Digital Tools & Outsourcing Tips with Sara Snyder

This is the Progressive Agency Podcast, where we help owners like you improve their agencies and teach you how to keep more of what you make. Our goal is simple, help you save on taxes, pull money out of your business in a tax-friendly way, and help you sleep at night with better cash flow forecasting. Here's your host, Craig Cody. Hello, Craig Cody here with the Progressive Agency Podcast.

Today's Encore appearance is by Sarah Snyder. Sarah is a CPA that works for us. She's our lead CFO. Sarah's been here about three years.

Sarah, thank you for taking the time out of your busy day to be with us today. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So, Sarah, today we wanted to talk about, you know, some of the services that we offer and how technology has changed those services, such as, you know, when we're working with clients and we're doing, you know, accounts payable and maybe accounts receivable and a little bit more bookkeeping.

So, you know, over the last few years, you've probably seen some changes yourself in the technology out there. Is that correct? Yep, that's correct. Things are a lot more streamlined.

It's a lot easier to communicate with each other on these different platforms. So why don't you tell us about some of the services that you're able to offer your clients? So some of the services that I particularly dabble in, in the scope of the CFO world, is accounts payable, managing the bills, the billing process, and managing the invoicing process. And what does that process typically look like?

Because I know sometimes people are a little concerned. You know, the bills come in. How am I going to get them to you? How do we make sure things don't get lost?

How do you typically work that? So on the billing side, for the majority of the clients that do AP with, we use build.com, which each company will have its own inbox. So all bills can get forward there.

Either you can have vendors when they, instead of emailing invoices directly to the owner and such like that, and kind of like crowding the owner's inbox or even employees' inboxes, they can get directly emailed to this inbox for bill.com. And at that point, we have visibility to them and we can enter them and get them over, get approved by the owner or whoever's in charge of approving bills. So instead of saying having invoices sent to accounting at Craig Cody and Company, it would be maybe Craig Cody and Company at Bill.

com or something like that? Right. Exactly. And then how does that work?

I know since we're increasingly in an increasingly remote environment where finance teams may be remote, the owner may be remote, or they may be everybody's remote. and where in the old days, you know, somebody had to write a check, somebody had to sign a check, or somebody was signing it and it wasn't the owner. How does the new process make that more efficient and safer? So there's like a few things we can go over with that question.

One of the things is the approval process, you can create kind of a hierarchy. So instead of it going straight to the owner, it could go to maybe an admin or operations manager first. that kind of knows all the jobs that everybody's working on, the account managers or the account executives, they could approve it first. Once they approve it, they can move to the owner or whoever's again in charge of the final approval process.

So there is a hierarchy there and we're able to assign people to approve it in that workflow. There's also ways to communicate with each other. You could have a number of people with different sort of accesses on build So if an invoice came through and I knew that there was an account executive on it Jane Smith for example and had a question about a particular invoice before I entered it and sent it for approval I could send a communication to that person through bill.com and it would go, they would receive a notification directly to respond to it.

Okay. And then I guess also before it even gets to that point, sometimes, or I guess most always before it gets to the account manager, we're reviewing it. We're making sure that that invoice or part of that invoice wasn't already part of an invoice that was paid before? Correct.

And actually, build.com has a really cool feature where it will detect duplicate invoices that were sent to the inbox if they've already been entered. And because we've become so familiar with our clients and their accounts, we'll usually catch that on our own, even if the system didn't, which honestly, there's not a case where I haven't seen the system detect a duplicate invoice. Okay, great.

And then from the onus standpoint, by the time it gets to him, it's probably been reviewed by one or at least one, two people. And then at that point, he could just look at the vendor. He could quickly look at the invoice of Nebii and pay, correct? Exactly.

So usually we'll send it through the approval process, whatever hierarchy or workflow we have set up and the owner wants. And then once they stamp off the final approval, we can pay it that day. We can have a scheduled payment. It depends on obviously how the net pay structure that the owner or whoever's in the operations and management likes.

Like I have some clients that they do like a net 30. Some want things to be paid right away. Okay. And then you can also schedule things.

Sometimes you'll do clients' payables on 10th the month and the 25th. Sometimes you'll do them weekly, depending on what the needs are. Correct. So for that, we try to actually, our team, our in-house team, we actually try to look at that stuff and process it weekly.

But if there's a certain schedule where the owner likes to pay the bills, that's when they want to cash flow that money out. Then we can set up that system where it's the 15th or the 30th. That's when the money is being cash flowed out for these bills. And can you set that system up?

So like if the owner approves it today, but he doesn't want it to go out until the 30th of the month, it won't go out until the 30th of the month? Correct. So when you pay a bill, it actually asks you what day do you want it to be processed. Great.

And I think bill.com not only processes ACH, but they do process credit card payments. Is that correct? They do process credit card payments.

They process ACH, and they will also send checks out if you do not already have the direct deposit information for the vendor. Okay. But if you use a credit card to process payments, I'm assuming there's an extra fee for that, correct? I'm not 100% with that fee.

It's off the top of my head, but yes. Got it. Okay. So that's on bill payment.

How about receivables? Receivables. So, again, you can still use the inbox for that on bill.com.

Say there's a new contract that comes through. It can get sent. to that inbox and you can write an email. This is for, you know, any particular details you want.

Or a lot of times the contract says it yourself. We read the contract and we can enter the invoices. After we do that, we'll save it. And there's note sections on the bill side, but also on the invoicing side where I would usually, you know, tag the person that's in charge of approving invoices before they get sent out and say, this one's ready for review.

Okay. All right. Other than build.com, is there any technology out there that also makes it a little bit easier to process either receivables or payables?

So the bill pay side I think build is perfect On the invoicing side sometimes we will keep a little like a Google sheet that we share with our clients where we can leave extra notes and stuff like that just to maintain like say there retainers that get sent out every month just so we can keep that transparency And when there's updates, we'll update it. You can always comment back and forth and stuff like that, which makes it really easy and clear channels of communication. Okay.

So what are some of the benefits then, to take it a step further? If a client was thinking about or somebody out there was thinking about using an outsourced service to do their receivables or their payables, whether it's they're going to hire their own bookkeeper to do this, or they're going to hire an accounting firm to do it, and there are loads of accounting firms other than ours that do this stuff. But what are some of the other benefits that they get by not having somebody in-house that's doing that?

I think there's a few benefits, peace of mind. You have a team that this is what we do all the time. You're not having to retrain people or show people your process. For instance, if you lost your employee that handled bookkeeping, the bookkeeping marketing team, then you'd have to hire someone else and show them the entire process.

if you you know let us work with you then we're handling it and we're the ones going to communicate to our team how things are done so you always have somebody you can count on the other thing i would say is obviously you're not hiring a full staff person to do this so it would be more cost efficient and then if you have employees instead of it and they are become there's more work for them um this could free up some time for them instead of having to hire another employee like another office associate or something like that to handle the bill pay, which I've seen in my experience.

I was going to say, I've seen that happen a lot where the one, you know, the employment process is very tough right now to hire people. People are finding that, you know, that person that's doing that job, maybe handling a number of different positions, and it gets to the point where they need to free up their time to work on, I'll call it higher level type of services, and then they'll look to off-site it to somebody else that can handle that piece of it. Correct. In a more efficient, cost-effective manner.

Especially with the remote world, it's harder to train somebody to do these things, see if everybody's working remote. So keeping it with an accounting firm like ourselves, I think that just makes the process much easier. You don't have to worry about turnover and training people. Right.

And that really probably comes down to relieving the owner, for the most part, of the stress of handling that position. Correct. That's that peace of mind and having a professional that you know for a fact is professional handling it. Okay.

So what are some other services that you're seeing that accounting firms can offer to agencies outside of the accounts payable, the accounts receivable, and the tax planning services that we're already providing. Okay. So some of those things would be bookkeeping each month. And sometimes, depending on the need, it could be weekly.

When we do AP process, AR processing, we do help with cash flow projections and budgeting, especially in the last year or so. It's been tough for agencies. So there's been a lot of attention on cash flow and trying to manage that flow, especially if they have paid media or something like that, or if they're getting prepaids and needing to plan that cash over a long period of time. So I think that's been a big focus this last year.

I'm trying to help agencies have visibility on kind of the things that certain benchmarks, like the payroll to the AGI and making sure that you staffed appropriately that your pricing is in the inappropriate spot or like the industry standards at least try and help clients become profitable essentially and at least help them maintain or move in a forward position from where they are now. Understood. So we're going to talk about this on a separate episode, but you did talk about you know, prepaids and stuff like that.

So not to get too far off track, but, you know, for accrual basis counting, which, you know, most agencies should be on, I know often we'll come in and we'll see, you know, not a whole lot of prepaids, but taking deposit money up front and it's hitting, you know, sales and, you know, cash and the services haven't been done. So how does, Does having somebody with the knowledge that you or somebody like you brings to the table help with that part of the accounting function? Well, for me, because I work with a lot of agencies, I think that really does give me a strength in that I understand how agencies manage their business.

In that when I start with a new client, if I don't see that on the books, I know that's probably the case. And so that I can start helping them get their books in a position that gives them more accurate information. And then I can start running cash flow reports if they want to. For instance, we are in the business of tax planning.

So some of the tax planning things that we do, such as the fine benefit plan, that does require a cash outlay at some point. And I want, obviously, to benefit the owner the most by helping them be able to contribute to that retirement plan. But also, if their business is struggling, I have to help them plan the cash flow for that also. Got it.

And then which that leads right into, you know, cash flow reporting and being able to see when you're going to be paid and when you have to pay things. And then looking at your P&L, if you're looking at it on a monthly basis, which you should be looking at more accurate information versus something that looks like, you know, a mountain in the valley, a mountain in the valley. Correct. And we actually have some software that helps us do cash flow projections.

I'll give you a good year, two years if you want it on those projections. Great. Well, anything else? I know this was just going to be a quick take on, you know, AP and AR and, you know, different services that you're seeing your clients want.

Anything else you want to add? um just that i have seen an increase in the the need for ap ar sort of services because it's alleviating that pressure from agency owners and relieving some pressure from some of the employees and allowing them to perform in other areas of their business and i mean i have some clients who they didn't start with us that way they did increase the service because they realized we we did offer that and their business is definitely in a positive direction and i think not not only that was part of that change.

But like I said, they're able to take some of that pressure off and some of their key employees didn't have to focus on that anymore, which definitely benefited them in the long run. Right. Leads to probably better profitability because people are doing, you know, kind of like the highest and best use of their time. Exactly.

Well, thank you very much for being with us today. Appreciate it. You will be back. So you're not off the hook.

No, thanks. Thanks, Sarah. Thank you. Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Progressive agency podcast.

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