Bri-anna Ramsden   0:06
So everyone, welcome to our latest webinar, the Great Plains Migration Road map for nonprofits. We're going to let a few people get in right before we get started.
So today, this is our agenda. We are going to start with introductions and polls to our speakers, chat about the growing risks of Great Plains, what nonprofits will need next. The migration road map and little mini demo in AQ and A at the end, before I introduce our speakers, though, I want to.
Start with a little housekeeping. So I'm going to ask everyone to keep their mics off when they're not speaking. I know in my house I have a bunch of noisy pets that'll really like to steal the show away from us, but I'll save the pet show and tell for another day. Please feel free to put your questions in the Q&A, but we also have time at the end for questions.
A copy of this recording will be sent to you by e-mail within the next 5 business days and saving the best for last. We do have an exclusive webinar offer at the end of this recording, so please stick around to learn more. And with that I'll pass it off to Gary.

Kinley Graham   1:20
Yeah.

Gary Servius   1:24
Hello everyone. My name is Gary. I am an account executive at Spark Rock. Been in the space for over 15 years and I'm really excited about today conversation and hopefully I'll get to chat with some of you after the webinar and I'm going to turn over to Kinley for him to introduce himself.

Kinley Graham   1:43
Hi, my name is Kenley Graham. I'm the director of presales here at Sparkrock. I've been here for about 10 years and I was a customer for five years before that. Yeah, that's about it. I'm going to pass it over to Wendy here.

Bri-anna Ramsden   1:58
And.

Wendy Brown   1:58
Thanks, kinley. Good afternoon everyone or good morning, depending on where you're joining us from, I'm going to be your tour guide today for our mini demo towards the end part of this session, my background I've been working with organisations like yours since.
1997 to help them move from paper based processes to digital experiences, so I look forward to sharing what we have to offer today.
And I'll pass that on to Bree, I guess.

Bri-anna Ramsden   2:37
Yes, and I almost start talking with the mic on. That's how you start a good webinar. So I'm Bree ramson. I'm the marketing manager here at Sparkrock, and I'll be hiding behind the polls here. So I want to ask you a question.
To get started, because we're going to start thinking about great planes and how you might be moving off them. So what version of great planes are you on?
You on 20/18/2016 2015 earlier or you're not on Great Plains but you're here to learn more.

Kinley Graham   3:19
It's like 2018 is pretty popular.

Bri-anna Ramsden   3:25
Yeah, look at that.

Kinley Graham   3:25
But that's good. That means people are staying up to date.

Bri-anna Ramsden   3:29
Yes.

Kinley Graham   3:30
Like that. That's good news. That's smart.

Bri-anna Ramsden   3:32
It's very important, especially when I think about security and everything going on.

Carol Cressman   3:36
Yeah.
Yeah.

Bri-anna Ramsden   3:43
And now question #2.
How long has your organisation been using Great Plains? Less than five years, 5 to 1011 to 20, more than 20 or NA? Or you just don't know.

Kinley Graham   3:47
Wow.
This one's going to be super interesting.

Bri-anna Ramsden   4:03
Yeah, this one's cool. Let's.
Long time. Look at that.

Kinley Graham   4:09
Oh yeah, I see when when I first purchased dynamics NAV it was what, 15 years ago. So I can see why we're in that 10 to 20 year range, but that's great to see. It's especially great to see that you guys have been on those you've been on.
Great planes for that long and you're on 2018, so that means you're keeping up to date and you're moving forward with the updates and everything else, which is fantastic to hear because security is super important and we know that as we move forward and the old products go away, that they stop supporting them.

Bri-anna Ramsden   4:49
So now pass it over to Gary to get started with the webinar.

Gary Servius   5:01
All right. Thank you, Bri. So GP is reaching end of life. I think everybody got the memo, right. Microsoft has been communicating around it for a while now. And one of the big questions that a lot of organisation are asking themselves.
Is how soon should I start planning? So I think it is important to start the conversation by talking about the growing risk of staying on great planes. And there are three big risks #1, planning and timing is everything.
And you have less time than you think. Unfortunately, #2 great plane is becoming a secret and compliance liability. The longer you will stay on the platform, the more exposed you will become. A #3 generic ERP, Kent.
Meet nonprofit requirements.
But before going through each of those challenges, let's first see what the GP end of Life timeline looks like. So in less than three months from now, as of April, first GP will stop selling new customer licences, so no more new customer on GP.
Next year in 2027, we'll see an implementation rush where organisation that have waited last minute to migrate will end up actually competing for implementation spot and we will see why in the next slide and why it is actually important to understand this timeline.
The following year, the December 2028 release will be the last version to include the year end tax date and then the official end of life date will come on December 31st, 2029 when GP will no longer provide any Technical Support.
So after that date, if you need any technical assistance, well you are on your own and GP will have then officially entered what is called the maintenance mode where they will only provide critical security updates and they will provide those update all the way to April 30th 2031.
After which there will be no more security update at all.
All right, so now we have a clear idea of what the timeline is. So let's talk about the the challenges.
You have less time than you think, so some of you may say, well, Gary, you say that they are updates all the way till 2031. So we have plenty of time. It seems right. So First off, let's say that we will not recommend anyone to expose their organisation to the risk of running a solution that is no longer supported.
By its provider, right, so we will not even recommend staying on the GP past the official end of life, a date which is December 29. But in all cases right there are a few things to consider.
That will deeply impact how you should look at this timeline.
First off, AGP transition requires several steps and unfortunately and I see that almost every day right, it is very common for organisation to underestimate what it actually takes. Going from evaluating the different solution available.
To contracting with a new vendor and then migrating to a new platform like at least.
At the very minimum 12 N and this is very minimum.
You also have to think about the expertise around GP, right, the partners, the consultant that provide those services today, you have to think about their business. They no longer have new client on GP. They are seeing their existing client migrating to other platform, right.
So you can trust that they are actually already shifting their business to focus on modern cloud solution like Microsoft Business Central, right? So that expertise is actually shrinking by the day then adding to that that thousand and thousand of GP customer are or will be asking for help at the.
The same time, right. And we already know that there will be way more demand that partner capacity, the closer you get to the end of the life date, the more difficult it will be to actually access qualified partner.
So let's look at some actual number, right? To really understand the situation, there are about 30,000 organisation that are still using red planes today, right? And out of those, 57% have announced that they are not planning to migrate before.
The end of life date, which means that 17,000 of the organisation will be rushing to migrate after December 31st, 2029 and this is a lot of risk and pressure to put on your organisation and knowing that the average ERP migration can take up to 12 months from evaluating to go live, right.
This would result in a huge capacity overload.
But we there is more.
For specialised organisation like nonprofit right, this is actually amplified.
So you already have a market where you have less expert, less partners, less consultant and less truly viable option. So the more you wait, the more challenge you will be facing, right and it goes the same for the challenge #2 around security, right? The more you wait.
So more GP become a security and compliance liability and I'm going to hand it over to Kinley to cover this next challenge.

Kinley Graham   10:53
Sorry about that and a weird technical glitch there. So as I was saying earlier about the versions and it's great to see that everyone has kept up on their versioning on 2018. It's the the compliance in this case is going to become more and more risky.
As products reach the end of life, they are more of a target for lots of different nefarious people, let's say. And as we've seen in areas like Windows, if any of you are in IT, with Windows 10 reaching end of life, there's a giant push to get up to Windows 11 to stay compliant.
And stay safe and all that kind of stuff. The closer and closer we get to this deadline, the more and more people are going to be looking at this as an opportunity or a potential attack vector. Everything is great up until there's no more security updates, but once there's no more security updates, it's going to be a liability.
To lots of organisations and they're going to need to get off in a hurry. When I was a customer, this was something that we all had to deal with with different versions of Windows Server and we had to deal with it with on premise installations. One of the great beauties of cloud based software and SAS in general is that they're constantly updating.
In this case, with Great Plains, Microsoft had originally announced an end of life sooner than this. They've now extended it, and it's until December 31st, 2029, and they're not going to release any more security updates after it all. So we want to make sure that we're correctly articulating that right now, there's nothing really to worry about.
And it's something that we just want to encourage people to move off the platform so that they can be in compliance for audit and all sorts of other reasons. So hopefully everyone's starting to schedule and plan these things. I'm sure your IT departments have talked about Windows 10, but in this case it's something to start planning for now.
I'm going to pass that back to Gary and let him keep going.

Gary Servius   12:51
Thank you, kinley. So, so far all the challenges that we've discussed will impact anyone using Microsoft GP, right? But you are not anyone. You are a nonprofit organisation, so you are kind of special, right?
And as we've seen from the poll right, most of you has been using Microsoft GP for for decades, so you may not be aware of the state of the ERP market today, right? What is out there, what's available, right. The first thing that you absolutely need to know is that.
The vast majority of the solution available out there, including the big names right, are generic ERP solution that were specifically built for businesses, right. And businesses are extremely different from nonprofit. I'm sure you're not learning anything when I say that, right. But businesses are focused on their revenue, their sales, their.
Margin, their inventory maybe right when you think about non profit right, you are focused on the expenses, the money going out of the organisation, right? It's all about how you spend that money making sure that every cent is properly accounted for right? Especially whilst it's too much report back to your funders.
So you have to think about requirements around requisition, invoice approval around project rent, accounting rate around specific reports that you have that do not exist for the for profit organisation. And because those generic ERP solution are not suitable for nonprofit workflows, right, they are something that require.
A lot of customization, a lot of workaround, manual processes, and end up being extremely expensive. And when I say expensive, it's not just in terms of dollar value, right, but also in terms of time, in terms of effort, in terms of resources, and even now many of the nonprofit organisation using GP are currently using extensive workarounds, right?
Exercise like the A A segment, the custom SQL reporting right or exported Excel sheet to track spending a background cycle and really GP reaching enough life should be seen as an opportunity to modernise your ERP solution for a solution that works for you, right?
It is designed specifically for you with your needs and requirements in mind.
All right, so where does that leave us? Right. So that leave us with three options, really. Like 3 path that you could take for your GP migration. So number one, you could say, like Gary, we don't care about what you said, right. I will just stay and wait after December 2029 to figure things out.
In that case, she's just delaying what is inevitable and maybe make it more difficult down the road, but this is definitely an option.
The path #2 would be to migrate to Microsoft Business Central.
And Microsoft dynamic business Central is actually the logical and natural a great path from Microsoft GP right. Business Central was actually designed to be the successor of GP. This is Microsoft solution will be compatible with most of your Microsoft tools and different solution that you're using.
And Microsoft has designed a smooth path to migrate your data from GP to business central rate. So this is a clear, easy and straightforward path, right? But here's the thing, this is a perfect natural upgrade path from GP, but not for you, not for non for profit unfortunately.
Business Central is a great, robust, beautifully designed solution for businesses. And like any generic ERP solution for you, it means a lot of manual processes. Early I mentioned how the generic ERP solution does not work for non.
Profit, right. And what you see on the screen here, actually the area where the absence of workflow designed for nonprofit really hurts and creates a lot of pinpoints, right reporting, budgeting, employee expense, claim purchase to pay workflow, credit card reconciliation, right.
This is where nonprofit have the most pain, and those solution cannot help you. Those solution were not built for that.
So what's left? Right. So what's left is the last path we have, which is choose a specialised ERP solution, so specialised organisation requires specialised solution, right? And here comes spark rug impact.
A solution specifically designed for nonprofit with all the automation around your everyday task like expense claim, credit card reconciliation, a powerful purchase to pay workflow, full visibility and control over budget, the ability to track.
Grants and project in real time, right? The solution is really designed to help nonprofit to reduce manual work, eliminate errors, streamline processes, improve visibility, ensure compliance with funders, and audit requirement.
And even going beyond finance, right, you can easily support payroll benefits or rule across multiple unions and much more, right? Ultimately, it's all about control, visibility, efficiency and compliance all in one system.
And the beauty of that one system that it's built on top of Microsoft Dynamic business Central and sits and live within the Microsoft 365 environment, right? So remember earlier I told you that Microsoft has designed business central as natural and logical upgrade path from Microsoft GP, right?
So with Spark Rock You can actually take advantage of this. You have the benefit of the Microsoft infrastructure, the security, the stability, the interconnectivity within the Microsoft ecosystem. You have it all. And on top of that, you are benefiting from layers and layers of capabilities and features.
That were designed specifically for nonprofit thanks to 23 years of experience, expertise and deep knowledge of the nonprofit sector.
And when I talk about layers and layers of functionality, right, here's a slide that will make it perfectly clear. Well, hopefully will make it perfectly clear here. You can see the extent of the modules available within Sparkrock, right?
You can see this as a capability map of what Spark rock can do. Some of you may need finance only Ozer finance and HRP or scheduling and so on, right. And really what we would like to show you here.
Is the level of functionalities that we added on top of business central to meet the needs of non for profit organisation.
The modules that you see here in purple or maybe magenta, I guess right AR inventory management, cash management rate, our module from business central that we touch the list we modify or improve less than 50% of those functionality.
When you look at the one in blue, right, we tremendously improve the original functionality by more than 50% to meet the needs of all nonprofit customer. You look at AP fixed asset budget management GL.
Purchasing or even power BI, which is already huge, right? But then when you look at the functionality in yellow or orangeish, right, those are 100% Spark rock. Those functionalities do not exist at all in business central.
And we're more reputation built for you, right? And they're absolutely critical to nonprofit fund accounting project and current accounting requisition management commitment and encumbrances expense claim the entire HR and payroll.
Section and so on.
But those are not just a bunch of modules that you have here, right? All you see here is within one single solution, one single application that is fully integrated. All those module that you see are are interconnected. And as I said earlier, specialised organisation.
Need a specialised solution.
All right, so now that you understand the GPN of lifetimeline, you understand the challenges and understand the migration option right? Would like maybe to break down the migration timeline a little bit, right? And walk you through what those 12 month of evaluation to migration actually look like and I'm going to hand it back to Kinley.
To call that section.

Kinley Graham   21:30
Thanks, Gary. So my journey at Sparkrock started as a customer for five years. I purchased the software, I used the software, it was the full finance, HR, payroll, everything. I upgraded the software long ago when it was on premise, before this great world of SAS.
And when I came to work here, I started as a finance consultant. I've worked in most of the departments within the organisation and it's given me a kind of a different viewpoint that I now get to share with organisations. Like all of you, when you're looking at doing things like this. So we've created a really great guide that's just to help in general the.
Moving process from 1 system to another. So our very first step in all of this is probably where a lot of you are right now and you're a set you're thinking about. OK, we're gonna have to move off this platform. So what? What do I need to do first? Like, do I run out there and go in contact? All sorts of organisations?
And have them come to me with ideas. Do I go out and shop for it like I'm shopping for a car? Well, we've come up with this guide and the first step that we suggest everyone do is assess your current state. You're going to go, and you're going to look at what's going on right now.
You want to see where your workflows are, how they flow, what you're doing, you're going to want to determine how reliable you are on all a reliant. You are on all these outside systems. Do you keep lots of stuff in Excel that that's a real pain. Are you still using some paper processes for certain things? Do you have approvals you can't do?
That you wish you could do. Are people able to do self-service reporting like you want? There are lots of things that you have the opportunity right now to go and assess where you are and basically create your dream list, list, whatever your wish list is that you hope someone could come along and wave a magic wand and it would solve all the problems.
Make everything better. The best thing to do is just sit down and make the list. Get a hold of your stakeholders and assess exactly what's going on right now in your organisation.
The next thing you're going to go and do is you're going to go and you're going to develop a vendor checklist, so you're going to take that information, you're going to compile it together and you're going to work with your internal teams and you're going to figure out what things matter the most to us. What things matter, the least, what things are in the middle.
Yeah.
You can take that and you can kind of make a matrix out of it. Excel works well. Lots of other tools work, but you're gonna go and you're gonna go and look for the softwares that you think are gonna tick some of these boxes and then you can make little check Marks and see which ones have what. What are you looking for? Do you want something where you don't have to have infrastructure and updates happen on their own? OK you want.
It's good SaaS solution, constantly ongoing. Do you never want to have to update again like a big huge change? Again, you're going to look at that SaaS solution. Do you need stuff like fund accounting, auto fund balancing? Do you want to have nice dimension chart of accounts or do you do you like your segmented GL you have now?
Or not have now or might currently have what kind of purchasing items do you need? Fixed asset features? What's nice to have? I know a lot of organisations and in Canada specifically are having to do tangible capital asset posting. Depending on your reporting, things like that, what would?
Make your life easier. So you're gonna make this really good checklist of what you're looking for in the system.
Now the next thing you're going to do in there before we get to finalising the shortlist is you're going to pick which vendors you want to go out and ask for these demos and then like we're saying here, go to them, you're going to.
Meet with them. Ask them some questions, potentially send them an RFP of sorts, so you can have your three quotes and your multiple pieces of information.
Once you go and you are shortlisting your vendors, you're going to want to plan off a certain chunk of time. In this case, we're saying 90 days in total is kind of our suggestion. It realistically takes about 3 months, so you want to figure out when you're going to have your demos organise your internal team that are going to attend those demos, come up with your criteria.
For evaluating everybody. You're gonna wanna then have those demos. You're gonna wanna score them. You're going to want to go through references. All the final negotiation and all that fun stuff. Now, at the end of the call, we're gonna provide everybody with a recording, and we're also gonna provide everyone with.
A downloadable ERP assessment guide. It's it's definitely not specific to sparkrock. We just want to help you in in this journey.
So at this point, you've gone and you've selected that vendor, you've got your agreement all in place. You figured out what you're gonna do. The next thing you're gonna do is you're gonna have an implementation kick off. This is where you're gonna take your resources, and you're gonna inform your vendor. These are the resources I have.
Windows there available. This is when they're not available and then with the vendor you're gonna make a project plan and that project plan is gonna lay out when things are gonna be completed in what order, who's doing what? Excuse me. And taking into account all of those blackout periods and restrictions, we all know that during an.
Audit is not the time to be doing UAT testing so.
With that, you're going to confirm all the scope those roles you're going to have all your internal alignment. The vendor is going to have alignment with you, and you're going to build your entire change management road map, because a part of this is going to be that you're going to want to change and improve things through this process because this is the best opportunity to do that.
So as a part of this, you're gonna go through, and you're gonna do some process mapping. Probably you're gonna figure out where your own bottlenecks are, and your vendor's gonna help you do this. You're gonna sit down and you're gonna talk about how AP flows, how fixed assets flow, how purchasing flows, your approvals, all that stuff, so that the system can be configured in the best.
Way possible for you to save time and do things as well as you can. So as it shows on the slide, you're gonna go and whiteboard these things out. You map the current process, you define what the future state is going to look like, what it would look like. But we have a key item on here that is kind of separate there the document approval.
And.
Budget controls. We've really seen that this is a place where efficiency can really be gained in a change of system by distributing that authority, allowing people to make decisions and have information upfront and get the right approvals in a timely manner without chasing people without having to figure out who you're waiting for.
Where the approval is stuck, it really comes in handy to have this mapped out and set up to be as automatic as possible. The next thing is data readiness. This one I find really fun because our legacy systems, especially if you've been on them for 10 to 20 years, there's lots of data in there, some of it.
You don't necessarily need. There are different ways to back up and store this data for long term use and going through and making some key choices at this stage can really save you a lot of time and money. Things like master data, get rid of the vendors and customers. You really don't need and don't matter. You haven't used in a long time.
Restructure your chart of accounts in key ways and take advantage of dimensionality because it really speeds up reporting transactional data, you have many choices. You do have compliance requirements to keep the data, but all that data doesn't necessarily have to be migrated.
You could take annual balances along with current year detailed actuals and have enough data to do year over year comparisons. Do all your reporting lots of good stuff without having to migrate the detail of all of that history. In some cases migrating all of the history makes sense and perfectly able to do that. Just trying to think about the.
Overall cost of implementations and what you're taking on the last one here is scans, documents and images. Those kind of things depending on how you're currently working might be in the system might not be if they're in the system, they don't necessarily all have to be migrated. There are many different ways to go about storing those things along with that financial data.
One big thing here is you don't want to recreate GP exactly just for the sake of recreating the same thing. We understand very well that lots of people are comfortable and change can be hard, but this is the opportunity where everyone can list the changes that they want for.
Used to be better.
OK, so once you've gone and you've done that, you're going to be working with your vendor and your vendor's going to go off likely and they're going to do the core configuration. This is by taking your legacy data combined with speaking to you and talking to you to populate, you know, chart of accounts, dimensions set up your fiscal year, you're going to set up funds and grants and all the other dimensions and dimension values.
Values. So this is like all of your core GL bank APAR. Those workflows are set up adding in budget controls and those kind of things is something you're going to have upfront. What level of granularity are you going to have on your budget? What security, what roles? All that stuff?
So you don't want to wait on all of this stuff. You're going to be involved with your vendor all through this to make sure the system is set up that the best it can be for you going forward. Once that's set up, that's the basic configuration. That's like framing the house.
Now you're going to go and you're going to finish the house. This is where you have the advanced configuration and testing now. I talked about approvals earlier. I talked about the budget granularity, but this is the point that your approvals go in. This is figuring out who's going to approve this, who's going to approve that if it's over the budget, what happens? Is it going to?
Just be dead in the water right there, cuz there's no budget. Or are you gonna have the big scary me budget approver that it shows up to only in the case that you're over budget, those kind of things are items that you can get in at this point set up and when you're training all of your end users, it all comes as one big package. This is the new way that it's going to be structured.
These are all the benefits. It's gonna save you this time. We understand it's hard, but it's all for the better. And we're all changing at the same time. And we can all do it. This is the point that you're also setting up certain exception based items you're gonna build out role based dashboards, which in the case of sparkrock.
You can go and you can individually customise your own experience, but you can always do a customization of an entire role that applies to everybody. Let's say that nobody ever has to go into something like a fixed asset. I think that would be kind of a weird world, but it can definitely happen. You can customise the role centre so fixed assets don't show up for anyone.
Things like that.
So the next thing is user acceptance testing and this is the part that it takes focus to get your timeline as short as possible and to reduce cost as much as possible when you're doing your schedule with your vendor, you want to find a way to compartmentalise your UAT testing.
We all know everyone is busy. You've got people doing two and three jobs at the same time and testing a new system kind of can take a backseat if at all possible. Find backfill, find ways to fence off your resources so you can do this testing in a very short time.
It creates this really great result and the result is from people focusing on making sure it works, making sure there's no errors, but it also takes that training and it burns it into the back of your head. That way you're not going to forget how to do things. So this is the state at which you go through, you do your end to end testing and any issues.
You go and you resolve them in the configuration system with your vendor. So this is validating the end to end workflows. This can be stress testing the system in things like payroll. Running a full payroll you can go and you can test the security and restrictions you have for your full users all the way down to your very granular end users that might have much higher security.
Security on them.
You finalise the training, you're going to provide to your end users and what resources you are going to give them. We find that constructing your own little manual that you provide to the end users based on information you got through the project not only enables them to use the system effectively, but it also lets them.
Understand more and have resources they can self-serve. The more self, the more experience they have. Figuring out things on their own, the less time it's going to take away from you trying to do lots of other things.
The other thing that happens at this stage is you lock down the cutover, plan. The cutover plan is really key here because that's the window of when are we moving in and locking the master records? When are we moving the transactional data? When are we officially switching from 1 system to another? Are we having a grace period? Where?
Stuff might go into one versus the other and and continuing forward.
So once you've got that cutover, plan all set. You're going to go and you're you're gonna go, and you're gonna cut over. Really. So once the plan is all set, you're gonna go through that final month, you are going to follow the cutover plan exactly as you had.
Had laid out or as much as possible, which is stopping the use of one system starting the other, moving over the transactional data, and then you're gonna go live. And this is where the hyper care kicks in. Most organisations you would stay with the team that helped set up your system for 30 days. That can vary depending on vendors.
Some hand you over to support right away. Others it's longer. Our standard is 30 days and we found it's really the great spot to finalise the configuration. Get you going on the system and transition you correctly to the support team so they have all the information about what your system is, how it's set up, who you are and how it's working.
And now I get to pass it back to Gary.

Gary Servius   35:51
Thank you kindly.
All right. So are we just?
And this section by saying that we've 23 years dedicated to serving the industry right. Sparkog is really the natural and logical upgrade path forward from Microsoft GP for non profit.
And this is not just about migrating from GPS, it's really about setting yourself up for the future. Think about Sparkrog has a Microsoft infrastructure backed by expert who truly understand your work.
We can really get you to a successful migration and a successful path forward.
And today actually.
The.
Just need to move to the next slide. There you go.
All right. Sorry about that. So today we have way over 100,000 active users all over North America and on the screen here, what you are seeing is just a small sample of the valuable customer that trusted us and that made the choice to partner with us and hopefully.
You will be one of them as well.
All right. So we'd like to take a few minutes, so you can also see your solution in action, right? So I'm going to end it over to Wendy for a quick snapshot of what the modern solution could do for you.

Wendy Brown   37:29
Thanks, Gary. All right. So we've got just a short demo today, then we will be opening it up for questions. But for the demo, I'm going to focus on these specific features just a couple of them that we find Great Plains customers really.
Appreciate the most about sparkrock. So you're gonna see clear visibility on commitments and encumbrances. So ensuring that you don't go over your or overspend your budget, you're going to see significantly easier reporting. And you're gonna see a fully integrated purchasing and expense.
Module so many of our customers before coming to sparkrock. This was a third party application for them to have that type of functionality. So this is a really big win for our customers and you're going to see how it's all supported by AI to help you answer any.
Questions against your business data. So let me just share my screen and we'll get started. And on the team, can I just have a thumbs up that my screen is being shared wonderful. Thank you.
OK, so if you've seen business central before, this might look familiar to you where you are in one of the role centres, so there's different role centres based upon your job persona. So for example, a purchasing role centre or an accounts payable role centre, you'll see the action.
Dashboard and there was actually a question in the chat here prior to me demoing about how is Power BI incorporated into the solution. So you can see how power BI is actually a widget right? In my dashboard I can.
Can select different reports, expand it and interact with it directly within our application. Where I'm gonna go to 1st here is I'm gonna come into our chart of accounts and I'm gonna search up my office supplies, for example.
So this is a really good visual of how we are giving you better transparency on those commitments and encumbrances. So you can very clearly see right at the chart of account level, we have our budgeted amount.
And then we have our commitments against that budget. So commitments are requisitions. So those are requests. And right from here I can drill down directly to that requisition document, including any attachments. And AI is really pervasive throughout.

Michael Gummel   40:38
That.

Wendy Brown   40:38
Record as we come back to our chart of accounts view, so commitments were our purchase requisitions, kicking off the purchasing process, encumbrances are your purchase orders. So we can see our orders here. And again, I could also drill down to that document.
And the net change is the actual invoices and again being able to drill down directly to all the details about those transactions. So let's just come back to our dashboard here. And so I mentioned that AI is pervasive and I'm gonna show you a couple of other things in.
Regards to that AI tool copilot is embedded right within your financial system here, and it can of course give you how to or ask answer simple questions, but it also can do calculations, give you specific details about.
Your financial data. So in this example I'm asking how many posted purchase invoices did I have last year for example, and it's going to actually go out and give me the total amount, but also give me a launching path into those records.
Is where I can do additional reporting, so my demo environment is a little slow this morning, but we can see that the progress is telling me it's scanning the records and finding the relevant data and when it comes to the AI results, you're always going to have a path.
To check where those results came from. So it's gonna tell you specifically which records or path in the system was taking you there. So it tells me it's almost done. It's a particularly sleepy this morning. Here we go. We have 77 posted.
Purchase invoices. It is going to give me the most recent but I can link right from here to that posted purchase invoices page. Now what I love about this is it's automatically putting in the date philtre for me here in the philtres. So this was last year I asked for so it's looking at my physical.
Physical period of last year and within every page you have the ability to use the AI tool to build reports. So for example, maybe I want to do a summary by vendor, so just by using natural language I am able to.
Manipulate this data and view it in a different view. So in this case here we have it by vendor including how much is remaining still to be paid on those invoices. If I wanted to make any adjustments. So for example maybe I want to drill down.
By invoice here I can add additional prompts. You'll notice to the right. We also have the manual tools that we can use, but if we look at this, we can drill down right to each specific invoice and even right through to that actual document. If we need to.
All right. So that really changes the way you report on data where I want to show you go to next is what we call mysparkrock, which is your portal for giving all of your employees access to the ability to submit.
Expenses or so you can see. Here's my self-service. I have our finance and purchasing tools, so again all wrapped in permissions from here I can kick off reporting as well as purchase requisitions. There's a manager, self-service.
What I'm going to focus on here is the expense claims. So right within our application, you're able to manage not only reimbursable out of pocket expenses, but also we support a purchase card reconciliation process.
So if you're using purchasing cards in your organisation, when you get that statement from the bank, you import it in and we can see these are actually my corporate visa transactions here. So if I'm a holder of the corporate card, it will be my responsibility to come in and code those transactions add.
Would receive attachments and then reconcile those against that credit card statement. So for those out of pocket expenses very simply, I'm just going to click on new expense and you are able to.
Determine which categories are going to be available here for your employees to choose from, and one of the benefits of the expense type is it will enforce specific rules about the purchasing of these specific items. So for example this is a.
A meal expense so I can put I have rules on how much this expense can actually be. So you can see I put in $20.00 but it says no, the maximum allowable gross unit cost is $16.00 and it automatically defaults to that 16 it's informing.
Think me that an attachment is required and so I can either drag and drop that or I can go out into my folders and upload that. If I was on a mobile phone. So this is a mobile first technology, I would be able to add this right from my phone.
Own or to even take a picture. At this time, the expense type has a default GL and I'm able to further define it with what we call account sets, which marries my GL with specific dimensions. Now, once this has been created, I'm able to save it. I can.
Can create multiple expenses. So if I have additional expenses to submit, maybe it's mileage. For example, now when it comes to mileage here in Canada specifically, we are able to help you with.
Tracking the distance that they've gone already. So once they reached the 5000 kilometre threshold as determined by Revenue Canada, the rate that they are reimbursed will change according to those rules.
So once you have all of your expenses created, you would just make a claim or add to an existing claim and that will go through an approval process and can include.
Sorry notes and descriptions and then from here we also can see the exact expenses that are attached to this claim. So in this case I just have the one, but also how am I performing against the budget. So making sure that every.
Everyone is accountable to the budget and giving them that transparency so you can decide who would have access to this and who would not. And I would just go ahead and submit that expense claim. So your depending on your role.
Within the organisation you might just have access to expense claims or you might have access to the broader financial tools, including the ability to run simple reports. So as a department manager for example, I might want to have.
Visibility into my GLS for my department or account sets and all of the transactions and how I'm performing against my budget. So that's a quick peek at the solution here today.
And as Kinley mentioned in his presentation, typically folks that are evaluating our product, they're going to want to get exposed to it. Usually there's an overview demo and then deeper dive for different personas within your organisation where we.
Really do deep dives into the functionality and I will now hand this back to the team, but I believe we're going to open it up for some Q&A.

Kinley Graham   49:36
Okay. So while Wendy was presenting there and Gary was presenting earlier, I've been going through and I've been trying to answer some of these questions I just answered Jessie, big question there. While we're sitting here, I can answer a couple more in here.
The copilot licence that was just asked in the chat copilot is actually licenced through the system. There's just an option to turn on within the system. Currently there is no billing associated with it. In the future, Microsoft will likely start charging, but it will be something that will be processed.
Through the system itself, and it would come along with your subscription bill. PDF invoices can be dragged and dropped as attachments no problem. You can drag it onto the purchasing module, purchase requisitions, payment requests on expense claims. You can drag them on there as well. Doesn't have to just be PDFs can be word, can be excel and can be images.
Sparkrock finances AP solution. Does it need? Does this replace the need for 3rd party solutions? It kind of depends on what you're doing. The sparkrock AP module allows you to bring in invoices, process them and then you can turn around and you can you you go to a payment journal, you create a file.
When you upload it to your bank and then create the payments, if you're talking about AI character recognition and all that kind of stuff, we do like to partner with a product. It's called continua and we work with them and you can basically e-mail your invoice to an e-mail address. You can upload it manually, it will OCR the invoice, it will create it and it will dump it.
Right into spark rocks in invoices to be paid. Let me see. Let me see.
Trying to get down to the bottom here. Security of data and the use of AI. OK, great question. I absolutely love hearing this cuz it's something I really love to talk about, so the system itself without the AI piece is super secure. It's compartmentalised our product lives inside Microsoft's business.
Online, but it's within your tenant, which means you own the data. You're the only one that can access it. You control licences, even our licence, and you control all your ability to do backups and everything else. As far as the AI piece goes, you have the ability to turn it on and off if you click that thing off. It's a very simple setup. It will just stop and that will be it.

Gary Servius   51:58
All right. And I see that we also have a question here. The last question about licencing cost, what is the cost of Park Rock? Is there nonprofit pricing available? Are there different bundle cost package available? How do we find a local?

Kinley Graham   51:59
MMM.

Gary Servius   52:14
Vendor right. So the first thing when it comes to pricing. So obviously a spark rock is 100% focused and specialised on nonprofit, right. We don't do for profit organisation and we're very conscious about the budget limitation. So yes.
All price factor, non profit pricing and non profit discount 100% when it come to what is the cost. This is a very vague question so I'm going to give you the usual answer. Which is it depends right. So it depends of your needs depend of your requirements depends of the number of users that you're looking for. Depends if you're looking for.
Financing, HR, payroll. So a lot of factor will impact cost whether it is a subscription or whether it is the implementation, right. So what I would recommend for us to be able to actually answer that question or go deeper into this is for us to reach out to us to contact us so we can see it, we can talk, we can go to your requirement.
And then we can give you an actual estimate, but all price are definitely 100% very conscious about nonprofit limitation in terms of budget.
How can we find a local vendor so you can reach out to us? You can reach out directly to Spark Rock. Everything is done through US or team will be here to help. You can reach out to the team actually.
Let me share my direct e-mail actually so you can reach out directly to me at gary.series@sparkrock.com. Let me add that to the chat.

Kinley Graham   53:51
E-mail him, please. Please. I want people to talk to. I love this. It's super fun. I want we we want to help all of you go through this and and be as successful as possible. Gary is fantastic. Please e-mail him so we can set up some time to figure out how we can help you.
Yeah.

Gary Servius   54:09
Yeah. Any question you have any concern even if you had the early stage, we can help, don't be shy or worried at how well it's in the early stage. We are here to share information. We are here to provide guidance. Obviously, we went through that a lot. We we've been doing a lot of migration from GP to Spark Rock, right. As I mentioned, we are really the.
Actual upgrade path recommended by Microsoft, right? So we'll be here to help, so please don't hesitate to reach out.

Kinley Graham   54:38
There was a question earlier in here. It was about dynamics, finance and supply chain. And when you're looking at Microsoft products and you're upgrading from GP, you are gonna come across a bunch of different products. You're gonna come across basic D 365, which is it's kind of.
Kind of the bottom of the tier, I don't like saying the bottom, but it's kind of the bottom of the Microsoft offering. Then you've got business central online in the middle and Microsoft decided to do business Central online because they had GP and dynamics that were both purchased at pretty much the same time.
We wanted to refine it into one product and the structure of the two products dynamics was naturally a little more advanced. So that's why Microsoft moved into business Central and took the dynamics base as the map for what they were doing.
They changed the platform to be extendable instead of being modifiable by vendors, which protects all of us. It makes the system much more robust and it's easier to customise, but then at the very top there's finance and supply chain. If your organisation is very, very, very large, that's almost the only time that that would really fit, not-for-profit.
And if you're using GP, odds are it would be overkill. The projects in there I've seen them take 18 to 24 months just to do finance sometimes and the cost can be four to five times as much as implementing business central. So it's definitely great to go and look at the options that are out there and see what's.
Gonna fit, but make sure that you're not going to the very, very top because the cost can get very high if you're not in need of that level of power. Sorry, I jumped in there on Gary. I'm. I'm sure he has more to say.

Gary Servius   56:22
No, actually I don't have much to say. Thank you for adding those. I see another question.

Kinley Graham   56:25
Oh.

Bri-anna Ramsden   56:26
I'm going to take over quickly, so I'm going to do the wrap up for our recording. So then Gary can answer question and talk about our special offer. But everyone please stay on. So thank you everyone for joining. We hope you learned a lot as Gary and Kinley said, you can reach out to us. You can either e-mail Gary.

Gary Servius   56:31
Yeah.

Bri-anna Ramsden   56:45
Or you can go on our website at www.sparkrock.com.