Charlie and Phong, co-founders of MakersHub.ai joins us to demonstrate a new, simple, and very powerfully robust AP and Receipt Management tool that works bi-directionally with QuickBooks Online AND Desktop
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/
Charlie and Phong, co-founders of MakersHub.ai joins us to demonstrate a new, simple, and very powerfully robust AP and Receipt Management tool that works bi-directionally with QuickBooks Online AND Desktop
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 everybody to another great Power Hour. And we do have maker smart joining us today and I'll let them introduce themselves makers.
Dan DeLong:That's pain pill Mistake. Number one,
Michelle Long:I'm thinking of happy hour, which is with cocktails. So I apologize. That little faux pas there, MakersHub I am Michelle Long owner of Long for Success. And Ted and I were just reminiscing of, doing some work with him. Gosh, 10, 10 some years ago. But anyway, very glad to have y'all joining us today. And that's enough about me. Dan, go ahead.
Dan DeLong:All right. My name is dan DeLong owner of Danwidth and school bookkeeping worked at intuit for nearly 18 years co hosting today as well as at the workshop wednesdays on wednesdays over at school bookkeeping and doing the tech editing over at qbo for dummies book series, so so joining us today is Ted and Charlie and Phong. So if you could go around the horn there and introduce yourselves and talk a little bit about who you are and and then we'll, and then we'll kick off into the content here.
Ted McRae:Okay yeah, so as Michelle said, her and I know each other from way back when I've I've been in this industry for I hate to say it. I because I know I look like a young buck, but like 29 years started at ADP and then I worked for small companies like you've probably heard of them. It's a really small company called Intuit For about on and off, you know how that goes if you're an Intuit employee for about 11 years And then I worked for an even smaller company called Zero. And then at the time it was small, I was employed number 15 at Zero US, went to accounting suite, and now I'm over here with this awesome company called MakersHub. So that's just a tiny bit about me, but it's more about Charlie and Phong today. I'm going to, I'm sitting in the background here, just answering any questions.
Charlie Howe:Yeah, not at all, Ted. Thank you. My name is Charlie Howe. I'm one of the co founders of MakersHub. And, ironically. Neither Phong nor I comes from a traditional accounting background. I worked in financial services for almost 18 years at Citibank in a number of different roles. And Phong and I met while in school at the University of Pennsylvania. And we came to the the tool and the company that you're all going to learn more about here shortly, which by virtue of having lived a series of problems, in our real world backgrounds, and most directly that was Phong's experience running an advanced manufacturing company. And I'll hand it to Phong to talk a little bit about that as a kind of precursor to why we've built what you guys are about to see.
Phong Ngo:Great, thanks a lot, Charlie. And thank you, Ted, Dan and Michelle for welcoming us here. My name is Phuong, I'm the co founder of MakersHub, and before starting MakersHub with Charlie I spent the last 15 years in investment in equipment manufacturing, where I start out, as Charlie mentioned, Not in the accounting background at all. I was an engineer by heart and starting from engineering, moving to operation, and eventually run that business for many years. And in that transition from the engineering to running the business where I recognized how much and how challenging the account payable process was and still is for small and medium sized business especially for myself, where we build a lot of really very large equipment. Many of them have tens of thousands of parts. And for an AP person, the accounting team, to really allocate it to all the right place that ultimately allow the business owner to have any sort of insight to run the business was very hard. I didn't appreciate it enough until I got a chance to run the business and recognize my own shortcoming. Not having the information that was I had and looking high and low for all the different tools that I'm trying to solve my own problem that couldn't really address it or what ultimately inspired Charlie and I to start it, make us up to to build this product that you will see today.
Dan DeLong:All right thanks again for joining us here today and really looking forward to seeing what what. What this does and what and how this could save time. I think as I was Sharing that you were, you guys were coming on I saw a few folks that were like, I learned something new every time I see a MakersHub demonstration. I'm sitting in that boat too. I'm just waiting to see what what, how you guys rip off of each other for the for this demonstration. But a little bit about the QB Power Hours and housekeeping. Every other Tuesday at noon Eastern normally not eligible for CPE, but thanks to Ted we are actually offering a one hour of CPE this for this webinar. Unfortunately if you are watching on YouTube or catching the replay, you can't get the CPE credit. You got to be in the in the Zoom webinar participating there. And we'll talk a little bit about those requirements there. But you can always check the website, qbpowerhour. com for upcoming events. We are going to be talking next week about the recent announcement with QB live that was made yesterday, a lot of emails and things like that are. Are talking about that there is a webinar tomorrow with the qb QB live community. Talking about talking about that. If you're like, what the heck are we talking about? We'll digest that and we'll talk about that next time on the QB Power Hour. And you can always go to the qb power hour.com/resources for the PDFs of prior slides, the prior recordings, podcasts, and other resources as well. So about the CPA credit, you'll get one hour. You do need to participate in the polling questions and evaluate maker's hub would be also very helpful. Ted, any any o other add-ons or requirements there for the, yeah, it's for the CP, it's,
Ted McRae:Yeah, 55 minutes. CPE credit is a 55 minute hour, so you have to be. Present for at least 55 minutes participate. The evaluation is the evaluation of the webinar. It's it's not a requirement for CPE, but it's something that we would very much like you to do helps us get better.
Dan DeLong:Yeah, we'll have an end of webinar survey as well as the polling questions throughout the webinar to participate there. As we go through some of this content today, if you have specific questions about things that Charlie and Phuong are going to be talking about today please put them in the Q& A because it makes it a lot easier for us to follow up if we can't answer it live during the session. We can reach out after that. If you have just general comments like, hey, Dan, you're showing your Facebook instead of the slides, please put those in. The chat. But try to limit your your questions about. What it is that we're talking about into the Q and A. Please direct them there and also the handouts are available there. We should have put them in the chat as well so that you can download those and and follow along a couple of things about the QB Power Hour for this year we are trying this live stream multistream option here which just as of yesterday decided it's actually Meta decided to pull its support for streaming into Facebook groups. So as we were wanting to, send this into the Facebook group as well, it doesn't look like they're allowing us to do that. Thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg. But once we actually do figure out the the ins and outs of all of this you'll want to be able to participate and Facebook, because it is a private group, it does need to have access to be able to see you other than a nebulous Facebook user as we go through. And do this here. So there's a QR code to allow that to happen We also have launched the store. If You know want to check that out that would be much appreciated As well. So our agenda today is to really talk about the current state of AP management We'll talk about this technology called OCR and it's expectations versus reality. I feel a meme coming on or something like that, where we have things like this is what I expected to do. And here's the reality. We'll talk mostly in a live demonstration, because I was talking with Charlie and Phong yesterday. There's really no way that we can explain this properly. It's really just, but there's no way wrong to to show it to you wrong, right? And then we'll talk about some of the conclusions and key takeaways. And next steps with with a Q and a session as well. Let's go ahead and talk about MakersHub in general. So Charlie or Phong, who wants to talk about the catalyst of MakersHub and where it came from, because I love that part. If we talk about. Yeah, superhero movies. I always love the story behind Peter Parker, right? Like when did you get bit by the radioactive spider when it comes to No bills, go
Phong Ngo:ahead. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks a lot. Then. Yeah to try to introduce it a little bit we didn't really I mentioned earlier, Charlie, I didn't really come at it with any sort of, grand ambition. Solving the world problem AP didn't even actually seem like even supposed to be a problem. So as I introduced earlier my entire career have been in engineering and the machine that you see on picture here is one of the many machine that I have built in my past life. This one in particular produced the Boeing airplane glass that when you fly on this Boeing Dreamliner, you press a little button, the window go dark on you. This is the kind of machine that
Charlie Howe:produced not to interject that of all the problems Boeing airplanes have had, window glass is not one of them. So we just wanted to
Dan DeLong:yeah, that's a good point. It's our
Charlie Howe:doors and bolts and other engineers.
Phong Ngo:And so that was my that was my life. That was my passion. And as you can see on here to see like a very complex equipment and my last company we design, we manufacture, and we put the into production and in building this kind of machine this one in particular had over 10, 000 components. So if you imagine the amount of bills that were coming in for the projects we have a team of about five accounting personnel in the accounting team. And I did not appreciate how complex and how hard AP was until we need to quote the next job where we built one machine. And now we need to go and say, Hey, I need to build 5 more. How much did it cost me in the 1st place? The end of really eye opening is that because the volume of bills that were coming in Our accounting team will struggle hard enough to get the bill entered and pay on time, let alone spending the amount of time and effort needed to allocate these things at the right project, a cost code that ultimately allow me for this whole future planning. And that was like very, very hard to accept the business out because. You expect that you press a button. Somehow people magically tell you where everything is. And that was the inspiration for us to recognize the state of the industry at the time for there are a lot of OCR technology. Back then, we're running the companies do today. Promise to you that they can extract all the information that you wish you would have until you actually try them and then find out that, it doesn't read all the line item that you need. It doesn't go to the right place. And as a business owner, I spent a lot of time looking for the right solution. That didn't really address my problem that I'm looking for. And that was the inspiration for Charlie and I started Makerson.
Charlie Howe:Yeah, and we like to give that as background because, we've come to in building the company, being very focused on the accounting industry and the, migration, if you will, from Phong's life as an operator to make herself being very accounting focused is that the the solve for many business owners like Phong when they can't Get the books to do what they want them to do is to, outsource that problem, if you will, or to hire folks like you all to help them with it. But in making that's a kind of passing the problem down the conveyor line rather than solving the problem at its core. And I think it's helpful without going into a tremendous amount of detail to talk about. When we went through and said, okay, we have this very real world problem. It seems to be unsolved despite there being really big companies been around a long time who have attempted to solve this, to identify why hasn't it been solved and why is it that there's some uniformity to this sort of Less than optimal offering that was available in the marketplace for, an OCR supported AP system. And as long as I started to dig into this we realized that the root of the problem, though there are many the root of the problem is that the actual OCR tools that many AP companies rely on and other companies rely on are quite limited. And that if we were going to actually be able to solve the problem as we think we have, or we think we're on the road to doing. We needed to take a very different approach. As most of you probably surmise, I'm not the technologist, so I'll explain this in a lay fashion, but the way that traditional OCR works is that it goes out, it's a computer software tool that goes out in search of very specific key value pairs. So it says, I want to know what the total is for this bill, and I want to know what the skew number is on this bill. And it looks for those very discrete pairings. And one of three things happens when it does that, in order of best to worst. Best is that it finds it, and what it finds is accurate. That's great. Second best or first worst is it finds what it thinks it's looking for, but it's wrong. And that seems like it would be the worst, but it's actually not because as long as it gives you some data, you then could go in and say, you're wrong, but I can identify why you're wrong. And I could write a correction for it. The third worst, but unfortunately the most common. And the reason that you get so little data back from many of these OCR tools Is that it just return, it doesn't find what it's looking for. So it returns you nothing. And if it doesn't return you any data, then you can't correct it. And so there's no ability to learn or to grow. And so when we went and looked at the state of the industry and understood this, understood why this is the root, like the root limitation of the industry, we said, if we're going to do this better, we have to do it entirely differently. So we built OCR technology fully in house that takes an entirely new approach to how we read and understand bill documents. And for anybody who's interested, Feng can go into how this works, but I'll give you a, one minute explanation and then we'll just show it to you. But instead of saying, hey, here are the 20 or 50 or 10 key value pairs that we want you to go find, computer, we say, don't tell us anything specific. Instead, give us every data point that you can about a document. So rather than getting 10 or 20 or 50 data points back from every document that we evaluate, We get something on the order of 50 to 60, 000. And so we say, tell us every character on the page in relation to what other characters, where they are, but don't try to be smart about it. Just give us all of the information you can, and we use best in class computer vision technology to do this. And then once we have all of those raw data points that in and of themselves are meaningless, we index them, and we index them on a very vast basis. And so that allows us to take a document and to say, we can rationalize or contextualize anything on it because we have the entirety of the information about what was on the page. And then the last piece is, I'm sure all of you who sat through, presentations like these in the last year or so, I've heard about AI and I think it's far too hypey and buzzwordy, but we do use it and we do use elements of it. And the way that we use it. Is that we've built language models internally to say, okay, in cases where our indexing isn't yet smart or isn't yet definitive about what that raw data means, help us rationalize it, help us figure out what this very complex text is, and you'll see that in practice in a minute,
Dan DeLong:but
Charlie Howe:that's
No One:just a little bit of backlit.
Dan DeLong:Perfect. Let's let's go ahead and launch that first poll question. And while we're talking about, or while people are answering that, that first poll question I want to talk a little bit about what you were mentioning about, all of that data and how that gets in. And you mentioned, and we talked a little bit about OCR. So I'm going to, I'm going to lightly toss the ball to Phong to hopefully not to take that ball and run with it techno, talking about the technological part of it, but what we can what is OCR in general and how does it show up? Cause now we can make some Guesses, right? With the amount of data that you're able to pull in and utilize from your technology, how, when comparing this with other solutions that are out there, it's not all the same technology Fonk?
Phong Ngo:That's right. So so OCR broad term. So it's an optical character recognition and this having invented back in the seventies and at the fundamental what the technology does is trying to look at an image. Or a PDF and is, scan through line by line and pick out the character. That's like the very basic of what OCR does is your handwriting, a letter A, it's been trained many times to like, that's a letter A. And as the technology continue to expand and evolve, it not only that pick out what the character is, but then it start putting frame around it. Where is it on the document? And is there other character next to it? And then, so that were like the very basics of it. And many large industry use it, like bank use it, try to read ID or checks or bank statements and many other documents. And, fundamentally, a lot of the company and a lot of the so called OCR technology have that have been attempting to solve this. To build data entry, the approach has always been, what Charlie talked about, is that it scan the document, pick out all the text, and then there are humans that go and say, hey, a total is over here. And then the next document, oh, hey, the total is over here. And over a lot of data, these models eventually become what this thing where you send in a document and send back here the total and here is the vendor name and here is the invoice number. And that has been the approach that many AP companies have taken. The problem with that approach, and that's what we started with, was that, that's how we go, that's what everybody does with the state of the art. The problem that come, and many of you who ever used the software have learned, is that this is not my total. You reach the wrong spot. It's actually over here. And when all you have is, hey, your total is a hundred dollars and twenty cents. There's no other way for you to fix it. So this is why Instead of actually improve the data, most people would start adding more human resourcing and okay, so you fix it yourself or ship it out to outsource it outside to fix it. At the beginning, what we did, what we write a lot of custom logic, you're like, go and, try to fix it. And very quickly, you can recognize that is really not scalable or anything that technology can really help, right? So we go back to the technology and instead of, hey, the total is this we go and using the most advanced vision system to actually, don't tell me what the total is, tell me every block of data that next to each other that we can index. And we're going to show you a little bit so that in the scenario where our base model is wrong, you can actually teach it where to look for the data. And that's it. Technically, how we really advanced as well.
Dan DeLong:So if I could translate for phone, I think what we're seeing is that you're bringing in all of the data. And and using technology and AI to to segment that data into usable data so that you're not putting, or firms or businesses, they're not putting people in place of processes, right? And so that's the true. Magic of Maker's Hub is that it just, it sorts all that data out and I think probably the base, the best way to, to see it is to see it. Who's gonna, who's gonna do the the demo? I assume it's gonna be phone because I would
Phong Ngo:share the screen and I will be the mouse clicked of the Charlie. That's alright. Okay.
Dan DeLong:All right, so he's going to be the he's going to be the narrator of the demo and then the actual one doing it. Okay, perfect.
Charlie Howe:But please and please ask questions or ask us just one more time on anything, but we'll try to give you just an overarching sense of what's possible. And anybody who wants to see more or learn more, we're thrilled to connect after this meeting. But what you're looking at on the screen, despite our focus in, this discussion today on some of our technological capabilities that are at the root and foundation of MakersHub, we are a full A to Z accountable platform all the way from getting bills into the system and, an inbox repository all the way through to paying those bills, bank reconciliation, et cetera. So we'll go through this at a somewhat high level, but use some very specific and challenging examples to demonstrate how good the software is. And then when it's wrong anybody who gets on a call like this and tells you, Hey, we're perfect. We're not perfect. We're very good out of the gates, but where we can accrue to perfection is allowing our users to. to help teach us when we're wrong, and this gets very difficult and not to jump ahead. But the reason it gets difficult is because what's true for company A is not always true for company B. What company A calls a person's order number, company B calls a customer job number. So a model, if it's just going to say, hey, what does the model believe? Both things cannot be true. So does that mean that company A and company B just are at odds with one another? Not in Maker7. We'll talk about that and show you how that works. But what you're looking at on the screen right now is an intentionally very simple summary dashboard of where your documents are in the AP process. And if we go into the bills that are there to be reviewed. You'll see basically what looks like just an inbox. And documents get into this inbox one of a number of ways. You can drag and drop any kind of file though the vast majority of our users are entirely email based. And when you go in to look at the documents themselves, you can see how different the amount of data that Microsoft can extract and read and contextualize from this bill is. On the left hand side of the screen is the bill itself, the PDF that came from the vendor. And on the right hand side of the screen is Microsoft's interpretation of what is on this PDF. Overlaid with information that we've ingested from QuickBooks. So at the time that you sign up for an account with QBO, it's an instantaneous integration. And in that integration process, we bring in all of your vendor information, all of your chart account information, all of your items, data, basically any data in QuickBooks that should play a role in the AP process.
No One:And so I just want to,
Dan DeLong:I just want to pause there and just like a Marvel. And, the difference between what on the PDF and what MakersHub extracting, because if anybody has looked at any other solution, This is a lot of data that you're able to utilize and manipulate. Just the the receipt capture inside of QuickBooks online itself is so rudimentally simple compared to what you see here which then. Leads you to, if you want to do anything more, you got to do it manually. So what's the point of scraping that data off of a receipt? If you're just going to have to go in and manually manipulate it later. Exactly.
Charlie Howe:And our goal here, and I'll talk about what's on this in more detail in a second, but our goal is for the bill review process to be a bill review process, not a bill entry or a data entry process. It's to unlock all of the folks that are on the phone today's time. to level up their contribution to their customers. And we'll talk about how this makes that possible. But if we start in the upper left hand corner of the Make Yourself screen, you'll see that we read the vendor as Belimo Air Controls USA, Inc. And we read it that way because that's what it says. So the first time that we read this, we say, Okay, this is who the vendor is. And then we perform a search in your vendor list in QuickBooks. And this Red question mark says you don't have a vendor called this. So one of two things is true. Either this is a genuine new vendor and you want to set that new vendor record up in QuickBooks, which you can do directly from here by clicking add a new vendor. We're going to pull in all of the information that we know from the bill, and then you can finish populating this and we'll create that vendor record for you in QuickBooks. Or we say, show us the closest vendor names that you do have, that this could be. And so in this case, this is just a naming convention to mention this match, right? This vendor is in QuickBooks bulimial error controls. We can say with a high degree of confidence that this is likely who this is. If that's the case, then in clicking this bulimial error control, you have taught the system now, hey, anytime you encounter this name over here, you're this name, and that's a one time teach and an example of how the system learns from you and learns from the interactions within the system. So the next time we get a bill from Beliebo, this is just going to be green check.
Dan DeLong:And I wanted to, again, pause. I'm sorry to throw this in there, but I want to point out that this is not just a QuickBooks Online integration. You guys actually started with a QuickBooks Desktop integration first. And it's bi directional so that it, it communicates from and to both ways. So that's one, one important distinction I think that a lot of people need to understand about what it is, how this would, how these workflows would would tie together. And Michelle came off video, so I think she will be able
Michelle Long:to answer. So I have a question. So speaking of manufacturing or whatever, so let's say somebody in the warehouse receives a shipment in, and instead of, I can't tell if it's 12 or 13 pieces or whatever, what if somebody makes a manual mark, let's say they cross through that and they only got 10, how would it handle handwritten things like that on that bill that they received?
Phong Ngo:That's a great question. So handwriting a little tricky and like the honest answer. We pretty good as long as it's a handwriting that you can read like human can read. But most of the time makers have can pick them up. So I'm going to show you this one example of my handwritten document here. And so these are entirely handoff handwritten. And we're able to pick it up really well. Now it really depends. We also work with restaurants, where sometimes you got chicken scratch all over the place. That, those scenarios like that, there are times that, require a little bit where, you would have to delete your lines or pick a new line. But we get very good at reading handwritten notes. And this is another advance that, instead of trying to find a build data extraction, We went for the best vision system that would train a lot of handwriting.
Charlie Howe:Yeah, so we go back to just a good general rule of thumb and Michelle to summarize that is, if you can read it, chances are we can read it. If you can't read it, chances are, neither can we. Now you'll see on the right hand side of the screen, all of the other details that we've picked up the invoice number, the due date, the payment terms. We'll come back to the payment terms in a little bit. The P. O. Number. We use that P. O. Number similarly to how we use the vendor information to say, okay, If this has a P. O. number, go perform a search in your customer project lists and give me options for what customer this might be for by virtue of how similar the P. O. number is to the customer numbering convention. And we'll make those available for you here and let's say that this bill is in fact for the customer Job bills, windsurf shop and the sub job cell tower. I do need to make a quick call out. I saw Hector Garcia's on the website. This little down carrot arrow was a Hector Garcia suggestion. So thanks again. We appreciate it amongst other great suggestions. And so what this says is, okay, here's the closest, customer number to the PO number. And if in fact, this. Bill is for this customer. It's a single click to assign all of the line items on this bill to that customer. Now, any of these are editable in a scenario where you threw in something else for a different customer. When you click on this, it's just going to serve you your QuickBooks customer dropdown, and you can either start typing or just make the Appropriate selection and edit any of the fields that you see here. The other thing that you'll notice is that this bill has been precast as being set as an expense and coded to the GL account job expenses, job materials, and the accounting class new installation. So this is a tremendous amount of previously manual interaction that has been done for you. The important question is it done right? And how did the system know what to do? And so the system used what we call our integration mapping tool. And for the vast majority of businesses out there, even ones with very complex charts of accounts and attributions, there is a logic that underlies why they code things to the accounting system a certain way, regardless of the complexity. And what this tool does is allow you to capture that logic and let the computer follow it in the future. And this is the big benefit of being able to read and understand so much information from the bill and to give it structure. There are four tabs, and we'll go through this really quickly, but each tab answers a different question. The first is items and categories. We have a bill. There are a lot of line items on the bill. Are we treating those line items as items or as expenses, items or category details? And the way that you read this is just an if, then, unless simple rule system. So this is if match all, if everything, set it as a category detail. Assume that everything is an expense. Unless, The vendor name is Scott Electric. Everything that we buy from Scott Electric, we itemize, and we itemize it in the miscellaneous electrical button, so put it there. Unless the description, what it actually says, includes shipping or handling, that shipping charge we put into the shipping item, et cetera, et cetera, and you can do this for a number of factors, things like vendor, PO number, description, et cetera. And then you can get very deep into the chart of accounts if you want to, and it's appropriate, if you want So first, we divided the bill between items and expenses. And for expenses, category details, which is the bottom half here, now knowing that it's an expense, where? What should I do with it? And this works the same way. If everything, put it in non categorized expenses. Let's just assume that it goes there, unless a series of details beneath it. Unless it comes from this vendor, put it in job materials. Unless it comes from, this other set of vendors, then send it to different places. And for items, if we recognize the item, we're going to search in your item list and say, okay, we got the item number, there's an existing item in QuickBooks, but when there isn't, one of the biggest pains for people who are doing a lot of itemization accounting works, I'm sure many of you are sympathetic to, is that before I can even do that, I need to create that item in QuickBooks, and that's a major pain. And so this create new item says when we identify that the item is new or doesn't exist in QuickBooks, where should we create it? And you can do this deep down into the expense accounts, income accounts, asset accounts, if it's inventory, etc. And then you can do the same thing for accounting classes, customer projects, etc. And now going back to the bill, we can give you guys a couple other examples of some just customary challenges of bills. And one of those that we hear all the time is, hey I got, so here's an example of how we can correct the system, right? So what is happening here is we got this bill from Glass and Mirrorcraft, and the total is 1, 766, and you can see that we read the total correctly. And okay, that's good. But we perform a lot of internal checks to make sure that we didn't just get the total right, but we have some line items wrong, for instance. And one of those checks is that we'll sum all of the line items and make sure that sum matches the total that we read. And in this case, it doesn't, right? Because the three bit, or the three line items are here and they don't sum to the total. And the reason for that is because there's this surcharge buried here. that the first time that we saw this bill, we didn't pick up. And this doesn't happen often, but it does happen. And so before we even allow you to go forward, you'll notice that you can't approve this bill. We're telling you something is wrong. You need to help us fix it before we can move through this. And what's wrong in this case is that this surcharge is missed. But let's say you order from Glass and Mirror all of the time, and they always bill you in this fashion. I don't want to do these one off corrections every time I do it. So I'm going to teach the system how to not make this mistake again. So in this case, you're going to add a line item. And you're going to see this little magnifying glass and the benefit of indexing the entire document is that we're going to search the document. I, the human, I, the accounting professional, I'm going to say, I know what's wrong here. It's that you missed this surcharge and I don't want you to miss it again. So you're just going to start typing surcharge. And when you click on this and then remember it using this little blue button. This just taught the system, hey, anytime we get a bill from Glass and Mirror that's in this format, make sure you go look here. And now it's trued up and reconciled, and this is a one time fix. And this is what I mean in terms of how our users accrue to a 100 percent accurate experience in MakersHub very quickly. Because this thing that in other tools would just be a perpetual nuisance that I need to go and fix every time was a one time fix. We just taught the system.
Dan DeLong:So now you're going to have, whoever does the AP always go in and look for the surcharge and add it as a line item, whereas now you've just told the system anytime it comes in from this vendor, this is a common thing. Always look for that and make it as a line item.
Phong Ngo:Yep. You train the system and a lot of our user you can see is automatically, hey
Michelle Long:That is huge because I remember previously There were apps who, would scan the bills for you and all this stuff. However, when it wouldn't read the invoices right or the bills Sorry, I'm sitting here looking at invoice on there. But when it wasn't reading the bill correctly, then we would have to contact those people and say, Hey, it's not reading surcharge or whatever. Oh, we'll fix it for you. We'll have to reprogram it or whatever. And they would have to do that and it would take some time. So I love this, that not only are we able to do that, but look how easy it is. Even I could do it, a non techy person,
Phong Ngo:That was the goal. That was like Michelle, you would describe my life for a good six months before we came up with this idea. Exactly. That was basically every time we're wrong. What I did were actually, I got notifications. So I go and comb through and write custom logic, trying to fix it. Okay. And that way you recognize no way this will work, right? No way this will ever work. It has to become where user can like in very, intuitive way that almost like you did do your job. You're not really training it. You did do your job, but then by virtue of doing so the system learn from it. I
Michelle Long:love that.
Phong Ngo:And it's not only that line item, right? You know what Charlie mentioned before is kind of stuff like this. For example, let's say we read the custom PL number in this number, which is really correct. But let's say we have a user who say, I don't really want this number. I want this project name. Imagine that a lot of customer like project driven. So now the AP person had to constantly go and copy and paste these things, right? You can do the same thing here. You can click on your POs and such for that. You can just like type project name, index it for you. You say, Hey, yep, that's it. Now, every bill from Belimo, we're going to go and look for that project name to be a PL number. So like we added almost everything on here have that kind of capability.
Charlie Howe:So the bill's complexity, go ahead Dan, did you have a question or?
Dan DeLong:No, I was just no, I was using, I was thinking of an example like where I was testing this out and playing around with it, I forwarded a document that had a bill and a spreadsheet and it combined the two to use that point of, oh, here's an extra thing, and it combined that into one document. It's a great segway
Charlie Howe:and I was exactly where I was going to go. So when you talk about why bills are hard, and if we're going to really generalize, it usually exists on two dimensions, right? The first dimension is a little bit of what we just talked about, and that is, bills are hard because they're really, it is hard to rationalize what's happening here. The structures are complex, or, The logic of retainage or things like that are complicated. So there's an actual real complexity. The other dimension is sometimes they're just super long, right? And the way that a lot of billings happen, and Fung pulled up a great example. It comes from, a real customer use case is we get a bill or a PDF, but that PDF is. An assortment of documents, right? It's 50 bills and 30 credits, or it's a scanned list of receipts and bills and other things that we put into a physical scanner. And how do I make sure that we're discreetly capturing these as the individual economic records that they are? And so this is an example of a 90 page PDF that is 24 individual documents that you previously would have had to sit and go through the entirety of and imagine if your job, many of you, this probably has been your job. Is to sit there and put this all into QuickBooks it's hard enough to separate this into the 24 individual documents, let alone capture all of the line item information that you want and attribute it appropriately into the accounting system. This took MakersHub about a minute to process, plus or minus. And so in this we'll break it out. We'll leave the individual PDF as it is because sometimes there is some rationale for why it comes through as a single PDF, but you'll see the system has automatically broken this out into all of its individual constituent parts with all of the line item data captured and attributed per the rules
Dan DeLong:that you set up in the integration mapping. That in and of itself is, um, standing ovation thing but Ted, if you want to go ahead and launch the second poll question so we can make sure we capture that as well, and then we'll continue on with with the conversation. Go ahead, Charlie. Oh here comes Michelle again.
Michelle Long:Not to, not even to mention the data accuracy. If you have somebody manually inputting things, you always have inaccuracies, and mistakes, and transposition errors, and who knows, what else is going on. Not only do you have the efficiency, but you also have the accuracy.
Phong Ngo:Absolutely. We work really hard. This is, this is something we find really funny because, especially when you're trying to automate thing, it's actually human very tough on computer mistakes. It's actually, if you go and type in a 90 page PDF, Majority of human going to make a lot of mistake, but wow, hey, that's a lot of pages. But when computer make mistake, human be like you better not making that mistake again. We continue, we provide efficiency, but a lot of the thing and to be trying to learn what you do, ultimately, and that what we saw was Really the biggest challenge in trying to solve the problem is that when the accuracy is not there, it's actually giving you more work than actually less work. So it's not hey, I'm going to read this doc 80 percent right all the time. It's actually would be more of your problem. And now I'm going to sit here making sure you read it right. So we really worked very hard to get to 95 percent plus. It really where we see it became this binary thing where human can start trusting the system, doing a job and relying on it for automation versus this whole constant checking,
Michelle Long:so can I ask one more question? So earlier you showed on that one where it didn't pick up the surcharge that it gave you the error on there. So let's say you're feeding in or the emails come in, and you get 30 emails, in the morning or something. Is there like a dashboard or something where you would see these 10 of the 30 have an error code or these three? Like, how do you see those that have the error message? Like, how does it alert you to those?
Phong Ngo:That's a really that's a very insightful question. Is
Michelle Long:there a dashboard or something? We
Phong Ngo:do, we do have dashboard. We do have a lot of filtering where you can filter by tag and by vendor. But that's a very good question. So the way our user operate on MakersHub. Is that they really an AP person would go in and see the star at the first dog and the way of what would make us have a majority of time. It would be right. And if when it you're really your only job hit approve button. You're making sure a right approved button as automatically load the next one. So your job is really not sitting around looking for where to make a mistake but rather you could go in, you could run the bills assign it. We also have a lot of functionality around collaboration where you can loop in project manager or other people into the system and then you approve and it's load the next one. So to my, that's a really good question that we may probably adding some additional kind of colorings or things like that to notify our user. But majority of the time, our users don't really seek out for problems to fix. Hey, I'm sitting at entering bill. That's what my workflow is. And I'm to do it and then approve it. Load the next one. If you make a mistake, I fix it. And then I load the next one. You just notice
Michelle Long:that when you come to that, yeah, I won't let
Phong Ngo:you basically, it could be like, I learned you that. Hey, you can't really approve it until you fix it. And then you did does it. Again, I, show a lot of ability to learn and train and building rules. Not really, not so much on this is what you need to do. It did more on what the system capable of. But what you would do, like your daily life that now being assisted by this, really hardworking computer that won. Complain. Or take day off on you. And then, they try to make you go faster and slowly it gets you faster and faster all the time.
Dan DeLong:Michelle keeps saying that the AI is the intern. So you have an AP intern at your disposal.
Phong Ngo:Yes. Very hard working intern. It won't complain. It's
Dan DeLong:so we're, before we run outta, before we run outta time, I do wanna toss this question over to you. Like the pricing strategy that you have how it differs than others that are out there. You typically, looking at, other ones that are out there is the number of documents or the number of users or the number and then there's a separate. transactional fee. Can you talk a little bit about your strategy as opposed to, how those different aspects fit in here?
Charlie Howe:Thank you for asking the question. Our goal in pricing the software is twofold. First, offer unequivocal value versus the landscape of Alternatives given our set of capabilities, the other is to just be very transparent and consistent. And so what we heard many complaints about as we were starting formative journey of building the company and how we price it. And can we get paid to do this? And that sort of thing was one of the things that was most frustrating, especially to folks in the accounting industry who do value based pricing and other pricing methodologies in terms of pricing their customers with. Hey, I signed up at a price, but that price is never what it actually ends up being at the end of the month. So it becomes very hard to prognosticate my actual usage. So usage based pricing was something that we wanted to avoid. And we decided that we would just price the software as a what is what you get pricing. And what we mean by that is we don't charge by users. In our view, what we're trying to accomplish is to have a very hygienic and consistent AP process. And you shouldn't be carving out somebody who otherwise would be a constructive member of that process simply because you don't want to buy a seat for them. So there's no user pricing. There's also no transaction pricing. Transactions are included in the software. And the goal in this is to say based upon my bill volume, so the only thing that matters is how many bills are you using the system for a month? Based upon my bill volume, let me choose the appropriate tier. And then I'm going to add all of the people at the organization or partners of the organization that should play a role in it. And I'm going to do however many, physical check ACH transactions that I have that and that's what I said.
Dan DeLong:Now, that 1 document that was the PDF that was 90 pages that turned into 24, how would that count? Was that 1 or 24? Or that
Phong Ngo:would be 24. that basically that would be 20 for so the way you think of it is. Every individual bill record that got created in
Dan DeLong:QuickBook. Okay.
Phong Ngo:That's right. Yep.
Dan DeLong:Got it.
Phong Ngo:Yep.
Dan DeLong:And you mentioned that transaction fees are included, if you wanna scroll down a little bit there. Yep. You, two of your service offerings offer same day a CH, so That's correct. The the pestering that I get from other softwares that want me to get my money faster at a fee. Is not a, is not an issue either. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. We
Phong Ngo:work directly with a bank partner where we operate on all five same day ACA windows. So basically, if you authorize a payment before 3 p. m. Eastern time, your vendor get money the same day if they receive ACA.
Charlie Howe:And part of the reason for that is not just a convenience for our users, but one of the things that we heard that surprised us as we were building the company was how bad an experience many other tools are for the vendor, and how much that actually trickles down to the user. So we've put a tremendous amount of thought into how do we make our platform be very positive for the vendor and getting paid quickly is a very important one. Another one is that the vendors don't need any opt in. They don't need a login for our service. They don't need to have any kind of, password or account with us to get paid. And we also do very full and complete reconciliations to the vendors. So we've got tons of customers who, Hey, I pay 10 or 15 bills at a time. I'm capturing some credits. I'm taking some discounts and the vendor appreciates getting paid. But it always results in a phone call because they have no idea what they're being paid for. Every vendor, every time they get paid, gets a very complete reconciliation email, like the one that you see on the screen, of what the payment is and what it was for, hyperlinks back to the original invoices or credits, any discounts that were applied et cetera, et cetera. Saves you the time of getting the inevitable phone call about, thanks for paying, but what is this for?
Michelle Long:So Charlie, does the vendor have the option to set up an account so that they can log in later and self serve if they have any questions or want to look something up about their account?
Charlie Howe:So they don't really need to with this. Of course, a vendor always has an opportunity to become a user. Many vendors have said, this is a wonderful experience for me. I would like to pass this down the line and become, I've got a lot of customers that way, but it obviates the need for that, Michelle, because of the comprehensiveness of what they get automatically. So this. Reconciliation email is giving you all of the otherwise would go in to be searching and looking up on the user side in terms. Go ahead, Dan. Sorry.
Dan DeLong:I know. Phone could you can click on those invoices and that'll actually show the. That's correct. Yep. Yep. That's correct. Yeah. So the vendor.
Phong Ngo:That's right.
No One:There's
Phong Ngo:a band that will never play. Hey, what invoice is this? So like a lot of times you got an AR person and then there was some discount between the sale team. This did eliminate a lot of the question, right? And the
Charlie Howe:equivalent on the user side is, hey, I just want to know where the payment stands. And we have put a ton of care into on the payment details page showing people, hey, give me the entirety of the information about where the payment stands. Who is the vendor? What was the invoice? Who approved the invoice? Separately, who authorized the payments? Those are two separate workflows in our system. And then if it's a two legged transaction, where does the ACH debit stand? When does the, ACH transfer happen? As you can see, these happen simultaneously, complete with ACH trace numbers images of physical checks, images of deposited checks, etc. I know we're only a minute left here, Dan, but
Dan DeLong:Yeah, there was another question I wanted to throw in there. What about international payments? Is it U. S. only, or is it?
Phong Ngo:Yes today, U. S. only, and we can support check payment to Canada and Mexico, and we are rolling out our FX transfer. But today, it's ACH and checks, and we're able to mail check to Mexico and Canada. The majority of their banks can cast a U. S. check with no problem.
Dan DeLong:Michelle, what do you think?
Michelle Long:I am very impressed. I absolutely love it, and I think you guys have done a really great job. I'm very glad I attended today. Awesome. We appreciate your,
Dan DeLong:Your gumption of doing this right after surgery.
Michelle Long:Yeah thank you. And I understand you guys have a certification for accounting partners or something? That's correct. so much.
Charlie Howe:We do. So anyone who's interested in undergoing the maker sub certification, please reach out to Ted. Ted can put his email address in the in the chat. And anybody who, didn't get their questions answered, we apologize. We'll follow up or happy to book time directly with me and or Phong and spend more time on anything that we had to gloss over today.
Ted McRae:And 2, 2 things also, y'all I put the link, I put a link to sign up for your free trial as well. So there, there is a link there in the in the chat. And I'm going to put my email address in right now. If you'd like to do certification, so certification is a 2 hour course. Michelle, it is obviously 2 CPE credits. And we go through everything, like getting started with MakersHub, everything not really basic, because we do go into some advanced stuff. But it's just the basics of getting started, getting set up how the rules really work, because I was comparing bank rules when we when we first started doing the the bank feeds, how do you like, Oh, if it equals this, then do all this stuff. So these are like advanced rules. So we go through a lot of the advanced rules. And the one thing we didn't. Hit on very much is the approval workflows. And so we go through the setting up for the approval workflows. And these are robust approval workflows with makers of. And since you can do unlimited users, that really makes a big difference with these approval workflows, not only for bills, but for bill payments. So we go through that whole thing on the certification as well.
Dan DeLong:Fantastic. And probably have to have you back on to just go through the approval side of things.
No One:Yeah.
Charlie Howe:Thanks again, Dan and Michelle and all of you for for spending an hour with us today. We really appreciate it. Fantastic.
Dan DeLong:Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time on the QB Power Hour. Have a great day, everyone.
Phong Ngo:Thank you.