Tanya Talks: Conversations with Dext

Tanya: Hey Facebook world, social media world, everywhere world, Instagram, world, YouTube world, wherever you're watching this from. I'm back again, Tanya Hilts from Cloud Business Services and Tanya's Bookkeepers Bootcamp. And I am here now coming to you from the second vendor day, but third official day of Scaling New Heights in Orlando with Dext. So, we have two of the Dext representatives right here, if you guys just want to go ahead and introduce yourselves.

Nana: That's good. My name is Nana, I am a senior practice solutions expert here at Dext. I'm a CPCA and I'm really here to enable our sales team to make a big impact on the accounting community.

Alex: And I'm Alex. I oversee the partner success side of the business for Dext in North America. So, my responsibility is to make sure that all of our account managers, and our onboarders, and trainers are setting up our partners for success.

Tanya: Absolutely, awesome. So, for those of you who don't know what Dext is, and of course we've already agreed, we can say this formerly Receipt Bank. So, hopefully you've heard of them, one of the major receipt capture apps. And the only one that we use too, on an old grandfather plan, but you know what, I love it. I love the platform. I absolutely love everything. I can't talk about pricing because I don't know what the pricing is now in the plans, but I do know there's all kinds of plans, depending on what level. If you're a small firm, or a big firm, they've got all kinds of stuff on that. And I mean, all of our clients carry phones, what is better and easier? We actually have a hockey team as one of our clients and they came to me and they said, all the players submit expenses and they have a hard time getting the expenses from them. They'll throw their receipts in their pockets and then do the laundry. And I said to them, can the players take a selfie? And they're like, yeah, they do it all the time. I said, then they can take a picture of their receipts. It is that easy. So, yeah. Is there anything specific that you guys want them to know about on the Dext side, or any of the other companies that you recently acquired to solve accountant's problems, or bookkeeper's problems, or client's problems too, right?

Nana: I think one of the major topics that I found working in practice and then in industry for several years as well, is accountants like to take a lot of shortcuts when it comes to capturing data. So, the front end of the process, and then they end up spinning their wheels or spending a lot of time on analytics and reporting. And guess what, if we had captured all that data to begin with.

Tanya: And the analytic recordings are wrong, right? Because the proper data wasn't captured in the first place.

Nana: So, the best thing to do to not take all the shortcuts is to take the best possible shortcut, which is just take a picture of a receipt and uploaded into our app, or send it to a specified email address. And then it gets captured in our app for 10 years. Minimum requirement for IRS, I believe is seven years, same with the CRA.

Tanya: Same thing in Canada, CRA is seven years.

Nana: So, it's 10 years. So, you're totally covered, and then you have all of the data, you've captured all the information that is available to be captured and easy peasy, now you can go on, right? So, that's our bread-and-butter product, Dext Prepare. Many people know it as Receipt Bank. And then again, to talk about the newest trends, digital commerce. In the past couple of years, we've had so many companies start using a digital product. So, Square, Stripe, PayPal even. Who would have thought PayPal was back, right? And Amazon marketplace is doing well. Well now, accountants have all this other data to capture, and it's actually already digitalized, which is great. But now we have to log into several different platforms in order to capture the information in the first place.

Alex: There's duplicates all the time, if you have from Shopify and also have a point of sale.

Tanya: Just on my website alone. So, everybody who doesn't know about me, I don't do a lot of e-commerce. I do a small amount of e-commerce but I still deal with three different platforms. One works better with Wix on my website. One works better with here, and I have only got like four things out there right now. I mean, it's ridiculous.

Nana: There's so much data. So many tech solutions for these businesses to operate on. And then the residual effect on accountants then is all the reconciliations, the logging in, and then extracting of data, and making sure that all the parameters are standardized for, again, the analytics and reporting. One platform might call sales, sales. The other platform might call it revenue. They're the same thing. So, let's call it the same thing on our path form, which is Dext Commerce to provide that solution, integrate with all of those platforms. Bring that information in, reconcile it, send it to your QuickBooks or Xero. And that's it. So, again, we're focusing on data capture with that product, but ultimately at the end of it all, you still want to make sure that there's data validation and data integrity is there. So, then again, you can fulfill those reporting needs. So, yeah.

Tanya: Sorry, just want to point out really quickly that there's a feature my team was not aware of up until about a month ago until I pointed it out. We were looking for a specific receipt. Something happened. I don't know exactly what happened, whether it got flagged as a duplicate, whether it got deleted accidentally. I think it was a transaction got deleted in QuickBooks instead of voided or whatever. And they were going in and looking. There is an advanced search that you can pull up and you can type in by date, by amount, by something in the description, by pretty much anything to be able to go in, and it makes it easier instead of...

Nana: Searching through paper?

Tanya: Searching through paper, exactly. Boxes and boxes of paper going, where the heck was it? Or again, just searching through emails, going what did I call it? I don't remember what I called it. So, it's really, really easy to find that stuff as well too. I was just, you guys don't know about this?

Nana: Speaking from an auditor's perspective, I was an auditor for a number of years. I remember seeing several auditors carrying massive briefcases. Right? And they’re just reeling it around from client to client. Well, imagine now, if all your information is digitalized, right? It's just a matter of searching.

Tanya: Well, absolutely.

Nana: And it's easier for your auditors even. Can you imagine? Happy auditors, happy accountants.

Tanya: I actually did have the easiest audit that I've ever gone through for a client in my life. They came, I had everything ready for them. Put it on a USB stick. We chatted for 20 minutes. He left. He actually messaged back. He'd never heard of that before. He messaged back to say, "That was amazing." Now, one thing that I want to say too again, which is really good about the Dext Prepare is that, you're using QuickBooks, or Xero, or whatever platform you're using. You have them take a snap and use one of those systems to get it up there. You decide to change platforms. Now what are you going to do with all of that stuff there? So, we use it at our firm. All clients take a picture, it goes into Dext, or email it in, or drag and drop, whatever works for them because you can drag and drop, it just doesn't take Excel. So, that's the one thing to know, let your clients know, do not forward an email with an Excel because Excel won't go in, but pretty much anything else. And then we've got a copy in QuickBooks and we've got a copy in Dext. If anything happens to that in Quickbooks.

Nana: You have all the details, that's it.

Tanya: The client decides they want to change platforms, they want to go back to desktop, they want to go to Xero, they want to take it on their own and do FreshBooks, whatever the heck they want to do, or they closed their business. It's only accessible for so long there. Or again, a transaction gets deleted. This is a great backup, it has it in two places. It's saved our bacon several times.

Nana: Absolutely.

Tanya: And I'll tell you, receipts are a lot easier to find in Dext than QBO, sorry Intuit, but it's true.

Nana: She said it. Yeah, certainly. And once the data is in your system, right, you want to have the comfort, that it is valid, that the accuracy is there, right? Maybe even if you use Dext Prepare, you want to feel comfort that the data is standardized a certain way, or the integrity is there. And that's why we created Dext Precision as well, it's a great practice management or task management tool as well. So, we have something called a health score, which is quite unique. So, even before you start an engagement, before you signed the engagement letter and you take on a new client, you can connect their QuickBooks or their Xero to Dext Precision. And we're able to see how many duplicate transactions they have, unreconciled accounts, the number of transactions. So, although they're telling you, "Yeah, it's fine. It's fine. My books are totally fine. It'll take you two hours to complete it." And then you start an engagement and it takes you ten.

Alex: Fifteen hours later.

Tanya: Yeah, and that's on a good day.

Nana: But now you actually get that insight in advance of agreeing to anything. So, no surprises, you can provide a no surprises approach to any of your engagements, right? And even on an ongoing basis, let's say you've already taken on this client. Well, on an ongoing basis you can still see that data, those insights, and again, proactively quote, or proactively agree on the work that's to be done with your clients. Right? So, it's all about putting the power back into accountant's hands so we're not working so hard.

Tanya: Absolutely. It's like an administrative team member right there. You can go in, again, Prepare is what we use. Prepare is what I know best. So, only on my file do I have auto publish. There is auto publish. I know many people in the States use auto publish, there are less Canadians that use it for a reason. Our CRA is much more particular with some things, we don't have up in Canada, a completely standardized date system. Like, one gas station will use, month, day, year and the other uses day, month, year, depending on where their head office is. So, Canada's just kind of a mix of stuff. So, it's a little more difficult. So, I know more people in the States have that turned on, but you can go in.

Tanya: What I do is as soon as I bring a client on, especially cleanups, l love it for cleanups. We have them push all the receipts in. I wait until they're in there. I then sort by supplier and I go in and I say, okay, here's what I want these suppliers to default. So, maybe Staples, I'm going to have Staples or Office Depot, Business Depot for the States. I'm going to go in and put okay, office expenses, but it's not always going to be office expenses, but most of the time, if it's 50% of the time or more, I put that in. So, that way I don't have to recode that. So, that goes in there. If there's a US vendor, I want to see the US dollars if we don't have multicurrency. So, I put USD in the description so that I just have to go in and fill in the amount, little things like that. And then go and sort by date, just to make sure that again, our Canadian dates weren't picked up wrong. And I go in and just do a quick date start, fix those ones, and then bam, I go back to sort by supplier and just quickly go through and it cuts that cleanup time down hugely.

Nana: Absolutely. And, again, it's all about how much data, how well it's captured in the beginning of the process. And it makes the whole engagement just go so much smoother.

Alex: And you don't even have to always have your clients submitting for the suppliers. We also Fetch.

Tanya: Right, exactly.

Speaker 3: So, you have clients that consistently get monthly bills. They have the exact same suppliers that they're consistently having data flow through from. Set up that invoice in Fetch and they don't even have to submit it. It's just coming automatically.

Nana: That's right.

Tanya: The only thing that I would point out with that, because that's something that we did when the Fetch came out, I'm like, oh gosh, I did not have that turned on at all. Just simply because clients were getting confused as to what they were submitting, and what they weren't. So, there is a little feature that you can turn on. If it's a duplicate, the client can be notified immediately by email, and I love that immediate notification. "Oh no, we've already got that. Thanks. But we've already got that." So, that way we don't have the duplicates coming in there and there's a lot of customization. I don't like things merging because there's a lot of ones that our clients might have that are the same date, same amount, same company and the invoice number might not be on there, but the description might be different. The AI is not smart enough yet to pick that up. But you can again, go in and turn off that and say, no, don't merge these. I want to decide if I want to merge them, let's say the client then does submit, they take the picture with the wrong one, there's single, multiple, and combined that you can use. Let's say they use the wrong one. You can then go in and you can split them there's so much you can do.

Tanya: Go in and play around. But those tools are there to be able to help catch those human errors that are being made.

Nana: In terms of communication, you can communicate within the app with your client, per document as well. So, you don't have to go searching through emails because we all know we get enough of those. No searching through emails. You can just communicate in app with your client directly on a specific document as well, very efficient, and effective communication ultimately increases or rather boosts client relations.

Tanya: Absolutely. Just make sure the client has notifications turned on. They won't necessarily get it if they don't have it turned on, but yeah, you're right. Because if you send an email saying, oh, you just submitted a receipt, I can't tell what it is. I can't see it. It's too blurry, something like that. They're like, which one? I don't know. I just I got five receipts from that place. I just uploaded. You're right. You just send it back immediately. It shows the picture. It shows everything, you type your question, they get it. They can respond. And most of our clients are working on phones these days. So, it makes it super, super easy.

Nana: You know, the one time I had a paper receipt, hand written and I took a picture of it and our OCR actually processed it.

Tanya: It's actually does. It's really good.

Nana: I was astounded.

Alex: The CRA might not like it but Dext will take it.

Tanya: Absolutely. It's not perfect, but you're absolutely right. There have been several handwritten receipts. That again, I was surprised that it did that.

Alex: I think the benefit of the partner program too.

Tanya: Yes, I was going to say, let's talk about the partner program.

Alex: So, what we're talking about is a ton of customization. So, we have a dedicated team, Nana included, and our partner product specialists, they're able to work with you to identify what is the best setup for you, your firm and your clients. So, we want to really take the consultative approach, understand how you work with your clients and the types of industries that you have. Do you have construction, do you have retail, do you have commerce? What are the best ways that we can set up a product to help you? So, extremely customizable across all three of our products and we have a team that's dedicated to making sure that we enable what's best for you and your clients. Because all firms have a lot of similar challenges and a lot of similar pain points, but no firm is the exact same in terms of how they interact with their clients. So that’s the basics.

Tanya: And there are different pricings for the partner clients versus a direct SMB coming in as well too. So, if you do go looking and you haven't looked on their site yet, make sure you're on the partner site. But if you do want your clients to pay for the app themselves, again, there is an option to do that. So, you can get the best of both worlds.

Alex: Yeah. You can have the partner program and then if your client wants to have direct and add you as your accountant, they can do that. But again, that partner program, Tanya, to your point, has that full-on support, preferred pricing obviously, and more dedicated support from our team as well.

Tanya: Probably the better dashboards too. I love your dashboards.

Alex: Speaking of, we do have a couple of new things coming up. So, for all of our current partners who are on optimize...

Tanya: That would be me.

Alex: That would be you. We have a new practice insights dashboard that is coming, which is basically our current optimized dashboard on steroids. And Nana can speak a little bit more to it, but the idea is to be able to look... it's in Prepare, it's able to look at all of the submissions, all of your client data, your team data, how much automation you have set up, and looking at all of that, to make sure that you're the most optimized to be saving the most time.

Nana: The objective here is to provide actionable insights, right? So, if you can see all the receipts that have been submitted and the status in the process, whether they are up for review, or whether they've just been submitted so far, you can even address behavior issues with that. So, you can see how the documents have been submitted over time, over the past month, the past week or year. How they'd been submitted, via the app, or by Fetch, or via sending them the receipts in the emails, whichever. And then you can see how that's affecting the speed of your engagement, for example, or the efficiency with which you're communicating with your clients as well. So, having all those insights is really excellent. One of my favorite ones actually is seeing between a group of clients on a practice level of which suppliers for instance, have been auto categorized and auto published into QuickBooks.

Nana: So for example, use an 80/20 rule, for example, if you have a set of clients doing restaurants, and then they talk to you as a similar vendor, while there's no reason why one restaurant or center of restaurants should have auto categorize and auto publish for that vendor, but then there's one client who does not.

Tanya: Right.

Nana: Well, there's an opportunity there to create some additional automation and streamline those processes as well. So, those insights and that dashboard is just, again, going to, like Alex said, just boost, the efficiency that you can get from Dext Prepare. It's basically the dashboard on steroids.

Tanya: That's absolutely awesome. And just for those who don't know, the dashboard is where you see all of your client's information at once. Once you go in, you can see all of that information as well in there, at a glance and I love that.

Nana: That's right.

Tanya: So, just to wrap things up here, first off, where can people find you?

Alex: We are towards the back where you can have your lunch service. I actually don't know what booth number.

Nana: 91.

Alex: 91!

Tanya: There you go, she's more than just a pretty face.

Alex: I just show up.

Nana: I try. I know numbers.

Alex: She's a CPA, she knows numbers. So, we have a number of things, you should definitely swing by if your current partner or you're interested in learning more about Dext. We have multiple new products, as mentioned, so we can definitely run you through a lot of the things that we talked about today in more detail, we also have a couple of conference specials. We have a raffle going on. So, if you stop by, we can scan you, if you book a demo, we also have a fun wheel to spin in true Wheel of Fortune manner. So, there are three prizes that we're giving away, basically different ways of interacting with us gets you more entries to win. We are giving away Apple AirPods. We are giving away an Apple watch and our grand prize is $1,500 towards Airbnb for your "Dext" adventure.

Nana: Your "Dext" adventure. We needed to put that pun in there didn't we? Take your practice to the "Dext" level, everyone.

Tanya: That's awesome.

Alex: So, we will be drawing the raffle tomorrow, Wednesday at 1:00 PM.

Tanya: So, make sure you're here before then. Also, as we wrap things up, just point out, yes, they are a sponsor for the puppies as well. If you haven't seen the puppies yet, I don't know why you haven't seen them because you just haven't been on social media then. But what they've done is there are two puppies that are going to be available for adoption for two lucky people out there. And so, Dext has bought them. Some people are like, how much do I buy the puppies for? No, they've been purchased for you and $50 from each of these puppies, so a hundred dollars on behalf of Dext is going to Beagle Freedom Project. And between all of the sponsors here, there's $850 going towards Beagle Freedom Project. You can look it up. It's absolutely great. I've been involved with them for 10 years.

Tanya: And all that we ask is, and all the instructions are on here; we just ask that you take a picture of your puppy, tweet it out, get some social media. Thank Dext for this, all the tags are on here for the Beagle Freedom Project as well. Everything's on there. And you know what? If you really want to get excited, just follow the same storylines that we did with the puppies the last few weeks, for those of you who've seen them, let the people at Dext know what your puppy is doing. You know, your travels home, puppies interacting with siblings. Have some fun out of it and you don't need obviously to feed them or walk them. You just need to love them.

Nana: These are amazing.

Tanya: Thank you very much for that, for giving to that social cause that's so dear to my heart. That's awesome. Thank you for taking the time to speak to me. Was there any last things you wanted to let anybody know?

Alex: No. I just think thank you for bringing the community together. I think the Beagle Project is a phenomenal effort and I'm really proud to be able to contribute to it.

Tanya: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.

Nana: Thank you.

Tanya: All right. We'll see you later everybody. Have fun and stop by.