 Hello, everyone, and thank you to all who have tuned in today for this live webinar looking at FileMaker and Zero Integration. My name is David Baldness, and I'm the FileMaker Business Development Manager for APAC. And joining me today is Andrew Duncan, the CEO and owner of Database, one of our accredited development partners and a member of the FileMaker Business Alliance Program. Today's webinar is for those people who are considering the FileMaker platform for their custom business app requirements and for those who are interested in the value and benefits of integrating FileMaker with Zero. A brief piece of housekeeping as we get started, a broadband connection will deliver the best experience and you can listen to today's presentation through your computer speakers. If you're experiencing issues, you can call one of the citric support numbers that I have on the screen. We will be taking questions following today's presentation. And during today's presentation, you will have the opportunity to type in questions. If you think of a question during the webinar, please go to the control panel, click on the questions section, enter your question and click send. Again, we'll cover as many questions as time allows at the end of today's presentation. To start, I'd like to talk about FileMaker Inc. as a company. FileMaker Inc. is an Apple subsidiary and the sole focus is enabling business teams to create their own custom business apps. We have a great deal of experience in this area, in fact over 31 years of experience. To date, we've shipped over 24 million copies of our software to organizations all around the world. Custom apps built with FileMaker run cross-platform on Windows, Mac and through the browser and we've seen a great deal of success with iOS. With over 2 million downloads of FileMaker Go, our free app for iPad and iPhone. But to fully answer the question, who is FileMaker? I would say we're a company that believes in the simple and not the complex because we enable non-IT people to create amazing custom business apps that transform the way their business operates. Over the years, we've spoken with our customers and we've found that too often their teams end up spending time and effort on unproductive, inefficient activities that make it more difficult to reach their goals. There are three common challenges that we hear constantly from our customers. One challenge is inefficient processes. The workflow is error-prone and time-consuming. Our team all approach the task in a different way and this means that it takes longer than it should to reach our goals. Another challenge we hear frequently is scattered information. In business today, information is literally everywhere. It's in multiple applications in notebooks, in spreadsheets, in someone's iPad and our team spends too much time and energy trying to find the information they need. Finally, people are still struggling with rigid technologies that aren't flexible enough to adapt to their specific business needs. Our customers know that technology could help to overcome these problems but organisations often have a difficult time finding technologies that fit their exact needs. So with the FileMaker platform, you can develop a custom business app that meets your exact business requirements and you can deploy the solution so that the entire team can participate giving the team access via Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad and the web. You can cost-effectively bring together all the needed information. You can quickly streamline business processes and you can easily update and deploy across different devices and platforms. Giving everyone access will deliver the efficiency and productivity that your business requires and will help you reach those business goals. And integrating your custom FileMaker app with Xero, well this can take it so much further. To further the discussion on the value of Xero and integrating your custom FileMaker app it's my pleasure to introduce Andrew Duncan, the CEO and owner of Databuzz. Andrew, welcome to today's webinar. Thanks David, it's a pleasure to be here. So Andrew, tell us about your company, Databuzz. Sure. I founded Databuzz in 1999 and I've been developing with FileMaker since 1992. Databuzz is a proud and long-standing FileMaker business alliance member. At Databuzz, we build amazing custom business apps on the FileMaker platform for just about any industry you can imagine. We are certified FileMaker developers and also a Xero-approved developer. So Databuzz has a particular focus on integrating custom FileMaker apps with our systems. Could you tell us about your products and services, Andrew? Sure. Databuzz solves business problems. A custom FileMaker app might be managing information about your customers or managing the services or projects that you are delivering. What makes Databuzz special is that we specialize in linking your systems together. Databuzz provides products and services for integration with credit card payment gateways, SMS messaging services and accounting software. FM Accounting Link is our product for connecting to Xero. With FM Accounting Link, you can connect your existing Xero system to a custom FileMaker app and benefit from an end-to-end business solution. There's also a version of FM Accounting Link for MYB. Great, so tell us why businesses are selecting Xero. Well, Xero is beautiful, easy to use online accounting software. There's more businesses than their advisors. It's all online in the cloud, so you can work where and when you want to. Your bank statements are automatically imported and categorized, letting you see your cash flow in real time. You can invite your accountant and bookkeeper and work together on financials in real time as well. Xero has everything you need to run your financials, including invoicing, paying bills, sales tax returns, reporting and much more. Xero makes it easy for small businesses to stay on top of their financial situation. So Andrew, could you talk a little about the value of integrating Xero with FileMaker? Sure. In many small businesses, sales and service people in the field are generating sales orders. These orders may come back to the office in the form of emails, spreadsheets, paper or PDF documents. We have the order, sales has closed the deal, now the office staff needs to generate a sales invoice in Xero. This can result in data entry errors, lost orders, multiple emails and phone calls to resolve. The process can be inefficient, error prone and can cost you time and money. This scattered information challenge results in inefficient processes. Okay, so by integrating Xero with your custom FileMaker app, you can streamline these processes and benefit from an end-to-end solution. That's right. And traditionally, the bookkeeper or finance team are the only ones with access to the accounting software. Not all staff will have access to your Xero account, as that contains confidential company information. This creates a number of problems for customer service staff who are gauged in with the customers on a daily basis. They need to be able to manage customer information and confirm invoices have been paid and what the customer account balances are. Phoning or emailing the bookkeeper or finance team creates extra work and unnecessary delay. Imagine if all your staff had the ability to generate a sales invoice, record a customer payment or get a customer's account balance, all without having to contact your bookkeeper and all from within your FileMaker app. With a FileMaker custom app, you can create a central location for all company data, given sales, admin and other office users access from the desktop or iOS device. Let me give you an example. One of our customers is an Australian franchise company that provides on-site servicing of cars and the technicians use a custom FileMaker app on their iPad to log their jobs and record their time and materials used. At the end of each day, they sync their data back to the head office, which runs a nightly process to generate invoices and associated payments in Xero. They've been able to automate what was previously a time-consuming manual process that was riddled with data entry errors and inconsistencies. Okay, so no more re-entry of information. The data is accurate, admin time is reduced and as a result, the team can focus on more important tasks like servicing their customers. That's it. The most common scenario we see for FileMaker in Xero integration is to automate the pushing of a sales invoice from the FileMaker app to Xero. FileMaker is used to generate and issue the invoice to the customer. FileMaker buttons and scripts are developed to push the customer details from FileMaker to Xero. If the customer record already exists in Xero, we update it. If there's no customer record, we create it. From Xero, you can download a list of inventory items, tax rates and chart of accounts to assist with the sales invoice data entry in FileMaker. You can then push the completed sales invoice from FileMaker to Xero at the click of a button or these can also be batched for bulk uploading at the end of the day. You can also upload and allocate payments received from customers. Okay Andrew, so how does all this happen? How do we create that bridge or integration between FileMaker and Xero? Well our product FM Accounting Link is a completely unlocked FileMaker solution that shows you how to integrate FileMaker in Xero using the Xero API. You can leverage your existing FileMaker solution that your staff are familiar with and add new buttons and layouts to handle the push and pull of data between FileMaker and Xero. If you don't have an in-house FileMaker developer or an external consultant data bars can provide this consultant service to set this up for you. And if you don't have an existing FileMaker solution you can use the FM Accounting Link as a starter solution as it has the full Xero integration out of the box and you can customize it to suit your business requirements. Okay Andrew, so now it's time to get technical. Why don't you walk us through the details? Sure. So let's talk through the main features of FM Accounting Link. Firstly, FM Accounting Link is a FileMaker solution that works with FileMaker Pro version 12 through to the current version 15. You can use FM Accounting Link with either FileMaker Server or Standalone with just FileMaker Pro. It works with both Windows and Macintosh and it's 100% unlocked so you can learn how it works and then recreate just the features you need in your existing FileMaker solution. It includes examples for the common FileMaker Xero integration tasks such as handling the authentication, pushing and pulling contacts, invoices, purchase orders, payments and many more. FM Accounting Link is available in a number of licenses including a company license, vertical solution license and developer license. Finally, if you're planning to use FM Accounting Link with WebDirect or FileMaker Go users you will need to be using FileMaker Server to host your solution as we use a FileMaker plugin to handle the communication between FileMaker and Xero. How about I take the time to demo FM Accounting Link? Andrew, that would be fantastic please if you would. Okay, so I'm just going to switch over to FileMaker Pro and bring up FM Accounting Link. So this is the file that we sell completely unlocked which has all the examples for integration with FileMaker and Xero. Now I mentioned earlier that you typically don't want to give all your FileMaker users access to your Xero accounting system so that contains confidential company information but you do need to give them the ability to perform common tasks such as pushing contacts, invoices and bills from FileMaker to Xero and pulling down customer payments and customer balances. So before we can exchange information we need to set up what's called a private application in Xero and this handles the authentication between FileMaker and Xero. So let's walk through how that process works. I'm going to click on organization and this is my screen where I can set up my Xero preferences including all the details about my particular Xero organization. To set up what we call the private application we need to create some keys in FileMaker, share them with Xero which will give us some other keys which we then share in FileMaker. So I'm going to click the create private keys button which quickly creates two keys for me. I'm going to click into the public key and copy and paste that to my clipboard. Now I'm going to head over to the Xero website in my browser and I need to be on the developer.xero.com part of the Xero website. I'm going to click on my apps and this is going to bring up a list of any apps that I've created. I haven't created any at the moment so I'm going to set up a new one. So as I mentioned before we're creating what they call a private application which is just for use within my own organization. No one else can access this. So I need to give this a name so I'll call this FM Accounting Link Demo. And here I'm going to choose which of my Xero organizations I want to work with. So typically you'd only have one. We do recommend creating a demo company as that means when you're testing integration you can upload and download information without affecting your live Xero accounts. So I'm going to select the demo company and click key from FileMaker tick these two boxes and click save. Now Xero is going to go and create the private application for me and it's going to return some keys as well. You'll see here it's created a consumer key and a consumer secret. So with a private application I just need to copy one of those which is the consumer key. So I'm going to copy that to my clipboard go back to FM Accounting Link and paste it into the consumer key field. So I've now shared my keys with FileMaker for me. Now I'm ready to test that this works. I'm just going to click the authenticate button and that's going to attempt to authenticate with Xero and return some information about my Xero organization. So you can see that was successful. It's pulled down my Xero organization name and my Xero organization shortcode which we'll discuss a bit later as that helps us create links directly from a contact or invoice record in FileMaker straight to Xero. Now that we've successfully authenticated the next step is to download some configurational setup data from Xero and this is normally just a one-time event because we're going to be downloading things like chart of accounts, tax rates, tracking categories and so on as well as our list of products or inventory items. If these change in Xero you can also always redownload them at any time. So I'm going to start by downloading my list of chart of accounts and I'm going to click the import accounts button and that's going to request from Xero a list of all my chart of accounts and I've got about 60 or so in my demo company and as you can see they've come down successfully the click of a button in a matter of seconds. Now let's get the tax rates and that's a much smaller list that won't take very long at all there's only about half a dozen of those and I'm going to get my Xero tracking categories next if you don't use these tracking categories in Xero you can skip these steps I'll get my branding themes which control how my invoice is looking in Xero and finally I'll get my list of currencies and if you only have trading one currency there will only be one record in that list in this case Australian dollars the final piece of information I want to download from Xero is probably one of the most important ones as well which is my list of products or inventory items as they're called in Xero I'm going to click the import products button and that's going to download my full list of products as you can see they've been downloaded successfully now the reason we download this information is that it makes the data entry of a sales invoice much easier which means less typing for users and more accurate and more consistent data so now that we've successfully authenticated and downloaded some configuration data from Xero let's have a look at data entry and pushing some information from FileMaker back to Xero to demonstrate this I'm going to switch over to my iPad in this screen here and discuss the experience of a sales person who's on the road, caption orders working with clients isn't in the office very much but needs to generate a sales order and send that also back to the office for approval and then for posting to Xero and possibly sending to the customer as well so here you can see on my iPad I've got a list of all my customers so I've logged in this myself, I'm on the road I'm going to be visiting FileMaker today so they're going to be my customer for today so I'm going to click the FileMaker record and you can see David is my main contact, he's an active customer I've got his main contact details up here and if David had any previous invoices we would see our list of invoice history down the bottom so this is David's first order so I'm just going to click the new invoice button and generate a new invoice and I missed, there we go ok so now we're into our invoice so I've got an invoice number, some invoice dates and G dates I can record some notes about this invoice here otherwise I'm going to start adding some invoice items by clicking the plus button so I'm going to click the plus button and now I can click on the product list and you might have seen this is the same list of products that I downloaded from Zero a few moments ago so all I need to do is select some items from the list so I'm going to choose some development work and we'll make that 10 and then we'll do another item and this time we'll do some project management and we'll do five of those ok so that's everything I need for my invoice I'm happy with that you can see there's a section up the top where I can either approve that or send it for review now I don't have, as a sales person I don't have the privileges to approve these invoices so I need to click the send for review button so let's click that and you can see that was successfully submitted back to a file maker server for review by the accounts team so I'm going to click ok now I'm going to switch back to FM Accounting Link so I'm going to demonstrate uploading a contact from FM Accounting Link to Zero first you can upload contacts at the same time as you upload an invoice but there will be times when you may need to upload a contact separately such as when you update their contact details so let's go into the contact screen and here's my list of contacts so there's my record for file maker down the bottom with David as my main contact so I'm going to go into that now as far as Zero is concerned the only mandatory field is the company name field I've also filled out David as my main contact I can enter some additional people phone numbers and addresses as well and if you have a look at the financial details tab I can enter some optional defaults as well for sales invoices such as the account code and the tax rate and you can see that these items are coming from the list of data that I downloaded earlier from Zero if David was a supplier I can also select the purchase equivalents of those as well you'll notice then here I've also got fields for the customer balances so for any accounts receivable outstanding overdue and the same for accounts payable so I think I've got everything I need now to push this record to Zero so I'm going to come up here and click the push to Zero current record button that's going to go and push the information to Zero and you'll see it's been successful and one way I know it was successful is that we now have this field here called the Zero Contact ID which has a value and I'm going to hide this from your file maker users so they don't need to see it but it's confirmation that that record was successfully uploaded to Zero and if I was to make any changes to this record and push it again it would simply update the record in Zero and not create a duplicate record so let's have a look at how that record looks in Zero I'm going to go and click the open contact in Zero button and using that Zero shortcut that we got before it's going to take me straight to that that contact record and you'll see all the details that I had in my FM Accounting Link contact record have come across including the name, the email, the phones and the address and you'll notice I've also populated the what they call the Zero contact code CT1050 number if I go back to FM Accounting Link you'll see that that's actually my file maker primary key or unique ID in a file for this record so that makes it easy when comparing records in file maker in Zero to know exactly which record to which and if you look at David's financial details of my history so there's no previous sales or purchases against this record so let's go back to the FM Accounting Link file and let's have a look at some invoices now we've shown you how easy it is to push a contact now let's talk about a sales invoice which is the most popular integration scenario for file maker in Zero integrations so I'm going to go jump into my invoices screen let's see if we can find an invoice that needs approval, please while we're not authorized here we go, here's one down the bottom it's our draft invoice so I'm going to go into that invoice and it's my job as an account team member or bookkeeper to review this invoice and make sure all the data has been entered accurately now the advantage of having the sales people just choose a product from a list means that everything is entered by default so it's populated the description the unit price the correct account code and the text type now I can override these on an individual line on a basis if I need to but having them defaulted based off the product code means I won't have to make any changes in this example now I'm pretty happy with this invoice it all looks good I've got an invoice date, a due date it's linked up to my contact correctly so I'm going to change this from draft I'm going to say that's authorized now we're ready to submit this invoice to Zero so let's go ahead and click the push to Zero this invoice button it's worth mentioning that you can batch these so you can upload a group of invoices at the end of the day or daily or offload them to form a server to them after hours so good news that invoice will successfully upload it to Zero and once again it's with our contact we've got a Zero invoice ID so that's how you unique identify so let's go and have a look and see what this invoice looks like in Zero I'm going to click the open invoice in Zero button that's going to take me straight to that invoice in Zero once again without me having to go and find it and as you can see it's got the same number of line items correct account codes, tax rates prices and so on also with the same correct subtitles and tax totals you'll notice that I've also populated the invoice ID with the filemaker invoice ID and that just makes it much easier for me to map invoices from filemaker to Zero you can turn it off and have Zero generate the invoice numbers for you if you prefer so the other common scenarios that you might be using filemaker to record payments against the sales invoice so down here I've got a payment section so let's go and record a payment for this invoice from David so I've created a new payment it's put into today's date I can now choose which bank account that money was paid into once again these are coming from our Zero account codes that we downloaded earlier so I'm going to say it was deposited into the business bank account if it was a check or an EFT and you have the reference number or the check number you can put in the unique transaction code there and now we need to put in the amount so David's a bit short of cash so you can only afford a part payment so he's giving me $2,000 now I'm ready to upload that invoice that payment sorry so I'm going to click upload that's going to push that payment to Zero and it's going to allocate it to this invoice at the same time so let's go back to Zero and let's just simply refresh that invoice in our browser and now we can see that the payment has been applied to that invoice so the $2,000 payment has been applied if we click into the payment details we can see it's uploaded the amounts it's got a reference number and the payment date and it's allocated to the correct bank account so very little no more double data entry all at the click of button and all within seconds so let's go back to our FM account link and for our final demonstration I want to talk about the role of a customer service staff who might be talking to these customers on a daily basis need to have some macro information about their account balances at the time they're talking to them so if I go back to David's filemaker record go to the financial details tab we can see here that the account receivable outstanding and overdue fields are empty and I know that David does indeed have an invoice that is only part paid now if I'm talking to David it's good it's important for me to know whether he's got any money outstanding or overdue so I'm going to come up here and click the update balances from Zero button that's going to request just an update for this particular record and as you can see that was successful and now I know that David has just over just under $3,000 still outstanding it's not overdue so David's still within credit terms so I don't need to chase him for payment but if he did have some money overdue that would be important to know if I'm talking to him on the phone so that concludes the demonstrations you've seen that we've been able to authenticate pull down information from Zero upload contacts, invoices, payments and record customer balances all of the click of a button and all within a matter of seconds so let's go back to the presentation so in summary the benefits of our product Ephraim accounting link are lets you securely integrate your custom file maker solution with Zero it automates the exchange of data between file maker and Zero removing double data entry and improving the accuracy of the information flown from file maker to Zero which in turn frees up your staff to work a more productive and interesting tasks rather than many old double data entry to what Andrew I can see a huge number of benefits here you know reducing double entry of data reducing administration time you know accurate data and again allowing your people to spend more time serving your customers fantastic so really appreciate your time Andrew and let's take a look at you know the questions of course but before we do that let's speak about the next steps so from file maker's perspective look if you haven't done so already download a free 15 day trial of file maker pro 15 take a look at the file maker training resources the link is on the screen and there's more recorded webinars that you'll find available on the website that may be of interest and if you do need any further assistance with resources or licensing programs look drop me an email or drop me a call and with regards to the data bus well go to the data bus website and review the information that's available on FM Accounting Link watch the video series demonstrating how easy FM Accounting Link is to use and integrate and of course if you need further assistance or wish to purchase FM Accounting Link or contact Andrew Duncan his contact details are on the screen okay so we've got a few more minutes left now to review and to respond to some of the questions that may have been posted through the go to meeting control panel but look we may not have time to cover all the questions or you may have a question that you would like responded to privately so right now you're seeing on the screen the contact details for both Andrew and myself so we do have a question I'm a I'm new to file maker and I currently invoice out of zero can you explain why would make more make my advising over to file maker Andrew what's your thoughts about that well zero typically is in use to run your business it's an accounting solution at the end of the day file maker lets you create a custom business app with lots of other functionality that zero doesn't provide so you can integrate into what's commonly called a customer relationship management or CRM solution which lets you do a lot more than just invoice your customers you can SMS them, follow up emails record notes, record conversations give access to all your all your staff and in turn through file maker go access to people on the road out of the office using file maker go on an iPhone or an iPad so basically you get a lot more functionality still with the benefit of integrating with zero and pushing the invoices that you create in file maker up to zero at the end of the day so they're in your accounting system look Andrew I think that's really spot on and if you look at the way we do business today it's all about having access to information today and again it's about everyone and the team being able to participate and in particular if you've got a business that has guys out in the field extending the reach of this out to an iPad or an iPhone through file maker go is going to give you that efficiency and productivity let's see if we've got another question or do you want to say something that comes up a lot is that zero is very limited in the information that you include on an invoice some of our customers are running quite sophisticated sales and invoicing solutions and they need to include a lot more information on an invoice that's issued to a customer then what zero will ever let you allow let's see if we've got another question what if you're using file maker for a membership database and they request slightly different info for invoicing then you want listed as their contact details will they automatically over be over overridden or I guess would it create a new record we can certainly the information that you record in file maker and the information you send to zero don't necessarily have to be the same you can certainly have an option to you have complete control at the end of the day over what the information that you send to zero is it doesn't have to be identical to the information in your file maker database so if there's information you don't want to share it from file maker you certainly don't have to share that in zero that might be a question I can follow up offline there might be a bit more to that particular question so please feel free to contact me we can follow that up in more depth now we've got another question that says here I've got quite a number of people in my team and I'm wondering about what are the right licensing options for file maker look absolutely there's a number of licensing options we have file maker licensing for teams we have our legacy licensing options annual and perpetual it really depends on how you're going to deploy file maker as to which is the most appropriate path so again on screen you're seeing my email address david underscore borgness at filemaker.com if you'd like to send me through some more details on how you're going to be deploying file maker we can answer that question okay we've got another question here that says if you're pushing invoices across in say a retail situation where there's a lot of transactions is there a transaction limit there's no transaction limit as such there is a limit about the number of requests you can make to the zero API each day in a 24 hour period I think last time I checked it was around about 5000 requests a day and an individual request isn't necessarily one invoice it could be a batch of invoices so you can bulk upload multiple invoices in one request some customers are not uploading every transaction they're simply uploading a consolidated daily takings at the end of the day or the end of the week or the end of the month so it's really up to you but if you're doing more than 5000 invoices a day zero probably isn't the appropriate solution for you in any case but I haven't had any customers hit that transaction limit yet okay we've got another question that's come through if I was to contact data bars to set up the FM accounting link can you describe how that engagement would work? Andrew please sure so yeah we would certainly meet up with you either in person or virtually and get you to share your existing file maker solution and then essentially discuss what problems you're trying to solve for you you're trying to push invoices or purchase orders or bills or credit notes or wherever it might be then we'll do a bit of a mapping exercise to map out what you've currently got and how that compares with the data that zero requires and then we can essentially leverage the FM accounting link solution and perform a bit of a field mapping exercise and create buttons or scripts on your layout so you'll have the similar functional leads that we've demonstrated today in the FM accounting link solution alright so we've come to the end of the questions that people have posted once again Andrew I'd love to thank you for joining us here at FileMaker today for this webinar looking at the integration between FileMaker and zero and the value of doing so it's been fantastic to see the product that you've brought to market so with that I'm going to say thank you to everyone who's tuned in today it's been a pleasure presenting to you once again if you have any further questions that you would like us to answer on a private in a private way you can see our email addresses on the screen we will be in touch to see how we can help you further but on that note I'd like to thank everyone once again for joining us today and we're going to close down today's webinar take care thank you