Efficient Sales operations automation for accounting

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awesome so today we're going to be talking about quoting and billing process automation connect booster is one of our integration partners that focuses on billing Automation and the match between the benefits systems that quota has in place are quoting a proposal software covered today we are going to be talking about what quoting and billing crisis automation looks like who the stakeholders are that are involved and what key Parts can be shared across the people that are creating the quote to the End customer that is checking out right through to the bookkeeper or the administration side and then we'll talk about why connect booster we'll get into a live demo and and then we'll talk about ways you can get started with some time for some q a at the end automation is an area of continuous Pursuit as technology always changes and improves the changes and those that a business can adopt is constantly evolving and within the billing and quoting process there are key areas that you know we want to eliminate bottlenecks uh prevent any kind of manual tasks and repetitive tasks from inquiry to Service delivery so in this graphic here on the West Side we've got inquiry and we want to shorten that path and let teams work more in synchronously one of the key changes that we've seen too with hybrid and remote work is that teams um work a lot more collaboratively and we see that there are different parts of the sales process that can be distributed across different people in an organization so with quota quotes are published based on inquiry and if you've got a integration with uh QuickBooks online or xero that would submit uh estimate to those accounting software tools and then from there once a quote is accepted an invoice is created and right through to payment uh and the payment part is where connect booster and their payment processor EMG gets involved and then once that payment is made on the customer side the transaction is applied to the invoice in your accounting tool and then the cooperation is sent to the customer I think one thing to highlight here too Scott is is really just the MSP space uh specifically has a lot of recurring Revenue right I mean a big problem they have is making sure that all of their customers are set up with automated billing it's streamlined it's easy for them as an End customer to go in and put in their payment information ideally it's saved there so that if they get a one-off invoice for some Hardware or something down the road it's easier for them to quickly make that payment but also the recurring Services I mean pretty well uh probably a lot of people a lot of msps on this call are are dealing with I don't know a monthly basis and most of them may have an automated solution already but some may not and so when you really look at the number of cust and customers you're trying to service and that routine task of billing each month automating on the payment step is is a really uh sort of critical part of this process right yeah thanks Ash that's a good point like maybe should though mention that we we have a wide variety dozens of Integrations that we're not showing on this charge so there's many other pieces of this process that you can automate that we're not speaking to but we'd be happy to in the Q a if there are any questions about specific aspects of this process we've also really sort of uh boiled the process down to a few key steps and it might actually look more fragmented here than in reality often a quote is accepted and payment is taken really in a few seconds um in the same same part of the flow and obviously everything on the top of that is is automated um so yeah just a few extra points there yeah yeah this is a very distilled version here it's kind of like one part of the iceberg you could say um but yeah with that I think we could probably uh move on to whatever's part here you got it thanks Scott so as Scott mentioned there and called out connect booster and our BNG payments arm are an integral part of that customer code acceptance payment uh and Reconciliation process there but we are not their only payments integration so why are we on the call right why connect booster what is it about connect booster what do we bring to the table that makes the relationship that much better and you can see there's a few different things here Ash mentioned it as well the ability to save and recall payments for future use so when customers are coming or returning to a quote for the next thing that they need to purchase or do they don't necessarily have to re-enter their preferred form of payment that's absolutely a value-add the ability to accept payment be via both credit card and bank account ACH based payments is another value add that maybe isn't there on all the other payments uh Solutions available and some extra things that tie in for our clients that are users or Mutual users of coder and the connect booster payments portal solution is that any of those save payment methods that initiate through that quote acceptance and payment and quota are then stored to a common resource a repository that allows them to be pulled up into the connect booster portal which then further allows your customer to log into that portal you know a week later for their regular invoice and pay that regular invoice or have that forward payment on file to be used with things like empowering your your cash flow process around those recurring payments that connect booster really focuses on and does well helping you to assure that let's get this customer this new new client for example MSP client into into the fold here and let's set expectations from the beginning let's collect that form of payment let's get them enrolled for automatic payment and that way I'll never chase that customer's cash right from that time forward that our customers that take after those approaches and really look holistically at how they can use the tools they've invested with their business to the greatest greatest extent are the ones that are really taking advantage of sort of that aspect of the mutual relationship here between connecting student quote awesome thanks brother I do see we have some questions coming in in the Q a shot that's great we'll address those in just a few seconds here we'll quickly show you guys what this looks like from Bose the MSP standpoint we'll just walk you through really quickly what it looks like in Quota to create a quote most of you may have already seen this but uh hopefully there's a few who haven't and then I'll walk you through the End customer experience as well okay hopefully everybody can see my screen and what we're looking at here is a is a demo account we use just going to minimize participants so I can actually see what I'm doing and yeah this is basically your your quotes list quotes index uh I'll just quickly jump into one of the quotes here and edit this quote so you can get a quick sense of our interface I'm not going to speak to every piece it's a functionality here but if anybody does have questions please reach out either in the Q a or after the call I'd be happy to set up a quick demo with you or hand you off to our sales team and ease if that's a preferred approach but in a quote you can modify details that come through from a quote template so generally we advise that you set up everything you need in a quote template and then only make slight modifications for each quote cover page cover letter those all come through from the template you've got uh prepared for here now normally in a brand new quote what you'd see is the ability to search people from any of your Integrations connect to eyes Auto task I'm spot Synchro I drive there's a number of other Integrations as well where you can very quickly and easily pull in people from I probably should have shown you that but again I can show you that after if you'd like um and then moving down to our line items so again just a very sort of standard quote here with some basic line items highlighting the fact that we've got sort of Custom Tool tips on specific items if you do need to provide any unique information on that item to your sales people on forming them of policies or procedures they should be following very easy to set up items to be optional default selected edible quantity or toggle recurrence but again that can be said at the template level and then I'm just going to scroll down to the bottom here and quickly highlight that this because it is an existing quote we have an item here that came through Ingram Micro we do let you know if another distributor has a lower price if you're modifying a quote we do a real-time check to the Distributors through our product Cloud feature and inform you if the stock has changed or the item again is cheap for a different distributor or if I think even if it's cheaper at this distributor and you can quickly jump into product Cloud there and review that specific npn against any of your integrated Distributors so just a quick thing to highlight there then you can also jump in and add in touch bands um to this quote you can check on shipping and taxes which we can automate as add comments appended content which shows after the quote section and then acceptance and payments as well so a lot of on the Fly configuration you can do here but again you generally don't need to do any of that I quickly published a quote and then walk you through the End customer experience as well so most recent published quotes show up at the top this one's already at the top but uh just to quickly highlight that and I'll jump into webview here so now we're looking at the quote that the End customer would receive and they can view this as a PDF or they can view this in the webview at this URL and yeah so all this content is just coming through from the templates um obviously it's completely customizable to your needs and then we're down to the quote section here so we have the line items that we were looking at there monitor coming through from Ingram Micro and if we click accept the quote we will see the connect booster option here now in most cases the MSP would have only one payment Gateway configured in which case you wouldn't have these two options in this demo account we have I believe stripe configured as well but connect booster is really what we want to to focus on here with the advantages that Trevor brought to light so I'll just quickly scroll down agree to the acceptance terms type in my names and continue to payment and so here we have the connect booster information that they're displaying from the vaults payment details from BNG and so you can see it very easily we default the individual to their saved payment methods credit card is showing here but bank account can be saved here as well and you can have multiple on file and you can see it very quick and easy just to type in the last four digits confirmly expire and use the card we're highlighting how much you're needing to pay now versus recurring we're also um via connect booster allowing them to obviously enter a new credit card or a new bank details as well so yeah that was the extent of what I was wanting to show but please uh jump in with any questions into the Q a and I'll be happy to address those in the next segment here thanks Ash and just to add to that too after that payment is made the End customer would get a copy of the proposal or quote as well as a payment confirmation and just really by connecting them like we're just looking to streamline the process right we we store that information we make it easy everything is there um and just like a little bit better you know End customer experience too and not only in the clothing side obviously with what you guys are doing but with what we're doing on the payment side as well yeah it's a good reminder Taylor hey so much of a user experience these days I mean there's so many different tools out there that can solve a problem but at the end of The Daily we want the End customer to have the best experience they can and I feel like uh quota has a huge emphasis on that connect booster has a huge emphasis on that so together we really do help that and customer have a great purchase experience right um they go in hand in hand so nicely too which which is just really nice so we do have a mix of attendees watching this right now if you are an existing user um you can contact our support uh or contact myself or Ash after the call and we can connect you with someone directly there and um our support is free for our partners you can facilitate that uh integration and configure it through our support or we do have self-configuration with the cook steps at the knowledge base article below so that will be shared uh in the recorded session or just head to help.quilder.com and search for connect booster I didn't show the integration settings page but it's really really easy to set up and really easy to use and you can toggle if you want to capture credit card or ACH or both um you can also choose which credit cards you want to process so you've got quite a lot of flexibility there to you know set it up and and get it running really quickly and easily and also leverage that flexibility too as you can say my contact information is also there so if you guys have questions about connect booster just want to be pointed in the right direction I'm a good middle man that can at least help you guys find the answers if you want to see the product um itself right we didn't show the connect with your product but what does that look like and how does that look like in our own portal we can do that um as well and show how quarter fits in that too so great and with that we can open the floor to some q a and just hopping in there now to feel them a bit we did answer this one earlier but yeah we only do integrate with QuickBooks Online not desktop um and and that's on the quarter side um connect booster we do integrate with desktop online Sage Trevor I'm probably missing a ton The Rundown in terms of accounting Integrations on the connect booster portal side to QuickBooks desktop QuickBooks Online zero those two of which we saw in the previous slide as well as Sage intact Microsoft Dynamics Great Planes and Dynamics business Central solution working on more yeah I mean well we hear a lot of the time is msps are wanting to have their data flow through to the PSA and then leverage that back to uh you know something like connect booster so you may not really need the integration from quota directly but having that integration with connect booster could be it could be all you need to your accounting system Miguel is asking does connect booster do automatic monthly subscriptions so I'm not quite sure the context uh by which is referring to monthly subscription but we absolutely helped to facilitate the payments acceptance and Reconciliation for recurring Services recurring service invoices specifically so in our uh way of looking at things nothing's real until it's invoiced into your accounting solution how it gets there is up to you up each individual company in their and their solution back so for many of our msps uh that would start their invoicing process and start within their PSA solution uh connect wise that's not data auto task started an agreement or contract over there generated an invoice into their accounting package books online for example connect booster sees both versions of that invoice and then we have very powerful and flexible automatic payment rules that allow you to set up and meet your customer where they're comfortable to get enrolled in automatic payment building things like review periods just in case something changed and you know help you address some of the concern that's where connect booster really shines payments then collected accepted recorded back to that accounting solution so you save time and you're in your internal processes and aren't spending a lot of time doing Simple data entry and bookkeeping that's one of our value ads and the money shows up in your bank account a couple days later so hopefully that helped out today yeah yeah I think so thanks Trevor I've got two questions here can the invoice that gets created automatically in QuickBooks be synced to connectwise as well um well what we do maybe that's a question really between uh QuickBooks and connectable eyes um but we certainly push the data to connect wise so a number of steps along the process and it's quite configurable as well so when a quote gets published we create the opportunity in connectwise or allow you to do opportunity selectors so if you use person search you found somebody existing in connectwise that you want to create a quote for we will show you any open opportunities for that individual and then you're not creating a brand new opportunity and connectwise you're simply going to be updating that opportunity with the details from the quote as well as PDF of the quote and line item details and everything else we do have a video on that so feel free to take a look at our integration series on YouTube there's one that goes through that process but yes essentially what we'll do is on publish we create the opportunity or update the existing opportunity when it gets accepted we will also update the opportunity so yeah basically there is data transfer to the opportunity connectwise as well as to the invoice in QuickBooks now between those two we could have a different demo or different uh session to talk through what it might look like in between the two systems we don't directly push an invoice to connect wise so that would have to come from QuickBooks okay yeah thanks to that Ash um next up we have a question around how cash discounting Works trying to combo a question here Rick is asking do you support a quote that offers a credit card that is Cash discount based adding fees to use a cc if they choose that payment method versus say ACH it sounds to me like the question being asked is can we have a like a surcharge added if they're paying my credit card perhaps um sorry just to kind of cut in there just a hair for your Ashes to the conversation I've had a lot cash discount convenience being surcharge in the broad context uh they result in the same thing and people use them interchangeably uh though in the United States cash discounted and four MSP Partners is the best methodology it has the least regulation and it achieves the best uh end so it is they are equivalent in their effect they're different in the uh kind of the ropes that are tied around them so cash discount but you're right saying the quotes for a thousand dollars but it reflects a three percent cash discount by choosing to pay with a credit card you're forfeiting the total payment amount for this quote what about 30. is what he's asking is there's a feature functionality like that with it uh yeah thanks forever so there's certainly discounting functionality you could add a discount to you know the line items or all the quotas as a whole um wouldn't that be automated at the sort of checkout stage or when they're deciding how they're going to pay no so you wouldn't need to sort of determine that up front to go with the discount approach we have had feature requests for adding a credit card surcharge uh it's not in our near-term roadmap but if that's something that's really interesting to you and will be highly beneficial please do reach out after the call let me know we're constantly evaluating our roadmap and feature priority list to service the MSP community so we always want to know um you know what's the most important to you guys Angela asked I saw the connect booster logo on the payment option are we able to replace it with our own painting Corner logo and while connect booster and Visa those logos Architects um there are three different checkout steps and there's a logo at the very top in the demo there Verizon MSP was like our demo account that can be swapped out to your business logo so your end customer or client can see a branded experience at checkout yeah we do trigger emails both on quote acceptance and on order so you don't you know depending on your workflow if you want to uh take payment as part of the the End customer experience that's great um if you don't and you just want to have them accept the quote and then you know maybe you're going in and and or I mean as Trevor came up the other day you could do a very small payment just to capture that credit card information and then be going into connect booster to manage the account that way that could be your approach but what I was going to say is you can customize those emails as well so if you want to have a different branded experience after the fact you can certainly do that right well those were all the questions that we had there in the chat uh thanks to everyone who submitted a question and as a reminder as well feel free to contact myself or Taylor after this recording um this session is recorded and will be published so you can look out for that either on the connect booster newsletter or on our YouTube channel um hopefully within the next week but um feel free to subscribe to our newsletter if you haven't yet as well and you can be notified there thanks for having us on Scott yeah thanks everyone for joining yeah awesome okay that's all no thanks guys we'll see in the next one