Spend Advantage Podcast

How to save hundreds of hours during auditing process for you and your customers

October 21, 2022 Varisource Season 1 Episode 2
Spend Advantage Podcast
How to save hundreds of hours during auditing process for you and your customers
Show Notes Transcript

Welcome to The Did You Know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders, executives and experts at amazing technology companies that can help your business save a lot of time, money and grow faster. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business and give you a competitive advantage

https://www.varisource.com 

Welcome to the Did You Know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders and executives at amazing technology companies that can help your business save time and money and grow. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business. 1.5s 

Hello, everyone. This is Victor with Varisource. Welcome to another episode of the Did You Knnow podcast. Today I'm excited to have Alex, who is the CEO and founder of Uplink. So essentially, Uplink is building the next generation audit software to track and speed up the auditing process and as well as our due diligence and internal compliance, which we're going to get into for sure. So welcome, Alex, the episode, our fellow floridian. Yeah, thanks for having me. We're excited to be here. Yeah. So, Alex, why don't you maybe give a quick intro of yourself and maybe a little bit of your background? Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Alex, CEO of Uplink, and I started my career as an auditor. So this space is near and dear to my heart. I was amazed. I was working at the Big Four when I graduated college, and I was amazed at the lack of technology that existed for the audit process. It is incredibly manual, incredibly time consuming, and incredibly tedious. And so after doing audits for six years or so, I switched into building software at PwC and enjoyed doing that for a number of years. But then I decided to leave and start my own company. And that's where we're at today. 1.4s 

Yeah, I mean, that's so fascinating. One of the things being a startup founder ourselves is just a story. Like, ever since we started our own startup, like, the people, the founders we met, it's really the stories that are just like, how do people even came about to dislike to this thing? Right? And it's fascinating. Obviously, a lot of people don't get to see that when they go to your website. So we'll definitely talk about uplink and everything, all the great things about it. But I love to start with but you mentioned a couple interesting things. Alex, you were working on one of the big fours. You were an auditor. 

So based on your experience, why do you think it's lacking technology? These companies have tons of money. Like, why do they just not have they just didn't have the focus? Or why do you think was missing technology? And what were some of the challenges you were facing when you were an auditor, right, when you were doing your job? Sure. Yeah. So I'll never forget starting at PWC in audit. I was working at one of the largest banks, was my audit client. I won't name them specifically, but we have this massive list of documents that we need from the client. And so every day we would get dozens of emails inbound to the shared inbox with these documents. And so I was the poor associate who had to go through that inbox and update the status tracker every single day. And it took at least an hour to do this because you were getting so many documents in and you didn't want to mess up. If you missed something or said something was received and it hadn't been received, it could basically throw a whole wrench in the audit, so really slowing things down. And so it was just a very manual process. And so that's just one area where there's so much opportunity for efficiencies. And that's actually the area we started with. Uplink. Right. Uplink today is very good at creating these requests, sending them out to the client, and then giving the client an easy way to upload those documents. As an auditor or as a compliance professional, you can track exactly what's been uploaded and see a dashboard and you get all that stuff right there. Nice. So, yeah, a lot of companies we talk to, whether SMB, Mint, Market or Enterprise, across a lot of the company functions, there's usually still using spreadsheets. And it's just like, wow, like, that is crazy to me. Like, that's how people run their business. And again and that's congrats to Microsoft. We're still holding onto this excel, I mean, it's still very useful, but it's just like right. I think that's why people start software companies and just saying, hey, there's got to be a more efficient, better automated way to do this. Right? Yeah. Amazing. Right. 

Don't get me wrong, especially as a former owner, I love Excel 1.2s very frequently, 2.4s and their power is in their functionality. Right. You can do anything in a spreadsheet, really, but once you have process that is repeatable and is time consuming and cumbersome, it's time to move it out of the spreadsheet and into an app. 1.3s Yeah. So if I heard correctly, and correct me if I'm wrong here, you mentioned you then went so you were an auditor, I'm assuming not a technologist, didn't know how to code. Did you end up teaching yourself how to code or your co founders are more the code? Yeah, so I actually did teach myself how to code. There's a lot of great 1.9s resources online. I'm really fond of, actually. 

The MIT Intro to Computer Science course. I took that, and I think you can get it on Edx or Coursera or any of those sites. And that was just really opened my eyes to the possibility. And so I did that, started building apps kind of on the side, nights and weekends. And then I actually had the opportunity to switch into a software role at PwC, where I was responsible for leading software teams, building out some of their internal tooling. So it's a pretty unusual career path going from auto to software engineering manager, director, but yeah, it was definitely the right path for me. 1s That is amazing. I think there's just anybody who has a dream. You can now teach yourself how to code. You can teach yourself anything, and it's just whether the person has the persistence and desire. That's awesome, man. So let's talk about uplink. First of all, I love the name. I think it's easy to remember. I think it makes a lot of sense. I just like companies whose name kind of, like, resonates with kind of what they're doing. 1.5s Yeah, I appreciate that. We spent a lot of time thinking about it because it's like we wanted it to be that right. We wanted to be something that wasn't like, what do you guys do? We wanted it to fit with what we do, you know? That's awesome. So obviously we talked about Uplink being a software platform. 1.3s That helps companies around the due diligence, the internal compliance and auditing process. So can you kind of give us couple of minutes of kind of walk through, right, of how does it work? And of course, we're going to keep it interesting so that we can get you on a webinar to visually show people how this beautiful thing works, but kind of walk us through what is the current process that companies typically go through today, right, the current process and then the process with Uplink and the difference? Yeah, sure. So if you think about the steps of an auditor, the steps of a due diligence process, or steps of some sort of compliance process, it really all begins with the auditor or the due diligence professional or compliance professional asking for a lot of information 1.3s from their client or from the person that they're investigating, if you will. And so they'll typically have a massive spreadsheet of anywhere from dozens to hundreds of items that they need from these other parties. 3s And these other parties will have to then supply that information. 

What we do with Uplink is you take that list, you upload it into the application, and you can assign requests to individual people, and those people will get notifications, an email link that says, hey, upload these files here and there's, status tracking reminders and all that stuff built around that. So that's basically the beginning of the process. From there, the auditor gets notified, hey, Joe uploaded 14 documents for you to review. You can go inside of Uplink, you can preview those files that Joe uploaded, take a look at them, you can send them back to Joe if something's not right, ask follow up questions, things like that, or you can approve it, and then it goes to a complete status. So at every point during the project, you know what, the status of requests and all of that stuff is centralized. So the requests and the status and the discussions are all centralized in the name application because before everything was done over email, 1.6s emails would be sent with documents and there'd be followups on individual threads, so everything was very scattered. What we're doing with Uplink is bringing it all in one place. 2.7s That makes a lot of sense. And I think some 1.2s tax people we work with or we know should probably use this as well. Everybody, even tax season, I still love the emails and those things going on. It's just just that concept of email and how you track it and yeah, you got to look for all these things I love that are simple to understand, simple to implement, and get immediate ROI. 

Absolutely. Yeah. And to your point on the tax prepare stuff, we do have tax preparers who are using the software and they love it. Right. It just streamlines the whole thing and they can keep track of not just a single client, but they're keeping track of hundreds of clients that they're doing this tax work for, which having all of that visible in one dashboard makes things really easy. And the software that's out there that a lot of tax preparers are using these client portals where basically it's like a Dropbox. The problem with just using Dropbox is that for this purpose right, is that you don't have the status and the expectation of these are the twelve documents I need. You have to go into each folder or each portal instead. 

Okay, I know I need these twelve documents and I only have eight. Right, so then you're following up manually with your clients having everything go ahead like a checklist. In a way. Exactly, very much so. 1.5s Yeah. We could all be more organized and use a checklist. So that makes a lot of sense. So a lot of companies, when it comes to auditing, some people might think it's relevant to them, some people might think it's not relevant to them. But you mentioned something early on to me that either you're auditing somebody, you're an auditor, you need this tool because you're auditing somebody, or you're a company that needs to get audited maybe once every year or whatever the case may be. 2.6s What I love doing is have you speak to the specific use cases so people can really understand. Right. So if you were talking to an auditor, what would the ROI how would you explain to them, the auditors, your value? And then after that, I want you to explain to a business owner. Let's say a business owner is listening, right. 

Or a decision maker is listening, a CFO, CEO. What would be the ROI for them? Sure. Yeah. So for an auditor, every auditor I've talked to, as soon as I showed them the product, they understand the ROI immediately. Right. Because they've built it, they've lived it. They've requested these hundreds of documents and dealt with the pain of going back and forth with the client 1s on many of them. So auditors really get the ROI pretty quickly. One of the things that's interesting when I have conversations with them is that they're actually using uplink to win more work. Right. So, because uplink makes the client's life better, they use that as a selling point, as a differentiator from their competitors. It says, look, we have the software, and the whole audit will go faster and be much less painful because we're using the software. And so that's basically a competitive advantage for them as they try to go in, work out in the market. That is smart, man. Now that is smart. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Then what about for the customer side? 1.6s Yeah. So, typically 1.1s at a company that's being audited, you'll appoint a person inside of your company to be the go between, to be the liaison with the auditor. And this is expensive. Right. You're paying somebody full time, effectively, to do this. And. 1.5s It's at least months, and the bare minimum time is a couple of months and it can extend even longer than that. So first of all, you're going to be removing the burden on that person, right? And that person can then go do their job that they have apart from managing audits. So that's helpful. And then you're also kept much more up to date as the client. So if you're being audited, you know exactly where the audit stands because you can go in at any time and look at the dashboard and see where things are at. So you get a lot more visibility and the whole process takes a lot less time. 

So our vision really is to make audits ten times faster than they are today. And that sounds audacious, and it is, but once you understand how much wasted time there is in an audit, it becomes very obvious that it's possible. So most of the time is spent waiting between the client and the auditor. So the auditor makes these hundreds of document requests and it takes several weeks for the client to gather all the information and provide it to the auditor. Then the auditor is looking through all that stuff. They make sample selections and ask for followup information and that takes time. So what we're doing with uplink is making things a lot more self service and speeding up that go between that back and forth to reduce the overall time it takes to do an audit. Yeah, time is money, man. So I guess, especially in this economy, and according to 1.8s different people, 2023 is not going to get much better. If not going to get worse, possibly 1.3s company need to find ways to optimize time and spend and everything. So with that kind of picture in mind, right, 2023, like, okay, things are not getting better. You got to prepare for the worst. Like, how do you think companies can leverage your platform? Again, we talked about time is money. Are there other areas where you feel like, hey, especially with where things are headed, tough times ahead. How can you help these companies generate more ROI, do you think? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the interesting things that we haven't talked about yet is the experience of using better software, right? So 2.3s right now, we're in a situation where employees have tremendous amount of leverage and choice. And so to the extent that you can make your company a better company to work for, that you can make the day to day work, the day to day lives of your employees better, the morale is going to go up, retention is going to go up, and you're not going to be suffering with this talent shortage as much. And so 1.6s that's one area that we're talking to people about as well. Improving the workflow of people on a day to day basis actually makes them want to stay. 1.1s 

That is another genius 1.6s approach. I think that's definitely smart, and it makes a lot of sense. So, obviously, last two years with COVID, 1.2s there's a lot of digital transformation, meaning 1.9s how we used to do things change. And I think it forces companies to have to change because, again, when you used to sit next to each other, things are a little bit easier, or you do things a certain way for a long time. Like now, like you said, people work remote or, you know, things change more. And so how have you personally kind of seen changes with customers? Or do you feel like there is more of a need for your type of service now, like post COVID kind of in this new world? 1.5s Yeah, absolutely. I think that to your point about following up with somebody going over their desk and reminding them to send you some document. In a lot of companies, auditors actually used to go to the company and had a special room with no windows, of course, but the auditors were shoved into and so now that those hallway conversations can happen, a lot more stuff is being done over email, which is just not a good tool for managing work and managing workflows. So there definitely is more of a use case for Uplifting having all of the context around the request in the same application. So you not only have the file, you have the details of what was requested and you have the ability to interact and discuss that request 1.2s all in one spot. So 2.9s what size of companies would you say are your ideal partners today? Right, again, it seems like every company, small or large, needs auditing or gets audited. But yeah, right now, is it the SMB? Is it, midmark? Is the enterprise where you can help any and all sizes of clients regardless of their requirement, it scales very well or how does it work? Yes, so it definitely does scale and it's going to depend probably on the industry as well. But if you're a company that's struggling with audits or compliance or internal security audits and requests, uplink is an excellent tool and really makes a lot of sense for those use cases. 1.7s Nice. 

No, man, I always love chatting with you. 1.3s There's just so many start up stories and battles that we go through every day, so it's amazing. And we're super excited to obviously have you guys in the air source platform. And so one of the last questions I always love to ask our guests is whether it's your personal experience or work or startup or anything like that, if you were to give the listeners who are business owners, business decision makers, one advice, again, it could be a personal advice, work advice, whatever it is, what are you most passionate about? What advice you would want to give to people? 1.3s Yeah, so I think the thing that comes to mind is 1.5s to really do what you love, but be strategic about it at the same time. So when I was an auditor, I didn't love it, and I was doing it for several years, but on the side, I was teaching myself how to code, and there was an opportunity that came up, and because I had prepared, because I learned, you know, on the side, I was ready to take that opportunity. So I would say, 1.6s Do what you love, but be prepare for it. Right. And that's been the case with my switch as an order to technology and then my switch from being a director of Software engineering to being a start up founder. So, yeah, another follow up question to that, which is as we wrap up here, is how did again, switching from one skill set to another completely different, and it takes complete different personality and 1.4s focus and discipline to do very two very different possible things. 1.4s How did you feel like you helped yourself 1.4s go through that conversion? Or, again, just because you want to learn how to code doesn't mean you can. There's resources, but doesn't mean anybody has the personality or capabilities to do it. So how did you feel like you kind of made that transition? 

Was it just because you're the way you think, it's kind of transitioned? Well, or if other people are looking to make those type of transitions, I guess what I'm asking, if they're hearing you and say, man, I want to make that transition to again, they can find resource, they can find YouTube videos. They have the desire. But how did you maybe make that transition actually happen? Yeah, so I think that for me, it was, 1.6s first of all, learning the basics, right? Start from scratch, be humble, recognize that you're a beginner and be okay with that. Learn as much as you can. And like I said, be humble. And then basically just keep your eye out for opportunities as they come your way, right? And so something eventually will come up, and when it does, you'll have prepared, you'll be ready for it, and then you just jump on it. That's amazing, man. I really appreciate all thanks for being on the episode, and we look forward to getting you guys on the webinar to showcase your platform. Awesome. Well, thanks a lot, Victor. I appreciate your time today. It's great being on. 2.7s