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Add eSignature Dental Supply Order Invoice

okay so without any further ado i think uh we'll get started here if anybody from your organization you want to send this information to or joins later on and misses the first half of this we are recording this session so uh after we're done here today we'll post that up on both our respective websites on binary streaming and fidesic and uh you'll probably get an email from us too letting you know this information so um thanks first off thanks for taking the time out of your day to learn a little bit more about how we can help out with ap automation and join our panel here today to uh discuss the automation directly with uh our panelist here today sarah sawyer of mb2 dental so first off thanks binary stream for hosting and a big thanks to sarah for joining us here today really what we're going to be talking about is the types of things that we're all encountering currently given the current situation where we're all sort of working remotely working in a different environment than we're used to it's a challenge that a lot of companies are facing and mb2 is facing this challenge while they're also growing at a rapid rate so i think they're able to shed some insight on exactly how that process has been going just some housekeeping type things we have questions built into go to webinar here so if you have any specific questions put them in the chat we will be addressing those questions at the end if we've got some time and i think we will so if anything comes up if you have any questions throughout the process definitely put those in the chat and we'll get to them at the end there are also some handouts at the end uh or attached to the webinar screen as well so there's a couple documents there that you can take with you and again all of this will be recorded so uh definitely check out the video of this once we're all set here so uh to get things started uh just quick overview of what we're going to be doing here today we're in the intro right now the vast majority of what we're going to be doing is this panel discussion that's where we're going to be chatting with sarah directly kind of figuring out uh the problems that they faced as a growing organization with ap automation specifically uh one that is spread across multiple entities and doing so while we're all sort of on shutdown here um and then just quick at the end we'll be doing the multi-entity management overview uh justin from uh binary stream will be taking us through that and we'll be doing a quick fight etiquette overview and then we'll have time for qa at the very end here but again the vast majority is just going to be our discussion here with sarah so to get things started um my name is kevin prichard i'm the product manager over at fidesic which is kind of a cool unique position for me to be in because one i can kind of work with clients directly and get information on what their use case is and how things operate and then b directly turn that into our product type decisions and that allows us to really be product focused here and um we also our main panelist here is sarah sawyer who is the controller at mb2 dental uh sarah has been the controller at mb2 for i think about eight years at least according to your linkedin sarah so you've been there uh throughout this entire growth process does that sound about right oh yeah oh yes from the beginning okay cool so uh yeah sarah's been involved throughout the whole process i had the privilege of working with sarah during our onboarding of fight essec um so it was great to work with her and happy that she was able to join us and then we've got justin uh with uh binary stream and justin i don't know if you want to give yourself a little intro at this time as well but uh feel free today yeah thanks kevin so justin mccool i'm one of the partner account managers here at binary stream um mbt dental and sarah and the group have been a mem customer with us for quite some time in fact um so really looking forward to presenting you know obviously getting feedback from sarah kind of providing the audience here with a you know just a high level overview of what mem is and how it can help organizations um like mb2 or many others uh with managing entities and much of what they're doing today so thanks kev here to prep joseph um so justin and i will be kind of alternating uh based on what the questions we have at hand kind of driving the discussion here with sarah so um to give you a little background on mb2 uh they are based in carleton texas uh and you've got locations spread over about 20 different states and uh forgive any of the information on this slide sir i know you guys are adding things uh really as we go i believe you've added about 40 more practices since uh i've started working with you about six months ago so uh that lines up right with the 5000 fastest growing private companies in america and looks like you're 53 is that still accurate for the year yes and we're adding more by the day yeah it does seem that way uh not an exaggeration more by the day it's a pretty cool business model um sarah you might be able to speak to it more than i can but uh i actually when i was in college i worked for like a dental delivery service so i do know the dental world just a little bit and it seems like uh you know a lot of dentists don't necessarily want to be small business owners they want to be dentists and i feel like you guys are sort of the bridge to help them focus on their patients and focus on care without having to uh you know deal with accounts payable automation right is that is that a fair assumption pretty much yeah we do all the back office stuff so that so the doctor owner can do what they want in practice dentistry okay cool um and originally you guys uh we're on quickbooks as nearly every company starting out is and we're using build.com for ap automation um was that your first erp system that you guys had or i guess i use the two erp loosely is that your first accounting system that you guys were using or did you have something else that you're using before that even no that was the first one we used was quickbooks when we when we started out with about 20 entities gotcha okay cool anything else you'd like to add about your company specifically sir you know i mean we're just we're growing and you know when you grow and in your growth mode you know a lot of time you're in panic mode and so it's it's trying to get everything correct and and bill's paid on time and you know fidessa came in and really helped us on that cool yeah that is definitely where i think it's a spot that i'm sure binary stream finds themselves into is when companies are growing it shines a light on all the sort of things that you were able to ignore for a little while and i feel like ap their accounts payable is definitely on that list for a lot of companies it's easy to ignore until it's until it's not right so we'll kick things off here um like i said majority of this will be the discussion um we're gonna start off kind of with how things used to operate just you know provide some context on that and hopefully some of the people on here today in attendance will see themselves and see some of the struggles that they have initially and then we can kind of talk about what we did there so with this uh original setup that you guys had in a world before multi-entity and before fight essec what what was the struggle what was causing you guys the biggest problems what were the challenges that you guys faced directly you know the biggest issue with our growth and how fast we were growing and trying to keep up with the growth and and what you know system is going to be will work with our growth and you know we found that quickbooks only will go so far and before you break it literally um and and you guys have that set up with uh individual was each entity its own company in quickbooks was that the way that you had it set up yes each entity was its own company and running a report across 80 entities at the time it would freeze and crash and and you know the the other way that that worked is that with bill.com is we had to go sync everything individually to each company instead of doing one large thing so we faced a lot of time doing things in slowness especially training people and quickbooks is fairly easy but when you're adding other technology into it you know that's when you start getting a little more complicated yeah yeah you mentioned when during the initial uh install i remember we were talking about some things and you had mentioned that you guys are the ones who are constantly stress testing everybody's software and breaking everything because it was always more volume than anybody else thought that they you could process through pretty much we've um i don't think anybody has seen quite like our how we're set up you know where every company is still an individual tax id but we need group accounts because we're so large now and so it makes it difficult when you have individual tax ids to do a group account under one company because you know it's either under that one company or it's under each individual tax id so it takes it takes some finagling with vendors to to get everything to work together yeah either 80 ap accountants or one it's sort of balancing between those right exactly if you want to chime in uh yeah no thanks kev so hey sarah when you think about the implementation process with the with the previous system right where we're talking quickbooks and bill.com what was the implementation process ultimately and what issues did you face when you're kind of implementing that you know erp for lack of a better description and bill.com associated to that well you know with bill.com every time we added an entity we had to individually go in and create an entity set up a set up an individual bank account in there um and then test it and so you know when you when you're having to do that and then you you you add 20 entities a month it's a lot it's a lot it's a lot of individual stuff to go in and set up and so sometimes things got missed especially when you're doing manual stuff you keep making the wrong bank account by accident or just so it doesn't work um and and so you know a lot of the issues are volume based because you're doing so fast and you can't get it to sync and then you have to troubleshoot and you know wait for someone on chat they got to get they got to know us very well on their chat function that's great that's great thanks sir great great answer did they did they get to know you or were you getting different people every time that's the real question right yeah exactly right it was interesting because they um they actually changed their model in the middle of us with them and so before i actually had talked all the way up to probably one of the senior vice presidents and then after it was just on chat with people that you couldn't actually call them anymore oh that's always yeah always makes things very interesting for sure ouch yeah probably because we called him too much yeah you're blacklisted at that point right yeah exactly that's funny thanks sir cool so um what was i guess i don't know about the final straw but what was the thing that prompted you guys to realize this was never gonna work again or you had to come up with some sort of solution what was the situation that pushed you over the edge and decided to kind of start looking fresh on how to solve all this well you know there are a couple things one it was getting expensive um they were raising their prices you had to pay a fee for each account and then you had to pay for each user um in the account and then once you got past so many users and and it wasn't that we could add one user for all accounts we actually had to pay for individual user in each account and so obviously if i'm on every account we had to pay for me on every account in build.com so you know that that got to be monotonous especially if um an owner wanted to be on there too so then we had we added them and so the costs kept rising and you know the other thing is that quickbooks just could not handle what we were what we were doing we would run reports and it would take three hours just to run through all the files and then run back and then and that's if it didn't error out in the middle um so there were some very late nights of working with quickbooks and if not playing nicely with others and so you know we got to the point of you know we're a big company now this is we're not 20 offices anymore this is not going to work we need something that's more robust and will actually um you know house this many companies because of how large we are and do it in one system and not have to have a separate file for each company gotcha and uh sort of expanding on that was there any intermediate step i know you guys decided to move into microsoft dynamics but um did you guys know mem was the solution for you out of the gate at that point or did you try sort of stock gp and kind of go from there and figure out that's where we had a really great gp consultant um we actually were in attendance by the way i saw them on the registration list um yeah i think they're here yeah the anchor group love them um we actually met with two separate consultants and you know the first consultant all you could tell he was a salesman he didn't know the system he couldn't answer the questions and and then we met with with brad at the anchor group and like he could we asked questions he could answer them he could tell us about the system he could he took notes of what we needed and then he suggested what we needed and mem was one of them just because of how large we were and the way that we were set up and so we started out with them because it you know it just it made sense to do it and you know they've been with us this whole time and you know literally they still there sometimes they still hold their hand because you know we need help we break things we we break things very easily um and so it's been really nice working with them because all of their consultants are really really friendly and helpful um to get everything done that we need done that's great i think sir um yeah i can't imagine trying to manage 52 entities or companies within gp today without men that would be quite uh quite a task um so hey when you look at kind of where you are today with respect to fidesic and mem um how does it compare to the previous system if you think back i'm you know you've kind of mentioned some of it but if you could elaborate a little bit more yeah absolutely you know honestly there's really no comparison you know fidestic and men has literally brought us into the 21st century we um you know back on quickbooks and bill.com it took time it took a lot of time to get things and with them and fidessic it's fast it saves it saves time we're actually able to focus more on on researching ap processing our invoices we do about ten thousand to twelve thousand invoices a month across all entities and you know with with fidesic and then it's been you know it's been much smoother it's easier to research um it's easier to pay you know we're not having to print out checks and send 10 000 checks out a month so that's great and and i i mean and as you know before i even mention that i mean we're more comfortable with the group for essec and ap automation and you know i think it's pretty seamless with respect to the uh the flow of information back and forth through both products i would assume is that correct absolutely and they both talk to each other if there's a problem we just reach out to pedestric or men and you know and problems are solved within a timely manner and and most of our problems are really small you know there's something somebody's keyed in something wrong and we just don't know how to fix it and kevin's always very responsive or you know i tell my people go to chat ask the people in the chat and they're always real responsive i think they're getting to know us really well too that's great yeah you guys you guys are known around here so that's great thanks sir um so this kind of follows along on the last one too which is basically what are the what are the main benefits that you would say obviously you have talked about it you know connecting not having to deal with the issues that were associated with the other setup that you had but what's uh what are you using what's like the benefit of it aside from uh you know it actually working yeah you know one of the great things is we just we just got all of our ach ids up and running and it's nice to be able to know that we can get payments to our vendors faster and and i know gp has a function where you can where you can pull it out and send it up but with fidestic they do it for you and especially the checks and stuff so you don't have to print your own checks and you know it's it's faster it's cleaner you can go check things if you need to look at an invoice from within gp you just copy the link and put it in a browser and it opens up so you know that's great for especially if someone's looking for something and they don't want to have to go into the fidestic system they can look from their gp um we can also load if we pay stuff outside of the desk we can load that into the desktop to mark those invoices as paid and you know that's a really easy process you know a lot and and uploading stuff um in groups especially because we're adding companies all the time instead of having the key in an invoice or a key in a new entity one by one we can upload it with that with the function they have so well thank you so when you think about oh how can i when you think about the changes that you had to adapt to with gp and with uh you know obviously using fidesic on the ap automation and mem you know what did you kind of ultimately have to adapt to you know from a changes perspective yeah absolutely we you know a lot of it is you know some of the ocr we've never really worked with ocr before um and and learning that and learning that okay just because it's going to go through ocr does not mean you still have to check the invoice you know because you didn't see it in yourself so you know making sure you're reviewing your invoices um we did you know one of the things we did learn you can only import so many invoices at once i think we had one employee tried to import 150 at once and we're like yeah that's not going to work so they gave those the recommended number so but you know it and and doing in batches instead of just posting directly you know that that's something my team has had to get used to but you know for us that's a good thing because if it errors out then it makes them go and check it so yeah like that yeah no that's great yeah i know change is always an interesting topic right because there's it's just almost an adjustment at the end of the day but that's great thanks for that great answer um so along that same sort of vein uh what we're so like how did the day-to-day operations and the reporting side of this affected so you kind of talked about the day-to-day but uh i'm sure mem has some great benefits for you on the reporting side of this so i'm curious to get more info on how things have changed and you know this is your perspective too as a controller like do you actually feel like you have better visibility now what can you see uh what do you wish you could see kind of just elaborate on the visibility and reporting side of it i suppose yeah absolutely and you know kind of just retouch on the day-to-day we're not sending we're not stuffing 10 000 checks a day anymore so that's always nice and and that's a big change but as far as reporting the great thing about men is that you can look at all your companies in one like smart list or one list or one report and then you can dig down into that if you see something that doesn't look right and especially if i'm looking for an invoice that i think i know that we've received but somehow wasn't posted in the correct entity i can now look across all entities and see where that invoice is and i can do a search and and so that's really nice that to be able to do that and to be able to have the visibility into looking at a ton of things at once you know i can put an account number in there uh our gl account number and pull up everything for that account number for however time period i want and see you know did someone book this invoice twice and you know because yeah you can you can if fidessic has a thing where it says okay this this is a duplicate invoice but people have learned to get around that you know if you put an asterisk on the end or something you know so we we've had to learn to to to review on some of these to make sure because we have seen some duplicate invoices come across but you know that's on our end of making sure our people are trained to do the right thing and not not bypass that yeah understood that's great that's good to hear well thanks so hey sir when you talked about multi-entity management and kind of where you heard of it and the group at anchor who we work with closely and are great um and they kind of brought uh multi-entity kind of your attention um but maybe if you can just talk about how you discovered both for essec and multi-entity or fidestic specifically that'd be great yeah absolutely so we started out um you know we were getting tired of printing ten thousand checks and stuff in them a month um and so you know me and my director of accounting we were we were discussing okay we need to find another solution for ap this is this is ridiculous it's taking all day you know it it's too long and so we reached out to a couple vendors that we thought could help and you know we reached out to a vendor mineral tree and you know the first question they ask is do you have men and our answer is yes they're like we're sorry um we don't integrate with men but um there is a new company that's come come around and and their names um fidessic and here's you know here's kevin pretzel here's his email go talk to him and he can help you and so you know you don't usually see another vendor giving another vendor's name out so that's that's amazing first of all to have a um a recommendation from another vendor and so we you know we connected with kevin we had a lot of meetings especially right when coveted started we were having tons of meetings and going over and i think kevin knows we pretty much asked every question underneath the side and this is all under the timeline of the world steadily falling off a cliff as well we were talking about all this too much yeah and because our world was falling apart with you know printing checks and we were like we can't keep doing this we need a better solution you know not only is it costing us money to print and send these checks but it's also costing us manpower that could be used for reviewing and and just tightening up our processes and so once we discussed with kevin we had a few months we you know we took about a month off because of code and we had you know where everybody was in crisis mode then you know once we came back we you know our cfo was like hey let's get this going and so that's when i reached back out to kevin and said all right let's go let's do some groups and you know let's let's get it up and running and i think we had pretty much everything up and running by the middle of july uh with the exception i don't recall were you guys just looking for check processing out of the gate and then saw everything else or was everything else on the uh like um list of things to do as well everything else as well something that integrated with you know with them and into gp and could still go out and do check processing as well it was kind of one stop shop which is great um because we want you know we want our our director of operations out in the field we want them to be able to look up their invoices they get a p l every month um that lists the invoice in there and if they have a question we want them to be able to go and look at it so that they're not emailing us 20 million questions and and so this is nice we actually just went uh have tested with uh one of the do's started testing and she loves it you know she i gave her access to view her company and i didn't even give her any training she just figured out how to look everything up on her own she did have a couple questions but other than that this the system is so easy to work that it you know it's really nice it's awesome that's it's great to hear i don't remember if this is my turn or your turn justin but uh yeah you go ahead that's not sure either so hey go ahead take take it kevin all yours yeah no problem um yeah so obviously we've sort of been talking about this the whole time um obviously i had the privilege of working with sarah on this project so of course we're going to talk about the uh you know the whole process but um in terms of working with binary stream and i don't know working with uh maybe our support department that's not me and fidessic how is that process been for you sir it's been great you know working with binary stream we don't reach out directly we let um brad at anchor group reach out because he knows the questions to ask he knows what we've broken and so he knows what to ask to help fix it if we you know if we're having an issue um but you know i'm the main contact with fidessa and it's been great you know i i reach out on chat all the time if i have a question hey this doesn't look right or um hey have you uploaded you know such and such yet and it's been wonderful and even when kevin was out on vacation you know i can't remember the guy that stepped in for you he was really great at responding and answering questions and stuff and you know just working with y'all in general and y'all been really well great at catering to some of our specific needs that we needed and getting those resolved in a timely manner awesome that's great to hear and i can vouch for working with binary stream as well otherwise we wouldn't be here um we basically a few years back we had a client reach out to us about mem and uh we reached out to binary stream and they were more than willing to help us out figure out uh how to architect the solution so and that was just through like the regular support channel they were super helpful so that's that's that's why we're all here today yeah no and i vice versa kev your group's been fantastic to work with and so no that that's awesome um so i know tough tough question at the end of the day and sometimes difficult to quantify but if you think about that from resources you know after implementing mem and fidessic what would you kind of comment on there or could you quantify in some way i honestly we've saved hundreds of hours um you know we've actually expanded our staff obviously because we're expanding the number of entities we have but you know just the amount of time we save you know having to not print our own checks stuff our own checks you know this you know when the system slows down and we had another program that was sitting on top of gp that that was causing a slow down issue as well and you know getting rid of that program getting into fight acid it's really really saved us manpower and it's been able to have our our ap coordinators and staff focus more on our customers and vendors and making sure payments are paid timely versus trying to get you know payments stuffed and send out in the mail that's great no thank you and then uh i think lastly on uh the sort of prompts for this conversation here is uh what tips do you have for anybody else looking into making a change uh in their erp processing probably a company that's spread across multiple locations and entity like you guys what's what should they be looking for what's the what are the questions to ask you know the questions you ask have to be specific to your organization so you really have to have a list of what you want and stick to your list you know there's some things that you can you can ebb and flow on but but for the most part if it's on your list you need it and make sure that when you're talking to erp people that you're not talking to a sales person you're talking to an actual engineer someone that actually knows how to work the system because a sales person can you know that's what they do they sell you something but they don't always know what your business is and how it how it's going to fit with their product and that's why you want to talk to someone that's actually working in the product and and can tell you hey yeah this is going to work or no this is not going to work at all um and so you know make sure you stick to your guns on on what you want and if you know if you're talking you find out that you know this it's just not what you're looking for then you know walk away and find find another vendor because you don't want to compromise what you're already doing or what you want to improve upon gotcha yeah that's i think that's really solid yeah that's great all right so anything else you want to add sarah i greatly appreciate you taking the time i know with in the backdrop of rapid growth and being a controller i can only imagine what your daily calendar looks like so greatly appreciate you taking the time here anything else that uh you want to add no just you know if if anybody has any questions for me on our personal experience with podesta i'd be happy to answer them you know feel free to reach out to me and you know we can discuss it that's great well hey i thought we'd take a few minutes um you know as you can see on the next slide just to kind of provide you with a ultimately an overview of what we're talking about today what is multi-entity management for those of you that might be on the call that aren't familiar with you well in essence the simple definitions is is really it allows organizations if you think about how many erps are set up today they are set up in as independent business units companies and some systems entities in some but what we really allow is the consolidation of those companies within the erp to run as one single database one single business unit so in essence once multi-entity management is deployed everything in those multiple databases becomes centralized becomes one's database or company or instance for example and reporting if you think about that as sarah mentioned earlier becomes far far more streamlined so that really you have the tools to to manage and make better decisions you know within the business and uh so if you think about that if you think about once you're consolidating those entities our companies are consolidated into one centralized company handling you know inter-company transactions across those many companies the allocations across different companies um master records across the companies vendors customers items all those typically things that you are ultimately maintaining within the independent companies become centralized and you can just imagine the efficiency that's created when you're only maintaining one set of those things or being allow the flow of information through those uh those companies and then most importantly is the reporting so all of that um along with you can imagine is once you consolidate all that company information into one company or database there's the security obviously you want to make sure that people are able to only view or have access to or work in the companies that they are required to and so we've added an extra layer or multi-entity has within the dynamics erp so that we can manage that so that people can get readily the information they need but also limited to the information that they really shouldn't be um able to see or report on or have access to so from a high level from 100 foot viewers like to call that's what what we call mem as as we like to call it as well so why don't i hand things over to kevin and he can give us kind of a brief uh overview of fidesic yeah happy too um the good news is uh everything that justin just explained in terms of accessing multiple companies from a single location having user-based control all of that sort of control and reporting that stays consistent with fidesic so think of fidesic is like the front end that extends the function of the erp system but maintains the same controls that you're used to directly in your erp with mem directly so the things that we actually extend uh sarah had mentioned that there's data capture and the really nice thing about our invoice data capture is it is smart enough to recognize location aka entity on the invoice so we can use that to dynamically code invoices that are captured by our system based on that entity so it's not like everything goes into one hopper and you have to sort through it it's going to be split by our data capture into its respective entity right out of the gate the same holds true once it's captured it's going to be pushed into a workflow engine to get it routed to the correct person to get the necessary approvals and we can route it based on anything that's on the invoice but if you're using mem a pretty common way to do it is going to be based on entity and that is something that we support so if you have your separate business business entity managers they can approve and review invoices uh directly within our system and everything that our system does is all web-based so while we connect to the erp everything that we do is going to be available from anywhere that you have a web connection um multi-location support this is sort of redundant based on what we've talked about all day here today but you can assign users to specific entities and all their uh visibility and controls will stay the same um and most importantly we do integrate with mem i have mentioned this several times that we connect directly to it we split things into the proper entities it's one export into all of your entities not one export per entity and then as sarah has mentioned a couple times here as well today we also do payment processing and the really nice thing about the way that our system handles payment processing in addition to what i've already mentioned in terms of entity controls is you can approve your checks and achs through a single portal single process and then you'll have that formalized signature on that ach as well as the checks themselves so if you know you have an audit or you need to prove that there was a payment approval that took place on those ach transactions you're going to have that formalized record on that ach in addition to the paper checks so really those are the functions that we have that we help out with on accounts payable is capture approval on the invoicing side and then payments uh once you've got that information synced over to your erp so that's really kind of it we do have some time here for questions um but if you guys don't want to hang around for questions i greatly appreciate everybody who took out the time of their day to view this presentation here today hopefully you found something useful hopefully you learned something um again this will be available on our sites and probably our youtubes if you want to send to somebody else at your organization if you need any more information uh you can contact either of our sales teams um i promise they're not too salesy as uh sarah can attest to they're more of uh consultant teams we should probably change those emails based on this content but um but thank you appreciate it um and if we've got some questions let's pull that up uh see what we got so it looks like the only the only question we have is a joke question but i'm game um for sarah which star wars characters remind wait how do i phrase this how star wars characters are you most reminded of when thinking of kevin and justin i don't know if you're still with us there oh god paul what's a little oh i'm just can't wait for this one for this one right yeah that that that's uh that that's paul from anchor group he knows me very well but we're we we talk about star wars all the time so you don't have to answer if you don't want it yeah you're not prepared to answer that question i thought i'd be chewy for sure but whatever that's why so anyone else if you have any uh product or any sort of question send them in otherwise i think we're all set here again uh reach out to us sarah can't thank you enough uh you're the best we'll let you get back to your i'm sure packed calendar and uh binary stream thanks for hosting uh wouldn't have been able to do without you greatly appreciate it kev same with you thanks so much all right thanks everybody take care take care everyone bye