's just one account. What is it? You know, how does that what, what's next for inside of QuickBooks? Yeah.
Vikram Pothnis:Right? So you don't actually need to have the feed coming into QuickBooks at all because all the transactions, as long as the transactions are authorized by the bank and which, which happens to be all the time we get the transaction, because we write in the authorization workflow for any of the cards through the networks directly, right? So you can be rest assured, this is, this is the single source of truth, even, even better than the QuickBooks feed that you would typically get from the banks, right? And this is not broken. And to that extent, you get a fully matched ready to reconcile data from Fyle into Q B O. With the images of the receipt as well. So there's no real reason for you to still have those feeds in. However, we do have customers who enable that into a different bank account, and there is no duplication taken care of. The fact that it does not create duplicates duplicate entries in, in, in good books. Right. So that's been taken care
Dan DeLong:of. Got it. All right. Anything else that you wanted to demonstrate for us?
Nash
Nilesh Surano:just quickly wanted to show you the admin side of things, like what it would look if you were an admin or a approval. I'm gonna last bit
Dan DeLong:list the last poll while you're doing that. Yeah. About, you know, maybe learning more about Fyle. Cause I know there's some questions about, okay, this is great, but how much does it cost? Right. That will be more of like setting up setting up a demonstration with, with you directly. So we can, we can do that by opting in here. Sure.
Nilesh Surano:So, yeah. You, if you're an account on the accountant side, if you're a finance team side, you get to see a task list which says how many unverified reports, how many submitted reports, what all do you need to do when you are, you know, starting your day with Fyle. Let's say you're doing it at the end of the month or at the end of the week, and you want to close your book. You get all, everything in one single site. You can even send reminders if your employees have pending tasks. I mean, in this case, there, it seems, there are no pending tasks for Theresa Brown here, but. If there were pending tasks, you could send reminders or even schedule reminders. So let's say you want to schedule a reminder on the 25th of every month to send it to everyone that, Hey, filing expense reports, because closing time is coming. And then the next important part I wanna show was the spend overview, which is basically what we talked about when we said you could get real-time data on how much spend is happening month on month or quarterly, or early or weekly. And you could see it by the card merchants, categories, employees, departments, projects. This would really help you understand where your money is being spent most, and what's the change like from the previous period, because that would help you manage spend much better for your clients and for your com complete self. And you could further go into your analytics section and you could see the spend by categories, departments, projects, business units, cost centers, who's violated a policy, travel planning for hotels for flight. So you know who's spending within seven days above seven days, or hotels, flights. And then which merchants are the most used? For example, Marriot,$80,000 I've spent, you probably want to go to Marriot and negotiate a better deal for yourself. Right.
Dan DeLong:And a little bit, a little bit around what, what yeah, what, what
Nilesh Surano:else? Just one quick thing that I wanted to show, because without that, I think this would not be complete as the integration side. So because you asked how would it look in QuickBooks? Mm-hmm. So once you go to your QuickBook setup inside Fyle, you could go to your export log and you click on this. Okay. I'll just start to probably click this. There's a problem. The demo account. Yeah. This is how it looks like inside Good looks.
Dan DeLong:Immediately has, or, you know, based on your, based on your settings, it'll push this Yep. This transaction directly into into the credit card account with lots of detail and the, you know, the project. And so they can still run reports category description. Yep. If you're, if you're, if, if you're running the reports out of QuickBooks, those are not gonna be interrupted by, by this, this connection. There's your receipt. There's your receipt, you can see the receipt. Awesome.
Nilesh Surano:And the memo, like, you know, it's a reimbursable expense by a particular user, so yeah. So, like
Dan DeLong:I said, we're, we're a little, we're a little bit over our, our our hour but we just wanted to kind of just come in for a landing here. So, you know, so this, what this really does is it allows real-time access to, to expense expenses using the cards that people are already using with technology that they're already familiar with using. So they don't have to change their cards, they don't have to change their their, their, their technology workflows for, for employees to submit expenses or just entering in expense transactions that with, with company credit cards. Does that kind of summarized Milledge what we're, what, what Fyle does? I don't wanna speak for you, but I think I
Nilesh Surano:No, it does, it does summarize it. I mean, that's what we do. We don't, we, we are trying to simplify it for everyone. We it for the end user, be it for the contents. And, you know, anyone who wants to like, has any more questions, you know, reach out to Dan, reach out to me, reach out, or reach out to Vik and we'll be happy to help. I'll be happy to show you around the platform itself. I mean, there's a lot more to it. I just wanted to share the key parts. So yeah, and great speaking with everyone. All right
Dan DeLong:On the, on the QB Power hour website, we're gonna have a landing page four Fyle. There is a place to, to submit you know, referrals. If you, if you just wanna, you know, send something over the wall or directly to Fyle, if you you know, if you want a client to you know, to, to see a demonstration or whatnot, you can certainly do that right there on the Ki Power website. Michelle, any any closing thoughts?
Michelle Long:I just think it's amazing. I hope you guys will check it out. I put the link in there. There is a great accountant's portal as well, so if you have multiple clients using it so I put the link to that in there. But check it out. It's pretty
Dan DeLong:cool. All right, well thanks for joining us. The list from Fyle and Vikram, the voice from Above. Yes, thank, thank you and we'll, we'll see you next time on the Scaling New Heights.
Michelle Long:Yeah, I look forward to seeing both of them in real life at Scaling New Heights. All right, have a great
Dan DeLong:day. We'll see you next
Nilesh Surano:Power Hour. Thank you so much.