Joe Schab With FinQuery

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio. Brought to you by On pay. Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:25] Lee Kantor. Here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Onpay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have Joe Schab with FinQuery. Welcome.

Joe Schab: [00:00:42] Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:44] I’m so excited to get caught up. Tell us about Finn Query. I heard you kind of had a brand change.

Joe Schab: [00:00:50] Name change we did, we did. So Finn query. We are a B2B SaaS solution that helps companies with their largest areas of non-payroll spend. So the things that they lease, the things that they subscribe to, their software and the contracts that govern those arrangements. We recently changed our name to Finn Query to reflect the finance and technology bent. Previously we were lease Query because we focused solely on lease accounting and lease management, and we expanded our remit to include software, software management and contracts recently. And we felt that the Finn and financial technology better reflected our expanded influence within the office of the CFO and the office of the CIO in technology as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:37] But the kind of the premise is similar, right? You’re enabling your clients to get kind of a holistic view of all of the financial issues that they’re dealing with. That might be complex because they could have a variety of different, like, I guess you started in leasing, but there could be a variety of, you know, software and licenses and all kinds of financial issues that maybe it’s hard to visualize, you know, because they’re so spread out across the organization.

Joe Schab: [00:02:06] That’s right. That’s right. So going back to the beginning, so, you know, our our legacy was in leases. The you know, it doesn’t sound really sexy, but it was really quite interesting. The biggest change in the accounting industry occurred several years ago occurred in 40 years, occurred in the accounting industry when the Government Accounting Standards Board, the Federal Accounting Standards Board, changed and required that every publicly traded company, every privately held company, every government entity changed the way they account for their leases. And they made that requirement more complex. So what they used to be able to do through spreadsheets and Excel spreadsheets and Google Sheets, they really needed to have technology. And so we created that technology, a B2B SaaS solution. And we by far became the largest, most complete provider of that solution. We have over 8000 customers today along the way. So if you think about it, leases are a large, large, light item within a customer’s books and you think about the things that they lease, it’s their office, it’s land, it’s equipment, it’s their fleet. Along the way, as we were acquiring these customers and doing great work for them, they were asking us to do other things for them. And as we were evaluating those other things, we were looking at other big problems to solve for them.

Joe Schab: [00:03:22] And one big area was SaaS subscriptions. So if you think about it, you just think about your own home life. Um, you know, people are subscribing to we live in a subscription economy now, right? You think about Hulu and Netflix and all the things that you subscribe to. Well, companies are no, no different today. Companies will spend anywhere between $5000 to $15,000 per employee on their SaaS solutions. Right? So a 100 person company will will spend probably around $1.5 million on SaaS solutions like their ERP systems, like their CRM systems and the like. And those are those continue to grow. And so our our customers are saying, you know what? Managing those contracts, managing those renewals, managing, you know, whether we’re managing these these solutions in an appropriate and efficient way, we’re becoming really unwieldy. And they were managing them through spreadsheets, just like they were managing their leases through spreadsheets prior to adopting, um, a solution like lease query. And so we looked into this problem. We were facing that problem ourselves. I faced that problem myself as the as the president of the company. We were growing so rapidly that we had our employees say things like, hey Joe, I need 15 more licenses or seats to our sales, to Salesforce, our CRM system.

Joe Schab: [00:04:48] And I’d look into it, and either we did or we didn’t. Um, but, you know, it was really hard to track. And so when I went to go look for solutions, there really wasn’t a solution for it. And so we decided to enter this market. Um, and, you know, we are seeing great success in adoption. Um, we are talking to our current customers, the 8000 customers we have today, as well as net new and helping them solve this really, really big problem. Uh, and so it’s continuing to grow the customers, um, continued to report that they’re acquiring buying new SaaS solutions every single day. And managing those contracts and managing those agreements are really a big problem. One of the things that we’ve, um, uncovered is that about 44% of a customer’s, uh, SaaS solutions go either unutilized or underutilized, meaning they acquire a solution, and then they’ll only use about 40 to 44, 44% of that solution, meaning it only half of their their people are actually using the solution or not using it at all. And so our solution helps them give visibility into what their people are using, how they’re using it, so they can actually get visibility and be more efficient about how they’re spending their dollars.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:06] Now, I would imagine once you kind of decide to get into this space, this is a pretty easy conversation because everybody like you mentioned can relate to it in their own personal life. I mean, and then you look at an organization that has hundreds, thousands, you know, tens, hundreds of thousands of employees. You don’t even know, you know what? You could be paying for licenses for people who don’t even work in your organization anymore. Mhm.

Joe Schab: [00:06:36] That’s exactly right. So we really have two modules in our system today. The first is spend management. And that’s really a tool, an application for the office of the CFO to give visibility into what they’re spending their dollars on. Right. And then we have SaaS operations, which is for the IT team to help with the for exactly what you just outlined to onboard and offboard new employees and exiting employees so that you’re very efficiently in a click of a button. You know, if Joe were to leave the company, Joe’s license is shut off immediately as opposed to finding out, you know, a month later that he’s left. And now that license is still is still alive. And potentially either a it’s a security risk because Joe still has access to it, or B, you’re still paying for that license and you haven’t been able to you haven’t reprovisioned that to somebody else who’s come on board. So, um, it is a very efficient way to manage your systems. Now, to your, to your point about it being an easy conversation. It is, but it’s so new that many, many customers, many companies don’t know they have the problem yet. It’s when you have this, you have the conversation with them that they realize the light bulb goes on like, yes, exactly. That’s exactly what we’re facing. Tell us more. Oh, you have a solution for that. Tell us more about it. So it really is kind of a two pronged type of of conversation. First you have to give them the the light bulb moment and then you tell them about the solution. But it really is so new that customers have to first be told that they have the problem, and then it really illuminates the situation for them.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:16] Now, have you gotten a feel for like, you deal obviously a lot with the larger enterprises on average, how many licenses does an individual employee have like that? I mean, I’m sure this number is is a very large number, much larger than people think it is.

Joe Schab: [00:08:34] It is much, much larger. As a matter of fact, we had one of our board members. We just gave him a little assignment at. His company. Um, we asked him how many.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:45] I’d ask him to guess first and then tell them.

Joe Schab: [00:08:48] That’s right. We asked him to guess, and he came back and he said I was way off. We had four times the number of applications that I thought we had. And so, you know, the number basically varies from company to company as to how many applications, um, they’ll have per employee. Um, it could be ten, it could be 50. It all depends on the size complexity of of the organization. But it’s growing exponentially every single year. Um, and so the problem isn’t going away.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:19] Right. Because I would imagine this is a situation where people are getting enamored with some software and, and it could be important, super important software. But there’s so many new softwares coming and new things to try that somebody’s like, oh, we should get this for the team. And they buy one maybe for themselves to try. Then they implement it for the team, and then all of a sudden now you have 100 licenses and they’re like, yeah, that. And then no one’s using it and you move on to some other shiny object and you’re still paying for this license in the background because like, nobody’s pruning, they’re just adding.

Joe Schab: [00:09:53] Yeah, that’s exactly right. So what you’re describing is generally called shadow it. So shadow it occurs when um, as a as an organization you’ll have a process generally of procurement. Right. Um, where there’s an organized process where you’re, you’re buying, uh, provisioning software, there’s that general procurement. It’s going through proper channels. Then each individual department will have its own budget, and a person or department might buy a piece of software because their team might need something, or they, as an individual might need something. They put it on their company credit card, or they bill it to corporate to, to finance, um, and they use it for themselves. They use it for their department. And it didn’t go through proper channels. And so you end up to your point. You end up having all these people who’ve gone rogue, and you end up having so many more applications than you thought that you actually had. And that’s the other that’s the other problem that we solve is that we identify the shadow it that organizations have that, you know, CFOs aren’t aware of and IT managers aren’t aware of.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:00] And I would imagine that this also uncovers some redundancy, like you might have several tools doing a similar function that have just been purchased by different people.

Joe Schab: [00:11:11] Then it just then, then what you do is, you know, companies will then just have a conversation internally about, okay, which ones do we want to turn off. Which ones what, why first, firstly why do we have this going on. Second, um, can we streamline this so that we have either, you know, we use just one system or we downgrade to just, just the applications or the seats that we actually need. So it sparks conversation for efficiency’s sake. But that’s exactly how it goes, is that you’ll you’ll identify all these rogue systems. And it sparks conversation about how do we increase and improve our efficiency.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:54] Now, have you gotten to the point where you can, um, share with them, like where you’re getting a feel for, okay, once you implement our, you know, this new, uh, Finn query system, we’re going to save you X amount of like, like it shows a savings, I would imagine immediately because you’re able to kind of visualize, okay, this is it’s obvious here. Now when I look at it in this manner, I can see them all on one page. You know, I got a I can see what the issue is. Whereas these things are kind of like weeds growing, you know, without any, uh, you can’t see them. They’re hidden.

Joe Schab: [00:12:29] Right. Exactly. So that’s that’s exactly the process. So once we’ll have. Uh, we’ve onboarded a customer, and we what we call hydrate, um, the system with their data. Right? So we’ll we’ll hydrate all of their, all of their systems. So now we have complete visibility into all the applications that are being used by that, by that company. And then we, then we send the report back to them to see to show them, here’s what you’re, you’re spending your money on, here’s how many licenses that you’ve bought, here’s what you’re using. And here are your opportunities are for savings. And so we’ll immediately start sharing with them savings opportunities. And there hasn’t been one customer, not one customer where the cost of our software is is more than what we save them. So in essence, our software pays for itself because we identify, um, more savings than what our software costs. So we guarantee we have basically a guaranteed ROI on our application because we immediately show them savings, um, and where they can save and how they can go about savings.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:40] So now is this, um, kind of industry agnostic or does this work better in certain areas or, or enterprise level organizations that have certain issues, or is this pretty much. That’s a.

Joe Schab: [00:13:52] Great question. That’s a great question, Lee. Um, it’s industry agnostic. Um, we have um, we have customers in virtually every industry, high tech, manufacturing, education. So it really is, um, industry agnostic. What we find is people can companies can generally, um, track these, track these things fairly efficiently, up to about 150 employees. Once you get north of 150 employees, then it really becomes unwieldy for you to track these things efficiently on board and off board, efficiently, to be able to forecast, budget and manage efficiently. So the real it’s it’s we are agnostic as it relates to the industry, but we really focus on, um, companies that are 150 employees and larger. And our sweet spot generally is 250 to 5000 employees. That’s really where you can see demonstrable savings and efficiencies.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:56] Now, I noticed you didn’t mention government. I would imagine this would be tremendously valuable to government.

Joe Schab: [00:15:05] Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So when I, when I say organizations, companies, I’m also being inclusive of governments. Um, it’s a different animal to onboard a, a uh, to, to provide, uh, access to all of your systems. So, you know, to be honest with you, we don’t have, um, we don’t have, uh, a government systems yet. We have some nonprofits, but not government entities just yet. Now we have plenty of government entities for lease accounting. Um, but we haven’t gone into the government yet for cost savings. But to your point, um, because the sales cycle is just different, right? The sales, there’s so many more considerations as it relates to the government. But, um, it’s just a matter of time before they understand that there is, um, demonstrable cost savings to be gained here on behalf of, you know, taxpayers for sure.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:55] Right? I mean, this is, to me an obvious area of waste. Uh, I mean, just if everybody just looks at their own home and like you mentioned early with all your subscriptions and just managing those subscriptions more efficiently, I mean, everybody’s paying for something that they’re not using.

Joe Schab: [00:16:12] Yeah. No. Exactly. And I think one of the other areas that we see is valuable in our platform is in addition to the software management, we’ve also released contract management. So, um, what’s in the market today and fairly available. And you’ve probably seen it before with DocuSign and Adobe and Echosign are these workflow systems that are pre signature. Right. So as you’re negotiating redlining and agreement, um, it’s readily available. Um, what’s lacking in the marketplace and it really ties seamlessly with software management and subscriptions. Is post signature a central repository post signature for all your contracts, not just subscriptions, but all of your contracts. So we bring the value of software management to contract management as well. And we basically take the handshake from a contract lifecycle management, um, entity like an ironclad that that uses a DocuSign and Echosign pre signature. And we take the handoff and we’ve layered in, um, renewal notices, alerts, um, to the business. Because usually what ends up happening is when a contract is signed, whether it’s a subscription like what we’re talking about with like your Netflix or, you know, Salesforce, um, or, or your lease. Right. Um, it generally would go into a legal department and it would just sit there right where really the entities that are driving the business are the CFOs or the lines of business and the like, and those are the folks who want to get alerts on, hey, when is my renewal window up? What are the what are the key clauses I need to be aware of? And when do when do I get alerts on when those clauses? There might be some some sort of alert that I need for those clauses.

Joe Schab: [00:18:02] And so we’ve expanded the reach of software management, that sort of active management capability. We’ve expanded it outside the realm of software management into any, any sort of contract. So that to your point, there is no waste. Um, if you’re using our system, there’s no waste that you can experience because you are actively, um, being able to manage any one of your contracts, whether it’s software, whether it’s a lease, whether it’s an insurance firm, our contract or anything like that. So that what we facilitate, Lee, is your active management, forecasting and workflows and accounting of any of your contracts that you’re signing that that signs you up and commits you to a spend for any sort of firm, whether it’s a year or five years? Um, and it allows CFOs and CTOs to be able to really actively manage all of their spend, have complete visibility so that there are no surprises. One of the things that we talk about internally, all all the time at Finn Query is no surprises, no surprises. You don’t want to be surprised with a Netflix bill of of an increase, right? You know, same thing with, you know, any sort of lease terms or any sort of insurance or anything like that, whether it’s software or not, you don’t want to be surprised with any sort of increase in cost or renewal or anything like that. So we believe in no surprises. So complete visibility into all your large areas of spend.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:29] So now let me make sure I understand this, that within the contracts, if there’s terms that say, oh on this thing on this date, this is going to go to this price, your software can kind of understand that and give me a heads up like, hey, don’t forget, you know, June 1st, this thing’s going to cost you 50% more. Like if you don’t make this move like it’s kind of it, it reads the contracts and understands where the, uh, issues might be, uh, based on what it’s seeing in the document. And it’s giving you some sort of a heads up.

Joe Schab: [00:20:04] That’s that’s exactly right. Several years ago, we made a pretty substantial investment in artificial intelligence to read contracts and alert, um, and alert, um, people, whoever you designate, as being the point of contact to make alerts as to whenever those key clauses become, um, uh, come to terms. Right. So, so, yes. Exactly. Right. Um, if there is a renewal window that’s coming up, um, our system will give you an alert that. Okay, it’s it’s now March 7th. Um, you’re 60 days out from your renewal. Your renewal window kicks in in 30 days. Um, and there is a 5% price increase. And so it gives you that alert so that you can now proactively reach out to your vendor and actively negotiate. Eventually, part of our roadmap, Lee, is to give people analysis about whether they’re, uh, overspending, underspending, whether they have a good deal, a fair deal, or whether they’re overpaying, and give them analysis based on the the depth and breadth of the data that we have, we’ll be able to analyze, hey, you’ve got a good. Deal a bad deal. Um. And you need negotiate harder and or. Here are here are three other vendors that you might want to be talking to. So eventually providing them with a market opportunity to not just analyze whether you’ve got a good deal, but here are some other better deals that you might be able to, um, uh, benefit from. So that’s that’s on our roadmap. They’ll be coming soon.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:33] Wow, man. Exciting times for you. Congratulations. Um, thanks.

Joe Schab: [00:21:38] We’re having fun over here.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:39] Now, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team. What’s the coordinates? Website.

Joe Schab: [00:21:47] Go to fin query. Com fin q u e r y.com. Um. Or you can reach out directly to me um at zhokhov at fin query.com. Um and be happy to facilitate any, any type of conversation and uh, be happy to help in any way that we can.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:04] Good stuff. Well, again, congratulations on all the success. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Joe Schab: [00:22:10] Thank you for the time. We enjoyed it.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:11] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.