 And folks, for those of you who didn't see me dropping in the chat and who are still paying full price for a quick book, that's one of the many cool products that TechSoup has available for a massive, massive discount. So please tell all your friends not to pay full price because yeah, there are still some nonprofits out there that haven't gotten the word that they're all just kinds of great software products there on TechSoup for crazy little prices. So anyway, I'm Sean Hale based here in Austin and my day job is helping nonprofits get their back offices running smoothly, but one of the many great things that I get to do during my volunteer time is help out with the nonprofit tech club here in Texas. And one of the things that I've been wanting to do for a long time is get my friend Tristan Pierce to talk about QuickBooks because he knows so darn much about that because he lives, eats and breathes nonprofit accounting all the time. And one of the cool things that he and the team over advisors for change do they don't just help nonprofits get their accounting straightened out but one important piece that has helped them leverage technology so they can work smarter rather than harder. And one of the things that's happened in the QuickBooks world and the technology world over the especially the last three, four or five years is that so much great technology has come online that is all of a sudden it's super user friendly, and it's super affordable even for small and mid sized nonprofits some of these things we used to dream about them right when we were spending umpteen hours doing the same thing every single month, and it sucked and we thought we don't want to do bookkeeping anymore. But now we have these great tools to take a lot of that out of our lives. And Tristan and his, his colleague john from advisors for change, they're going to be sharing with us some of their tips, so that we can really make that technology work for us so that we can go back to doing some of those other things are going to deliver a higher value for our nonprofits, and higher value for our mission because I don't know about chill but it's friendly. Every nonprofit I've ever worked at there's always been a to do list and a wish list of things to do a mile long. And when you get this technology in place all of a sudden maybe you can make that wish list and to do list just half a mile long right. Anyway, I don't want to eat up anybody anymore time and take any more away from Tristan and john so Tristan john you guys please take it away. Thank you for being here. You're so excited to be here really appreciate the introduction john and thank you Eli for really facilitating the space for us. Love that kindness is such an important part of our intention here today the world needs more of that. So that's me on the screen I'm the chief innovation officer and advisors for change. I've been with a FC since 2016 and before that served in different finance director roles at nonprofits of various sizes so I love the work that I do working with different mission types every day. And I like to say that I get paid and light bulbs and I love seeing people understand finance and engage with it differently. I like to turn it over to my colleague john to introduce himself. He's the brains behind this presentation and really appreciate his work and putting it together. Thanks Tristan hello everyone, appreciate all being here and that's me on the screen, I've been with advisors for change since last year. My role in particular is oriented around helping our partner organizations, implement and roll out new systems as like Sean was saying there. There's so many amazing technologies and tools out there that can help us all do our jobs more efficiently and you know save that time and invested in other aspects of our lives and organizations and so that's what I'm looking forward to talking about today and appreciate everyone being here. I'll pass it back to Tristan. Thanks John so just a little bit more about AFC. We've served about 45 different nonprofits and 2020 last year, and over 200 since we were founded, roughly 15 years ago. We have 15 team members that are spread across the country, mostly in the DC area and also here in Austin so we have five team members here in Austin, Texas. And we really work with nonprofits to help build their financial management capacity. So not enough people with the skills and finance sort of go into nonprofit work so we see ourselves as a bridge and up training people, and how to do bookkeeping and how to understand financials and how to set up financial systems. Within that, the systems that we're going to talk about today are a really big part of increasing our capacity at our nonprofit organization so looking forward to diving into what that looks like. A little bit of housekeeping I heard this was a really rowdy bunch so we want to make sure everyone stays in line. You know, we trust everybody and appreciate the guidelines that Eli highlighted before. If you have questions, please pop them into the chat or you can raise your hand using the reactions button at the bottom of the screen, and happy to call on you to share your question feel free to leave your video on or off if you're having dinner or a glass of wine with this presentation so no judgment there and we look forward to your questions and feedback throughout. So some of our goals this evening for our presentation is what is a tech or app stack we want to clearly understand what that is, how our organizations can benefit from putting those in place. And then how we use our app stack and sharing some of our stories and expertise from working in the field and implementing these systems with our nonprofit partners. First question out to the group is and please respond in the chat box. We're going to play a free association word game so please give us one or two words that immediately come to mind when you think about financial apps and implementing software and systems at your organization. Thank you everybody for responding and feel free to keep adding but I'm seeing some some common themes here so feelings of overwhelm and complexity. How expensive they can be the time it takes. It's a lot of work, it can be intimidating, thinking about rolling it out to the teams, and how they integrate together. And now turn it over to john to talk us through what is a text. Alright thanks Tristan. Hello again everyone so I'm going to be doing a lot of talking. So we're going to try to break it up intermittently with some fun little questions and polls like the one we just did but by all means feel free to comment in the chat box but I'm going to go ahead and just start at the most base level of what is a tech stack. There may be people here who are experts on that and there may be people who have heard the term but aren't sure what it means so we want to start at the most fundamental level. So the tech stack is really just a fancy term for the technologies or software that an organization or a company uses to perform a particular set of tasks or functions. And when you hear people talk about building a tech stack it's really just how you combine or stack that software together to automate certain processes to make them more efficient. Now, I don't know if stack is necessarily the best term a lot of times it ends up being more of a web around a central hub which we're going to look at later with QuickBooks online in particular. In these days there's there's an app for everything right these your technologies or software or apps that you use can, you know be orientated around any aspect of running the organization but for today's purposes we are going to be mostly focused on financial and accounting processes around, you know, payment processing time tracking expense management, you name it, and we're also going to briefly touch on CRMs because even though they may not seem finance specific. They often, you know, overlap with the finance team and are one of the most sought after apps for nonprofits. I don't know how everyone feels about this mean, but you know there's so much jargon or lingo out there of how to refer to these different softwares right you'll see you'll hear people use the term software system app tool solution technology program, but they're all basically the same idea. So for today I felt like it was a good idea for me to try to choose one term so you know I'm going to use the term app and I'm going to be using the term app stack I just feel like it's a little bit more relatable. I think if we refer to a tech stack as being high tech it can seem like a barrier to entry. Like we saw a lot of the word association that we just did people are feeling overwhelmed or, you know, confused about these elaborate implementations but what I'm hoping to do today is to kind of demystify this idea of a tech stack and the different apps that can go into it, and in particular around QuickBooks Online. Right well, you know, why should you even stack apps why should you combine apps at all you know what is the benefit to your organization. Well, when you can get those apps to work together seamlessly, they lead to an increase in operational efficiency, aka your saving time. They can increase your organizational relevant now I am going to explain what I mean by that. In the next slide, and they can transparency for your team and also there's something that's not talked about as much but it's, you know, very important is the impact on staff well being and productivity, which is of course, interrelated to efficiency as well. So looking at how app stacks can solve the problem of efficiency loss at an organization, the main way that different systems and apps can do that is by filling any gaps that are causing delays or inefficiencies, preventing bottlenecks and process failures. And I think we can all relate to these but some of the most common ones are people having to repetitively enter data manually. When these days there's apps that can automate that process for you. Of course, we know there's human error right so a lot of times that manual data entry can lead to data errors which then people have to spend a lot of time tracking down and fixing often across multiple systems. And then also sometimes there's just missing information you know what if bill was paid but where's the documentation and then when an auditor is requesting it. In the next year you have to go back and search through stacks of paper files and it can be you know quite a nightmare so a lot of the processes which are traditionally done manually, or in Excel, or repetitively, they can be outsourced to different apps and platforms freeing up your and your staff's time to reinvest that time elsewhere. So again a lot of common inefficiencies which you know the term pain points is thrown around a lot. I don't like to use that term unless actually have to I don't want to scare people off but you know inefficiencies which can be alleviated by having an effective stack. One is siloed data. What that means is data getting sort of trapped in one system, but not able to flow seamlessly to the next one which leads to it having to be manually entered or double entered. So you want to make sure your data can easily flow between multiple systems so that's a big part of what integrations are about. Of course wasted time. Nobody wants to waste time double entering into multiple systems because the systems can effectively talk to each other. So again highlighting the importance of having a direct integration. A lot of times, there may be sort of an incomplete integration or a lack thereof which requires someone to have to format data in order to import it into another system so I think everyone here is probably either seen this or done it where you've got information from your credit card statement in Excel format, but now how do you get it into the accounting system, how do you get it into QuickBooks or MIP or whatever system you're using and a lot of times, that is requiring a lot of manipulation of the data to get it mapped properly so that you can finally get it in there, but these days there are software solutions that make that a one or two or zero click process if properly set up. Again kind of following up on the idea of silo data you know having an inability to sync or reconcile between systems can often create multiple versions of an item, you know, multiple versions of the truth so to speak so which one is correct. You know that's, that's definitely a common problem which can be solved by effective integration between apps. Like last but not least, lack of scalability, you know, organizations may have a legacy system in place that relies on manual processes or relies on Excel and it's working fine for them at their current scale but you don't receive, you know, a massive influx of funding and your reporting needs become more intense, and you need to do 10 times the volume of bills and bills payments that you were previously doing or you have to enter so many more credit card transactions than you're used to, can your system scale to meet that. And if it's a system that relies heavily on individual doing manual tasks, it's going to then increase the amount of time they have to spend. With leveraging technology, it's built to scale with the organization. All right, well enough of me talking. I'd love to hear from you all, you know what are some ways that you've seen apps or systems or lack there of affect the operational efficiency of an organization, you know whether positively or negatively I'd love to open up and hear from the group, whether in the chat or anyone wants to unmute. Thanks Michelle, dive on in. Hey, whatever. So, I have spent, I've been in this executive director position for about a year and three months. I've spent probably three months of that year and three months trying to fix things that aren't working. So, I inherited a whole bunch of old stuff, making the best I can of it. But if technology isn't coordinated and like I've got a laptop with the database on it, the database is only on that laptop to protect it. In theory, I should be able to get to it from my Mac. Guess what, the laptop has to be open and I have to open the program on the laptop in order to work on the desktop. Makes no sense to me. And I can't even begin to tell you how much, how many hours I've spent with Intuit trying to get me as the head of the organization to be able to have permissions to do things like pay payroll taxes. Hello. I mean, these are big things and I have spent a lot of time doing it. So that's where I see the operational efficiency affected is if I have to keep chasing down old things or things that are easy to turn over, it's huge. It's a huge problem. Thank you for sharing that, Michelle. Some of the things that I'm picking up is, you know, when systems aren't in the cloud, if we can't access to them, you know, can't access them, then how useful is that technology? And then also we're going to talk about support. So what kinds of support are we getting from these apps in terms of how useful it is to ourselves and also to the rest of our staff. So I'm seeing in the chat box, another share that the misuse of QuickBooks for things that was never intended for. For example, using QuickBooks as their donor management system. So I'm sure we can all relate if we've seen a general ledger that has really detailed donor information in the general ledger. It can look really messy. It can over complicate the general ledger. So sometimes it's also how we use that system or how we don't use it for a particular purpose that makes it successful. Thank you for sharing that. Any other shares, either positive or any challenges that you would like to share with the group over systems you've experienced? I can share one as a lead into my next thing, you know, thank you, Michelle for sharing that, that story because that's something that, you know, of course, I know we all experienced when the COVID-19 pandemic started and the curtain and revealed a lot of pre-existing inefficiencies that couldn't adapt to kind of the new paradigm and, you know, we work with countless organizations who, you know, maybe they had an existing system that where someone had to sign a check and mail it by hand and work fine until you can't go into the office anymore, right? And I'm sure everyone knows, experienced the same thing, right? And so there are, you know, systems like bill.com or Milio or other accounts payable systems that can allow you to completely automate that in the cloud. And, you know, there was kind of a rush of people wanting to do bill.com implementations. I think that's a more efficient way to do things in the first place. So that kind of goes back to that idea of scalability. Now, that also relates to the next topic of relevance. You know, what I really mean by that is sort of adaptability. You know, nonprofits have an increasing and evolving need for technology, but I think we all know a lot of times aren't the most tech savvy companies, for lack of a better word, whether that's due to, you know, having limited funding or, you know, whatever the needs are, you know, there's this drive to need to kind of keep up to date with the trends. And this is true for accounting and finance teams in general. You know, digital cloud accounting is kind of the inevitable future that everything is headed towards. And that's because it does produce a better outcome for financial teams and organizations that are more accessible and promotes accuracy and transparency. And then of course again going back to how we all saw the world change last year, you know, remote work, the ability to work from any location and not have to rely on one software on one computer in the office to do your job is essentially a necessity, you know, in this day and age. And so, having an app stack that leverages these cloud based technologies has really become a necessity, and that trend is only going to continue into the future and so it's important for organizations and for ourselves as the staff of these organizations to try to keep up to date and stay relevant with these trends and as you can see, you know, an amazing resources the cloud accounting podcast. If you haven't heard of it, some people might say hey I listened to that every day. It's a very, it's a great podcast so if you want to kind of say how do I keep up to date on these trends you know where do I look, just listening to this podcast is an excellent way to see the direction where things are headed in and what are some of the latest technologies and integrations between those that are available. And again just touching on this, you know, I think we can. None of us are surprised by this but there was a study done in 2019 which is very interesting. I'll gladly share the link in the chat later in this presentation it's called the state of software happiness report. And that you know more than half of people a majority of people said that they're using more software tools than they were two years ago, and that was in 2019. So I can only imagine what it is now, you know, in 2021, and we know that trend is going to continue. So software is, you know, staying up to date on the latest apps and systems and softwares is kind of a necessity to stay relevant in the current paradigm. And just following up on this idea of transparency, you know why it's important to have an app stack is that it can give your teams the ability to pull financial information from their type of there. I'll update that but from their specific system, instead of it having to be pushed out to them from a centralized finance system. So traditionally what a lot of people might be able to relate to is there was there's a general ledger, and that's where all the information is, and if you need to know anything about finances or about your specific need that has to be kind of pushed out to you from a centralized finance team in order for you to have that that visibility, but because of the way a lot of these apps work you can have teams work on their specific process and have access to all the information they need. And that information is then flowing into the general ledger. Everybody can kind of have more visibility into their specific role, yet the separation between apps and different user permissions allows for proper internal controls. So if the development team needs to use a CRM to manage all their constituents information, they can have complete transparency and do their job and let that flow into the centralized accounting system for the finance team to do their job. And then everybody can kind of have greater access to an understanding of the financial information they need which also, you know, promotes by in an ownership of one's role. And kind of the last, the last of my, you know, topics of why abstracts are beneficial is staff well being and productivity but we've given it its own section here because we do feel like it's so important and it's something which is sort of under. Not talked about as much as it should be. You know when we think about implementing systems a lot of time we think about its technology you know moving data from one place to another, but that technology and that movement of information affects people right as we all know. And people in time are our most valuable resource and so when evaluating any potential new apps. Definitely consider how is this app or system impact staff productivity happiness and ultimately retention. And the right software will always increase productivity. Of course we can all relate to that 95% of people surveyed in that state of software happiness report agreed that their software makes them more productive. Right, so if we can move away from paper based manual entry and towards cloud based digital remote access information that flows into the accounting system that's always going to lead to greater productivity. We can save ourselves and save each other from getting bogged down in those day to day administrative tasks, we can take that time saved and apply it to higher level tasks like analysis forecasting, and you know honestly even outside of a work perspective. When you save time, it allows you to even have that space to yourself to think and develop yourself professionally as well. The goal is to essentially create a positive feedback loop between finance and the rest of the organization. If the finance team can be productive and have access to all the information that they need, then they can. They're not the rate limiting step where they're having to constantly push out that information to other people who are requesting it. They don't have to spend their time doing that they can then invest that time elsewhere which makes, you know everybody's lives easier and makes the organization as a whole more efficient. And if you're wondering why I have a picture of an email, a washing machine and a dishwasher here. Just, I think they're pretty apt metaphors for thinking about these apps right like we, we apply technology in so many different ways in our daily lives to increase our productivity is that we probably just take for granted right like, I'm not sitting writing letters by hand and going to the post office and mailing them I'm sending emails. I don't want to wash my clothes by hand I want to drop them in the washing machine and take that hour or two or three that I saved and invested in other things that I'm interested in right. I don't wash dishes by hand unless I have to right so taking that idea of how we use leverage technology in our personal lives and looking at the workplace and seeing, you know how can we looking for new opportunities to how we can save time and be more efficient. And I've put a picture of a paper and pencil accounting ledger and Emmanuel calculator, which is how things would have been done back in the day and I'm guessing no one's using that and it's for good reason. We can all agree that you know having the right software, you know, helps with our work life balance right. And so that's really what this is about you know we are here to talk about QuickBooks online and how to build an app stack around that, but we wanted just wanted to contextualize that within the broader, you know topic of your organization and the effect that these tools can have beyond just technical moving of data from system to system it can affect staffing. And, you know, it can affect happiness, more than half of employees have experienced unhappiness at work because of the software they're using. And, you know that's more than half of people and then 25% of people have considered leaving their job, because they're frustrated by the software they have to use at work now this data is not specifically from the nonprofit sector but I think we can all relate right I put an image of a traffic jam because I know the way I feel when I have to use a system that's not working for me is, it's like being in soul crushing traffic where I have a car I have a machine that's designed to help me go fast, and yet I'm sitting there not moving at all. So, it's important to be mindful when selecting systems or rolling out systems to your team that you know we want these to make people's jobs easier and not be so cumbersome or so difficult to learn, or so compartmentalize that it actually ends up being a frustration for them. And this just goes back to what Tristan mentioned earlier about how you know one of the considerations is what is the quality of the support and resources available. Do they offer chat support, do they offer phone support or can you only email them and wait for a response three days later because then you're stuck in the traffic jam. And so, considering, you know, apps that have high quality support can help alleviate the pressure on the finance team, or that one or two people in the office who are tech savvy to be the help desk and have to spend their time sort of helping everyone fix little problems. If users can contact, you know, build calm support directly or into a support directly, then that's going to, you know, save your staff from spending their time on something which could be better spent elsewhere. One little note on the apocalypse. Avoid app overload. And what I mean by that is, you know, I just visit this is one sliver of the thousands or tens of thousands of apps that are out there and what you're probably wondering is okay I get it apps are great but where do I begin, how do I even know where to start. And so, we are going to get into that how to kind of narrow down your search, but when I say avoid apple below you know, we don't just need to use an app. Just because, you know, to wrestle in the worlds of saying we have an app, because then you might end up stuck in the traffic jam always try to be thoughtful and, and really do your research and do a demo and talk with your team and make sure that there's enough bandwidth amongst your team for the rollout. It's better to start small and go one by build your stack one by one instead of trying to do, you know, five implementations at once. And so some other considerations when selecting, you know which apps to include in your app stack or what is the barrier to entry. Is this something that your, everyone on your team is going to have to attend an eight hour training just to be able to use. How does this app promote proper internal operation of duties required for nonprofit organizations that auditors want to see. And then of course, as we just discussed consider the positive or negative effect that having the system will have on staff, you know, is it going to make people's lives easier is it just the next thing that people are going to be stressed out about. And then our kind of motto or theme at AFC is that we always promote financial systems that are transparent accurate useful and timely in their information so you're looking for sort of a rubric or means of evaluating whether this app is right for you and your organization, consider how it's going to affect positively or negatively those four factors of transparency accuracy, usefulness and timeliness of information. All right, I've been talking a lot. I'm going to pass it to Tristan. Shortly, but you know rolling out a new app or system at your organization is more than just entering your email attending the demo and saying okay fine and entering the billing information, you know there's a whole process of roll out and that affects people. And so I'm going to pass it to Tristan to talk a little bit more about the emotional journey of systems change. John, so we're going to stay focused on on the people aspects of this for a minute and I'm sure everyone here has experienced no matter how great a system is or how many benefits are listed out on the website. But if people aren't ready to embrace that system and to make that change, it can still be really difficult and it can still fail. And so one of the things that we do at AFC as we help our partners make a lot of changes is to encourage them to sort of preview this emotional journey of change and this can happen. And then you can go through any process when you go to budget when you go to implement one of the systems that we've talked about today and we'll talk about further so this is something, you know change is promised, both in our personal lives and professional life and what does that journey feel like this model was really created originally by Elizabeth, Elizabeth Kubler Ross, and it was developed as a model to show the grief process so as we know grief is really difficult human experience and just so is change in general and and this is what it feels like to go through that journey so we start off really excited. This is the best ever. We're pumped. This will be fun. We're still excited. Oh, it begins to feel harder than we thought it was. This is a lot of work. You know we're out of our comfort zones. We start to feel like we have no idea what we're doing. We've created ourselves in this, what we call the swamp of nonprofit despair. And that's where it can feel really lonely and isolated but as finance teams, you know we can work with our non finance staff to give them a bridge across that swamp. The bridge can look like, you know mapping out the ability to what is your organization's capacity to make this change so maybe we map out in a year all of our major projects and try to find spaces where we actually can devote time and resources to building in enough time and then carefully planning and communicating a rollout plan for that system implementation. So with that bridge, people are starting to regain hope in this change process. They're excited to see some progress. They see that the system is working as intended. Now everybody's really excited. And then finally at the end of the process people feel like they've accomplished something and they're proud of their teams and their organization and so, you know, we go through this process all of us over and over again throughout our lives and at our workplaces. And the practice of going through it is what builds our confidence and competence at our organizations and so priming our teams for this is going to happen this is going to feel this way and this is a common experience helps people really embrace change and makes it possible to implement these new systems so we always encourage not to just focus on technical benefits and efficiencies but also help people feel and moving through this process. Back to you John thanks. Alright thank you Tristan and also Sean thank you for the great point in that in the chat. I think if anyone surprised like why we're talking about people so much when this is supposed to be about QuickBooks apps you know the technical stuff is coming but you know what's the point in using a new tool if you know it doesn't improve people's you know jobs and therefore efficiency and happiness so thank you. So, now what we're here to talk about today, building an app stack around QuickBooks online in particular. There's so many different accounting systems out there. We kind of like to start by just doing a quick poll you can respond 12345 in chat or you can just type the name and if you want but we'd love to hear what accounting system does your organization does or if you work at multiple organizations or previous organizations we just love to kind of gauge where people's experience lives when it comes to accounting systems. Alright so seeing a lot of QBO QuickBooks online which is good. Michelle you scared me for a moment saying you're moving back to desktop but it looks like it's actually desktop to online. Sorry. So, in terms of, you know, how to build an app stack around QuickBooks online, you know, QuickBooks online is the core accounting and reporting system, but it's not meant to be kind of the all the everything where you do every task right it's all about now in cloud accounting having it sit at the center of the stack and to be used as little as possible, and to get the most out of those automations which connects to QuickBooks online to have those time saving apps flow, you know flow information directly into QBO quick note on cost in case anyone's wondering Sean also brought this up earlier in the chat box but TechSoup is amazing and offers you know incredible discount to nonprofit organizations to for QuickBooks online advanced and QuickBooks online plus so if you're concerned about cost. There's an amazing discount available through TechSoup, one of the many reasons we love TechSoup. In terms of you know why have QuickBooks online at the center why can I just keep using desktop. This goes back to the idea we talked about how the role of the GL is changing, you know instead of having this, the GL be the source of information and then only a certain group of people can access and push information out. There's this whole ecosystem of apps that integrate with QuickBooks online. And so you know, I put this meme in here because you know accounting has, you know become a lot more, you have to be a lot more tech savvy these days and understand that there's kind of an app for everything these days right there's payroll apps, expense management accounts payable accounts receivable all these things which can flow into QuickBooks online so when you think about what am I gaining by using QuickBooks online you're really gaining access to that whole ecosystem of apps, which are all cloud based. Process specific solutions. So what that means is, you know if there's a third party app for accounts payable. That's their business that's their specialty that they're having their developers and their support team. What they want to devote themselves to is making that accounts payable experience, the best it can be. And, you know, into it is, is wonderful and they've created a great accounting central accounting system in QuickBooks but they're never going to be able to create each unique specific process as these third party developers are right so those apps are also constantly being improved because they need to compete with one another because as we look saw on the apocalypse side there's thousands of them out there so that there's this drive to constantly create the best user experience for you all. So if you want to just take a look at what these apps are. You know I don't know how much into it had to pay for this domain name but it's literally just apps.com is where you look to search all the apps that integrate with QuickBooks online. So it's pretty easy to remember. And so yeah in the cubio ecosystem so to speak there are more than 700 apps and increases every day and you can search by, you know, different solutions whether you're looking for CRM or expense management, etc, etc. And all of those are going to have a direct integration with QuickBooks online. And, you know, when there's 700 apps out there. Again, where do you how do you know where to begin what we're going to share our specific example of what is our app stack and advice for change that we recommend and implement for our partner organizations. So we have QuickBooks online at the center again as the core accounting system and general ledger. And what are the different sort of satellite apps that are feeding information into that well for payroll we utilize gusto accounts payable bill expense management Divi which also has a credit card component which we can get into later time tracking we recommend QuickBooks time which most people still call T sheets because that's what it was previously called for decades but it's now officially called QuickBooks time. There's also an amazing new app called fathom which you can use to layer on to QuickBooks online to get more robust reporting. Of course cubio has reporting built in but if you're looking for a more robust tool fathom is a great option for that. And then we also utilize sassant as a bulk importer to cubio when necessary, a lot of you have probably heard of or use transaction pro importer. So that is essentially an alternative or competitor to that. And then we also have rewind backups, constantly backing up the data in the background to ensure the integrity of the data in QuickBooks online because that's a lot of times, a sticking point or something people are very concerned about when making that shift from desktop to online is okay if I don't have my file on my computer backed up 100 times on different hard drives, how do I know my data is safe. Am I just trusting, you know the into it cloud servers are never going to go down to a certain degree yes you do have to trust them but there are solutions like rewind where you can make a backup of your company, just in the event of any catastrophic data loss you would have, you wouldn't actually lose your data. So not putting all your eggs in one basket when it comes to the QuickBooks online server. And in terms of why we've chosen these apps, it really just goes along the same themes that we've discussed throughout this presentation, they're scalable, you know they're built to grow with the organization whether someone's doing $10,000 a month of accounts payable $100,000 you know build.com will scale with them value these are all relatively low costs, you know there's these are the same as some of these bespoke solutions out there that might be designed to integrate with one very specific platform. But none of these are going to break the bank so to speak they all have to have competitive pricing because these are, you know fairly popular, well vetted companies that have, you know, thousands of users. And so, again, that leads into reliability, these systems are going to have a lot of training and support resources available because that's how they have been able to build their business. And of course, the highlight here is interoperability we want strong integrations between the systems to make things as efficient as possible. All right, so I know we're a little low on time like I said I told you I was going to talk a lot. But we want to use the rest of our time as effectively as possible so you know we have these seven different apps that we use in our app stack. And I'd love to hear from you all which of you know which are you most interested in hearing about and I can kind of focus on those one or two apps before we wrap up, because I don't think we have time for all seven so feel free to vote in the chat and I can, you know, dive a little deeper on which app you're most interested in learning about. All right, well I see two options sass and quick books time. So I think, Tristan, if that's all right with you I'll just go into those. Sounds great. Thanks john. Let me scroll through the other ones I had set up here. It's where we need to be. All right, so let's start with quick books time. What is it. It's a web based and mobile time tracking app for employees is formerly known as T sheets. If you like it, you know it has robust reporting you can, you can have employees track time to specific projects or grants. You know, there are a lot of payroll systems have time tracking built in and try to get you to use their time tracking but in most instance instances it's not as robust as quick books time. So we find that people prefer to use T sheets and also the user experience it has a very intuitive interface for employees and supervisors or managers where you can control the different permissions that people have. So, if someone just needs to fill out their own time sheets they can just sign in and all they can see is their time sheets and other people will have access to approve and review time off reports. And then admins have full access to everything. And then also that information can easily flow into gusto and put books online because of those integrations that we like to see. If you're wondering about the cost, there's a base subscription fee of you know $20 per month plus $8 per user for the premium, and then there's also the elite option which is twice the cost in base fee and then $10 per user So what we found it's for most people is that premium is for most nonprofits premium is sufficient to their needs. The elite version really is like, I mean things like geolocation where you can track someone's, you know location on their phone and they're actually at work or having a digital time clock at, you know, in but in, I think for almost all nonprofits you're looking at people track their hours and allocate those to specific grants that they worked on and so the lower pricing is, you know, more often meets those needs. So real quick, I'm not sure how much people are able to respond in the chat box but have you worked with this system do you like it. Do you specifically dislike it because of your experience with it or have you never used it you've never heard of it I'd love to just kind of gauge people's experience with QuickBooks time before I move on to sassant. I've never used it, never heard of it. Alright, good. I'm glad to share QuickBooks time today sassant. So, of course, in a perfect setup, everything in your app stack will integrate perfectly and there will never be a need to manipulate data to get it to fit into another system. Now, like I said these apps are constantly in a process of improving their API and developing the software so that it does have the most direct integration possible but sometimes you do need to sort of a bandaid to stick the different systems you can't implement seven new systems at once you have to start a square one. And so, I think a lot of people use Excel for that or transaction pro importer, we recommend sassant what it is it's a tool for bulk import, or export or deleting transactions into QuickBooks online from Excel. So, I've put a little diagram here of how it works essentially you can upload an Excel file, for example with a list of transactions into sassant. Then there's a very easy to use mapping system where you map the headers from the Excel file to the fields and QuickBooks online. You get a chance to review for any errors to make sure the mapping is set up correctly, and then essentially with the click of a button as long as there's no, you know, mapping errors, you can import hundreds or thousands of transactions with the click of a button into QuickBooks online. So again, if you are able to extract data in Excel form, for example from a bank bank statement. The last thing you want to do is manually enter 100 credit card expenses into QuickBooks online, you can quickly reformulate that data and use sassant to both input it. Why is that good, you know, saves time. There's data validation built in to make sure you don't accidentally do duplicate entry or accidentally create a bunch of new vendors. It's reliable if you look at the reviews for sassant on apps.com the QuickBooks online app center. It's known for being reliable and not breaking down. And like I said, this can be kind of the band aid to patch together multiple systems as your app stack is being developed. The last is pretty major discrepancy between if you have just one versus multiple. I included the price difference here in case anyone's from an accounting firm or works with multiple organizations but it's basically $10 per month. But there's a heavy discount if you have more than one company connected. And, yes, anybody use sassant before or is this kind of the first time you're hearing about it. I love to age the group's experience on that before we wrap up. This is a fun, unique name sassant. If you go to their website they have a lot of different tools that this tool in particular is called sassant transactions for QuickBooks online. And again, you can find it, the QuickBooks online specific version by going to apps.com and searching it. All right, I don't think we have time to talk about rewind I talked about a little bit. I think we probably run out of time to talk about CRMs as well but I did want to just make a note that, you know, we don't have a CRM in our app stack and advisors for change yet because it's kind of outside our normal scope of work but if you're looking for a better way to manage your donors and constituents and want it to integrate with your accounting software, there's tons of CRMs out there that have direct integrations with QBO. And some of those are kind of donor perfect and little green light, which we've heard of a lot of people implementing more recently. So, if you're looking for a way to not have to manage customers aka donors in QuickBooks online and, you know, the development team having to access QuickBooks, you can have a CRM and have that integrate with QBO. All right, and again, I think I'm kind of out of time but final note, I just wanted to say, you know, this app stack, you can consider it sort of like a living app stack where it's constantly being updated and changed because the power of these specialized apps is that, you know, they have developers singularly focused on making them better every day and making them more useful and expanding the functionality so it's, you know, you don't have to just implement the app and never think about it again. It's always being made better and you can always be versatile and flexible with your app stack and look for new ways to increase that efficiency, employee happiness, transparency, and relevance of your organization. So yeah I mean again kind of revisiting our goals, hopefully everyone gained a better understanding of what is a tech stack or app stack, how you can benefit from one and what are some of the ways you can stack apps around QuickBooks online to automate processes. And I think that's it. I don't know, Sean or Tristan if we have time for questions. But that's it for me. Thank you everyone. John, thank you very much and Tristan and thank you everybody who's tuned in. Tristan and John, we're officially at time if there's interest and if our presenters have a little time, I think we can run over by a few minutes and Eli won't get cranky at us. But thank first of all, let's double check. Tristan and John, do you have the time interest to stick around for an extra 10 minutes if there's some Q&A requests. Yeah, we'd love to open up for, please, if anyone has any questions or. Let's do that and let's just go free for all so first person to unmute themselves get the first question in and also Tristan or John if you guys could please drop your website and email addresses into the chat for folks who want to follow up with you later. Doing that right now. I'm on the screen too. Alright, so somebody ask a question. So Lori is asking if there is functionality missing from the enterprise application. So the enterprise application is actually desktop version of QuickBooks so it's not going to be in the cloud. It's going to be more functional functionality than other desktop versions of the QuickBooks application and so it's a little different than online. And there are going to be sort of a cross section of features that you might get from enterprise that you don't get from the other desktop versions. So what we're influencing everyone to do is really move to the cloud because there are apps that cover some of that functionality that you get from enterprise that you'll be able to use with QuickBooks online instead and let's say for example you work at a nonprofit that really has a lot of assets or equipment or property to manage. That's one of the advantages of enterprises is that it does manage those. It's better and has more functionality around fixed assets. There's also apps that do the same thing so we're encouraging across the board, really to get out of QuickBooks desktop and move to QuickBooks online. Any other questions or stories or takeaways that you'd like to share. It remains to be seen Lori and what we're seeing is many times a third party app is going to be into it to increase functionality and so we continue to look at QuickBooks as more of a database that is powerful when it's connected to these third party apps so it's possible that into it comes out with the same functionality. An example would be Milio versus bill.com so Milio is going to allow you to process payments and bills within QuickBooks and might be a better alternative for much smaller organizations because there's less cost there to use that program so you really have to evaluate what works best for your organization and specific use case. I think we have folks dropping and so we really appreciate everyone being here with us this evening and sharing your evening time with us. I want to thank John for putting together the presentation. Sean connecting us to the group. Appreciate that and Eli for setting up this tech space for us so it was a delight to be here with you and please reach out on LinkedIn or email and we'll share the presentation so you can reference it and get to reference the systems that we didn't get to cover. Chris and John, thank you so much for sharing all of your advice and your experience and helping everybody to kind of understand what all these different apps can do for them which really just wasn't even a thing a few years ago. It's a very new world and exciting where we have all this great technology at our fingertips and at within our budget range. And thank everybody who's tuned in as well for, you know, working a little overtime to serve your nonprofits and your communities better. Thank you very much for everything that you're doing to make this a world a better place. Good night everybody. Thanks guys. Good night. Thanks everyone.