The Accounting Podcast

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David Leary: [00:00:00] How did you even have time to roll nets? Like, how did you do this?

Shana Veale: [00:00:03] Oh, it was.

David Leary: [00:00:04] Did you bring your implementers? You do it yourself. Like, how did this happen?

Shana Veale: [00:00:07] No, we did it ourselves. We we worked with NetSuite Direct and all of the the developers and all of the Aces team, and we did all the pre videos. I mean, it was a lot of work. I don't know how now I could do it with my schedule now. I don't know if we could be like, Hey, let's implement a new system. I'd be like, I don't have time, but maybe we found the time.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:28] This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast was recorded at the Oracle NetSuite SuiteWorld Conference in September of 2022. To learn more about NetSuite and the SuiteWorld Conference, visit NetSuiteSuiteWorld.com. Hello and welcome to The Cloud Accounting Podcast. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:51] And I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:52] And we are recording at SuiteWorld 2022 in Las Vegas. It's our last interview of the day, and David has lost his mind.

David Leary: [00:01:02] Just zoned out for a quick second. Actually, to be honest, I got thrown off. I was looking at our guest LinkedIn. I saw that she was at Arthur Andersen. Oh, and I was like doing all that in. Like, I was just thinking, like, that was the Enron like years right around then, I think. And so I was trying to do math in my head, and that's how I zoned out.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:19] Now, we definitely have a topic of conversation. We are speaking with Shana Veale, CPA. Hello, Shawna. Hi. Welcome to the show.

Shana Veale: [00:01:25] Thank you.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:25] And you are a VP slash CFO at PharmChem Inc. PharmChek. Drugs of abuse, sweat patch. What does that mean?

Shana Veale: [00:01:34] So. So the drugs of abuse, sweat patch. The PharmChek is. It's a patch. That's one on the arm for 7 to 10 days of somebody who's being drug tested. So it's an alternative to urine testing or hair testing or blood testing. And it's worn for 7 to 10 days and then it's taken off and that the little cotton pad is sent to the lab and then it's tested to see if that person had done any had has done any illegal drugs.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:58] So I've had to take drug tests to get a job before, but I've never heard of this ever. Is this new?

Shana Veale: [00:02:04] Is this. It's not new. We've been around for, gosh, 30 years. Wow. But we're in the criminal justice arena right now. So it's more probation for all pretrial type client.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:15] And why would that be preferable, This patch to a urine test or something like.

Shana Veale: [00:02:20] That on the patch is harder to tamper with. You can't I mean, it collects your sweat. You know, you can try it over, hydrate, but it still has collected your sweat over the 7 to 10 days. So if you've done drugs, it's going to keep those molecules in there and it's going to show up on the lab test.

David Leary: [00:02:35] Yeah. And looking at the picture, it looks like it has a like a it has a code on it. It doesn't look like it's easily removable.

Shana Veale: [00:02:41] Like it's it's pretty solid. So if you tried to remove it, you know, when you remove a Band-Aid, you get a little bit of skin layer. That's what happens immediately off of the patch. So you can't like, put it on, take it off and put it back on it. It would be obvious. So, yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:56] And what is your role there as a VP slash CFO?

Shana Veale: [00:03:00] So my role is I'm the finance department. I'm the we're very small. We're nine people total. So I am I'm the one that does customer checks, bank recs, financial reporting month enclose. I mean, I'm that.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:14] You are the finance department and you're on net sweet.

Shana Veale: [00:03:17] I am, yeah. We just moved January of this year. Yeah. So we're very new. I'm also the admin of that NetSuite platform, so I have lots of hats.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:27] Well, you're the perfect person to talk to because you know it all.

Shana Veale: [00:03:30] We're going to say that I do.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:32] Well, so what were you doing before you said this company has been around for 30 years. What was the situation before NetSuite?

Shana Veale: [00:03:40] So we were on QuickBooks. But when we were on QuickBooks, we were six people, of which four were continuously using the QuickBooks system. We had two remote people who were kind of overseeing the organization. But we hired we were hostilely taken over last year. So we got new board, new management. We're hired for sales people and we were already transitioning into that suite. But that made it that accelerated it. So because we had four new people on board, we don't want them in QuickBooks because they're not going to understand the system. It's not helpful to them. So we we accelerated the process and went live one on one and then trained up everybody with LCS training. And here we are.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:20] Yeah. And what was the motivator to switch accounting systems?

Shana Veale: [00:04:25] It was the CRM portion that we didn't have. We wanted to grow the company even as we were still the six people before everything happened. We didn't have a proper CRM system. We couldn't you know, there were notes in there, but you couldn't pull anything. You couldn't pull reports as to what notes, who talked with whom. So we just needed a better system for that.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:43] And you didn't have a CRM previously?

Shana Veale: [00:04:45] No, it was just the accounting system. And they kind of used like the the R record, the customer record as their CRM. That's where they keep the notes.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:53] So normally, if I were talking to a business on QuickBooks and they didn't have a CRM, they would go out and they would find a CRM and they'd plug it into QuickBooks. But you didn't do that.

Shana Veale: [00:05:03] No. And there's so with our invoice, our invoicing import at month end, so we get the invoice from the lab with all the people that wore the sweat patch and it's individual line. So it's 10,000 lines or more of a CSV file. We were importing that into access, running the invoice and then importing that file into QuickBooks. We wanted to eliminate that step, so we needed a more powerful system to do that.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:28] So you said it's a record for everyone who wears it because you charge by the by patch or the patch.

Shana Veale: [00:05:35] And so we would put it into access to then it would accumulate all for like one customer. It would bring them all into one record, and then it would create that invoice for that customer. And then we would import that file like the file or whatever it was into it.

David Leary: [00:05:50] I'm very familiar. Yes, I'm an expert on that.

Shana Veale: [00:05:52] Oh, good. Because I'm not I just know enough to, like, get it out of access and put it into QuickBooks. But it's not efficient.

David Leary: [00:05:59] Oh, it's very it's error prone. It's risky. Yes. Yes. All the things wrong with it.

Shana Veale: [00:06:04] Yeah, it was working. But then we would have a 1000 page invoice to print out and then stuff and mail in actual US mail.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:14] And who are you invoicing.

Shana Veale: [00:06:15] So all of so, you know, like U.S. probation if they have if their field office uses this patch on, you know, ten people for that month at two know so 20 patches use that month we would invoice that field office for us probation. So it's all the individual agencies, if you will, if that were invoicing.

David Leary: [00:06:34] So so you were like, hey, we need to CRM. And they're like, Yeah, but I also get this nightmare. I have to do this invoice thing. Maybe something can do both, and that's just you on your journey.

Shana Veale: [00:06:42] That's kind of what the thought was, is it was kind of it wasn't two pieces that made the, the decision. It was kind of all kind of happened at the same time. Like it would be nice to have a CRM and it would be nice to get off of access. So let's figure out how how can we do that at the same time?

Blake Oliver: [00:06:56] And how did you go from that problem to realizing that Net Sweet was your solution?

Shana Veale: [00:07:02] So I wasn't involved in that piece of the evaluation. I helped a little bit, so it was between Salesforce and NetSuite. My husband's used Salesforce before and he doesn't like it for very specific reasons.

David Leary: [00:07:15] Because he had to use it.

Shana Veale: [00:07:18] So there were and there was reasons that, you know, we thought we would need that would be helpful for for us. So I just kind of passed that information along and said, Hey, my husband says that this is not a good thing because it won't do what we think it's going to do. And this area that he's worked in. So we went I don't know if that's the reason that we went with NetSuite, but I'd like to think that that was the reason that we chose it.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:38] So how did you make the leap into this role? How did you get wound up where you were at?

Shana Veale: [00:07:44] So like you said, so back in the day, I started with Arthur Andersen, literally right before Enron hit the news. I started in September of 20 of 2001 and then 911 and then Enron. And then I lost my job like eight months later.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:03] Okay.

David Leary: [00:08:03] So you got a beautiful taste of accounting. Instantly.

Shana Veale: [00:08:06] I did. And so it was an Albuquerque, which is much smaller than like the Fort Worth area than I am now. So the market was flooded. All the people that had lost their jobs were looking for jobs. There was only so many jobs available and I had eight months of experience. So it's. Pretty much right out of college in that instance. So I found a couple of little, little firms to kind of that took me in. They really weren't what I wanted to do. So I found a midsize firm that took me in for tax. So I sucked it up into tax.

David Leary: [00:08:34] So I just because the listeners cannot see your face right when she said tax, you should have seen her face. If you can imagine the face we would make when I had to do tax. So just know that.

Shana Veale: [00:08:45] Tax is not my favorite. So I did tax for a year and I ended up making my way back into Big four because I kept in touch with a partner. So I got back into KPMG through the tax door. So about a year of that, I got to the audit side back where I should have been, where I belonged. I worked there for eight years, moved to Fort Worth, and then, you know, the industry that's in Fort Worth is not the industry that I have experience in for public accounting. So I found a local accounting firm that worked better with my my knowledge and my history. And then at that point, I made a decision to just that's gone to let's go into private, let's get out of public. I've been here for 13 years or whatever it is for a long time. Let's try my hand at private industry. So I went to one of our actual our customers. That was with the accounting firm I was with. I went with one of them and learned a whole heck of a lot. I had a big role. I had the control role, the acting treasurer role and the acting youth coordinator role all at one time, kind of when kind of at the end.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:48] So. So you didn't really cut your hours when you went from public into private?

Shana Veale: [00:09:52] Oh, no, no, no. This was 12 hour days. There was just so much work. Yeah, but I learned a lot. I mean, you leave someplace and you, you know, you're like, Oh, my gosh, I learned so much with that one. They unfortunately laid me off, which happens. And then I found where I am now at farm camp. And it's it's kind of a funny story. So, you know, I found them. They were looking for somebody and I was like, I'm not sure. So I kind of passed up applying at that point in time. Well, there was a woman with my same first name and a very, very similar last name. Well, the CEO at the time had called our audit partner, who I knew very well, he started talking about me because that's the name he heard, not the other woman's name. So I ended up the CEO called me directly and said, Hey, do you want we got a very high recommendation. Do you want to come to an.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:39] Interview with us? You got a job interview by accident.

Shana Veale: [00:10:42] By accident? Yeah, By just by word of mouth. By accident? Yeah. Amazing. Yeah, but now I've been here five years, so.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:49] Yeah. Do they make you use do you have to, like, new PharmChek a new farm. Come employees. Do you have to wear the drug patch as, as the part of your drug test.

Shana Veale: [00:11:00] No. We make everybody do a urine test just because for employment purposes, it's faster. You know, it's. But we're doing a wear test right now. I am not because I took it off to come here just because I was going to be.

David Leary: [00:11:12] Oh, just on the air in Vegas will probably cause it to react.

Shana Veale: [00:11:16] I know I could be. So I wore it for seven days before and I just took it off when I got here. And then I'll go home and I'll put it right back on to see how long can I wear it and what is there anything that wears funny? Is there anything that we need to know? So it'll be all all of us are doing it right now. I just had this kind of interrupting the wear time because I really struggled. Should I wear it here and have everybody ask me questions or should I?

Blake Oliver: [00:11:40] It's great advertising.

Shana Veale: [00:11:41] I thought that too. But then I was like, it'd been seven days in. So we'd been through workouts and.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:46] Through kind of, you know.

Shana Veale: [00:11:48] It was kind of grody. So I didn't yeah, it's one of those I struggle a lot and I was like, Oh, I should just take it off.

David Leary: [00:11:53] We had that, we had the Crumble cookies guy, and then we had Johnny Pops and they all had samples. You could have gave out samples.

Shana Veale: [00:11:57] Could have been like, Hey, take this home.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:01] Except nobody. Yeah, yeah. It's not a good, not a good product to give to people.

Shana Veale: [00:12:05] Unless I know. Right, right, right. Yeah. They might have questions.

David Leary: [00:12:08] So you rolled out net sweet. You're on net sweet. I'm on your website now. And across the menu you have this menu bar and you can you have a customer toolbox. You can pay your bill, you can reorder the products, you can request a quote. Is that net sweet under the covers or using any of the ecommerce features, or is this all proprietary or.

Shana Veale: [00:12:22] For the reorder? It was built because of net sweet like we didn't prior. We didn't have that option prior to implementing that suite. It still has to be entered by the salesperson, but they can go in through the system and it kicks out an email to us that says, Hey, this person wants to order more product and it has to be a customer. So that's why it's not automatic, because we can only sell. We can't sell to like you because what if you were on the patch from probation? What if you changed out your patch? You know, it's more of a control feature, but, you know, we're trying to automate a lot more. It's just there's nine of us. So it's it's in order to continue to do our job and roll out, it's very time. We just it's tricky. So we're trying to do the little things we can and, you know, outsource what we just don't know how to do. So we're still we're still growing.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:12] So Farm Cam's been around for a while. You've been with them for five years, it looks like. Is PharmChem like aiming to. Grow rapidly. Well, you said there was a hostile takeover.

Shana Veale: [00:13:23] We did have a hostile takeover.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:25] How does that happen in a small company like that? Because I'm picturing, you know, a hostile takeover. It's always like big public company with some billionaire investor who buys, you know, shares. Yeah.

Shana Veale: [00:13:36] So we were actually surprised. So we're otcqx traded, so we're on the pink sheets and we were actually limited information at that point in time because we weren't reporting. We didn't need to, you know, so we were limited. Well, here comes a shareholder who came out of the blue. Literally. I came out of the blue and bought up so much of the shares. And, you know, he talked with the CEO at the time and was interested in, you know, he wanted to be on the board, but we didn't We only have three seats. And so they did a proxy fight with us, which I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know how that worked. Well, they won.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:11] So what is that? How did that work? Tell us about.

Shana Veale: [00:14:13] That. So, you know, when you own shares in any kind of company, you get the proxy once a year that says, hey, vote for the board members, vote for the auditor, and if there's any other matters, well, we sent ours out with our current board. They sent one out with who they wanted to be on the new board. Well, they had enough shares and enough people on their side, if you will. So they ended up winning the proxy fight. And at that point in time, they then dismissed the board that we had, which was the CEO and the CFO at that time, promoted me up to the CFO, promoted who our president was at the time to the CEO role and brand new board.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:52] I must been a lot of drama.

Shana Veale: [00:14:54] It was it was intense. Yes, it was intense. So we were lucky enough to have three months with the former CEO and CFO to kind of transition things. If I had questions or whatnot, to kind of help bounce things off of. But yeah, it's been a it's been a journey. And I don't know anybody else who's been through a hostile takeover, like.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:14] Personally, Yeah, they're not that common. Makes good TV. It was a surprise, which is why it happened, because normally there's these, you know, poison pills we read about.

Shana Veale: [00:15:23] Yeah. No, this came literally came out of the blue. Wow. Like earlier that year, we're like, what is going on? Like, where did this come from?

Blake Oliver: [00:15:29] So I imagine the investor did this because they believed in the company and they're going to say, So what's the plan now?

Shana Veale: [00:15:36] Well, you know, so the board directive is to to grow sales, obviously, and to try and merge ourselves into different revenue streams, different markets. We face hurdles because, you know, our FDA clearance is for criminal justice only.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:52] Really specific purpose. They limit you to that.

Shana Veale: [00:15:55] They did mind you, this was years and years ago that we went through the FDA clearance. So we don't know. Okay. Can we now go into has the time lapsed? Can we now do it? Do we have to do new FDA clearance? Do we have like what do we have to do to get into employer employee testing? I know maybe off the shelf testing for parents, You know, kind of. I've always had the thought that we could break into like the NFL or the NBA. You know, nobody really listens to that suggestion, but I think it's a good one. So when we get the new product manager, I'm going to throw that out there to find somebody to talk to.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:29] Just tell all the sales guys you're going to get tickets to these games we're selling.

Shana Veale: [00:16:33] Let's go talk to that. Yeah, find the person. So, you know, yeah, we are trying to expand but we're very niche. Yeah. Two and we kind of are premium product over the other drug testing methods that there are out there.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:48] What's it cost.

Shana Veale: [00:16:49] Is that right right now a single patent we just raise prices so I'm going to quote the old one a single patch itself costs 3145, and then the analysis costs, Allied analysis is 31.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:02] 45.

Shana Veale: [00:17:03] $31.45 just for the standard testing, which is five drugs.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:08] Okay, that doesn't sound like too much.

Shana Veale: [00:17:10] No, it doesn't. But when you compare it to a urine test, which is less than $10.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:14] Okay.

Shana Veale: [00:17:14] Because you have the patch cost, which is 1058, less than $11 for one, plus the lab cost, which is 3145. Then you're getting up there in the in the price point, you know, and that's why urine is but our testing is less tamper able. Yeah, our cutoff levels are lower usually than what a urine sample will be. So we have a lot of benefits, but we just had need to find the right.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:39] Market, your premium product, and you just got to get into those. The people who want that.

Shana Veale: [00:17:44] Yeah, just need to find the right market for it. Yep.

David Leary: [00:17:46] So on the day to day, it sounds like, like you said, sort of teeny. There's nine of you, you're doing tons of different hats, right? You said you did the reconciliation app, you're doing r you're doing everything. How did you even have time to next week? Like, how did you do this?

Shana Veale: [00:17:59] Oh, it was.

David Leary: [00:18:00] Did you bring in implementers? You do it yourself. Like, how did this happen?

Shana Veale: [00:18:03] No, we did it ourselves. We we worked with NetSuite Direct and all of the developers and all of the access team, and we did all the pre videos. I mean, it was a lot of work. I don't know how now I could do it with my schedule now. I don't know if we could be like, Hey, let's implement a new system. Be like, I don't have time. But when we found the time, it was a lot of meetings, a lot of testing, a lot of it's a lot like we didn't get Christmas break. That's so because we had to implement on the board directed one one you will be done. So I was like.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:32] Oh, but tell me you're getting it this year.

Shana Veale: [00:18:34] Yes, yes, yep, yep. We're implemented. The testing is done because it was a we were testing the invoice import and that was the key, right? And it was only.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:42] Right because that's revenue.

Shana Veale: [00:18:43] That's revenue.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:43] Get in the door.

Shana Veale: [00:18:44] To our customers. And it was a very it's a very complex system and how it was developed. So yeah, we were testing it and that whatever would break we would have to wait and then have them fix it and then retest it. And it was we had family in town. I was like, I'm going to be in the office.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:59] So, you know, I feel like what the problem you had or the challenge you had with the whole, like invoicing, very specific. It's something that actually a lot of organizations have. I worked for a very large HOA, and we had a similar thing where we had this proprietary software that had been developed for us to bill all the different, you know, properties.

Shana Veale: [00:19:20] Yeah, okay.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:20] And it required this import and the guy who, you know, maintained it was like 80 years old and only he knew how to fix it and he had to give us a new version every year. Oh, because he had to manually update all the tax rates essentially and.

Shana Veale: [00:19:32] Oh yeah, yeah. Okay. So and then I feel so bad.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:35] No, it's I think like there's a lot of organizations doing that.

Shana Veale: [00:19:39] And we were, you know, when we were trying to find, okay, how can we do this better? We were trying to think of other organizations that would have a similar, you know, invoice import process. And we just we couldn't think of one to, like, call and be like, hey, we have questions like, how do you do it? Well, maybe we're doing it a completely backwards way.

David Leary: [00:19:55] There are so many people still using ifs and it just makes me scream.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:59] So well, because until the process, until the process reaches a breaking point, they'll keep it going. Yeah. You know.

David Leary: [00:20:05] And a lot of people have some legacy piece in their business that they just can't replace or it's too mission critical and it's working fine and they'd rather not fix.

Shana Veale: [00:20:14] It, improve it. That was. I was all for. How do we get the stupid? I was also very, very determined and stubborn. If nothing if it if one thing didn't work, I was like, We can't work with that. Like, you need to fix it. So they probably were like every time I emailed them back because so I was like, No, it's not right yet. Like, we need to this is this is how it has to be. There's no alternative. So I mean, we worked very hard and very close with them. Like I said, I'm sure they were happy to be done with us.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:41] Well, you know, they must like you because they brought you here to SeaWorld, right?

Shana Veale: [00:20:45] I know. I know. I'm pretty amazed. So and and it wasn't because the invoice import, it was because LCS because of our use of them.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:53] Lcs. Yeah.

Shana Veale: [00:20:55] The I can't think of what else was.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:57] The stand for. I forgot to. What does it do?

Shana Veale: [00:20:59] Learning, learning LCS Learning cloud systems solutions. It's it's the piece. So there's aces and LCS Aces is who we go to for different projects. Lcs is who we went to for training on our system. Got it. Yep. So we use them.

David Leary: [00:21:17] Is that the customer learning cloud support? Yep. For Mitsubishi Education Services.

Shana Veale: [00:21:21] Okay. Yeah. We learn how we use them. They went into our system after it was built and learned it, like learned all the customizations that we had and then taught our sales team more than once, which was amazing. So that everybody was on the same page, everybody saw the same demonstration.

David Leary: [00:21:35] So they're training your staff based on your implementation of NetSuite? Yes, that's pretty cool.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:40] That's really neat. Yes. Nifty.

Shana Veale: [00:21:41] Yeah. So I have I have nothing but good things to say about us.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:44] Yes. And when you bring on a new salesperson, they.

Shana Veale: [00:21:47] Can always we can always get a block of time with. And I've said her name a thousand times with Darlene Kendrick. She is amazing.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:55] And yeah, shout out to Darlene if you're listening.

Shana Veale: [00:21:59] So yeah, she and she's happy to change. We brought on a new person in February and she did a one on one with her to go over the system and walk her through like all the things on how to do a sales order and how to fulfill it and invoice and, you know, processes that they need.

David Leary: [00:22:13] So and then you don't have to do it. So you got one thing off your plate, right?

Shana Veale: [00:22:16] Yeah, exactly right.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:18] Well, Shawna, you know what? It's happy hour right now. Okay? It's 5:00.

Shana Veale: [00:22:22] Awesome.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:22] This was wonderful. Thank you so much for speaking with us. I would keep going. But, you know, we got to call it quits some.

Shana Veale: [00:22:28] Oh, I know, I know. There's drinks waiting for us.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:30] That's right. So, Shawna, Will, CPA, thank you for your time if people want to connect with you. Yeah. Online. Where where are you available?

Shana Veale: [00:22:37] I'm on LinkedIn. Just. I mean. Shawna.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:40] Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes.

Shana Veale: [00:22:41] Okay. Yep. That's a good place to thank. Shawna. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Shawna. Okay, bye.