Name: How to Build Custom Business Systems on a QuickBooks Foundation
Uploaded: 2026-03-12T19:31:43.623Z
Duration: 59 min 40 s
Description: How to Build Custom Business Systems on a QuickBooks Foundation

Transcript for "How to Build Custom Business Systems on a QuickBooks Foundation": Alright. Hello, and welcome, everyone, to our our webinar today, QuickBooks plus method, how to build custom business systems on a QuickBooks foundation. I'm Heather Rutherford, senior marketing manager for partner demand gen, and I just wanted to open things up, welcome everyone, and go through a few quick housekeeping notes. We do have chat enabled today, and we encourage everyone to engage with us, chat with us, provide your, you know, input, experiences, feedback through chat. Please try to put questions, though, in the q and a. It just helps us with prioritizing those questions. For the live q and a session, at the very end, we will try to get to all of your questions, but please put questions in the q and a and not in the chat. And you can also upvote questions. So if you see a question come in that you're interested in having answered in that live q and a, feel free to upvote that so it'll push it up towards the top. I think that's about it for now. We are gonna record this. We will share the recording, and there is closed captioning, so feel free to push the CC button if you need that. I'm gonna go ahead and pass it off to Matas to go ahead and jump into the presentation. Thank you. Thank you, Heather. And thank you to Intuit for having us. And, obviously, thank you everybody for for joining us today. We have an exciting session planned for you. So I'm gonna start off with, some quick introductions of our speakers. As Heather said, my name's Mattis. I'm the content lead at Method. I've been working with small businesses for the past decade across payments, payroll, business systems, and CRM. But we're, of course, joined by Marwan, who is the founder of Alift Team Business Solutions, who he's a runs a company that consults around software development and specializes in CRM customization, workflow automation, and accounting integrations, which is obviously very exciting for us today. It's got a wealth of experience, has customized, thousands of businesses and transformed their systems into integrated operational workflows. He's worked across logistics, construction manufacturing, retail, professional services, so a whole gamut of industries. And then we're also joined by Errol, who is our senior product specialist at Method. He has thirteen years of experience helping advisers and their clients build smart systems on top of both QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online. He's the man behind Method's technical documentation. He runs a lot of hands on workshops for business owners and their advisers to figure out how to get the most out of this. So we have two experts here who are really gonna show us what you can get out of the platform. K. So before we dive in, I think there's a quick poll that Heather's gonna launch in the in the background. We'd love to learn who everybody is who's joining us here today. So the options are rather an accountant or or a bookkeeper or an adviser or maybe you're a business owner or working in a business and not advisory firm. Maybe you're working in house in the financial department or other. Maybe you sub something else. Would love to hear that. I believe there should be a poll tab. If you just click on the poll, we'll be able to vote and submit your answer. Yeah. Just give it a couple of couple of minutes to get those answers in. And then I believe, Heather, you'll be able to share those within a a few seconds once everybody's answered them. Okay. Amazing. So we have almost 40% of accounts and bookkeepers at Affirm, and then 30% business owners, and then 10% in house. Love it. K. We will keep moving with the next section. So what are you going to learn today? So we're gonna cover three things. First is gonna be to actually turn your client's disconnected QuickBooks systems and workflows into consulting opportunity if there are disconnected systems and and you see them. Maybe fix or expand your own systems. This will also include a short introductory demo of method that Daryl's gonna do for us. So if you're totally new to the platform, you will understand what it's all about. The second, Marwan, is gonna walk us through a real before and after workflow transformation. I'm gonna be capturing business and also include as, you know, corrupt QuickBooks file and integration and integrations to multiple systems. So that's been a really exciting part of the of the presentation today. And our goal really today is to make sure that you leave in with enough knowledge to know when something like method or or a more integrated system and an implementation makes sense for you and your clients and what that would look like. So without further ado, let's kinda jump into some of the some of the context setting here. We wanna specifically think through kind of how we use QuickBooks and and what it is. And this is a pattern that we see constantly at Method, like, the data in your QuickBooks file, especially once it's reconciled, whatever the cadence is their reconciliation, it's it's the source of truth. Right? It's accurate. We can trust it, and we can turn to it. But the moment you actually move outside of that file and into the operational workflows, things get a lot more messy. Right? There's spreadsheets, emails slide back and forth. There's a bunch of different systems, bunch of manual copy pasting, and so on. So the financial data is solid, but the operational data is a bit of a mess, or it can be a lot of a mess. And I'm I'm seeing some people saying that there's audio issues. Let me just have a moment to see if I can change the microphone settings. Just give me a moment. Is this better? Okay. Somebody says yes. Somebody says it's better. Okay. We'll try we'll try this. Let's do this instead. Great. Yeah. So as I as I was saying, your files will be clean at some point in QuickBooks. But on the operation side, there is no cadence of, like, reconciliation. So things are a bit of a mess. And that might seem like is it a really a problem? It is. And it's actually costing you or your clients quite a bit. And so it's it's very wasteful. So we had this case study that we recently did at Method with a company called Top Stitch Canvas. They're a manufacturer. And before they implemented some of the automated workflows, they were actually spending every single Friday, multiple people going through the operations that that they have in place and trying to sort out the the status of each client file, sort out, you know, what are the next steps, what are the different projects associated with it. And in the meantime, everything is running smoothly, and it's up to date, it's accurate in QuickBooks desktop, and they're still on desktop. But as soon as you take things outside of that and you kinda have multiple people stepping in, people who aren't accountants, you know, people who are in the field crew making changes, making decisions, things get really, really messy, and it adds up in terms of the costs. So what we kinda wanna propose to you today is what if we make this shift and think of QuickBooks as the the the the baseline or the foundation for everything? And then on top of that, build something that is accurate and can refer back to that foundation and expand on to things like sales and orders and customer service and be anchored and connected within the same source of truth. So that's what Method is. And a quick primer on Method, in case you're not familiar with us, we're customizable CRM. We have an instant two way sync across QuickBooks fields, like customers, invoices, payments, and products, and Arrow's gonna show us what all of that looks like. And the thing that sets Meta apart is its flexibility. Right? It's a highly customized CRM that allows you to build all kinds of workflows. We're also into a platinum platinum partner and and have a lot of positive feedback on the QuickBooks App Store. And just a quick view in case folks want to refer this later on, you actually have it in your, documents that you can download. This is all of the items, actually, not even all. This is a fraction of the items that that sync between QuickBooks and Method, and then a section on how Method actually builds on top of QuickBooks. So with things like work orders, cases, documents, customer portals. So this can you you can use this as a baseline for thinking, okay. The things that I wanna how to equip those and maybe the things that I wanna extend out beyond them, something that's useful to refer to, later on. So I encourage folks to download that file. With that said, Errol, I'm gonna throw it over to you, and we'll start by showing us how the data actually syncs in the platform. And then we'll move on to to to Marwan and showing that more customized system and moving things from sales orders to invoices. K? Amazing. Thank you so much, Mattis. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen now. And while I'm talking, I'm hoping that everyone can hear my mic okay, and it's not going squirrelly or anything like that. Just ping me if it looks okay. Okay. Let's just hope that it is. Nobody has said anything, so that's amazing. Now what I have here is I have QuickBooks open up. I just started this account this morning, and I also have Method open up this morning as well. And what I want to show you first is that we have a two way real time automatic sync with QuickBooks. So in other words, I updated a Method, and and it immediately goes into QuickBooks. Now here I am. You will see that I have this wonderful customer named Sanford Company Art Gallery. And if I go into my customers and leads, I will also be able to find Amy Ford of Sanford Company Art Gallery. So let's go ahead and edit her. And, you know, I'm just gonna make it really quick. I'm just gonna go ahead and just delete her phone number, save and back. Huzzah. Okay. We're good. Now let's go over to QuickBooks. I'll just refresh the screen. And when QuickBooks eventually comes up maybe I should've just opened her up. I don't know. Maybe it would've while while it's loading in, you can do it. Go go gadget QuickBooks. Amazing. I'm saying it even before it comes. There you go. So the e the phone is immediately updated. And as I said, it is two ways. So let's go ahead and edit this phone number and add it back in. We'll go ahead phone number. And, you know, and also to make a little bit bit different, I'll just put in an extension 123. Let's go ahead and save that. And the same idea, I reload the screen, and you will find that the phone number is back in. So we have this real time two way automatic sync, and you can see that it did not update. Hey. Come on, you. You know, I do this every single week. And, of course, on the day that I'm doing a webinar with all of you, it does not happen. Well, you know what? I am gonna go back here. Come on. Why didn't you update? Did I hit save over here? Okay. Well, you know, you're you're gonna have to, like, trust me on that. But what I'm going to do is that it does update update from quick method to QuickBooks. It does update from QuickBooks to method, and, of course, it's not doing it now. So what I'm going to do is I want to show you a whole work flow right now. And the workflow that I wanna show you is that if you take a look at my customers and leads, I actually have a lot of leads here, and none of them sync over to QuickBooks. And that's by design. Depending on your industry and in your workflow, you might not want everybody to sync over to QuickBooks immediately. And or you might want them to sync immediately. I could go in here and immediately sync them over. But in this particular case, what I'm going to do is I'm gonna pretend, you know, since we are a CRM, that I get a lead, and I want to track, for example, this person. And she is interested in getting an e, an estimate from me. So let's go ahead and put all of this stuff in. And at the end of this, you will actually see also that they sync over to QuickBooks. I'll put in her address. All well and good. And I'm gonna hit save. Now like any good CRM, usually what I would do is I would probably keep track of, like, a phone call coming that she is interested in some sort of, I don't know, interested in estimate, you know, and it's gonna cost this much money, whatever. And that's the phone call incoming, and then I should also create myself a to do that, you know, she wants me to do this because I'm a forgetful old man, and I always forget what's going happen. So I'm just going to put that in as a date happening tomorrow, whatever. Do this. Okay. Do do this estimate. I'm speaking in caveman terms because, you know, I'm typing at the same time, and I can't do too many things at the same time all at once. Okay. So there we go. And the reason I'm doing this is that if you have your salespeople and they want to see everything in context with the client that they are working with. Right? And, that would be very important because, as I said, I'm gonna create an estimate for her. And so let's go ahead and open up a new estimate. And as I do so, because I said before, maybe I am forgetful. I don't know what's happening half the time, and I blame my children. But that's okay. So I can I can go back over here, and I can even check? Alright. This thing was for $284. That's all well and good. Let's go back over to my estimate. I'm gonna go ahead and paste that in. If need be, if I want to think to myself, wait a minute. What do mean $204? What's that for? I could just email her. Or if there was a phone number, I could call her. But another thing I also wanna point out is that I have this wonderful little widget here that says pending sync approval, and it's yellow. Yellow means it probably hasn't synced over, and it has not. And the reason for that, as I said before, is leads do not sync over to QuickBooks. And, again, that is by design. In this particular workflow, I'm gonna have it at the end when she actually pays first thing. So what I'm going to do now is that I am going to send her this estimate. So let's go ahead and send this estimate off to her. This this account, as you can tell, is, branded. My company is called Best For You Services. I have wonderful colors here, and I'm gonna send this off to her. Now for those of you who might already be in Method, you might wanna check, oh, hey. That's really neat. Can they actually approve, their estimate online? And, yes, they can. If I were to go over home go over to my home, and if I were to take a look at the preferences for my Estimates app and I know I'm going really quickly. I do apologize. But, again, we your the recording is going out, and you can always ask your account manager about these sorts of things with help center. I'm going to enable approvals on estimates so that they'd be able to approve it online because the email that they get is not actually the actual estimate. It's actually a link to a secure and private online portal. All of you are familiar with portals, I'm assuming. Right? This is where we do live in 2026, and we are familiar with how this works. And a portal, you know, we can go in, and maybe she'll be able to check out, hey. Wait a minute. Why why don't I have a phone number in here? I should give them my phone number in case they wanna call me if he's lonely. So there you go. I put in a wonderful nope. I don't wanna save the address and so on. So, yes, the customer portal. You are familiar with it. And if I take a look at that estimate, I do see, I'm able to accept this estimate. Right? And when it does get accepted, then the business owner will be, will be notified. So I'm gonna accept it. I'm not gonna reject it because I got enough of that at high school. And I they also have the ability to add in a wonderful signature. So my signature is horrible. Oh my goodness. I I don't know. I'm, like, shaking hands today. Okay. I blend coffee. I'm gonna add in this wonderful email signature that I was able to draw, and then I'm gonna hit accept. Amazing. And then the client has finally accepted this estimate. Now, she will get an email. I, as the business owner, will get an email, and I'm not gonna go and open up my email because I don't know what's in there. It's a mess in there, and I blame I blame spam. So here I am. I'm gonna go and take a look at page, and I'm going to see that she has accepted this wonderful estimate. And if I view the signed PDF, I'll be able to see my really ugly rabbit that I drew. Oh my goodness. Am I in kindergarten? Okay. Whatever. So now that I've accepted this estimate, again, it is still pending sync approval. What does one do when you have an estimate? Well and it's approved. You're gonna create an invoice from it. So let me go ahead, create an invoice from that. Again, this too hasn't synced over. And I could receive the payment right now, but I'm not gonna do that because we have a we have a portal. Why don't we do the self serve things? Let's go ahead and send that off to her. Okay. The email has been sent. Now I could just I could wait. Are you gonna come in? Or I'm I'm I'm already here. So let's just let's just go back. And, she would actually get an email that has come in, but it's I'm already in the portal. So let me go into my invoice right now. And, yes, if you have a payment gateway set up on here, you can pay for it online just like, you know, any any other any other kind of platform. And this, again, is out of the box. So as long as this person has an email, they can, oh, go ahead and pay for their things. And you also will need to set up a payment gateway. We do support a number that's not a great date. '30 okay. That's fine. We do support a number of payment gateways. So let me go ahead and do do this. GoGo gadget processing. You are all well and good. Oh, I completely lost my thought process. I usually say something while the payment's going through, and I completely forget what I was gonna say. Well, that's okay. Now now that it's paid, you're probably wondering, oh, the person has paid. They probably should be synced over to QuickBooks. And, yes, let me go over here. I would get an email that they paid. Let me just refresh the screen. And if I were to go over and take a look at page right now, you will able to find that they are no longer a lead. And, actually, it says that they're a customer. And if I were to take a look at this invoice, and if I were to open it up, you would also find, ta da, it it's green. Green means good. It means that it has synced over. Not has it synced over, but also the payment synced over. Let's go. There you go. The payment has synced over. And if you don't believe me, I'm gonna go ahead and refresh the screen on my QuickBooks account, and I will be able to see that we have a wonderful person named Paige Park in there, and she has synced over with a wrong phone number because, like, oh, who has a phone number of 24234, whatever? And then we have also the invoice and the payment. So you can use this as a wonderful lead management tool. And depending on your industry, you can actually either sync immediately or you can sync at the very end of your workflow. But that's it for my demo. I know Marwan has amazing things to talk about, so I wanted to go a little bit quickly here. And I will turn it back to you, Mattis. Thank you so much. Thank you, Errol, for the exciting demo, and I totally get it. You start forgetting things because of your children as I've started to learn over the past couple of years. So k. So we're gonna move on to to to Marwan's other presentation. I I saw somebody asking, like, what is the workflow? Marwan is gonna about to dive into that. So over to you, my friend. Thanks, Mattis. Thanks, Errol. Everybody can hear me okay? Sounds good. Okay. Awesome. My name is Morwan. Not to be confused with moron. Happens all the time too. But today, I'm gonna show you that's not the case. So, I have a really awesome, presentation to show you. It's actually a client of mine that we got on to, Method, and we were able to solve a a a big portion of their workflow and and their issues. And I think, actually, they're here in the webinar today. But, Mattis, yeah, if you can give me if you can stop sharing so I can share my screen. Oh, right. Right. We gotta go through the slides. In any case, so JP Cook is the company, that we're talking to. They're based in Omaha, Nebraska, and, it's a family owned company, for four generations. So Julie, who is the person working who's kind of part owner of the company with her siblings, they run the company, and, I guess, you know, their their father and their grandfather ran the company before that. And what they do is customer rubber stamps, engraving in manufacturing distribution. They also have a an online store through their website that they they receive orders from where they use WooCommerce for. Cool. I guess I can just jump directly into the presentation here, Mattis. Yep. Thank you. And share my screen. Alright. So I kinda wanna tell you just, like, a little bit of the story of how I got to know Julie and the JP Cook team. What essentially happened is they've been using QuickBooks Desktop the entire time they were in I guess QuickBooks existed. I'm not sure. But they've been because of the sheer amount of orders that they get, they could get like, just from online orders, they could get something like 30 orders a day. They have a bunch of sales reps as well selling other product on their behalf, plus all the catalog orders that come in through the phone or email or whatever it may be. So you could imagine in one day, there could be almost a 100 orders, if not more. QuickBooks Desktop was their source of operation, and I've created here from early on I'm gonna scroll down and show you the the workflow essentially before, like, how things used to happen. And, the way I tried to kind of make it look I know you're gonna go like, oh, it's a bias. You're trying to make it more complicated. I promise you. When I was making those lines and everything, I'm trying to make it as readable as I could. But there's two sides to the business. There is the office side, obviously, where all the orders come in and the sales, and there's the manufacturing side. Right? I think they're all in the same building, and there's communication there. But, essentially, you know, sales come in through the catalog or through a phone call or some some sort of a way and goes into the sales rep. This is supposed to be a sales And the sales rep goes into the QuickBooks desktop QuickBooks desktop, right, and creates a sales order from there. So if you imagine, if you have, like, five or six sales reps and they're entering into your QuickBooks file, right, and entering sales orders from there, what happens is as soon as a sales order comes in, they need to create what's called a manufacturing ticket. Okay? So in the manufacturing ticket, it just says what sort of things that this this customer is ordering so they can go ahead and manufacturing it manufacture it. And then a person comes from the factory, walks over, grabs tickets, goes back. You know? They work on them. They ship them, then writes in, you know, the tracking number, the weight, the shipping dates, all of that, brings them back so that the sales rep can go back and update the sales order. From there on, the sales order becomes an invoice, so that's just standard stuff from QuickBooks or they can collect the payment. In terms of the WooCommerce side or the retail side from the website, all of that comes, as email to Julie. And Julie literally used to spend I can't remember. It was a Thursday or Friday. Remember we had a call about it, and I'm just shaking, and I'm like, Julie, you're gonna go and watch, like, your kid's soccer games from now on. You're not gonna do this anymore. And she would spend, like, a full day or two days just kind of entering all those orders ask sales orders into QuickBooks desktop. And then from there on, go ahead and calculate all the commissions that she needs to pay off for the sales reps. So spaghetti all around. And, hopefully, I'll get to show you, method afterwards. But that's not the reason why they came to me. The reason they came to me is because of the sheer amount of data they would enter into QuickBooks. Their QuickBooks desktop would just keep on crashing, and then she would spend days trying to fix it. And that was, like, a recurring nightmare. Julie had a very good way of putting it. She was like a Groundhog Day all over again. Right? Every time QuickBooks would crash. And what happens is that she worked with a QuickBooks adviser at the time and who happened to be my friend. And she the adviser would ask me, like, do you think Method could help, right, alleviate all that data? And I'm like, of course. The world's best Method developer. Of course, it can help. So what we decided to do is migrate them over from QuickBooks desktop to QuickBooks online. And with that migration, you might lose a lot of things. Right? So you could for example, sales orders don't exist in q QBO at the time. Or even the whole idea of having the sales rep initials, that is a crucial feature in QuickBooks Desktop. Does not exist in QuickBooks Online. So all of those things being we needed to think about and the whole migration on how we we're gonna do it. It is not easy when you have this many orders coming in. But, you know, they came to an expert, and we were able to do it. Actually, it didn't take too long to to migrate or, you know, relatively speaking. So we were able to get all the data into QBO up and running. And then to kind of cover all of the missing features, Method became kind of like the layer that that goes through into creating all of the stuff. The the the whole reason why we came into Method, it was almost like an opportunity for JP Cook now to kind of transform the their workflow and how they work. And then as as you can see here, there's, like, kind of, like, some moving pieces here and there, but the spaghetti workflow is done. We've created the system. Right? I don't know if any of you have read the Michael Gerber book, the e myth, where he talks about creating, like, a system for your business so you can kind of, like, step away from it and then have the system run itself. That's essentially what we came on to do here. So same thing, Office and desktop. And now what happens is all the catalog and the phone calls that come in into the sales rep, we create them as sales orders inside of Method. There's no need for the sales reps to go into QuickBooks anymore. The only people that need to be inside of QuickBooks is the owner themselves and the the accountant. Right? The the the bookkeeper. Everybody else who doesn't need to deal with the QuickBooks stuff should always be in the CRM and just see their own stuff. So that's that's essentially what happens. Now the sales reps use their own stuff. They create their sales orders, and they convert them to invoices as such. But they'd no longer have to be concerned with, you know, printing the ticket, putting it somewhere because what what I've done and what we've done with Julie is as soon as you create a sales order, we have a button that says print manufacturing ticket. And what that does is it digitally creates a ticket. They can print it if they want, and it automatically sends them to Shiprush, which is also a software that we migrated into. And now the factory, what they do is they just log in to Shiprush. They can see all the orders that are coming in, and they just lock them out like that, right, from the list that are of open ShipRush orders. They ship the information. Once they print the the ship date the packing list, then automatically that updates the sales order inside of Method with the tracking number, the weight, the shipping dates, etcetera, where it can be ready to become an invoice. So at that point, the sales rep could go ahead and email the customer directly from Method or just convert to an invoice and call it a day. And then from there, now we have we also created a custom app inside of Method because Method is fully customizable. I can fill in the pictures of cats if I want. Then that automatically calculates the commission for the sales rep. So we also have, almost like at the end of the month, an automatic system that calculates the commission, prints the report. Julie can approve it and send it over. And you can see that Julie is now out of the picture. She's no longer doing anything manual. All the WooCommerce orders direct as soon as they come in, they go as a sales order inside of Method. And that kind of allows them to send them to Shiprush, and it goes through the work workflow again. Yeah. And then everything gets consigned inside of QuickBooks, nice and clean from invoices to payments, sales orders remaining method. But, honestly, why would you need sales orders in QuickBooks in the first place? So that's okay. And then there was this one other complicated layer, and that is tax tax, essentially, and compliance and being able to pay tax, which Julie spent hours doing as well. And that was actually on on on her accord. She found TaxCloud, which she liked. She thought it was, like, a good fit for her and asked me if we if could it could help with Method. The problem with TaxCloud at the time is that their integration was direct with QuickBooks, with QBO. And, essentially, what they would do is you would create the invoice, and then you would click the TaxCloud button, and it would go ahead and calculate the tax in that county, in that state, in that city, and then send it back to QuickBooks. And the question was, well, that kind of takes you outside of the workflow, and it's not it's not kind of smooth. Right? Because we're doing everything in Method anyways. So what we've built is an integration with TaxCloud, and I'm hoping to show it to you. So here is JP Cook's method account right here with, obviously, test company of mine, and I have created this item right here. And the whole idea it's just it's a lot like it's a lot like QuickBooks, the way you create items with the custom information that you have. I have the test here. So, Julie, if you're watching this, yeah, just ignore this one. But the idea is when you print the manufacturing copy right here, which I'll do real quickly, that is what's gonna send this order over to ShipRush, this process. And there is a a big way there is, like, a bulk way that you could do it as well in terms of, like, WooCommerce and whatnot. And then, essentially, now the factory, what they have is when they scan this barcode, it opens up opens it up directly in ShipRush for it. Right? So we take a lot of the manual work out. There you go. All the ShipRush details right here. And then when I click save, maybe this item some items are exempt from TaxCloud or it's been a while, so I got forgot. Or maybe it's on the invoices, actually, where the the TaxCloud information happens. But, essentially, what what happens is that it sends it to TaxCloud and comes in as a tax item here. It just auto calculates it, and then she could reconcile in tax file. Yeah. And that concludes kind of, like, my demo on how to think about, you know, when you wanna build a custom system that it can be done for you if you kind of sit down and engineer a way to go through it. It really does help to work with, you know, a system engineer if you wanna do this. Matas, I'm gonna stop sharing my screen so I can go back to the slides. Cool. Yeah. Skip over that slide, and, there you go. So the so before, it was you know, Julie would spend days on sometimes just manual work or editing stuff inside of QuickBooks and fixing it. And we were able to take her out and kind of create as much automate automation as we can. And with automation, there's a lot. Right? And now we live in the age of AI where you could pretty much ask it to do whatever you want. So you kinda wanna be purposeful in the way you do it and kind of slowly trust your way through it. And, yeah, sales reps are outside of her QuickBooks file. They have their own view of doing things. Real time order updates, they see whatever they want, and the whole automation on tax and calculation has quite saved them some time. I'll throw it over to you to Matt Sass, and, hope looking forward to answering your questions afterward. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much, Marwan. Really, really appreciate the workflow walk through. I think because there are two components to this. There's the in the weeds stuff around, okay. Here's what exactly happens at a granular level. Like, this data item moves here and this data item moves here. What how do they move? What is the nature of those items? But then I I do think there's this, like, 30,000 foot view that is important to look at in terms of what are the actual steps that you wanna take and what are you trying to accomplish as an organization as a whole. I do have some follow-up questions for you, but maybe as before we kinda dive into that, in the q and a, was wondering, if you wanna call out folks wanna reach out to you if they have more questions about Julie or, or about, any other potential systems or method, how can they get in touch? Yeah. Thanks. So you can come in, get in touch with me. So, I run a company called Edith Team Business Solutions. I have eleven plus years of continuous experience working in Method. Fun fact, I was actually a, an ex Method product manager. So I helped build the software. So, like, the portals that, Errol showed, that was actually the very first feature that I've ever shipped when I was working in Method. And before that, I was four years, lead consultants and just building, solutions on top of Method for small business owners. So I have experience with thousands of small businesses across different industries, and I have this really close relationship with the Method team. Some of them are my closest friends. The CEO is actually quite a few blocks down from me. He lives I don't see him often, though. But, yeah, he's good friends there. If you want to kind of start, you know, your digital transformation and kind of automate your business and you want, you know, one of the world's best, I'm the guy, and this is how you can reach out to me. Elifteam.com is my website or my name at elif team dot com, marwan@elifteam.com. Happy to connect and talk to you. Awesome. Thank you, everyone. So I'll I'll have a bit of a discussion in just a moment. Before I get through that to that, we just wanna run through a couple of things. First one being around how to get started, like, case you are exploring building this additional layer on top of QuickBooks and be it QuickBooks Desktop or online. I saw somebody commenting how many people still use Desktop. You'd be surprised, actually. It's it's not it it it's not an area that's, like, completely done. There are actually companies that depend on it for sure. But if you wanna get started, if you are an accounting or bookkeeping firm or consulting firm, we do have a partner program. It is a program that's designed to to create a stream of opportunities for you and and have Method as a partner that's a tool to solve real client problems, not just like a one off recommendation. It's it's built usually for people who are already working with clients who are using QuickBooks. In terms of the process for joining the program, it's free to join. You get a free method account right away, and then we have one on one onboarding, tailored plans for your business, and ongoing training and sales enablement, as well as early access to product updates, a listing on the final partner page, recurring commissions as well. So if you wanna get started, you can email mpp@method.me. And we're gonna jump into a few questions just shortly before that. Curious if folks are interested just from what they've seen so far, if you'd be interested in trying method for yourself, exploring the partner program, or nothing at this time. So we'd love to hear what you thought, and we're just gonna give it a couple of seconds for folks to respond. Not sure if the poll is going. Okay. I see that the poll has opened up. Amazing. We will keep going as as folks answer that. So as folks are answering, quick call out. In case maybe you maybe you've you've seen something that you're interested in, but you're not quite ready to dive in, right away. We actually recently just launched, a subreddit, where folks from the community, Marwan included, actually, answer questions and engage with, with different business owners and different advisers. So if you have questions, feel free to jump over to the subreddit and and share your thoughts there. And then other ways to get started with Method, we we have one on one walk throughs with experts. You'd like to book a demo, those are available through through our website. And if you get started this month, if you get started before March 31, we do have a promotion that's running. You'll get 25% off for your first three months if you're bringing a team of two or more. K. So that concludes kind of the the announcements. I think the poll should be closing soon, and we will jump into the q and a section. Yep. Heather, I see you're, you're back here. Actually, yeah. What But if you if you walk them through the questions, you can do that to yourself. So all of the q all the questions are in the q and a. You can feel free to dive right in. Yeah. Absolutely. And I I I will definitely want your help with that. I think the first thing that I have is actually a question from Marwan right off the bat while I was, enjoying your presentation, Marwan. I was curious, if there was any, like, what was the reasoning? Because I think there there's a lot of different ways to approach solving that type of workflow. Right? And, like, I I I think I saw somebody in the audience saying, look. They're like, this There's method approach, but, like, there's lots of different approaches. We're living in the age of AI. Right? What was the what what led you to this type of implementation? Because there is something, I think, unique in the way that things were built here. Yeah. I think it's the the the the main requirement was really the QuickBooks QuickBooks way of things. If I ask you, you know, get out of Outlook and go into Gmail, you'll be like, I don't know. Kinda weird, but, okay, I'm willing to give it a try. But if I tell you, hey. Leave QuickBooks and go somewhere else, you're it's gonna be an absolute no. So and I I decided to go on method, one, because I really know it really well, and two, just knowing the the budget that JP Cook was going with, method just happened to fit the bill, and two, being able to do it. Right? Like, I was very confident that we are going to achieve the goals that they wanted to achieve. So, there was, like, a level of trust that Julie had in me. Right? And hence why I decided to go with Matt. Thank you, Marwan. And I I I know that we we kinda touched on the on the sales tax integration to to to some extent. There's also obviously, also the the WooCommerce integration and the the QuickBooks transition itself. I think because the thing that we maybe didn't speak about too much or too into depth was this idea of moving from desktop and into online and and some of the changes that came along with that. I'm just curious what were kind of the biggest, like, transition moments and, like, what what you had to implement with, method and additional tools in that transition. Because I know that a lot of businesses go through these, things periodically. And I'm just resharing a slide. Aaron was asking for the slide, around the, the promotion. Yes, sir. Go ahead, Marwan. Yeah. I think the sales order piece was, like, the biggest piece to figure out. But, you know, luckily, it's, Method just had, like, their own, default sales order that kind of mimics QuickBooks exactly. So I didn't really have to think too hard about how we're gonna do it. So the idea was, alright. Let's just take what we know and go there, which is actually actually another reason why we decided to go with Method because, you know, like, some of the work is already done for us. Right? Could have taken them to Bubble, could have taken them somewhere else. Also, great apps and awesome solutions there. But then I'm I'm redoing things. Right? And the idea with QuickBooks Desktop as well, another big feature that a lot of people ask for and get shocked when when they go into the online world is the sales rep and how important that is, the sales rep initials, specifically in QuickBooks Desktop. A lot of businesses find it to be very, very important because they run reports on it. And so for that one, you actually have to go custom. Right? You have to build your own custom way on on solving for that, which is what we've done with j with JP Cook. If if you noticed, I did have a sales rep. It's literally a copy of how sales reps work in QuickBooks Desktop in it. But in reality, you don't really when you come into kind of building the workflows and engineering it, you realize that the reason a lot of companies do things is because they're just got comfortable doing things that way. And so when you when when you start building automations and and you start, you know, build custom systems for for them, you really need to take a look of what am I trying to achieve here. Alright? I know you asked me a specific question, and I'm going into, like, a a different kind of a a route, but, you know, same thing. Trying to trying to get into, you know, what what is the question really trying to entail. Yeah. Totally makes sense. I do I did see some questions that were, like, a little bit more hands on, and so we wanna make sure we address those. I saw Keith asking, if we could repeat how the work order gets into QBO from WooCommerce. Like, what what can you walk through, like, the the the details of those steps? How does that work? Yeah. Absolutely. So so WooCommerce is one of the most popular or Shopify, one of the most popular requests that I get, especially for retail and manufacturing warehousing businesses. And the way it works is, you know, if somebody goes on to your store and they order something, then I created a a almost like a system that that's through the order. So it checks to see if this customer exists in your QuickBooks or not. And if it does, then attach create the sales order through the API into it. And if it is, then it creates the customer first and then creates the order and sends it there. It's really that simple. K. Alright. We have a couple good questions that have come in recently. One is, can you build custom dashboards on Method which aren't available on QBO? Yeah. Of course. The you you can create so at the end of the day, method is essentially it becomes like a a database. Right? So there is a reporting feature in it that you could do. Also, very common thing that you do. Next one is QuickBooks does not have a job leads and pricing from vendors, and only has a way to create estimates. So after there's a clear job lead and pricing, can Method help with that? Definitely. Yeah. Absolutely. The I think that Method can come in and fill that white space quite nicely. As a matter of fact, there is an app in Method called proposals that you could use as well, and it does come as a a precursor to the estimates as well. And a a lot of the times and I do have other customers as well where they they have kind of, like, a post estimate or a pre estimate process of, like, let's say, order forms or whether it's, you know, like, a presales order kind of claim intake or something like that. So, definitely, you can fill that white space. Awesome. How is method planning on managing inventory? I'll leave that to the method team to answer. So I don't have the, the product team on hand here currently, so I I don't know in terms of, like, the exact details on the, on the road map. But I do know that we have, the option to have pretty deep integrations with various systems if you have an external system. And I think that there are instances where folks build out certain types of inventory, applications within Method. Errol, I don't know if you have anything else to add. I know that the team is working on something, but I don't I don't have any concrete answer, at this at this moment. But, No. Errol, What you said you. is is pretty much, it, and, also, we are expanding our inventory. So we do, we do sync, the products and services or items if you're on QBT QuickBooks desktop. We do sync that over to Method, but I also know that we are expanding how we deal with inventory, trying to make it obviously more functional. And so that is coming down the line, except I don't know when. And so I don't wanna exactly promise anything, but that is that is currently being worked on. There's a whole team working on how inventory is handled. So, eventually, when that happens, I have to write up documentation for it. So that'll be amazing. Next question. It's showing up on the screen. Do the estimates feed to QBO? Yes. Yes. They do. If from the demo that I did, the estimates that I created, I did not sync over to QuickBooks. But if I wanted to, I could have synced them over to QuickBooks. I just in that particular workflow, I just, we we waited till the very end. Gotcha. Let's see. Can you elaborate on when we should be creating work orders versus sales orders method? We are a subscription based company. Oh, it's a good question. I can I can jump into that, Heather? So so work orders are essentially almost like a way for you to have your team go and address a specific kind of on-site or a specific job that they're trying to achieve. While a sales order a sales order is more like a middle transaction that that that kind of promises the sale. So it goes from estimate sales order to invoice for that reason, while a work order is a specific way. So a good example that I like to give is that a if you are, let's say, a a service business, so in in your case, you were you're saying you're a subscription based company. The work order is essentially would be, you know, go and visit the client to fix x y zed, while sales order would be like in Julie's case where it is you know, the customer has ordered this set of products, and we need to go and and manufacture it manufacture them. So we're holding the sales order for now before we invoice the customer. I hope that answers the question. And I. I would love to know, like, what kind of subscription that that you do, like, as in a service or a product or something like that, because that kind of also decides on the best way to go about it. Hopefully, they'll put that back in there, and we can get back to them. I have a consulting business, accounting tax, and I've been subscribed to Method. How can I use Method as part of my client intake? It's a great question. I I would strongly suggest, as a starting point, reaching out to to the team. So if you if you shoot an email to mpp@method.me, they can help you out there for sure. But I would also add the question is really, is it about using Method for your firm as clients come in? Like, how would you prefer to process them? And maybe it's through that client portal or building out some sort of a custom workflow. Or are we more talking about how do I talk about method as clients come into the door, like, if this is something that they would benefit from in having better workflows? So I think it if you could clarify which which direction we're talking about. But I think reaching out to the partner team would, would definitely go a long way here. Do you have a best practice for tracking method development tasks, a certain platform or tool? Method development task, as in, like, customization tasks. I'm not sure. Just says, do you have a best practice for tracking method development tasks, a certain platform or tool? Well, I actually use Method itself to track all of my development. So I develop and consult, and I use the activities inside of Method to kind of track that. And then anything I have an integration with my Notion board as well where I can take all my notes on there. But, really, it's a man a matter of preference. If if I'm not understanding the question correctly. Oh, It says rather than Google Sheets or ClickUp, question mark. Not sure. that's a follow-up to the question, Yeah. I guess? I think, so. okay. Yeah. Oh, It's. in the chat. Yes. Yeah. Again, it's a preference at that point. But one advantage that you have when you have everything in one place is that you have that history. Right? So that's why I use my tracking my leads and customers inside of. So I would love to see the history of what I've done, what I've said, what I've emailed, what I've called, etcetera, things like that. Hence why. Marwan, your sound is a little bit hard to hear. I saw a clarification on that previous question around it would be more kind of like a workflow where I have a lead and then ultimately they become a customer. I think because what we showed, Errol, that you demonstrated was really, like, already managing existing leads. But maybe you could talk a little bit about how it actually leads get into the method because there's because there's whole bunch of ways, I think, to to to enter them. I think people might benefit from from that. Sure thing. If you have a lead in method, there are a couple of ways that they do sync over. One, if you actually create an, any type of transaction, whether it be an estimate or an invoice for them, and then you decide, oh, I wanna sync that transaction over to QuickBooks because all transactions for leads also don't sync over to QuickBooks. But if you decide, oh, I wanna sync it over, then everything will automatically sync over as well. And as you saw that if they pay for it, then that lead will automatically convert over. But then you can also just manually convert over. You could just open up the person, just say, no longer lead, and then they sync over to QuickBooks. So there are a number of ways where you can manually set it, or it will automatically go over it. There, I haven't covered opportunities, but that's another sales opportunity. If they if you if it if you win it and it closes, then they will automatically sync over then. Right? So, depending on whatever process that you might have, and it's every industry is different, then you can choose where in that workflow you want the lead to sync over, and you can even customize it to, your own preference. So, it it does it does depend on, what your industry is like. Yeah. And it will also depend on how you prefer to collect those leads. Like, we have webto lead forms as an example if you just wanna collect that information on your website. But you can also add people through a list, or you could add them as you're talking to them on the phone. Just a whole bunch of different methods. There's a question that came in that somebody even thumbs it up. As an active Method user, can you explain how the new jobs app and schedule app will improve our current work workflow in comparison to using work order schedule or work order app? Yeah. Absolutely. So for those folks who, may be new to Method or maybe you're not as deeply working within, an environment where you have to, like, deliver field services, we have, a way to operationalize some of the field service workflows. And chances are that some of the people who are working in that space, you've maybe customized your application, you've built out additional workflows because, you know, like, a a technician at one company is gonna be very different from a technician at a different company based on what they have to do, what the steps are, what matters. Right? But what we've seen over time is that there are there are certain requests that we have around these types of workflows of somebody actually going out into the field and then having to do something and having to record that information and everything needs to simp sync back to to the central office where maybe you have a dispatcher managing everything. So the the biggest difference and the big biggest benefits, I would say, are, number one, a centralization of the job records. So, really, it's like a new dashboard that is dedicated for the dispatcher that is specific to jobs and that allows you to quickly access different items related to the job as opposed to a dashboard that is maybe dedicated to, like, managing contacts. So you think about it, like, are you managing jobs as the primary thing versus are you managing, like, a list of contacts? So so that's a a a big piece. There's also a component around next step logic. So it's very obvious and clear to see what happens next, depending on a job. There's also improvements to, crew coordination. So, for example, assigning multiple people to tasks, right, and making sure that you can schedule them in a clean way. And then, also, I would say there's there's improvements to the customer self serve comp component. So the portal that you saw, Arrow, show off, that is actually also getting advanced, improvements and and and, new components there that that are gonna have, let people figure out what kind of things they're managing on the job. The So customer themselves can see, okay. When somebody's coming by, maybe they need to schedule something, maybe they need to reschedule something, that type of stuff. So I would encourage you to reach out to your account manager if there are specific questions you have about your account because depending on how your account was set up and depending on the customizations that were available, they might make a, you know, different or better recommendation for for your business. Awesome. Hopefully, that. helps explain it. Yeah. And then we're right at the last minute, so I'm gonna go ahead and try to wrap things up quickly. So one last thing that I just wanted to share with everyone is we do have two webinars. QuickBooks has or Intuit Enterprise Suite has two webinars coming up at the end of the month, one on March 24 and another one on March 26. We encourage you to attend both of these to learn more about Intuit Enterprise Suites just to understand the why behind it and also the how of actually making that move. In addition, we just wanna, you know, cover, the big takeaway, which is QuickBooks is the foundation for your financials. But with method layered on top, you can extend that foundation across sales, service, and operations without leaving QuickBooks. So today, you saw how real time two way sync eliminates manual entry, keeps data aligned, and allows you to build custom workflows around how your clients actually operate. So if you're ready to see it in action, there is a button at the top of your screen, start a free trial button that you can click. We're gonna send everyone the recording, presentation, and all the next steps in a follow-up email that you'll receive tomorrow. And anyone whose questions didn't get answered, we are going to make sure that you get followed up with, directly and separately after the webinar wraps up. So, Matas, Varun, do you guys have any, final thoughts? Anything else you'd like to say? No. Just thank you so much for having us, Heather, and thank you for everybody who who joined. Thank you so much to Marwan Errol for jumping on and doing all the all the hard work of showing things off. Alright. Thanks. again for joining us, and, we appreciate your time. I look forward to continuing the conversation. Have a great day, everyone. Correct. Bye bye.