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Digital bill format for non-profit organizations

[Music] hey there everybody i guess we'll go ahead and get started right at 10 30. i'm having a hard time um streaming into facebook i think we've had some updates to the facebook platform so we'll go ahead and record this and then drop it in the facebook group for anybody that likes to go back uh and watch it we'll have that available um probably later on today we'll get this video downloaded into um the facebook group so to a couple um you know intros for those of you that haven't been on any of our calls my name is tasha anderson i'm the founder and ceo of uh the the boutique accounting firm called the charity cfo that's all we do we do accounting services for nonprofits i also have um tim hudson here tim if you want to do a brief intro of yourself yeah my name is tim hudson i am a cpa and partner here at the firm i serve as the chief operating officer i've been working alongside tasha for about three years um helping non-profit organizations across the country streamline their accounting improve their processes uh and clean up their their accounting data so that's that's sort of my specialty i like working with systems and um and doing cleanup projects and uh you know help make everyone's life easier the client's life my team's life everybody's life easier in the long run uh through improved processes so i love talking about these sorts of topics mostly because for one we work with so many non-profits and they come to us with all different challenges but i can especially relate to the need to systemize and make efficiency for nonprofits because i used to work for a non-profit and i had one of those jobs that i was hired because i too am an accountant as you all might have picked up on uh so that's kind of my credentials in my day job if you will but when i worked for a nonprofit i had all other duties as assigned so i was in charge of hr and i.t and facilities and really what that meant is the job that i was hired because of my skill set i did in about 15 hours a week um out of survival not trying to brag um really out of survival so that i could make time for all of the other things so taking that kind of theme and that experience and frankly frustration when i worked for a non-profit i actually started this firm about five and a half years ago with a goal of applying a lot of the things that i've learned and my obsession and now our obsession to him is equally as obsessed as i am with finding better faster more effective ways of getting the work done so everything that we do is finding the hybrid of you know administratively in-house uh when i talk in house i don't just mean for us i mean for our clients the nonprofits we work with how does it make it easy for them to get the same you know stuff done it has to be done but how do we get it done better and faster and also how can we have things audit friendly what do i mean by that internal controls segregation of duties accuracy we have our eyes dotted t's crossed with respect to maintaining documentation in addition to being accounts tim and i both come from an audit background we've both audited companies in the past and now we are subject to many audits meaning most of the clients we work with get audited voluntarily or because their funders or donors of some sort require them or other banks maybe um so everything we do is through that lens right how can we get it done quick and effective and how can we have it audit friendly so kind of keep that in mind so one of the major themes that we find and tim knows this certainly i think you would agree is that some of the kind of the day-to-day tasks things that have to be done that we um you know could maybe get done a little bit better and so i just put a couple talking points together we like the the beginning of these calls to be very kind of informational let us share a tip trick hack or just kind of news that's going on in the industry and updates um even if it's kind of on a regulatory side compliance head whatever and then we'll open it up to kind of an open q a so you you all can answer whatever questions you want whether it's about the topic or something else so we just put together more for um visual tim if you want to share your screen or i can it doesn't make any difference but we're going to go over some of our um specific tips tricks and hacks with respect to pain bills pain bills and tim works with this platform all the time full disclosure we have no financial partnership formally although we probably should they should give us some sort of kickback or something right we just like the platform we always use platforms that are a couple different things i apologize if i'm stealing your thunder 10 and i'll talk about this my preference for software number one it's not proprietary which means the charity cfo unfortunately did not invent we do not own we do not financially benefit from our clients buying this software okay it's not proprietary meaning we didn't create it we don't get any kickbacks for it number two um it is transferable because it's not proprietary whether you choose to work with us or whether you work with one firm or another firm or one account in bookkeeper or another it doesn't matter no one owns this but our clients and number three is it really easy to use intuitive and low cost so i guess that's really like three and four right so this is one of the platforms that we like to use and just kind of keep that in mind this is just the best way right now with all of the things that i've already sprinkled in this conversation why we like using this platform so what do you think tim should we just kind of dive in and start talking about how we use this platform for our clients let's do it can everyone see my screen i can see it okay tasha let me know if it stops working because sometimes my my screen share will go out on me in the middle of a presentation um okay so yeah like tasha said the goal of this presentation is not to sell you on bill.com we don't make any money from this presentation um we like build.com for many of our clients but there are many of our clients that we sort of dissuade from using build.com we recommend against it because it doesn't make sense in all situations so we really have just a simple you know slide deck here i want to show you what what most industry experts can consider to be the best basic workflow uh of any bill pay process and then we're going to go through some pros of using bill.com and how bill.com can align with this ideal process and then we'll go through the cons some of the disadvantages of using the system and then you can make an assessment for yourself if it might make sense for your organization or not so as far as the ideal build process typically it's four basic steps it's not all that complicated you want somebody to submit the bills to the accounting team for processing or to the bookkeeper for processing um that means it could mean different things in different circumstances right you may be getting a bill via email from a contractor that needs to somehow be sent to the person that will be responsible for processing the bill you may get a lot of bills in the mail someone needs to scan those bills in to an a to a system or maybe they're not scanned in maybe they're collected and stacked on somebody's desk to review later but somebody's got to gather the bills from all the variety of sources all of the contractors all of the vendors that the organization works with gather them together and put them in the hands of the right person for processing so that's number one number two is process somebody has to have responsibility ideally it's someone different from the person responsible for gathering the bills right ideally you want to have separation of responsibilities for each of these four steps but someone needs to come in and take the bills that have been given to them and process them so what does that mean a they've got to put it into the accounting system so they've got to track them in the accounting system as a payable we call that ap or accounts payable so that needs to be recorded in quickbooks or um or whatever system you're using b you need to go in and determine how to work how to record it in other words how to code the expense in the accounting system you need to determine um you know the amount that needs to be paid sometimes that's not always readily understandable from looking at a bill believe it or not you'll have you know a previous balance due that might represent um you know a balance that has already been paid but the check just hasn't cleared yet so you've got you know money going out and and then a bill coming in they cross streams so you got to make sure someone's reviewing that to determine the amount that is actually owed that actually needs to be paid and then um and and then putting that into the system for tracking then you've got to have someone come in and approve that's the third step and again that has to be a separate person from the one that did the processing somebody has to come in and review the information that the accountant or the bookkeeper has presented they review how the expense has been coded they review when the expense was recorded the date they review the the amount to make sure that it's the correct amount um and then once they agree that we do owe that this vendor or this contractor this amount of money and we we agree on the due date and all of that then that approver can can indicate their approval either through an old school sign off um sometimes you know in an old school environment they they're the ones they just indicate approval by signing the check so the person processing will prepare the check and then the person approving will just sign the check and that's indication that that they approve um in a more modern environment that could be done digitally through the click of a button they review the bill and they hit approve and then it goes to the next step but no matter what there has to be some sort of approval process so that bills can't just be paid randomly right if you have one person recording the bills and paying the bills and approving the bills that's a lack of segregation of duties and it opens up the door for potential mismanagement misappropriation of assets if nothing else financial misstatements right somebody screws up and just records something to the wrong place because there's no oversight so that's important you've got to have some some way shape or form and approval process and a process that i should say is demonstrable or something that you can look up later and see there is evidence that the approval happened um we always say in our line of work if it's not documented it's not done um if you can't prove that it was actually approved through a sign off or through you know a record on on on a piece of software that shows that the button was clicked to indicate approval or the digital sign off or whatever there's got to be some way to go back in time and prove that that bill was approved on that date and then the final step the fourth step is payment of the bill and again ideally that's a separate person from the person that approved the bills once the sign off is is complete once the bill is approved someone needs to actually do the work of processing that payment making sure that the check gets physically delivered mailed to the vendor or if it's an ach the ach is actually processed initiated and goes through so in a perfect world you have really four separate job duties here that are completed by four separate people now in a small non-profit environment you may not have four people that really have the skill set or you know the you know for them it would make sense for them to do these four separate steps and that's why we like build.com because it actually handles kind of facilitates this process in a way that there is some built-in segregation of duty so if we use bill.com bill.com takes care of step four so off often in a old school accounting environment a small small um you know smaller organization the person processing the bills is usually the person paying the bills so you process the bills you will have a step for approval generally but then they have the person that process the bill has to mail the check and make sure it gets delivered theoretically that does open the door for some again misappropriation of assets potential for fraud potential for um for you know financial misstatements um it's it's better than nothing at least you have an approval process you know it's not the worst thing in the world but it's not ideal if you use bill.com bill.com takes care of step four so it allows the bookkeeper to focus on processing bill.com takes care of the payment and then it facilitates the approval process in between those two steps so let me go into the pros of using bill.com and tasha please chime in if you if you want to interrupt me or you have other thoughts to add here but yeah we just go through the list and then we give a couple case studies as to some of these specific things um we talk about the pros but yeah let's do high level pros for those for those of uh you all can kind of see where oh this might make sense for my organization or it may not so yeah cool okay so pro number one is it is very it saves a lot of time um especially if you are processing a large number of bills each month typically what i'll ask my clients is say you know are you writing checks more than like seven or eight times a month meaning someone has to go in and write the check sign the check mail the check stamp it you know all that stuff if you're doing that more than you know eight to ten times a month that's a lot of time um you know just the administrative time buying the envelopes buying the stamps you know addressing the envelopes whatever um and if you know if you can save a couple hours a month or a couple hours a week even by switching to an automated digital system like build.com that alone might justify the cost of the software and we'll talk about the cost of the software in a little bit but you can save a lot of time just cutting out that work now in this day and age a lot of uh smaller organizations will you know set up automatic payments through their credit card for certain bills they may have um you know bill pay through their bank that's sort of automated they may not be writing that many checks to begin with and if that's you you may not be ready for bill.com yet now you may decide you want to make that leap for some of the other advantages but you know you may not stand to to save all that much time by switching to bill.com if you're not really writing that many checks already you may want to wait until the organization grows and and uh and you know it starts to make more sense to justify the cost but time saving is a huge a huge benefit elementary time saving because this is i think a very common theme with some of our new clients initially you'll hear the disgruntlement oh it takes me more time it's a software and it's a process so like anything initially it's gonna it's going to be wait i need to scan everything i have to upload it into this portal and then i need to go and encode things to the portal how does that take me less time than if i just have the paper invoice here i just enter it into the system i set out a check i stuff it in an envelope and throw it in the mail it's one of those things that you know i've yet to see a situation where it doesn't actually save time in the long run because like any process once you do it more and more frequently you get you get the rhythm down uh everybody knows what to do it does end up saving a lot more time and we could talk um i think time savings is kind of interwoven through all of these different stuff so i'm going to stop there but um if you all have tried it and you might say i've done something like this it takes way more time it's way more labor intensive you know that's kind of a common complaint with anything right uh i i just remember my husband would go and get a new tv and he's changing the technology all the time like this is harder than what i was before and then you just get used to it it's like any new technology a new phone a new cell phone god forbid if you go from an android to an iphone you know or a pc to a macbook it's like the end of the world so um it does save time in the long run i've yet to see situations where it doesn't really say unless tim like you were like you know you have a handful checked you caught a month yeah maybe it doesn't make sense but but even then um there's a couple of the reasons why i like it even if it doesn't save time there's a lot of other reasons why yeah we'll get into those other reasons so related to time saving is the fact that it will integrate with your accounting system so in an old school environment the person that's processing the bill has to go into the accounting system record the bill you know put the right date put the right amount put the right you know gl code uh and then post it then they have to go in and actually prepare the check in a separate system you know sometimes those are integrated but often they're not that's sort of a two-step process in bill.com it's a one-step process you put all of that stuff in all of that same information into one system bill.com and then build.com will sync that information into your accounting system it works really well with quickbooks online but it will work with all the other modern accounting systems um and then it will also prepare the the checks and the payment separately once the approval goes through so it handles all that on the back end which makes your life a lot easier it also guarantees that your accounting system and your bill pay is in sync so you know sometimes this happens where you record a bill for one amount and then you write the check for another amount and so then it comes time to reconcile your bank and you're you're you're mismatched because the systems are separate in bill.com they're the same and so you don't have that mismatch problem and that alone can save some time and i'll interject you with the integration another and i and i see some family names on the call today and i've talked to some of you all and i know your processes where so not only the integration of the accounting system but let's take a step back and talk about the coding of invoices in a very perfect world um you know you would have a non-profit who those that are in current expenses i'm talking about your development director i'm talking about your program director i'm talking about maybe your admin assistance is fine supplies whatever they are generating expenses on behalf of the organization right and hopefully they have some sense on where those expenses are coming out of their individual projects if you've got that's in a you know very perfect utopia world um and then they would be coding some of their own expenses whether it's credit cards or or sometimes through vendor payments right so if you have um development director and they are hiring um entertainment or party rentals or whatever for your gala you would hope that they have some sense on what their budget is for that event and which line items that might coincide with your accounting budget so one of the really great things with with bill.com is think about many of you all i know you have like some email you know print to a pdf create little red boxes with signatures or maybe you have a separate template a separate word doc and you populate like a po like purchase order or some sort of expense approval or coding paper or maybe it's all in paper right they print it they're like okay this goes to the expense and digital like they've gotta handwrite all the stuff down or key it in and print it attach it to that paper then they hand it over to the bookkeeper and the bookkeeper says okay now i have this invoice let me go and key it into my system and this vendor wants to be paid through ach so now i have to go to my bank which is totally a separate system this time was alluding to i have to pay and then i have to go and post it so now you you've essentially taken one invoice and you've touched it you know maybe three or more times right and they're all out of sync so you can have data keen errors with um you know maybe your um bookkeeper didn't put the right information that your development director put on the purchase order so all of this purchase order that's why i call the paper shuffle the paper shuffle going back and forth really it streams all that and there's one point of data entry so as somebody submits the invoice they could actually depending on how you set up bill.com and there's a couple options there on which we won't go into the nuts and bolts we're not doing a full-on demo here we're just giving you case studies and examples of how we save money that we um we can actually have people input the coding themselves so as a development director i'm submitting an invoice i'm coding it this certain way and now the bookkeeper is going to say it like oh that looks legit that seems like it drives with the budget i agree with the account coding i don't have any issues or questions there and also if the bookkeeper needs to tag it to any donor restricted funds or you know particular funder or update the particular department or anything to just double check the coding that your initial expense you know initiator um created and like tim said all of those things are integrated within your counties so there's one point of data entry rather than multiple points and i distinctly remember that being a huge source of frustration for me when i was a cfo of a nonprofit because i would have 10 different people submitting purchase orders 10 different ways nobody ever did it totally correctly it's like why are we even doing this at all no one's actually doing it because i'm ultimately just changing everything i need people which isn't the best practice but um that's a that's a good integration so any of you all that are doing the paper shuffle or you're doing some weird hybrid email all of a sudden now you have 50 emails um extra per week because you're trying to get vendor invoices approved this will completely eliminate all of that noise in your life yeah exactly um and kind of related to this tasha talks about the paper shuffle the third point here that we consider to be a huge pro is it's really conducive to a virtual environment and the fourth point is it eliminates the need for paper all this is related right um when covet hit everybody on in back in march of last year um two of the biggest cat areas in probably in the entire non-profit industry that was really um that really caused problems in switching to a virtual environment was depositing checks and paying bills uh and of course we're just focusing on paying bills here but if you if your bill pay system is sort of what tasha described earlier uh as far as you know receiving a paper copy filling out a po you know shuffling papers from someone's desk to another desk to another desk you can't do that in a virtual environment you know if everybody has to go home tomorrow and work virtually for the next six months you can't just pick up that process and move it to a virtual environment um it doesn't work like that bill.com is 100 conducive to a virtual environment everything is in digital format bills that are received digitally can be configured to automatically uh forward straight to bill.com meaning if you have contractors or vendors that send you an email bill you can you can set up the system to for bill.com to collect all of those bills automatically and then it's in a queue for your bookkeeper or your office manager to review and process each week or twice a week or whenever they decide to do that um if you get any bills in paper form in the mail those need to be scanned in and uploaded directly to bill.com now these days almost every type of vendor every type of bill that you might receive you can receive it electronically even your water bill and your utilities usually by default those come via the mail but you can configure those to come digitally and funnel straight into bill.com um obviously if you're if you're dealing with paper checks and and bills and pos and all that stuff you can't just pick that up and convert that to a virtual environment at the drop of a hat you very much can with build.com and i will say um not to speak for our clients but you know from the the feedback we've received from our clients they had a lot easier time transitioning to a virtual environment at least those of them that had already set up build.com that we've already set these processes up um they were in much better shape going into this pandemic than many other nonprofits were um you know this time last year so that's a that's a huge point i think of of um you know a pro from build.com that's becoming more relevant or has become more relevant in the past year i'll skip go ahead as it relates to virtual sometimes we think about our staff but many of you all have second signature requirements on thresholds over a certain dollar amount and i don't know about you all but i remember you know anything over 25 100 had to be signed by the board treasurer and naturally you have a board charger that may travel a lot for their job or they have a very demanding job anyway and you in order to pay a vendor you have to go hunt down your treasure whether that's you drive across town in your car in the middle of a workday or what have you to collect checks signatures i've done that multiple times um this isn't just limited to like the ceo and the office manager or department heads oftentimes if there are uh internal controls which will talk a little bit more about that but it eliminates the need of tracking down individuals for um just normal course of business whether it's your team members are all virtual more and more of our clients have no office their team is spread out all over the country so that's pretty normal for us sometimes we have a board treasurer we have to hunt down or a board president we have to hunt down guess what they can just log into their computer and review the invoice uh because in this system it's not just okay i'm gonna approve you're paying five thousand dollars to some unknown vendor you actually get to view and review the invoice um and also i like to joke with my ceos one of the big points of concern for many ceos you know oh i can't go on vacation on fridays or i have to configure my whole week to make sure that i'm present and available to manually sign checks i can't take vacation on fridays or i have to make sure my bookkeeper gets checks cut on thursdays so i can take off early on friday you can review and approve checks to be cut if you're sitting on the beaches of hawaii if you feel like it um so that's also another benefit if you have a rush job on a check you're not chained to your office um which yes of course during the pandemic we saw that absolutely more relevant to every non-profit but there's some freedom that comes with with this kind of virtual environment as well that are more practical in nature and i would expect that nonprofits will continue to have that issue beyond koben yeah great point tasha moving down the line so employees and contractors can look up payment statuses through this system so i'm sure everyone has experienced this pain point um you you process the bill you approve the bill you mail the check or you submit the ach two weeks later the contractor comes back and says where's my money you know did you pay me what's the status and you're like i don't know i i know i i think i paid it i think i remember seeing the bill but that was two weeks ago you know i've forgotten by this point if you're a good accountant you would have tracked you know the date that you sent the check in some sort of log so that you can kind of review and see what's going on um but let's be honest i mean in most cases that stuff doesn't get tracked very well um you may know that you you can go back and look at your your checkbook obviously and see when the check was written but you may not know when it was put in the mail or you know uh even where you mailed it or whatever i mean you know if it's ach you're gonna have to look up with the bank it's another system you've got to go back and figure out okay how did i ach this do i have a copy of the confirmation somewhere tracking that stuff down every time someone needs a status of their payment is a nightmare or even you know maybe you want somebody wants a status of a payment and you haven't even seen the bill yet because you know the bill got you know stuck in in the mail on the way to you or um you know it got lost in somebody's inbox or you know whatever just hasn't made it to your desk yet um that's always a huge point of pain for any bookkeeper any office manager any accountant um bill.com really radically reduces the pain associated with that process so with bill.com everything is managed in a central location so if you have someone calling you or emailing you and asking for a status of their payment all you have to do is type in their name search for the vendor name you can find it you can see a history of every payment that you've ever made to that vendor bill.com will show you how the payment was made so bill.com will process an ach payment they'll process a check payment meaning they will write the check and mail the check on your behalf they'll pay the vendors however they want to be paid and you can track it all in one place you can see okay it looks like you were paid via ach on the 22nd this is the amount this is what it will look like in your bank so you should be able to look it up and see where you were paid and match that to our um bill if they were paid via check it's either better you can literally look and see the date that the check was mailed you can see the date that the check was delivered so you can they give you postal service confirmation when the check arrives in the mailbox and then you can see when the check um clears or gets cashed so you can write in bill.com you don't have to look in your bank statement to figure out when the check cleared you can look right in bill.com and see the check cleared on this date and so sometimes we'll you know respond and say you cashed our check so i don't know why you're confused but i can see right here the check was cash you can send them a confirmation and eliminate all of the hassle of trying to track down that information yeah so for those of you that have vendors that you find move frequently i'm looking at you artists entertainers i find i've worked with some arts organizations and we'll have to make you know small payments to them for performances or you know exhibits or anything like that and there's always an issue well we paid the check oh well i moved you know or something so uh three months ago well you never told us that before we issued the check so um and then of course they're you know pretty eager to get their money or college students or anyone else that you find if you have a group of vendors that you pay especially seasonally it's a big surge or event based or something like that uh it's really nice to be able to set those up with ach i can't tell you how many times i had to do the whole you know search for the missing check and no one knows where it is we know we sent it out it didn't clear the bank we have no idea that actually reached their destination and only to find out that's not actually their home so we have no idea if it's going to get forwarded so we had to stop the check and then reissue i really love you know really forcing our vendors to essentially hey how we pay bills now for our internal control purposes and just overall optimization of our administrative function we do everything through ach so you never have to do the whole unless you switch bank accounts it's not out of the wrong process much much less frequently nowadays than how frequently people move so forcing your vendors to sign up through ach payments eliminates that whole you know missing check search journey that you go on every single time it is very labor intensive to do that especially if you have a high volume of those checks with like i said those sorts of vendors the populations that tend to move a lot yeah and and i i'm glad you brought that up tasha because i talked about how easy it is to look it up but i didn't really explain you can give access in bill.com varying levels of access to your employees or to your contractors your contractors can set up their own profile in bill.com now all they'll be able to see they won't be able to see your accounting but they'll be able to see when the bill is reviewed when it's approved and when the payment is sent um so they can get every step of the way and if you're you've got a contractor that's constantly bugging you you can just say hey log into bill.com you can find out for yourself where your payment is at same with employees if you've got certain employees or you know tasha reference like maybe the development director has lots of bills going out for an upcoming um you know fundraising event you can give them access to look up those bills and see the statuses on payment themselves to save you the the bookkeeper or the accountant the time for having to track that down yourself and all of this is done securely so that no one has access to do anything they shouldn't do they only have access to see what they what they need to see to get the information they need so that was a great point tasha um limits internal control risks and that's this you know dovetails nicely into this next subject area internal controls is sort of the buzzword that we use in our industry in the accounting industry and really it just means good governance policy good structures checks and balances and processes in place to mitigate the risk of fraud misappropriation of assets theft basically uh or financial misstatements um those are the kinds of things that as accountants we're constantly worried about we don't want any chance any opportunity for those sorts of issues to arise and so we build processes and procedures and safeguards to prohibit that from happening at least as much as we can you can't ever fully safeguard against any sort of fraud or theft or whatever but you can you can make it really really difficult to successfully pull something like that off and the best way to do that going backwards one slide is to follow this four-step process where there are four separate roles responsible for submitting the bills processing the bills approving and then paying and you can do that again through bill.com very easily and i should also mention i'll go right into the next point it's a very audit-friendly process we work with audit firms across the country um i don't know probably something like 60 of our clients get audited every year tasha and i are both former auditors we understand the audit process very well and um everybody we work with as far as as far as auditors or board members or anybody in a position of governance or or whatever is thrilled with the bill.com system it's always better than you know whatever in-house system you're going to come up with as a small non-profit just because it's almost impossible to have a really solid internal control process with separate duties when you're a small non-profit yeah if you're a you know if you've got a team of 100 employees and you've got an accounting team of seven or eight sure you can build in those safeguards in an old school method pretty reliably because you've got enough people that can kind of segregate roles most you know certainly most of the people on this call are not in that position um if you're a smaller non-profit you need to leverage software like build.com um to to really implement the solid internal controls that we're talking about and the nice thing with bill.com is it documents every step of the process you can always go back in time and see a record of when the approval was made when the payment was made who approved who paid who processed you can see all of that information so that the auditors can get you know solid evidence that the process was followed correctly so again like i said earlier having the process is one thing that's important but it's only half the battle you've got to make sure that the process is configured in such a way that it is documented every step of the way so that when you've got an auditor coming in it may be a financial statement auditor it may be a government auditor right maybe some sort of desk audit or you know you know god forbid an irs audit um something like that that they're knocking on your door and they want proof that you followed a prescribed process if you've got you know paper shuffling processes and you've got to find or track down a copy of a signature on a bill approval from two years ago that's a nightmare um you know even even if it still exists it may not even exist anymore may have been shredded or thrown away at some point with bill.com all of that data is preserved and very easy to look up and very easy to prove yeah i think we all know we all know the routine um you know when the auditors come in let's make sure we signed all the invoices let's double check everything before we hand it over and the reality is sometimes life happens and we're in a situation where somebody is out of the office you know i can't sign the actual invoice just pay the bill online i'll try to do when i get back and then you forget about it and then when the auditor comes in they're like well we looked at 50 invoices and two of them didn't make your signature and you have the argument as the ceo or you know the person in charge well i reviewed the bank statements i you know signed the bank statement or even i signed the check i just failed to sign the actual invoice we see this happen all the time and frankly that's one of the reasons why we started implementing this for our clients because it's a foolproof way to never have to worry because we really can't uh we can't pay bills if you set the rules up like you were saying tim we can't pay anything without the appropriate signatures now what's also great about that is you have flexibility for where you can do that so worst case scenario if you have to log into your phone um or on your computer you can certainly do that from any place where you want so that's all the pros right yeah let's talk about some of the cons um and you know they're probably more than this but these are some of the ones that we came up with as sort of the most common ones common reasons why you may want to defer implementation of some sort of system like this or it may not make sense for you to implement bill.com number one is it's very costly like i said it can save you a lot of time it has a lot of advantages but if you are a small non-profit that that already has a decent streamlined efficient process for paying most of your bills um it probably doesn't make sense for you a lot of non-profits that don't even have physical space right like they're not maybe they're renting space from like a co-working space and they don't have like utility bills or they're you know all working in a virtual environment those sorts of nonprofits generally don't benefit from bill.com because they just don't get that many bills um or you know like i said organizations that are you know fairly modernized and a lot of their bills are recurring bills that are automatically paid or paid via ach through the bank anyway um it just may not justify the cost because we're talking about a base price of 50 bucks a month now i didn't have this on here but they do add i believe ten dollars per user yeah so if you've got multiple accounting teams if you got you know multiple department heads that need to approve bills whatever that might look like that's additional costs it's two dollars and eighteen cents per check so anytime you pay a check it's two dollars and 18 cents and it's 50 cents per ach so the costs add up quite a bit in practice uh organizations that use bill.com i don't know you know for 20 something bills a month that's going to generally cost somewhere between 80 and 100 a month just in practice um you know organizations that are processing more i have some clients that pay three to five hundred dollars a month for bill.com if they're working with a lot of different contractors that they're you know some organizations will pay their mini grants out of a system like bill.com that can get very costly um now ironically the more expensive it is the more it's probably worth your while because if you're if you are making you know 100 check payments a month you really need a system like bill.com to keep everything straight otherwise it's we're talking about a disaster i mean that's a full-time job just to keep up with bills if you're doing this manually so ironically if you're kind of on the high end of what you would pay it it's probably worth it but if you're on the low end if you're only going to be you know cutting you know five to six checks a month and you're talking about spending you know 60 75 a month for that it may not be worth it for you right away um other things and tasha alluded to this it is very difficult to set up this is a complicated software system um it's i i will say it's reasonably intuitive reasonably user friendly but it's not the kind of thing that a novice can just pick up and learn in 30 minutes um it takes time to really get comfortable with the system to really learn it and to really get good at it and just like like tasha said like any system in the short term it will take more time uh you know we bring on clients all the time and i always warn them it's sort of like ripping the band-aid off you've gotta you've gotta give it one to two months be patient with yourself be patient with your team be patient with us you know it's it's going to be painful but once we get past that one to two months where everybody really learns the system gets comfortable with the flow of the process it will save time in the long run i guarantee it but it's it's a little bit of a transition period if you're in a place where you're you know you don't have the time to dedicate to some sort of implementation it's probably not the time to implement bill.com because you really need to have some time some bandwidth across your organization to get comfortable with a system like this i think in many cases it's well worth it in the long run but in the short term be mindful of that the setup can be difficult and i'll also say if you if you know if you don't have um you know someone that's pretty good with software and accounting software in particular on your team you may want to consider you know contracting that out at least for implementation certainly with our clients they're in great hands because we we follow that entire setup we handle the setup we handle the the training and the troubleshooting for them so it's it makes it a lot easier but if you're doing it on your own and you have limited experience with this kind of thing you may want to consider bringing a professional into your corner to help you out difficult to troubleshoot so again it's a complex piece of software there's a lot of weird things you've got to understand especially the integration between bill.com and quickbooks or your accounting system sometimes that integration will get out of sync and troubleshooting those sync errors can be confusing but you've got to make sure those systems are in sync otherwise your accounting is going to be inaccurate so there are some things that are can be difficult to troubleshoot i'll say that the support team for bill.com is relatively good um sometimes not as good as i would like but generally speaking they do a decent job they can be slow to respond but they'll get you the answer they need that you need but it takes some patience again especially as you learn the system it takes some patience to troubleshoot and to figure it out again our clients are in good hands because we really do that process for them they never even have to find out about the sync errors because we troubleshoot that for them our t you know we've had we have actually have had clients that have moved on from working with us for one reason or another and uh and you know found that build.com was just unworkable because they weren't really comfortable with the troubleshooting and the back end and the stuff that they've never had to deal with before but anyway that can be a little bit of a pain and then the final con which you know i put an asterisk next to next to this one because it's sort of a con but it's sort of the way it should be you do lose some flexibility so if you're an organization that doesn't really have a solid bill pay process in place you know we pay the bills when we're ready to pay the bills a contractor comes to our door and you know needs us to you know write them a check for mowing the lawn or whatever we just write the check right there and whoever is available signs the check that's not a very good process that opens yourself up for a lot of risks when things don't follow the standard flow but a lot of organizations good bad or otherwise are in that situation and if you're transitioning from that sort of situation where you know it's the wild west and everybody does what they want to do and we pay the bills when we need to pay the bills um if you're transitioning from that on unstructured situation to build.com which is very structured and has all these enforcement policies to ensure that nothing gets paid until it's approved nothing gets approved until it's been processed um you know transitioning to that structured system can be a little frustrating you lose the flexibility right your contractors have to get used to the fact that hey if you want to get paid you have to send the bill to this place we're going to have to process the bill in a certain way we're going to have to approve it and then you'll get your payment um you know getting everybody on board with that can be a little time consuming can be a little frustrating at times you do lose some flexibility but i contend a solidly designed bill pay process should not be very flexible if you really want to combat you know the risk of fraud or financial misstatement or whatever you you need to have a relatively rigid structured system and bill.com will allow you to do that so as you know as an organization grows especially your your ability to be flexible in these processes sort of goes down you're going to have more scrutiny you're going to be subject to more scrutiny in your audit you may have to get different types of audits depending on your size um you know your board is generally going to be looking over your shoulder a little more to make sure that processes are being followed correctly and you know all of that really equates to you've got to have your stuff together if you are um you know a growing nonprofit that wants to be sustainable long term and bill.com will help you sort of facilitate that anything else tasha that you want to add uh i don't i don't think so i you gave me a new idea for a webinar um as you were talking about troubleshooting software and it's so fascinating to me i've been in the business long enough to remember auditing organizations that still do did their accounting on green column paper believe it or not um or in just a basic excel and how much the world of accounting has really morphed like many other areas of business into a very tech heavy tech driven space and you know i think we could do a whole conversation on ways that we have always defined and we joke about this we've probably said a hundred times on these calls where sometimes i feel like we run an i.t company because everything is just so tech driven and we're so obsessed with figuring out ways to make things better faster smarter and not just in a way to rush through the work but oftentimes it lends itself to more accuracy and the more that we can take off of the existing non-profit team right so the staff right all those administrative processes because we're usually the ones kind of creating more work for them how can we make it done better um and it's just really important to i'm sure with every element of the nonprofit business to be evaluating the systems and processes but it really just kind of speaks to the need for tech savvy individuals because systems are great until they stop working there's little glitches and then generally i mean the tech we we train all of our staff on how to troubleshoot it so it's certainly not possible impossible rather but it's just really important for you know your accountant or bookkeeper whoever you're working with to be able to kind of troubleshoot and kind of look at a higher level view on how do all these components work together and is there a way to make things uh better and smarter not necessarily harder right so um i would say in the grand scheme of things this would be a struggle or difficult for people that are used to using quickbooks desktop and they like their checks and they like to print with checks and they like to file them in a paper system and they like to mail they like feel it they like to touch it while they sign it um i actually had one person that wanted us to um do their checks and decided to not move forward with working with us because she just liked to touch the check stock and sign the paper checks and i said well there's a place for everyone um but we're probably not the right solution for you because um it just creates a lot of challenges uh you know as we kind of morph into this more modern world i guess but yeah so if you all are wanting any questions or have any questions feel free i'll drop the link here shameless plug for our facebook group uh we monitor that uh and i personally respond to the questions so if you have any thoughts questions concerns or want to just you know throw any other software by us it's likely um we're not experts on all software uh we certainly come across it through the course of our work but i'll drop the facebook group there if you have any questions about build.com the functionality or if there's another area of your business that has seemed to be a source of frustration that you know there has to be an easier way to get this thing done go ahead and go over to the facebook group drop that in um i do know we have a few minutes left on this call we can also open it up to just general questions if anything has come up i know that there's a lot of things going on right now in the world of nonprofit we're happy to do our best to answer questions or at least you know kind of point you into the right direction so let's just go ahead and open it up to kind of general q a whether it's about accounting or non-profit management software processes audits internal controls we're kind of spending a lot of time doing that right now um yeah so we'll go ahead and open it up to questions we'll stick around for another 10 minutes or so um we are doing these every other week now so um just keeping a look out if you're not getting the emails probably most of you are that's why you're on um we will send newsletters out through your email and just remind you of whatever the topic is i think um shameless clock i have it down for them as well let me tell you what i had planned on talking about in two weeks and doesn't even know so he's like great what a surprise for me um we were going actually i want to talk about um we've done so many ppp applications tim i want to talk about some foolproof ways that we've been able to get the ppp forgiven if you all have not already gotten your ppp round one for given if it was a nightmare for you or if you didn't get round one and you submitted funding for round two now the ppp program has closed again we have no i have no sense to maybe you're paying more attention to it than i was i think it's been closed for three days now or something like that i don't know if it's gonna reopen i don't know if that program's gonna get extended i do believe they ran out of money if i'm not mistaken um so we'll see what the buying administration pushes through for that there are other sources of funding that have become available uh so you know maybe consider some of those do some research but we were going to go over how we have been successful in getting our pvp applications for our clients uh gone through very very seamlessly with very little headaches and we could talk a little bit about that um if you all had struggled with that or if you're anxious about that so that's what we're going to talk about next time so not next week but the following week oh dave has a good question here he says our audit has taken abnormally long this year four months and counting our firm is referencing covet as the reason are others experience the same thing or should i be looking for a new firm you're putting me on the spot dave is that common this year yes um and if i'm not mistaken dave has a an august or september year end so if you were talking about december 20 what a year would we be in 2019 we saw a lot of firms really struggling big scrambling right tim last spring figuring out how we're going to get these audits done they've never done virtual audits they're used to coming on site the non-profits weren't used to didn't have their stuff digitized people weren't going in the office it was a little bit of a disaster to be honest with you i will say um and tim correct me if you think i'm wrong most firms really were able to get some good processes in place and re-strategize by summer so it's a little surprising to me that it's it's taken much longer than you're used to experiencing um i think likely what what in my experience and i don't speak for all firms here's here's what i've noticed happened and tim i think you would agree with this that all of the audits that were slated for march april so the december year ends last year march april may they were on hold people wouldn't let their auditors into their office their auditors didn't have a system to do it virtually maybe the client didn't have the means to digitize everything that the auditors wanted it was just an organized disorganized math frankly so all of those audits we know because we were going through it got punted into like june july august so dave when your audit was normally scheduled to work you also got booted as well so even though you think well i mean my audit didn't happen till the fall why is that still lingering we saw our audit season normally is very heavy this time of year uh and usually by when do you think tim because you manage more of these than i do um usually by late summer it's all wrapped up then we get a nice kind of a little break and then the junior ends um you know our august year ends start hitting us by you know fall so we do get a little bit of a break last year though we were still wrapping up december urines in october november and that is not common and you know i hate to you know brag but i don't think it's really our fault at all because all of our systems are audit friendly virtually all the time i mean they have been for years well i just like to think we were you know we're just ahead of the curve we're starting to trend you know um but a lot of the firms that are used to coming on site um struggled i think and a lot of those audits still lingered into the fall would you agree that tim yeah for sure it's been a disaster for the entire industry frankly and i won't throw the audit firms under the bus completely um i do think many clients you know not our clients but many many other non-profit organizations were not prepared for a virtual audit and it did make the lives of these auditors much much more difficult um you know it slowed things down quite a bit um you know the way audit firms work it's a very high volume low margin business and you know everybody's scheduled out with very little flexibility for the entire year especially audit firms that specialize in these smaller non-profit audits every single you know week of the year for every single person on payroll is accounted for uh meaning you know and not a firm that has a team of you know 30 accounting associates they're all booked up and as soon as something starts to slip it has this cascading impact on everybody across the organization and it can really slow things down but i got to be honest i was very frustrated with some of these audit firms we've worked with over the past year because it just didn't seem like they were prepared um they fell way behind schedule i had a few that didn't even meet the november 15th deadline which is sort of the deadline for us to get the tax return out after we file an extension if you're assuming your december you're in which dave i know you're not but most are anyway so it caused some a lot of issues um i will say i'm not seeing nearly as much of that this year it seems like it's recovered quite a bit if you're still experiencing issues even you know in 2021 um you may want to consider going out for bid you know considering consider a different audit firm we have a lot of great um companies that we work with that we refer business to that that we we find generally speaking do quality work and they do it efficiently so there there's you know just like any service they're they're good ones and bad words out there um you know without knowing the specifics of the situation i don't want to throw anybody under the bus but yeah it's been a it's been a crazy year for audits that's for sure and here's the good news in that i think um you know because we've set this whole virtual why do you need to come out on site and disrupt our team for two weeks and might i mean our team i mean we're clients team really because they want to go on the client side even though all of the all the documents are housed in the cloud uh why do you need to go on site which i and i don't mean that to say like oh i got some things to fight over here but it's very disruptive and oftentimes many of our clients have like one conference room i know i used to be an auditor for seven years tim used to be an auditor so you know they're they're very disruptive and they take up very uh valuable real estate right if you have one conference room and the audit firm is sitting there for two weeks um what i'm very excited about is so many of these audit firms have seen the light that hey they have to get better about being able to do audits maybe virtually because so much of the work is done virtually i can't tell you how many not really financial statement auditors but federal audits uh city city grants funders they want you to take whatever you have digital printed right in paper and have it sit on the table state auditors too uh and it's just like this is crazy there has to be a better way to do it so what i'm really excited about is that audit firms have been pushed pretty aggressively to become much more modern so that they could do things maybe a little bit more remote which i think is going to be really great for many of our clients that you know frankly it's pretty disruptive to have an audit team um on site and i will say a little controversial sometimes those audit teams don't always have to be out there that long because i will have clients say why do they have to be out there that long and i say because they charge you a lot of money to do that work and they want you to know that they're there doing the work even if they don't actually have to be on site so that's a little industry secret sometimes that um you know they do come on site for facetime and to spend time now many of us feel like you're lovely we love you that's great but uh you know can you get out of my office so i've got work to do and it doesn't include um auditing full time but yeah that's not uncommon we've seen things a lot better this year um i like to think too we tend to partner with really great audit firms that also kind of embrace this virtual world and work with those systems that we work with so any other questions um i know we just got like two more minutes so if any if there's any other questions uh go ahead and drop those here in the chat and we can get to those otherwise we'll just wrap this call up we'll see you all in the facebook group we'll be back in two weeks uh to talk more about um ppp forgiveness and maybe some other news and updates that we might have on some additional funding or expansion of that program if we get any news on that we'll see i haven't heard anything okay another question so we'll go ahead and end this call thank you all for joining us i hope you found it valuable if there's any other topics that you all would love to hear more about any other frustrations or issues you've had feel free to drop them in the facebook group um send us a message and we will put that in our queue to talk about everybody enjoy your weekend and we'll see you next time see you guys