Construction Trailblazers: Paving The Way to Excellence

[00:00:00] If you've ever wanted to say forget QuickBooks, but felt stuck with it, then this episode is for you. Welcome to Construction Trailblazers Paving the Way to Excellence the podcast where we cut through the noise to uncover what truly drive success. In the building industry, I'm Samantha. C. Prestige Your Guide in Leading Well and Making Work Simpler.

Samantha C Prestidge: You can explore our past episodes@constructiontrailblazers.com and start your journey to excellence. So today we're sitting down with Bryant Solomon, a co-founder of Control Core, who's on a mission to give construction businesses a smarter contractor friendly way to manage their finances without all of the accounting headaches.

That usually come with QuickBooks. So he's built a system that actually works for the way construction runs. So Brian, I'm excited to dive in and maybe try to pop the myth of is control core actually the solution we're working for? So just kind of take us back to early days. Where did this idea come from?

How did you start this? [00:01:00]

Bryant Solomon: Yeah. So, first, thanks, thanks for having me. Excited to be here. And I like that you introduce yourself as the guide. I was gonna say, it's very, very intimate. Like yes, I hold my hand through this process. But yeah, ControlQore is the brainchild of me and my brother-in-law, JD, who was on the podcast a couple of weeks ago as we explored.

Solutions for his general contracting firm. They scaled their firm from a, a $10 million shop to a $40 million shop in a very short amount of time and needed some new tools to help them manage their finances. And my background was all accounting and finance. And. As he and I dug in and started looking, we, we really felt like the construction industry just hadn't been offered anything that was very high quality.

There were plenty of solutions, don't get me wrong. [00:02:00] Like there's, there's tons of solutions out there, but nothing that was like truly. One that should win and should be like, the high quality, good piece of software that small and mid-sized contractors could rely on and use. And really honestly, the goal here is to get the software out of the way so that you can build more.

And so we didn't feel like there was anything out there that could do that for us. And so we decided to spend a bunch of money and build our own. Piece of technology but before. Before we started, JD was like, Hey, you know, you're gonna have to leave your comfortable cushy technology world as a CFO and you're gonna have to come work in the construction industry for a couple of years before, we'll build this.

And so he had me, you know, leave my, my throne and my chair and go and. Hang out in the construction space. Now granted, you know, they wouldn't let me swing a hammer. They were very, they were [00:03:00] very aware that I'm an accountant. And so, you know, I did their books. I managed all of their finances and I upgraded them , and brought them a little bit further along on their financial journey to where they are today.

And so that's really where it all started, you know, his experience and then what became my experience in construction finance, and just being genuinely dissatisfied by what we felt like was available to us.

Samantha C Prestidge: Yeah. First off, I love that he was like, no, you've gotta understand the construction side.

You have to come live in our world. I mean, that's what Tyler Campbell with a field proof is trying to do, right? Yeah. Is really like connect developers to what the field actually needs. And JT was like, you're gonna just get in the field. Don't give him a hammer. He's an accountant nerd. Guys can't trust him with that, but understand our side and Yeah.

Bryant Solomon: I, I like it that you bring up Tyler Campbell because I feel like he, you know, we, we haven't interacted with him in, in any way yet, but we consume his stuff because a lot of his stories, I swear, like they're verbatim [00:04:00] stories that JD has told or I've told or we've talked about.

So just, yeah, really enjoy some of that stuff. That, and feel like, yeah, we're, we're not the only ones. We're not the only ones who sense this, this problem and this, this mismatch between technology and construction.

Samantha C Prestidge: Well, I mean, like, I'm not in the tech space, I'm not, I, I work with construction, but I'm not in the construction company.

Right. And I could see the mismatch. And I was cringing when you said there were a lot of solutions out there because I was like, there's a lot of options. Mm-hmm. There's a lot of options. But everything, especially 'cause some of our work really dives into processes and so we have to look at the tech stack and what's the workflow for some things.

And so for some clients, we're. Totally taking apart the tech stack and trying to rebuild it. And when I'm researching stuff, it's anytime you see like reviews on Capterra or something, it's like, oh, they got 4.5 stars. I'm like, awesome. This could be an option. Like let me read through the reviews. And their reviews are like.

It's good enough mm-hmm. Compared to X, Y, Z. It's like, this is, this like, solves this [00:05:00] problem. Here are like the four other problems it brings, but it solved this one thing. So like, we're kind of happy with it. And I'm like, the bar is so low, you know? Yeah. And , I really appreciate that you guys were like, here is the problem, and here's the standard that we wanna raise it to.

Yeah. And like, we're gonna replace QuickBooks and you kind of have now.

Bryant Solomon: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Samantha C Prestidge: So walk us through like the, the features, what you started with and kind of where you're at now in the replacing QuickBooks for construction journey.

Bryant Solomon: Yeah, so back in the early days when we were deciding, you know, like, what, what can we do, what needs to be done in reality or construction, finance and the industry as a whole.

we came down to this, the idea, and we've come to really believe that. You need to have in your tech stack, there needs to be a single source of truth. You know, where's your Bible at? This one thing that everything else can [00:06:00] rely on and your processes can rely on to be that single source of truth.

And you know, the more we thought about it, the more we said, well, you know, is it the project management tool? Is it, is it the HR and the payroll? Like what, what is it? Well, it's, it's the general ledger. The old, the spine, the brain of the entire business. The whole reason why you're there is to make money.

And so the general ledger has to be the hub of the rest of the business. And it needs to be in direct communication with every. Aspect of money that is, is happening in the business. And so we, we set out to build our own general ledger, which isn't, you know, isn't particularly fun.

It's risky and it's dangerous because you're messing with people's actual finances. They're gonna be filing taxes based on these things and stuff like that. So we took our time to build [00:07:00] that. And that's really where we say like we replace QuickBooks. We are a general ledger that does accounts payable, accounts receivable bank reconciliations, and the standard set of things that you would expect from a general ledger.

But then on top of that, we do a lot of things that are very important for what we felt like the construction industry needed. The ability to job cost specifically, and how do you trust and rely on your job costing tools if your job costing in multiple applications and hoping that all of those transactions flow into wherever else they need to go.

Right. Job costing is that is super important for your project financials. You're also dealing with company financials anytime your job costing. And so those two processes have to work very closely together in order for your business to be successful. So you've got job costing that happens with your corporate [00:08:00] cards and your expense management.

You've got job costing with your timekeeping, with your accounts payable. And then on the flip side, you've got, you know, job, job reporting for your, your revenues when you're going out and invoicing your clients. Even manual journal entries in ControlQore you can assign those to a job and job cost a manual journal entry.

And I can go on and on about how we've made ControlQore very specific, like it's a general ledger that's built for construction in a modern environment. There's lots of general ledgers out there that are built specifically for construction, but I don't wanna be mean. They're 150 years old.

Samantha C Prestidge: Yeah, we could be mean.

They're shit. Don't choose them. Let's be mean.

Bryant Solomon: Let's kick them to the curb. They're very old and they're very archaic and they're very difficult. They don't play well with others. And so our system is, is meant to be an the, the a real true all in one minimal amounts of employees having to get in there and tinker with things fully automated solution that does your job costing for your [00:09:00] projects, but also your accounting for your company.

Samantha C Prestidge: I feel like there's so many people now listening, they're like, okay, we need this. And if you're not, then I'm questioning your sanity because I mean, like, I've worked with clients like, Hey, we're doing credit card reconciliations by exporting an Excel sheet and then like approving transactions there, and add adding codes on that.

And then, or even job costing on spreadsheets and listen, I mean, like if there's no viable solution. Your spreadsheets are working for you, like keep it for now. But control core is that viable solution to jump out of spreadsheets and have something automated. And I wanna go back to what you said at the beginning of this is, the main goal is to understand that single source of truth.

And I think so often. Construction companies, their single source of truth is, like you said, a very outdated ERP that's trying to do everything for them. And I'm like I don't know who started ERPs, but I'm like, I despise them in every industry. I, get the idea of like, it's awesome if we have one [00:10:00] system that can do everything but.

ERPs never do everything that you want them to do. Yeah. So you end up overpaying and using like 20% of the features and still have bad data. Yeah. And so like, I don't understand why people use ERPs they are the worst. And so I appreciate, you're like, what's the single source of truth? Where do we start?

And then let's build everything else from that. And so what's a lot of this, just like the research you had when you jumped into j d's construction business?

Bryant Solomon: Yeah. A lot of it was, you know, we had our gut. You know, feeling of like, we've gotta build something that really actually moves the needle.

And I've, I've admittedly, I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I've always wanted to build something software related and impactful. And so this concept of like, Hey, you know, let's build a, a construction specific piece of technology that really actually moves the needle for a company that's like the most gratifying thing that's started happening now that we've released stuff is seeing [00:11:00] clients, you know, get excited about, oh man, you know, this is in QuickBooks Desktop. You can do, don't get me wrong, you can do this in QuickBooks Desktop. It's just not fun. Or, or it's not, it's not helpful. Mm-hmm. It or, or it's a process that isn't conducive to our workflows. We just have to bandaid and tape duct tape, you know, excel into this or duct tape our own approval process into it. And so like our experiences drove us to research. So like, I guess like, like our experiences of duct taping Excel and applications together to fit our needs drove us to go out and talk, start talking to people, Hey, like, what are you doing? What do you guys use for these parts of your business? And you know, just time and time again, demo after demo, after demo. You know, you'd start talking to the tech guys and you'd say, Hey, you know, does your system have the ability to record a [00:12:00] customer payment?

Like you can send a customer invoice? Great. Does it have the ability to record a customer payment? Well, yes, but it doesn't integrate with QuickBooks. Oh, you're saying? So I don't know when my customers is paid in QuickBooks versus when. It's been paid in your system. So now I have to do some kind of active reconciliation.

That doesn't help me. That means that I just have one more thing that I have to check, and then there's just consistently, we just kept running into those problems. And then contractors, I, you look on LinkedIn and you can see just the, or LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram, Reddit, anywhere. You can see just tons of complaints about the financial side of their business.

Samantha C Prestidge: Shout out to the people that are posting about the complaints because most of them are just accepting like, okay, well this is what it is. There's no better way to do this. And what I appreciate also what I'm hearing you say more than once now is like, what's fun? And I'm a firm believer in like.

How can we keep the process simple and fun? Because then our employees, like the people [00:13:00] executing on the process now, instead of spending all their energy and time being pissed off at their computer and the system, now they have more energy to catch stuff, to be a little bit more proactive and be like, oh, here, this, this doesn't match this.

Or like, I think we can do this better and spend their time in a better way. Yeah. I see you shaking your head. So what, is this bringing up some bad memories for you? Yeah, well,

Bryant Solomon: it just, it just brings up things like, like a lot of our clients and stereotypically construction, a lot of folks , the person who's handling the books is either a spouse.

Or a wonderful little old lady, Ethel, you know, that, or you know, I, I've, I've seen it so much, like, don't talk

Samantha C Prestidge: shit about the Ethel's now. Yeah, no, I'm not. I'm,

Bryant Solomon: that's what I mean. And, and if poor Ethel is having to jump through hoops to see why a specific integration isn't working. Hmm. Like, or, or they don't even know that an integration currently isn't working.

Man, that's so frustrating. [00:14:00] And so that, that part's not fun. In technology we have this we have this word, we call it gamification.

Hmm.

Bryant Solomon: The goal here is to, to tap into our natural tendency, tap into the dopamine supply in all human beings by gamifying whatever process or whatever thing that you've got in your, in your application.

And so what we like, the, the, the only thing that we have right now that I would say kind of gamifies it is just this nice, you know, when, when you have a list of transactions that you've got a job cost or approvals that you've gotta run through, you job cost them, the transactions start going away one by one, by one by one, until at the end.

You just have this blank sheet. There's nothing there. You know, like, oh, what do I have to do right now? Oh, nothing. There's nothing in here, means my job is done, whatever this process was, it's done. Like, you get that tiny little [00:15:00] dopamine rush of like, oh, I finished this thing. And so like gamifying it, making it fun.

But the way that you make it fun is that you have to trust. It is everything that you need to do, and it is capturing the entire scope of your, of the process and the scope of your work. So that's, yeah, like gamification is, is. What we'd say to make it fun.

Samantha C Prestidge: Yeah. I mean, nothing about QuickBooks feels fun or gamey to me.

It just fills me with dread every time I have to open QuickBooks. But you said something important there about trust, and I would imagine that that might be one of, not to like dive into like your sales process or anything, but I'd imagine that that would be one of the objections is maybe people that have just accepted.

The crappy systems for so long are feeling like, well, this feels maybe too good to be true or, because that's also something in any industry when we're looking at automations, some of the resistance to change there is, well, how do I know that automation is working, whereas the checks and balances, right?

They prefer [00:16:00] some of the manual steps there for that quality control. Yep. So how are you guys kind of combating it and reassuring people? You can trust this data, you can trust a zero to do list.

Bryant Solomon: Yeah, that's actually a super good question and something that is inherent early on in conversations.

JD and I when we talk about the product, typically I will defer to his industry experience because he's got a lot more years in the industry than I do. But one of the things that he advocated for was intentional inefficiency. An intentional bottleneck that is, that it can be worked through quickly, but it's exactly what you're saying.

Automation is great and automation is awesome, but unchecked and like uncheckable automation is super dangerous. That's where you get, you know, bad bookkeeping. You get fraud occasionally that like, because things get too [00:17:00] automated. So you have to create intentional inefficiency through approval processes.

Where it's like I'm gonna let my superintendent job cost this transaction for me. Like he, he went out, he purchased something on a control court card and now you know, he's gonna tell me what project was it for, what cost code was it for? And he is gonna job cost it for me.

Well, you know, hold on, let's let the project manager who owns that budget. Look over that job costing from that superintendent and make sure that it's correct and make the changes if he needs to, or educate the superintendent for the next time he does his job costing, educate them and change the behavior.

And then on top of that in other areas of ControlQore, there's just a lot of opportunities that you can make the process. Automated with human oversight, the like, purposeful and intentional human oversight. It's automated and it's working. It's doing what it's supposed to. But [00:18:00] at the end of the day, there's a person that has an opportunity to look at that automation or look at that transaction and say, yep, that's right.

Nope, that's wrong. So that you've always got, like, you can't ever hold the computer accountable. You can only hold a person accountable. And so you've got to be able to have those, those. Interventions in strategic places where they don't feel like they're overwhelming, but they also get the accountability across.

Samantha C Prestidge: Wow, that go back to like, oh, just intentionality. There I am, I am almost speechless because I do like the same thing with like even some of my automations in my project management system. I'm like, yes, I do want notifications. I understand it'll blow up my email. I'll do some email filter for this, but I want notifications whenever this type of thing is automated because that way I at least see this, this is happening.

And so I have that awareness and I. Can still feel somewhat in control. And something else you said thereafter, intentionality was at least like, can we [00:19:00] educate? And that's I think something I really see breaking down between accounting departments and everybody else, right? They get annoyed, like, oh, well they're not coding correctly, but I want them to code because why should that be on my to-do list?

It takes too much time. Mm-hmm. I'm like, okay, well are we able to slow down and like talk to the people? Yeah. Can we educate them? And it sounds like a inherent part of your process.

Bryant Solomon: Yeah, so we have a couple of things that like are again, inspired by our own experience, like we don't like the accountants or the bookkeepers in our firm to try and guess what the superintendent bought over at Home Depot.

Like, we want them to do the job costing. We want the project manager to approve it. The only thing that we want our guys doing is saying, yeah, money went in, money went out and that was approved like it was okay. But we have a couple of things. PMs or, or a, you know, transaction approvers have the ability to not only look at it, but they can reject it and send it back to the guy with notes that says, Hey, for the future reference, this is going to be this project and, you know, recode it and send it back [00:20:00] up my way.

It's a great process. We have a couple of clients that use that quite often, but then on top of that, we also recognize that like we don't need a superintendent to have access to the entire. Frigging, space size application that control core is like we need those guys to just see what pertains to their job.

And so you have the ability at multiple levels to keep your superintendents or your guys in the field using control core. In its most minimal state, they have basically two buttons, you know. Cost code, receipt, that's it. And shortly there will be, you know, punch in and punch out. So we're gonna go up to four buttons and see how that goes.

And then, you know, on top of that, it's limiting their options. Even within those four buttons is like here, you don't have, there's hardly anything for you to do. 'cause we like the goal is like, [00:21:00] we wanna make it so easy for the field to give us those inputs because you're the most accurate. But it's the.

Suckiest stupidest thing to have to detract you from your day and do things that are, you know, non-revenue generating, you know, go out and code this for me versus, you know, actually, I mean, get the building built. I, I, I want you to build the building. I want you to spend as little time as possible on this, but still just, just, you know, gimme 15 seconds of coding that transaction and it'll save me 10 minutes of doing research.

Samantha C Prestidge: The, the idea of limiting buttons for me, what it's bringing up is hospitals for delivering babies. So typically now you have like a parenting kind of pre-birth class or whatever, or you at least get a tour of the hospital. And most hospitals have this where they tell you a specific entrance.

To go if you're like in labor or something. Mm-hmm. And that elevator has one button. It has one button to get you to that [00:22:00] floor. Because most of the time it's the husband or some friend. It's like, oh my God. Like this person's, it's a panic. It's a

Bryant Solomon: panicked husband. Yeah. You know not,

Samantha C Prestidge: and there are, I mean, you can go anywhere in the hospital and like get to this delivery floor.

Right. But here's the one elevator by the er. You go here, you don't have to try to remember what floor it's on. Right. And it's simple and easy. That's funny. So I, I appreciate the limited buttons there. Now let's go back, let's have a shameless plug because you're talking about your team and so I don't think people realize you have bookkeeping teams.

Let's have a shameless plug here about those. You're not only a tech company, you provide a service as well.

Bryant Solomon: Yeah. And that we, that's, I appreciate the shameless plug. When you do technology, like everything, you just basically are shameless. You have to, you have to do everything. And so it was really important to us as we started to talk about control core with other clients, we realized that we were in a position of privilege [00:23:00] with our own bookkeeping and accounting. JD had up to that point been managing things and he had gotten overwhelmed and so he asked me to come and we had gotten our contractor firm into a very good place when it came to its accounting was running like, it runs like clockwork.

It still does. But. As we started having conversations with subcontractors in our network and with contractors across the nation, it was like, guys, I love what you're doing. I think it's great. My books, I haven't filed taxes in four or five years. I haven't done a bank rec in that exact same amount of time.

I would love to migrate, but I don't have time, and we're just like, Hey, whoa. That sounds like something that we can solve naturally given that we have a tool that sets you up for success. So we got, we started early on. We started getting into other clients' accounts and started managing their books for them and, and doing things that helped them, like just feel like they were under control.[00:24:00]

Like that they, you know, the phrase we often heard is, I don't know what I don't know. I. We hear that all the time, and so like, Hey, let's, we'll just get in there and do your bank recs, do your AP and do your AR in whatever system you've got right now. Don't even worry about ControlQore for a minute.

Just we will work in whatever system you've got. And we will migrate you after we feel like we've gotten things under control. And so we've done that for quite a few clients now, and that's great. We clean up their books, we get 'em feeling like they're okay. And then we make the migration and it makes everybody, feel better about migrating their books because that's, that's the scary part. When we're talking about control core, it's like folks are nervous about migrating. We've got a process in place and we're still, we're honing it, but we've got a process in place that if you need bookkeeping services, let's get in there.

Let's get your books cleaned up and then we'll migrate you over time. If you just wanna start with the software cold Turkey and get going. We can get you [00:25:00] on and up and running in less than 48 hours. You know, based on what kind of needs you have. But yeah, so the bookkeeping part just came out of a genuine need, and I'm sure that you see this too, is just like there's so many guys out there that they got into the business to build.

The bookkeeping thing is not their strong suit nor should it be. They just need somebody that can come in there, wrangle the finances and let them go out, estimate and build.

Samantha C Prestidge: I am gonna continue to be in awe at just how much. Everything you guys do is built for your customers and this intimate knowledge of your customers and saying like, how do we make this transition as easy as possible?

How do we really best serve the people that everyday sucks because they don't know their numbers. Yeah. And totally lost. Yeah. In business 'cause they don't know their numbers. And so that, that transition period and kind of migrating to control core is still an awe about that because I so often.[00:26:00]

Whenever a software company says, oh yeah, we'll help you, I feel so, like I do not trust you, and I'm like, this is just like some upsell service, right? Either like, you're gonna take six to eight weeks to migrate me, or you're gonna tell me to go to some partner who's just some other consultant. That's, I don't know what they're gonna charge me, right?

So I almost never trust any software company to migrate anything. That's like under their umbrella. But for you guys, it, I haven't had that feeling at all. Because you are so intentional about how you're doing things. Yeah. And be, be able to get someone up and running in 48 hours. Do you get prospects that are like kind of shocked by that?

Bryant Solomon: Yeah. And that, again, that's, that's a very specific set of scenarios. Like you have to be either organized with your books or you have to be just brand new and, and relatively small. When we're talking about the guys that are doing a little bit more, that's more of a process and that's, that's a couple of weeks in, in terms of their transition.

but what we wanna do, and what we have done with most of our clients, is like, we let them set the [00:27:00] pace. We have a client right now that they're awesome and they're happy as clams using ControlQore but they want to do it in a, they want to implement ControlQore in a tiered way.

So they're starting with their accounts payable. It's like, we just wanna start with your bill approval process, 'cause it's beautiful. And then once you get out your timekeeping module, that's the next one that we're gonna do. And then once you get out those two things, let's talk about cards, your corporate cards that you have.

Okay. So we're gonna do it just one step at a time for them, whereas some other clients are just like, yeah, just, just just give it all to me right now.

Samantha C Prestidge: Yeah. Okay. I didn't, I didn't realize you guys are either have or are planning on timekeeping. Do you guys integrate with any payroll services?

Bryant Solomon: Not yet. So we are building our own timekeeping module that will integrate with payroll keeping services. We will not build our own payroll but we are actively in the market looking at different, different payroll options that we can integrate our timekeeping tool to.

Samantha C Prestidge: Awesome. [00:28:00] Okay, cool. Then we'll be definitely looking at your developer B for that and keeping an eye out. Okay, so going back to like, we intimately know our customers, you guys are like so ingrained in the construction community. Part of what you're doing on that is attending this super cool summit in June called Converge.

So anyone that doesn't know Converge, it's hosted by Megan Shapiro. She was a guest back in the fall on our podcast. But great contract lawyer in construction. And so she's hosting this kind of small summit in June in Sedona. So what are you looking forward to there? And also you guys are presenting, I think, 'cause you're a sponsor.

Yeah. So whatcha looking forward to

Bryant Solomon: Unfortunately, we get, we get all the, the entire attendees get to be our captive audience. And so we're just gonna, we're gonna do the most monotone.

Ooh, yes. It's gonna be

Bryant Solomon: like construction accounting 1 0 1

0 1.

Bryant Solomon: There are some people who love construction accounting.

None of them are here, but we're gonna you, no,

Samantha C Prestidge: I'm gonna start bowing and like throwing to minutes, like 30 seconds in.

Bryant Solomon: Okay. So first of all, I love Megan. [00:29:00] we went to the Savannah event last year and that group was very small, but just incredibly. Like tight knit. It was a awesome experience.

I consider myself kind of a fly on the wall because I feel like there's so much personality and so much expertise and incredible minds in one room that I'm just like, I'm happy just to watch and be here and soak it all up. And so this year I begged. Megan at the end of the event in September, I was like, Hey, you know, let me know and let us, you know, participate at a little bit more of a level.

Let's, we will sponsor some stuff. And so she let us come in as a sponsor. I. And I'm super excited to introduce the world to my brother-in-law, jd, who's just a really good fun guy. A genuine guy. And I'm, again, just looking forward to, it's a lot bigger this year. Not, not, you know, not massive.

I think there's what [00:30:00] maybe. I

Samantha C Prestidge: think there's like only 30 seats and they're almost sold out.

Bryant Solomon: Yeah. And that's awesome. I, you know, 30 seats, that means I have a hard time remembering, you know, 10 people's names. So 30 is gonna be fun. And so having everybody there again, feeling like there's just a genuine desire to collaborate and to learn from one another, and then also just have fun.

Like, it is a fun group I feel like Megan and Goose and Josh, there's a lot of other folks that have just tapped into this. A, a network of people that are fun and want to bring about, you know, success for their business, but also like success across the industry by just working together.

So very excited for Converge.

Samantha C Prestidge: Yeah, I mean, they kind of adopted me to, into their community around, I guess July or August last year. So I did not get to go to Savannah, but I had such FOMO afterwards. So as soon as she announced [00:31:00] Sedona it was like the first day I was like, I'm buying my ticket.

I'm gonna be there. And now I'm like, oh my gosh, how do I keep up with all these personalities? 'cause you're right, Megan and Josh and Jesse, everyone else that's gonna be there is. The top-notch personalities of fun. Yeah. And like they know their shit as well. So yeah. I, that's,

Bryant Solomon: and that's, that's I love them and I'm, I, I hope that they, they watch this podcast, but yeah, that's the, the intimidating part is that they know their shit.

Mm-hmm. And they, they know it well , but, but they, at the same time, while that's intimidating, they're also the most approachable people. I mean, I sat

down

Bryant Solomon: with Jesse at that at, in Savannah, and I'm just blown away. By just the genuineness and the goodness and then all but also the tenacity that each one of them had in going about their particular set of skills.

Samantha C Prestidge: Yeah. I'm excited. So, okay. If for any listeners you wanna join us, have fun with us, you gotta be cool. So don't show up and be the monotone, lame guy. I, they're almost. Sold out on tickets. So we'll link that in the [00:32:00] show notes if you're interested in joining us in coming up in June. All right, so Brian, I always like to leave people with one small action step that they can take, and I get that in the world of accounting, what even is the action, right?

Like, there's so many different things because it can get so messy. So besides obviously signing up for control court, getting your bookkeeping team to clean stuff up for them, putting that aside. What's just one small step they can take if they are feeling overwhelmed with accounting and finances

Bryant Solomon: The first thing that comes to my mind and the most important thing that you can do for your finances, ControlQore or any other ERP, is do your bank recs.

That's, that is the, the very source of all things accounting starts with actual cash. Do your bank reconciliations. If you are worried about fraud, do your bank recs. If you want to do job costing at a minimum, start with your bank recs. Like do your bank [00:33:00] reconciliations or get somebody to do your bank reconciliations that you trust.

Mm-hmm.

Because that trust that you can, that you trust or can segregate them from the rest of your processes so that you're not worried that anybody's tampering with it. Bank recs. Mm-hmm. Start with your bank recs.

Samantha C Prestidge: Hmm. I love that. And also, I, I'm gonna throw on if you, you don't have an outsourced person that is in-house, just communicate with your accounting team.

Don't treat them like just the data entry doers. Keep them up to date on, on what's going on. Be nice to our nerds there. Yeah.

Bryant Solomon: Yeah. Be, be nice to the little, the white little accounting, you know. Creatures. Apples in the back corner. Yeah.

Samantha C Prestidge: Oh, all right. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Bryant.

For our listeners, we're gonna have so many show notes and links here. If you wanna learn more about Bryant, we'll have his LinkedIn or you can go to Control Core, that's Core with a Q, so ctr QOR e.com. We'll have that there as well as the Converge Summit link if you wanna join us. And thank you again for, for hopping on and chatting with me,

Bryant Solomon: dude, Samantha, you're [00:34:00] awesome.

Thanks so much. Love it.