A Deeper Dive Into Mueller dotKonnect
Join Beth Ulbrich and Jill Walton as they dive deeper into Mueller dotKonnect. In this episode, they describe the services MdK provides, the integration of these services, and what it is like working with Mueller dotKonnect.
Listen now :
For more information, please contact:
Jill Walton
Director
(847) 649-8837
jwalton@pkfmueller.com
Beth Ulbrich, CPA, CGMA
Vice President Of Operations
(847) 649-8826
bulbrich@pkfmueller.com
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Ashley: Hi, I'm Ashley, and you're listening to "Connecting the Dots Across Finance Functions", the Mueller dotKonnect podcast. Today, we welcome Beth Ulbrich and Jill Walton to find out more about Mueller dotKonnect. But before we begin, let's find out more about our guests.
[00:00:23] Ashley: Beth is Vice President of Operations here at MdK. She has over 30 years of experience in outsourced accounting and consulting. Her experience includes virtual CFO, budgeting, forecasting, financial, organizational, and strategic planning service. Beth's strengths is bringing clarity to complex issues and embracing a collaborative and client-centric approach when serving clients.
[00:00:45] Ashley: Jill is focused, professional, and knowledgeable with over 25 years of accounting experience, many of which were in public accounting, Jill is a trusted advisor to her clients. She works with clientele varying from individuals to large privately held companies within the manufacturing, construction, nonprofit, and professional service industries.
[00:01:03] Ashley: First of all, I wanna thank you both for joining us on the podcast.
[00:01:06] Jill: Thanks for having us.
[00:01:09] Beth: Yeah. those are first experience doing a podcast, so thank you.
[00:01:12] Ashley: I recently sat down with a few of our colleagues to discuss what Mdk is, but would like to know more about the specific services Mdk provides. Would you start off by giving us an overview of your services?
[00:01:23] Beth: Sure, Ashley, if you think about Mueller dotKonnect, we really serve as an extension of a client's finance team or accounting office. We integrate with a client, so there could be a piece of it. We might take a particular task or we may take on the entire function. Some of the specific things we've helped our clients with is processing expense reports. We've got some clients that have, numerous, reconciliations and proofing of that information, and we can take some of that, that load off of them by processing and getting everything ready for their approval.
[00:01:59] Beth: We do similar things with Bill Pay. For many of our clients, we've been able to streamline the process using our technology to make it a fully automated process. Our team then serves to get that documentation together, get everything coded, and then the clients are free to approve and really analyze the information.
[00:02:19] Beth: We can continue through services including bank reconciliations, invoicing, really everything up to getting the financial statements, the close and ready for analysis and use by our either our clients or our advisory team.
[00:02:33] Jill: And I would say the only thing that we're not doing, and I think Beth covered everything for us, is we're not being able to provide the assurance services.
[00:02:43] Beth: That's right. We will work with auditors, external auditors. A lot of our clients are being audited, and then we might serve as a liaison, making sure the client's ready for, for audit, that the controls and the processes have been in place all along to make that more streamlined.
[00:02:58] Jill: Yep.
[00:02:58] Beth: Um, includes tax preparation as well. Sometimes we're working with an external tax preparer, but able to make sure that the supporting documentation and the information is all ready for them.
[00:03:09] Ashley: What are the benefits or value of these services that Mdk provides?
[00:03:13] Jill: Thanks Ashley for asking that question. One of the things that I think is really important is that we are able to have consistency throughout the process with our clients. Someone's out sick, we're able to cover with all of our, staff. I've noticed, for myself, you know, having, a team that works together, being consistent is really important. .
[00:03:35] Beth: Another aspect of what we can do is really to enable the rest of the team. So if we can take the burden off of some of the day to day, that might allow our client to really focus on the meaning of this information, truly managing it and the analysis. So were hoping to take away the, the mundane.
[00:03:54] Jill: Day to day. Mundane. Yeah. It's the day to day.
[00:03:57] Beth: Yeah.
[00:03:58] Jill: Hey, there's that not working in your business, but working on your business.
[00:04:02] Beth: That's exactly right. And our team is really enabling our clients to be able to do that, whether it's or not for profit or commercial business.
[00:04:11] Ashley: What does the typical integration and implementation process look like, if I were to engage Mueller dotKonnect?
[00:04:16] Beth: So the first thing we do with our clients is really try to dig deep and understand their processes, understand how they're currently doing it, where the pain points are, what systems are being used, and then we really divide it up because I, as I mentioned before, it's very much a collaborative effort. We're part of their team, so together we design it. What's the scope of work? What's gonna be our responsibility as Mueller dotKonnect? What's gonna be shared? Where we're collaborating and working with our client through a process.
[00:04:43] Beth: And then, and what will the client retain? Once we understand that we can develop our process guides that Jill had mentioned and then we start onboarding. We've got a nice checklist to make sure we've got access to the information, that we're gonna need. We get it staffed. In some cases we have an onboarding team just to make sure everything gets off on the right track.
[00:05:05] Jill: you kind of cover what I was gonna say. But, but really it is, it's doing planning. You know, we talk about planning for particular projects. We basically come into the client, we look at their pain points, we figure out what's a better process, right, that they might need to do. So we take everything into account on what needs to be done, what we wanna help them strive to, to make a better process, and it really helps the client in the end, and it helps the team in the end being able to service them better.
[00:05:36] Ashley: So the last question I have for you is, can you tell me about PKF Mueller's involvement with Mueller dotKonnect?
[00:05:41] Beth: Yeah, actually, dotKonnect and PKF Mueller have been in this business for quite a. Jill, as a matter of fact, had been doing this very similar type of work as what we've described here at PKF Mueller for probably most of your time here. Right? 15 years,
[00:05:56] Jill: 15 plus years.
[00:05:57] Beth: 15 years. Right away she's been exploring the technology that would allow us to help our clients, not just at year end, but throughout the year. So she kind of pioneered our, the bill.com and automated bill pay, remote bookkeeping, etc. And we have a very nice size team here. But we realized that there is such a need for these services. We wanted to do it bigger and better with a larger team. By forming Mueller dotKonnect we now have a, a larger team with a variety of skill sets.
[00:06:28] Beth: We can provide these services at a good value to the client. As well as go deeper, we can take more expansive projects that we maybe couldn't have done, simply under the CPA firm model.
[00:06:38] Beth: So now that we're doing these kinds of services under Mueller dotKonnect , that also does enable our CPA members to be able to provide those advisory services, work with good solid accounting information to help the clients with the next thing, with the future, and with the planning.
[00:06:56] Beth: So our teams work seamlessly together. The idea is that our Mueller dotKonnect team can make sure that accounting information is efficient and solid and reliable. And then our, advisors at PKF Mueller are able to really take it to the next level and work with that information and that, our two firms, while separate, we'll always be working closely together.
[00:07:19] Ashley: You mentioned working closely together. Do you often get the opportunity to meet with the team in person?
[00:07:25] Beth: I was able to meet and work with our new team members back at the end of April, and now Jill will be joining me, along with quite a few other members, from Mueller. We're gonna get to continue to get to know our teammates in a better way and that is, how we're gonna keep up our culture and be a strong united firm.
[00:07:43] Jill: It'll be nice not to just see them on camera every day.
[00:07:47] Beth: Oh, it's amazing. When I finally got to meet our team members in person, it, it was amazing on both sides. I had worked with some of these people every single day on Teams and got to know them. But it is a different dynamic to get to know somebody, over dinner and to, and to see them in their, in their work environment and in their home.
[00:08:06] Jill: You know? It's really amazing. And she's like, They were asking where you were at, why you weren't here in April. I'm like, I've only been working with them for a couple months and they're like, Yes, but they really want you to come Jill.
[00:08:19] Beth: They did, because I see Jill as one of the leaders, and that was just so important really to them to, to see us there and I think it's a change we really are designing this to work together as teams. This isn't an over their, black box type of situation, right. They're team members just like everyone else that we've worked with in the past. And so I think this is novel to them. They were excited that we would come down to meet them. And I know they'll be so excited to meet you, Jill. And they're gonna take us shopping. I mean, thank God we get in on a weekend. We can go shopping right away and . Exactly.
[00:08:57] Jill: Um, I would say though, one thing I have noticed since we started working together is everybody, kind of reserved initially, but they've really all come out of their shells. They're not afraid to say, well, can I just reach out directly to the client? And if I don't see a problem with that, I'll say, Please do. If you wanna copy me on the email, I'm happy for you to copy me and the conversation between them and the client it's not just have to be the 20/80, you know? Exactly. It doesn't always just have to be me at this point. They're getting to that level,
[00:09:35] Beth: They're learning, they're so anxious. When we were in India, we had an all day team meeting. It was amazing to me to see how attentive and interested they were. I didn't see anyone picking up a cell phone or wandering off. They were all in this and that's the people we get to work with. It's, it was really exciting to bring them in and we'll continue to introduce more of our teammates to them and bring others to India and vice versa if you will get to come visit with us here in the States as well.
[00:10:03] Jill: Looking forward to that.
[00:10:04] Ashley: Well, I think this was a really great overview and thank you for your time today to further explain Mueller dotKonnect.
[00:10:09] Ashley: And thank you, to our listeners, don't forget to visit us at MuellerdotKonnect.com to learn more about our firm's service.
[00:10:15] Ashley: You can also follow us on LinkedIn at Mueller dotKonnect for more updates and insights.
[00:10:20] Ashley: Mueller dotKonnect is a related entity of PKF Mueller, an award-winning certified public accounting and business advisory firm based in Chicago. Mueller dotKonnect is not a CPA firm. Assurance services are performed by an independent external firm.