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welcome to the modern cpa success show where we're 100 focused on helping accounting firms achieve success if you're an accounting firm owner who wants to learn how to provide virtual cfo services then this podcast is for you all right welcome to today's podcast i'm really excited about today's guest it is uh pete potsos and so um he is from build.com and build.com is a company that we've been working with it feels like forever i'm guessing it's one of the really first vendors we got connected to so um this is a podcast that's been a long time coming and excited to really dig into it but before we dig into build.com pete welcome to the show and i'd love to hear a little bit more about your background and kind of how you got to build.com oh wonderful well thank you very much for having me i've been watching some of the past episodes and you guys have been doing a great job so it's an honor to be here and to talk about this and um so uh a little bit about myself i'm a cpa it's a recovering cpa started out in detroit um at cooper's library office and i did some internal audit then i got into sales and then started my i idita.com borders and then i did my own.com and then when everything kind of uh burst and you know com was a four-letter word i i went into the technology accounting space i landed a company called thomson reuters it was creative solutions back then so since 2001 i've been working with accounting firms and i've learned a ton from some of the you know biggest firms you know that have been really necessarily just in that time it was more like not big but firms like you that just knew what they were doing right so it was great to kind of learn from those that got it and then share that with with smaller firms that were just getting going and then um i uh someone told me hey you know so much you should get into your own firm i did that for a moment uh and then got pulled back into the accounting space and i started working with cpa.com and cpa.com this is around 2011 was helping firms get into cloud-based accounting services and using best of breed technology so that you know we were sort of a a reseller if you will of in tax agent now and and bill.com and we're trying to help people get into into the space in the early days adam we've had this conversation before it wasn't so much about selling the technology it was more about making people feel comfortable about being in the cloud and we were like more like cloud psychologists back then yeah us too [Laughter] and um so then um so you know bill.com was sort of like the killer app it was like the like you know when i think back to my accounting classes we learned excel you know and some tools that you needed to be an accountant and uh this i think is a tool that is kind of essential it's like the you know the entry gateway into cloud accounting services and then over the years it's just been [Music] working with um firms that have grown that have been acquired that have acquired other firms i came to work directly for bill.com almost four years ago and um and now i work with some of the larger larger partners here at bill.com what he's saying is he no longer works with us he's reserved for the big dogs so no it's okay we get it we get it we get it it's okay we've been there everybody everybody deserves an upgrade yeah but yeah no it was you know we have known each other for a long time you've been a great resource for us and yeah i remember the days of um we thought we were pretty high-tech whenever we started getting this special ink where we could print our own chat so we would get this big blank stock of checks and we'd print our own checks that way we were never running out we were like oh this is great you go into this like locked filing cabinet there'd be all this stock of client checks what a disaster and potential disaster anyway you got a bunch of checks and then you'd have the electronic signature your client just stamped on the things and uh yeah it was really cool whenever banks allowed you to start aching stuff but it was then it became super inefficient because we were like i mean we got to put it over here and we got and i remember arguing like we had this argument internally people are like this is so much double work like we don't want to do this electronic way because we're just and then when bill.com came out that argument went away we were like look you only have to do it one place it all takes care of it from there that was revolutionary for us yeah yeah and and and that's that was the beauty of it because it really starts with the the transactions and capturing those transactions and why not get it before that even happens right if you can get that bill into the workflow and digitized then that's half the battle that most firms are dealing with you know you're chasing them down for stuff now now you're you're getting it before it's even paid and now you can be a part of the process in making that part of the workflow to make sure it's done properly and then if they're you know super busy and you know they need some help you can create controls where they didn't exist before um and you know because they teach this in accounting you know segregation of duties you've got to have three different people doing everything but that's not the case in most small businesses and you know where you find um you know businesses that get in trouble lose money it's when this one person in the office has been doing everything and then they go on vacation you find out oh you know there's three hundred thousand dollars missing but um yeah i'll tell you one thing that i thought was huge for us too and this was like uber obnoxious we used to have these like tubs for all of our clients all their records right and we were paperless and so paperless used to be kind of a joke because all meant was you had more paper because you just shredded a ton of stuff you know and then you were constantly printing stuff and so it was just like just paper over paper which was kind of obnoxious but it was one of those things too where i remember right before that where we were scanning everything it was always hell trying to find the documents so either people take stuff out of folders and you'd never find it or whenever we started to go paperless people would scan it but then you didn't understand their hierarchy or you know you'd tell them all like do it alpha do it by vendor do it by whatever and then it would get mixed and matched and whenever bill.com came along and we were actually indexing our own documents then even for clients that we weren't doing bill pay for we were like look like this is the way to go you need to do this because now you've got an electronic filing cabinet where you've you've already done the work to index every single one of your things and you can look at it in all these different ways which was amazing yeah you're taking me way back because i've had numerous conversations about the filing structure how to name everything and um yeah now it means just a logical thing that you just sorts with the vendor attaches itself to the the bills you know so you can find it in multiple ways via the the tagging and and and paper clearly is a boat anchor um you know i think now we've we've found out you know with the pandemic the past year that um you know it's been the biggest uh hurdle for a lot of people uh in that you know they'll get calls from their clients saying thank god you put me on to this because if you hadn't if we hadn't listened to you they just shut down our whole office building we can't go into the office building or the mail the postal system with with you know obviously the pandemic but but now with all these deliveries coming and um and then just during the election the slowdown during that time mail is just not getting payments like live checks are not getting opened and deposited or people don't want to go into the office and touch the mail so you know getting rid of the paper is is um you know the first thing you've got to do and throughout the whole thing and it's one of the things that we're trying to do as well is like okay it's in the workflow but like let's get rid of the actual paper check um that's one of our biggest things that that we're we're working on doing um and i can just tell you yeah i was gonna yeah you so i worked um prior to coming to summit i worked for a couple you know fortune 5000 companies billion dollars of revenue and i can tell you like when i made this shift it was amazing to me like how bill.com really has small businesses keeping up with those large companies you know some of the tools that they were using were pretty cool but super expensive and still had a lot of people in there involved in the process and i would look at it and then when i came to summit it was like oh wow this build.com pretty much provides almost everything that these large companies are using for 10 times the cost and it does it for a small business that whatever the size you know so i think that's the big advantage and i think that's something i really noticed from my first day at summit yeah absolutely like it's it's an enabler uh in in it just takes you to a different level and now i mean you talk about the the you know intelligent back office that's in the terminology uh our um our ceo recently started using our it's it's it's the back pocket in you know the office is now in your back pocket and now it's on mobile and you know you can do it anything from anywhere um pandemic aside i mean this thing will this video hopefully will be around beyond this but um but yeah you know now you can do anything anywhere and with everyone's kind of mindset changing i think you'll see more and more of that um where we'll be doing business from from yeah from your back pocket anywhere yeah some of the features that we like to one i like the security aspect of it because like you said getting the paper out of the mix i used to brag about how they get a copy of the bill with it too because whenever we do that we forget to send remittances so they would get that in the paper check but i like now that whenever i go to set up all my vendors they're all invited to put their bank information in but i don't have to deal with their bank information you know what i mean like it's they're doing that and managing so there's a you know there's a security component i'm not transferring that stuff back and forth clients love it because they're getting it um you know the vendors love it because they're you know because they're getting their money faster they get the the all the notifications and then we get to save money because you're saving money not having to print it and touch stuff and so that part of it was slick and then another big feature that helped us out tremendously the world's getting smaller and allowing for international achs not having to deal with just the the that part of the bank website the money management part of bank websites is like uber obnoxious like i mean you know some better than others but you're walking around with kiosks for a kiosk and and then you need a code in six seconds and it's like it is just obnoxious and you got to learn all these new platforms because you can't really mandate a bank to a client because they're in different regions of the country so but by having bill.com from an efficiency standpoint we're all working off of the same platform and i know jamie's a process guy so i know that's near and dear to his heart too yeah it's definitely yeah so control you know in security is like top of mind for for people and um you know we were talking earlier about the largest you know we're like in 80 of the top 100 uh firms i will i would assure you that these firms are constantly making sure that we have the security protocol i mean i had a firm send me a 300 line uh spreadsheet to fill out with all these questions about the security and i kind of laughed i'm like wait a minute you guys did our sock audit you know more about the security why are we doing this and um but you know that's really really essential to people and then uh like you were saying about the vendor um invitations and having them fill in the information we we are doing things now where we were even going to make that even easier for you um you know we're calling it funded invite so like it'll go to the vendor you know they'll get their their notice that say hey there's something coming to you you if you want you can get this electronically you just have to enter your your bank information and then if they do it right away that money will convert into an e-payment and they'll get they'll get it faster rather than uh waiting for the check and so that's something that we're doing the other thing is uh in our intelligent virtual assistant or iva is is where the when the document comes into the inbox it's looking at it and it's looking at you know doing some pre-fill of the information which you've probably seen but it's also looking to see oh it's an international payment um because the ibid number is on here so do you want to use this information um and then and then we're sending and enabling uh international vendors to do that um themselves because they know better how to get paid then you you know how to get paid so why not let them let them do that um so lots lots going on there um yeah the ai yeah the ai component's going to be huge um you know just being able to read it and even if it's not perfect the idea is we turn our people into reviewers instead of data enters you know so then you know so it's already doing the data entry for us and then we can catch the errors we don't need a second layer of people to catch errors which is pretty cool yes yes yes i feel like this is an area where technology just continues to grow like every time i talk to someone like you or i listen to a podcast on it's like oh wow i didn't no that's the direction they're going and it feels like it's constantly moving forward which is really a fun industry to be in i'm sure yeah we were i was just on a call earlier today and we were talking about some new stuff that's coming um and and i i said to him i said well that's great so now the moment you release that they're gonna want it you know even better and bigger and um but yeah it's constantly moving forward and um you you hear all the time so-and-so is thinking about adding payments or this other company added payments and you know people will ask me at a show it's like what do you think about that i'm like okay first of all whenever they announce something it normally takes them three years just to even get it started and then once they do i mean we're already 14 years ahead and really it's not about um you know um just hey you can do it there's so much around it that where i spent a lot of time is is you know um getting people to feel comfortable about it you know when they're when they start um making payments electronically for the first time and they make a mistake who's going to talk to them and what you know talk them off the ledge so you know you hear about companies being efficient like the last thing you want is is to be working with someone who's efficient you want someone that's got you know a person on the other end and um i think about uh if you're from the midwest there's some after the mom the bell breakup ameritech was the company and they had a tagline it says in a world of technology people make the difference and um you know having the people behind it i mean we're we're up to almost uh 400 employees now supporting all of our partners and developing and our the folks that we are engineers the the risk operations people there's so customer success there's a lot of people behind this organization and um so it's not it's just not like oh we're doing this now yeah well you better have a whole bunch of people behind it to make sure that no one's trying to miss you know misdirect that money and and do stuff um so um night and day from where you came from for sure i mean it's uh definitely grown i know you went public and everything so um so who who would be kind of a competitor um not that we're overly promoting them because obviously you're you're our um you know that's definitely the tool of choice for us but i mean what are the other optio s out there for people and why would they want to go with you know bill.com versus some other solution yeah you know so even going back to 2011 um you know one the one of the biggest uh competitors paper like i mean the fact you know that that people are doing it still using paper that's ultimately the the biggest you know challenges is in where i spend most of my time is change management getting people to to think differently and do things differently um there's still people that like want to print the checks and literally someone signs them and i don't know they must like the smell of and so that that's probably number one and then you know there are the you know the early days it was the banks you know and having their bill pay there and um you know in that world actually that you know in many cases now that's that's a bill.com you know is powered by bill.com or or whatever so you might even look at that and say well you know they want to use this or that and um so in that in that area i'm like fine you know if they're going to do that the bit you know if the person at the um that the client is going to do that they're going to use a banking tool you know think about unless there's ways to ahead add extra users and give them specific permissions you know do you really want an employee giving you know having access to your bank account after they just you know asked you for a raise and you said no yeah but even on that in that case where there are extra users and in such there are some of the limitations in that is is the api right and um you might have a tool that you want to feed in on the front end let's say it like a hob dock or or maybe you're using you know something else like earth class mail or whatever you know we have all these these apis have been pre-built and partnerships that feed into the build.com solution in the other cases it's it's kind of locked down and you know for for security reasons on their part so they won't let you you know interface those tools and the other thing is you really want to have control of who you know invisibility into which of your staff are on there and when they when they depart and go to another place or retire or whatever you don't want them to still have access to various accounts and when you're in in various different tools if you've got your staff in there and you don't have a visibility into that that's that's a potential uh exposure for you especially if it didn't if they didn't voluntarily go um you know they might have a grudge and you might you know make sure you know who right is accessing this account so having a console and being able to see where everyone is um is is important and and then and then an audit trail there are other solutions out there um you know that are inside the intuit platform now we were there at one point but um you know and there's some solutions out there that are free that are kind of throwing on an extra little you know like oh we're doing bill payne now and um you know it's fine i mean it it if it were just about moving money um it's not you know we really have three things that we do and that's it's the inbox and being able to capture the information and having a single place for all that information the workflow having the different appropriate people and the approvals the controls the security the permissioning the approval types the policies all of that and then um and then it's the payment and then the different security around that um but it's not you know you know when someone says hey we're doing this for free now um there's nothing ever for free right and i used to sell payroll which might not payroll well i did but tax software and there was a company that had all you can eat you pay one price you get every tax you know form possible well okay um they might do electronic refunds really really good you know and that's like their bread and butter but like when you need an oklahoma 1041 this you know return and you want to make sure it's right because this is like a million dollar client of yours you know you you need that thing to be right and when people are just bundling stuff in or throwing it in there's no real attention to that um you know so that that that's some of the the challenges there where you're using it as a loss leader just to grow business elsewhere um you know we find that to be true in almost all software we talk about it all the time it's more it's better to be best in breed everybody's looking for that one software that'll do everything from a to z and exactly what you said they're really good at one aspect of it it's where they spend all their r d time everything and they're like oh yeah and i need an accounting platform so they just start adding stuff on right without really you know comparing themselves so you know of course they're not going to be an into it you know because like quickbooks has been mastering that for years just like you all focus on bill.com which is kind of you know just a quick pivot we also use bill.com for invoicing for some clients as well can you talk a little bit about how that like like how that evolved or how that works yeah so there's you know in a business network there's there's always two sides to a transaction you've got the accounts payable and then you got on the other and the receivables right so just the natural connections that are happening um we were talking about mybill.com swag i'm always wearing a build.com you know logo and um i remember i think when i first started we were golfing uh like a sales kick off and some guy hit it onto our side of the fairway and you saw the bill.com stuff and like oh i get paid with bill.com in the airports um you know lounges i see people you know even back here where i live in michigan you know they're people starting to you know on the shuttle to the airport um so so when when you pay and you do it electronically that person on the other again and gets a free bill.com receivables account um so they can you know take their payments in and if they decide that they want to pay bills and they can you know upgrade their account and start paying bills as well well too but even for like someone that um is using bill.com they now want to do accounts receivable as well um well you know you can do that a million ways different companies offer that but what works really nice with us is that we have the ability to um set up recurring invoices especially if you've got a fixed fee arrangement it's just set it forget it and then um it'll invoice them it'll go the method that they want um we mail statements out too uh so there's some people that just like to get that annual dues like i haven't gotten my statement from my homeowners association here yet so like now i gotta go log in and figure that out but like had it come in paper i probably would have paid it already yeah yeah but we just switched companies uh so i i am i do believe in not you know no paper but sometimes it's a good reminder um and then so we do that but then we can do an automatic um pull of the funds so you know it just it's we call it auto pay so the money just comes in and you don't have to trigger anything you just you just you you did a setting that say i want to get paid within three days of the due date and it just happens so that's that's that's where that's that's at and just a easy way to do that stuff yeah i think the interesting thing that i've seen from from our clients with build.com is you know i've been through a lot of onboardings here and a lot of times you know we we recommend different softwares and i think build.com is the one that i've never really heard push back on either whether it was in the initial stages or like okay we're taking over your ap we're moving to build.com and you guys don't have a choice like that's the way we're going to do it if we're taking over your ap or whether a client isn't even using us for that service and we kind of do a process documentation we're like what you guys are doing is completely inefficient here's how you should be doing it using bill.com and so i think you guys definitely have that edge in the processes you've set up and the way things work is it's really user friendly and we've been able to walk our clients through that pretty easily so just real quick here i want to throw our email address out there so that our listeners can reach out to us and also reach out to you pete if they need to you want their email address out after this but real quick our email address is cpa at summit cpa.net again cpa at s-u-m-m-i-t cpa.net so um a couple minutes left here p kind of give you um final thoughts and also how people reach out to you yeah um well first of all thank you very much it's been great to be here and be part of the guest lineup that you've been pulling together i'm really honored and appreciate that i've known um jody and adam for a long time glad to meet you as well jamie and i would say that right now you have an opportunity to uh digitally transform your your clients uh life we've all been impacted um i don't think anything's really going to change um they're going to want to see things and tools that make them work more you know efficiently and effectively and you know having something like build.com is is kind of one of the first things you can do to make their life better and it's not just about providing financial information you want you know at the end of the day they just want to you know pay as few taxes as possible they want to spend more time with their kids and they want more money in the bank and you know and if you can make that you know reduce the friction and get rid of paper that's like one of the first things you can do to make their lives better and help them realize one of those three things above and as far as getting hold of me i think the easiest thing is as i'm i'm on twitter it's uh pete pazzo's pot sos cpa is my twitter handle um or i'm on linkedin as well too and you can connect me with me there and then you'll get right into my my email here at builder.com but i'd love to hear from people on twitter and we'll be tweeting about this up you know this conversation too so we'll look for you there great well yeah i definitely appreciate your time and adam any uh final thoughts like i said i know bill.com was well established before i even started at summit i think that was five years ago now so um any other thoughts on bill.com and what our listeners should know yeah it's just a no-brainer i mean if you're looking for best in breed it's it's the it's the one and only out there for this kind of a service it brings a lot of legitimacy to your organization and what you do um security all that kind of stuff bundled in one so again if you're looking for best of breed to make your life easy and your clients life easier there's really no other choice bill.com is is what we've used for years and we'll continue to use so we appreciate that awesome well thanks again pete and adam this is a great podcast look forward to listening to what's out there thank you all right thank you enjoy this episode visit our website at summitcpa.net to get more tips and strategies for achieving modern cpa firm success we're here to be a resource in this ever-changing industry [Music] you