Sage Intacct and DataBlend | Easy Integrations

Sorry about that. With that said, no matter what software you're using, there are some common challenges among all of them. So my focus is Sage Intacct, but I've actually worked with clients using Sage 100, Sage 50, QuickBooks, Microsoft Dynamics, and a few other products as well. I've worked within some of these solutions as well as supported clients within several of these, and a common thread among all of them is that users often fall into a state of complicity with current processes and getting through day-to-day activities. So I know that we as humans tend to be change averse and does anyone else here always order the same thing when you go to a certain restaurant? So I know I often think about trying something new when I go to my favorite restaurant, but then at the last minute I always go back to my old favorite every single time.

Please feel free to react with a thumbs up if maybe this happens to you two or maybe I'm the only one. But habits and consistency can of course be very beneficial. Thank you. Thank you. I'm not the only one, so habits and consistency can be very beneficial, but when we get stuck in our normal day-to-day processes within work, we may push to the side thoughts of the challenges that these daily processes have. So some of those daily struggles are listed here, cumbersome workflows, bottlenecks, errors, duplications, manual processes, they all slow down tasks and reporting efforts. So these challenges tend to stifle growth and often lead to errors and additional reconciling items. So with the technology capabilities that we have today, we should be shifting our processes to include as much integration as possible so we can shift our employees from focusing on repetitive and manual data entry to more meaningful tasks such as data review, researching outliers and validation tasks.

Next, I wanted to show two different workflows for you. So these two workflows show the difference automation can really make on the left. The workflow is clearly broken, it has many manual processes and human intervention, whereas on the right you can see a much more streamlined workflow with automated and integrated workflows, much less risk for manual errors and a focus on review and data validity. Oftentimes when I'm speaking to clients, they indicate that they have an operation system or maybe an expense system that require separate data capture. The majority of companies are doing some form of exporting and importing to combine this data into a single place. So exports into Excel typically need to undergo manipulation in order to ensure proper formatting and column placement before an import can take place. Look, I love Excel. It has a place, but it should not necessarily be your main source of getting data from one system into another.

It isn't efficient and it tends to be prone to errors. So when you have all these segregated systems, revamping the integration of data is often not a priority during a system implementation or normal day-to-day processes. However, these additional systems likely how some of the most important data aspects of your business, this data should easily flow between systems with minimal errors in order to be properly displayed in your financial reporting through automated integrations, you can add operational data, expense data, accounts payable data, and many more types of data housed in separate systems quickly and easily into your accounting system. So next I'm going to speak specifically to Sage Intacct functionality. I hope this section's insightful for those of you who are using Intacct as well as those on other solutions who are maybe looking to move to a more connected software environment. Cloud-based products such as Intacct are essential in a best in class mindset where you're able to use the operational system expense system or other specialized system that makes the most sense for your company while maintaining an excellent accounting system to report on the pertinent data for your business.

I like to start this section with a quote from Sage's CTO, Aaron Harris, I'll let you all read it really quickly. So Aaron often speaks to AI machine learning functionality. His message for us is to elevate our work by allowing machines to take on that administrative burden of repetitive tasks. You are unfamiliar with Aaron Harris. I definitely recommend going watch some of his videos, especially if you're as intrigued in AI as I am. So Intacct can certainly assist with some of this automation innately. Some of the benefits of Intacct specifically are mentioned here is a true cloud product allowing for anytime access automated consolidations, allowing for simplified multi-entity management, multiple dimensions, quarterly updates, which continuously expand the functionality and add requested features. Then of course the open API access the quarterly releases are huge. Coming from a place of supporting software such as SAGE 100 and QuickBooks Desktop users were only able to take advantage of new features through an upgrade, which could take a full day or more to complete and would stop work within the accounting system.

During the upgrade, upgrades took a lot of time and were costly but necessary to remain supported and on current operating systems. So they would only happen every few years With cloud products such as Intacct, you can have access to new updates and releases every quarter with no downtime at all. So this really allows the users to take advantage of new features throughout the year and continuously improve their processes if they choose to do so. So let's talk a little bit more about the API. So for those of you on Intacct, you already have access to an open API which allows for integrations to take place easily. If you're unfamiliar with the term API, this refers to an application programming interface which allows data sharing between Intacct and other applications. So this functionality allows data blend to supply many prebuilt integrations between Intacct and other products and it allows you to take advantage of a true best in class philosophy where each area of your business can have access to the tools that benefit them the most, but all connect to your financial system for that comprehensive reporting. And with that I'd like to turn it over to our friends at DataBlend so they can speak to their approach and the power of integrations between Intacct and other popular tools. So Eric, I am going to hand it over to you.

Erik Neilson: Excellent, thank you so much Skye, and first and foremost I want to thank you. We sincerely appreciate the opportunity to take part in this webinar today and this presentation. I speak very highly of our partnership. I can say everyone, I can speak for Sky and everybody at the EisnerAmper team that you guys are just a top notch partner, top-notch organization and you treat your customers the way we treat ours, which is with respect and really always do what's best for the customer. So we are not only pleased but honored to be part of this presentation today. My name is Erik Nielsen, I am a senior account executive at Data Blend. With me today is my colleague Zachary Griggs and he'll speak in a little bit. We are both natively New York City boys and we're conscious of that and we talk fast. So we're going to do our best to talk at a regular pace today so that everyone has an opportunity to absorb what we have to share and gets the full value of today's webinar.

However, if you feel like we're talking too quickly, don't be afraid to ask a question. Can this guy talk a little slower please? I will be glad to do so. I want to start by just talking a little bit more about what DataBlend is, who DataBlend is and the value we serve. DataBlend is an IPAs solution for the Office of Finance and Accounting. We're specifically designed for CFOs for controllers and the functionality of the Office of Finance, right? Our competitors in the market will often try to be jacks of all trade and say, Hey, use us to integrate absolutely everything for your organization and we understand that there's a value add to that that you already have the info security done and you might as well use a tool that your organization is familiar with. But part of our core philosophy is that no organization should be bogged down by point to point integration, but once more that they should have a scalpel or have experts that understand financial data outside of the regular integration that they may face.

So that's where we come in. We have our expertise and our core value is around our ability to transform that financial data. We can do one-to-one stuff like customer by customer, vendor to vendor, but we could also do more elaborate things. We could reference tables to calculate formulas. Pretty much anything that you would do in an Excel spreadsheet, and I am a big fan of Excel spreadsheets is this little sign here would suggest they have their place as Skye suggested, but anything you would do in that spreadsheet, what we call Excel gymnastics we believe should and can be done inside of data blend on an automated basis, right? And the benefit of that are multifold, which I'll get to in a second. Now how we build on that value is we have a Swiss army like way of connecting to different systems and that really gives us the flexibility to connect to the given systems that you're using to the best method possible both financially and in terms of integration.

And that really opens up in the last two years I've only had to say no to one integration project and that speaks to our flexible connectors and our experience with integrating with new systems. And as Skye pointed out, our research shows that the average organization might be using eight or more applications that hold some sort of financial data that's valuable to run from system to system. And our philosophy is not that you should have to choose a system based how it connects to your ERP or how it connects to your payroll system. You should be able to choose all of these systems because they serve you best and they heighten what you're going to get out of Sage Intacct. So let us worry about how you're going to connect and let you focus on choosing an application that serves your in particular business use case.

Now we also like to make sure that you can manage all these integrations from an easy intuitive interface. We spend a lot of time formatting that and really we're a tool. We'd rather you get value out of the integration and not get bogged down by how to build it and how to maintain it. So the fact that it's easy to use and easy to build all speaks to giving you the ability to focus on your tasks. What Aaron Harris referenced in his quote, we do have part of our credentials and our qualifications to be here today. Today we have over a thousand customers. When we presented this and got this slide together just a couple of weeks ago, the over 900 number was correct, but it's climbed since then and so I'm happy to report that we have over a thousand customers and I'll share that 80% of those thousand customers are using us to connect to Sage Intacct.

It is by far our most robust API connection. Part of that is Sage Intacct has a very easy to navigate, easy to use API, it's fairly robust so we can pretty much send any data in and out of Sage Intacct, which makes us a great partner for partners like EisnerAmper. We offer a no-code, low-code workflow builder that offers secure integrations and so you'll get this idea that you have peace of mind in working with data blend, everything from how we present our tool to how it is to use our tool to how we contract, how we price. Everything's supposed to provide this peace of mind because we want to make integration within reach. The goal is not to make it this thing that is just outside of reach, it's to make it easy and give you the peace of mind that you're dealing with the right people when it comes to that integration.

And it is important to note that we're designed for no matter what stage your organization is in, whether you're a small startup and you're just getting started, whether you're a mid-size that's growing, it's a perfect time to think about integration and it's always a perfect time to work with DataBlend because we are an integration tool of evolution. You'll hear me reference this a couple of times today in the sense that not only with your processes, we are very amendable and can easily adjust your workflows or add workflows to what you're doing between your systems, but it's just as easy to unplug from one system and plug into another. So if you need to change payroll providers, if you need to change a CRM or upgrade so that because it's not doing you enough and you want to make sure that you're using the best in class applications to be in line with Sage Intacct, we could do that. And where traditional integration, if you stop using one system, all your bridges kind of break, you just unplug and then we plug into the next system and then tweak your workflows and then you're off to the races. So it's really a new school thinking of integration where you're not chained and bogged down and you don't have to worry about the cost of totally revamping your integration just because you want to change your system. So it's all about peace of mind and freedom there.

At the end of the day, what we're going to be doing based off of our core value is we're going to be reducing your manual effort. Again, I know we all love Excel spreadsheets and I know sometimes we don't want to give up our Excel spreadsheets, we're so proud of 'em, but like Aaron Haer says, you're better off focusing on the things that are essential to your business, not spending days or weeks dealing with financial data and making sure the transformation. Also, there's a loss of peace of mind if you're counting as an organization on a person to check the data to make sure that it's valid and to make sure that it's a high quality data. You don't have that peace of mind if you're counting on a human to do it right? But if you have a tool that could help run quality reports against that data and give you insight into what quality data is moving, then there's value there.

So we're going to reduce your manual effort, right? We're going to give you hours back to focus on your business. The return on this investment is not only that saves time, but also the improvement of the quality of the data, right? You're going to have higher quality data moving more frequently between these systems because a process that used to take you days and weeks is now going to take you minutes and hours. And so imagine you can run a process every day or every hour or more frequently if need be, and it gives everybody in your organization more visibility into the data and more visibility into cleaner data. I'm a little repetitive here, but for an example, if someone on your sales team is using A CRM and they want to know what's the outstanding invoice somebody owes, right? If you could have real time data about what's sitting in the accounting system in the CRM, then that empowers your sales team to speak intelligently about where their clients account stand, right?

So that's just an example of some of the data we're moving. Some other popular use cases include moving payroll data and my colleague Zachary is going to demo an instance of this in a second. And the payroll data is really interesting because it's a great example because payroll systems are known for having expensive APIs to access and they're not always user-friendly or cannot always be robust, but through our multiple types of connections, we are going to make that available to you and we're going to ensure that you're not spending more money than you should and that you've got the data that you need to post that journal entry and Sage Intacct, it's a very popular use case. We could also get bank fee data from systems that don't already have integration with Sage Intacct. And we can move information like invoices and payments like we're talking about CRMs or billing, other billing platforms where you can get that data, move it into Sage Intacct and eliminate the manual entry of those invoices and eliminate the manual entry of it.

Sorry, that was redundant. Popular connections include systems like HubSpot, Stripe and Workday, but we do more than that. I started four and a half years ago and when I started four and a half years ago at DataBlend, we mainly connected to two systems, QuickBooks and Workday Adaptive Planning, but today we connect two hundreds of systems and as I already stated, Sage Intacct is our most robust with 80% of our customers using us for that. But it's how we've accomplished that growth is because we have two releases every month and in each release we're releasing at least one new connector if not more. And what goes into that roadmap is completely dictated by what our customers and partners need to connect to. So doing things like Sage Intacct really well for a few years is in our wheelhouse, but also looking at a new system and making that work for you is also inside of our wheelhouse, right?

There's very little we can do and there's very little moments where it's not appropriate to say, Hey, data blend, can you help me integrate this? Or you talk to Sky and say, Hey Skye, can we talk to DataBlend about doing this and Skye will gladly tap me on the shoulder and bring me into this. So these are just an example of some of the systems that we have experience connecting to. And if you don't see something on that list, don't be afraid to ask either Scott or me about that. Now we've all heard me talk for a little bit, so I want to give you a chance to take a break from my voice and introduce probably one of the smartest people that's inside of my organization. My colleague Zachary Griggs, he is our VP of customer and partner experience. He taught himself how to use DataBlend and to date is one of the smartest and strongest users of our tool and I don't think there's anybody better in my organization who can talk to the realtime implications and value of what our tool is doing for our customers in real time. So without any, I don't want to steal too much of his thunder. So without any further a Zachary, I'll hand it off to you to further introduce yourself and demo some of our product for the people watching today.

Zachary Griggs: All right, thanks Eric. I think you might've oversold me a little bit there, but a few things I'd add when it comes to my role at DataBlend and also what I'm going to take you through today is that I'm obviously the VP of customer and partner experience here at Data Blend. Been working with the tool for about four years. The piece that I like to highlight whenever I do a demo like this is my background is in accounting past director of finance. So before these four years with DataBlend, I didn't know what SQL was, I didn't know API or integration, any of those things. And I was a user of Intacct and often when it would come up is how do we bring in data from Salesforce or HubSpot or these other systems? It was always a very technical and difficult conversation to have at the time, and that wasn't because of Intacct.

Intacct is a very easy to work with kind of hub of data for an accounting team. It was more so the concept of integrations. DataBlend, as Eric was saying earlier, has taken the approach of how do we simplify this? How do we give you the tools to use a very robust API and platform like Intacct and work with these seven, eight other tech stack publishers that you might have in your tech stack? How do we it so that we can have it someone in accounting, in finance that's going to be able to maintain those, use those on a day-to-day basis without using it? Hopefully when I take you through the product in just a minute here, that's going to really bleed through and you're going to see exactly what I'm talking about. I'm going to share my screen now, so let me just give a second to get that situated.

Give it a second for the media plate or pickup. There we go. Okay. Alright, so today I'm going to take you through a day in the life of the tool. Probably going to only take about 15 minutes or so. There's obviously a ton that I can take you through within DataBlend, but I'm going to keep it really simple and give you an idea of once you're using Data Blend as a platform for integration, what does that look like? What is your interaction with the tool, how does it work? And also hopefully give you some ideas as far as the different things that you can integrate within Intacct as well as many other systems. It doesn't have to be Intacct centric though we tend to be. So on the screen here, I'm on what we call our dashboard and this is where someone that is using DataBlend as an integration tool is going to spend 95% of their time is on this dashboard.

You have this section here that's your favorites and I'm going to use the term workflow quite a bit, but think of workflow like different business processes that you've automated. You've regained time in your day, your team has regained time in their day by having this automation tool take care of these actions for you. You might see some popular ones like here, you might have Salesforce and you're going to move some opportunities into Sage Intacct and so you don't need somebody to go in and look at Salesforce, update those records and then do an export, some Excel gymnastics, then an import. You can simply click a button and have that run. And you'll see here, if I hit this run button, it's going to update in my history section to run that integration. I'm now successfully moving those opportunities into Intacct and it just takes either a click of a button or a schedule for that to run.

You might see some other examples in here. So we have the payroll entry, which I'll showcase in just a minute. We also have connections to SQL and on-prem databases as well. So if you have these legacy tools that might be difficult to work with traditionally when it comes to integration and just data automation, we have the ability to connect to those as well. You might have multiple accounting systems, you might have QuickBooks, you might be in some m and a and you have NetSuite and you also want to bring in data from there. So we can connect all of these different systems in one place and that's why when you look at my favorites, you can see I have about a dozen on there of all very different use cases, many different popular software in this space. All of those are in one place. Data blend is a platform, so you have to think of it different than if you're connecting, let's say a bill.com into Sage Intacct, where that's point to point A to B data blend gives you the ability to do all of that automation in one place across those eight different solutions that you might have on your tech stack.

Now if I go over to this history section you saw before that that completed, it took about a minute. We also have, you can see here as this being an example, a very robust audit trail. So you're going to see who ran something, when did it run, what data came between or moved from system A to system B and so on. So at any point that you need to troubleshoot, you need to dig into your data, you have access to that, you have full access to that. You can see what users are running this, who's the one that kicked it off and when they kicked it off, if there's ever an issue, let's say that I was moving my opportunities into Intacct and there wasn't an item or a GL account that was set up in Intacct yet, or maybe someone didn't populate a certain field on the Salesforce opportunity, it's going to notify you.

You're going to see it in the history section, you're going to see it in your inbox. It's going to let you know this needs to get updated in order for you to successfully create those Intacct invoices so you have full visibility to your data and your integration. If I keep going down to this section here in the automation, you're going to see I have schedules and I have triggers. The schedule is exactly that. I say I want this to run every 10 minutes, once an hour, once a day, once a month, completely up to you. You can set it on a per workflow basis and then you don't have to think about it. So when it comes to integration, no news is good news. You just set it and forget it and it's going to send over the data where it needs to go. You'll get notified of course if anything goes wrong, let's say that it is missing that GL account.

You're going to have a notification in your inbox that's going to call that out. So then you can take an action or whomever's owning that integration can take an action to clean that up and complete that flow of data. Triggers are where you can have something external be a real time trigger. So that let's say you go into Intacct, you change a record, you've updated your customer record now you want that to go do something else, you want it to update something else. You can use that as a trigger to then kick off the integration to go take an action. And so you can have generally these multi-step business processes automated where one thing takes place and then the automation echoing what Aaron Harris was saying in his quote is going to then take care of those next steps for you so you don't have to go through that process manually.

So very robust capabilities here from an automation standpoint where you don't have to be the one that clicks this button though you can at any point you can come in and kick this off. So let's say it's month end or it's the start of the next month and you're in your close and you want this to be refreshed right now you simply log into data blend, click the run button and it's going to do the rest. And then lastly, I have my credentials here. Credentials is just visibility to make sure that you're still connected to all these different systems. So in here you can see I have my adaptive credentials are green, my black line credentials are red. That just means that I need to potentially refresh my user, put in a new credential and update it so that I reestablish that connection. But we give you this dashboard with these four different quadrants so that you can manage just about everything you need to do from an integration standpoint in one place. You don't have to go into bill dot com's integration and then you have to go into Adaptive's integration. This allows you to go to that one place and manage all of those all at once.

If I go back up here, I'd use the example, this one here where I was going API to API. So Salesforce to Intacct to cloud-based solutions, very easy to connect and work with. And so that's how that would work. But what happens when it is one of those systems like Eric was mentioning, where it might be hard to get access to the data or their API might be behind some type of paywall or licensing fee that might be, let's say it prices itself out of the conversation. How do you get your data where it needs to go? That's where I like to use what we call our SFTP plugin. So that's this one right here. And taking it a step further, I'm going to open up my inbox. And so in here you should be able to see just a blank email that I can go in and I can now send a file into.

In this case it's going to go to zg payroll at data blend files. And once I do that, if I go back to this dashboard, I just give that a second, what that's allowing me to do is attach a CSV, I can attach an Excel file, it could be a TXT file, whatever file type you're getting from that source system. And it could be simply by downloading a report, it could be one that's emailed to you from that different system. It allows you to put it into their email, literally hit forward. And when you do, you're going to now see that it's kicking off this workflow and it's already three fourths of the way done. It's taken that CSV file, which looks nothing like what needs to go into Intacct, all those Excel gymnastics, those go away, right? That's being automated by the data blend tool.

It's going to do that reformatting and then it's going to transform it into a setup that Intacct, if I go over here, once it's done, it's going to accept, it's going to be the proper debits, credit's going to be balanced. If I needed to do any allocations in there, it's also going to be supported. I might use some custom dimensions or I might have repurposed my class dimension. All of those things, all not a problem. That's all happening because it was set up in the automation. So as soon as that file is forwarded and simply through an email, it's going to then get ingested and create the entry within Sage Intacct. If I come over here, you'll now see my payroll entry exists and it takes as you saw under a minute for it to process and that CSV looks nothing like what it would be as if you were importing it into Intacct. So all those Excel gymnastics go away.

Erik Neilson: Hey Zachary, we have a couple of questions that I think this might be a really good time to throw them in here. Megan had one question about is there a record limit to use data lend her team is using a very large general imports around 200,000 rows for a single journal, excuse me, and they have to break those imports into three or four files. Can you speak to that real quick?

Zachary Griggs: Yes. So that's not a problem. I'm familiar with that. In my past days of work with Intacct, we often had to do that as well with the larger entries that we're getting imported. When we're going through the API and the way that we are, we have the ability to batch it into different journal entries all at once, or you can also put in X amount of thousands of rows of data into that one journal entry. You'll want to just be mindful of how large that's getting within a single journal entry, but at a minimum it would all go in at that one click of a button. So when I send that file through the email ingestion, I can send all 200,000 records or rows and it'll properly either create one or maybe five or however you want to batch it entries within Intacct. And we work with customers on the data blend side that are working in the millions of records. And so from a data processing perspective, this is what we do. And so the upper limit as far as putting in the data into all these different systems, we have to work within the bounds of what they'll support. But data blend can pass through millions of records at once.

Erik Neilson: That's great. Excellent. Another question here, and I'll take this one real quick. Someone asked, what is SFTP? While some people may get that, we do have a lot of acronyms in our business that stands for secure file transfer protocol and it mainly means that there's a safe place for the data to be sent to. But there is another question Zachary that you could answer here is, are the credentials encrypted within data blend? How are they secured? Can you talk to that for a second?

Zachary Griggs: Yep. So I do, and you see on the screen here, I just brought up our S ftp. I just want to touch on that previous point you made, Eric for the what is SFTP? You can see here it's an embedded S ftp. This is true SF tp. So if you had bit fives file, Zillow, whatever local product you wanted to use, you can log into these credentials. This is secure. This is only accessible to anyone with these credentials. So this would be your own SFDP, you're not sharing it with anyone else. And it looks just like a file explorer. In my case, I have different folders. I can organize things, I can label them how I see fit, and I can simply upload the file right to this by clicking on this button and you'll have access to this right within your SFTP and the tools, this option right here.

Now going into your question about the credentials, if I go into one of these credentials here, and let's say I clicked on the adaptive one, you'll see it's going to mask and encrypt my password. You can see my login. And then in here this is also, and I can't retrieve this, no one can add data blend once it's input, everything here is masked, that's encrypted and then it's used in the other parts of the integration. So you only have to put in once. You can also lock that if you'd like. So if you had one person on your team that was owning this, they could go in, add the credential, don't have to put it in again, and then it gets used for the other parts of the integration such as collecting different pieces of data as well as sending in the data. From a security standpoint, we take that very serious. We are SOC two compliant. We also ISO compliant as well. And so we have an on staff SI O. And so all data that is passing through data blend is highly secure and the first consideration with any of our connections and access to the data is going to be around security.

Erik Neilson: Excellent, excellent. And what I'll add is before I mentioned that there was only one opportunity that I ever had to say no to in the last two years, and part of the reason we had to say no to that is because that opportunity wanted, the vendor wanted us to download an app outlet to our server. And without getting too technical, all I could tell you is that that violated our SOC two procedures and we weren't going to do that because data security is important to us. So I like to share that story because I think it's a great reason to say no is data security in our SOC two ISO compliance protocols. Feel free to send more questions. We'll glad to answer them along the way. But with that, Zachary, I'd like to hand it back to you to continue with the regular scheduled programming.

Zachary Griggs: The last thing I'd mention too is that we have plenty of clients and customers that we work with that require HIPAA compliance as well. So that comes up often as well as our international clients require GDPR. And so we do also work with all other levels of security depending on the different regions or industries that our customers are in. So the next thing, just picking up where we left off here. So I had sent in this entry, it created the journal entry within Intacct. And the other thing that it did is it created a notification that would've gone into my inbox. And that is going to, and I'm not sure if it's coming up on the screen though, I think it might only be sharing the data blend view. I don't know if Eric, can you see my validation report here?

Erik Neilson: I'm only seeing the data lens screen there.

Zachary Griggs: Okay. All right. So it just might be not sharing the second window, but that's okay. So ultimately what happened was that it notified in my inbox, it reviewed the data that would've gone through that entry and then it creates a report for me that I'm seeing, and it could go to your HR manager as well. And that report is going to give you visibility into how much, in this case it's a payroll entry, how much was that person's salary amount in this payroll versus the prior? And it's going to flag if someone is paid 25% greater than the prior payroll. This is just one example of where data integrity is also being checked as the integration is happening. So when you're normally importing into Intacct, you might have some checks and balances along the way where you're going into, let's say that Excel file and you're just pivoting it, maybe taking a look at the proper values are in there, we're all human, so none of us made a mistake when you were putting in a, let's say one of those numbers and put an extra zero.

All of those types of data integrity checks can still happen through data blend. And you could automate the process, you could have it so that a bill can't be created for a vendor until you have the proper documentation on their vendor record. You need to know if they're 1099 eligible and that box is checked on the way in. So you could put all of those checks and balances as part of the integration so that the proper people are getting notified at the time that the integration is running and it would automatically go to their inbox as well. And so coming from the background of accounting and finance, for me when I thought of integration historically was I'm losing visibility, I'm losing control. I don't know if my data is what I need it to be before it gets to an important place like my payables where someone might get overpaid, get paid, they shouldn't and we pay the wrong vendor. So losing that visibility to me was crucial or a crucial concern of mine. That data blend has addressed through what we call these data quality reports and you can see within here this is that section that they would be Okay. On that note, I dunno if Eric, if you had any other types of scenarios that have come up as far as when it comes to the SFTP, I'm though I'm using the payroll entry, if there's other ones that are common or different validation rules that you generally see with our different prospects.

Erik Neilson: Absolutely, yeah, I mean it's a handy bringing in files through that. SFTP is handy with any industry specific system that might not yet have a fully built out API or sometimes companies claim they have an API, but really they deal with SFTP. So it's always good to have this in our back pocket. There was an opportunity this past summer where we were working with a company that works in the maritime space and they were dealing with an application having to do with nautical shipments and the way that we were able to integrate that was all through flat files and through that we were able to bring customers in vendors and bills and payments. So we were able to deliver this near API experience without having to build anything custom without really exaggerated costs. But the customer and their systems don't know the difference, right? They still have this clean flow of data, right?

It's also a resource when we're trying to get bank feed data out of banks that may not have robust APIs. So really it, and I think's also one of the more popular connections up there with Sage Intacct. So there's a great deal of overlap between our customers using our SFTP connector and our Sage Intacct API connector because some of their systems might not just have API access. So it's really a very handy connection technique and the amount we could automate through that, especially with the email feature is very significant. And then I'll say with the data quality reports, there's also always, there could be databases where clients have data and they want to clean up their data and that's another great use of data blend is to clean up data that may be sitting idle somewhere and run some logic against it to get better insights into that. So it's not just about moving data and I think you're hitting on that with your presentation today. It's also about how can we take that data and improve the validity of it and the quality of it. So thank you so much for that share. Zachary, I think you have a couple more features that you'd like to share today, correct?

Zachary Griggs: Yes. So let me jump in now. So that's a day in the life of once it's set up how you'd interact with the integration tool, but now I want to give you a little bit of visibility into the level of effort when it comes to the actual setup of the product, there's essentially two different areas that data blend can approach. This as one is the same thing. You'd think of a custom integration, you have a very unique setup and you'd like us to come in or your partner to come in and set up that integration custom to that unique nature of your business process and your data. We do that all the time and obviously that takes a little bit more effort than it would going through something that we've done many times. For instance, we have what are called wizards and those wizards are these essentially, I don't want to say cans, but they're prebuilt and thought out integrations that are designed so that someone who is using a tool in a way that we generally see, they can simply go in, go through the steps that I'm about to show you and that whole implementation process might take a few minutes and it's something that is obviously much quicker and it's really focused on the specific use cases that we have seen many times before.

So if I go to this wizard section here and I click on this option, you'll see you have a source, a destination, and then the type of data you want to move. If I click this dropdown, you could see a few different options that might look familiar to you, but in our case, let's say we did HubSpot and then I can go in and say I want to send my HubSpot data into Intacct and then I have a few different options as far as what I'm going to move. I can update contacts, contracts as the header as well as the line level items, order entry, project tasks, customers, so quite a few different quote to cache oriented use cases here that just being one of the more popular use cases between HubSpot and Intacct. I can also go the inverse direction too if I wanted to change this around, but for today I'm just going to focus on going HubSpot into Intacct.

Now if I go in and click on customer, you'll notice that it now gives me five steps in this wizard. If I click through, I can select my credentials. So I mentioned before based on that other question that you put in the credentials once and then you can use it elsewhere. I don't need to know these HubSpot credentials. I don't need to re-key them in. No one can see these. I'm doing it all behind the scenes. It's encrypted and secure in our database so that I don't have to have anyone else see my information either and I just simply hit a dropdown and select to use them. Once I'm in here, you'll notice it populated these fields. It's about 171 on the left side. These are all my different properties. If you're familiar with HubSpot, those are the different properties that exist on this specific table and it's customers, so it's going to be like my company or account on the HubSpot side.

And these different properties can be custom, they could be standard, it could be ones that you added. It's going to read off of what you have access to in that credential in your instance of HubSpot. So if you're different than someone else's build of HubSpot, which is highly likely, it's going to pull exactly what properties you have access to. On the right side, there's 12 of them, pretty standard ones that we had worked through in this case. We worked through this with the Sage Intacct team to build out some essentially a foundation of the different fields that will be required on the Intacct side. And so it's giving you a starting point, it's selecting 12 of these different fields, but if I, let's say I wanted to add in let's say description and simply I checked the box and moved it to the right and now I have my description down here.

And so it's really easy to add these additional fields if this isn't exactly what you want as part of your customer integration. Next, I can go to the query setup, my step three in the process, the left side is going to be my data coming over from HubSpot in this case. And the right side is Intacct. If you've worked with Intacct import files, these headers might look familiar to you. Those are the different what are called objects or fields within Intacct on the customer record that would get updated and you can see it's already mapping all of those. This is where we're giving you the foundation, but if at any point you said, I want my address to actually go to address two, you can just drag these just like that. You can also put in some transformations to the logic. Let's say you want to pre pens like A-C-U-S-T before the customer ID as an example.

You have the ability to do that all at this stage. We're going to keep it really simple and leave it as is though down in this description box, you'll notice it doesn't know where to go, right? We just added the description field. I can click this and now I have all my fields on the customer record from Intacct and I can choose which one I want this to go to, right? So let's say I came in and let's see, let's put it in comments, description sounds like comments. So I'm going to select that. Now I've mapped my description field to my comments field and I can go to the next. And then once I'm in here, I'm choosing my Intacct credentials. Same concept as before. I've already keyed these in or someone else has already keyed these in and you don't have to redo that at this stage.

Then I go to this final step and it's going to take care of all of these and I can hit create. It's going to run through. This is now in me over explaining it for the last five minutes. Created a successful integration between these two systems and it took me five minutes to go through and it already, I just used for the most part other than the description field, I just used what we already had baked into it. But if you wanted to change it, you have different properties, maybe different things that are important to you on your different customers. You can select those at that step where I was choosing the field and then map it to the appropriate field on the intact side. Once this is done, it's going to do all of these different steps within this workflow. I can favorite this, I can save this and now this will be on my dashboard, but before I go back to my dashboard, you'll see within here it's going to collect my data.

It's going to then go send in some customers. It's going to collect the data again, and then it's going to put, in this case, the sage intact ID because in my example here, Sage Intacct is using auto numbering on my customers. I want to send that back to HubSpot. It's going to all do all of those things. And it took us five minutes to set up and I can go back to my dashboard and now I have a successful integration right here and I can run that as needed. I can put it on a schedule and it only took a few minutes to do that entire process.

Okay. One other thing I do want to show is this option right above this. And so what often happens when it comes to data integration, especially when we're integrating new systems or let's say a new system's being implemented and you want to make sure that your data's talking to your other systems, is that you have different codes. Let's say you're on a DP and then they might have an employee ID that looks like one thing, but then you go into Intacct and the employee ID is something else. You can use these data tables is what we call them. You can also access 'em through here. And so if I click on this edit data, it's going to actually bring that up. This is essentially just an embedded Excel sheet and I have the ability to put, in this case I'm doing accounts, I have a bunch of accounts that might be coming off of my old chart.

They look like this, and then this is the target account. I have the ability to add more rows. I can do some de-duping in here. I can add more columns. I can say that it was this code in the prior system, in the new system, it's this other code. The power of this is that all your data doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to look the exact same between all these different systems. You can use something as easy to use is this data table, which is going to be right on your dashboard to put in the new values, to do that new mapping because if anyone who's worked with different Excels and imports, you tend to have a lot of backups. You might have a bunch of files on SharePoint and you have different versions of it. You have to remember to go into that.

Then you have to pass it through when you're doing your Excel gymnastics to get it to the proper code that's going to be perfect for Intacct. This takes all of that, puts it right within one place within your integration platform. Keeping in mind that this might not only be Sage Intacct, you might also have a mapping that you want to use for HubSpot, for a DP, for Paycom, whichever system you're working with. All of those different data tables, existing data blend, so you have one place to go, but let's say you are happy with those different Excels. You also have the ability to download and upload them. So if you have an existing mapping file between these two different systems that you're using in your current process, simply upload it and it'll create this exact data table for you aligning with your Excel, and then you can modify it over time.

So when you get that new GL account, you get the new customer or let's say a new employee is added, you can simply go in and update that. And in addition to that, if you wanted to dynamically update this, you can have, let's say a new employee gets added to a DP, they can automatically get populated as a row and then that'll flag for you that you need to put in what their Intacct employee ideas as well to make sure it flows all the way through. So just more tools here that help address the uniqueness of everyone's use of these different software because one of the biggest and most powerful capabilities of software today is its flexibility. When you look at Intacct, when you look at a HubSpot, a Salesforce is sticking with the ones I've been talking about so far. All of them really talk about their robustness to be customized, going in, adding in custom fields, custom objects, custom dimensions and so on. All of that we work with as well. And make sure that those small changes and variations from the norm when it comes to one of those three isn't going to break your integration. You don't have to fit into that box that it's going from A to B. We can then build it around what your process is and make sure that it's a successful integration.

I see that We also got one more question there related to the format of the journal entry. So I do want to just highlight, I didn't bring up the CSV before just because I couldn't share it, but the data that we receive does look highly unique. It doesn't look like the import into Intacct, and we can work with whatever comes through and then pass that into Intacct or Salesforce or HubSpot, whichever system we're working with in the exact format that's needed. So we do all those Excel gymnastics within the tool, within the transformations. But that's everything that I wanted to show for today on the demo. Obviously there's plenty more within the tool, but hopefully that got you thinking about the different capabilities of what we can do and ideally how easy it is to use. And so like I said, when I started at Data Blend, I didn't know anything about integrations and technology DataBlend really supported that allowed me to use this tool to do those very complex and technical functions that are highly valuable as I'm sure all of in regaining back that time by automation.

Erik Neilson: Great. Excellent. Zachary, thank you so much for that. The one thing that, and I think Zachary covered a lot of ground there to be truth, we could probably talk for another two hours and talk about other features that Data Blend has to offer. But what we hope you walk away from this is one, data blends not just about moving data, we're about handling data no matter what format it's in and being able to transform it to get it to where you need to go. So that data transformation, I think Zachary did a great job of showcasing the experience we have with that and how we can manage that and make it easy for you to manage as well. But the other thing is that we are an integration tool of evolution, right? Whether you're doing HubSpot to Intacct and it's one of our wizards that we've had tons of experience with and have really driven that cost down and it's one of our founding principles, right, is to get the cost and effort of implementation as close to zero as possible.

And we're not there yet with everything, but we haven't some of those or whether you're on the other end of the spectrum and dealing with a system that's relatively new to us or new to the market, there's really nothing that we can't take a look at and there's very few things that we can integrate with. So you should be able to move the data from every application that you're using in your stack and get it into Sage Intacct and really increase the value that you're getting out of Sage Intacct. So I wanted to just highlight that and I wanted to thank Zachary for that presentation. I also, as I hand it back to Sky, I want to again thank everybody for their patience and their questions throughout the presentation. I think that you all highlighted and made it a more valuable experience for everybody. So thank you so Sky with that, I'll hand it back to you.

Skye Duhon: Okay, great. Thank you all for joining us. I don't yet see, I just wanted to make sure y'all knew you could reach out to us. So these slides are going to be available to you guys, but I don't see any additional questions in the chat at this point. So now's the time. If y'all have more questions for us today right now, please go ahead and type that in the q and a. I do appreciate knowing that I'm not the only person who orders the same thing over and over again when I go to my favorite restaurant, so I appreciate your feedback on that as well. Eric, did you have any other questions on your side that came up?

Erik Neilson: Yeah, one other question that we often get is where can we find a list of the things that DataBlend has experience connecting with, right? We referenced a couple of systems today, Salesforce, HubSpot, those are both CRMs, but you can also find that on our website, data blend.com. On our integrations page we have a complete list of everything that we have connected with. And again, if you don't see something on that list and you need to connect to it, please feel free to reach out to Sky and she could reach out to me and we can take a look at it. But if you're curious and you want to get the conversation started, our website is a great resource and it also has some extra demo videos where you probably hear Zachary's voice of some of the other features that we have to offer.

Skye Duhon: Perfect. Thanks. That's also reminds me that data blends also on Sage Intacct marketplace, so you can look there as well for their tools and contact us for any additional questions you have. Of course. So with that, I believe we will turn it back over to Astrid for any closing remarks.

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