How to Simplify your Farms Accounting with Jacint Tumacder, Intuit QuickBooks
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we're delighted to host Jacint Tumacder with Intuit QuickBooks. Serving over 15,000 small businesses during his 30+ years at Intuit, Jacint shares how using a robust accounting solution can help Farmers efficiently grow and manage their businesses.
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James: 0:51
Welcome everyone to the direct farm podcast. We've got a great conversation for you today, with a product veteran from the QuickBooks team which I'm sure you guys have all heard of QuickBooks. By far, the number one accounting solution for small businesses across America. And as you might be aware, we're, we're very delighted to be partnering at Barn2door with QuickBooks Online to help farmers grow and manage their direct sales. And this summer too, we're really excited to feature QuickBooks as our official conference partner at the upcoming Direct Conference on August 3rd. You're welcome to join us at that free virtual conference where you can learn the tools tactics, And the insights from industry leaders like QuickBooks and farmers like yourself. You can register DirectFarmConference.com. So today, we get to hear, like I said, from a three decade veteran, Jacint, a QuickBooks sales and product engineer over at Intuit. Welcome, Jason. Why don't you give a little introduction to yourself?
Jacint: 1:42
Great. Thanks, James. Yes. So as you mentioned, I started in 1992 I was 12 at the time and uh,
James: 1:51
You do look quite young. You look great.
Jacint: 1:54
But you know, I started in I had no idea that this was going to be, I was going to be here this long, but I started in tech support. And that's where I saw that this was sort of a different company, was really about all about like developing customer empathy. And that's what they were talking about. It's not just about solving your problem with saying like, look, you know, tell me what it is, your problem, why is this a problem for you? And, you know, I did that for my first three years on the job, literally spoke to if I wanted to do the stats, literally spoke with probably over 15,000 customers. Well, can you take a lot of calls during the course of a day and you hear everything. And you know, so that was great. And you do get, you do develop a satisfaction by helping. Like, so when I'm done, so like, let's say, I'm talking to you, James on the phone and I'm done. I'm like, okay. He's solved, and he's not going to call back because we I've got them taken care of. But then but then I had a chance to move to product management and that was so liberating because then, I got to build, you know, take all of this feedback and these learnings and say, Hey I can help everyone by solving this need or fixing this issue. And that's just, you know, that's just so gratifying. Right. You know, I'm not on the phone anymore, but then after you launch it, you could say, you can go and say to everybody, Hey look everybody, I just saved you an hour a week, doing this.
James: 3:13
Wow. And time is so critical for small businesses. It must've been really cool though, to make that transition from technical support where you're hearing about the problems To actually being the person now figuring out like, Hey, how do we actually solve their problems from a, from a software development standpoint?
Jacint: 3:28
Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It was super gratifying. Internally I think. I think they were happy because they were tired of me being the quote WTF guy when I was gone. Wait, why are you doing it this way?
James: 3:39
And during your tenure You know, the Intuit and QuickBooks is evolved quite a bit. And I think like you said, I think Intuit's done a fantastic job of being very attentive to customer feedback. Tell us a little bit about this notion of being a customer advocate. And I know specifically, you know, there's kind of two initiatives inside of Intuit around like the voice of the customer and the follow me homes for our audience. Can you, can you describe what that looks like and why is that so important into it and shaping you guys as product development?
Jacint: 4:06
Yeah absolutely, one thing that, Scott Cook did when he founded the company was you know, just started with one simple premise it's like, look, you find an important customer need or problem. And then just work diligently to solve it really, really well. But how do you do that? You know, you have to get these customer learnings. It's like, look, when I've collaborated with your team, like, I'm not a farmer, I don't know, farming, but whatever that customer need is we go out to different industries and try to understand, like, what are your specific needs? What are your challenges? How do you need to get paid? You know, all around your workflows that are with, within your industry. And then of course, how do they overlap with, you know, all of your core accounting needs such as. You know, getting paid, you know, paying your vendors, you know, making payroll, et cetera. And you know, each one, well, from an accounting perspective, it's all relatively similar. You know, there are unique needs for, you know, each one of those industries. And so how do we best solve for that?
James: 5:05
So that's the concept of the follow me home kind of follow the customer, understand their journey and then represent their voice back to the product team in terms of like what their unique needs are. Even though you guys have a horizontal solution. There's like you said, there's always some unique need or requirement for every industry or vertical, right?
Jacint: 5:22
Yeah. That's right. And then sometimes, especially like, as a product person, we try to get everybody to do that. Right? Like, it's one thing for me when I'm the product manager to have it in my head. But what's great is if you can get your engineers and your folks testing it to participate, because then they can internalize that need and say, when they're building it and sort of intuitively figure out. what's going on or the best, the most, the best part about that is now, now we're all sort of got that problem internalized, and now we can all kind of bring our insights and make it better, right?
James: 5:54
Yeah. It's awesome. When you get that type of customer feedback, like no, one's got the corner on the truth, right. It's fantastic to get better feedback. So you're again, not throwing darts blindfolded. You're actually trying to really, you know, aim at the target and get some very directive feedback on where to aim. Right. So that's fantastic. Let's, let's shift to your role a little bit as a sales engineer right? Many businesses, especially farmers as you can imagine, this time of year are looking to move faster and save time. We've never talked to or met a farmer. whoever says they have extra time on their hands. They work and, you know, incredibly long hours. But you know, what are, what are two or three of the most valuable capabilities that QuickBooks online offers a farmer when it comes to managing their business, you know, to help them manage and grow their sales?
Jacint: 6:34
So really there's, you know, there's several, but, I'll try to keep it to a smallest. So one is flexibility. And what I mean by that is you can work from anywhere you know, whether it's at your desk, whether it's in, literally in the barn, in your case, or in the field, for this industry.
James: 6:52
It happens. Trust me all the time. Yes.
Jacint: 6:54
And literally from any device, whether it's your computer. Your phone or your tablet, we have QuickBooks apps for all of those. And then really the second one is I'd say like, look, it's it's peace of mind. Cloud apps have come a long, long way, so they keep your data safe. They use industry standard tools to keep it safe, secure, and always available. So it's always backed up. So really you don't have to hire an it team at this point and worry about like, oh my gosh, the data that was on my computer in my back office is gone because there was a, you know, a spike or something, you know, or flooding or something
James: 7:29
Or worse yet the, the receipts of my shoe box you know, got eaten by the dog, right. So just like you said, having an always on and available mobile, tablet, in the cloud, it's everywhere at any time. Huge benefit.
Jacint: 7:43
Yeah, and then there's probably the third one is really about what I call collaboration. You can collaborate with all of your team members. So, you know, you as the owner, you know, you're going to run the books, but a lot of times it's a family affair. You can have your family members take on roles. You can collaborate with your employees. They can submit time very easily. And then, you know, what's key is collaborating with your accountant, which, we can talk about in more detail in a little bit. And then lastly, even collaborating with folks like yourself, Barn2Door. So what I call apps. And so, you know, we know that QuickBooks as its core is an accounting system and, you know, a solution obviously like Barn2Door, it's a specialty solution that does, you know, manages the commerce for that industry. And so we have an open API and we will work closely with partners like yourself to make sure that you can integrate with our solution.
James: 8:32
We're super excited about that. You know, our businesses, you know, is all about helping farmers manage their sales and growing their business, but being able to have a proper accounting solution. In fact, the best in class solution like QuickBooks you know, to manage all those expenses, to manage the vendors, to manage their employees or time cards or payroll. I mean, it's just a huge time savings. And like you said, I think one of the big ones you hit on, Jacint, is that collaboration capabilities, When it's in the cloud like this, you know, the farmer no longer has to worry about, you know, downloading data from Barn2Door and uploading it into QuickBooks. Right? Or vice versa, right. You just press a button enter in your credentials like you said, the data transfers securely. Right. And there's not going to be any errors, right. It's accurate. Right. So that's another really big value. a big value add is it's just going to operate seamlessly. It's going to reduce those fat finger entries, you know, that people have when they're trying to type something in on the computer. And like you said, many of these farmers are family affairs. So while they're farmers might be operating the business, they might have another family member who's keeping the books, or maybe a daughter or sister or brother that you know, is doing it in another location. So being able to have QuickBooks online, anywhere, huge value add for these farmers to be able to get access into the books at any given time. Talk to me a little bit about some of the details here, right? So when it comes to managing income, right? Why is it so important to keep accurate records? Most of the farmers we work with today don't have a general ledger, right? Candidly, most of them had just relied upon their bank account. Very few farmers actually utilize QuickBooks or any form of general ledger. What are the benefits? I mean, you've been at Intuit for three decades now. What are the real benefits for small businesses who manage their expenses and do it well, in detail. . Jacint: It's really all being able to control and manage your business. There is of course the compliance aspect of it, making sure that, you know, whatever money you've collected is, categorized correctly. So for example, if you received a thousand dollars because of a sale, you know, that's income and it's taxable. Let's say if you receive a, thousand dollars as a down payment towards something where some towards service you haven't provided yet, that's not income yet. So making sure that that's categorized correctly is a super important from a tax perspective. You know, you do taxes quarterly and then, you know, at the end of the year for most folks, but really it's all about, you know, being able to manage your business, knowing about like, Hey, how much money did I really make a month? Right. This month? You can look and you can say, you can look at your bank account and you can say, okay, here's this deposit for a thousand dollars deposit for $5,000. But, you know, that's, if you're going through a credit card processor, which you are going to go through when with a commerce solution like Barn2Door, that's just the net of, of what it was of what the actual sale was. The gross sale was probably significantly more. So what you really want us to get inside saying like, look, this is really what my income was. These were the, those were the costs. These were my merchant fees and my cost of goods sold, et cetera. Our farmers, I mean, they're in the business. They have to move these products. Right. And all those affect, their margins, both gross margin and net margin. Right.
Jacint: 11:43
Yeah. So then, so now you're shifting from, Hey do I have money in the bank by just looking at the bank accounts is to having a really clear picture of what. You know, it it's as simple as what is my money in and what's my money out. Do I have enough money to make payroll this month, do I have enough money? I've got property taxes are due this quarter, I got enough cash to cover that. Right. I know we're going into the winter. So do we have enough surplus cashflow wise. If you keep your books up to date, QuickBooks provides all those dashboards. We have provide cashflow dashboards. We provide income dashboards. We can do that for you, so you can get insights into that into your business.
James: 12:21
So what I'm hearing from you is just the value of these insights is going to give farmers a better understanding of where the money's going, where it's coming from and where it's going. and then to be able to make better decisions, ultimately like, okay, what are the most profitable ventures that are pursuing, which might be, you know, what might look good at the top line, but from an expense standpoint might be too expensive. It could be the shipping cost or the loss rate on shipping. It doesn't pan out. Maybe I should be focusing more on pickups and delivery for my farm, right? Cause at the end of the day you have to make a net profit. Right. It doesn't matter how big the top line is. If you're not. profitable. Right. So Jacint let's let's shift gears. Let's talk a little bit about reconciling the books. You know, most farmers we work with are going to be reconciling their books on a monthly basis. How should you know, the farmer, the small business owner be thinking about the data that they're looking at? Right. there. some data that's coming directly from Barn2Door. That's going to be posting into a journal entry with a set of clearing accounts. And then they're going to have their bank feed set up where their income's posting. Sometimes these numbers don't align. Can you give our listeners a little bit of understanding, you know, why that is and kind of how that process works?
Jacint: 13:25
Yep. yeah, absolutely. So the data that's coming in from Barn2Door is going into an account that in the accounting world, you would call a clearing account. And I believe that account in QuickBooks is going to be a, the type of account is a bank account. You would look at it and you would say, Hey, well, this isn't really in a bank account and you're right. Think of it as just a holding account. You know, once a month or daily, it will push the sales from Barn2Door into QuickBooks. And what's good about that entry is that it does all the work of breaking down. Like here's what your gross sale was. Here's what the fees were. Here's what the shipping was. uh, Here's what sales tax was collected, et cetera. So, so you don't have to do that guesswork and go into Barn2Door and try to create those reports. That's the magic there. So now you're going to get accurate data from an accounting perspective. From a bank feed perspective, you're going to see deposits coming in from Barn2Door, those are the merchant deposits from the, a payments provider that are coming through. And so typically, there's a slight delay. Uh, Let's say you, you made a sale today of a thousand dollars. It'll get deposited the next day or the day after tip in most cases. So you're going to see those coming in throughout the month. Here's a little bit of a tip or tutorial, so to speak is you don't want to post those to income. When you accept those into QuickBooks, you know, that's the real deposit that came into your real bank account, that could have been made up of two or three sales. And then the net deposit was, let's say $2,000, but you don't want it to post those to income. What you want to do is post those to that bank account, which is that clearing account. For this example, I'm going to call it Barn2Door clearing. Because really it's a transfer of that money. So what's going to happen there. If you don't do that, you're gonna overstate your income.
James: 15:14
Yep. You double it effectively,
Jacint: 15:16
Yeah. That's a fact. So then, you know, then what's going to happen is at the end of the month, or when you get to the time you do your quarterly taxes, your income is going to be inflated and you may end up overpaying your taxes. If your accountant doesn't catch that
James: 15:29
So it's important to reconcile both the bank feeds and the, the data we're posting. Now, the data in theory it should match exactly. But because of some of the time delay on a monthly, on the payment side, right? Some of the credit card payments can take, one to two days in some cases, even three or four days, if it's a small community bank, right. Sometimes that income will actually be delayed until the next month. Right. Essentially. Right. So you'd have
Jacint: 15:52
That's right.
James: 15:53
One monthly reconciliation based on the data you received from Barn2Door. And then the data is coming from your bank feeds. There's always going to be a little bit of fudge factor, right? Every month, Simply because of the delay in payments.
Jacint: 16:05
That's right. Yeah, and the delay could be as little as a few in a lot of cases, it's as little as a few hours. So for example, a lot of what the the merchants have, what they call a cutoff time. And, you know, for a lot of them, it's 3:00 PM pacific time. So for example, if I made a $10,000 in sales today, and 7,000 of it was before three o'clock and the other 3000 was after three o'clock let's say your merchant provider. Does the next day deposit, I'll get 7,000 the next day. So then on the next day I did, let's say a $2,000 in the morning. So then on the day after I'm going to get the $2,000 plus the $3,000 from the day before. So I'm going into that level of detail. So I'm hoping that the audience gets like, okay, I get how this money flows. It's going to get there. It's just really a timing difference.
James: 16:57
Yeah. it's a big deal and I've never seen it in my career where those two things have ever been reconciled. Exactly. I don't know if you've seen it at your, in your career in 30 years
Jacint: 17:05
No, I've never, I've never seen it. What I tell people the big tip is that you want to get a sense for what that balance of that bank account is over time. And for every business it's going to be different, but you'll get a feel for like, you know, what the balance should be because there's money sort of in the queue. It's always going to be sitting around $3,000. You know, that's based on my volume of business and everything. And once you know that, then you can kind of just spot check it and say like, wow, why is it 10,000? It's $10,000. I better take a second look and see, right?
James: 17:38
Yeah. It's really critical. Obviously, from a cashflow perspective, like you said, farmers have labor to pay, seeds buy, you know, there's processors to pay, et cetera. There's always something. So having a strong understanding of your cash flows, obviously really critical, for that. Yeah, just knowing what the fluctuation and like you said earlier, getting visibility into that super comforting, from a financial peace of mind, maybe we can shift gears here because you know, you, you've talked about, there's a lot of complexity when it comes to accounting, right? I'm not an accountant. I'll be the first one to tell our listeners right now. that I am not a CPA. But I I've gotten to the point where I'm dangerous when it comes to accounting. I didn't know which questions to ask my accountant. But for many of our farmers today, they are relying upon a family member to do the bookkeeping. And that may have been fine for when they were a small business, but as they grow, right. And they start doing some real income you know, it becomes important to really get an expert who really understands the nuances of accounting. Tax treatment at different types of income, like you mentioned earlier, shipping might be treated differently. A delivery might be treated another way. Tell us a little bit about that QuickBooks pro advisors network and what you've seen in terms of value that they can bring to folks like our farmers in terms of helping them get a better understanding and a grip on how to manage your business.
Jacint: 18:51
Yeah, absolutely. There. Yeah. So you hit the nail on the head. The audience here, which is the farming community, you're, you're not unlike other businesses. And in fact, you're hitting a lot of you are hitting to what we would call a mid market business. And so, but yet you're finding it difficult to really get started or get your hands around. How should I best, do my accounting, you know, utilize my accounting solution. Well, it's really not any different than any other thing. Like you've gotten really good at doing your your farm operations. So you would, you just need to get that's where the pro advisor comes in. We've got a network of over 200,000 pro advisors worldwide, and you can find the right one who obviously knows QuickBooks and then knows how to manage, how to do the accounting for a farm operation. And so then they can work with you to do one kind of configure your books so that you're posting things in the right area. And then, but more importantly, it can help you with like, what, how am I going to do this from it day to day basis from an operations perspective. you know? Once they get those operations down then, the accountant can focus on doing, you know, compliance tax work. Anything with payroll, if you need help with that. And then most importantly, just being a trusted advisor to help you with saying like, hey, let's do some planning. Let's say, Hey, you know, you're thinking about expanding. Let's talk about that. How we would potentially manage that.
James: 20:11
And there's some great resources that it might be available on a QuickBooks capitals and other really great product you guys offer. And and if those there's QuickBook advisors, you know, the great thing about it for these farmers everyone's become very familiar with zoom and how to use hangouts. These types of video conferencing tools that are available to all of us now it's very easy. Like you said, to find a QuickBooks pro advisor online, who's familiar or with farming and particularly your area farming even need in some cases. And they can be remote right. You know, they might be on the other side of the state they, don't have to necessarily just be down the street. The key here is finding the right advisor who understands your business. Like you said, who can become a trusted you know, advisor for their business, help them make better decisions. Right. Ultimately that's, that's just huge. And I know for a fact that, you know, again, the farms that we have who work with not only QuickBooks, but with a QuickBooks certified pro advisor, Again, these tend to be our most successful farms because they have accountability, no pun intended, but they have accountability because that's somebody else asking tough questions and helping the, that business owner think ahead. Before we sign off, I'd love to hear Jacint from you. You've been around the block for a long time. You've worked with lots of small businesses across every type of industry. What would you like to share? What advice would you give to these farmers to help them, feel like that they're in a good spot going into this 2021 and coming out of this pandemic and feeling like they're really ready to grow and manage their business more effectively in the year ahead?
Jacint: 21:35
There's lots of ways to to do that there. But first I just want to take a moment to acknowledge all the farmers, you know, just thank you all for the service you provide to our community there. You know, if the one big thing is that, believe it or not, our number one competitor is pen and paper or spreadsheet. So, I would say, look, if you're still managing your books that way, get an accounting solution. And I know we just talked about the Pro Advisors but if you're just getting started, go ahead and start with somebody who can get you started on the right foot. I can't tell you how many home projects I've started. And then I ended up calling somebody you know, cause I probably watch a little too much HGTV and said, oh yeah, I could fix this cabinet.
James: 22:14
Yeah. And the big thing to your point earlier, too, I was like, farmers are very DIY people. They know how to fix everything. that can fix a tractor, they can hang their cabinet and do some plumbing. But when it comes to tax compliance, when it comes to some of these kinds of financial accounting obligations, these are very nuanced and they also change all the time. Right. Especially in the current climate that we're in. Right. So, the value of being able to not only manage your money but have kind of some, again, peace of mind that you are in compliance from an audit perspective, it's a big deal, right? No one wants to receive a letter from the IRS saying, Hey, we're coming down your driveway to, to audit your books. And if it's just pen and paper and a spreadsheet, it's going to cause some concern that's for sure.
Jacint: 22:52
Yeah. And then, like I said earlier, just knowing like, once you start doing it, you know, you'll be spot checking it on a regular basis. So now when you get the question, I can't tell you how many people ask. Especially in, when you're talking about personal finance, I said, Hey, do you know how much money you spent last month? Do you know how much money you spent? Like over the last of course of the year? People don't know. Yeah. you're going to know that you want to know those are key things you want to know.
James: 23:16
Yeah. Big time. Well, Jason, we really appreciate your time today. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your insights based on all those decades of experience that you have. You do look young and sprightly still. Uh, So thank you for continuing to work so hard. We're trying to do our best to keep up with and support these farmers who are working tirelessly to feed our country. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Direct Farm Podcast. I want to extend my thanks out to Jacint and to the entire team over at Intuit. we're delighted to partner with them to offer farmers a solution that integrates Barn2Door and QuickBooks online. To help you save time and manage your expenses more accurately. If you're interested in learning more, we'd invite you to join us. This coming summer at the Direct Farm Conference on August 3, it's a free virtual conference and we'll have several sessions with the QuickBooks team where you'll be able to learn more about managing your expenses and saving time. Go to DirectFarmConference.com and register today. Thank you for joining us today on the Direct Farm Podcast. We hope you tune in and listen again. Next week. Take care.