Hello everyone. Welcome to today's webinar on achieving financial agility and real time insights in today's dynamic business environment. I am Stacy Writes, the Senior Demand Generation Marketing Manager at Accumatica and I will be your webinar moderator for today. And also today we are pleased to be joined by Acumatica's Vice President for Solutions Architecture, Doug Johnson. Before we explore this exciting topic, I want to share some helpful resources for you. So, to learn more about today's topic, we encourage you to review the resources that are located in the resource list. And also if you have any questions during the webinar, please click on the Contact Us widget. This will connect you with an Acumatica expert who can provide you with the answers you need. And if you happen to experience any technical difficulties, please reach out to us. Using the Q&A box. You can also access the help document that is located in the top right hand corner of your screen. And Please note that this webinar is being recorded so you and your team can access the recording, which you will you will access through e-mail. And lastly, your feedback is valuable to us. So please take a few moments to share your thoughts using the very short survey so that we can better understand what you would like to see in the future. And with that said, I'd like to turn it over to Doug Johnson. Welcome, Doug. Thanks, Stacy. All right. So today we're going to be talking about primarily financials, but we're going to show that in the sense of we have a, you know, modern interface. We're using AI as part of our, you know, built in AI techniques. And then we're also going to show a contact to cash scenario at the end just to show how everything's integrated. So all that stuff's very high level, but you'll see it during the course of the next 30 minutes. We'll be doing some exciting and some mundane things in the demonstration. So we'll be going over things that are just as simple as balancing your checkbook. And then we'll be pivoting to real time AI insights based on data that's showing in your system from anywhere. So we'll be going through as many we get as we get to. Maybe we'll hide some and show them later in videos. So the whole point of your business is to grow and we accomplished that by an integrated CRM with different modules so that you can improve sales while you're improving your financials. You'll notice that we have multi companies and multiple departments will be going over that. And most importantly, the system's going to scale with you as you grow your business, either adding new solutions, adding more people, or doing whatever you need to do. As with everything, we're not user based, so you can add everybody. So as your company grows, you simply add more users to it because the benefit you're going to get from the system is, of course, everything that's involved there as well. So with that, I want to actually just start getting into some of the demonstrations. So let me go share my screen and you can now see controller dashboard. So I'm logged in as the administrator here. The administrator has access to all kinds of goodies. Not only does he have access to typical things like finances, which was where all your journal transactions live, your cash management and you know, AP and AR, but they have line of business applications. So you'll see there's bills, material and production orders for manufacturing projects if you're into construction and things along those lines, a full distribution set of features. So all those things are built right into the Acumatica interface if needed. Though you see there is a lot going on there. This search bar up top is what I often used to get the thing. So if I type ABC you will see it comes up with some inventory planning areas that will show. If I go over to the transactions and profiles, you can see a pulls up, you know, different objects, contacts, cases, whatever it is inside Acumatica. Help topics are also one click away. Help is built into the interface, so the help will give you relevant help depending on where you are. And then last but not least, we have document management built into the system, so it'll search through all the different documents. So if I go back to here, let's open up ABC Holdings just to get a look at what that is. ABC Holdings is one of our customers, so I'm taking to a customer screen. I'm on the customer screen and get a view of everything. Now, one of the things that might interest me are things like balances. You can see there is a consolidated balance. What that means is there's child accounts underneath of it. So you see, ABC Holdings doesn't do a lot of business, but it pays the bills for other companies that are inside and listed there. If I need to, I can go back and do the view account version. Accounts is a different option that is available for the folks in the sales organization. Let me switch, I'll show you real quickly the difference between the account and the old UI. And this is one that we're going to be launching. It's already available for customers to start using in in managed availability, but now you can see that I can switch over screen by screen to get that. So the salesperson has a slightly different view than my finance team. And role based security is really important to the system. So it's easy to set all these things up so that sales has access to some AP and AR and other people have access to the other. To demonstrate that a little bit more, I'm going to open up a different browser. This is my Firefox browser, and you'll notice that this is my AP clerk. Layla Boyvar is my AP clerk. Layla doesn't have access to as many things that I do as the administrator, but she has access to, you know, what she needs to and what she needs to do. So if she wants to, she can. All these dashboards that you see here you can easily drill into and get to the data. Data being at your fingertips is a key part of what we're making available. So as an AP clerk, I need to know what's overdue in certain buckets to do that. So all these things are things that you can configure. Notice that there is no configuration screen for Layla because she's simply a user of the system. Layla will frustrate me, so I'm going to switch back to my administrator because I like to have access to everything and and show a lot of more interesting things then can be shown from just being the AP clerk. So I'll switch over back to there now. Now, one of the things that might have caught your eye on this dashboard is I can drill down into what Layla was doing, but I can also drill into this interesting purple box called Potential Anomalies. Built into the system is expense management. I'm going to show uploading receipts and doing bank feeds in just a bit. If I click this potential Anomalies document, it drills down into a process that runs every night that flags things that might be a mess. So in this case, it's flagged 3 things. It's flagged some document that's in our sales demonstration data that the unit cost and the extended cost don't add up. I don't know how we did that, but it looks like a data error of some sort. Here's another one where somebody filled out an expense receipt. So I'm going to click on the reference number to access that document and we'll see that this is, we pay our expense receipts in Acumatica's AP bills. So this is Steve Church. One of our employees filled out this. Steve did a great job maintaining the budget by eating at fast food and staying at budget hotels. But it looks like when he went to enter his expense claim, he didn't process it very well and might have hit an extra 5. So this bill hasn't been paid yet, so it's good that we caught that before it happens. Now setting up anomaly detection is what this is, is quite easy. As the administrator, I can go edit this, the inquiry that drives all of that. I simply check this button and then I go in and I establish different values here for the value that I want to check into. So I wanted to look at the unit cost. Different inventory ID's have different costs, so that's why I grouped it by that. So the system doesn't say, well, I'm going to look at the cost of a computer and the cost of a hot dog and compare them because obviously they'd be huge anomalies. Instead of going all the computers together and all the hotel stays together. There's this other interesting field which I didn't select. This date field is very useful in an environment of inflation or something along those lines. If I'm going to switch to another dashboard here called the AI Trend, this is just a PowerPoint slide, so I don't have to keep switching back and forth. You'll notice that the anomaly detection, if we add these, if we add up all these, these different dots, we'll get an average of somewhere around 4:00. So the system will identify December and January as anomalies. If I set that date, then it will look at the trend and take that into consideration and it will accurately identify March as the anomalies. So anomaly detection and all those things are built right into the system. So it's really, it's really important to to see how that works. You also have is depending on what your role is, you can see there's a number of other different dashboards. I'm not going to show all of them to you, but it fits the same process that you basically have access to all kinds of different of things within the system and it's all linked together through every time you process something and we'll do a process later, It all shows up here into your financials immediately. So Speaking of financials, let's get into some financial reports. I'm going to look at this 12 month rolling profit and loss report to get us started. You can run this. You can have multiple ledgers in Acumatica and I'm going to go ahead and run this one for the actual Ledger. You can also have budget ledgers and other things. If you have a budget Ledger, you can configure your columns to this report to show the budget versus the actuals. I'm going to also click this thing called Groups right here. Now you'll notice this is a consolidation of multiple companies. Acumatica helps you grow. If you're just starting and have one single company with some maybe reporting branches underneath of it, you can do that. But it can grow and you can add companies as needed. So if you keep your eye on this 8.7 million number, I'm going to click on the products wholesale branch and you'll see that goes down to 4.5. When I go here, it's a smaller, less active branch and then so on, so forth. And if I want to, I can even roll it up by a company level, finally getting back up to my 8.7 million. All this structure is also following the structure you see here. So as the administrator, I have action ability to access my capital company, my products and services. So if I switch over to the services company, there's this, you can see there's the same report that comes back up, but now I'm in a different company for when it comes to making GL entries and paying bills and doing things like that. I'm going to switch back to wholesale just because that's the one that most of the activities in. Of course, I have the ability to drill into these reports. There's an account and sub account structure. I can continue drilling into reports until basically I get down to an individual, you know, item or batch in this case with the underlying reference number that might be the invoice or whatever drove that particular transaction. So it really makes it easy to take a look at your financials and drill into them to see what the potential problem or issue may have been. Now the other important thing about Acmatic is it's also as a web-based system. It's mobile enabled, so you can use a mobile device to assist with your financials. So here I have my mobile phone on the. If you see, I'm holding it up in front of the screen, but I'm going to display it there so you can see how that looks. I can do all. I can see all the recently visited records appear here. I can add different KP is depending on what's interesting to me and I can do things like approvals is one of the common use cases for this as well as entering time and expenses. So in my time and expense module, I'm going to go in and I'm going to capture an expense receipt to just show the functionality. Right now it's opened up my camera and I grabbed a receipt I had lying around from a few weeks ago and we'll take a picture of that. This is also using optical character recognition as well as AI to make a suggestion and load this into my system so I don't have to type in my expense receipts. It'll automatically capture the image and attach that for an easy process. Identified Harris Teeter and well, it looks like the Oreos with double stuff didn't get away from me from visibility here and somehow it figured out this was the date, even though that receipt's pretty rubbed off. So then it goes and you can create this as needed after you normally would make a, a guesstimate as to what that expense item was and then I can save it. Now the benefit of the mobile application is once again, it's connected directly to the same database as we have here. So if I go into my recently used records, you'll see that there's my expense receipt that shows up in my my area just like it did. Also, if I go here, this is the receipt, it's automatically ready for processing. So I can do that. I could have processed that and gone through if needed. Now the other interesting thing about Acumatica is that everything it within here can require approvals. We have these things called assignment and approval maps that help you navigate who can do what and when. So let's take a look at approval maps. I'm going to go here and we'll take a look at some of these different capabilities. So you'll see here all these different objects have approvals that I can turn on. There's also auditing, but a lot of people use approvals for, you know, just any type of arrangement that that would be required. So if I look at this purchase order is 1 is turned on. So this is a purchase order approval where when somebody creates a purchase order, the finance team has to approve it. But if we go down here and want to see one more level down, really big purchase orders might require that an executive approves it. So all these are just things that you can configure so that they accomplish what you want them to do and make sure that your things are are perfectly managed. And once again, that applies to any different document that you have in the system. If have to approve something, I'm going to click up here and go to my profile. Let's say I'm assigned a bunch of approvals and I don't want and I'm on vacation or something like that. I might head out for spring break or something. You can go ahead and activate your approval on a certain date so that all the approvals are turned over to somebody else. You can also set those delegations as needed. So, you know, it's the ability to just keep, keep track of of all those things is important. I'm going to stop sharing here for a minute and go back and cover a couple more slides. We'll come back to some other demonstrations shortly. I've already showed one of the AI features that is important to anomaly detection. But most importantly, we're implementing an AI first strategy, which means your typical ERP system is built around a database. So our system is a database with a web front end to that database. That's the Acumatica interface you saw connects to our back end database. The database is a relational database. But we also have integrated the AILLMS into our plan. And the importance of that is that you're not an LLM has ability to put together new content, to generate content. You may have heard it as generative AI. So that opens up a realm of possibilities when you think about things and what needs to be done with your business data. Now, of course, we're not opening things up to ChatGPT and other things along those lines. There's no risk of public data getting outside the outside the, you know, firewall of your business. But using your business data to apply things is really quite important as well, just so you have the ability to, you know, use that. So let's go take a look at another use of AI, which would be as you process vendor bill information, we can get PDF documents and the PDFs we can drag and drop into Acumatica. It goes to an external ML engine that's learned what they're, you know what it looks like. That information is sent back to Acumatica. And then we have an internal engine which learns as you adapt and change what has been done. So in terms of what that would look like, let me go to a typical build process. So you would create purchase order in this case and let me share so you can see this one. 2nd so here I have an incoming document screen which is going to be based on me open up APDF viewers so you can take a look. We have this particular invoice that's. We've received and we've already created a purchase order that's very similar to this and the vendors delivered the service and that has sent us the invoice. So they've usually e-mail this to us and when they e-mail it, the process I'm showing right now where I'm dragging this file into here happens automatically. So there's no, the part I'm doing right now is generally not done. You would this would automatically process. So things just happen behind the scenes. Now, if I go hit the recognize button, that's going to go out to our third party AI engine, grind the way, find the information based on where things are located and send it to us. Then we take that and we compare it to even find the direct purchase order that it was linked to so that you can match those easily. Match those up. I'm going to hit save and continue and you'll see that I now have the purchase order linked to the bill. I can save that and I have once again the option to to take a look at it if I need to. In this case, it flagged something. So it flagged the fact that if I hover here, I think you can see it's on the purchase order. The unit cost was $29.90. The bill was 30. You can obviously not. Maybe we'll just approve it and pay the extra $0.10, but you could also go back and request a different statement from your vendor if that needs to be the case. That's one example of AI, but another one is the intelligent advisor, which does anomaly detection. We already went through an example of that, so I'm going to skip ahead to the next section. The anomaly detection. As you saw, I've used one of the prebuilt examples, but you can take any inquiry. The system ships with power with hundreds of inquiries and you can just by clicking a couple buttons and setting up this little bit of text, you can go ahead and and tailor that to do what you need and put that on your dashboard. So at the every morning when somebody comes in, they can have a task to go fix that. Anomaly detection is one thing for like an advisor, but the interactive assistant is and also the very interesting part of what we're, what we're developing for the future at Acumatica. The interactive assistant is gives you the ability to query your data and ask questions and take advantage of the AI in the sense that it it AI does more than just, you know, numbers. It can actually take voice commands and find information for you. So let me go demonstrate that quickly. I'm going to share my screen again and you'll see here I have an inquiry with a bunch of sales order information. Up here is my AI assistant, which now I can speak with. Sometimes this gets a little complex as I try and I'll I'll talk over myself and the assistant will tell me it can't answer that question. So see how it goes here. Hello, there we go. All right, so there, that's where I talked over myself. So after I've calmed down, now we're ready to go. All right, so let's ask some questions. We have some sales data here. How were my sales yesterday? And it views everything and it gives me a total amount of sales. A lot of times it would compare that to yesterday, but for some reason it didn't think I needed that. Let's say I'm more interested in what items I'm selling. So what are my top selling inventory IDs? And now the machine will go out and determine what it thinks I'm accomplishing there. And it'll in some cases provide a chart which describes that in a little bit more detail. So it's right now rendering the chart and you can see here it's returned the top three items that I've sold and it looks like by dollars. But let's say I'm interested in something else. I can try one more thing. What are my top five inventory? I DS by quantity. So now the quantity of items may produce different results here because I might have lower, I might have smaller items that are have less cost. So I sold a lot of them, but they might not have equal the total amount. So you get a little slightly different answer and because I asked for five. Now one of the other interesting things is this chart can be eventually added to a dashboard. So if I click this view chart, it's going to add this information over to it has the ability to add that to a dashboard and then that will update and make creating dashboards very easy. It'll just update like any other dashboard in the system so that we can so that you can process that. And once again, think of this as a future topic, but it's something that's going to be very interesting to explore as things come along now. I just wanted to once again mention that that's not quite ready yet, but we're working to deliver it. Before I get to questions and answers, I wanted to cover a contact to cash situation to show how that would work. The I I said earlier that it's very important to know that everything in Acumatica connects to the financials. So let me share a screen where I'll show this process. So here's a diagram I've added to a dashboard. So one of the things that's interesting is having sales communicate with shipping, communicate with accounting, and automatically let customers do collections. So I'm going to click this opportunity box. I've linked the app with a web-based system, so I can link this to anything in Acumatica that I want to and it's going to bring up my opportunity screen. Now, within my opportunity screen, I can have a list of things. This is my work list. So these are things that I'm working on. If I wanted to see all my opportunities, I could click this filter here. If I was a salesperson that wanted to see people I hadn't contacted in 21 or more days, I could do there. But let's just go back to my work list. So the top one on my work list is this thing that looks like it's supposed to close today. To get more detail about that, I'm going to click on this opportunity here and it will open up what happens. You can get a list of all the activities that have taken place. You can see which items I was looking to sell and get other quotes that you put out as well. So if this is if I want to, I can change things directly from here. So if I go here, it'll open up a different opportunity and I can say, well, this thing's from the Stone Age. I will get it a little more in line with what we're at. And now you'll see that that we have the ability to save it. Save it first and now it'll update over here so that that one's no longer read. But let's go back into this one and see how the whole process is going to work from the salesperson actually doing this. So I'm going to open this opportunity up this way because I'm a full screen type of guy. And you'll see. Here we go. And let's say they've sent some paperwork and said this is fantastic, we're ready to go that with this and the deal has been won. Now with one click, I can go ahead and create the sales order based on this particular opportunity. So the computer that the system behind the scenes is going from here to automatically create the sales order that it would take it to the next step I want. I can have approvals associated with this. In this case, I'm going to run and hit the quick process button. The quick process button is going to help me get through this demo very quickly. I'm going to go ahead and release the invoice as well. So I'm going to go ahead and execute that and it's going to take take us through the the next steps associated with processing this. So somebody out in the warehouse would be notified. Normally you'd see a dashboard for picking, packing and shipping. That's going to create the invoice and then it's going to create a payment and that's going to immediately flow through to the financial reports. So you'll see that I've already created my inventory and my invoice. I'm going to go look at my invoice just to have a quick view of what that would be. I'm going to go ahead and do what's called release it, which means I'm going to it's already been released. So it's it's ready to go. So this is already been posted. Now just to complete the cycle, I'm going over here to a portal. Notice I changed to a different site and I'm logged in and Sam Malone, Sam alone has the ability to take a look at this customer portal. It's a different website, but it connects to the same database. And this Sam alone now has the ability to immediately go pay that invoice. So you'll see down here I can go in and I can check this as I want to pay that particular invoice. I can also get a list of from within here. I can see all my previous orders. I can see all my information. I can assign more people to do this, but in this case, let's just go in here and you can see I can select some saved information. This is an ACH process that I can do if I want or I can use a credit card information. This is all done using Acumatic of Payments. When I process this payment, it will automatically go out to the processing center, create an A payment document and apply it to the invoice that you see up here. So that's a whirlwind tour of financials and how you can basically do this contact to cash process. If I go over here, you'll notice it's now in the closed statement. I have my payments applications. If I need to, I could also go here to pay it by if you didn't want them to send them to a portal. All that is is possible using Acumatica payments. So just to wind up robust financials, I showed you multi company, multi currency. Oh, I didn't show you multi currency, but we have that as well. I showed you some things about the modern UI in terms of, oh, I didn't show you everything I wanted to. I wanted to show also show you how easy it is to add user defined fields, but maybe I'll have to reserve that for some other time. I showed you some AI enabled features and a contact to cash workflow, all those things, Stacy, I think I'm going to wrap up there and let's, I think, I don't think I have time to go back and cover the other part about customizing the modern UI, but we can do that some other time. Sounds good, Doug. Yeah, thank you so much. So, so to everyone in the audience, we'll move on to the questions part of this webinar. So the first question is, is the Modern UI available? But when is the Modern UI available? Yeah. So I alluded to that one a little bit. The Modern UI is already available in 25R1, but it's available upon request. There are certain capabilities that we want to make sure we deliver a stellar experience. So we make sure we understand your use case before we enable that IN25R2, which is coming later this fall. We expect to open it up to everybody without being on request. But as I mentioned, it's not really that dangerous because you can just go screen by screen and put things in the and put that in there. Should I take a couple others, Stacy, or do you want me to wrap up? OK, I see one. Can the document management system integrate with Microsoft SharePoint? I didn't show the details of that. I could go over and you can do drag and drop like if you have an invoice, I can drag and drop back up and financial, I can drag any document into that. We work right now it hasn't. It goes into our internal database, which means when our system backs up your data on a rolling basis, everything saved. We also have an option and like construction customers tend to use this because they upload a lot of documents. We integrate with Amazon S3, which is a much less expensive document management system and all that's managed. We do not directly integrate with SharePoint at the moment. I'm sure somebody could custom build that, but we don't do that particular one. Go ahead, Stacy. Yeah. So would you like to take another question? I can do one or two more. Sure, sure. Oh, I yeah. So I didn't show the user defined fields. I got a question about that kind of popped up around it. I don't, I don't want to take time to do that one right now. So let me see if there's any others. Otherwise, we'll just move on. Somebody asked him something about the CRM module. I alluded to the CRM. When you saw me playing around in opportunities, the salesperson working, that was the CRM module. So I'm going to take that as a good question. When you had to ask if I showed it because it's so well integrated that you can't really tell when one's the other and the other's not. So all the sales quotes, the opportunities, the business accounts and and everything that I showed are built into the same UI and attached to the same database. But as you use user role based security, you can limit the sales people to just accessing the screens they need. OK. Yeah. Thank you, Doug, and to everyone in the audience and thank you so much for your time and participation today. If you would like to learn more about today's topic, we encourage you to visit the resources list that we have available and get in touch with us using the Contact Us form. And with that said, take care everyone. Goodbye.