No existing AP tool was

good enough

This is MakersHub co-founder Phong Ngo. Phong knows firsthand about managing businesses with a high volume of accounts payable. The machines pictured have over 10,000 parts. That’s a lot of vendors, bills, and line items to code into the accounting system. Previously as the President of General Plasma, an industrial automation company, Phong struggled with accounts payable in the following ways:

  • The manual data entry required to enter line item details from bills and receipts was huge.
  • It was almost impossible to ensure systematic coding of costs to the right place in the accounting system.
  • Collaboration and approvals were difficult without context, and without giving all parties access to the accounting system.
  • Payments were disconnected from the accounting system records, creating reconciliation headaches.
invoice

Phong at the impressive 6.5M m2/yr automotive & airplane glass production facility

invoice

Phong at the 75MW CIGS solar web production facility

invoice

Overseeing 500K units/yr of anti-reflective overlay for iPhone pilot production

The accounts payable pain that led to MakersHub

When he was at General Plasma, Phong had a CFO, Accounting Manager, and even 3rd party accounting help. Despite all of this, the books were never accurate or complete. When Phong asked for cash flow projections or job costing reports, it would take several days to pull the data together requiring multiple spreadsheets. The problem always boiled down to inaccurate and incomplete data entry. Bills and receipts were not entered correctly, or coded to incorrect buckets, and data was missing.

When your business needs to capture line item details from bills and receipts, it changes the AP process in a big way. The manual data entry required to reach this level of granularity tracking costs is often prohibitive. On top of this, because manual data entry is a tedious task that no one likes to do, it’s often done incorrectly or half-heartedly. Phong realized you couldn’t get mad at your team for making mistakes during onerous GL and accounting code processes. The reality is that it’s overwhelming and mind-numbing to face an inbox full of bills from your vendors every day.

Everyone knows that understanding your business drivers is crucial to success. You should, of course, know your cash flow cycle, cost of goods sold (COGS), and margins. However, most business leaders face a fundamental analytics problem - the data going into the system is often incomplete and unreliable.

This ongoing frustration led Phong to create MakersHub, the tool he wished he had all along at General Plasma. At its core, MakersHub is about capturing data and utilizing it in a meaningful way in the accounting system. The benefit is many hours of saved time, hugely reduced manual effort, and deeper, more accurate business insights.

MakersHub is made for companies with heavy accounts payable process needs. These businesses operate in the physical world, purchase from many vendors, benefit from line-item capture, and require many sets of eyes to validate their bills. That focus allowed us to build the best accounts payable tool on the market serving construction, construction services, industrial contractors, automation, and manufacturers. We also serve bookkeepers and accounting professionals who serve these clients.

Meet the founders

team

Phong Ngo

CEO & Co-Founder

Phong was previously President of General Plasma - a leading supplier of nanotechnology equipment and industrial automation solutions. General Plasma engineered and manufactured $100M in R&D and production equipment globally for OEMs in solar, automotive, display, and semiconductors. Phong has a gold medal in physics and two US patents. Phong completed his Wharton MBA as a Palmer Scholar. Charles and Phong in fact met while at Wharton in the MBA program.

team

Charley Howe

President & Co-Founder

Charley has 18 years of Wall Street experience in fixed-income structured products and venture capital. He spent more than a decade advising and transacting with the world’s most sophisticated mortgage-backed security, commercial real estate, and consumer lending investors. Charley then co-led fintech investing at Citi Ventures focused on early & growth-stage startups in payments, lending, and capital markets.

Next-generation accounts payable

Our proprietary WiseVision technology

Our proprietary WiseVision technology is so much more than simply ‘better OCR’. This is the reason we’re the only solution able to truly eliminate hours of manual data entry, and provide unparalleled accuracy. The WiseVision technology is comprised of two synergistic parts. Because of our focus on AP tasks, MakersHub is the first accounts payable tool able to capture all data from any bill or receipt format, and fully remove the need for tedious data entry.

  • Data canvassing & deep indexing. First, we utilize best-in-class vision technology to significantly expand the amount of raw information derived from a document. We can then digest and make sense of these raw data through spatial mapping and proprietary indexing of the extracted data.
  • Bespoke language model & localized learning. Post indexing, the partially reconciled data is exposed to a series of deterministic language models we built solely to make sense of bill data. With every MakersHub user interaction, WiseVision gets better through one-shot localized learning.
A deep 2-way integration with QuickBooks

Too many financial ecosystem tools promise the world, only to disappoint with subpar integrations. MakersHub has not taken any shortcuts with our integration, no third-party integration platforms are used here. We built a native and deep integration fully utilizing all the capabilities of the QuickBooks API. The accounting system is at the center of a company’s financial tech stack. That is why our integration with QuickBooks is at the core of our product development. We sync more data, and in a more useful way, than any other accounts payable tool. Because, if you have to enter it twice, it’s not really making life any easier.

Collaboration and context are overlooked cornerstones of accounts payable

Good approval flows help ensure that accounts payable are ‘ok to pay’ but also act as a forum to give feedback on what the item is for. It’s essential for businesses to code their costs to the right project or customer. Without this, it’s impossible to track profitability, know which customers are making or losing money, and if your estimates are accurate. This means you will need non-accounting people to be involved with reviewing and approving bills and receipts. They may be your team in the field, project managers, estimators, or salespeople. MakersHub provides a collaboration hub and full context to all the people who need to approve bills or authorize payments. All without having to give access to the accounting system or sensitive financial records.