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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  00:00

Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab sponsored by CPA practice advisor. With your hosts, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley.

Randy Johnston  00:10

Welcome to today’s accounting Technology Lab, we’d like to discuss the newly announced relationship between two reputable vendors quick fee, and Nula. Now, Brian and I had the opportunity at AICPA engaged to sit down and discuss the press release announcement. But the details here are far more interesting. So we did get to talk directly with CEO Jennifer Wawa and CEO Jamie pebbles. And kind of I guess we’ll call them their lieutenants will Baker and Sherry dodge and and we’ve known all four of those professionals for some time, and they’re all reputable now.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  00:53

And they all have they all have 10 plus years in the industry.

Randy Johnston  00:56

Absolutely. So Brian, what would you like our listeners to know about? Quick fee Nullah and the relationship? Okay,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  01:06

so So let’s kind of talk about who quick fee is and who Nula is, just to kind of help you out. Because you may be listening to this game. I’ve never heard of either of those two companies, why do I care? Well, there is a compelling reason to care. There’s cool flowchart coming up in about five things. But the idea here is that we are combining optional financial services. So this is a we’re combining this, this quick fee product and payments for polio to help improve the cash flow of firms, where we, where we basically have the ability to finance invoices, basically with recourse where the cost of financing is borne by the by the client. And, you know, they they’ve had integrations into products. But But again, they’ve got they’ve got a whole host of things to handle payment processing to handle to handle again, paying over time to handle automation of automation of the invoicing process. You know, Jennifer Warszawa, that ran worldwide partner programs for sage is getting the US president for quick fee. And she is you know, she is really pursued integrations with a wide range of practice management solutions, and has gotten most of them. And so it’s it’s the idea here is it is a plug and play tool to help firms get paid and clients clients get the financial services they need to make the firm’s services possible.

Randy Johnston  02:43

Yeah, you know, Brian, your point is well taken, Jennifer does what she says she’s going to do. And as an example, we discussed the integration of quick fee with the iris practice management products announced last October. And of course, quick fees, also integrated with a number of other platforms. Now, the platform also handles ACH. So that’s important. And we did ask about the Fed now rails because I think that’s an up and coming. But there is no limit on the ACH processing. And if you consider large audit work or recurring cash work, you can handle that with ACH. So it automates a lot of that type of thing. Here, plus the other. I don’t know whether I should call it a minor feature. But another feature that the quick fee folks have promoted is that if you want to do a technology upgrade, they’ll fund you for X number of days, 90 120 days as a CPA firm, so you can actually make the purchase and they’ll pay the vendor and then you pay quick fee for those technology services. But the most important relationship here is ease of payment for your clients. The ability to you know, take a credit card, a debit card, or ACH entry, the Buy Now pay later if a client really needs to, you know, have terms so you can handle that. And I really believe that quick fee saves a lot of time. And frankly a lot of administrative or unbillable partner and manager senior time. You can do automated email reminders with the platform, and you get invoices that can be paid with a single click so that again, there’s lots of features in the platform that I think are important.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  04:43

Now the other platform involved here is new love and Nullah is Nula is a platform for engagement letter creation and automation. And the the idea here is that you can send and incent clients and create creative engagement letters in bulk, you have consistent formatting, because it’s all created with an engine. You also have a centralized database of the engagement letters, their status and the client part, and the client or so the services in there. And they do a great job of onboarding. But honestly, that product is easy enough to use that it really usually doesn’t require much as far as onboarding. It’s a

Randy Johnston  05:25

sorry, that is absolutely right. Sorry to interrupt you there, Brian. Because, you know, the onboarding and use is so simple. We’ve talked about this in another technology accounting podcast, but there’s some pretty radical upgrades and Nula that probably merits an update. But, uh, Jamie reports that the average time to investigation to use is less than a few minutes. So typically, you can create an engagement letter in less than 10 minutes that you can then use for bulk mailing, he said that the record time on the platform is less than two minutes. Well, just think about your engagement letter process today. And can you get, you know, that many engagement letters out, track them and so forth, there’s some very advanced features inside this product that I don’t want to spend our time today talking about. But when I consider the engagement letter platforms that are competitors, and we’ll just pick on a few by name, ignitions, Emilio’s anchors, and so forth. This one has lots of flexibility, and works in the style that I think many of your firms do. And so I’ve recommended Nula as an engagement letter platform since I discovered it. And the integration here winds up getting us even more value in any Indian process. So Brian, can you talk about the benefits of the newly announced quickfee and Nula integration?

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  07:00

Well, the the thing about this is that they’re really trying to, they’re really going through and they, they will let you customize an engagement template with the quick fee payment link in it. So that way, you can offer quick fee, without, you know, you can check a box and put it in and then that’s just part of that engagement.

Randy Johnston  07:22

And so Brian, I think one of the questions we ask and that area is you could actually get fees paid at any point in time, you could have down payments, you could have, you know, partial payments in advance, you could have payments after the fact you can have payments, retail style on tax returns, if you want to have it paid before it’s delivered.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  07:42

And that’s one of the differentiators between that and the ignition product and some of the other some of the proposal tools out there, that that put that advocate subscription only. And I think that’s, that’s an important part here. Because, you know, in the long term subscription is probably the direction a lot of folks are going. But in the short term and in the intermediate term, we have to turn the turn the battleship again, and get from where we are to where we’re going. And so that means that we need a tool that will accommodate the, you know, all of the different possible payment scenarios that we contemplate when we’re negotiating and coming up with our arrangements with clients. Because, you know, again, the way you the way you set up an audit versus the way you set up a tax engagement versus the way you set up in a state versus the way you set up financial planning, that all have different ways you get paid. And so it’s it’s I think it’s important to for people to understand, again, that this, this flexibility is important.

Randy Johnston  08:46

Yeah, and you know, I think even in our own practices, the various styles of billing and payment that we do, even though you know, I tend to do a lot of flat rate billing, I still do have some time and material billing. And I still have a lot of deposits in advance and I have, you know, expenses that are billed separately and so on. And, you know, for me, I can’t imagine just having one style of Bill and one style of engagement letter that’s just not my practice.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  09:21

Well, and what I love about this is it gives you a way to offer these different payment options to people within the platform. And and it’s actually in both platforms. And then it automates the reconciliation of the payments back to those same engagement letters and invoices, including with electronic signature. So you can you can have this whole thing be digital and and go forward. So I guess the the, the exciting part about this thing if we look at it now, you know, if we’re, again if we’re if we’re thinking about this now there’s there’s a flowchart I’ve got on the screen now for those of you watching the video version of this file cast. And, again, I, I like the, you know, it just kind of shows the engagement to cash workflow that we’re going to have. And then the then as we put in the automation, I think this, you know, this the automation of the reconciliation, the other pieces like this, you know, this is the way things ought to work, you know, I actually had to have some conversations with with one of the, one of my favorite vendors at the, at the trade show floor, and he was I’m not gonna say who it was, but he was bemoaning the inability to get access to a particular piece of data in in a, in a system that he wanted to integrate with, because it would endanger the product, you know, the the incumbent product owner, that was was in the same suite as the application he was trying to integrate with. And he was going to engage in danger, their product, their solution for the problem that his product solves. And I love the fact that, you know, Nula and quickfee, and carbon and a lot of others are trying to put together almost like a Superfriends approach, where we have these point solutions. But then we’re going to solve the workflow pain points, and we’re going to solve the integration pain points for you. So that we can all work together. And we can have a, you know, it’s not a bespoke system. But we can have a, a modular system where we can, we can make all these things work together. So you can do business and have your workflows set up the way you want to.

Randy Johnston  11:36

Yeah, so Brian, you know, the key here is this is an Indian workflow. But basically, you can do your business development, synchronize your data between quick fee and your practice management system, and Nullah, out of Nullah, you can send those engagement letters. So when you get those back, then again, those are synchronized into quick fee synchronized into your practice management. And it basically is a single flow from the clients perspective, they see the engagement letter, they can make the payments from invoices, it’s all tied together. So

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  12:17

this is this is again, part of the genius of these two CEOs is that they’ve heard their clients saying, you know, I love what you do, I love what you do, just make it work. And I think they actually have that’s exciting. I think

Randy Johnston  12:33

they have and again, we’ll name you know, what might be competitors, because people are looking at, I won and they’re looking at anchor and they’re looking at Camp campfire. And they’re looking at axiom, you know, lots of these other tools that are out there. And, you know, this particular approach, I think, has satisfied most of my key objections or key desires. And we have recorded podcasts on some of those other platforms, so you can get a flavor of this. But again, reputable companies doing the right things together. It’s a it’s a big breakthrough as far as I’m concerned. So Brian, other parting thoughts for our listeners.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  13:14

I just love it when smart people work together to solve to solve problems and they they find ways to work together without getting greedy. I think the, you know, when I look at when I look at this integration, this is my hope for the future of the of the accounting technology space, is that we will focus more on solving the problems of our, of our clients, and we will focus less, you know, in this case accounting firms, we will focus less on, you know, navel gazing and figuring out how we’re going to sell more of X, Y or Z. I really like the fact that these folks have have gone after creating a solution instead of a product. Yep,

Randy Johnston  14:00

understood. And you know, it is our hope that each one of these accounting technology podcasts help you get gain insight to solve a problem in your practice and for your clients. We’ll be talking with you again in another accounting technology podcast. Good day.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  14:19

Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab, from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.

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