End-to-End AP Automation with KwikPayables for GP (Video)

One of the biggest misconceptions about digital transformation is that it’s messy, complicated and time consuming. It doesn’t have to be. Go digital with the complete AP automation solution, KwikPayables, which receives invoices electronically, extracts the data automatically using intelligent OCR, integrates directly with Dynamics GP and routes invoices for review and approval.

This recorded webinar includes industry data to support your business case for total digital transformation, as well as a live demonstration of KwikPayables for Dynamics GP. We feature the latest release, along with the many enhancements around purchase order related invoices and ktIQ.

Transcript below:

Melissa: Hi, there, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. This is Melissa. I’m a marketing specialist here at Encore. And today we have KwikTag with us to talk about end-to-end AP automation for GP. So, we’ve got Mary, who’s presenting, and then Michael, who will be demoing later. So, hi, there. Welcome.

Mary: Thanks, Melisa. We’re excited to be here.

Melissa: Great. I’ll hand it over to you. You can take it away.

Mary: Excellent. Thanks, Melissa. And thanks, Haley. Both of them will be in the background making sure that we stay connected and all of our systems look right, and our screens look right, and we’re showing the right stuff. So, thanks, everybody, for joining. As Melissa mentioned, my name is Mary Miller. And I head up the marketing and channel program here at KwikTag. And I am joined by my colleagues, Michael Sortino and Matt O’Neill. If you wanna take a couple of seconds and introduce yourself. And then Michael, I understand you had a question you wanted to ask everybody as we kick things off here.

Michael: Sure. Go ahead, Matt.

Matt: Hello. This is Matt O’Neill. I am the dedicated sales contact that works with Encore and their end-users and their new prospects. Great to have you on today.

Michael: And my name is Michael Sortino. I’m a partner manager here at KwikTag. So, I work with Encore to help put things like this on. And my question to start, as Mary was referring to, since it is a new year, we thought, hey, why not share and give you all a chance to share and become familiar with the question section? So, type in your response. I know it’s a question area, but just so you know where you can type in your questions during the webinar. Tell us, you don’t have to share, you know, maybe the most painful or challenging one, but what is a new year’s resolution for you this year? What are you gonna try and do different in 2021? Hopefully, it’s not too late. We’re in third week. Mine was that I’m gonna try and spend some time, a little bit of time in silence each day, at least seven minutes, because there’s so much noise and distraction. So, Mary, if you see me take these off during your presentation.

Mary: You can’t do it during the webinar, Michael. That’s probably not a good plan. Maybe later.

Michael: All right. What’s yours?

Mary: Well, so, I’m not a huge resolution person, but I do have kind of a word for the year. And I guess maybe a little bit in line with yours. My word for the year is recovery because I think there’s just a lot of recovery needed I will say some people that have gone through illnesses, whether related to COVID or otherwise, or, you know, maybe just the isolation and certainly just culturally and socially and family-related. And so I just feel like this is the year of recovery.

Michael: That’s good.

Mary: So, I wouldn’t call it a resolution, but that’s gonna be my focus and goal for the year as well.

Michael: I like that. Yeah. Matt?

Matt: Well, my new year’s resolution is a very common one. It’s been mine for several years, but this year, I am taking it very seriously. I am going to walk every morning, and I have several little loops that are about four miles each. And I wanna walk every single weekday morning that I’m able to and not miss.

Michael: Great.

Matt: I’m doing it.

Mary: Awesome.

Michael: How’s it going so far?

Matt: I haven’t missed a day.

Mary: Excellent.

Matt: It’s great. Yeah.

Mary: I thought you were gonna say it starts tomorrow.

Matt: No. But every year I do it and I end up lasting a couple of weeks, and this year, I’ve made it almost three so far, so I’m gonna keep going.

Mary: Excellent.

Michael: That’s great.

Mary: And Melissa or Haley, do we have any in the questions that people have shared as well from the audience?

Melissa: Not so far.

Mary: I think everyone’s being a little bit shy. So, no need to be shy. As you can tell, we’re very open and conversational in our discussion. So, go ahead and find that Questions pane in your GoToWebinar and feel free to share yours now and throughout this session. And of course, ask your questions of the content and the material that we’re gonna cover during the course of today’s session in that same pane as well. So, with that, I’m gonna turn off our cameras, and then we’re gonna focus our attention on the slide content so that we can save some bandwidth and real estate here on the screen. And go up here to the slides so that we can get going with the meat of our discussion today. And as Melissa mentioned, we’re gonna talk a lot about transforming your AP process to go digital. AP automation is kind of the theme. Maybe you’ve noticed. But we’re gonna talk a little bit first about why that’s so important. Share some industry data, some research that supports that. Hopefully, you feel like you’re not alone in this process because there are a lot of other companies that are struggling with the same types of challenges. We’ll talk a little bit about where KwikTag and Microsoft Dynamics fit with that suite, with the ERP system suite. And then as Melissa mentioned, Michael is going to demonstrate AP automation for us with KwikTag called KwikPayables for GP. We’ll share some use cases and benefits and then, of course, we’ll leave time for Q&A at the end. So, that’s our agenda for today.

So, let’s dive right in. Why transform? Why go digital? Why are we having this conversation to begin with? Well, right now as many of you can probably relate, there’s, you know, the pressure to close your end, prepare for audit, pull all the documentation together, and, oh, by the way, many of us are now working remotely, yet due to COVID or other reasons because maybe you had a remote workforce that, you know, normally is part of your business process, but at audit time, it’s often a challenge because we need to come together and provide a lot of documents and processes that are specific to your end at audit time. So, the challenges here, as you can see displayed on the screen, are that we spend too much time. I used to be an AP manager, I worked in GP, and I know the feeling of literally looking around in the system for things, and then running down the hall and finding the right file cabinet to support that information with the paper documentation, and/or offsite where we’ve had customers that are, you know, in Fargo, North Dakota, or in the far northwest or far northeast, that right now may be not the ideal time to be looking for things in offsite storage locations that might be a little bit closer and more difficult to get to. Not to mention, as you can see in the industry data, we spend 30% to 40% of our time doing this, looking for documents, both physical and digital. And again, the remote environment sometimes makes that even more challenging. So, it’s really critical that we can put our fingers on documents when we need to.

Secondly, we struggle with visibility. Forty-percent of organizations say that they really struggle with document tracking and visibility into the approvals specifically when it comes to invoices. We’ll talk a little bit more about that and show you how KwikPayables for GP can help address that challenge. And finally, compliance. As I mentioned, we’re getting ready for audits many of us at this point in time. And 90% of companies are challenged by financial close and year-end audits or semi-annual audits, whatever that might be for your organization. So, the bottom line here is that these paper-based processes, our reliance on paper, our reliance on the human element and interaction with documents required to run our business, especially in AP and back-office operations where we have small teams and lots of paper and lots of responsibility, these processes that rely on paper are broken and they create a lot of stress. And they can be very expensive, not only from a time, but also how that translates to money as well. It can be very expensive.

So, that’s kind of in general why we wanna think about going digital, specifically as it relates to accounts payable. What we find in this, and supported by industry data, as you can see here, is that what that means is that we’re now doing a ton of manual data entry, which also creates very inefficient processes. Seventy-four-percent of companies say that’s their number one challenge, as you can see from the slide, manual data entry, number one challenge. Manual routing of invoices supports that whole lack of visibility we just talked about. Sixty-eight-percent of them say that’s a challenge for them as well, which then I think leads to these next three that are sort of symptoms of the top two, there’s discrepancies, there’s errors, there’s exceptions. Some of this is because things are coming in on paper, and then many times it’s because things get lost or missing or, you know, misplaced or whatever. And if you think about it now, again, because we’re all working remotely, that might be even easier because we’re waiting for somebody to, you know, go into the office and then forward them to us or scan them to us or whatever. So, the restrictions that we had even when we were all in the office it was tough. And now that we’re all working remotely, it becomes even more of a challenge. So, if you look at the bottom line on this slide, we can see that as CFOs really look to, you know, plan for their recovery, trying to use that word again, you know, nearly a third of them are looking for tech-driven products and services, such as KwikTag, to really come in and help them go digital with this and automate these processes so that they’re not as dependent on those paper and manual steps in their environment. And 54% of organizations plan to keep some level of remote work in place. So, whether it’s a full-time thing like it is right now for many of us, or if it’s a hybrid model, or whatever, this is kind of a new norm for us. So, we need to be prepared to access documents from wherever, see approvals, and have visibility into those processes from anywhere that we might be working.

So, those are the top five challenges specifically related to AP teams. And so the reason that we’re all here today, of course, is to see what you can do to address those challenges. Well, that’s where KwikTag fits in. KwikTag is a digital document management and AP automation solution that captures your documents digitally as soon as they enter your organization. And ideally, that’s when your vendors email them to you directly so that we don’t even need to print them at all. We have so many customers who tell us, “Yeah, we receive them in email, and then we go print them.” We’re like, “No, don’t do that.” So, if you can relate to that, we’re gonna show you how you can get away from that. I should go forward. So, we capture the documents digitally, that’s step one. We integrate very, very tightly, as you’ll see in the demonstration with the Dynamics ERP systems, in this case, Dynamics GP specifically. And then we automate those documents, we automate as much of the process as humanly possible. You might have noticed that we have the word “touchless” in the title of this discussion today, “Touchless End-to-End AP Automation,” because we wanna automate the data extraction, we wanna automate the integration with GP, we wanna automate the approval routing. So, all of those steps are maintained digitally in the same system so that you have that end to end visibility. So, we capture, we integrate, and we automate. As you can see, here, we’re gonna show you how it works.

The way that we do that, today, we’re gonna focus on the far left of this screen with Dynamics GP. But as I mentioned, KwikTag integrates across the Dynamics ERP system suite. So, we have document management available in all of the flavors, Business Central, Finance, SL, NAV, and AX, and of course, GP, which you’ll see today as well. Some of them are available in the cloud as well. And then also, KwikPayables, which is our AP automation solution is available for some of them now and added to the roadmap for others coming soon. So, everything you’re gonna see today is gonna be demonstrated with Dynamics GP and our KwikPayables automation solution. So, with that, I’m going to change the presenter to be Michael. Hopefully, this works. Michael, did you get a little notification there?

Michael: Yes, indeed.

Mary: Awesome. And he’s gonna demonstrate KwikPayables for GP for us. Go ahead.

Michael: All right. And can you see the test screen?

Mary: Yep. We got it. Thanks, Michael.

Michael: All right. Thank you, Mary. And hopefully, most of you could relate to what Mary is mentioning. Hopefully, it wasn’t too painful going through that. But it’s good to face it. And usually, automation, if you’re not already there, it tends to be on everyone’s mind. And we’re gonna show you how KwikTag takes care of that for you. And the idea here… And I love the word “touchless” because it does really…it’s really personified here and you’ll see it as it comes through. So, the idea is get these in as quickly as possible. What you’re looking at right now is a web-based interface. Every AP person will have their task screen they come into every morning. And instead of having to shuffle through papers on your desk that have come in, invoices, or go through your email inbox and start checking to see, well, who replied or did I send this one in or not around for approval. It’s all here. So, you get to see right away, what has come in and what needs to be processed. So, these have either been scanned in if they came by paper, or you can have vendors directly email to a dedicated email addressable setup that goes right into KwikTag, or you can forward them in yourself when they come to AP.

So, if you notice here, when you click on any of these, the documents are visible right there. So, at heart and our foundation is document management organization. So, always making that document visible to you so you know which one you’re working on, and then later on tied to all of this information, that’s our big priority there. So, if you scroll across here, the nice thing is I haven’t…like we mentioned, we haven’t really touched this. All I’ve done is just selected to show you, but there’s information that’s been gathered already. And all I need to do then is come in here and start processing. So, I click on this little pencil, it opens up a task screen. And it presents a warning here that this document number has already been processed. So, a big question in a lot of people’s minds is how do you handle duplicate invoices. This is how we handle it. We’ll show you where it is in the system, whether it’s KwikTag or GP, and then you can choose how to respond from there. So, we’re always going to let you know that we are… Let’s just put New 2021 here on the end of this document number. But we’re not gonna let you put through a duplicate invoice. All right? So, that’s first and foremost. And how did it even know what the invoice number was? Well, it’s been processed through a service that we call ktIQ. And this is really exciting for us. And I wanna move through this part of it first and then we’ll talk a little bit more about how it differs from the old way of OCR, but…because the point is, is that you can do this all very quickly now. We’re not gonna require any type of manual data entry when it comes to grabbing information off of the invoice.

So, this invoice is not tied to a PO. I’m gonna show you both, one that is tied and one that is not. And so what it’s done here, KwikPayables, has gathered information from the invoices, read it like a human has, and it’s gone and verified some things in GP. So, our GP connection, as Mary mentioned, it’s the best out there. And we’re really excited that we’ve been the longest integrated with GP and we keep making it better and better. So, if you’re using intercompany, in this case, in this scenario, we’re not gonna show, you know, a company that is utilizing it, but you can turn it on and off and use it just like you do in GP. It’s gathered for this… Fabrikam is our company and ID, and our favorite one. It’s gone and read Interiors, Inc. and it’s gone and looked into GP and verified that that is the vendor here and it’s pulled over the vendor ID and populated that for you already here. You can type a description in here. A lot of people use that here. And it’s grabbed the document date, document number, the purchases amount. All of this has been read. You can change this document type because we do do credit memos as well, if you’d like to. And that’s all. If you wanna do your GL distributions on the first step, you can do that here as well. So, really, that’s all the data entry that needs to happen. And when I click on GL Distributions, if you’re utilizing your defaults from GP in the vendor card, then those are there already as well because we will pull from those. If you’re not using them, then you can go ahead and look up and make any changes, you can add. You can search based on keywords here and make any changes, and break this up into as many lines as you’d like. You can put a reference here that’s carried over, if you want more info here in the GLs. And I’m gonna go ahead and hit OK.

So, now I’ve added some coding here that maybe I want my approvers to take a look at, right? This is not based on a PO. It hasn’t been approved yet, let’s say, where it needs to go through this process and allocate it. I’m gonna go ahead and select an approver here. But we can… This is one way of doing it. We can set this up as many ways as you’d like. So, it can be based on certain parameters as well and send it along automatically to a string of approvers, one, two, as many as you need. Workflow comments, this is helpful so that you don’t have to pick up that phone and ask specifically. You can type in your question here or you can put anything like if this was for a specific event or show or a need that the company had, you can put it here by way of communicating within the workflow. You don’t have to email or pick up that phone again. And that’s it. So, it’s simple and easy. I hit Submit and this will go on now to Michael Department Manager, my alter ego here, to process. And while I’m doing that or loading that in, maybe Matt, you can tell them a little bit about the differences between ktIQ and the old way of doing OCR.

Matt: Sure. Sure. So, I’m not sure if any of you had exposure to Zonal OCR, which is really the technology that ktIQ is replacing. But Zonal OCR was really only recommended for our end-users that had a very high volume because it wasn’t necessarily a silver bullet, not as user friendly, say, as ktIQ. You had a user interface. And what it would do is look at a zone or an area on each invoice and try to decipher what the characters are. And it’d look at each character and assign a confidence to each character. Some it would have confidence in and some it wouldn’t. And you’d have to go in and make some adjustments for those low confident characters. So, there was kind of a lot of interaction going on there. So, that really made it difficult for end-users because they had a lot of work to do. But it also just made it undesirable unless you had a really high volume of invoices because there was a big price tag on it and it also was not very easy to install and implement. So, it ends up that Zonal OCR was good for some high-volume end-users, but ktIQ looks at things like a person would and uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to handle all of those interactions that you normally would have had to in the older technology. So, there’s really no user interface. You just enjoy the service. When an invoice comes in, it puts it in the right work queue depending on if it has a purchase order, if it has receivings transactions, things like that. It will understand what workflow to put it in. And once it does that, it does the data extraction. It communicates with GP to get some of the things that aren’t even on the invoice and processes that through. A much easier, more reliable, more accurate and less expensive process than really what it’s replacing. And that’s it.

Mary: Awesome.

Michael: Perfect. Thanks, Matt.

Matt: Yeah.

Michael: All right. And as you saw there, all that information was put through ktIQ. And like Matt said, there is no extra interface that you have to navigate. It’s already waiting for you there on an info. All right. So, now I’ve logged in as Michael Department Manager. I have the ability to approve invoices in a number of ways here. So, as you can see here, I’ve only got one in my task queue here. This is the one we were working on. You can see the document numbers that will need to be adjusted to New 2021. I can click on it, take a look at the document, or I can come here and open up my email. I don’t know if anybody saw that come through, but we got a notice here. And this is a common request, you know, because let’s say you have, you know, 20, 30 approvers…let’s say you even have just five approvers of invoices, but a common thing is that they don’t wanna have to learn a new system. And so can we do this by email? Yes, you can. You will get a notification when you’re an approver that an…the attention invoice has been routed to you for approval and it requires your attention. So, we include the invoice here. And I’m gonna open that up here just to show you. So, whether they’re working from home, if they’re traveling, again, which, you know, some people are, or they’re at the coffee shop and they need to get something in quickly, this will open up on whatever device they’re getting their email in.

So, they can take a look at the invoice. They can come here and see the information that’s been added. They can even come down here and see the GL codes if those have been added already and the workflow history as well. And this one here says, “Please check on price.” This is what I was talking about. You can communicate within the workflow. And they can click on Approve or Reject. This opens up a return email. And they can type in comments if they’d like for approve, reject, will require comments, and send that right in. It updates the system and moves it on to the next person or part of the process there. So, you can do it by email, definitely for sure. And a lot of our customers really appreciate that. If you have, let’s say, you know, a ton of these to go through or if you’re someone who simply doesn’t like working in their email and you wanna just use KwikTag, it’s simple and easy as well. So, as an approver, as you can see here, I’ve clicked on it here. I see the document. I can literally just click on these buttons to see the extra information. So, there’s that workflow history now. I can see that they wanted me to check on the price. I can email this off to someone if I had a question. I can see the GL codes here. I can actually delegate this to someone else too if let’s say this was a purchase that normally comes to me, but then, in this case, someone else in the organization needed it. So, I can hit OK and type in some comments here and move into them. Or if I hit Reject, this allows me to put in those workflow comments because as an AP person, many of you know you don’t wanna get something back without realizing or knowing what needs to be changed or what’s wrong with it. And, again, we’re all about saving you time. So, instead of having to pick up that phone or send an email, it’ll be right there, trackers in the workflow comments. And clicking on Approve, this will send it along here. So, you can save prices, right, and you’re ready to roll.

So, that’s how simple it is to either approve by email or within the system. We do have an extra edit step here that some of our customers like using. They call it the final edits. So, this gives AP one more chance. So, let’s say this goes through multiple people and, you know, some comments have been made, they can come in here and check it out. Okay. The price is good and so it’s good to go. Or if someone said, “No, you need to change this GL code to this or that,” this gives AP one more chance to take a look and make any changes that they need to. All they have to do is click on the Edit button. From here, they can go into the GLs, make any changes or they can go ahead and enter any further comments here and say this is okay to pay. Go ahead and hit Submit. And we’re done processing that invoice. Now we can move on to the next one if we’d like. So, that’s how simple it is to take an invoice that’s been put into the system quickly and move it along. We only showed one approver, but if you have multiple, we can set that up and design that as needed.

I’m gonna jump over to GP now and show the end of that one before I show one that’s tied to a PO. So, in GP, we’re on 80 different screens here. And we come alive in the Additional tab. So right now I’m in the PTE screen. Once I hit on Additional, starting a tag all the way down is the KwikTag functionality. So, right there, we’re embedded. It’s not hard to find. And there’s a lot of things you can do with document management, especially not just with AP. And that’s where tagging comes in. Adding supporting documents, viewing documents later on, doing a global search. This is a huge thing for GP users because it simply just does not exist when it comes to finding documents. You can…we put it in here ourselves so you can easily find documents based on keywords or other parameters. And then viewing the work queue here, so this is the end of the AP automation process as far as getting it into GP. So, if you notice, I didn’t have to…again, this whole touchless thing, I didn’t have to, like, manipulate any data or download it from KwikTag and upload it into GP. It’s actually waiting for me now in this worksheet here. So, if I come in, I see that these invoices have been approved. This is the one we were working on. We recognize that from the document number as well as the workflow comments. So, the goal here is to just create a batch or add this to an existing batch so that I can get it paid as quickly as possible because once it’s here, it’s been approved.

But let’s say I’m just learning the system and I’m a little…I still wanna make sure you can still access the document from this screen here. So, I clicked on…I right-clicked and chose View Documents. Most of the time, you can tell just by, you know, the information gathered there, but you can say, “Okay. That’s the one I wanna add to a batch.” If I wanted to grab, you know, just some of these and that will create a batch with them, or all of them, I can do that as well and create a batch. But in our case, I don’t wanna steal anyone else’s documents, so I’m gonna go ahead and add this to an existing batch. You could type in a new batch there as well, but we like to keep it neat and organized here. So, actually, Mary, I have to change that to 2021 now. One of the many things that changed a little bit here. So, it’s added to the MSDEMO 2020 batch. So, I’m gonna go ahead and pull that in here, as you normally would. And here it is. So, this is how easy it is now to create that PTE in order to post and pay. You don’t have to type anything. And remember, as you mentioned, everything’s gonna get ported over. So, all that data, there’s our document number, the date. There’s that description memo we typed in. We created a voucher. There’s the purchases amounts. When I go to Distributions, our GL distributions are there as well. If I wanna go ahead and expand and see that comment that I added in there on that first one, there it is, “More info.” So everything has been brought over, the data. And then the nice thing too, as I mentioned earlier, if you want to see the document that supports this PTE, it will always be associated. So, even if you delete it out of your system or your…if it gets deleted out off your email or whatnot, it’ll always be available here when you click on View Document. It’s stored in KwikTag but connected and tied to GP here.

And so that’s it. That’s at the end of the process there for AP automation with an invoice related to… Not related to a PL. If I wanted to go ahead from here and tag further documents, like a lot of people will add a packing list, I wish I had a ton more time, but this is where you would do that, you can go ahead and put packing lists, there’s comment and browse out for that document or scan it in related to this barcode label there. So, there’s a lot more you can do with supporting documents as well. But to keep things moving, today, I’m gonna go ahead and show you one that is related now to a purchase order. So, we’ll come over here back into the KwikTag interface into my tasks screen as AP…

Mary: And Michael, just to interject there really quickly, I heard you use the comment many times as you were going through that flow of the invoice coming in and the data already extracted. Let’s think back about that. Seventy-four-percent of people say that, you know, too much manual data entry and too much time related to those steps in the process. And you literally did none of that. Had you not been explaining it to us, you’d have been done in about 30 seconds, right? So, I think we need to kind of keep that in our minds as we look at, you know, just how simple and fast this process can be once we have this type of automation in place. So, yeah, thanks for that.

Michael: Yeah. Thanks, Mary. I mean, you can start the timer now because I won’t explain as much on this one. Ready?

Mary: We’re good.

Michael: So, here we are in the Purchase Enter/Match. So, over here on the left, these are different things. They are different types of invoices. So, as Matt mentioned earlier, ktIQ decided which workflow to put this in. I didn’t show you this earlier, but you can change the workflow, if for some reason it had misread something there. But in this case, here’s a UI invoice. It is tied to a purchase order. It saw a purchase order there. And so it went ahead and validated that, and now all I do is click on the Edit button. It’s got all that info. As was mentioned earlier, I will get that duplicate invoice warning. Go ahead and change that. Okay. So, it’s grabbed the invoice date, the vendor ID just like you saw before, the total there. But the unique thing here is that since it saw a PO number, what it did was it went back into GP and looked for open POs, you know, tied to that purchase order, so open amounts. And then it brought that line in here down below. So, here it is MS234522. Two hundred were ordered and 200 were received. So, this is a three-way match. So, it shows that 200 were received. And now it’s saying, “Okay. How many are we invoicing here?” So, so far the zero have been invoiced. But let’s say this… So, over here on the right, we see that 200 are being invoiced here. I can change this if this was a different amount, say they are invoicing us for 250 and we actually have another shipment coming or whatnot. You can change that or if the price changed, and this is a different price, you can go ahead and update those two and then submit it along, send it along for approval since something changed. Or in this case, everything matches here. Two hundred already have been received, ready to invoice. I can put a workflow comment if I want to. I don’t have to, in this case, since it’s all approved. Now I’m just gonna go ahead and hit Submit. And I’m done. So, what was that? Forty-five seconds, Mary, maybe a minute?

Mary: Maybe a minute. But yeah, right with that.

Michael: Yeah. So, that’s it. So, we were able to validate it against the PO. I didn’t have to go back into GP and look at it. And since everything matched, I didn’t send it off for approval. But I will jump over here into GP and show you where this ends up. So, I go to Enter/Match here. It’s the same idea. I come over here to Additional and come here to the work queue. And it should be waiting for us now. Yep. There it is. And I’m gonna go ahead and add this to our batch. And I’m gonna go ahead and pull that in. There. Let me see here. MS2020. Just like that. Okay. So, ULINE invoice. There’s our unique document number there. It’s created this factor of the pay here. So, in the purchasing invoice entry screen, there’s the totals. So, this is ready to roll. And as I showed you earlier, the document is associated now as well. So, that’s how simple and easy it is. And oh, lo and behold, I can quickly highlight that we have this unique feature as well. So, it’s not just the invoice now that is tied in here, but since this is a three-way match and there was a purchase order and we did have a receiving as well, all three documents are made available. So, this is another unique feature for KwikTag. We try to provide as much information as needed. And as, again, what Mary mentioned in the beginning, finding documents related to these transactions while you’re working on them, but then also later during audits, it’s huge. So, you don’t have to go chasing around and spending a lot of time tying that story together. We’ve done that here, all three documents, you can click on each one in view and they’ll be forever tied to this transaction here. So, that is the end of the demo here. I’m gonna go ahead and switch this back to Mary.

Mary: Excellent. I’ll bring up the slides and we can continue the conversation there. Awesome. Thanks for that, Michael. And definitely, we can see how quick that process can be once we add AP automation into the mix. Did you wanna talk a little bit about what you just demonstrated for us is managed, where it lives, how it gets facilitated for people in their environment?

Michael: Definitely. So, you have options. With KwikTag, if GP is on-prem and you’re keeping everything on-prem, that’s where we’ve started and have always been and will continue to be. But we’re excited that we do have KwikTag Cloud. It was a huge hit last year. And as Mary mentioned, as more people are moving to remote environments in the cloud, everything you saw today was all cloud-hosted. And so you do have that ability as well to go ahead and host KwikTag in the cloud, your document management, AP automation. And this is… There’s, you know, a ton of benefits to that. I mean, I think the top one is, is that, you know, within your IT team is free up to do what it does best, protecting you all and making sure everything runs smoothly as opposed to, you know, setting up new servers and managing other third-party softwares. We take care of all of that with KwikTag Cloud.

Mary: Excellent. Thanks, Michael. And for those of you who are considering, you know, moving potentially to one of the other Dynamics flavors down the road, whether it’s Business Central or Finance or if you plan to stay on GP, we offer those services in the cloud as well for the products that we support in those environments. So, we know that a lot of people are thinking about the cloud, starting to move that way. And just know that wherever you would decide you’re gonna wind up we’ll be there to support you when you’re ready. So, Michael and Matt, the other thing that we talked about at the beginning of this conversation was that we’d share some case studies, real-world examples and benefits. And before we get to the Q&A part there…and I see that we do have a couple of questions coming in, so please, continue to submit those. We’ll address those at the end. But maybe first, Michael, you could share the case study with us here.

Michael: Yeah. No problem, Mary. This is a great one. I mean, we work across all industries. Healthcare is one of our top ones. So, this was a healthcare network located…it’s headquartered out of the Northeast. And they’re a network of providers that serve families with special needs children. And they’re growing. They had a lot of organic growth, but then also through acquisitions as well. So, they’re really taking off. And as some of you can relate, that’s when the pain points or the things that you’ve been living with for the longest time suddenly come into sharp focus where you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, can we continue going on this way as we grow and we add on more offices or more areas of our business?” So, definitely their challenges were lack of integration between their ERP doing HR and other financial applications. So, everything was disjointed. Too many Excel spreadsheets, some of you can relate to that. I mean, some of you and some of us in the past it was a necessity. It’s like, okay, I’m sorry, but we have to keep using Excel. There’s no other way. KwikTag is the other way as you’ll see and saw today, but…

And then limited access to the right information needed to close the books, that was a huge thing. We talked about that during the demo, finding things that you need when you need it. And then too many locations where these documents are stored. So hard to find things. And none of them were connected to their ERP system. So, if we move on to the next slide and talk a little bit about…a little more. So, they had GP. It was managed by their VAR. And they were connecting to GP via a VPN. So, they were disjointed in different locations. They had a little over 20 GP users and 1 GP company, and they were processing about 2,500 invoices per month. So, you may be thinking to yourself, “Okay. We’re not that big or we’re much bigger.” Just so you know, this is a middle of the road example. So, we handle all types of organizations. And the solution that this company put into place, this organization, they do KwikPayables for GP with ktIQ. And it was a SaaS solution as well. So, they hosted it in the cloud. And so it’s very easy to get up and running. They didn’t have their IT, didn’t have to, you know, add a new server and set up workstations for people. It was very simple and easy to do. The benefits that they saw, they instantly reduced costs. So, they definitely brought down the time it takes to process their invoices. And they don’t have to do any of that manual data entry. It’s down to almost none except for that coding as you saw. And now their documents are easy to find, quickly, across the board all unified in KwikTag now and tied to their AP approval process as well, and now being able to look back for audit as well. They did have the payment batch approval workflow included there. I wish we had more time to talk about that. But definitely put that on your list if you do a personal demo with us because it’s often the unsung hero, you know, of keeping this whole thing paperless when you have the payment batch approval workflow as well. So we can show you that in another time.

Mary: Awesome. Thanks, Michael. Yeah. I think one of the things that you mentioned there at the end, documents are easy to find and fast. And you mentioned it while you were in GP doing the demo about how the global search comes to life even right inside of GP, but across KwikTag. We talked at the beginning about 30% to 40% of our time being spent looking for documents, whereas you can type in any of the, you know, parameters, document data, metadata to search things, of course, in KwikTag or GP. But I think what’s really powerful and is kind of, you know, summarized into those two little words, “and fast,” in that benefit statement from the customer was that you can do it, you can search in KwikTag or GP using KwikTag for even global content. You can put in a word or a…use a string of words, phrase, or whatever, and we’ll search that entire document because we are reading all of the documents and all of the content within them as well so that, you know, I need to find invoice number 1234567 from, you know, 2 years ago that was for glass tables or whatever, you can put in glass tables and we’ll find it. So, that is a real, I think, differentiator and something that people really appreciate when they need to find things very quickly. So, a great example. Thank you.

Michael: Yeah.

Mary: So, some other benefits that we hear from our customers often, and Michael on that, feel free to jump in with those that you hear and see with customers on a regular basis as well, but, of course, that time savings that we just talked about comes to life. But also we hear that it improves their vendor and their employee relations because, again, I put my AP hat on from my time pass as a GP user. You’re stressed, you gotta get the bills paid. Literally, we’re trying to keep the lights on, right? So, you gotta get bills paid very quickly, you’ve gotta get them into the system. And in the old way, we would literally walk them across the hall and, you know, after stamping them with the rubber stamp and waiting for someone to put either the GL code or their signature on that, you’re creating a much healthier, happier environment, less stressful environment for your employees when it’s all digital. You know you can just look at a workflow history. You know you can just see, you know, how things are coded. And if the person does have any feedback, it’ll come up right in that comments as you displayed. So, everything being digital makes your employees happier, less stressed, and your vendors are gonna be happier because they’re gonna get paid faster because now when they call you and say, “Hey, what’s the status of invoice 1234567?” you can just type that into the KwikTag, very quickly find it and say, “Oh, that’s just waiting for approval with our CFO. Let me see what I can do to rush that along,” or whatever the case may be.

So, in addition to that, we see increased employee productivity. We had one company tell us that they increased their employee productivity by 52% within the first week of implementing this solution. So, they were literally measuring what used to take two and a half hours down to minutes in this case where they’re able to track that. So, it’s a little bit different for everybody, but they do see…everyone sees significant increases and, you know, better productivity right away. They’re not having to look for data and paper. Of course, then we decrease the paper and the processing costs associated with that manual routing because everything is now automated for edits and approval, etc., as we saw in the demonstration. We eliminate the data entry with ktIQ as well as the automatic routing for approval with that transaction being automatically created in GP for us whether it’s a payables or a purchasing related transaction. That embedded integration is so key. No more import or export. You don’t have to upload anything. Once you submit it, we’re gonna take care of that handoff for you, which of course all of this gives you that visibility we talked about at the beginning, that 40% of companies struggle with document tracking and the visibility into where things are from an approval standpoint. This takes that away. No more bottlenecks. You can see everything instantly at your fingertips. And if you’re looking to take advantage of early-pay discounts, same thing, everything being digital is really going to accelerate that process and enable you to take advantage of those if you so choose.

Now, when you’re considering an AP automation solution, it’s really important to not only, you know, ask about and talk about the features and functions and certainly the workflow acceleration. Everything we’ve shown you and talked about today it’s also important to consider if you have other systems in your environment which GP companies…companies that use GP tend to have anywhere between 5 and 12 ISDs. So, if you think, “Gosh, we have a lot. We’ve got five or six.” Don’t worry. You’re not alone. And that’s right in line with others in the industry. Five to 12 different ISDs are commonly in place. Now, some of them might be for, you know, inventory management and, you know, manufacturing and things that are outside of what we’re talking about for AP. But if some of them might happen to be, say, binary stream for multi-entity management or sales pad for your sales order processing, those sorts of things are solver for your reporting, rec logic for purchasing rec, and, of course, the Dynamics ERP system, we work with those other solutions. So, when Michael created that payables transaction entry with the distributions already part of the transaction, if we also had binary stream in that equation, it would automatically assign the transaction to the correct entities within GP because it is also binary stream connected by way of example. So, it’s really important to consider, does the solution talk to all of the different applications that are relevant to your AP process? And when you’re looking for something that ties it all together, certainly, you’ll find that with KwikTag and KwikPayables for GP as well.

And just a little bit about our background. If you’re not familiar with us as a company, we’ve been around since 1997. So, we’re, you know, 23, almost 24 years old now. And as Michael mentioned earlier, we were the first to integrate with the Dynamics ERP system. So, we have a very long history. We’ve got a lot of expertise in the company of working with the ERP systems. And we pride ourselves on being able to learn and make that experience better for you because we’re working with them to support you as the end customer. And as a result of these 24 years in business now, we have around 120,000 business users around the globe. And we’ve helped them automate AP and contract management and just automate HR files and college applications and, you know, medical records, lots of different types of documents, and lots of different types of processes. So, this is often where people start, but then KwikTag can be that one system that connects all of your systems and has all of your documents be digital in the same environment as well. As you can see here, we have nine patents. What’s cool about that is when I started with the company about five years ago, I think we had six. So, we continue to innovate, we continue to respond to market demands, to customer feedback, and to needs that we learn about from you, our customers, and partners along the way. So, when you think of something, don’t hesitate to ask us about it because we wanna challenge ourselves to do better and continue to enhance our products based on your needs. And 100% of our support is right here in the U.S. right here in Tempe, Arizona where it’s starting to be really nice again. So, as people are looking for that winter getaway, definitely consider coming down to Arizona for a visit when it’s safe to travel again. We’d love to welcome you to the warmth of the desert. And most of the time…don’t come in June or July, but right now is a great time to visit. So, with that, we do have time for questions. And I see that Haley has told us we have a couple here. And, Michael, I’ll throw this one to you first. Can the fields be customized in the approval screen?

Michael: Okay. It’s good a question. As far as [inaudible 00:48:06] I’m wondering, which fields they are referring to.

Mary: So, yeah. I was thinking of the same. I thought maybe I throw it over to you first, but…

Michael: Yeah. I mean, we do… On the approval side, you have flexibility. I know that we showed it one route where the approver is simply saying approve, reject, or they’re delegating it to somebody else. The other way of doing that is by making that an edit step so that they actually can edit those fields that you saw me do on the first step. And they would do that in KwikTag. They wouldn’t do it by email. So, that’s definitely another way of doing it to where they can do the coding themselves, they can, you know, adjust anything else that was needed, put memos and comments in and things like that. They’re in that edit screen. But as far as adding other fields there, we definitely…as Mary said, we’re open to any customizations that are feasible and we’re happy to discuss further after this, set up a time and we’re happy to go through your specific need.

Mary: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And some of it depends on whether or not that data needs to pass through to GP or if it’s just something that you wanna have commented in the workflow history and be accessible in KwikTag. So, a lot of times people will add a second level of approval or $1 threshold that if it’s over $10,000, automatically send it to XYZ manager or CFO or whatever. Those things can all be configured within the workflow. So, as Michael mentioned, we’re happy to learn more about your specific needs to discuss what that would look like for you. So, it looks like the next question is, can multiple invoices be approved at once? And the answer to that is define at once. No, I’m kidding. I say that in jest, but what I mean is when you’re logged into KTX in the web interface as Michael displayed for us during the demonstration, you would see a list. Now, he only had one in his queue, so it was only one row of data. If there were multiple, he would be able to look at each invoice, hit the checkmark, and it would go on its merry way, and then etc., etc., through the list where he’s basically check, check, check, check, check. So, it’s essentially the same as doing them, you know, in the same view, in the same session as it were.

The reason that we don’t give you a little like multi-select checkbox is that because most people that put in automation want their approvers to look at the GL codes or look at the comments or look at something related to that invoice to make an informed decision before they approve one or many of those invoices. So, when it comes to the approval, you have the ability to look at it and go through them very quickly simply by clicking the checkbox for approve as well. So, it’s not a multi-select, but it is a very quick process too as you look at it, check to approve it. And I will say when you do have them approved, Michael showed us the creation of those payables and purchasing transactions in GP with, you know, one at a time. You can also…you can multi-select there, one or many, or even all that are in that work queue, to put into the respective batch. And the reason they stop in the work queue for that step is so that you can say, you know, maybe these invoices go in this week’s batch, and maybe those invoices go in next week’s batch so that you can make, again, some informed decisions about where and how you want those invoices to be paid, which batch you want them to go in. So, you can multi-select there with any that are approved and waiting to be created at that final step inside of GP. So, yeah, absolutely. Great questions. Let’s see. What happens if the approver is on vacation, heads out of office? Perfect. Yep. We have an out-of-office alert. Michael or Matt, one of you guys wanna take that and describe what we do with that?

Matt: Sure. Sure. Actually, I can.

Matt: If you remember in the demo up on the right-hand corner, you’ll see there’s a little icon with the end-user’s initials on there. If you click in there, you can go into preferences and you can set up another person, another KwikTag end-user to basically take all of your tasks while you’re out of the office. So, you just indicate who you want to take the tasks, and then you click it on, and a big orange bar will go across the top of your environment. And that orange bar basically says that you are out of the office. So, when you return, you will return and get into the system and start processing things. The first thing you’ll see is that big orange bar that says Danny or someone else in the office is now responsible for your tasks. Are you back in the office? And you just will click that off and resume your duties. But it’s hard to miss this. It’s a big orange bar. So, the person that designates another person will never not notice that they are still out of the office when they get back upon their return.

Mary: Right. Right. And if… By way of example, to extend that, if the person happened to go out on sick leave or something, a KwikTag admin can go in and turn that on for somebody and delegate the tasks accordingly as well. So, if you’re already gone or you forgot to do it before you leave on vacation, just text your manager, they can go in and set it up for you as well. So, yeah, great question. Any other questions? We are coming up to the top of the hour here. And as you can see on our closing Q&A side here, we do have… You can find us on the web at kwiktag.com. You can follow us on Twitter and connect with us on LinkedIn. We post white papers and resources and case studies and videos and all that kind of fun stuff. Oh, we have another question. Let’s see. Does KwikTag make GP workflow obsolete? Oh, great question. No, it does not. In fact, we have a lot of customers who use GP workflow particularly, I’ll use the example of what you saw demonstrated today, with the purchase order related invoice that Michael showed us in the second phase of the demo where if you’re using GP workflow to, say, create the PO, get the PO approved, and then have that step of, you know, okay, now we’re…it’s waiting to be received against an invoice, that is a perfect tag team with KwikTag because now you didn’t have to go source another solution for the requisition process. You can use GP workflow for that PO approval. And then when the invoice comes in, it marries up quite nicely with the receiving transaction, and then you can match it against whether it’s a receiving transaction or a three-way match, the way that Michael showed us. Either way, KwikTag can support it in the KwikPayables process. So, they actually work hand in hand very well. And then I see we have one more question. How long does implementation typically take? Matt, do you wanna take that one?

Matt: Sure. So, the fastest KwikPayables implementation ever for us was 17 days, but that was certainly…there were some business requirements built around that. And we hope to have more time than that on average project. I would say a good rule of thumb would be two to three months, generally. If there’s really business reasons why we need to accelerate that, there are ways for us to get some of the information to you quickly, have you populate it, and get the project rolling more quickly. But I would say generally about two to three months for a project.

Mary: Yep. And if people choose to start with document management and then add the AP automation, we can literally have document management up and running in a few days. So, that’s something that you can… Or if you go with AP automation and wanna have people start using the document manager right away, you can do that as well. So, there’s lots of different considerations as you go through implementation that your project manager will suggest to you and work with you on a kickoff call shortly after you get started. So, it looks like that about wraps up our questions. And we’re coming to the top of the hour here. But any closing thoughts, Michael, Matt, that you’d like to share with our audience today?

Matt: I just really appreciate everybody participating today and joining. It’s great to see the turnout. Thank you.

Michael: Yeah. I appreciate it. And great questions too. And I would just say the thing that we didn’t get a chance to really touch into too much is that you can expand KwikTag to other areas of the organization. So, as Mary said, you can get document management going in many other departments and it’s something that I can help, not just AP.

Mary: Awesome. Yep. Thanks, everybody. And definitely stay focused on whatever your goals are for 2021 and, hopefully, automation and saving your team time and money and energy is part of that process. And we look forward to continuing the conversation with all of you. Thanks to Melissa and the Encore team, Haley for facilitating our questions in the background there. And we really appreciate all of your time. Thanks, everyone, and have a great day.

Matt: Thank you, everyone.

Melissa: Great. Thanks, everyone.