Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of Financial Snickens. I'm your host, Alisa McCabe, the owner at First Steps Financial, and today we are talking about what my favorite apps are right now I'm a total tech geek, and I love finding new ways to streamline business operations and enhance efficiency. And as a part of our ongoing effort to find better ways to run businesses, we are out there looking at other businesses, asking other people and working with small business owners to see how they do things.
We also go to conferences and ask other people in our industry what's working for them. Then we take them internally and we test them to make sure that they actually work. So these are three. That we use and we love and they are worth [00:01:00] taking note of. So this one, I probably have talked about it before because a time to talk to everybody about this one.
It's called Scribe How, and it is. It stands out among everything that we work with as an online tool for conveying procedures and creating instructions. It is so amazing. You put it in your browser and then whatever you wanna show somebody, if you wanna go to a website and you wanna tell 'em to pull down a report or you wanna tell them to do something, you say you.
You click on start capture and it captures everything on the screen. And the result is that it takes pictures of each screen and it transcribes the actions that you took, and it highlights where your cursor is so you don't have to do anything except for do a little bit of editing and a process that would have taken at least 20 minutes [00:02:00] to screenshot each one and then write out the captions and maybe put circles where things are is now down to 30 seconds.
And you haven't had to really stop what you're doing, you're just continuing to do what you already do. So it really is an amazing tool when you need to tell somebody how to do it, because we are constantly educating our clients on how to do things, and also educating our team on how to do things. The one that we also love and we have just started using, and it's kind of relatively new to us, and it has been around for a while, is Core Pay One.
So what it does is it enables seamless receipt management and integration with QuickBooks Online. So it does a whole bunch of other things. But this is what I love it for because you can give access to anyone on your team. They can put it on their phone, they take a picture of their receipt, they upload it.[00:03:00]
They and you, you segregate what categories they can pick from because you don't wanna give a big list to your clients to pick, uh, of your, I mean, I'm sorry, of your employees to pick because they might pick the wrong thing. And so you might say it's meals and it's, uh, travel and hotel and air, and you might give 'em a small list of things to pick from.
And they put the information in and then the receipt goes into Core Pay and then goes over to QuickBooks. And when that transaction comes in from the bank, it shows up there with the receipt attached to it and it's categorized. It's amazing. It's a time saver. Your employees can also do, um, re do reimbursements from there.
So what happens is when you invite your employees in, if you are gonna do expense reports, if your employees are gonna do expense reports, they need to set up their payment information. How they're gonna get paid because it's a reimbursement. It's not something that you have to run through payroll because there's [00:04:00] no taxes involved.
So it's a reimbursement. They upload their receipts, then they pull down a report that has all the receipts attached to it, and it has the all the expenses listed. And you can do an approval system. So you can approve the, you can approve all the expenses. It is so great and it's a huge time saver, and we are loving it.
Because you can also pay bills through it and setting up an approval system in there. And it's really streamlining all of the accounts payable side and receipt collection, which is always a big pain for business owners and anyone who works with employees, even yourself. When we go to a conference, we're taking pictures of receipts and uploading it and making sure that it gets into QuickBooks.
This is a super easy solution to this. It also is very secure. No one has access to bank accounts and they actually even [00:05:00] offer a MasterCard with it, which we took advantage of, and it has reward points. So it's a great, it's also a great credit card, but you can use it associated with the core pay and it goes into QuickBooks online.
So it's, and I say this to everybody, when things link together, when you can have Core Pay link with QuickBooks online. And you don't have to do anything. There's no double entry. That's why we love it too. So, The third thing that I'm totally grooving on is chat. G P T. I know, apologies, you've already heard about it.
Um, probably a million times, but I can't emphasize enough how much it's really starting to play a role in the small business world. People are using it for social media. People are using it for analysis, people are using it for all kinds of things. What we use it for, and we don't use it so much for accounting purposes, but we use it on.
Professional emails and [00:06:00] helping editing our blog, and that has been a game changer. Have you ever sat down to write a difficult email and you just don't know how to word it? You kind of know what you wanna say, but it's delicate, so you're not sure, and maybe there's a motion involved in it. So if you put in to chat, G P T.
That you wanna write a professional email explaining to a client why you made the error, and maybe how it's not gonna happen again, and see what chat G p T comes up with. We've been impressed with what chat G P T comes back with and we've been able to use these well crafted responses to be able to answer questions that would normally take us a lot of time and create some angst too, but it allows us.
To be professional and give quick responses, whereas otherwise we might put it off for a day or two. So we've really liked that. I also love that you can [00:07:00] say what kind of tone you wanna use. Is it gonna be friendly? Is it going to be professional? And it's really important to be able to. Give that kind of direction.
And again, the more you use chat G P T, the better you're going to get at prompting chat, G P t to provide the output that you want. And if you think about it, you start with the end in mind. Stephen Covey, start with the end in mind. You start at the end. What do you want as a result? You want a professionally written email, you want a delicate matter handled in a professional way.
You want to send an offer letter to a potential employee and you want to, you know, uh, you wrote a blog on something and you're, you know, you're not sure that the grammar is a hundred percent correct or whatever it might be. You can plop it into chat g p t and allow them to take it and. Change it and adjust it, and you don't have to use exactly [00:08:00] what they output.
You can take that and then make your own edits to it. So we're really finding it to be such a useful tool, and I think the things that we are gonna use it for is gonna grow. I just think they're gonna keep finding more and more things that chat G P T can do really well and. It's free. There are, there are paid versions, but you can definitely use the free version and the paid version only about $20 a month.
So check it out. When you get a chance, take a look at it. Um, we found it to be great. So those are my three tech things that I'm grooving on right now. And as we continue our quest to find more superior applications that optimize business management. We're gonna bring some to you. In the meantime, if you find any that you are using that are making your life easier, making work, go faster, creating efficiencies, let us know.
Head over to my [00:09:00] website, first Steps Financial do com. Click on Let's Talk, or shoot me an email, Alisa first steps financial.com, and tell me what you're using because I love to talk about these things. All right, I'll talk to you soon.
