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Welcome back to the first ever Hot Apps. This is probably a really bad idea, but we want to go live on LinkedIn and show people Accruer. I'm Tom, I do all the marketing, product, and sales stuff here, and I come up with dumb ideas like this. We've got Jesse, who's our CEO – he's on the call really for moral support I think. And he loves the spotlight just as much as I do. Michaela, who is working the chat, is all things account management, keeping people happy. We got Tyler, who doesn't work for FinOptimal. So Tyler, why don't you give a little context on who you are?
Yeah, I would like to say I was just your first fan, you know? Saw Jesse wearing the "for the period" shirt at QuickBooks Connect, got talking about Accruer and FinOptimal. Made besties, and now I use it in my firm and I run a half-ass accounting podcast – so, let's go!
There we go. So Tyler does not work for FinOptimal, so everything that he's saying that's nice is genuine, okay? He's not here to be a shill. So, Accruer does prepaid expenses, deferred revenue, fixed assets, directly in QuickBooks. No spreadsheets, okay? You do not need outside spreadsheets to use Accruer. So we're going to go through a classic Accruer demo today but with a twist, where we're going to be eating Hot Ones. I think Tyler, should we just like start with the first one now?
Yes.
The basic one?
Dare we say everyone, only 1,800 Scoville. Nice and tasty.
What are you working with, ribs?
Yeah dude, you said it was like afternoon lunch, I'm in. Not even a challenge.
All right, let's start this, I'm going to share my screen and get into it. Alright entire window.
Be a great bait and switch right now.
All right, can you guys see this? How's it look Mich? If anyone has any feedback, meaning like this looks like crap, just slack it in the chat and Mich will figure it out. But we're going to start with the prepaid expense example. So like, Tyler why don't you tell them a little bit about how you used to do prepaids before you used Accruer as I tee this up here.
Yeah so, the issue for us is you always get on the month-end review with the client. You're going through and reviewing the financials and all of a sudden it's like, huh, what's this 20K expense that came in? You're asking them about it. And of course it's always at the 11th hour, they want to get financials out to their investors, their lenders, their stakeholders, their partners, whatever – and it turns out that that's a insurance expense and it's not even for this month, it's for the last 10 months of the of the insurance period. And so now I've got to go in and make an entry to post it in, starting in December and then one tenth of it every month until next September, and that's going to take me time. Versus, now with Accruer I can do it live on the call.
So all you have to do is write "for the period". Okay, that is the magic phrase. So think about like what you're doing with the spreadsheets today – it's gone. You literally just write "for the period" in the description, you click save, and in a matter of seconds it calculates and books every entry, and it creates the schedule. Yes, we are going to show you the schedule. But it does the entire thing based off of the description, okay? So "for the period" magic phrase – remember it. That is the first thing that you must do. The second is, we are booking this directly to an expense account, okay? Accruer uses the reversal method. Means you post it to the P&L, Accruer moves it to the balance sheet for you, and then does everything from there. Okay? Doesn't matter that it's an expense. Could be a bill, it could be a check, you could be using Bill.com, Ramp, Expensify, Divvy, whatever you're used to using – you just got to book it to the P&L. Tyler, do you write your dates like this, or how do you typically write your dates?
Well it depends what personality of me is taking over that day, right? Sometimes I write them as a single character month, double digit day, and four character year. Sometimes I'm lazy and just say December of 24, or 2024. I don't know man, I'm a little bit all over the place, Jekyll and Hyde.
Cool, well because we wrote it with this 9/25 to 12/24, it's going to prorate the first and last month. So if you're prorating stuff, you write it like this. If you're not, we'll show how to do it on the flip side, but let's show you the automated entries. So we've got our P&L here, I'm going to zoom back out, trying to make this look good for everybody. Nothing on it, nothing staged. We run this report, boom, it's done. Every entry posted in a matter of seconds to spread that out for you automatically. Just based on writing "for the period". Not doing anything else besides drinking Miller High Life over here, okay? That's it. Write "for the period".
Here are the automated entries. I guess, before Tyler we get into this, that was like, not spicy at all and I kind of feel like a baby so I think I should go to the next one. I would just jump a whole tier, but I feel like you guys told me not to do that, so I'm just going to go one up.
36,000 Scoville. Los Calientes. Tom what do you think?
I think I just need to go for Da Bomb, this is like not bad at all.
No, it's quite tasty, it's wonderful. We actually just invited people to watch us have a nice little lunch snack.
There's not nearly enough stuff, this is boring, so all right I'm gonna do the spicy one next. Here are Accruer's entries, okay, posted to the balance sheet $12,000 immediately reversed to the balance sheet. Sorry, posted to the P&L, reversed to the balance sheet. Same exact day, Accruer is going to tell you, that is a reversal entry. One journal entry dated for the last day of the month every month. We Zoom all the way out – if I can type – see the entire thing booked out immediately. You can control that if for any reason you don't want to book every entry, I don't know why you would do that, but you can have it only post month by month if you'd like that. I like to post everything at once, give your clients, give your stakeholders proform of P&L just by writing "for the period". So let's look at an automated entry before we get into, "okay what if I didn't get it right the first time?" This is what an entry looks like okay? I'm going to show you in a second how to customize the description. What matters here is that name, location, class, project, customer – whatever you're putting on that parent entry, that first line is going to show up here, okay? Super easy to track and split things, literally just right "for the period", tag it how you want it to show up in the in the P&L later on, you're good to go.The highlight in my mind is this memo field okay? There is a link right here. This will tie you back to the expense, or the bill, or wherever you wrote "for the period". So if you're reviewing entries and you're, "like why are people posting these entries, what do they look like?" That's also over. You can clearly tell why these things are here, where they came from, alright? That is how Accruer works, day in and day out. You literally just write "for the period", and you're good to go.
Tom can I ask a question though?
Please yeah, go ahead.
What if I screwed up up on the original entry, or one of my staff members did? I don't want to go back and fix the nine entries that Accruer just made for me.
You're such a showman, I love it, I can't wait.
I'm here for you, man.
You’re a professional podcaster.
I want to earn that beer you promised me.
Let's talk about adjustments, but Tyler, I'm gonna go for the this, Da Bomb. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna jump.
10 minutes in, he's going for it.
Jesse be ready to take over for him.
The point of this – wow this is disgusting, holy.
He got ambitious folks.
How many units. Did you already flash how many units?
Uh, 135,000. We went from 30 – oh, one point, yeah 1.5, never mind.
Wow, okay.
Yeah that escalated quickly in the words of Ron Burgundy.
All right, now we're talking, that is disgusting and my mouth is absolutely on fire. This is, that is really really bad. All right, so – um, these books are completely unlocked. So we're going to talk about what Accruer does if you make adjustments. We'll also explain what would happen if – holy f – I said I'm not gonna curse, I might curse.
You need some bread man. That's horrible dude. I'm going to try to rough it. Alright, so if the books were locked, Accruer wouldn't restate a locked period, but let's talk about if the books are open. Wow this is brutal. Okay, so I'm going to change this entirely. I regret this and Jesse said if I didn't do this he was gonna fire me, we don't have an HR department, so everyone who's watching, um you guys are –
You don't get a day off tomorrow for this either, Tom.
If I go to the hospital, um, it's on Jesse.
Whew!
Oh my god dude, that is terrible!
You asked for this.
Should I go for the milk or should I rough it?
We told you wait until later, we told you to wait.
The beer? Alright.
Actually it's just a trap, the beer makes it worse.
Yeah you're, never drink after spicy food. You eat bread.
Yeah this, this is horrible. Alright so the first line I just wrote "for the period September 2024 to December 2024." Because I just changed the way that I wrote it Accruer is now going to do September 1st to December 31st. I'm literally crying. It's going to update all of the existing journal entries, okay?
Who just took a screenshot.
Who did? I, I'm – I can't even like hear right now, I'm just talking. I like feel I could do this in my sleep.
We all want to remember this.
So it's going to update the existing journal entries. Now what if the books were locked? It wouldn't restate a locked period, Tyler what would it do instead? Bail me out while I take a sip.
Yeah because Tom is suffering and can't talk about his own software, if I were doing this and I couldn't mess with a – whew – a closed period that a client had already reported, on – whew – I'm gonna pray to god that I can post it in the most recent open period. So I don't want to affect 2023, I'm gonna post all the changes in 2024. Back to you in the studio.
I'm like, sweating and my heart's racing. Alright, the second one, um second line I put text before "for the period" – hotels for the conference, alright. Hotels for the conference is now going to show up on all of the automated entries downstream. Okay, so you write "for the period" after it, that text is going to show up on the automated entries. If you put text after "for the period" it's going to stay right here. So you can customize the description based on where you write "for the period". Also, one date for the period November 2024, let's say you're going to a conference. This will be a prepaid expense today, fully recognized in November. One date is going to shift it, and two dates is going to spread it. I don't even remember if I clicked save. I hope I did, otherwise I'm going like an idiot when I show these updated entries, but let's do it. Oh my goodness.
Yeah you were a little eager when we got into this.
Well the point of this is Accruer's so easy to use, you can use it when you're suffering. I think now I'm getting to the point. Alright so now we've got these updated entries, great. Four equal periods, one push out to 1,500. Holy – ah god. For anyone who knows me, you know how hard it is for me to not be cursing right now. So points to me again for not cursing. Now Tyler it doesn't just post the entries, it also creates a schedule right? What do you guys use to reconcile the month at your month end – holy.
Well it depends what types of accounts, but you know we use Keeper as our system and we want to be able to post backup. As to what's sitting in every single balance sheet account so we know what's out there because the balance sheet is where things go to die, and come back to haunt you later. So let's make sure we know what's there.
Alright. So we're going to tie out prepaid expenses and I think I skipped this in my moment of delusion, but this also works the exact same way for deferred revenue. We'll cover fixed assets after, but if you have an imagination you can expect how it's going to work for different revenue. And if you don't, please just have me show you at another time what I'm – I can feel my face. So we're not going to do the whole deferred revenue dance tonight.
Alright, so now let's jump into FinOptimal. I don't know this is just terrible TV, and just for no reason, but this is horrible. Alright, here is um, FinOptimal. So this is our app. This is where you would log in to control your settings and review your schedule, alright? One log in for a firm if you're a firm, toggle between all your clients in one place. I'm going to jump to reporting though because honestly once you set up Accruer, you're really just in here for reporting at the end of the month. Alright, so we'll start with our roll forward schedule because this is everybody's favorite new thing. Tyler have you used this yet?
I actually have not, I'm here to learn now at this moment. And eat.
Alright, so people were asking us, they wanted a traditional rollforward schedule. Let me shrink the months a little bit and zoom in so people can see. Holy – this is, I have do – the one after this is gonna be worse. Got two minutes, so better hurry. Everyone wanted a traditional rollforward schedule, so this is what we built. You can see the beginning balance, any additions throughout the month, what's been recognized, and you're ending balance all in one nice and easy report. This updates for you automatically, okay? So you can filter this, you can add information, but this is going to replace your schedule. I really underestimated this. Alright, I also like to use our schedule view. So this is the traditional method, I'm assuming Tyler this is what you're using today as part of this, right?
Yep, log in see my balance by month, by entry, or whatever is making up that balance.
Right, okay, so we can – and Mich, I'm assuming we don't have any any questions, but if we do shout them out.
Do you see the question on the screen?
I hate you so much Patrick, I swear to god. That's a good one.
Great question Patrick, thank you so much.
So you can add additional, yeah this is great. You can add additional information – description, start date, end date, P&L account – these are some things that I might want to add in. The reason I'm showing this is I actually like to use this as part of my balance sheet rec instead of the rollforward. This is what we're used to here at FinOptimal. You also want to filter, I skipped that step because I can't remember anything, so you filter – great, here's our prepaid expense balance, and let's Zoom this out a little bit. God.
You're out of milk before the last one man, that's a bad move.
I have a I have a whole gallon. Alright, you can save views, okay, so you can create unique views for all of your stuff. So, every time you log in this is going to be pre-filtered on prepaid expenses. This is the most milk I've drank in probably 100 years. Um, best practice would be one per balance sheet. Any questions? Tyler, how'd I do?
I think you covered it. I mean, the beauty hit home here is that Tom is not in his normal state of mind. The reconciliation is easier than it appears. But Tom, it's time for the last one, dude.
Can I just take like, a one-minute break or something?
No, man, you signed up for this.
I actually feel like I have, like, a moment of relief right now. Was that the only question we had on that entire demo, was just Patrick?
Yeah, yeah.
Good, must be doing such a good job, or the entire audience left because this is the worst idea I ever had. Alright, we're gonna do fixed assets. What'd you say, Mich?
I said this is the fastest demo I've ever seen you do. Like I've never seen you explain –
What did I miss? Did I miss anything?
No, no, I don't think you missed anything. I would love if anyone has any questions on how reporting works, please throw questions in the chat. We'd be happy to answer.
Let's assume people joined late. I will show deferred revenue while I have a very brief moment of “I can talk.” Alright, so that was showing – jinxed myself, the beer didn’t help. That was showing prepaid expenses. Actually, I’m not going to show this anymore, my friend doesn’t work there anymore. My friends work here, this is where I’m going to do. Alright, so it works the exact same way for deferred revenue. Again, for those who are joining late or weren’t paying attention, Accruer uses a reversal method. So for expenses, you book it to the expense account. Why is this doing this? And for revenue, you book to the income account. Same concept though. “For the period of October 2024 to December 2024,” click save, and that's it. Accruer is going to move this 15K from the P&L to the balance sheet, and do all of your revenue recognition from there. So it's not just a prepaid expenses tool, it is also a deferred revenue tool. You see this might be small, let's zoom in. At the end of the day it's going to boil down to this magic phrase, "for the period." Okay that is what matters. Tyler, what are you using it for, more prepaids, or more deferred, or more fixed assets?
So I think the two magical uses I absolutely love is if I have a client that has, you know, an invoice they sent out for a wedding event or something. They're sending out the money, the invoice today. They want the client to pay it in the next 30 days for you know, a wedding next July. Well let's write "for the period" in there, it's going to post next July, but we're going to still have the invoice dated today. And the client doesn't think they have until July to pay it. I love it like that on the revenue side, I freakin love it when I do my allocations on my P&L for my own company by client, because when I'm trying to do profitability, I also want a post that it's for this, the payroll period was for this 14-day window that spans both months, Accruer does the work for me and just automatically does my payroll allocations.
That's true, it also does payroll expenses and I'm definitely not doing that today, because I can't do this. Alright, let's show revenue.
I'm gonna interrupt.
Go ahead, please.
I have a question. Weston, thank you so much for chatting in. When backdating will it run through prepaids, and allow the prepaid expense. Oh, will it run through prepaid and allow the prepaid expense balance to be negative from earlier months, or will it use acrrued expense and switch to prepaid after the date of the expense?
I like Weston, Weston, that's a sharp question. So your setup is you're basically going to pick what your asset and liability accounts are. Our recommendation would be to have your asset account be prepaid, your liability account be accrued. And if you do that, it will flip it between accrued and prepaid. Okay, so what Accruer is doing to make that determination, on either side, is it's looking at what we call the "service period." So these dates, and it's comparing it to this date. And based on that relationship, it's determining what entries belong on which side of the balance sheet. Now, there are a handful of users who don't like to do that, they actually want to use one account for both asset and liability. Basically I want prepaids to be negative instead of using an accrued expenses account. So you can have it do that if you'd like, but recommendation is to use prepaids in accrued or unbilled in deferred, and it'll flip automatically. See Patrick? That's how you ask a question. Alright? No more funny business.
Tom you only got eight minutes left.
Alright alright alright alright alright. Alright. I'm gonna do it.
Last one coming up on the screen folks. Two million, what are we at? 2.6 million Scoville. See on the other side.
I feel like I might actually throw up, to be honest but.
He wasted no time.
Jesse you're getting ready, jump in? Weston if you needed any more clarification, please don't hesitate. Happy to provide more.
My mouth is so dry from the milk, that I can't even like, chew it.
So dare I say, one of the beauties here –
It's not as bad.
What was that?
Is it not as bad?
I told you, Da Bomb's the worst man.
Wow. Well hold on, before I speak to soon, but wow. Da Bomb was horrible!
There you go, if you ever want to torture your friends everyone.
Okay, fixed assets – wow god, that's so great. I mean it's still horrible, but it's not as bad as the last one. Alright, so fixed assets. The way that we do fixed assets – what you were seeing us do is work with our different workflows, okay? So now we're in FinOptimal – yeah this is still not good either though, Jesus.
It's a slow burn.
Alright so we got expenses and we got revenue, but we got two fixed asset workflows. Tyler why do we have multiple fixed asset workflows?
Because you need to close your fixed assets over different periods. You know, computers over what, three years? I can't remember dates FF&E over 15 or 7, I don't know numbers anymore.
Yeah I'm just asking you questions because I'm just trying to get more milk. Alright, so the reason we do it this way is for each fixed asset workflow, you set one fixed asset account, and then you pick the useful life for that. Did we lose Tyler? Did he just fall backstage? We lost Tyler,
that's it.
Oh he's back, hold on.
Hit a button.
Alright, say that, run that back, say that again.
Hit a button, go on.
Alright, so for each fixed asset account, you have one fixed asset workflow. Computers and tablets in this case, I've set it to 36 months. You could set it to whatever you'd like it to be, okay? Pick a number, any number. Fixed end date, fixed start date, lease hold improvement, cav software, we thought of all of it. There's also a disposal module, but let's talk about how easy it is to do fixed assets. You book it to this account in QBO, it's going to depreciate it over that period of time. Again, bank feed, bill, check – we don't care. Yeah that one's like a, that's a sneaky one, Tyler. Like it was wasn't bad at first, but now it is really creeping up big time.
It's okay, power though, you got this homie.
And release.
Um, I literally just booked something to this account, I don't write anything in the description, $26,000 over 36 months, you're done. That's it. You do not need to write "for the period". But Tyler, why would you write "for the period"?
I was just going to ask a plant question, what if I have a client who is putting this as a leasehold improvement at a certain property, and they only got four years left on the lease? Well that would be a different, that's a different answer actually. So if it is that, what I would do is I would actually come in here and I create a new workflow.
That's a fair point.
And I would set a fixed end date, and I would pick the "lease end date," look at that. You set me up without even realizing it.
That's what I'm here for man.
Here's a different question. Like let's say, um, I spilled milk all over my laptop and then Jesse fired me. And then he sold this laptop to somebody else, and they wanted to depreciate it but it's not worth three years anymore, it's worth two years because someone who got fired spilled milk on it. Okay, so then you're gonna write "for the period October 2024 to September 2026" and it'll now do two years starting in October over that period of time, rather than a default 36 months.
But it will still do it to the right active account, right?
Yes, it'll still do it to the same account, you don't need unique fixed asset accounts for each individual asset. You can deviate on the asset by asset basis. Alright. Anything else? Jesse how'd I do? How'd we do?
You still got to make it through the last minute and a half though.
Tom, I feel like you got to polish it off with one more Da Bomb. No, no shot dude. Literally, literally no shot.
I feel like Tyler has a lot more bottles back there.
I do.
Maybe when we eventually do one of these for Booker, depending on how well this actually went, I'll do more Da Bomb or something else. Um, alright, do we have any banners of like, where to find us and stuff like that, or do we not think that far ahead? Alright, yeah we do. So if anybody who's not using this right now and wants to, you can use that code HOTAPPS and you'll get 50% off for the first three months. Just go to finoptimal.app. It's linked above, or it's attached to any one of our LinkedIn pages. If you can't find it, I don't think you'll actually be able to set up Accruer, so just go figure it out. Um, Tyler where can they find UnAccountable?
Oh yeah, go to unaccountable.co. Search us in any of your favorite podcast apps. We probably have some of the worst five star reviews out there, it's great, feel free to add to them. Uh, yeah!
Nice, if anyone needs any help–
I feel so sick. I feel sick. Like, my stomach feels horrible right now. I just drank like, half a gallon of milk.
You should definitely call an ambulance and have them drive you straight to "you asked for it."
What they don't tell you is that the worst part of this for your body is probably all the milk. Um, but if anybody wants any additional help or support getting started, you know where to find us. You can DM any of us on LinkedIn. Um, and we'll be there to help you out.
Okay, can we stop now?
Yeah we can stop.
Thank you.
Get back to work.
Yeah, get back to work.
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