[42] – Special Guest: Roupen Egulian – Cloud Depot

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts, Rayanne Buccianico and Chris Tim. Learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP business. Let's listen in. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayanne Buccianico. Hey, Rayanne, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great today. Chris, how are you? I'm very well, thank you, Rayanne. I think we have another special guest. Do you want to introduce our special guest today?

Yes, we do. We have a very special guest, and he's all the way on the other side of the world, so we've got a multinational, multicultural podcast today, so you're going to hear three completely different accents. With us today, we have Rupin Agulian from Cloud Depot. Hi, Rupin. How are you doing?

Good, Tim. How are you? Hi, Rayanne. Hey, Rupin. Nice to meet you.

Thanks for joining us today. Likewise. Likewise. Rupin, do you want to just give us a little bit of a background about yourself, a little bit about your company, how you started, all that kind of good stuff? Yes.

Yes. So, Cloud Depot has been in development for about 10 years now. I co-founded it with my co-partners back in 2011. I've been in the MSP industry for about 20 years now. That's the first job I've started.

I've actually never worked for myself, so I've only run my own MSP, which is awesome. Over the times, I've noticed that we can utilize our systems a bit better and try and make systems in automation where you're in the world of IT, so automation becomes key in certain parts. Over the years, PSAs and RMM tools have played a big role in revolutionizing that part in the industry. So, as being an Autotask user back in the heydays, certain things lacked for what we wanted to do. We wanted to move to the cloud.

So, I went on the journey of building My Accounting Toolbox, which became our first product. My Accounting Toolbox is an Autotask to zero invoice synchronization, and that's where Cloud Depot originally started from. So, we've built probably, you know, we've built custom designs, we've built products that people all around the globe currently use. We do about $100 million worth of invoices every month on behalf of MSPs on a global scale. So, you know, we're becoming a part of business where we see value, where MSPs decide to expand, but, you know, the team can't get to the resources available.

Our systems come into play to do the invoicing, because that's the crucial part of any business is invoicing. The other crucial part that we saw that was a need in the gap was collecting your payments. And that became the next big project for us. And about a year, year and a half ago, we embarked on our journey to design a product called RPS, which is a recurring billing platform. That became, that's become our focus as we move forward, moving on cloud, COVID, you know, basically helped push that system forward, because during that time, cash flow is key.

And we've decided, you know, the systems are becoming more and more intense. And so, we said we built a system to help collect payments. So, our systems now in terms of the IT industry model will go from PSA all the way to accounts, to collections, back into your accounts. And then obviously, notifications throughout the process to identify collections, where it's gone, which customers have paid, and making it recurring. So, if your amount changes every month, our system will acknowledge that and change the monthly amount to ensure that you get the payment that you require.

In a nutshell, that's what cloud depot does. So, I think you probably just answered the question that I had since the minute you started mentioning the recurring payments. So, the MSP still does the invoicing out of Autotask, right? And then they push the invoices into, I'm assuming zero. Is that the only account?

Correct. At this current moment, that's the only one, yes. Okay. And then, so, once the invoices get into zero, then your recurring payment system picks it up and then runs the payment, or how does that work? Yeah, so, the recurring payment looks at zero and says, do I have an invoice?

And then says, does this customer have a direct debit profile? Am I able to charge a credit card and or bank account? So, obviously, in the United States, it's all ACH and credit card. In the UK and Australia, they're called direct debits. So, you know, our system can do multi-currency that doesn't matter where you are in the globe.

So, it goes and checks and make sure that, yes, you have authorization, and number two, you're allowed to direct debit and the bank account and the credit card, which helps certain people with their cash flow, obviously. But the difference between us and many others is we do not do the processing, we facilitate the processing. So, we connect to payment gateway providers that allow you to go and collect payments. So, Stripe is one example of our integrated partners that we're with. Also, the other one is IntegraPay, which does the ACH and direct debits around the globe.

So, we're partnering up with many gateway providers. Obviously, that may not fit everyone, but once we're releasing our feature request website soon, which people will be able to go, I use, you know, Braintree or I use PayPal or I use some other one or Authorize.net in the US. And that's what we're trying to build up now is a list of gateway providers that we can connect to. Oh, I see. So, right now, you're only connecting to a handful.

So, if they want to use My Accounting Toolbox and they also want to set up the automated recurring payments and they have to use one of your already approved merchants, they can't just plug in any, right? Yeah, correct. So, the My Accounting Toolbox doesn't need any merchants. That's just an invoice synchronization. The recurring billing requires a gateway provider.

So, yeah. Thank you for clarifying that. We are building the list, but again, we look at what customers want and then we build basically what customers want. And if there's a lot of one, then obviously, that goes higher on our list and we build it and integrate it into the system. Rupin, so just a question around that, though.

So, you mentioned IntegraPay. Now, you know, I personally use the Cloud Depot product myself and I also know a few people in the UK who use it. And, you know, one of the big direct debit partners here is GoCardless. Firstly, do you integrate with them? And if not, is there any sort of, you know, anything in the development for you guys to actually integrate with those guys or?

We are. We have a meeting today after this podcast to discuss our development part. GoCardless is definitely on our list of potential payment providers. We've got GoCardless and PayPal that's on our list that people have said they want to integrate with. So, it is definitely on the list.

Can't give you a time frame at the moment, but it's definitely high on our list because, as you said, the UK like their direct debits but don't really like their credit cards. The US love their credit cards but don't like their direct debits. Yeah. Yeah. I've never understood the fascination with spending money on credit cards like our American friends do.

But, you know. It's because, you know, so we have all of these different rewards and so people like to spend money on credit cards so that they can get the airline points so that they can have the free travel. That's why we use credit cards. Fair enough. Yeah.

I mean, you know, credit cards here, as you probably know as well, Rupin, is, you know, in the UK it's very seldom or somebody actually, well certainly not in business to business, they certainly wouldn't be paying with credit cards. You know, maybe if you go and shop at Amazon or something like that you may do. But, you know, on a business to business transaction it's all direct debits pretty much or if you're dealing once or for the customer they may just deposit the money straight into your bank account. But, yeah, very, very seldom do they use, you know, credit cards or any of those kind of things. So, and just another question, Rupin, you mentioned about, you know, when you were talking about the PSAs and you mentioned about all the tasks specifically, is that the only PSA that you integrate with and do you have, you know, again, any plans to integrate with anything else?

Well, the way that we decide what we integrate with is customer feedback. So if customer feedback says we've got a thousand feature requests to connect with ConnectWise or other PSAs particularly out there, then we will put the resources and time into it and build it. At this moment we're only connected with Autotask. We started with Autotask 10 years ago, so we're connected with Autotask for the invoicing component of the equation, so my accounting toolbox as specifically being the product. The recurring billing is PSA agnostic, so provided you use Xero, you can use the recurring billing.

So you can use ConnectWise and other vendors to integrate your invoices into Xero and then you can use the Cloud Depot recurring billing service to go and collect the payments on your behalf. So my accounting toolbox is a PSA fixed, but recurring billing is agnostic. So we can pick anyone, any PSA, but it has to connect to Xero at this current moment. We do have potential pipelines to connect to QuickBooks because that's probably the next accounting package that's probably widely used in the IT community because of the integrations from the past and bringing them into the future, but at this stage, yep, we're only connected with Xero for the recurring billing and Autotask for the PSA. And just, so you're talking about your recurring payment system and just, you know, a lot of these tools, so Stripe and GoCardless and IntegraPay and all these kind of things integrate directly into Xero anyway.

So, you know, just sort of talk me through, why would somebody want to go for the RPS system when they can integrate them directly into Xero? Great question. So what we've done is not only recurring billing is a billing platform, but it also gives you other features that we've included as part of the system. So one feature is a customized white-labeled statement portal where customers can log in with a unique URL and go and download their existing invoices that they haven't paid, also go and download the invoices they have paid, but also go and tick the ones that they want to pay and pay it on the spot. So that's particularly one of the things that is pretty crucial.

All those others don't offer that type of service. So this gives you an online customer portal, it's white-labeled as your organization. It doesn't know that it's a CloudDepot product, but it sits in the background. The other thing we also have is we have a conditional-based payment rules where you can define how you collect payments from your customers. For example, you can say, I'm allowed to direct debit all the managed services invoices from their credit card on the due date, and it will go and process it.

But we can also define to say, if you're selling hardware to that customer and it's over $5,000, you're not authorized to charge their credit card. You can send them an invoice and get them to manually pay for it. So not only can we define how you collect payments by chart of accounts, but we can also define the value that you're allowed to charge. Because obviously, some customers want to not charge a $50,000 server on their credit card, even though they'll collect the points and probably go to three states or four states in a day. That'd be great.

They might be able to get to Australia with that. I think you need $5 million by the rate it's going at the moment. So it helps you define that, but it also minimizes the impact of chargebacks, right? So people go, I don't recall authorizing this, and I don't recall authorizing that. And that's what our system allows us to do.

So that's one of the other features. The other one is if we've sent out an invoice and the customer is on a direct debit or on a payment arrangement to take their monthly, their monthly amount can change every month. It doesn't matter if this month it's $10 and if the next month it's $20, it will automatically change the payment that it needs to charge automatically on the due date. Can you put a top level, like, hey, you can charge my monthly fee as long as it never exceeds $1,000. Can we do that?

Correct. So you can set thresholds. You can set thresholds by dollar value or by chart of accounts. So you can say any managed services I'm allowed to bill, anything hardware I'm not allowed to charge a credit card, please send them an invoice. So it allows you to define that, which helps a lot of companies.

Because some people got direct debit out of their business account for their managed services, but the CEO or the directors want to collect the points, as I said before, and buy the server and buy all the hardware on the credit card. So that helps you do that. The other thing is if the system has recognized a payment, it actually automatically cancels that payment schedule for you automatically. So for example, if your invoice is due on the 14th and the customer is a really good customer and paid you on the 12th or the 13th, our system will recognize that and go, they've already paid the bill. I don't need to go collect payments anymore.

And I will cancel that for that month. So it actually is a bit smarter than schedule. And if they've paid or they haven't paid, it will still collect. Our system, we've put some smarts to say, if they've already paid, you can't charge them twice. Then you've got to do credit notes and go through the process and they might call their bank and go, I didn't authorize this, and you don't want any of that.

You want a smooth sailing when collecting payments. How easy is your system to implement? I mean, what's your onboarding process like? We've got a eight-step onboarding process where Nathan, who is our product manager, will help you through that. There we do not have an onboarding charge or cost.

So we include that as part of our service. We don't believe in onboarding fees. We want the customer to use our product. We don't want them to provide them a barrier of entry. That's got to give you a step up because everybody charges onboarding fees.

We've thought about it, but we said, we want a long-term customer, we don't want short-term because some people go, I don't want to pay the onboarding fee, they don't sign up and they don't have the experience or they don't get the experience that we provide. Some people come on board and the experience is awesome. So we help them through the process. So we usually provide them a checklist beforehand, they give us all the information and then we basically set up a time and we go through the process of setting up the system for them. So talking of your billing methods, the way you charge people, do you guys have any kind of long-term tie-in or is it month-by-month?

All our products are month-by-month. We don't have any contract terms. We've never seen that to be a problem for us because we believe in our product and we know our product works. So we don't want to go, well, we'll tuck you into 12 months, but we provide a product where we want to make it easy for everyone to use and have an experience with. That's basically what we want to provide to our customers.

Right. Out of curiosity, what is the price point? I mean, like here in the United States, we have plenty of people that use Xero. I understand that Xero is far more popular outside of the United States, probably in Australia, New Zealand and over in Europe, right? Is that where your largest market is?

Yeah, our biggest growth market is in the UK at the moment. The US is slowly understanding, yeah, we can use another product other than QuickBooks. There is products out there. We're not just QuickBooks in the United States. But yeah, Xero is becoming more and more popular because of people like KPMG are pushing Xero to their small business clients in the United States, from what we've been told, which is helping a lot for their push.

So in terms of a product, we've got our own pricing, which is for the platform, but we don't govern what the gateway providers charge you guys or charge the end customer because they may have done millions of dollars and they may have the best rate. We might come back with a rate that is a standard rate, right? So the recurring billing platform has got three packages, which is $25, $75 and $149. That's USD for everyone that is not in Australia and New Zealand. And that basically sets you up for the system.

Basically there's a little numbers within the systems where the first one is a pay as you go. So basically it's a platform fee and then you pay a percentage on the transaction for facilitating our system. $75 includes some value. So I think it includes about the first $15,000 a month of transactions and then there's a separate fee and the $149 is for the first $50,000. So depending on how much you direct, it depends on the package you potentially can go on. Basically it's that plus the platform fee.

So every month you'll get an invoice of the monthly fee plus the value you did, the interest, the successful transaction fee and that's how the invoicing works. So would they automatically move up to the next highest level or do you keep them at whatever service level they chose until they choose? It actually moves automatically. So if it sees halfway through the month you've hit the minimum balance, we move you automatically to the next one. Because obviously if you move halfway to the next one, you should be at the next one anyway to start with.

So we actually automatically move you to save obviously the end user some money because that's the whole point of the exercise. We don't like taking money and providing a service. We help with the help of their business growth. By the time if you get to the $149 plan, for example, you're on the $25. If you did the same value of the $149, you'd be paying three times the amount of money.

So we help through that. So if we say mid-month that you're seeing that you're up to this particular threshold, we automatically change it for you in the background. I personally look at that every month just to make sure that everyone is okay and it's working correctly in that sense. Okay. Well, that sounds really good.

I mean, I think there's... And I can attest to it. I mean, I use the product myself. I use Xero. I know that Rheanne's a QuickBooks person.

Yeah. So unfortunately, you're not going to be able to use it, Rheanne, but the rest of us can. And yeah. You can always switch to Xero. It's okay.

Like 90% of my company is built on QuickBooks online. So I don't see us hopping. And believe me, I've considered moving to Xero. I would love to have an alternative to Intuit. Don't tell them I said that.

But I've looked at Xero and it was just really difficult for a company like mine to move 70 companies into Xero. And so we decided against it. That's okay. How long have you been using it, Chris? How long have you been using my toolbox?

Probably, what, six months, Rupin? Somewhere around there when I engaged with you guys. Probably somewhere around about that region, six months. And honestly, it's an absolute lifesaver in my business. Because as you know, Rheanne, you and I are the same.

I do everything through Autotask. So every single invoice I generate in my business is through Autotask. And then what I do is I do the approving post, I create the invoices, and I sit back and fold my arms and put my feet up. And it ends up in Xero and the customer gets the invoice. Which is great for me because, as you'll know as well, I'm a very lazy person.

I don't like to do a lot of work and I like these tools to do it for me. So it's great. I can just, although I have to do a lot of it manually in Autotask, to be fair. But once I get it into the invoicing process, put my feet up with a nice cold beer and my customers get invoiced out of Xero. So that's what I love about my accounting toolbox product.

I've heard good things about it. I have not seen it in action. And I've heard of my accounting toolbox on Reddit and on Autotask, user groups, Facebook. And so your product is really well known, Ruben. I don't know if you hang out on Reddit or the...

Yeah, my business partners hang out on Reddit a lot. Yeah, they like to hang out on Reddit. I'm not the techie type of person, but I'll leave that up to the geeks to do as I call them. I'd rather do the sales front. Might be a bit different.

Absolutely. So, I mean, sounds like a really great product and sounds like you guys are doing really well, which is really good to hear. So Ruben, if anyone wants to reach out to you or anyone in your company, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you? The best way would be by email or go to our website and fill in our online form. So our online form will probably definitely come to me.

And then I'm more than happy to have discussions. Obviously, based on the time zones of everyone on the globe, we'll try and fit everyone in. So we're not half asleep or half awake, one of the two, and can discuss any requirements that you may need. Even if there is a requirement on something that you have thought about that you want to get a custom design done, we are more than happy to help you with that as well in the Autotask world. In the Xero front, again, with our dev teams really into the Xero world.

But, you know, we're more than happy to help if required on custom development, as well as what we've got as a current public product that we've got on offer. And just in terms of the website address, I know we've been using the My Accounting Toolbox terminology for the product, but the actual website, is that clouddepot.com? Yeah, www.clouddepot.com. And the pricing will be specific on where your region is. So it will define which part of the world you're on and provide you the correct pricing.

Okay, cool. And we'll make sure that we get all of those in the show notes. Great. Well, that's been great. Do you have any further questions, Rayanne?

I don't, but thank you so much for joining us today. And I know that we got you up at a bit super early. Over there in Australia. So thank you for coming out. Thanks, Chris and Rayanne, for your time.

It's been good. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Rupin. So, Rayanne, as always, all that's left for me to say now is your PSA is the key to your MSP success.

So go out and make an impact on your world today. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Rayanne. Thanks, Rupin. Cheers.

Bye. Thank you for joining us today on PSA Impact. We hope you've learned something and that you'll join us next time when we answer new questions posed by our listeners.