The Benefits of Being Financially Nimble with Matt Jacocks, Intuit QuickBooks
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we're delighted to host Matt Jacocks of Intuit QuickBooks. Listen as Matt shares the importance of cash flow and how it can impact the decisions you make for your business.
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James: 0:50
Hey, welcome everyone to the Direct Farm Podcast today. We've got a great conversation in store for you with Intuit QuickBooks. Many of you probably know the brand. They are the number one accounting solution for small businesses. And barndoor is obviously eager and delighted to be partnering with Intuit QuickBooks. So we can help your farm grow and manage your direct sales more effectively. Right. We wanted to ensure you have a safe and secure integration between our two companies. So we're really eager to announce this relationship this summer, we're going to be hosting Intuit as our official conference partner for the upcoming Direct Farm Conference on August 3rd. You can join us. This is a completely free virtual conference while you learn all the tools, tactics, and insights from industry leaders from folks at QuickBooks and from farmers like yourself. Who are again, using QuickBooks and Barn2Door to better manage and grow their farm business. You can go online today and register@directfarmconference.com. So let's go ahead and get started today. I am delighted to welcome Matt Jacocks who is the partner account manager at Intuit, and he's going to walk us through a whole scope of resources that are available to you and your farm through which you can access with the QuickBooks online platform. Hey, welcome, Matt. Great to have you here today.
Matt: 2:03
Great to be here. James really appreciate the opportunity to to talk to everyone today.
James: 2:08
Thanks so much, Matt. Well, tell us a little bit about yourself. My understanding he'd been at QuickBooks for almost 10 years. What were you doing before you joined QuickBooks? Before we dive into that?
Matt: 2:17
Well, that's a good question. So we'll go. We'll go pretty far back. We'll go back. I grew up in the Midwest, so. Western Illinois, about 20 miles from the Illinois border. So I grew up in farm country, and I
James: 2:28
So you know the smell of manure. You can appreciate that.
Matt: 2:31
I know the smell of money that's right
James: 2:34
Right answer.
Matt: 2:35
Absolutely. And it started off my career actually in manufacturing and logistics and was a supplier for two of the biggest heavy construction equipment makers in the land, one based out of Moline, Illinois, and the other Peoria. So I'll let you do that math on that one. But after that, about 11 years, I moved out west to Arizona. Had a couple short stints in the food industry and managing a restaurant and working for a food distributor and then landed it into it. And started my career there and really took off. And when I came into it was working as a small business consultant. So, working with small businesses all over the United States working to right, fit them with solutions, accounting solutions, our payroll solutions, whatever it was to run their business effectively and get control of their financial stability. And during the first part of my career, it was really a good learning experience, really, to talk to customers, to find out what the pain points were for small business owners. And after that moved into more of a corporate growth position. And that's what I'm in today, I'm in the corporate growth through partnerships and like we're executing with Barn2Door we're looking for partners that we can work together with that have a common values and looking for growth. And looking really at the end of the day, to help and educate the customers and clients, to make sure that they're getting the best possible solutions that are available to them.
James: 4:09
Well, that's fantastic, Matt, what a great career too. And then being at QuickBooks now almost 10 years, it is an incredible company. And like you said, shared values and a passion and a heart for small businesses. And as you know, at Barn2Door, we work with farmers who are small business owners, right? These are farms that are making probably somewhere between 50 K and maybe $5 million a year. In annual revenue, they're the backbone of not only our economy and creating jobs, but also provide, you know, three quarters of the food on the dinner table for every family. So really appreciate the opportunity to partner with you in the QuickBooks team. Tell us a little bit more about your role as a partner account managers specifically, right? I mean, I know how I've gotten to work with you. It's been a real delight, but help, maybe help the listeners on the other side of the, on the other side of this podcast or video to understand, like, what does it mean when Barn2Door and QuickBooks partner together?
Matt: 4:57
Yeah it's a really good question. So again, I, we go back to that alignment in values, right? So we're looking for partners. And when you look at Barn2Door's values you're looking at it healthy and humble and those types of things. And when you look it into its values, we're talking about a customer obsession and we're talking about being stronger together and really that comes from aligning with the. Not just customer solutions, but identifying customer problems and really falling in love with customer's problems. And that allows us then to go in and really fix things, not just to be hyper-focused on, we have the solution right off the bat. So through our partnerships, again, we look to work together with them, groups like Barn2Door who are doing the same thing, really educating their customers on how to do things and finding out and talking to the customers and getting those critical data points, find out what they need and what's causing them. Things to cause them to take more time than it should good. How can we speed up their daily process? How can we make it more accurate? And really that comes from talking to the end users. So when we partner with a Barn2Door, whoever that may be, we really want to identify. What are your goals? What are our partner's goals? What are our goals and what are the customer's goals? So really it comes down to being able to educate. And provide tools to those clients through a partnership. And another thing that we look at and like you brought up earlier with Barn2Door our integrations. So when we look at a partner who's already working in developing an integration into QuickBooks, we've got an open API and open platform that allows us to happen. And then when you work with our teams here at Intuit that takes information and moves it from one spot to another spot without us having to manually enter in information. And when we have a partnership like that, where we see that we're really trying to be hyper-focused on eliminating time to do those types of tasks to reduce the amount of air that can happen through that. That's when we know we have Partner that we want to work with and hopefully they want to work with us as well.
James: 7:07
Well, that's well said as super important. For those folks listening in API stands for an application program interface. That's essentially another way of saying as Matt said, a way to seamlessly transfer our data between our two companies safely and securely, and most importantly, accurately the big thing here is going to save you a ton of time. So, well, Matt, you know, a lot of our listeners are certainly familiar with the QuickBooks brand, right. Have a lot of probably trust and a lot of you know, affirmation in their own communities, knowing that QuickBooks is a great company, but tell us a little bit more about what does it mean to work with QuickBooks and QuickBooks online, specifically as a solution, right. And how has it evolved over the last five years? Right? Because most of the farms that we work with, we see, you know, probably more than 90% of them don't have a general ledger. Right. So what does, you know, working with QuickBooks online, but what does that look like today? Yeah.
Matt: 7:57
So another really good question. And just to go back a little bit further many do recognize the name QuickBooks and for many years, QuickBooks was a desktop platform. Which menu you took the software, new, loaded it on a computer, and that's where you work from. But in the mid two thousands, we took an opportunity to go and try and develop into the online space. And what we found is we did a, not a very good job of it. It looked different. It felt different than what people were used to. It wasn't easy to navigate. So we, we had the know, take some humble pie and kind of go back to the drawing board and then really in the, after 2010, Is when we started to really dive in to make the online platform, what it is today. And when you talk about an evolution of going to online and what's been happening the speed to be able to make changes, the speed that we're able to change. And update through an online platform far exceeds anything that we were ever able to do in the desktop solution. So you start to see things like. Now I'm able to input my expenses automatically. I'm able to capture receipt through a picture. I don't have to manually enter this information and oh, by the way, I can track my mileage with the app on my phone. Oh, I can find out when I'm sitting on my tractor where I'm at financially and what invoices have just been paid and when they'll hit my bank out. All of that has given the small businesses the ability to be nimble. And to react quickly and react faster and making smarter decisions really at a pace that they weren't able to make before. So really when we talk about, you know, evolving it's a much more stable platform. It's much more user-friendly and now it's built. And you'll hear us talk it into it about our big bets. Yeah. And we've got five big bets and there's a couple of them that really relate to what we're talking about today. And one of them is being that central central point for small business growth. So when we think of QuickBooks online as the center we're then looking at an ecosystem of where I can have a payroll solution on that. I can have a payment solution on that. I can attach these integrated partners in to my QuickBooks and all this information. I can then attach my bank account to QuickBooks and all of this gives me the ability to have information, clean information, like you said, Come in quickly, accurately, and I can start making decisions on where I need to go and what I need to do on a daily basis, rather than taking information that I wrote down on a piece of paper, I copy and paste it from an email. I kept in a shoe box and now I have to go home at the end of the day. And put that in to my excel spreadsheet or whatever I'm using at that.
James: 10:52
Or perhaps you're just still keeping a ledger and a notebook, right? Like most farmers that we know today are still doing business with cash and check over 90% of those payments are still cash and check. So moving online offers, like you said, a ton of advantages, right? If one of the reasons why we're so excited about this partnership and to your point too, like, look, all those things that you just mentioned. All accessible anywhere, anytime on any device, right? Tons of security. And knowing that, you know, you could be out of town perhaps you're out in the field, like you said, or out on the tractor, you're in the barn. If you want to know what's going on, you can pull up your mobile device and get the information right at your fingertips. So let's talk a little bit about like why and how farmers can save time by using you know, Barn2Door to manage their direct sales and for farmers to manage all their expenses with QuickBooks. Talk to me a little bit about, you know, what's the big, why farms should adopt a solution and pay? Obviously there's a fee to pay for a using QuickBooks. What's the big, why behind it? Why do farmers sign up today and use QuickBooks? I mean, you guys have millions of customers, clearly. They're thrilled with the solution. What's the big reason why people use QuickBooks today.
Matt: 11:57
We can probably talk about three things that, that are extremely important though. We've kind of touched on a little bit, is being nimble, right. And being able to access information to make decisions faster. And when you have the ability to have integrated solutions that are giving you information on your phone you're then able to move quick and make decisions and the right decisions or for your business, not just a decision, but the right decision for your business, whatever that may be. So that's one reason. It gives me that flexibility, like you said, I have had so many conversations with clients over the years where I'm like, if you're at a hotel and you're on QuickBooks online, you can walk down to the hotel lobby, log into your QuickBooks from the hotel lobby computer. So in that's just one instance of being able to do that. Whereas with the other solutions out there or your ledger solution, You're not going to have access to that information. So that's one just being flexible, being nimble, having that anytime, anywhere access. The second we look at is security and compliance. And when we think about security we hear today so many times of computers being taken over they're being held hostage to ransom there. They're shutting down and I can go into a laundry list of conversations had with customers that they've lost everything on their computer because it crashed or something happened and they didn't have their information backed up. Or the ledger got eaten by the dog. Right. You know, where they go. And those things, when we talk about, you know, having security, all of our systems. I mean, when you think about Intuit, we handle the nation's taxes with turbo tax. We handle the nation's accounting solutions with QuickBooks. It is our utmost want and need to keep that data protected. And we use all the same encryption technology that the big banks do. So one of the things, when we think about why, is security. The other one is compliance, right? Am I paying my taxes on time? Am I paying taxes correctly? Am I paying my payroll taxes correctly? Am I doing things right? I mean, there's compliance issues when you're running a business. And when you're a farmer on how you're growing food or how you're distributing, there's compliance with that. There's the same thing in the financial industry. So those are two big reasons. And then the third reason is just having access, time is so precious to us nowadays and having access to information and to things that we need to make those decisions right now is so important. So when we talk about the QuickBooks ecosystem now I have access to things like QuickBooks capital. So if I need to go out find money and I need to support my cashflow, or I need to go out and look at a capital expenditure. I can do that right in QuickBooks. If I need to go out and find an expert, a pro-advisor someone to help me with my QuickBooks, I do that right through QuickBooks. I don't have to go out and look anywhere else. I don't have to do a phone book search or a Google search. I can work everything through QuickBooks to get the help I need. So those are the big reasons that people make the move and get into QuickBooks online. And then when you start to introduce an integration from a tool like yours that streamlines it even more.
James: 15:14
Yeah, it's all, like you said earlier, it's about being better together, right? Where one plus one equals three, because literally, I don't think I've ever talked to a single Farmer who told me they had extra time on their hands. They always have a list that's longer than their, what they're going to complete in a given day. And something unknown is going to happen almost every day or every week, something unexpected. That's going to take more time or more financial capital, like you said. So, you know, Farmers, again are the backbone of our country's economy backbone for providing all this great food for us. So again, to be able to give them more financial security, more peace of mind, you know, we're really honored and pleased to have this opportunity to work with you, to help deliver this type of solution for farmers. Let's talk a little bit, I want to go back and hit on one of the things you mentioned, which was the QuickBooks pro advisors, right? Let's talk a little bit more about what that means, because it's one thing to get the farms that we work with at Barn2Door introduced to QuickBooks, we want them all using it. We know that farmers who have Barnard or in QuickBooks have a higher margin that they are more secure. They have more resilient business and candidly, they make more money. But a big part of that is because they oftentimes get connected with a QuickBooks pro advisor as well. Let's talk about these pro advisors. What does it mean to be a pro advisor as an accountant who is in the QuickBooks ecosystem?
Matt: 16:27
Yeah. So this is such a super huge tool for QuickBooks users, clients. The pro advisor network is a group of bookkeepers and accountants that not only know accounting and know bookkeeping, but they also know QuickBooks. They know the product and how they get to know that as they go through a training process, they go through a certification process. So when we talk about going to get help and going to a pro-advisor not only are you going to go to someone who has the knowledge of bookkeeping and accounting but they also are certified on how to use QuickBooks online, how to use QuickBooks, desktop, how to use our products and they don't get this certification easily. They go through rigorous training. And they get rewarded for that because they're able, they're a stakeholder, right? So, when we look at the stakeholders in the ProAdvisor network we look at them as a stakeholder. We want to help them grow their business. We want the customers of QuickBooks to have access to someone who knows bookkeeping that knows accounting and can get to them easily through our network. And that's what do through online. And then at Intuit, we benefit when everybody wins, when the pro-advisor wins, when the customer wins, because they're getting the assistance they need pro-advisor is growing their business. It works for everyone. So it's a super huge tool. It's a benefit that is sometimes hard to quantify because it is so useful to everyone. And we just, we really feel strongly and have felt strongly about the program for many years.
James: 18:07
And I would really encourage any Farmer out there who is not working with an accountant or a bookkeeper today to look at the QuickBooks ProAdvisor network. It's a big deal because you know, these pro advisors, you know, as Matt just shared, they're not only certified on QuickBooks. They know the tools, et cetera, but more importantly they're oftentimes are going to be offering you very practical business advice. It can give you a hate to say it. Provide some accountability and ask you some tough questions that might make you uncomfortable at times, but are going to help you make it better business decision for your business in terms of how you manage your expenses. Let's talk a little bit about like, you know, obviously all of these expenses that a business has, right? We know the farms that come to Barn2Door, they're having success, growing their revenues and accessing more buyers. And that's what we have to offer at Barn2Door. It's like, Hey, Grow and Manage your business, go acquire more buyers. And, you know, Get more sales. That's ultimately a farmer wants to sell their products. But when it comes to managing expenses, you know, like, look, you can have a ton of sales, but if your expenses are out of control, you're not going to make any profit. So let's talk about some of the things that QuickBooks offers for these small businesses. You mentioned payroll taxes, vendors, et cetera. Walk me through, let's just, let's talk about QuickBooks payroll, right? Cause this, I know a lot of small businesses. This is a big deal, right? Like this, the heartache and the sweat that goes across their brow each night or every two weeks when they have to make payroll, tell us a little bit about QuickBooks payroll and what that means for Farmers potentially.
Matt: 19:27
Yeah. And I'll go back again to conversations that I've had over the years. I typically ask the question that the small business owners did you get in business. Why did you get in business and rarely if ever have I heard, because I wanted to do accounting and I wanted to do payroll.
James: 19:43
I can assure you, that's not the number one thing on the list of every farmer listening today.
Matt: 19:47
Exactly. And coming from someone who ran a restaurant and had to do payroll. There is a lot that goes into it. There are so many rules and regulations to keep up. And there are those out there who can manage it themselves, but it takes a lot of time. And a lot of effort, you have to invest a lot of your your own resources into making sure. Well, QuickBooks online and QuickBooks products, we have QuickBooks payroll. In that attaches directly to QuickBooks. So it's a seamless service that we provide a feature within QuickBooks that you can then go in and utilize and we're updating the information. So when we talk about compliance to payroll you're always on the correct payroll calculations the information that's provided as we are responsible updating into the system.
James: 20:33
Cause those things are changing every week, every month, every, certainly every year across all 50 states and different counties and cities, they all have different payroll requirements. Right?
Matt: 20:43
Right, and you may have not only state and federal taxes, but you may have local April that you didn't know about. So there, there are so many things you would have to employ a full-time person maybe two just to make sure you're keeping up on payroll and. What's going on. The other thing is when we talked about partnerships you talked a little bit about evolution and how QuickBooks online has changed. When we identified a partner years back, called TSheets and TSheets was a time-tracking group, and we liked them so much that we acquired them. And now we utilize that as QuickBooks time. So when you think about being able to track time from a mobile device, being able to have employees punch in and out that automatically feeding into a payroll service, allowing you to pay your employees right. Now you have the ability to really gain insight into where your employees are at what they're working. And it's all done seamlessly through, QuickBooks and it's compliant and it gives you notifications. For example, one of the things that I loved about the, that our payroll was, if you were paying somebody 40 hours a week. And one week they came in and it was 80 hours. You're going to get a notification that says, do you really want to pay this employee 80 hours this week? And it's air checking to make sure that you pay the employee right. Because not only do we find that the employees get underpaid sometimes, which they do and they'll let you know about it. But employees do get overpaid. And there could be money flowing out the door that we don't recognize because it is a manual process and we're not able to keep up on it.
James: 22:19
Well, let's talk a little bit about that the TSheets thing, right? Cause this is a big deal because this works for contract labor too, in addition to full-time employees, because many of the listeners here are, as farmers might have a few employees but they oftentimes will have a number of contracts, seasonal employees. Right? So you're saying that the TSheets app will enable them, or I guess a QuickBooks app would enable folks to be able to manage and punch. Punch the clock essentially on their mobile device. Is that what you're saying? It's like they could just use their iPhone or their Android device and punch the clock. Is that what you're saying?
Matt: 22:49
That's exactly what I'm saying. So, QuickBooks time, which was TSheets now allows . You the ability to have your employees out in the field, wherever they're at to punch their phone a time clock, you could even punch it for them if you wanted to. It also has geo-fence tracking. So, what that means is if I know that I'm going to move some employees to different locations, I can set up a geo-fence that only allows them to punch in. When they get to that side of wherever they're going to be doing there work.
James: 23:18
That's epic, that is epic because a lot of Farmers here listening have remote, you know, large tracks of land, or might have some land or leasing on the other side of the county. And they might be paying some laborers to do some work over there. What you're saying is they could have a laborer who's on the QuickBooks clock, right. And. They won't be able to punch in until they actually are at the property right?
Matt: 23:38
Correct. And then when they leave the property, they'll be forced to punch out. Right. So it'll give them notification that they have to punch out. So those are the things that when we think about, because again, that's a customer problem, right. You know, how do I know that I'm paying my employees correctly? How do I know they're at the job doing what they should be doing? This gives you that opportunity, that insight, and you can then schedule your, or your group too, and you can utilize it to set up where you want them to be. They can get notifications on where they need to be on certain days. So it's really a wonderful tool, efficient tool that, any small business, whoever you are can use. And especially like you said, in the farming industry, if you've got groups that work in different locations and you want to know and be able to have insight to that, it is a wonderful tool.
James: 24:26
This seems like a no-brainer. If I was a farmer, I would very much be interested in this. Just in the time, savings alone, let alone the accountability, no pun intended, but the accountability, knowing that the workers are out on site and I'm paying them when they're there and not paying them when they're off the clock or out to lunch somewhere else. Right. So that's fantastic. Matt let's shift gears, let's talk about another area that causes a lot of concern for Farmers and that's taxes, right? Many Farmers, you know, you know, sell all kinds of products, value, added products. Some products are taxable. Some products are not taxable. Some products are sold across state lines some states are, you know, origin base. Others are destination-based it's complex. It's beyond me as well. One of the reasons why we're so excited about the partnership with you as it in QuickBooks it's that you guys are also we're all three of us are. Our partners together and that's with Avalara, right? Avalara is being, you know, kind of the best in class, small business solution for managing taxes as well. How does Avalara and QuickBooks to work together? For customers of all three of us, like, so if a Farmers working with Barn2Door elects to sign up with QuickBooks and then chooses Avalara to manage their taxes. We'll let's talk a little bit about like, hey what is it things that Avalara has to offer to help again, and working seamlessly with QuickBooks to help these Farmers maintain compliance.
Matt: 25:35
Yeah, really good questions. So one of the things that you brought out are taxes are complicated in QuickBooks can solve a lot of those issues, but then we also look at things and we're, again, we look for partnerships and strategic partnerships that can allow us to be even better. And we find that with Avalara and helping out with a tax calculation, right on things that we don't internally have built in and you can connect. Utilize that service with Avalara to find out and make sure that you're taxing the right things. And then sometimes there's things that don't need to be taxed. Right. So, and the great thing about Avalara is they will guarantee their tax computations calculations. So we are in a position where we know that we are the experts in some fields but we also need help and we need to be strategic about giving our customers the ability, because again, taxes are complex, but they need to be done . Right. With our partnership with Avalara and then obviously with Barn2Door, we feel confident that the end user, the Farmer at the end of the day can be confident in knowing that their taxes are going to be calculated correctly. And they have all these great products to integrate it together.
James: 26:49
Yeah, it's fantastic. I know that offer thousands of different types of products and all kinds of use cases. Like you said, I, who knows what's taxable in one state versus another, right? I mean, it's just so complicated. I know in some cases, delivery fees are taxable. Other times they're not you know, a jar of pickles might be considered value added product in one state and another state they're not. So the last thing we want to see is a Farmer overpaying on taxes. Nobody wants to pay too much, but if you have a tax obligation, you certainly want. The certainty and the guarantee that comes from Avalara that it's going to be filed correctly and the best part about it. It's also going to be accounted correctly in QuickBooks. That's the beauty of having this direct integration with Avalara and QuickBooks as well. Well, let's turn it over to a third area where obviously managing expenses. We talked about payroll. We talked about managing taxes. The third area that our farmers have a lot of expenses is all their suppliers, right? So they've got all kinds of vendors, seed, feed, veterinarian's equipment, et cetera. You know, what does QuickBooks offer for Farmers who are trying to manage all these vendors and trying to think about how to you know, improve their profit margins, ultimately.
Matt: 27:52
Yeah, it's tough. Right? I when you look at it as a whole, you may not want to do it because it's such a, it's such a big opportunity. But it's so important. And to not only have the money coming in, but understand how much is going out when it's going to. Was it going out to in QuickBooks allows you to do that, to, to set up your vendors within the the program to set them up, maybe on the terms you have with them to understand on a monthly basis or a weekly basis, how much is going out. And then the other thing you can do in this It gets back to that. Being able to be fast and to be seamless is when you do connect your business bank account to QuickBooks. And you're making these payments and then this information is coming back in and you're needing to reconcile and understand when that money went out and who it went out to and how much that then creates this circle where you can start to understand better. And then you can classify it. Not those expenses, you know, sometimes we think about, well, I've got an advertising expense that I want to track. QuickBooks also gives you the ability to have some categories. Cause maybe I want to get a little bit deeper and I want understand what my web advertising is, what my social advertising is what my direct advertising is. And then I can start to classify those expenses. And over time, what will happen is QuickBooks learns with you and it can auto classify. So I always give the Home Depot example, if I'm a contractor and I go to Home Depot all the time and I'm buying my supplies from Home Depot after a while QuickBooks is going to say, boy, he's always classifying these as a supplies expense. So I'm just going to go ahead and do that for him. And then he can just punch a button or she can punch a button and that can move right into QuickBooks. So the learning that it goes with you over time. Again, reduces the time and effort that you have spent on collecting these expenses. The other thing is, you know, you may have things that you have to buy when you're out. We touched on this just real quickly. But now you're able to snap a picture of a receipt. Now that we'll update your file and QuickBooks, whereas many times I've talked to individuals that have at the end of the year, a shoe box full of receipts that they go and they dump on their accountants a table and say, boy, some of them might be personal and some of them might be business expenses. And I don't know which ones are, which. But now you're able to do that out in the field right now, when you have the moment to do it, and it's going to auto update your QuickBooks file. So you could go home that night, jump on your computer open up your browser file of QuickBooks and see that you'd have a JPEG expense picture of that receipt tied to where you bought it, what it was for. And it's going to significantly help you understand better your business. When I think about the evolution in projects, right? So now I can start if I'm going to farmer's markets. Right. And I want to be able to chart events and see how I'm doing. I can assign expenses and income to that specific farmer's market as a project. So I can see how profitable, what sold, well, what went wrong? What I can improve on, but it's just really understanding where my money's going, you know. The cashflow is so important to the business. And many people just don't really understand how important it is.
James: 31:21
Yeah. So let's go back and just sum up the, some of those things you just hit on, because I think many of these are game changers, right? Like you said, they're going to go into instead of Home Depot, they'll probably go to tractor supply, right? Some Farmers go over to tractor supply. Maybe they're buying some feed, maybe they're buying some seed. What have you. But I do this today. It's fantastic. You get a receipt, you know, you literally can just take a picture and throw the receipt away. It's done. And the cool part about it. And I've seen this personally. It can ask you to read the picture right. And categorize it. Like that is just so cool. Talk about time-savings, you know, and what's great about this. It's going to save you money with your ProAdvisor, your accountant as well, because they're not having to manually enter in your receipts. Right? Like everybody wins. I can assure you that your accountant or bookkeeper does not want to manually enter receipts. And I can assure you no farmer out there wants to pay. A bookkeeper account to manually enter receipts. This is a beauty of technology. Take a picture of it. It reads it, categorizes it done, right. Is huge help, and all available online. All right. Well, let's switch gears and hit on kind of probably one of the last and probably most important topics. And that cashflow is king. And so we've been talking about profit margin, wasted, manage expenses, et cetera. But the end of the day, cashflow is what it's going to put food on the table. And it's also going to able to operate your business and pay things as they come. So, Matt, can you give us a little bit overview on like what QuickBooks does in terms of offering farmers better visibility into their cashflow?
Matt: 32:43
Absolutely. And this was something that it was kind of a game changer for me too. And I, when I really understood the importance of cashflow, because many times we talk to businesses and they know that money's coming in, they know that they're profitable, but throughout the month they're having problems paying bills or they're having problems with getting payroll done. Cause what they didn't understand was cashflow and how it was illustrated. Well, it's think of a a gas gauge in your car. And what that tells you is, you know, a very simple piece of information of how much gas you have left, you know, how much you put in, you know, where you're at and you know, when you need to get more. So it allows you to make a decision, right? That, that I can go an extra 50 to a hundred miles because I can get cheaper gas and I'm going to make it. If I didn't have that gas gauge, I would know that I have gas in my tank, but I don't know how much. So I may stop too early. And I may buy gas for more expensive than I could have. Or I may go too far and I may run out of gas. So what QuickBooks allows you to do is to see on a daily basis, again, this gives you that fast decision-making to know where your cashflow, where you stand with cash on a daily basis what your implications could be if you're not going to make payroll do I need to now make a decision where I can maybe go out and say, hey to my customer base. I've got some invoices out here. If you pay those early, we can give you a discount on those to get some influx of cash coming in. Maybe I can look if that's not the case that maybe I do need to go and get a short term loan to cover something but I'm able to make these decisions at the right time for the right reason. And I understand where my money situation is and not just that at the end of the month. Okay. I had more money than I did at the beginning and I paid all my bills, but now I can schedule my bills. Maybe I can go back to my suppliers and set up a timing. That better fits in works with my cashflow. And then that allows the client, the customer to make those are really good decisions. And sometimes they're hard decisions, but if you make them at that point in time, it's much better than trying to go back and figure it out after the fact.
James: 34:57
Yeah. It's you know, farmers know how to make hard decisions. They make them all the time, but you just want to have the information, right. And the challenge is, like you said, if you were driving the car super fast and you didn't have a gas gauge, then you're stuck with a decision. You didn't have it yet influence it at all right. So, I love this notion of giving farmers better visibility into the cash flow certainly, and enable them to sleep a lot better at night. Knowing that they're going to make payroll, that they're gonna be able to put food on the table for their families. Financial peace of mind is a huge benefit, right? Just in terms of stress and the impact that has on their personal relationships as well. Well, hey as we wrap things up, I know you guys have something special to offer to all the farmers that we get to work with, right? Because part of us, you know, working together with you guys is us. You know, deepening integration, providing escalated support and services to them. But what type of discounts do we have to offer to these farmers who might be a Barn2Door customer and looking to sign up with QuickBooks today?
Matt: 35:50
Yeah yeah. And thanks for that. And one other, the benefits, the through partnerships is we are able to extend a discount. That's not available to the direct consumer group, which would be 40% off of QuickBooks for 12 months and that along. And it goes along with payroll as well, 40% off actually for six months. So those are opportunities that are not afforded to everyone. So, yeah. Really a great thanks to Barn2Door for being able to be a partner and us being able to partner with Barn2Door, to give these types of solutions. And hopefully at the end of the day, provide things that are going to make the lives of Farmers better and give them more time back.
James: 36:31
Yeah big deal. Time is money. And also it means time back with their families, which is super important. So for any farmers looking for that discount, literally just log into, Barn2Door go to your account tab, navigate did QuickBooks, and there's a direct link from there to go click on there where you can sign up directly with QuickBooks and Matt wouldn't you say? I mean, the sooner you sign up the better, right? Like, you know, you don't want to start getting some sales and then. Try to eventually navigate to QuickBooks. It's better. Like, hey, once you get online, you start getting your sales, get signed up with QuickBooks right away, because you want to start, like you said, you know, starting to identify where the monies are coming in and start managing those expenses sooner. Right. Like I would assume that everybody wants to improve their margins right away. Right.
Matt: 37:14
Yeah the recommendation we always give is if I'm a business it's already incurring expenses. I need to have QuickBooks. I need to have something in line that I can start tracking those because typically we're paying money out before money starts coming in the sooner, the better that way you can capture that information. You can have it in a place where you can utilize it. And it's going to be a benefit, a tool that you can use.
James: 37:38
Yeah. Well, fantastic. Well, thank you, Matt, again for your time and all the advice you shared with our podcast listeners today. Before we sign off, do you have any final recommendations or any suggestions for Farmers?
Matt: 37:48
I don't know about any suggestions or things, but again, thank you for the work that you do, what you provide for us. We certainly appreciate that, we want to help solve problems, and we want to help you be as successful as you want to be.
James: 38:02
And I encourage any farmers. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to your Barn2Door account manager. I'm sure you're going to have other questions that will lead to follow on podcast with Matt. As we dive into other details of way she can manage your business more effectively. I want to extend my thanks again to you, Matt, and the entire team at Intuit. We're delighted to partner with them to give them. The best-in-class accounting solution. There is no better solution in America if you want to manage your books. There's a reason why everybody knows the name. It's because it's a name and a brand that everybody trusts if you're on the fence and you're not sure. Whether or not you want to get started with QuickBooks or Barn2Door just yet we'd also encourage you to register and join us at our upcoming Direct Conference. QuickBooks is going to be our official conference sponsor. And so during that conference, you're going to get a chance to hear from several folks from QuickBooks and from Farmers, like you who've been able to grow their businesses with Barn2Door and QuickBooks. Thank you for your time tuning in this episode at the Direct Farm Podcast. And we look forward to speaking to all of you again, next week.