The Accounting Podcast

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Lea Briscoe: [00:00:00] I don't really like statistics because it's an it's a it can be a this or that, but accounting, there's an answer and there has to be an answer because there has to be. So it just makes sense and it's there and it makes me feel happy that you can close something at the end of the day and you know that it's right. And we don't make judgment calls, per se.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:24] This episode of the Cloud Accounting Podcast was recorded at the Sage Transform Conference in October of 2022. Because it's a little shorter than our usual episodes, this episode does not qualify for free CPE on the earmark app. However, it's a great interview. I hope you listen and I hope you enjoy.

David Leary: [00:00:48] Welcome back to The Cloud Accounting Podcast. I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:50] And I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:52] And Blake, we are still at Sage Intacct.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:56] Sage Transform-

David Leary: [00:00:57] Sage Transform

Blake Oliver: [00:00:58] Sage Transform in Orlando, Florida.

David Leary: [00:01:00] In Orlando, Florida, we have another business. And actually this business we're going to speak to. We were supposed to interview last year at this conference and we had scheduling conflicts and it never happened. So welcome to the show. Director of Accounting for Purple Wave, Lea Briscoe.

Lea Briscoe: [00:01:16] Thank you. Hello.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:18] Hi, Leah.

Lea Briscoe: [00:01:18] Hello.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:19] So, Purple wave- tell us about Purple Wave.

Lea Briscoe: [00:01:22] So Purple Wave is an online only auction company. We specialize in the liquidation, agricultural and construction equipment and fleet vehicles. So the larger pieces of equipment go through an online auction process, and they. We connect the buyers and the sellers together to have a good purchase.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:39] So if I have a combine or a harvester or something like that on my farm and like we could buy a semi. Yes, a semi.

Lea Briscoe: [00:01:46] Yep. Okay. That is.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:47] Correct. All right.

David Leary: [00:01:49] A backhoe. This is so much we should be buying some of this stuff for fun.

Lea Briscoe: [00:01:53] But.

David Leary: [00:01:54] There's all kinds of stuff. And so it's an auction site. It's a bin site. Yes.

Lea Briscoe: [00:01:57] All online. All online. Okay. All online. We do not hold any live auctions. It's all purely online. As soon as the item is uploaded into its workspace for the event date, then you can start bidding on it.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:09] And where are you located? Or is it virtual or I mean, where. Where are you?

Lea Briscoe: [00:02:14] Our headquarters office is in Manhattan, Kansas, so home of the Wildcats, Kansas State University. So we bleed purple there. But yeah, we're all headquartered in Manhattan, Kansas. I would say about 60% of our staff is at the corporate office. And then we have a sales team that remotes out of their own kind of private residences in the Midwestern area, you know, north to south Midwest. And we're starting to expand more so out to the eastern areas and a little bit as far west as Colorado.

David Leary: [00:02:41] And so you have been there a very long time. I think I linked in page how many years?

Lea Briscoe: [00:02:47] Over 17 years.

David Leary: [00:02:48] And you basically grew up your whole counting career there. Yes. Right. So you started what did you do when you started before you became the director of accounting?

Lea Briscoe: [00:02:56] So when I started, I was actually 20 years old and I was actually in college for accounting. So I went to Kent State University. And in 2005 I graduated with my bachelor's in accounting. And so when everybody my senior year was asking me if you were doing an intern or anything of that nature, I was like, No, I work for Purple Wave and I do all things money there, and I feel like I'm just going to grow up with the company. So and that's exactly what happened. So I had no idea that I wanted to do anything in accounting till my senior year of high school, and I had to fill a void in an elective and chose accounting. And I loved it.

David Leary: [00:03:31] So that's a good story. We all love it. Eventually.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:35] I personally like I love the theory of accounting, I love the debits and credits, and I loved doing it, you know? And so clearly, we're on the same wavelength there. Yes. What what's the accounting team look like at Purple F?

Lea Briscoe: [00:03:49] So my accounting team has just actually grown with two more people. I have a total of seven people that report directly to me. I have two lead accounting associates. They kind of oversee the two teams I've divided them into recently. Recently, I have shifted my accounting team of seven into kind of two groups, people who mainly handle our sellers, which is, you know, all of the people that bring their assets to Purple Wave. And then, you know, we settle with them and make sure that they are paid correctly, timely and everything like that. And then the other employees kind of handle what I call the employee management. They handle kind of the administrative functions of our teams, credit card reporting compliances. One individual on the team does all the sales tax type type entries and remittance. And so I've kind of got the two teams divided right now, which is good because as we grow larger, it's very important that we become more fine tune in our specific responsibilities and tasks.

David Leary: [00:04:44] And obviously you're here, you obviously Sage Intacct Yes. What were you before that? I remember you have been on Sage Intacct since day one. Like how long you been on?

Lea Briscoe: [00:04:53] We've been in tech since September of 2017. Before that we were on QuickBooks.

David Leary: [00:04:58] Okay.

Lea Briscoe: [00:04:59] So and before that we were on a program called Auction RPM. So when I started in oh five, we were on auction RPM. We shifted to QuickBooks in 2007 and long outgrew QuickBooks before we ever shipped.

David Leary: [00:05:14] That was desktop or QuickBooks Online.

Lea Briscoe: [00:05:16] It was desktop. So there was no cloud based. It was it really stunted us from being able to do things and do them effectively.

David Leary: [00:05:24] So. So what was that trigger point like? What tipped it were You like, All right, we got to move. I got to find another solution.

Lea Briscoe: [00:05:30] I think it just kind of we bit the bullet and we just kind of went for it. Around that time when we shifted, we were experiencing a lot of growth and starting to see the volume in our sales and our gross proceeds hike significantly. We were becoming way more professional, not that we weren't already, but we just the company was growing up and maturing at a great rate. And so it. Just one of those things where we just decided we have to devote the time, we have to devote the energy and we have to shift or else there's no way we're going to be able to keep up with the volume. It was volume based and.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:05] Our like, what kind of volume are we talking about?

Lea Briscoe: [00:06:07] Volume of just just anything being able to record journal entries for our revenue. You know, being able to record our revenue in general with the detail that we wanted. Some of it was administrative type things like credit card reporting, being able to get all the journal entries then for those, although credit cards, you know, coding them appropriately. And it got to a point where we would try to download data from a certain time frame like a a small one, like even a month. And Excel would crash when we would download from QuickBooks because it was just so much information and so much detail that we wanted to have there. It just wasn't working anymore.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:44] So many sales transactions. Aw. Okay. Wow. So you must have a lot of auctions going on at any time. Like how many how many items are for sale or for auction on your own website?

Lea Briscoe: [00:06:57] It usually kind of depends. We typically have about, I would say, 13 to 16 auctions a month. Okay. We do have recurring auctions such as specific auctions, construction specific. Yeah, we have some that are government and we also have a vehicle and equipment and so and then also truck and trailer. And so the combination of those five all occur, you know, on certain weeks and then they'll happen two weeks later and then two weeks later. So we may get two or three in a month. But it just really kind of depends on how many items are really shifted into those auctions. I wouldn't say per say that we have kind of a threshold of too many items, but once the work just becomes starts to become too voluminous for a particular point in time, it's just we've got to shift it to something else kind of.

David Leary: [00:07:47] And then I'm assuming the auction site is like your own code. Some you code it up the auction site. So not you, but purple wave put it up the site itself. You're not running on somebody else's platform, I imagine. No, the auction site got it. And then do you have this custom website you have for the auctions tying back to intact like the data isn't moving back? Or is this manual process just like we're I guess take me from.

Lea Briscoe: [00:08:13] How does it.

David Leary: [00:08:13] Connect website yeah to your back.

Lea Briscoe: [00:08:15] End so as of right now we have our own homegrown invoicing system and that is where we do all of our entries, buyer and seller related. And that you know, of course things through our website, through our, our systems. We do not currently have a connection to Sage Intacct right now with our homegrown invoicing system, but we are planning to do that by the end of the year. One of the things that we've done this year is we have hired on product owners that handle from start to finish the auction process and all the components within that because. We have really invested in employees this year and getting people in the right positions and the right places to be able to scale with the company like we need them to. And so what we've done is within that we've hired what we call the product product owners and they owners and they facilitate certain functions part of the auction process. One of the ones that will be connecting our homegrown invoicing system, which we refer to as liquidator two Sage Intacct is going to be our settlement product owner and she will handle anything having to do with anything, post auction and anything back office.

David Leary: [00:09:26] So right now I think you just get like an export file out of your proprietary software. For when you bring up data into intact?

Lea Briscoe: [00:09:35] Oh, yes.

David Leary: [00:09:35] Yes.

Lea Briscoe: [00:09:36] We we're highly we highly use Tableau as well. Okay. So what right what happens right now is those reports are coming from intact to Tableau. We'll pull the information and we'll import it into Sage Intacct. But it's going to be significantly better for us just for the two systems to speak.

David Leary: [00:09:53] Okay. So did you get excited today when they announced that import feature for the the tables and you can map the data and import it in?

Lea Briscoe: [00:10:01] Oh, yeah.

David Leary: [00:10:02] Yeah.

Lea Briscoe: [00:10:02] It's there's so much with our general ledger right now. We feel like we just don't know what's there and we know we're not utilizing everything to capacity and that was one of the reasons that I wanted to grow my team is I want my team to be able to focus on daily and monthly transactions and myself personally, be able to create more efficient efficiencies within the team to be able to scale with our business. My team historically does not scale at the same volume that like our sales team scales. We are not going to get three more people because we've added 20 more people in the sales team. We just need to be more efficient in our systems and that's what my focus has been this year and will be for the next couple of years to make sure that we can scale appropriately.

David Leary: [00:10:47] And it sounds like you're feeling like the only way to do that is you really have to step out of the day to day. Yeah, because it's really hard to automate. And for some processes if you're just heads down typing.

Lea Briscoe: [00:10:56] Yep, absolutely.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:58] Are there any challenges that are unique from an accounting perspective when it comes to an auction business?

Lea Briscoe: [00:11:03] Yes, online auctions are fairly new. You know, just in talking about regulations and sales tax and everything of that nature, there aren't really statutes or publications too much written in depth about what to do in a specific scenario for an auction company that is not located in your state, but may be there for some reason, and just understanding all the compliances that are necessary for an auction company to be able to operate. Do they have access? Do they not you know, do they have people doing things? Is your customer entering the state? All that type of stuff.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:36] So you have to I guess because you do operate in all 50 states, Do you like do auctions everywhere? I mean.

Lea Briscoe: [00:11:44] So our sellers are primarily in the in the in the Midwest kind of where we have our territory managers, you know, north to south a little bit east and west. We are not registered in all 50 states because we do not currently do business, all 50 states with sellers. Now our buyers are from all over. Our buyers can be from international domestic, but once you start selling in that particular state is kind of one of those requirements in which you need to go ahead and start getting business registered. But we do not have any sellers, particularly kind of on the East Coast and far out west right now.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:17] And so. Got it. So your sellers are in sort of like in the middle of the country? Yeah. Your buyers can be everywhere. Okay, so you're registered and so you register for sales tax mainly in the states where your your sellers are.

David Leary: [00:12:30] Yeah. You know that's a big sell me is tractor. I went in the auction I bought it in the auction was tractor. I'm giving you the money, you're facilitating the funds and then eventually you pay it out to Blake after you take out ex fees or something like that.

Lea Briscoe: [00:12:43] Correct. So we handle the entire transaction from A to Z. One of the things about our auction company that's a lot different is the assets sell from where they where they're contracted at from the selling customers location for Boeing does not take a does not take ownership of the assets at any time. We don't you know, we don't go out there and move it to our lot similar to some how some other auction companies work they sit at the selling customers location until we're moved by the winning buyer. We handle the data capture, the contracting the listing. We put it all online, you know, all the pictures and everything. And then what happens is at the time point that comes when the buyer comes to pay, all the funds are remitted to purple wave and then we will remit it to the seller for their portion of the proceeds.

David Leary: [00:13:28] So are you kind of in a way, you're acting like an escrow company a little bit where you're holding those funds until all the deal gets done?

Lea Briscoe: [00:13:35] It's a very short turnaround. We. We only collect the funds. And then what we'll do is we'll remit it to the seller within 15 business days as based upon their contract. And so it's a very short turnaround. And then outside of that, we'll go ahead and remit all the sales tax collected to the state. So we will remit all the sales tax. We do that on behalf of our seller. We collect all the exemptions, we hold the exemptions in our systems, and then we'll go ahead and remit it to this to the state for the sales tax and go through all that. So the seller literally has to do nothing but take some phone calls, let the asset go once they get it paid in.

David Leary: [00:14:11] We're providing a service, a full end to end service, and I want to sell my thing. I don't have to do any of the other work, correct?

Lea Briscoe: [00:14:16] Yep.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:17] So do you do the sales tax filings yourself? Do you use a service? How do you do all that?

Lea Briscoe: [00:14:22] We do. Right now our sales tax is remitted to the states by one of my accounting associates right now, and she handles that all every month, most of our filings.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:33] Her role is to deal with that.

Lea Briscoe: [00:14:35] So one of the things that we realized as we scaled is that we needed a specific individual that handled all the sales tax. Now, there's other people who know how to do it and are integrated within it. But we need somebody who is the go to ask person. And so we were very fortunate to be able to hire somebody recently and be able to get that person on board. And so that person will remit and they it just shifted from another employee. We'll remit the sales tax on behalf of Purple Wave and handles all the exemption, management, auditing and making sure that everything is there.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:07] And so you're using intact any other tech in your stack for accounting and finance.

Lea Briscoe: [00:15:13] We so we use ramp, which is a credit card management software that we implemented last October. So we've been on it a little bit over a year. It is our credit card provider and our credit card software. They sync directly with Sage Intacct. And one of the biggest benefits that they have is the receipts that are actually attached in the system are shifted over to intact automatically. And that was one of the largest barriers that one of the individuals on my team had an issue was was attaching all the receipts that were provided to him.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:43] Okay. So, so somebody takes a picture with their phone and it goes it actually goes into intact as an attachment on the transaction.

Lea Briscoe: [00:15:50] It goes for a hyperlink, a hyperlink. So when somebody makes a credit card charge, they will take a picture of it. And because they'll get a text, they'll get a text from ramp saying you were charged at this place for this amount for for whatever, and they'll go ahead and get a picture of the receipt, send it in. They'll be asked for a memo. The memo will be put it in the system as well, and it'll be sent over to intact and all the hyperlinks go with it and all the coding goes with it. All the dimensions with Sage Intacct are connected on an employee basis or a vendor basis or all that stuff.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:23] And I imagine the people using this are mostly the sales folks you mentioned because they're traveling around.

Lea Briscoe: [00:16:29] We most of our staff, most of our well, all of our sales team does have a credit card, but there are headquarter employees such as managers, such as myself, that hold credit cards as well. So it's anybody who has a credit card. Got it? Mm hmm. They also do reimbursements in the system as well. So all of those no longer have to go through any type of manual process. They're user so they can go ahead and input a reimbursement and then it'll be swept over to intact and it'll be paid to them via ACH if that's what they choose as well automatically without us having to do anything.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:59] So in tax ramps, what do you guys use for payroll?

Lea Briscoe: [00:17:02] We actually used Ukg. We just implemented them in July of 2021. So we use it's a Kronos product. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:11] Were you impacted by their.

David Leary: [00:17:12] Say, didn't.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:13] They get they got hacked, right. Or they went down for a little while.

Lea Briscoe: [00:17:16] We were not impacted by that.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:17] Okay. Yeah, that's fortunate.

Lea Briscoe: [00:17:19] Yes. Oh yes. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:21] So Ukg anything else. How do you pay your bills?

Lea Briscoe: [00:17:25] We actually do that right now manually Checks? Yep. Well, we do so. We have different types of what you would call vendors. We have vendors like the electric companies, utilities, marketing vendors, and then we have our vendors, which are our sellers, which is significantly a higher volume. But for the other vendors like the electrical and the utilities and all of that nature, it's all manual as well. But there are some systems we are looking into right now. But one of the biggest components in parts of that is we do a lot of local marketing and so some of the marketing per say and it was surprising during COVID how many people did not shift to type of online type of payment or ability to take credit cards. We still do work with a lot of local kind of smaller marketing agencies within the areas of the assets that they're selling. And so they don't have a lot of those credit card abilities or.

David Leary: [00:18:26] We're still paper checks.

Lea Briscoe: [00:18:27] Paper checks.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:29] And so that's how you that's how you pay your sellers.

Lea Briscoe: [00:18:34] We also yes, so we also pay our sellers in that fashion, too. But it's handled by a different person in my accounting group. And so, yeah, we will pay our sellers by cash check or I'm sorry, not cash by check.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:47] Because mailing mail, we just mail them, you know, bags of money.

Lea Briscoe: [00:18:50] Yeah, we'll do check wire or Ach.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:54] Got it. So you're growing. You've been hiring? Yes. Are you finding it harder to hire these days? I hear that there is a shortage of accountants.

Lea Briscoe: [00:19:04] So my team, like I was saying earlier, doesn't hire too often. The last time we went through a round of hiring about a year ago, it seemed difficult to find somebody. And we were very lucky to find the employee that we hired when we did. But this last time I had two openings open and I feel like the process was much smoother. We are next to the university and there are times where I feel like we have shortages and then sometimes they're just all there and you have a whole plethora to pick from. But it just I don't know what the I don't know how to explain, like what causes the ups and downs. It's just sometimes hiring seems to be easier, sometimes it's not.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:51] Well, it's good being next to the university, Right. And I imagine they have a pretty good accounting program. And.

Lea Briscoe: [00:19:55] Well, of course, I graduated from.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:57] Yeah, exactly.

Lea Briscoe: [00:19:59] Yes. Yeah, they do. The university is a big part of Purple Wave's integration into the city, you know, wanting to make sure we get the right people for the right job. And Manhattan is not a it's definitely a college town. But it's not just a college town anymore. I've been in Manhattan since 95, and I went through the whole the whole, you know, grade school to middle school, to high school to graduation or to college there. And every step is different. And I've noticed a lot of the people that left for my class to go to school someplace else are coming back to Manhattan and to establish themselves as parents and full time professionals in the area. So the college there definitely brings a difference, a different level to it, because it is really great resource, I think, for a lot of our HR department to be able to source local individuals for interns and all that, all that that can help our company grow and scale the way we want it to.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:56] Cool. I have one last question. You mentioned that you love accounting. What is your favorite thing about accounting?

Lea Briscoe: [00:21:04] Um, so every single time that I tell somebody that I'm an accountant, they tell me, Oh, so you must love math. No, I don't love math. I just get it. But it's kind of funny because I feel like for me, for me personally, and I can tell my family you're either strong in English or strong in math. So I don't I, I am a firm believer you're not strong at both. Or at least I'm not. My kids are not. They're one or the other. But I like the way that things just make sense. I don't really like statistics because it's an it's a it can be a this or that, but accounting, there's an answer. And there has to be an answer because there has to be. So it just makes sense and it's there and it makes me feel happy that. You can close something at the end of the day and you know that it's right and. We don't make judgment calls per se.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:58] Yeah, there is an answer. There is one. There's one answer. Yeah.

David Leary: [00:22:03] So I just I guess I have a last question now. All right. You're saying, David, you graduated college second degree and you went straight to private? Yes, pretty much. What? What motivated that decision? Why didn't you? Did you intern at any of the big firms? Did you think about going public? Like where?

Lea Briscoe: [00:22:18] What there was? So when I started in 2005, there was a handful of people that worked there. There was, per se, no departments. I started out just as the front cashier and I was hired directly by our CEO, Aaron Mackey. And I grew up with a company and as it came time to graduate college, the company had changed and evolved so much to be what I wanted to be in and what I wanted to do. It just made sense for me to stay. And I've continuously graduated and gotten promoted over the last couple of years to now be the director of Accounting. You know, I was a customer service manager as we got there, and then I was accounting manager and then I was comptroller and now director of accounting. And so I've just kind of grown up with the company the same that the company has matured. And it was it was just a fit. It just it worked. And I don't ever plan on leaving and I'm happy there. But there's a really big family feel to the company. The the company was started by a husband and wife, Erin and Susie McKee. They're still there. They're still active in the day to day functions. They are fully infiltrated into the company to make sure that it is a success. It's very family friendly or family. Yeah, family friendly and flexible. You know, sometimes you just can't by flexibility. And it's just. It's a fit, and I think it'll always be a fit.

David Leary: [00:23:45] Cool. Thank you very.

Lea Briscoe: [00:23:46] Much. Yeah, Thank you.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:48] And if our listeners want to check out all the amazing vehicles and equipment and just sort of geek out about it on the Purple Wave auction site, you can go to purple Wacom. You've got some classic cars, it looks like. Yes. Like, here's a 1947 Cadillac series 62 convertible in Lake View AIA. That's a la Iowa. Mm hmm. There we go.

David Leary: [00:24:15] Let's buy a bulldozer for five grand.

Lea Briscoe: [00:24:17] Well, so that's probably not what it'll sell for. So all bids start at zero, so. Oh, okay. We don't do any reserves, but yes, there is bidding on it. And what makes it a little bit different is on auction day when the items closing, if somebody bids on the item within the last couple of minutes, it'll be extended. So it treats it like a real auction. It allows you guys to respond back to one another and it doesn't make it where it just completely shuts you off at a specific time. At 10:07 a.m., it's going to allow you guys to respond to one another's bids so that it is like a true live auction, but without the live aspect.

David Leary: [00:24:53] Oh, this is cool.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:53] Here's a 1924 star car model F for $6,000. I think we need to.

David Leary: [00:24:59] Spur the bidding.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:59] We need to buy this and paint it cloudaccountingpodcast.com blue.

Lea Briscoe: [00:25:02] There you go.

David Leary: [00:25:03] It's an expense. Right? We can expense this out. Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:06] Leah, thanks so much for joining us.

David Leary: [00:25:07] Thank you so much.