Accelerate Your Transition to AP Automation with KwikTag (Video)

In a world working everywhere, KwikTag has made your digital transformation easier than ever. KwikPayables Accelerate for Dynamics GP is a cloud-based (SaaS) accounts payable automation solution that provides a totally digital automated process for handling invoice and payment batch approvals. KwikPayables Accelerate makes AP automation more attainable with a smoother, faster solution deployment at a fraction of the typical cost.

This recorded webinar includes industry data to support your business case for going digital, as well as a demonstration of KwikPayables Accelerate, including a preview of new features coming soon.

Transcript below:

Melissa: Hi there, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. This is Melissa Greenhill. I’m a marketing specialist here at Encore. And today, we’re gonna be talking about accelerating your transition to AP automation with KwikTag. So I’ve got Michael Sortino here, I’ll let him take it away.

Michael: Super. Thanks, Melissa, and thanks, everybody for joining us. We’ve got our team assembled. Hopefully, you can see us. Hello. We got our cameras on here, and we’ll just jump right into it. So who we have on our team joining us is Mary Miller, our Director of Marketing & Channel, I’m Michael Sortino, I’m one of the partner managers here, And then Matt O’Neill, who is your dedicated account executive who will help you with all of your nitty gritty questions and needs and help find the best fit for you. So how are you guys doing today?

Mary: Good. Good to be here. Thanks, everyone, for joining.

Michael: Yeah. Matt, how are your fish doing?

Matt: Very well. The fish are surviving, everybody’s good, thank you.

Michael: Okay. Good, good. So, just as we go over the agenda really quick, I’m going to point out, there is a question box over…it should be on everybody’s right hand side but we like to keep these interactive. We’ll have a couple of polls in here just to get to know you all a little bit better but definitely type in any questions that you have in the question box. And I was thinking maybe just to start off, just so that we can know that you know where it’s at, go ahead and type in what you’re most excited about to do this summer. I know a lot of us are anxious to travel or get out of the house or see people we haven’t seen in a while or see maybe trees that we haven’t seen in a while. So go ahead and type that in the question box and you can practice finding out where that’s at and…

Mary: So Michael, is leaving the backyard an option?

Michael: Yes, definitely.

Mary: Anywhere but the backyard?

Michael: Mailbox run, yeah, totally, if you’ve been having Uber get your mail for you. So we are excited to share today our AP automation solution. There’s a lot of new things, if you’ve seen us before, so we’ve got some great surprises for you. But then also, if you’re brand new to us, KwikTag has a very unique way outside of just our poor attempt at wit and charm here that you’re experiencing. So Mary is gonna dive into the AP and payment challenges, so end to end AP automation from automating your invoice approval all the way through payments, right? So we’re gonna talk about all those things today. Mary is gonna talk about why we do what we do, Matt is gonna show you a very nice demo so you can get an idea of the way KwikTag does it, and we’ll talk more about payment processing and how we address that and go over some of the benefits that you can receive from there because it’s definitely a very helpful process to automate as well as the AP invoice automation side of things. Then, we’ll go over your questions and have some time for discussion at the end. So Melissa, I can’t see the question box so maybe…has anybody typed anything fun in there or found…

Melissa: Yeah. Well, definitely, someone mentioned swimming.

Michael: Okay. Yeah.

Melissa: So for sure, it’s always a good one.

Michael: Yeah. I’m in Arizona so is Mary, so swimming is vital for our survival in the summer.

Mary: Absolutely.

Michael: Yeah. You have to get in that pool or else you don’t survive. All right, good. So remember where that question box is. Feel free to type them in as we go along, and then off to Mary now.

Mary: Awesome. I’m gonna go ahead and turn my camera off so that we can save some screen real estate and hopefully, a little bit of internet bandwidth as well but feel free to follow along so that you can direct your attention to the slides on your screen. So as Michael mentioned, we’re gonna talk a little bit about the challenges related to both AP and payments that many of you might be facing and maybe what brought you to the conversation today because the challenges of dealing with manual invoices and manual payments kind of the way we’ve always done it, so to speak, have become many times and in large part, due to COVID over the last year or so, have become just unmanageable. If you’re still having people go into the office, chances are some of those people are the AP team responsible for opening the mail, taking the invoices out, you know, stamping them, coding them.

I talked to somebody just last week who was doing all of that and then mailing them, shipping them to the next person in the process. Then ultimately, those invoices along with whatever additional supporting information got copied and then put with another envelope with the checks that were printed out that get mailed or shipped to the signer. So a very cumbersome, very manual process, is what many of us have dealt with in the past and unfortunately, COVID has brought that to light even more because many of us are now in different locations. So what does the industry research tell us? Well, as you can see on the screen, it says that the manual data entry and the inefficient processes are the number one challenge most organizations face. Seventy-four percent of companies say this is their number one challenge when it comes to manual AP process, manual invoice processing.

Second, a close second I might add, the manual routing of invoices for approval. Think of the story I just shared with you, putting them in an envelope, printing them out, copying them, sending them to somebody else, and then waiting for them to be returned with the proper information, coding approvals or whatnot. I mean, it wasn’t easy, let’s face it, when we were all in the office, right? But now, when we have to deal with sometimes multiple locations, maybe multiple remote locations, home offices and whatnot, that challenge becomes even greater. And that leads to what I like to think of as kind of the rest of these issues as the symptoms of all of that, exceptions, errors, discrepancies, things getting lost, and all of that, largely due to the fact that much of this information is still coming into our business on paper.

So we’re facing challenges supported by industry data, many of our customers tell us the same thing, perhaps you can relate. And again, hopefully, that’s why you’re here to learn how you might be able to solve that problem, how we can work with you to address that. Other challenges, you can see, you might be able to relate to a few of those as well. But here’s the bottom line, if you look to the blue box at the bottom of the screen, as CFOs are planning to reinvent their business coming out of the pandemic, many of them are looking to tech-driven products and services. In other words, things like artificial intelligence, things like automation, things like the way to support remote workforces using technology, because, and the second half of this sentence, is that 54% of them plan to keep some level of remote work in place, maybe not 100% of the time for 100% of the people, but if you’re gonna be there part of the time, your systems need to continue to support it.

So automation is gonna be key as we move forward and come out of this environment. Now, much like invoices, as you can probably imagine, payments are often the next thing on the list that come into play from an automation perspective. Things that need to be automated, payments are a close second. And what we see is as you can probably imagine and maybe relate to, some of the same challenges, lengthy invoice processing time. From the time you receive an invoice in to the time that you issue the payment out of your organization, industry averages tell us that can be about 45 days. So if you’re trying to capture, say, early pages counts, if you’ve got a vendor negotiated rate if you get things in on time or earlier, those things kind of go out the window when you’re dealing with manual payments related to those invoices.

The data management and the payment errors are often high on people’s list of challenges when it comes to payment processing as well. And, you know, frankly, many of our customers said, “You get us, you know, 80% of the way there with invoice automation, you show us how you can capture it digitally, things get automatically routed for approval,” Matt’s gonna show us that in a minute here, “but then, we have to go back to payments and we sometimes even still then wind up printing those invoices and that supporting information along with the checks to get them to the signer.” So we really want to help you accelerate that process. So we’re going to show you two different steps that we’re gonna offer you to be able to address that challenge from a payment approval process and then should your business need it, actually issuing those payments. So we’ll come more on that later, but hold the thought.

But these are some of the challenges that are driving us to do this in addition to our customers telling us, “This is really important. We’d really like to have that end to end experience,” that Michael mentioned a moment ago. So the bottom line here, as you can see in the blue box, is the pandemic is causing organizations to really rethink their traditional back office processes. And let’s face it, AP, HR, all of the things that kind of keep the business running, keep the lights on so to speak, we’re the ones that are having the smallest teams, we have the largest amount of paper in many cases, and we have the most amount of dependency of, you know, getting the things out the door even if we’re working remotely, paying the bills on time, so to speak. So what they’re doing is then turning to automation for these procure to pay functions.

So I think what you’ll find is that end to end AP automation is not only gonna make these processes more efficient, it’s really going to help your business run more efficiently and get some automation into the processes that you’ll see exponential returns on. We’ll talk a little bit more about that in a little bit as well. So when you think specifically about the payment processing costs and risks, $26 billion in just the U.S. alone, and I know many of you might be in Canada as well, but the numbers are slightly larger, of course, if you expand to all of North America, so it’s only gonna get bigger, right? But $26 billion is spent issuing and depositing checks in the U.S. alone. The middle box, as you see on the screen, they’re costing you money, almost 19 billion of that is attributed to check fraud and losses related to check fraud. And the bottom number there in that same middle box, about a million, more than 1 million checks per day are forged in the United States alone.

Now, if you’re again, in other parts of North America or potentially outside of the United States, you may already be using more forms of electronic payments so you’re one step in the right direction in that. We’re gonna show you how we can even tie that more closely integrated with your AP process as well. So the furthest right box on this graph shows that about 25%, only 25% of companies say that they did not suffer financial loss, about 75% have experienced some sort of check or payment fraud within a given year. So payments are costing us money and they’re certainly costing us the risk for fraud and error. So we’re gonna look at how we can extend that automation from invoice through to payments. Now, if you’re thinking, “Okay, you know, we can relate, we’re building our business case, this is all helpful information as we look to explore that,” but there are still reasons, there are still challenges that hold us back, right?

There could be, the number one reason here you see, lack of understanding of current available solutions. Again, this is summarized based on industry research but being here, of course, is a step in the right direction to help close that gap so that you can become aware specifically of how KwikTag can help you in this environment. Some say lack of budget, others say no executive sponsorship or buy-in, or potentially, the lack of technical resources to manage an automated solution. So those are kind of the top reasons that hold organizations back. Well hopefully, by the end of this conversation and our discussion today, you’ll see how KwikTag can help you address all of those, even overcoming the lack of budget initiative and the technical resources, if that’s something that you’re looking toward by having somebody else manage that for you.

So there are a lot of different elements that we can help you really overcome these barriers to automation and that’ll be your go-to guide to help walk through your individual scenario. But hopefully, you’ll see, in the course of the discussion, multiple ways that we can help you address those. So what we see here on the bottom line, automation and artificial intelligence are really gonna help us address business continuity, employee productivity, and really driving down costs as we look to the future of work, again, much of which will be continued to be remote. So what we’re gonna show you today, and what you’ll see in the various steps of this process, is an APM payment automation solution that’s intelligent, touchless, it’s based on artificial intelligent data extraction, and then an integrated payment approval process as well as payment processing, again, if that’s something that your business needs.

Now, this is the process that we’re going to demonstrate for you from invoice capture through transaction creation and then we’ll give you some additional supporting material that can really help round out whether or not payment processing is right for your business as well. So we’ll discuss that after the demo. But for the first step in the audience participation portion of today’s session, Michael, would you like to share the poll with our attendees today?

Michael: Definitely. Thanks, Mary. All of you should be seeing a question pop up here. So it’s asking, how are you paying vendors today? And you can choose multiple ones. So if you’re using checks along with ACH, if you’re doing wire, corporate credit card, virtual cards, this is good to see so we can get to know a little bit more about your process on the payment side. Take a moment to answer that now.

Mary: Awesome. And while everybody is putting in their answers in response to that question, I’m going to, Matt, hand over the presentation to you so that you can pull up the demo environment and we’ll take a look at that next.

Matt: Awesome. Thank you, Mary.

Michael: That should be plenty of time, Melissa, I think to close out that poll. Thank you.

Melissa: Yeah, I just closed it out. I’m not sure if you can see the results but looks like we’ve got answers for checks and wire at the top and also corporate credit card.

Michael: Super. Thank you.

Mary: Excellent. Yeah, no, thanks for sharing that. We’ll come back to that after the demonstration as well as part of the discussion.

Matt: Okay, Mary, can you see the correct screen?

Mary: I can, looking at your demo environment, Matt.

Matt: Great. Thank you very much. So as Mary said, today, we’ll be showing KwikPayables, which is our AP automation suite, and that is front-ended by something called ktIQ, which Mary introduced a little bit there. That’s the intelligent invoice data extraction service, and I’ll point out what that does when we’re going through the demo here. I’m gonna show two workflows, two of our very popular workflows. One would be a Payables workflow for those non-PO related invoices, and the second workflow is Enter Match, which would be a three-way match workflow where you have the invoice, the purchase order, and the receiving transaction. We also, for your information, can do a two-way match but it’s very similar to these and we don’t wanna go through all three. We’re just gonna show you two of them.

So during this demonstration, we’re gonna start in KwikTag but we’re also gonna go into Outlook to show you the approval email functionality and then we’re also gonna show you where everything ends up in GP. But this is KwikTag, you should be seeing on your screen. I’m going to log in. And you’ll notice here, there’s a bunch of lines. We are starting off in the Payables Invoice Edit. This is my default but people can default whatever screen is their priority. So an approver could default a review screen or a view task but each one of these lines here is an invoice that has come in. Invoices can come in a number of ways. Invoices can come in by just having your vendor send it into your AP inbox and having that redirected to KwikTag. You can also put scan and paper invoices, but each one of these lines here is an invoice.

And on the left hand side, we have our tasks. This is a demo environment and I’m gonna be playing a couple of different roles here today so I have quite a few tasks available. Generally, people would have maybe two or three tasks that they’re responsible for and that they would be interested in and those would be represented there on the left. So here, I’m gonna filter these so I can get to some invoices that I’m working on, and we’ll start to notice something right away. Each one of these lines is an invoice and we’re gonna work this one right here and if you go across, you’ll see that a lot of the information has already been populated. And this is thanks to ktIQ, the intelligent invoice data extraction that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to populate all this stuff. And also, it goes beyond just data extraction of what’s on the invoice, the vendor and invoice information, it also communicates with GP and it will make some decisions for you to make things easier.

But it will communicate with GP to start populating and also, information that is not on the invoice. So here we’ll see, we have…the vendor’s name is already here, the document date, the document number, the purchase amount, the document type, the vendor phone number, all stuff that was extracted off of the invoice. But then, we also have vendor ID, which is information that generally is not on an invoice. And ktIQ brought that over after communicating with GP and it used live GP data. So it said, “Hey, GP, we have this phone number for this vendor and all this information, can you give us any more information?” And it will populate that vendor ID. And also, as you’ll see, GP and KwikTag communicate quite a bit. We have a live integration, it’s called a stateful integration, and often in the demo, when you see things happening, it’s using live GP data, and I’ll talk about that as we go through here.

But again, all this information is here and we have not even seen this invoice yet, so let’s take a look. I’m gonna click this edit button here and it’s gonna open the invoice. As it does, it’s gonna check for duplicates. Is there a duplicate document number in KwikTag? Is there a duplicate document number in GP? And this is a demo environment so I bet there will be duplicates because I use this document quite a bit, and we get this warning. Great warning so you don’t pay invoices twice, that wouldn’t be good. But as this pops up, you have the invoice, the image of the invoice, on the right and you have the fields where most of the information is already populated here. We have the vendor ID that was brought over by GP and ktIQ communicating. We have the document date that was extracted by ktIQ. We have a document number and I’m gonna make this unique so that we can follow it through the system here.

You have the purchase amount, you have the document type, and you also, here, have the GL distributions. So we’re gonna click in there, go into the GL distributions, and this is all configurable. If your AP team or the team that indexes invoices doesn’t do the GL coding, that’s fine. We can handle that. We can put the same functionality where it makes sense. But here, you’ll see we are using the default GL codes from the vendor card. We can add lines or subtract lines, add rows or subtract rows here and remove rows. And you also can look up, using live GP data, all the accounts in GP. And if you need to, you can search for them and all of the fields have type ahead functionality. So if you just start typing, it will look in GP or wherever necessary to find matches for that and it will bring up…here, we’re bringing up maintenance because I typed in main.

So you have that functionality there if you need help with a little of the accounts. But this all looks good. We’re gonna say OK. And now, if your workflow includes an approver, which many Payables workflows would include an approver, you have the approver here. You could have a default approver, you could have no approver required, you could have this drop down menu to select your approver, you could have approval by threshold. So there’s a lot of different ways you can get your approver assigned as needed. You’ll notice, we also have description and comment fields. The description field goes all the way through the process into GP, comments and workflow comments are more for this process. So here we could say, “OK to pay,” or just put any workflow comments in here. They’re not required but these will follow this transaction through the process here. But everything looks good here, we’re gonna submit and say, OK. Let’s say, Submit.

So that was the role of an AP person generally, indexing the invoice, getting it in there. Once it is sent on for the approval, it goes into what’s called the Payables Invoice Review for this workflow. So here, there’s a couple options. You can receive an email, an approval email. You’ll notice on the lower right hand side, there it is, there’s the approval email, and I’ll show you that in Outlook. But here, you also have the ability to approve this invoice, to reject this invoice, to delegate it to someone else. You can show the GL codes, you can see the workflow history, who has had this before you, you get to see the image of the invoice itself, and then all of that same information that was brought over by ktIQ and GP working together. So here, this one looks good. I’m gonna say, approve.

When you approve something, you don’t need to put in workflow comments. It moves forward in the process. If you don’t want a final review, you can have this when you hit OK, it goes right into a queue ready to be put in a batch for GP. I’m gonna say, OK. If I rejected that, I would have to put in workflow comments because it would go back to the person who previously had it in the workflow. So you’d want to tell them why you rejected that and it is required to have the workflow comments at that point. So as we were talking, an email came in. If you have approvers that have a preference of doing things on their phone and maybe not logging into the system, they can just get on their phone, go into their email, and see this, the image is attached here. You also have all of that same data that we were just looking at, including the unique document number.

And as we go down here, you have the GL codes and the workflow history. And here, they can click approve or reject. So again, if you approve, you don’t have to put in workflow comments. If you reject, then you do have to put in workflow comments because it’s gonna go back to the person that previously had that in the workflow. So in this demo, we have something called the Payables Invoice Final. This is not a mandatory step. A lot of our end users will start off with this but then they’ll say, “No, you know what, we really don’t need it,” because they find that everything is coming through just fine and they don’t need their AP team to take a final look at it. But we wanna show it to you because it’s available. And it basically just gives the AP team literally one last time to make sure everything looks fine before having it available to be put into GP. And speaking of GP, that’s where we’re headed now.

Mary: And Matt, while you pull that up, I’ll just add a little bit of color to that workflow step you just showed there. You know, when you give your approvers the ability to edit GL codes, a lot of our customers do find that that final step is helpful but to your point, it’s optional because not everybody gives their approvers the option to actually make edits to their coding and whatnot. So it just kind of depends on what your business process requires but, great example.

Matt: Thanks, Mary. So here, we’re gonna go into GP, into Payables Transaction Entry, and this is the first time we’re gonna see where KwikTag exists in GP. We actually are in up to 80 different transaction screens depending on your configuration but we are here from tag documents, which means attach a document, view documents, which means to look at any documents that have previously been tagged or attached, search documents, which is that global search feature where you can type in a keyword or a document number and it will bring all the documents that meet that criteria up, we have filters for that and templates, very functional. It’s almost impossible to ever lose a document with that. And then we have here, the work queue. This is where we’re gonna go now. You’ll see all of the invoices that have gone through the KwikTag approval process and are waiting to be put in a batch and go into GP.

So here is the invoice that we’ve been working on with a unique document number. So you can select that document, you can select a bunch of documents. For this demo, we’re just gonna do this one document, and you can create a new batch or put it in an existing batch. I’m gonna put it in this existing batch and click, Yes. And there, it’s in GP. Now we can go back to the PTE screen and pull it up. And there it is, there is the document with the unique document number. All of the information has come through, including the GL coding, which is available here. And also, you can go back to the additional and say, view documents. And here, you’ll be able to see the invoice that we were working on. And it looks like it’s actually in GP but this is in KwikTag. So it doesn’t take up a lot of GP resources, it just really gives you the user experience of being in GP but it’s all stored in KwikTag.

So that’s the Payables process. I’m gonna delete this because it’s a demo environment and if I don’t, it gets all haywire. And then we have another Kwik process to show you, another Kwik workflow, which is our Enter Match or our three-way match workflow, and this is for POs, invoices related to POs and receivings transactions. And I’ll pull up some that I’ve been working on. And again, you’ll see the same information has been brought over by ktIQ. One nice thing is ktIQ will look at incoming invoices and understand which workflow they should go in. So these invoices here in the Enter Match, ktIQ understood there is a receivings transaction and a purchase order associated with this document so it puts it into this workflow, makes it really nice, these all end up…each workflow ends up in a different place in GP so it’s a very efficient way to handle this.

But again, we’re gonna go here and open this. We are going to receive a warning on a duplicate document again, so we’ll make that unique here. And again, information came over, the vendor ID was a partnership between ktIQ and GP. The vendor name came over. You’ll see the total here. And with this workflow, we’re not gonna do…there’s no approver required so I’m gonna leave that blank. You can have an approver, it’s just up to how you want it configured, and that’s part of the process when we have meetings with you. We’ll ask you how you want everything to be configured and what works best with your process. And again, you have workflow comments, but down here, you’ll see something a little different. You’ll see the purchase invoice lines, which is the PO detail, and this was all brought over from GP. And you’ll see, we ordered 200, we received 200, and we’re gonna invoice 200.

So that all looks good. Of course, if you have to go in and change something, you can go in and make the changes. And if you’re noticing that there’s PO detail missing, you can click on this PO search button and see live PO detail right here and you can fill in the blanks. Whatever is missing, you can select it here and move on with the process. So very strong feature using live GP data. But this looks okay, we’re gonna say, Submit. And because we did not select an approver, we weren’t required to, this is already ready to go in GP. This time, we’re gonna go to Purchasing Invoice Entry and again, we’re going to the additional menu, and we’re gonna view the work queue. There’s the document we’ve been working on with a unique document number. And again, you can select more than one for this, we’re just gonna select this one, and I’m gonna drop it in an existing batch right here.

So now, it’s in GP. Let’s go take a look. Open this, and the document, and I’m gonna delete again because this is a demo environment. But you’ll see, once again, all that information has come through the distributions, if there are any, and also you have the documents here. So now instead of one document, just the invoice, we have the invoice, a purchase order, and an associated receivings transaction. So you get all of those documents always saved or attached to this transaction. And now also because of our intellivue, all of these documents have a relationship. So if you look up one of these documents in another capacity, you’ll see that there are some documents that are associated, meaning it was in the same transaction or they’re related somehow. You’ll see that in the system.

So that’s KwikPayables with ktIQ with the Payables, non-PO workflow and the Enter Match three-way match workflow. And if you ever want to see that personally, we can always set up a time to show you that demo and discuss more detail related to your specific processes and such. Thank you.

Michael: Thanks, Matt. That was great. And maybe while you still have KwikTag open, you had mentioned other workflows there on the test screen. If you wanna jump to Check Batch Review, this is where we’ll pick it up here with Mary to talk about payment processing and how we’ve enhanced that side of things.

Mary: Awesome. Thanks, Matt. Great walkthrough of the Payables and purchasing related invoice workflows here. And if you could just, yeah, expand that for me. As you look at that, now, that’s not a very pretty view but most of you can probably relate to. There’s a check edit list, a batch of payments now in GP lingo, the payment batch approval process. Yep. If you just wanna click down in that check related items, perfect. So this step eliminates…what Matt’s showing you here, and then you can maybe just click on one of those first invoices, EEC, four, three, whatever, whichever one, whichever row you’d like to, in the actual content row there, perfect, thanks. So what this is showing you is, so let’s say we route all of those invoices that Matt just shared with you through a workflow process but now, it’s time for that check signer or payment issuer, so to speak, the payment approver to review all of those payments.

The last thing we want you to have to do is hit the print button on all of those invoices, supporting documents. As he showed you with the POs, you might have packing slips and other related documents associated with that transaction. The last thing we want you have to do is print those along with your payment or remit detail so that somebody has to review before those payments can actually be issued. So in today’s version of KwikTag, what Matt has highlighted for you here, currently called Check Batch Review, soon to be called Payment Batch Review, to match with what GP shows you and offers it as, this detail will be available to you. Now, this is current product. You could see it today, you could drill down, and then you could approve the whole payment batch or you could reject it and say, hey, remove check one, two, three or payment one, two, three, or whatever.

But in this row, Matt, if you could just do me a favor and click on one of the GL codes on that invoice line that you’re on, right there at the beginning, all the way to the left, GL codes and then workflow history. Yep, exactly. This is the benefit for that payment reviewer and approver. They don’t need to go back into the system. They don’t need to go back into GP to look this up. They don’t even need to go search for the payable transaction in KwikTag to find it. It’s all gonna be right here as part of this history that they can review and approve before they look at this whole check batch. So they can go line by line, by invoice if they want to, or they can just look at the check level to see which invoices that payment is being issued for. So we’re enhancing this process, let me just show you, if we could switch presenter back to me, please, Melissa, then I will pick it up where Matt has at this stage and show you what’s gonna happen. Yep, perfect. Let me know if that’s visible for you all.

Melissa: Yeah, I can see that.

Mary: Awesome, thanks. So we’re enhancing that process as much value as our customers tell us that gives them with that visibility, another thing we get asked for, as you might imagine as we’re transitioning to the payment side of the process, is that payment detail, that remittance information, the settlement data that is part of the payment once it’s actually issued. So we’re enhancing the process that we just showed you that’s in product to give you that batch approval which looks just like what Matt just shared with us with a little bit more detail. But then, we’re gonna send a notification back to AP so that they know it’s okay to approve and post the batch because we’ll get that approval message from KwikPayables. But then once the payments are issued, as you can see my mouse over here on the right hand side, we’re actually gonna give you that payment data back in the KwikPayables process too, it’s gonna look like this, so that when you go back into KwikPayables, you’ll get a single integrated view of the invoice data, everything Matt just showed you, the date, that vendor number, the coding, all of that, and the payment data over here on the right, payment number one, two, three, four, five, the payment method, how that payment was issued, and the payment date.

So KwikPayables is being enhanced as we speak. It’ll be available shortly here in about a month to include all of this functionality. So if that’s something that you’re interested in, you think it can help close the loop in your AP cycle, definitely, let’s make sure that we get payment batch approval as part of your solution. Now, transitioning from the payment data is, as we mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, the ability to actually issue the payments as well. So we have partnered with an industry-leading payment provider that has 30 years of experience and is compliant with all of the North American and global compliance requirements and major connections to all of the worldwide banks that they need to actually issue these payments.

And what we’re building to support that integration is a communication between KwikPayables and GP and CSI, which is the name of the provider that we’re working with here. So it’s a seamless integration. You’ll see everything in the KwikPayables experience. We will actually issue those payments through this service on your behalf, and then you’ll have complete visibility into the status of that payment. So no more when you get that phone call from the vendor of, hey, what’s the status of this payment? Where is it? How is it issued? When can I expect to receive it? You will have that visibility at your fingertips through the KwikPayables interface. And then finally, on the right side of this screen, is you’re seeing payment processing integrated with KwikPayables.

You have the ability, in many cases, to actually monetize your payments. In other words, depending on how the payment is issued, there may be rebates that we can offer you that hopefully, you would then use to offset the cost of your AP. So remember, when we talked about one of the challenges being lack of budget, lack of ROI, lack of executive buy-in, you can use your AP spend to actually offset the cost of your AP automation solution. So there’s a number of different ways we’ll assess that with you to make sure it’s a good fit for your organization but many times, you can actually turn AP into a revenue center and actually help offset some of those costs. So how does it work? Well, the payment processing step, as I mentioned, is going to be integrated with the KwikPayables solution.

So KwikPayables will send all of the data into a screen that will provide the payment issuing information just like you see on this dashboard here. We’re gonna send all of that from KwikPayables through an API. Our relationship with CSI enables us to actually optimize the payment mix, it’s totally gonna simplify the process. And based on your vendors and the way they are able to receive payments, we’ll optimize to make sure they get the best payment form for your organization and for theirs. I recall from the poll that we did a little bit earlier, Melissa mentioned that many of you are using checks and ACH and some corporate credit cards. Well, if you’re using ACH or corporate credit cards, we may be able to convert those into what’s called a virtual card, we’ll talk about that in a second, and how that can actually help you monetize this payment process within your organization.

So we’re going to assess your vendors and see that we can make sure they’re getting the payment in the best way possible for them and for you, and then we’re gonna send all of that payment data back so that you can easily reconcile it in KwikPayables. So this whole process kind of follows this four-step process down here at the bottom. The determination of how your vendors can and should be paid, you will have already done the payment approval through the KwikPayables step, then the payment is issued based on these types that are available, and the reconciliation and reporting is then sent back to KwikPayables. So it’s all visible and integrated in one simple solution. So what does that mean when we say virtual cards and how can that help you?

Well, as payment processing completes the AP cycle, we wanna make sure that we’re using the most effective method to pay your vendors. And virtual cards are just like a credit card but there is no plastic that you actually have to carry around, so there’s no risk for loss or fraud or dropping it on a table or leaving it at a restaurant. It’s a single use number, which means it’s really difficult to hack because it’s only available for that one payment and it’s only available for this specific amount of that payment. So if somebody’s fat fingers the amount that you’re paying them, tries to, you know, go over or under whatever that might be, they might be able to go under but they’re not gonna be able to go over because it’s issued for an exact amount, which also gives it a very secure transaction processing as well.

So the virtual card is the most ideal way because it’s gonna be the most complete, most secure, most accurate way to issue vendor payments and it’s where we’re gonna see the greatest amount of monetization for your organization. So there’s a number of benefits here for you as an organization and for your vendors. Let’s take a look at them. Well, ultimately, we’re gonna reduce the payment processing costs. So remember, one of the challenges that people have to overcome is the cost and the executive buy-in. Well, when you’re reducing the cost and potentially getting paid for it, that helps address those two challenges right away. It’s really easy to get vendors onboarded and we’re gonna do all the heavy lifting for you. So we’re also gonna give you the most secure way to issue your payments so that we reduce those fraud challenges that we talked about before, and it’s going to give you this significant opportunity to generate income.

Now, when you’re having these conversations with your vendors, if you look at the right hand side of the screen, it’s actually gonna get the payments to them faster. So if you recall, we said the industry average from the moment you receive an invoice to actually issuing the payment is about 45 days, this can take this down too. You can have everything ready in the same day. Now, you may choose not to issue a payment in the same day, that’s absolutely fine, but you have the ability through an end to end automation invoice approval and payment solution so you can reduce their days, sales outstanding, because they’re gonna get their money faster from you, because you’re gonna issue it in a very optimized way. So it’s either gonna go via card or if they can’t accept virtual cards, that’s fine, we can still issue it via ACH or check or whatever else is your preferred option.

We’ll give them the option to get preferred vendor status if they receive virtual cards so that they can have a little bit more control over how they receive their payments from you. And as many of them will start moving toward virtual card payments, it’ll be the most secure way which reduces fraud for them as well. Plus, they’re gonna get, your vendors are going to get a detailed remittance. Just like we’re gonna send back that payment detail into KwikPayables so that you can see the status of the payments, we’re gonna issue a very specific payment detail to the vendors so that they know exactly what to expect and which invoices those payments are covering. Now, before we close out with some success stories and Q&A, we want to direct your attention to poll number two. So again, some audience participation here if you could direct your attention to the screen.

Michael: Yes. Thanks, Mary. So this question asks, approximately how many vendor payments does your organization issue per month? And here you would just select only one option here. So this will help us, again, you’ve been getting to know us and how we do things and now, this is getting to know a little bit more about you. So take a moment to let us know, you know, just an approximation of how many vendor payments you issue per month. And if it’s too painful to talk about, that’s okay. You just anonymously choose and we’re here to help. Right, that should be plenty of time there.

Mary: Perfect. Thanks, Michael, and thank you, Melissa, for facilitating that. So, you know, we’ve talked a little bit about the challenges that you may face as an organization dealing with manual invoices, manual payments. We’ve seen an excellent, thorough end to end demonstration from Matt about invoices as they work their way through the process and we’ve shared with you how that payment processing is really gonna close the loop and accelerate your journey towards AP automation. But we also think that it’s important that you understand how other companies use KwikTag and use KwikPayables and the benefits that they receive. So we thought it’d be really helpful to share a real world scenario with you. So I thought it’d be helpful to share this one customer story with you. And Michael, I’ll just sort of paint the picture and then maybe you can share what this customer has experienced in terms of benefits.

Michael: Sure.

Mary: This organization… Yeah, awesome. Thanks. This organization is a healthcare network. They provide and serve families with special needs children and they make sure that they have the services that they need. Now, this is a really fast growing healthcare organization, they’re growing organically and through acquisitions, maybe some of you can relate to those sorts of growth plans, and they were challenged by a number of things, lack of integration between ERP and billing and they had many other financial applications. They were tracking things on Excel spreadsheets, they were managing way too much paper, they had limited access to the information they needed to close the books, and invoices and other financial documents were stored in many locations and none of them were connected to their ERP system. So they couldn’t click a View Documents button like Matt showed you within GP connected to KwikTag. But Michael, maybe you could tell us a little bit about what they did and what they’re experiencing now.

Michael: Yeah, definitely. And it’s interesting that you said that about closing and finding those documents that you need for that. I was in the office earlier today and you could probably guess who I ran into, Rob [inaudible 00:47:29].

Mary: Absolutely.

Michael: But the nice thing is, is that he’s able to do it, you know, on his own he wasn’t running around crazy and it’s similar to this this customer success story here. So a little bit more information you can see there at the top, they had GP, had a great vendor there that was helping them manage that, and yet they were needing to use a VPN to connect their 20 GP users, one GP company, and approximately 2500 invoices per month. Now, this may not be your exact situation but we definitely can help you and meet you wherever you’re at. Nice thing for them is that they got KwikPayables for GP with ktIQ. So that’s exactly what you saw on today. And then it was all delivered in the cloud, which, incidentally, is what you saw today, everything you saw that Matt showed you was cloud-based.

And they included the payment batch approval workflow, so end to end there. And the benefits, it’s like switching a light on in the dark. Literally, they’re able…I mean, I think one of the biggest things was, like we said, being able to find those documents easily and fast in order to process invoices and get them approved and close their books, and then also, it’s a huge benefit during audit time. And they are reaping the benefits of bringing down there costs of processing invoices and getting that…and they can spend their time elsewhere too. And that’s why I love this story because it’s a great work that they’re doing and instead of chasing people now or doing manual data entry for these invoices, they can use that time to better improve the work that they’re doing.

Mary: Awesome. Thanks, Michael. And speaking of benefits, there’s a few more that we’d like to share with you. As you can probably imagine, the benefits, you could almost go back to those pain points that we talked about at the beginning and do a one to one, you know, kind of check them off the list. And so we’ve got a little bit of a mix here of both AP automation as well as the payment automation, but as Matt demonstrated, the AI-based invoice indexing step virtually eliminates the data entry step. So remember, 74% of organizations said that was their number one challenge, the manual data entry and the inefficient processes. Well, this takes that out of the equation. We can reduce overall AP cost by up to 80%. In fact, we’ve had one customer specifically call us and say, “We saved so many steps in our process on day one that what used to take somebody a couple of days now takes them less than five minutes.”

So it really does start paying for itself right away. And so as you look then, continue around the light gray circle as it were, you’ll get that complete visibility for audit trail for month end close, your end close, everything available at your fingertips. And if we jump back over to the left, the integration of the AP and the payment automation in one system, no more jumping from system to system, everything’s contained in one. And then you’ll get a fast time solution. Especially if you’re able to have things managed in the cloud, it’s faster to deploy but even on prem, we’re gonna guide you and work with you and your partners step by step and make sure that you’re getting the solution that you need. If we look a little bit to the darker blue there, you’ll see the payment benefits as well, that these virtual cards are accepted by millions of vendors.

So you’re gonna be using industry-standard technology. You’re significantly going to reduce fraud and you’re going to see a really good vendor acceptance of these cards, 20% to 30% is what we see on average in the industry, and we’re gonna help manage that for you so that you don’t have to do any of the heavy lifting. So as Michael said, you can focus on your day job, your financial analysis, your books, and that sort of thing. And then I’ll draw your attention to the last two here so that we can really focus on reinventing your AP team from being a cost center to a revenue center with an average of about a percent cash rebate for those vendors that accept…for you because of the vendors that accept the virtual card. And then when available, KwikPayables for Business Central, well, you can easily migrate this to that environment and all of the same functionality, all of the same visibility will be just as you saw today in GP. So that’ll be out a bit later this year.

As we look to our current integration and what’s next, as you can see, we’re embedded in all of the Dynamics ERP systems across the board. What we showed you today, of course, was Dynamics GP, which supports the document management that Matt mentioned, the AP automation, available in the cloud and so on. And as we talked about, Business Central is next, and you can see that we support the other applications as well. Now specific to GP, these are really important considerations. You know, we couldn’t possibly show you everything that the product has to offer today but just be aware that as you’re making this decision for your organization, you need to make sure that if you’re looking at something like AP automation, especially as integrated with GP as is so important, if you also have these other solutions in your environment, Binary Stream potentially, if you have multiple entities, or SalesPad, if you’re doing sales order automation with them, or Solver for BI and reporting and that kind of thing, you’re gonna want something that works with all of these types of tools with you, and KwikTag does.

KwikTag, if you’re using Binary Stream, will create for the multi-entity management, SalesPad, it has an integration to the four key screens in SalesPad so that you can use it for document management, and Solver, it has integration so that you can roll things up into various reporting and the ability to drill down to those documents. So and as you saw, our integration to Dynamics is very strong across the ERP suite. So keep those things in mind as you’re thinking about what’s next and what’s the best solution for your organization. And hopefully, through the course of this discussion today, you’ve gotten a really good sense for who we are as a team and what our product can help you with for your organization but also, it’s important that you know a little bit of background on our company. And so we share with you that we’ve been around since 1997.

So, you know, we’ve been doing this for a long time. We have hundreds of customers of examples and use cases and workflows that we have built this product around, and we’re a Microsoft gold partner so we’re constantly developing more and more with them so that we can support additional integrations with their solutions. And we were the first to integrate the way that we do in the ERP systems to have that, what Matt showed you, built in, looks and feels and functions just like it was in GP even though we’re an extension of that through the KwikTag connection there. As a result of this, we have more than 120,000 business users around the globe and yet, we’re 100% U.S.-based customer support. You can call us, you can email us, you can submit a ticket online, we’re here to help when you need it.

And we continue to innovate. You’ll continue to see more, to add to that patent number there in the lower right hand corner, we continue to innovate. When I started with this company about six years ago, we had six patents. In just that time, we’ve added three to that mix. So we take our feedback from our customers and our partners and you very seriously and we continue to reinvest in the product to make it the solution that you need in the market. So with that, I’m gonna hand it back to Michael and Melissa to address any questions that you may have submitted during the course of our sessions today as well.

Michael: Thanks, Mary. And it looks like we have a question from Kayla, and she’s asking, is it possible to show how KwikTag links with Outlook to obtain invoice details received via email and how it determines what is an invoice and what isn’t? So I think the key concern here is like, okay, what if vendors are sending documents that aren’t invoices, and how does KwikTag handle that?

Mary: Yeah, great question. So what we do in that situation is we work with you to determine the best input source. So let’s say we set up email as an input source, you’re gonna have two choices in that scenario. You can have all of your vendors send the messages with those invoices attached straight to that AP inbox that we’re gonna give you an email address for or you can have them stop in AP to look for those things that might not be invoices. Let’s say they send you a brochure on a new product, let’s say they’ve got some new terms or a new address or some correspondence in the email that’s relevant for a person to look at, what’s valuable about that is that you can look at those to say, “Yes, this is important for me, I’m just gonna forward the invoice as an attachment to KwikPayables to start in the queue,” because we’re gonna expect that the PDF that you’re sending us, that the file you’re sending KwikPayables is an invoice.

So if there’s an attachment, that’s what we’re gonna read. We are not gonna pay attention to the rest of the body of email. So that’s a reason that a lot of customers choose to have it stop with AP. Again, you can certainly send it straight through but those, you’re gonna have to then go back and clean up in the queue if it’s not invoice specific information that’s attached. So it’s a little bit of a business process decision and we’re happy to work with you to determine what’s gonna be the best path for your organization. Great question.

Michael: Yeah. Great. Thanks, Mary. And then, Matt, maybe you can answer, I know a common question that we get is the implementation time, like, what kind of a project are we looking at to get KwikPayables with ktIQ?

Matt: So not all projects are exactly the same but a good rule of thumb would be somewhere between four weeks and eight weeks, and it seems to be that a lot of our SaaS projects are more towards the four weeks than the eight weeks. A lot of our KwikTag cloud projects just seem to get implemented and go live really quickly. But each project is different but that’s a good rule of thumb there.

Michael: Super. Thanks, Matt. And yeah, so hopefully, you’ve seen today how KwikTag can help, you know, accelerate your transition to AP automation. So if this has been on your list, let’s take it off the bucket list and start having conversations around it. We’re definitely happy, as Matt said earlier, to do personal demos. Hopefully, you’ve seen a lot here to spark some good questions that we’re happy to answer as you consider them with your team there. And yeah, anything else, Matt or Mary, that you’d like to add?

Mary: Yeah, I’ll just close by saying, you know, certainly, we appreciate the time that you’ve spent with us but I think that it’s really important, especially in this sort of remote workforce environment, that you look at the costs. We’re happy to do a vendor analysis with you. We’re happy to help you with an ROI tool that we can share with you and really look at the why in your business that’s driving you down the automation path and how we can help you really accelerate that process. Matt?

Matt: Yeah, communication is the key. So if there’s something you’re wondering about, just set up a discovery call with us, we’ll discuss it. If it’s something that we can help out with, we’ll make that clear but if it’s something that we can’t, we may have some great ideas for you that will help but we’ll be upfront about that as well. So it’s always, I think, worth a phone call. Communication is the key.

Michael: Awesome. Well, thanks. Thanks, guys, and Melissa, thanks so much for having us and thanks, everybody, for attending today.

Mary: Yes.

Melissa: Thanks so much, Mary, Matt, and Michael, for presenting today and thanks, everyone, for joining us and have a good afternoon.

Matt: Yeah, thanks, everyone. Bye.