Brian Tankersley, CPA, and Randy Johnston review Apxium, a system that automates the accounts receivable process and compliance work for accounting firms.
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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab sponsored by CPA practice advisor. With your hosts, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley,
Randy Johnston 00:11
welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with co host Brian Tankersley, we want to talk to you about a payment system called axiom. Now, axiom we’ve known about for some time. It’s been around about 10 years. It was founded in 2016 in Australia, up in Adelaide, and we’ve talked to Jeremy come with one of the founders, and he’s got local talent as well nowadays. But these guys have done a really good job at getting payment systems implemented in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. Now there’s lots of cost and operational systems that are possible here. They have integrated a lot with a lot of the practice management systems that are out there, and these are run in AWS data centers here in the US for safety purposes. So Brian, you know, that’s kind of the quick overview of Axiom. But what might you want our listeners to know about the platform?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 01:06
Well, they do have a wide range of a wide range of firms here, including quite a few top 100 firms. You know, just kind of glancing at this, you know, it’s not just, not just global firms. But again, if you look at the right hand side of this slide, you can see that they’re citing Baker, Tilly and Kraft and I Bailey and Greer Walker and Crow and Warren Avery and, you know, again, many, many other big firms that are known, that are known in the US. So, so they’ve got great things here. Again, this integrated payment system problem is a is a problem that, again, quick fee and others are also addressing the the thing about the thing about this is that there’s so much Byzantine, busy work that comes along with not having an integrated payment system, because we have to make sure that we have to Bill people. We have to make sure they get, they pay. And we have to make sure. We have to, you know, we have to figure out how to negotiate payments, payment plans with people if they’re way behind in their receivables, so that we can continue to do their work. And again, we’ve got, we’ve got all kinds of things like this. And so again, the the thing here is that when we have these private equity investments, they expect to get paid, and they expect to get paid on time. And that’s that, again, that that means that having some of the cash flow issues that accounting firms have historically had is not going to be as acceptable as it has been. So
Randy Johnston 02:33
yeah. So you know what really happened to this? You know, I was aware of the system, but Nick Hellman, who’s their executive VP of sales and strategy here in North America, reached out say, you know, we want to make sure that you and Brian have seen the platform. We did have demonstrations on it. I’ve got clients on axiom. And one of the benefits of this platform is it will reduce DSO by up to 30% they claim, which is, I believe, true. And their automation in their billing and practice management integrations, claim that they can reduce administrative time by up to 90% that is pretty close to true also and clients of our firms are more likely to pay on time if they’re provided with online payment options. Many of us in the profession have resisted that because of credit card fees. And you know, many states are now allowing us to charge back those fees, and a lot of people are doing that. And axiom allows that as well. And if we can just get firms to reduce time spent on AR, we can do other value added activities, pretty straightforward in terms of the business proposition. All of the competitors like you just named quick V CPA charge, I win, and others are making the same basic claims, and I think most of them are pretty true. So that said, once you get past the benefits of the integrated payment system, these systems globally like linked to payment gateways, so you wind up getting connections to almost all banks. I think most of your firms will be dealing with a bank that can accept the integrations. One of the things that Jeremy said to Brian and I, which I believe to be true, they’re exceptionally technically competent, with all their programmers on the staff, not contract and because of that, if they get a request, they’re likely to implement it, because they figure some of the firm will want it too. So, you know, if you are using a community bank that’s very small and not been integrated, these guys are very likely to take the work to build it, and this integration is a big advantage of them. You know, they’re dealing with all of the dominant practice management systems, the CCH, the Thomson, Reuters, the iris star becoming firm management and in Australia and other markets, things like reckon are already on their cloud, and they’re integrated with Xero and MYOB and Acumatica and a whole lot of the accounting software products. But. You know, in their particular case, they provide Remote Connectivity both read and write, not on all systems, but most systems. So they can pull live client data from practice management into their payment system, and they can do the billing and write the payments and write the bills and post the payments back into the system, into your practice management. So this data synchronization lets you see invoice balances pretty much in real time. You can also see over and under payments, duplicated invoices, on reconciled payments, that type of thing is inside their system. They also have direct ACH globally, and the ACH that they’re doing is fee light. It’s not fee free, like a forwardly, like we’ve talked about another technology lab, but they also handle credit cards, and they have a very interesting, smart invoicing approach that they use, and they pull in a lot of legal regulations. So that’s a kind of a long rant of a lot of different things that they do, but it’s pretty bloody and pressing. So Brian, talk to us a little bit about the end to end AR type of approach that this axiom platform provides.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:15
Well, again, there, there are three separate modules. There’s engagement, direct debit, or again, for the for the recurring monthly engagements, where, again, you just, just like your just like your mortgage payment and your credit card payment may get debited out of your bank account. The idea here is that you, you set up an engagement thing and then it gets direct debited. But they, you know, in some platform, some platforms only support this. They also this Appium, however, also supports regular billing where, again, you go through and you have a invoice, statements and other things to get integrated into a portal in the payment gateway, and then the payments get automatically posted. But they also have these funding solutions. When you got somebody that’s behind and maybe they’re having financial trouble in their business, and they need to get on a payment plan, or they need some extended credit terms, you know. Again, I’ve often told clients that, you know, there are banks out there, but the Bank of Brian is not one of yours, you know. And I’m, you know, I’m glad to help you, but you know, I’m, I’m, I’m not in a position to be your bank, and
Randy Johnston 07:22
you know that particular issue on the tax debt funding as a direct example. I recently worked in a firm that specializes in resolution, not just tax resolution, but just resolution, which was fascinating, because they were talking about, you know, the payment plans and how they worked with the IRS to make those happen, not only on tax, but on some other issues. And it was like, huh, this is a smart structure, which we will talk to you about in other technology labs. But you know this idea that they can do engagement and direct debit with zero DSO, which is the way we like firms to run their CAS practices. So Brian and I have taught you to do that for some years. You know, debiting the client account on the 25th of the month, whatever to make sure that you’re paid in advance, or automating your regular billing. I’ve listened to so many broken billing processes in firms that just makes my skin crawl. I feel bad for the partners. I feel bad for the staff and managers. I feel bad for the admin people. I feel bad for clients and then, of course, the whole funding, you know, this really first surfaced in my vision with Quick feet. They were very good at doing that. And others, you know, have been doing it for a while. I just wasn’t thinking about it as much I probably should have. But axiom helps with communications. They can handle multiple entities in their client portal. They’re handling all these payment engagement and auto debits. They have a full merchant dashboard and a lot of AR tools and the funding overall, a very interesting end to end system. So maybe a few more details in these different modules might help you see what they’re doing today. But you know the whole idea of data integration with them. This ability to read and write and give real time monitoring is what you’re getting when you’re paying for and buying the axiom platform. It’s all native integration that they’ve written from scratch. It’s integrated with both hosted or cloud based systems SaaS systems, as well as server based client server systems that you have, and all of that is supported by their own technical team. And again, I actually kind of like it when I know I’m dealing with the vendors directly. So Brian, when it comes to the basic engagement and payment systems, they refer to as module one. What should our listeners know about that?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 09:45
Well, they set up all the communications with enabled client specific smart links, and the invoices are sent automatically. Statements can be sent monthly or On Demand, and you can, you can set up what I refer to as auto nag or reminders. Where you can have different timing and messaging, and you can, again, make that feel, make that fit your client experience that you’re trying to create. They do have a communication simulator so you can see what this is going to look like when you push this out in bulk, and it is triggered directly from within your practice management system. Now, when we look at this again, this full suite communication engine, you can see in here they’re sending from Star and practice engine. They’re sending invoices and statements. The invoices are attached, and then they’re also sending out, again, those statements and reminders. They also have a multi entity client portal and direct access via smart links. You don’t have to keep up with the password. They just send you, send you a link that lets you in whenever you want it. They have multi entity mapping, so you can have parent child relationships, or, you know, work with controlled groups and family family offices, and have segregation between the different entities. You can get continuous access to all the PDF invoices and do data synchronization with your Pm systems. The finance charges are visible and can be paid in the portal, and they do have a wide range of options, as well as as well as good historical information reporting. Now on payments, they accept pretty much everything in here, except Except barter and bright shells. Okay, so Visa, MasterCard, at American Express discovers. They also will surcharge where permitted, and they can turn it off as well. You can have, you can have credit limits and again, Ach, check, EFT, payments, settlement, reconcilement, reconciliation. You can clear the financials, you know, again, with at the end of each day for simplified cash reconciliation and and again, the firm name is reflected on all those client banking statements, so they’ll see where it’s coming from. They also have a merchant dashboard and toolkit that, again, gives you the ability to have different roles and permissions in the firm, so that not everybody has to have full access to everything. They also have multi factor authentication and a dashboard reporting, as well as a live payment view that you can watch in real time and a built in point of sale. Now Randy tell us a little bit about the automated debits feature that they have, yeah,
Randy Johnston 12:23
so you know, in this particular case, they can fully plumb practice management invoices to receive those payments. They also will do an engagement letter on the front end. Now, in other sessions, we’ve talked about engagement letter products, the news and ignitions and some of these type of things, but the engagement letter automation is completely inside the system as well. They also have an E signature built inside their engagement letters, and everything inside the system is is PCI compatible. So I have asked you in other technology labs to think about your end to end processes. And axiom has what I think is a full end to end process, minus they don’t really have the business development CRM on the front side, but they’ve got it all the way through the deliverable on the backside. So this is pretty good in terms of one solution to go end to end.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 13:21
Yeah, yeah. So cool, cool. And And again, when we get into the funding, this is one of the pieces that’s most interesting here, where, again, they offer not just the invoice, the invoice funding where you pay over time, but they also have whole book funding so that they can, again, you can, you can take care of your cash flow acceleration. You know, that’s a big deal for the firms that are really focused. On seasonal, seasonal type work. And so it’s, again, if you have extreme seasonality, this may be something that’s appealing to you. They also have tax debt funding to help your clients fund their tax debts, and again, help them, help the clients pay back over time and again, that’s that’s a big deal. I’ve known some people that have had tax problems in the past, and I’ve known firms that have had that again, have gone through and had this, you know, have needed this service for part of their tax resolution business. And I think this is one of the bigger deals of all, because in so many cases, if somebody has a federal tax lien against them or a state tax lien, that makes them largely unbankable. And so this is, I think this is a pretty exciting thing that they’ve got going on. And
Randy Johnston 14:31
those of you who are involved with that know that the payment calculations vary pretty widely depending on the terms you’re inside or outside of service and so forth. And many of the payment systems don’t accommodate the payments and the variability, particularly the final wrap up payments and so forth. But I believe this system does do it correctly. Well, you can hear there’s lots of capabilities inside here. Vendor intends to have automatic reconciliation within the you. Coming year and making sure that all external payments are auto reconciled. And that really is because not all clients pay via the payment dashboard. In other words, they have accounts payable departments. It also will accommodate a lot of the wire and check payment things further, these guys have built a pretty good OCR capability and optical character recognition capability on the bank feeds and any other remittance notice. So they’re innovating on the platform all the time. They’ve been at it in years or so. So it makes kind of sense that they would. So probably the last thing that I usually wrap our technology labs up when we’re doing a product specific thing is pricing. So, Brian, can you describe the pricing for our listeners?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 15:44
Sure, sure. So everybody pays the $2,500 one time implementation fee. And then for the you know, again, you can have unlimited merchant users with a monthly SAS fee that is $60 per million. Dollars if you’re less than 10 million, minimum is 350 thereafter it’s three it’s $350 per million capped, it kept at $1,500 per million, and $1,500 per 100 million above 100 million. And so again, it scales pretty nicely as far as the transaction fees go, the credit card interchange plus plus 70 basis points plus 20 cents, and again, you can recover that through surcharging AC, ACH and EFT, two tenths of a percent. Minimum, $1 maximum, $5 per payment, and automatic debit is $1 per payment.
Randy Johnston 16:33
Yeah, so I think Brian, just one correction. I think you said thereafter, 350 but it’s $30 per million. So I just want to make sure that that was heard correctly. But again, we’re not here to tell you what the pricing is, but I’m going to tell you that those rates, you know, for the automation seem reasonable to me. We wanted you to be aware of this particular system because it’s got lots of very interesting features with the two way automations into the practice managements, the engagement letters, the E signatures. It’s an all around end to end payment system that you could use in your firm, or you could use for some of your clients on the right platforms, like Acumatica zero or other platforms. So Brian, any parting thoughts on axiom. I think we might have it
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 17:21
well. I think we’ve got it pretty well. I think the, I think, in general, you know, the one of the things that we keep talking about is automation and AI and other technologies, letting the technology do the work. And this is a great example of where you can take technology and bring together banking, financial services, and solve a lot of problems, not only for yourself, but also for your clients, with this integrated solution. So it’s, I think it’s certainly worth a look.
Randy Johnston 17:48
It is certainly worth a look. Well, we appreciate you listening in. We’ll talk to you again soon in another technology accounting lab. You have a good day.
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Tags: Accounting, review, Technology