Name: Upgrade QuickBooks Reporting with AI-Powered Intelligence
Uploaded: 2026-05-14T19:31:35.206Z
Duration: 1 h 24 s
Description: Upgrade QuickBooks Reporting with AI-Powered Intelligence

Transcript for "Upgrade QuickBooks Reporting with AI-Powered Intelligence": Alright. Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's session, upgrade quick reporting with AI powered intelligence. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. We have a fantastic session lined up, and I'm really glad you're here. My name is Heather Rutherford, and I'm the senior partner marketing manager here at Intuit QuickBooks, and I'll be your host and moderator today. So before we dive in, just a few quick housekeeping notes. First of all, you're gonna notice an engagement panel on your right hand side of your screen. We want you to interact with us throughout this session, ask questions, tell us what you wanna see. We wanna make the most out of our time with you today. So, you'll find, the chat tab to say, go ahead and say hello in that chat tab right now and let us know where you're joining from because I know we definitely have an international audience today. There's also a q and a tab. Please put your questions in that q and a tab, and we'll make sure to answer that live at the end of the webinar. We may also bring up any questions that are pertinent to specific, pieces that we're gonna cover. Also, if you see a question from someone else that you'd like answered, feel free to upvote it. That just moves it up to the top of the queue for us to answer. Docs and resources, we have five different resources for you to download or take a look at in the docs tab. There's also the slide deck and, any additional resources for your reference, including case studies that you hear about today. And then, the call to action button. There's a button at the very top that says start your thirty day free trial. If you're interested, go ahead and click that button. No credit card required, full access to every feature. And then finally, recording. We are recording this session. You will receive an email tomorrow with that on demand recording link and the presentation deck and additional information for follow-up. So with that, I'm gonna go ahead and launch a quick poll. So how many companies do you currently report on in QuickBooks? And while we're waiting for you, I'll also answer that poll. I'm gonna give you a little context on why we're here today. So Joint is a platinum Intuit app partner. That means they're in the top 1% of all QuickBooks apps, and they built something genuinely powerful on top of the QuickBooks platform. Rather than replacing QuickBooks as your system of record, Joynt extends it, adding a dedicated reporting and consolidation layer that handles everything from multi entity group reporting to AI powered financial insights. So for accountants, pro advisers, finance teams, managing reports across one company or many, this integration addresses one of the most time consuming parts of Close. So we'll get into the details shortly, but the short version is QuickBooks handles your data and join turns it into decision ready output. Let's go ahead and close and share those results of poll number one. And then with that, let's see. We have 14.29 has one, thirty one percent two to five, seventeen point four percent six to 10, and, wow, the majority is thirty seven percent ten plus. Alright. So let's go look at who is talking today. Alright. So let me introduce who is gonna be walking us through all of this today. First, we have Harry Simons, head of customer success at JoiN. Harry works directly with finance teams and accounting firms every day, and he's gonna walk us through the platform from smarter reporting and group consolidation to JoiNntelligence, their enterprise enterprise grade AI layer. Harry knows his product inside and out, and he'll be leading our live demo. We also have Archie Simons, business development associate at join. Archie is often the first point of contact for new join customers, guiding teams through the trial experience, and helping them get up and running quickly. He'll be sharing a real world perspective on what getting started actually looks like. And finally, we have Rob, founder of Insight Matters. Rob is a joint customer managing 44 QuickBooks online entities through the platform, and he'll be sharing his firsthand experience consolidating re consolidating reporting across multiple companies, including what the workflow looked like before join and what it looks like now. So we have a fantastic group. Let's get into this. Harry, it is over to you. Hello, all. Thank you very much for the introduction, Heather. Lovely to be here. Lovely to see some familiar faces in, in the chat and some new ones as well coming through. So, so welcome to all of you. So we'll, without any further ado, we'll kick off and we'll, and get going. So a quick run through of the agenda today. We're gonna kind of take you from a bit of a kind of an intro to join for those of you that aren't familiar with us, talking about who we are, who our customers are, and what we do for finance teams and for accountancy practices. We'll look at some of our reporting, some of the the deliverables that, accountancy practices and in house finance teams can produce for their clients and their board respective respectively. We'll then be looking at our intelligence layer using AI and and how that works within join at the moment and and our vision for how AI works within the finance function. We'll then be having a bit of a chat with Rob, a a long time customer and, kind of close, critical friend and and someone that we work with, at JoiN who's given us lots of feedback over the years, as well and has got a really nice and interesting use case with some particularly interesting customers. I think we're gonna be talking about one of his kind of real success stories as well where, he's worked with a firm that, could've went from start up phase into a Nasdaq listed company as well, I believe. And then we're gonna be going into the q and a as well. So as we go, please feel free to put in questions, whether they are general questions about join, whether it's aimed at me or for Rob as well from customer perspective. But also feel free if you've got a question that's really burning and you feel it should be answered right this second and it adds to the webinar, feel free to to mention that in the in the question, and, and Heather might pose it to me. Hopefully, they're all all rather kind anyway. Okay. So before I give you kind of a quick elevator pitch on who join are, what we do, and who our customers are, are so we are, fundamentally, we are a consolidation tool, bringing together multiple QuickBooks instances into one place to allow in house finance teams, the county practices, franchises, you name it, to bring together their books and create consolidated reports with lots of other extra bits in there. We've been on the QBO marketplace since 2017, and that is when we launched as well. We spent about two or three years really kind of pre revenue in an MVP. The real reason for that was all the founders had other jobs, and they didn't really have the time to devote to join. And then we started to kinda see some real traction build, from there. A quick one on the origin story of join. We always like to tell this story because it's, we built join for a problem that we had. Three of the original founders were buying a business off of, Bill Gates. We always like to put the punch on in there that it wasn't Microsoft. And they had basically, they had to bring together SAP and QBO data into one place, and they had a three month timeline to do it. And they built what was basically the first version of join, a real skeleton version, that allowed you to, in the cloud, and that was a bit of a new thing at the time, bring together multiple finance systems of record into one place and then report on them as well. We've grown from strength to strength, going from the early days where we were we were scared to charge 50p per month, for our MVP version all the way to now being a, QBO, platinum partner, top 1% on the marketplace with thousands of finance teams using join, globally, across 135 odd countries. At my last time of checking with some real interesting ones in there as well. So if I very quickly take you through just some features actually more than anything else, some of the things and at a high level that we do within join, and then we'll move into the frankly more interesting part, where we'll go into the demo of the app. So if we're looking at this one here, financial and nonfinancial data. So I've spoken about this very briefly, but using our secure API connection to QBO, you can bring in your multiple QBO, instances into join across one instance. Or if you are a practice or advisory firm, you can have multiple clients as well, and we'll talk about that more later. But we see ourselves very much as being the center of a finance team or indeed not always a finance team reporting universe. So you can bring in data from your finance system, QBO, but equally, you can bring in data directly from Stripe, across on the API. And you can also bring in, nonfinancial data, whether that be from, your CRM, your HR system, whatever that be, and create that kind of rich group level reporting bringing together financial and nonfinancial data as well, with lots of the bits inside there. Intercompany analysis and intercompany eliminations and adjustments. Obviously, anyone that has worked in part of a multi group will know this is probably the key the key stumbling block in that kind of reporting process, making sure they balance, eliminate off against each other. You've got a pesky transaction on one side that you need to eliminate against the other, but there's a slight FX difference. We've got kind of all of that covered as well, and we'll be looking at that later in the demo. Another one of the key ones, chart of accounts. We don't need to go in this one too deeply. Doesn't matter if your chart of accounts are a complete mismatch. Say you're on a, buy build strategy, enveloping a business into your group. No worries. You can natively map those chartered accounts and join without even having to make any changes in QBO. You've then got the multicurrency and FX piece, again, for any kind of multi entity group who's working across borders. This is a real stumbling plot block, particularly if you're looking in Excel at managing this. Bringing in live rates is what Join does. We'll perform all the currency translations and FX management for you, whether that be on kind of just simple reporting, but actually on the intercompany analysis on your accounts payable and receivable, and, and on all of your dashboard as well. And then finally, budgeting and forecasting, we'll pull in all your budgets automatically from QBO, but, equally, you can bring in budgets into join as well. So before we move into, a later part of the demo, I think we're gonna launch poll two at this point. And just like that, it looks like it's come up on screen. There we go. And this one, we're just gonna be talking about actually how how our audience manages consolidate reporting. So are you reporting in Excel combining, trial balances with down with manual downloads, spreadsheets, and and macros, another reporting software? Maybe you're maybe you're curious about seeing, seeing how joint compares or actually consolidate reporting is too cumbersome and takes too much time, and you're not actually producing those consolidate level reports. So I think we'll give it a couple of seconds on that one, and then we can go into the results, and maybe we can have a quick chat about those results as well. So there we go. Okay. So we've got, our results to come up here. 34% of people are exporting to Excel, which is the kind of key one, and that's what we see we see time and time again. Rob, if you don't mind, could I, and I I didn't pre prep Rob on any of these questions. So Rob probably is, sat there looking around and suddenly I've called his name. Rob, for your clients pre the join days, what were some maybe some of the pitfalls, of producing those consolidated reports, for you and your team. So so with that particular client, we use join from the start, but before them, with other clients, the multiple Excel sheets, the currency conversions, and the eliminations, that was the recurring headache. Especially in my old days when we had a Hong Kong company with multiple Chinese entities and US entities, FX was an absolute nightmare in in the consolidations. Cool. Yeah. And I guess and I guess that kind of you've got the the potential for, like, kind of mistakes and effects, Yeah. like human error rate, dodgy macros, but also, I guess, it means slower decision making. And and if we say finance, insights matter. Slow insights aren't super helpful, are they? But I guess kind of like live live data is is the key there if I if I make a bit of a pun on the name. This is the most common use case we see with our customers as well, isn't it, Harry? Sort of trying to move away from that cumbersome reporting Excel, like you said, which is prone to lots of errors and pitfall pitfalls and looking for a solution into some real time reporting, which we're gonna touch on. Another one of our customers later on, Mixtape Ventures. We've got a bit of a case study coming up on that, about how they sort of move from dreading that quarterly reporting in Excel to actually weekly consolidated reporting, painting that picture across the group, and more to come up later. Perfect. Okay. So I think I'm gonna go back to the slides one second, and we'll and we'll crack on with there we go. Okay. Right. Perfect. Okay. So we're gonna go into the first part of the demo where we can have a look very quickly. Okay. There we go. Okay. I'm gonna share my screen, and I'm just gonna look at, basically, a real intro to join. So apologies for any existing join customers, for this one. This is gonna be kind of a real basic look at at the fundamentals of joining and how it works just to give you a kind of a flavor of what the app looks like and how it behaves. So our app, like we've said previously, is built for both in house finance teams but equally accountancy practice as well. If we touch on the accountancy practice side of things, to begin with, really simply, every instance of join is completely separate and secure. You can grant access to your clients, and you and your team can have kind of that universal access. And it's really easy to flip between in, for instance, Rob's case, his 15 clients, they'll all be listed out here, and you can drop in 20 of these ones, and it'll be a separate and succinct version of, version of join. So in terms of kind of the initial setup, we find that for a single instance of join, it takes about seven minutes from hitting the sign up button to running that first report that combines multiple QBO companies. So how does that work? You sign up for join. You get brought into this page here. Yours would be blank without all of your lovely QBO entities here, and you can begin adding your company. You collect connect to QuickBooks there, and it will give you a list of all of the clients, and entities that you manage, and you can decide which ones to bring in. And then you're ready to begin reporting on those ones as well. So we're gonna go over here, and we're gonna run a quick p and l or income statement. And we're just gonna look at some of the really basic functionality before we get into the kind of frankly more interesting and, and sexier reporting later on. So, at the moment, I'm looking at a p and l for one of my entities, and we're gonna build this one up into a consolidated p and l. So first, you can decide which of your companies to include. I'm gonna click on Saltrum here, one of my other, QBO entities, and I've already got another one down here. And I'm gonna apply those changes, and as we go through, join's gonna continue to run that report. And, also, it's important to remember all of this is live data pulling in directly from QBO as well. Then we've got the reporting currency. So at the moment, I'm looking at British pounds. Indeed, both of these entities are, British pounds based, but you can report on any currency you want. So I guess the kind of the example here and if we talk about how we use join as a company as well, if we are creating reports for US investors, for instance, or potential US investors, we can say, okay. Actually, we need to report in US dollars here. So we're now looking at this consolidation in US dollars, joins performing all of the currency translations and FX in the background to, produce these results for me. I can then decide how the report's laid out. So at the moment, I'm looking at just this month. But, actually, I might want to say, look. I wanna see this financial year to date, and then I'm gonna split that one down by company as an example. It's run that report for me, and you can see I've got my my two entities side by side with this consolidated total over here. And, also, it it's worth bearing in mind that all of these numbers deep link back into QBO as well. So I can click on this online sales figure. I could say, oh, that seems a little bit low there or a little bit high. I can bring up that number, and I can see all of the underlying journals that make up this account. I can click on the source here, and I've got a couple of options. It can either bring up in the side panel a a kind of a mock up of that original invoice, or I could deep link back into QBO. I'm not gonna do that for in this instance, but it would just take me to the original source document as well. If I go back into the report, I'll touch on some of the kind of the other functionality, particularly around consolidation, actually, which which will be of interest. I've got the option to decide how my reports are laid out. So at the moment, I'm looking at the standard off the shelf p and l. But, actually, I could come into here and I could say, look. I've got some kind of prebuilt templates or I can create my own layouts, which I've got here that I've kind of created previously. I'm gonna just choose one of these, which has got my own groupings, my own mappings, and everything like that in there. So I'll run that report, and I'm gonna have a nice summarized p and l in here. And all of these ones are, again, drill downable. I've got my own custom groups within that. I'm then gonna quickly touch on eliminations. So, I've got basically way over here in settings, eliminations that you can manage and handle those eliminations. Essentially, you're able to pick account for account eliminations or one to many if you've got a more complex elimination structure, but also you can eliminate at that transactional level. So your common use case there is within your accounts payable and receivable or your debts and creditors, you've got transactions that match off against each other, but you don't wanna necessarily eliminate the full account. If I just very quickly show you this one here, and I basically got the option to remove my eliminations. And, I'm just gonna do that here because I've kind of already created my elimination structure in the background, and I'm gonna apply those changes. And now it will remove the eliminated accounts, which I've previously tagged. Join can actually also tag them for you if you'd like as well. And then I'll get a kind of a clearer view of my my consolidated group without those intercompany revenues. And like I say, all of these ones will be matched off against each other. Any FX, differences, or discrepancies will be accounted for and posted back in as adjustments as well. And then finally, on the last bit of this side of the demo, I'm just gonna touch on budgets as well, budgets and forecast. So we can bring in budgets from QBO automatically or create your own budgets and forecast within join. And I'm just gonna have a quick view here, I'm gonna look at an actual versus budget with some variance and some variance analysis for these ones here as well. So that's that's a real quick look at, at the join platform to begin with. I'm gonna come back in now to the slides. Oh, okay. No. We've got a questions come in from Gracie Wright. So, what is the setup like for accountants? Not all of our companies have the same chartered accounts. Will join automatically pull the accounts in, or is there a manual process? I'll tell you what, Gracie. I can I can actually just show you right now? It is super simple. So if I go into settings and then chart of accounts, and and to answer your question, it's really simple. It doesn't matter if the chart of accounts don't align. The vast, vast majority of our users don't have an aligned chart of accounts, and you can come into this chart of account page and you can manually tag them if you want to. So you can say, look, these two should be the same account. Let's consolidate them for future reference or you can use our AI functionality, Click on that one, and it will basically, using machine learning, it will go through all of your accounts that have similar names, similar postings, appear to be in some way matched, and it will say, would you like to would you like to consolidate these ones? So hopefully that answered your question, Gracie. And it's also worth noting as well one of our product experts in the background, and they are they are, answering questions as well. Maybe some that aren't necessarily as related to the, to the webinar. So we've got a quest we've got one more question that we'll do now, and then we'll move on to the, the next stage. Oh, okay. So a question from Tara about, does join work well with Akumutaka, or how can we use join with Akumutaka? My my lack of pronunciation there might give it away. I'm actually not too familiar with if that's an app or a software, so I might have to come back to you on that one, I'm afraid. So we're gonna quickly go back into the slides. I'm I'm assuming this is I'm assuming Kumtor was, was an ERP platform or or a kind of a general ledger platform, but I'm not too familiar with it, I'm afraid. Okay. So, so next, we're gonna have a quick look at just kind of what it looks like from the accountancy practice side of things within join. So we produce and and kind of give accountants the tools to scale, manage multiple clients, manage multiple complex clients, and allow them to it's a bit of a cliche, and and everyone says it, don't they? But we take out some of the grunt work, some of the report building, some of the things where you don't add as much value that allows you to be that kind of trusted adviser within your client's business, which is what everyone wants to be. Right? And is is the kind of really billable really billable hours there. So that's the kind of tools we give, making it easy to have multiple reports across different practices, at different across different clients and easily scale and manage all of that. Our pricing as well is very much geared towards, kind of accountancy practices with multiple entities, multiple clients. There's kind of great economies of scale as you go up the pricing stage, as well. And it's kind of on a per entity basis that kind of cost comes right down as we go. And we make it really easy to share and collaborate as well. So you've got that kind of flexibility with user access, giving clients access. If you've got particularly, troublesome client that likes to go into account systems and and play about, you can give them kind of read only access and every kind of, different and kind of flexibility with usage access in between. Rob, this might be a good, point to get some insight from your side. As you're managing 12 clients, inside of join already, what does that process of onboarding new clients look like for you? Have you got any sort of tips or tricks how you manage it? What does that process look like within your firm? So we have in that sense two types of clients. The people that really are engaged and the people that just want us to do it and they don't wanna be bothered. The other ones, we don't add them to join. We just provide them with reports, they get the results, they get their financials, and that's it. The ones that do want to be more involved, it's super easy to give them user rights in they can either, from the top of my mind, either can just have viewing rights so they can run the reports that we prepare and look and play with like dates, selections, etcetera. Or we can give them edit rights so they can make their own reports so they can slice and dice in a bit more detail. But I don't think we've ever done a proper user onboarding because it's so intuitive. If they are engaged enough that they want the access, it is a five second conversation on where to log in, how to find the reports, and how to slice and dice it. So we've never had to onboard a client by with any form of hand holding. That is a and I I promise for everyone that was not a pre prepared question either. Our marketing team our marketing team would have loved that one, Rob, so, hats off hats off there. Okay. Okay. Great. So we're gonna go into kind of the the next bit here where we'll look very quickly at what an example of the the output might look like for Insight Matters or any of the, the accountancy firms that use join. And just before we, we do go into that, we're gonna launch a poll as well, I believe. And just like that again. So right. Okay. So I'm gonna go to the polls tab as well. So how and this is so this is kind of a precursor to what we're gonna be looking at later, in terms of in terms of AI. But let's just very quickly talk about, how are you currently using AI within within your financial reporting. So are you using AI tool? Are you completely new to it? You're exploring options? You're using AI for analysis and commentary, or, actually, it's kind of an integral part of your workflow. Am I allowed to answer on these ones? I'll see. Yes. I am allowed to answer. I I often joke that I owe about 50% of my salary to AI. So, there we go. So we'll give we'll give that a couple of sec seconds. We'll talk about those results, and, actually, we'll we'll we'll dive into AI a little bit later on, but this is kind of a precursor to that one just here. So if we just, launch those results. Okay. So really interesting and nice mix actually here. We've got about 25% not using AI at all yet, which is is exactly what we see actually. And, we we recently went to an Intuit Connect event in London, and we were getting some really interesting conversations. And, again, it's a similar split where there was concerns around AI. People actually just weren't ready to to kind of onboard and start using it and and all the different things in between. We've got some people that are using it for kind of some some AI analysis and commentary, which is kind of a native feature within join. We've got 33% of people exploring options, I guess, testing and playing around with it. And then we've got 13% who are saying that's kind of an integral part of our workflow. And we know there's definitely some trepidation around AI, and that and that's something we're gonna talk about later on, as well. So we'll go we'll go back into, we'll go back onto my screen one second once we come out of here. And I'm gonna share my screen, and we're just gonna have a very quick look, at some of the reporting outputs within join. So okay. So I showed you the basics of running a report, if we just remind ourselves, within the p and l. This is the kind of basic on screen reporting within join, kind of numbers for numbers' sake. But you also have that kind of report packs, which we can go into here, which are fully customized, branded. And this is you're producing, reports for the board, or you've got a client, as Rob was saying, that you're kind of producing their month end numbers or or some kind of dashboard and some kind of interactive KPI pack for them as well. So I'm gonna open up this accountancy practice example report pack, which, I created in, I kid you not, ten minutes the other day, and more on how that happened, later. And I believe as well, actually, that this is gonna be shared, as a document for people that they can have a look at, a free piece of material, during this session. It might even be dropped into the chat in a minute, I believe. So I'm just gonna very quickly look through this, and I'm actually gonna talk through some of the become the fundamentals that are going on in here. Again, brandable, customizable. We've got the join logo. You'd have your own logo in here, your own background that you can upload. And we're just gonna go through very quickly. We've got an executive summary here, which is fully AI driven. So you can see that little regenerate icon there. And if I just press edit on this one, you can see that we've got a prompt, that goes in kind of deep into the context of of my fictitious, group of companies, which I think I've called velocity SaaS. And it kind of analyzes the rest of the report as well. So you can see some kind of positive numbers here. But as we go through it, we'll see more there. We've got some different KPI results as well. So I'm just gonna zoom out for one second on those ones. And we've got a mix of financial data brought in from QBO. We've got, some Stripe data taken from, no. Sorry. We've got some subscriber data taken from our, our Stripe connection, and then also we've got some average revenue per, per user here, which is, taken in in from one of our CRM tools, I think, using a CSV file. So just some different interactive and live data there as well, which, again, like I say, I can interact with. And you can produce these, as a kind of a a PDF that you can send to clients. You can, kind of schedule to be sent automatically from join. You can produce it on the big screen as kind of like a live link. You can go into the office and present to your client, on the big screen however you want to manage that and whatever your relationship looks like. That's kind of catered for as well. We've got profit loss statement here again with some kind of custom grouping and some AI analysis as well. Just looking at those numbers. And, again, all of this is live. And if these numbers change, I can regenerate these ones, and it will redo the prompt for me as well, which I could I could sit here and wait for. It might take a couple of minutes so we can kinda move on, but we'll be more on that kind of how that works and and our vision for AI later. Balance sheet, again, we've got all of our core kind of fundamental reporting, included here. P and L, cash flow, balance sheet, all with some kind of AI commentary analysis that you that you might be producing for your clients. We've then got our deep linking AP report here. We also produce AP, AR, sales by customer, and purchases by supplier reports as well. And, again, these all at consolidated levels. So bringing across my kind of total accounts payable position, you might see that my fictitious company is particularly bad at paying bills. You might see here owing, 1,600,000 GBP to some of our suppliers. And all of this, again, is drill downable as well. So this is just a real example very quickly of of a report pack within join. You can see here I've got multiple, and they're very easy to share across different clients, share similar client, report packs across if they've got similar templates. And they're really easy to share from within join via email or or schedule for summary, as well. So that's that's a very quick look at that one. We're actually doing very well for time. So if we've maybe got some questions on this one. I'm not I'm not viewing the q and a because there's quite a lot going on. Perfect. There we go. Okay. We've got a question from Enrico. Do you have any nonprofit customers who use join in The US? Enrico, yes. We do. We've got we've got lots, actually. They make up a big percentage of our US customer base. Indeed, our biggest, our biggest customer is a not for profit, in the in the kind of the sporting realm. You'd have all heard of them. They've got 800 entities all on QBO, all in join, and they're producing they've got kind of almost a franchise model, almost a not for profit model. It's quite interesting. And they're producing, they're producing p and l's, balance sheets, KPI reports for investors, kind of, kind of, the individual sites that they manage, and all sorts of things going on in there across that kind of portfolio of I think it's up to, like, 825, entities now. So, Enrico, thank you very much for for that one. So I think oh, okay. We've got one more from Donovan, and then we'll move on to onto the next part. Okay. Donovan's asking, what downloads are available as audit trails to to present to the auditors to support the balances in the consolidated PLN balance sheet, and more importantly, the foreign currency translation reserve. So I can have a quick look at this one. I can actually show you. It's probably the easiest way of doing it. Again, I'm gonna go into the p and l here because it's the one where I've got kind of the the most data, the kind of perils of using demo data, but, it it works nonetheless the same. So, basically, any number, actually, I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go onto the balance sheet because then I can show a few more items in there. So, and I'm just gonna run a kind of a really basic balance sheet just to kinda give me a flavor here. So any number within join has that audit trail behind it where you can click on it, and you'll see, at first, the underlying transactions in their base currency as as the important thing there, and you and you'll have all of those items which can be downloaded, as kind of the first step of that audit trail. If we go back to the reports, on any report where there is FX involved, you'll have this complete FX trail, which will tell you, it's not a very long one here, but it will tell you exactly what FX rate has been used on every calculation as well. You've got within settings and FX rates. You can get a full downloaded history of all of your FX rates. And then, actually, on any kind of foreign currency translation, any adjustments that join ads, you can click on those ones. And I'm hoping you can see it because I'm, because I'm sharing. Sometimes it's a little bit dodgy here. It looks like you can. Hovering over any number, any adjustment, any foreign currency translation reserve, it will tell you exactly where that number comes from, any calculation that's applied, and also the kind of, the statutory or kind of accounting rationale behind that number as well to give you that full audit trail and history. Okay. So, I'm gonna jump back into the slides for the last part of the demo, and then we'll we'll get into the more interesting bit, I guess, where we we have a bit of a chat, talk with Rob, as well. Okay. So, okay. So join intelligence, and that's kind of very much our, our AI layer. And and I'm gonna talk through a couple of bits here. And then, I know Archie's got a few bits to say on here as well. So, obviously, AI is it's kind of buzzword. It's almost getting a bit boring, isn't it, about the amount of people are talking about it? But, obviously, it's kind of very much here to stay, and it will become an integral part of everyone's finance stack. If I set out our vision and how we we see AI, we see it very much as, a very clever, very kind of, hands on and always there employee that can do a lot of the grunt work for you, producing reports, and can can be like a kind of a trusted companion that's always there, producing producing numbers for you. We we very much talk about join join having the join guardrails that we see. Anyone who has taken two trial balances, and put them into ChatPT and said, can you combine these? Will have no doubt got complete nonsense come out the other side with random accounts added. And it it we all know, like, you can you can actually go be even more silly with that. And the other day, ChatchBT was adamant that there was only eleven months in a year when I was trying to work out something. So the the maths still isn't there. Right? But we very much see AI being a tool, and a driver for things within join at this moment in time. So we set we talk about our guardrails. Basically, the AI being able to go off and quickly do things within join. So rather than the AI bringing together two numbers and saying, here's your report, the AI can go into join and say, I'm gonna run this report including these two numbers and these two companies and these layouts, and then it brings back the finished report using the tools that we've been joined, which gives you that rigidity, and trust in the numbers because there's there's the audit trail, and it works exactly the same as it would if you'd if you'd gone and manually typed that one in. So that's kind of how we see it, and we've also got kind of enterprise security as well along that. So we're we're a using AWS Bedrock. Anytime that your data is used, for AI, it never leaves your version of AWS Bedrock. It never goes into any training or models, and it's very much secure and sits only within within your, version of join, which is a really important thing. I mean, and I know everybody's kind of becoming familiar with this, but the perils of putting a putting a kind of a I don't know, an expenses report to CHPT and then worrying about what model that trains on and where that might pop up later is at kind of the forefront of everyone's minds. Then we've got the kind of the the analysis and, AI agents tools. So some of the tools we've been joined. Basically, you can use it, like I say, as a as a as a companion, as a colleague that sits there and can crunch the numbers much quicker than you ever could and can be used as a tool, to get you to get you to the kind of results. And then you as the accountant, the CFO, the adviser, sit and add that real value to the adviser. You pick through the numbers. You you pick out the mistakes. We all know that AI still makes a mistake. And, it just kind of helps you to get to that kind of endpoint quicker and more effectively as well. And we'll we'll touch on that, a little bit later as well. So I think Archie was gonna talk a little bit, about the join MCP, some of our early use cases, and that kind of thing at this point. Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks, Tara. So for those of you that aren't, unfamiliar, an MTP connection is effectively pulling data from join into your existing workflow. So we've recently launched this in join, and we've actually had a really good example, from one of our customers. Really nice surprise, actually. We woke up to a LinkedIn post, and he effectively outlined how he was using that MCP connection to pull dates, consolidated p and l into Claude, write a summary about a peak in revenue, and then push it out in email as an executive report and a summary in Slack all in one prompt. So it's effectively pulling that live data from join into your existing workflow where you're already working. And, yeah, it's just really, really nice to see from one of our existing customers. Rob, it'd be great to hear your side of this because I know, at Inside Matters, you really value the human touch. So I'd like to hear where, where you see AI fitting in in that sort of client relationship while still allowing for that human touch. I actually think that the human touch is getting more and more important. I mean, we won't as humans, we can't compete with AI on the speed of processing or the efficiency in getting stuff done. But it is the translation into what does this number mean? What does this say about my business? How does this compare to my competitors? How does this change my budget forecast for next year? That's where I think the human judgment is actually more and more important, and that's where our role as a CFO firm is actually get is increasingly important, I think. Because the risk is that people start running with AI and Claude tells you to go all in on an absolutely doomed venture. So in terms of numbers and efficiency processes, AI is done is there. The decision making, I think, is even more human. Exactly. I I think we we share that view as well. It's it's not like AI is gonna be taking every accountant's job that is at you. It's there to do heavy lifting for you. Almost. we see, a lot a lot of our, advisors come back to, actually, the the joining AI is making us look really good because we can use it for the heavy lifting. And then, like you said, add that human touch of the analysis and actually applying it with the heavy workload being taken care of frees up that headspace for the more important stuff, which is that client relationship. Right? Yes. Exactly. And it's the the it's almost a translation. I mean, look, if I look at our client base, we have clients that are super savvy. They don't need a lot of hand holding. But the ones that are less comfortable with financials because they're more marketing oriented or more product oriented or more, NGO oriented, they may need translation. An amazing looking AI report with all the numbers still doesn't make any sense to them. It's still the translation of this is the story behind the numbers. This is why it matters to you. This is what it's where you're ahead or where you're behind. It's that translation to the to the to the world and the and the the language of the clients. And I think that's the skill that gets even where the human skill get even more important. Yeah. And it's about, like, it's about, like, the kind of business context as well, Yep. isn't it? And, like, that kind of real world feel. Like, AI and like, AI talks about context all the time and talk context in your prompts and stuff. But, actually, like, Rob, you sit down and you you might go for lunch with this client, and you know you know about kind of how important this business is to their family and and where they need to be in five years' time and all that kind of thing, which can't be translated into into AI, and would be a really bloody scary world if if it could. Right? So okay. So, yes. We're just gonna I think I'm gonna jump back in now to, to the slides. Okay. So we're okay. Here we go. Yeah. We're perfect. So so I'm gonna now jump back into, my screen share as well. And I'm just gonna show you some of the AI tools as well. So we're going into screen share and, window. There we go. Okay. So I'm gonna show you three different tools within within Joins AI. So you might have noticed there's this AI button up here, which is kind of consistent across across join. But what I'm gonna start with is our join AI, which, for those of you familiar with it, work and look very much like ChatchBT, but or any of the tools you've been using. But the important thing to know here is you've got an AI tool with context around your business, a deep link into your financials. It's also trained on accounting fundamentals and principles, and it's also trained on our user guide. So it's a really nice kind of circle there, that you can use. So I'm gonna use, like, a a really simple, really simple prompt within here. And I'm gonna say, what are my top five customers by revenue per share? Right? So this is something that, previously, you might have to go into five different QBO files, look at each of your top customers, compare the revenue numbers, and bring those ones back. But now you've got that kind of instant top five customers here, and we've got some of that my demo data in pulling across my top five customers as an example. If I relate that to how that works in the real world, we had a customer. So I might do a a quick another prompt actually while we're doing that as well while we're waiting for it to load, looking at cash position. But if I'm talking about a kind of real world example, we've got a, kind of venture capital firm that uses join, with QBO, and they were able to find suppliers. No. Sorry. Was it suppliers or customers? Yes. So they were able to find suppliers across multiple, ones of their businesses. So they they run kind of they they're a VC firm that kind of specialises in recruitment firms, and that's who they invest in. And they were able to find across different suppliers, kind of, commonalities, where the individual entities weren't aware that they were all buying from the same suppliers. So they were to get that together, find out how much they were paying, and then, kind of get some kind of collective bargaining on on the, piece of software that they were buying and reduce reduce their cost there. So that's a an example from, the the CFO at Ingenia, and how he's using the JoinAI. I'm also gonna very quickly look at the report builder as well. So, anywhere within Join at any point, you can click on build a report. And I could use one of the preset examples here, or, I can actually build my own, which I'm gonna do. I'm gonna dictate this one because, my typing is famous within enjoying for how bad my spelling mistakes are and typos. Build me a report pack with an executive summary, a p and l against chart, a balance sheet, and an accounts payable report as well for my joined consolidated group for April 26. So I put that prompt in, a pretty kind of complex prompt, and I can hit go on that one. And, like I say, that's how I built the report pack that we were demonstrating earlier. Like I say, it's kind of very much worth bearing in mind and kind of reiterating as we go here. We view Join as, Join's AI as being heavy lifter within within that kind of human firm, And and it's all built on kind of best of breed security as well, within those guardrails, which we we talk about a lot. So we're just gonna we're just gonna wait for this one to come back. And just a reminder while we're waiting for it to load, it's, we've got a a q and a section at the end, so please make sure we get our questions into that. I know we've had a couple going on as we go, but it'd be really good to get a really rich conversation going, straight away from the end. K. And there we go. Just like that, we're finished. I guess, kind of what? A minute? Feels a little bit long when you're on a webinar, and I'm twiddling my thumbs, but how long that might have taken to produce that report pack. Could have been hours previously. Right? So we've got the kind of raw numbers. We can have a quick look here. We've got an executive summary, which we can generate. We've got some profitability net metrics that we ask for, a look at our financial position at the consolidated level, and then our accounts payable report as well again for the joint consolidated group as as just an example here. And, it's kind of done heavy lifting for me. But, actually, I can come in here. I could say, look. It's not formatted right. I go and change it. I add the additional reports that I maybe forgot to add into my prompt initially, as well. And now we're gonna have, one final bit for the AI side of things. And I'm just gonna demonstrate that MCP server that Archie was talking about earlier. Lots of acronyms within AI, but it it basically allows you to pull in data from from your systems and bring it into existing workflows as an example. So I could just say here, use the join tool, run a p and l, and find out my net profit for that company. So that one will come in. I can ask TrackPeach to do that. It will go off into the cloud. It will tell join to ask QBO to bring in those numbers, and it'll bring it into join. And this is kind of a very basic example, but you could have this then interacting with other tools, sending data across to other places, as well. And it's just gonna go across, run that tool, and find, find the data for me and bring that one in. Okay. There we go. It's found my my company, Harry Excels. And it's gonna ask me, are you happy to run this report? Okay. And there we go. It's called the tool. Okay. There we go. Oh, are we gonna are we gonna have ah, there we go. I was, I was almost expecting a failure there, And so it's run the numbers. And for and for April for May, there was no demo data in there. Okay. So, right. We're gonna finish the AI section there, and then we're gonna we're gonna kind of have a good old chat with with Rob and try and understand a little bit more about him. And I know Archie is kind of keen to to run this section, so I'll, I'll mute myself for a second. I've done plenty of talking today. I'm sure you will agree, and I'll I'll hand it to Archie. So Yes. Thanks, Harry. And then, Rob, is there, a area you wanna kick us off in? Is there I know we've got a, a success story on our website around Inside Matters, but I know you wanted to, give some more detail around a particular client, that you've used inside of join. Yes. Actually, it's quite repetitive because it is pretty much repeating what Harry just said. So this was a client that started with us with one entity, but they were very ambitious. That's about five, six years ago, and now we run, their whole finance team with, fourteen, fifteen different entities, 13 of which are on QBO, one of them is on zero. I know that's cursing in this room, but that was an acquisition that we did not choose, to do, to choose the accounting platform for. Now. what is very interesting here is that they are listed on Nasdaq by now. We've grown them, we've grown with them from one single entity to listen on Nasdaq with all the compliance, all the regulatory, all, overhead, all the audits that come with that. And what we've learned is that, like I told you before, pre join consolidations was a was an absolute nightmare. I cannot even imagine doing that for 15 entities with some intercompany business as well and different currencies. So the way we do it now is the second that the accountants or the controllers tell us, hey. The books are closed. It is literally one push on the button in join to run the p and l consolidated to run the balance sheet, and that makes all the basics clear. On top of that, we've set up a couple of, tailored reports. So the way they look at it internally is different from the way we have to report to the SEC. So there's different sliced and diced P and L reports preloaded and joined, on, for example, a certain group of companies or a certain vertical of their services that, they wanna see a P and L for. All of that is a one time setup that is relatively simple, and then it's just push of the button, refresh the data, and everything is sliced. So that makes it very easy. And every time they do an acquisition, because they've grown to this extent by acquisitions, The only thing we need to make sure or we want to make sure is that the chart of accounts of the new entity is aligned with a similar structure and a similar breakdown as the existing ones, and it's just adding to to join. And they're, identifying any new eliminations, and we're good to go. So we're, we're we're coming into the last five minutes here. So I think we're gonna pop pop into into the q and a. So thanks for that, Rob. That that was some brilliant insight. Pardon pardon the pun there. I just had a question pop up there. So from Hamid Nasir Harry, will it work with, QB desktop or QB files that are hosted online directly? Yeah. So. I'm I'm afraid, well, it's it's got a two pronged answer there. We don't have a direct connection into QB desktop. However, you can upload that data using a CSV file into to join. Indeed, we do have, lots of, lots of people that have that kind of makeup, some maybe some people that aren't on the cloud yet, as well. And and, obviously, we're kind of we've I can see we've got some questions coming in, which is great, which, are about to be asked across. But if we've got questions for Rob as well, that would be excellent. Potentially kind of getting that kind of outside input. Like, obviously, I'm gonna say join's amazing. It'd be good to get some maybe a question for Rob as well before we close-up. K. Rob, So have can have. a question for you, actually. What do you see as the biggest win, in pre join versus a post join? That's actually a hard pick because I think the accuracy on eliminations is a key win. The accuracy on currency is a big win, and the speed is a big win. If you're going to force me to pick one of those three, I'm going to deny an answer. Well, So It's almost as if you're on the joint payroll, but we promise you. not. Okay. And just as we just as we, like, kind of look to wrap on wrap up on this one, we've got some documents and kind of materials being sent out afterwards as well. So we've got a a couple of case studies. So, obviously, we've got Rob's case study that's on our website. It's gonna be shared. And we've got a case study, for Dave from Mixtape Ventures who unfortunately had kind of last minute plans that meant he wasn't able to join this call, but that one's gonna be shared, as well. Okay. We do we do. have a couple more questions, but I don't think they're for Rob. So I think this is more for you, Harry. Okay. So question from Shelley. How does Joynt address concerns about financial data being used by AI agents and what security protection is in place? Okay. So like I like I say, we're we're very much your data never leaves your your environment within AWS Bedrock and join. So it's never used to train models. It's never shared. It's never posted, anything like that. It's very much self contained and never leaves join. We've got, a complete, AI policy as well listed on our website. It's got everything kind of all bases covered within there and our our AI, data processing policy as well is listed. But very much best of breed security, GDPR compliant. All of our, all of our data processes are SOC and ISO compliant as well, and all of that's kind of listed on the website. But, equally, if you've got particular concerns, we're more than happy to address, any of those ones that you can always just drop us an email. And, unfortunately, I think we're right at the end of time. So if you didn't get your question answered, we'll make sure you get followed up with directly after the webinar. And right now, I'm gonna launch a quick survey for everybody who's here. If you wouldn't mind, just taking a minute to complete that. And while you're completing that, I just wanted to give, Rob, Harry, Archie one final, opportunity to kinda give you, any remaining thoughts that you have, to leave attendees with. Cool, Rob. We'll let we'll let you go first. You've you'll have yours will become most important here. If you're running multi entity clients, don't go through a heck of consolidating anywhere else. Okay. So if I if I go from a a more agnostic kind of point of view, because, obviously, I've done I've done a lot of my kind of salesman hat on today. If you're purchasing software in in any realm, even if you're kind of the key decision maker, top of the chain, make sure you're getting kind of insights from everyone within your team, understand what what's making their life difficult, and where could you get gains across the whole team as well before considering buying software, whether that be CRM, payroll, whatever that might be. Archie, anything? Just just to add on that, we've got seven seconds to go. So think about the ROI ROI on free dot headspace in your team. Alright. Well, thank you, Rob, Harry, and Archie. Really, this is an excellent session. And, on path of Intuit and QuickBooks and entire join team, thank you everyone who joined us today. We We hope you walk away with something you can put to use right away, and we look forward to seeing you at a future session. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you. one. Thank you, Heather. Thank you, Rob. Thanks, everyone.