 Online payments is basically an add on feature within QuickBooks Online, adding banking features integrated within QuickBooks Online, primarily geared at giving customers more payment options while simultaneously integrating and in some cases, automating some of the transactions within the sales process. For example, it might have an impact on invoices, sales receipts, receive payment, and deposits, possibly also helping us with our tracking of accounts receivable and more easily constructing our financial statements from the financial transactions, that being the balance sheet and the income statement. So we're gonna start out listing some of the benefits, then we'll go into some of those benefits in more detail. Some of the benefits of QuickBooks Online payments include help accept payments faster, providing payment options on invoices, automates the receive payment process, batches and automates deposit for easy bank reconciliation, possibly provides mobile payment possibilities, can send a payment link instead of an invoice, you can automate reoccurring sales receipts. For example, if you have a subscription model, may be able to connect to e-commerce or such as a Shopify or other related types of systems. Let's go into some of these items in more detail now, starting with help accept payments faster, providing payment options on invoices. This is probably the first thing that we think of when we think of the QuickBooks payments, which is we would like to be able to send out our invoices and be able to give them options to pay us as easily as possible because the more payment options they have, the more likely whatever payment option they are most comfortable with, they will pick and possibly be able to send our invoices or get our payments faster because of those added payment options. Now, obviously there could be fees with different kind of payment options, we'll get into the downside and the fees related to it in a future presentation, but this is one of the major things that we would first come to our mind. Can we send out an invoice and have them basically click on it and have a bunch of payment options so they can pick their preferred payment options so that the turnaround on the invoice is gonna be faster so we get our money sooner and possibly also build confident with the customer because we're allowing them to pay us in whatever way they feel most comfortable doing so. So you got the ACH, which is an automated clearinghouse. This is basically the system used for the electronic funds transfer. So in other words, if they wanna pay from a transfer from their bank, they may have that option. They've got the credit cards and I think basically all the major credit cards for their Visa Mastercard Discover American Express, they've got the PayPal option. So some people really like their PayPal and are using it like a checking account. So that could be quite useful to some people, same with the Apple Pay. Some people are quite comfortable with Apple Pay. It's an easy thing for them to do. If we can send them an invoice and say pay us through Apple Pay or PayPal or credit card, whatever they're comfortable with and we have multiple options, it's likely that the turnaround on our invoices will be faster and that will make it easier for our accounts receivable tracking and that'll be better for our cash flow. So that's one of the first things that come to mind. They also have the Venmo. Okay, so next we have the Automate to Receive Payment process. So when you actually send out an invoice to a customer now, oftentimes when you think about accounting in like a textbook situation, we think of it like a paper invoice. And now we're in the digital area, we think about maybe an emailed invoice or something and then they still send us a payment however they're gonna send us it. But it would be nice of course, if we can send them that automated invoice possibly in an email with the link, allowing them all the payment options that they can do from that point. So that's basically what we have here because we've integrated our banking system within QuickBooks so it can more easily kind of integrate that within the invoice. So now we can kind of automate the whole process on the email. So when they get the email, they will typically have something that looks something like this where they can pay the invoice. Once they hit the pay the invoice, they can generally select the payment options that they think are that they're most appropriate to them, which they prefer. And that's the benefit. They have that variety of the payment options and the invoice can be used to just turn around and facilitate the payment much more easily. So batches and automates deposit for easy bank reconciliation. So on the bookkeeping side of things now, now we have the fact that we're sending out the invoice with an email and we gave them multiple ways to pay us through the link because we're basically using the banking services within QuickBooks that QuickBooks payments is basically giving us a banking facility like a checking account, right? So now we're gonna be able to track the information that's going from the invoice that we're gonna be tracking, which means we're gonna track the accounts receivable, which hopefully we don't have to track as long because they're gonna pay us faster. And then when they pay us, we should be able to track that with the QuickBooks payments because we basically have like a checking account integrated within QuickBooks through their QuickBooks payment options, which hopefully allows us to automate the payment processes a little bit faster. So payments automatically generate, receive payment form linked to the appropriate invoice. We'll take a look at some examples of this in future presentations, what the normal process looks like and how this automated process may be able to simplify it. But once we receive the payment, usually if I got a check, I would have to manually input the received payment. But if I use this automated process because QuickBooks is linked to the banking services, they might be able to record that transaction for us. Payments are bashed and recorded into the bank account in a format that makes bank reconciliation easy. Let's take a look at this on a flow chart. Now this is the desktop flow chart. We're talking about QuickBooks online, not the desktop, but the desktop homepage has this nice flow chart. And so let's kind of compare the process if we had QuickBooks payments versus if we did not have QuickBooks payments with the sales part of this flow chart. So when we do work, we typically will then send out an invoice and hope to receive payment on the invoice. Or if we did work at the same point in time, we might create like a sales receipt. That's the form you can think of if you're at like a cash register, for example, at like a restaurant. But let's think about the invoice. We did work, we're invoicing the client, we're sending our invoice, which is a bill to them. And normally we send it out and we've been able to, even if we don't have payments set up in QuickBooks, we can email them the invoice and then they would have to pay us somehow. Either they can send us an electronic transfer some other way, we can give them a way to give us an electronic transfer through PayPal or something like that, or they send us a check or we have some other payment option that's not linked directly within the invoice with the QuickBooks payments, right? They pay us in some way, shape, or form. And when they do, then we're gonna record the received payment at that point in time. Now, when we have the received payment, there's an issue here sometimes depending on the different ways that they pay us. So if they pay us with just an electronic transfer, if we have some batching system like a credit card, if they paid us with a credit card, they might, we might be collecting multiple payments from the credit card before the credit card then deposits it into our bank. And so we have this problem of batching because once it hits the bank, I wanna be able to reconcile the bank account to what is in our system, the bank statement to what's in our system. And if the batching from here, if I have multiple things that got deposited together at one time, it's gonna show up on the bank statement as one lump sum, which creates a reconciliation problem and that can be an issue depending on what your sales cycle looks like. So usually we put the money into undeposited funds, you can put it or into a clearing account, payments to deposit, and then you group the deposits when you make the deposit in the same format that you expect to see them on the bank statement. Now, if you have the integration of QuickBooks payments, that process could be easier, right? Because now you send out the invoice and then when they pay us, QuickBooks may then just record the receive payment on its own, not only that, but because we're using the QuickBooks bank account, if they're batching the deposits and they're gonna put the deposits in our system as a lump sum of some kind, they will properly batch out the deposits and deposit them properly so that we have deposits that will match the amounts that are on the bank statement. So that could be a huge deal depending on the kind of complexity that you have in your receivable cycle. So we'll go into some examples of that in more detail, but that can be quite nice from the bookkeeping side. So we might dive into that in...