Hello, everyone, and welcome to Bushel Buddy Seat. My name is Jake Joraanstad. I'm our cofounder and CEO here at Bushel. I live in Fargo, North Dakota, and I've got some teammates joining me today to jump into a conversation around payments. So we're gonna have you kinda take you through a streamline kind of payment flow today to think about how can we make it easier for you during the busyness of harvest and mitigate risk at your business, with all the payment processes that you have going on. And we know it's a convoluted process and can be challenging. And so we're here to try to help today. So before each topic, we're gonna start off with some questions we'd like you to ask yourself and think through. So what processes do you have in place to ensure timely payments to your farmers? That's a first question. Second one, how do you handle large volumes of payments during peak harvest times? Is it a lot of paper checks? Is it the printer going out and dealing with that? How does that look? And how do you communicate with farmers about their payments and account status? Good question to be asking as we get into it. I know some of you are already into harvest and maybe finishing up, and there's a lot about the start. So I think this is timely. And how are you reducing risk exposure to your business by implementing secure payment processes? So those are the, first four questions we want you to be thinking about as we dive in. And to help us with the conversation today, I'm gonna have, Colette and Colton join us. They are both, product leaders at Bushel. Colette, I'll let you introduce yourself first. Thanks, Jake. Hi, everyone. My name is Colette Bersie. I am based in Aberdeen, South Dakota. I am from a dairy farm in Minnesota originally. And here at Bushel, I get to work on products specific to our agribusiness customers. So how can they work better with their former customers, and then how can they work better together with their internal teams? Thanks for having me, Jake. Alright. Colton, you're up next. Hey. Thanks, Jake. Yep. So my name is Colton Schumacher. I'm the Bushel Wallet product manager. So I'm also based in Fargo, North Dakota here, and, my background comes from accounts receivable automation. So really specializing in how to get businesses paid and get paid quickly. Here at Bushel, I'm responsible for developing new features within our Bushel Wallet, product and getting those out the door and helping businesses like yourself get paid. So back to you, Jake. Alright. So this brings us to our first challenge. So using multiple systems to generate invoices, move money, and reconcile all those payments takes manual work from your team. It's time consuming, complex, and a lot of times has security risk to it. Moving to digital payments can streamline record keeping and reconciliation in one system. Thinking about managing and manually updating multiple systems is complex for your team. Again, you've gotta deal with manual reconciliation. Did I get paid on a paper check? Did somebody drop off a bag of cash at the front desk? How do we reconcile who did what? And then it's difficult to get a comprehensive view of the financial performance, whether it's collection on time or understanding kinda who and how you're getting paid can be a challenge. And so we think about, the egg retail channel that our customers work in. We think about, when you are selling things to your farms and other commercials you work with. If we can come up with a solution here, which we've been working on a bushel to use one system, send and receive those digital payments, allows you to gain insights into the status of your invoices and payments, things like being scheduled, reconcile and drill down into those details can help you with growing the business and better decision making. And so a fun fact I'll leave you with, and then I'll pass it over to Colette. Based on our data we see with our customers, the average invoice is paid in about forty five days. I know a lot of you wanna do better than that. So, Colette, we're gonna pass it over to you. Thanks, Jake. I would love to have highlight a couple customer examples on how they not only integrate their accounting software with Bushel to show digital versions of invoices to their customers, but how they've actually enabled simpler payments management with Bushel as well. The first customer is American AgCo. They are based in Minnesota near where I grew up. And not only do they originate grain from farmers, but then they also process that grain into feed and turn around and sell that back to dairy farmers in the area and other commercial businesses. And they actually have a business process of generating an individual invoice for every single truckload of feed that leaves that facility. And so what that leads to is a lot of invoices being mailed out, hoping that customers get all those invoices in one place, through the postal service, and then also waiting that average of forty five days plus for the customers to then find the time or make the time to pay on those invoices. And so with Bushel, we not only integrated with their accounting software for customers to have immediate access to those invoices digitally within the customer portal, but they also turned it on where customers can pay on those invoices immediately once they see them. It we all are guilty of that. Right? When something's top of mind is when you wanna be able to do it. So getting a new invoice is the exact right time to pay on it, and what they've seen is a faster time to payment once they've enabled those digital invoices and payments management with Bushel. The other success story I'd like to highlight is Ray Farmers United Elevator. They are based in North Dakota, and they have a full service cooperative for their farmers. So not only do they use the Bushel customer portal for farmers to see their grain tickets and settlements, but they've also integrated their accounting software with us where invoices and monthly statements are digitized and payable within the Bushel customer portal. So farmers can now see individual invoices for inputs that they purchase as well as see their monthly statement of how much they've accrued in charges for the last month. Farmers can pay on that immediately or schedule a payment even within the Bushel customer portal. And Ray Farmers has seen some really great success with that as well, where when farmers who maybe don't farm just as their full time career but have another full time career on the side, They sit down, and at eleven PM at night, they maybe don't wanna grab the checkbook and they don't wanna get the postage stamp and envelope together. They can pay it immediately on their mobile phone, and then Ray Farmers is realizing that day's sales outstanding much faster. Perfect. Thank you, Colette. Alright. So challenge number two. This one we're gonna dive into, a bit of a demo and show you what we're up to. So we believe meeting the farmer's timing can be, challenging and always a moving target, whether it's, they wanna pay get paid now or, actually, I wanna get paid next year. And those things can be challenging and the process can be difficult. But, when when you have that farmer who calls in and says, hey. Can you fix this payment or get a same day payment? That makes a lot of rework for your staff. The chances that you can print the check and get that to the farmer are are pretty low, unless they're staying there in the office. And so digital payments are the best option securely send your customers, what they're owed and and when they request it. So we're thinking about, how do we go from the post office who believes we shouldn't be sending those paper checks in the mail to begin with to an option that allows the customer and your farmer to kind of choose a path that they feel best about and meeting them where their preferences are. It also removes the problem around, encryption and sort of the fraud that we see. There's a lot of measures in place with digital payments that we can take to keep that from being a problem in the future, and you're saving on postage, check costs, and late fees, due to faster processing time. So and, again, you'll see this with Colette's demo next year. The idea that there's a record, it's automated, and it's not a paper process can really big be a big improvement to your finance situation at the at your operation. And so we believe the solution is to meet those farmers where they're at with additional payment. And, Colette, I'll have you, show off a bit about what we've enabled. Yeah. Thanks. It's always fun to do a little bit of show and tell here. And so I am going to share my screen. What you're seeing here is the staff portal view. So as an agribusiness customer working with Bushell, this is your portal view, and I'm gonna go into accounts payable. Jake is one of my favorite customers. He's a great farmer, and he just called and requested that we defer a settlement payment. This is something that we see often in the industry. Right? You defer from one calendar year to the next for tax purposes. Jake's having a heck of a year, so in August, he already notes that he wants to start deferring payments to January. And within Bushel, that's really easy to do. So I've just looked at Jake's account, and I can see the one unpaid settlement. This is directly integrated from my accounting software as an agribusiness customer. So So I didn't have to go and create this settlement all over again in Bushel. It just automatically pops up. And I'm gonna select make payment. And instead of paying on that settlement today, I'm able to schedule that payments to execute on a date in the future. We've heard stories from customers where on January one or January second, they have a literal line of farmer customers waiting outside the office to have settlement checks cut. And that's great. Farmers need to be met where they're at on their payment terms, but it's around the holidays for a lot of people. It's a time period that can get really busy with a massive flux of settlement checks that need to be cut from the, from being deferred earlier in the year. So I'm just gonna say deferring this settlement payment. You can see that I have scheduled it for January first of twenty twenty five even though we're in August right now. I can hit review, and I can defer that payment. And now suddenly, Jake has this payment that it'll be executed on January one. I don't have to go into the office to cut that settlement check, and then he just will see those funds immediately show up in his Bushel wallet. And that is an example of meeting the customer exactly where they're at, where you can still be at home, you can take some paid time off or a vacation, and yet in the moment when that customer requests the deferred settlement, you can make sure that you can set it and forget it. Alright. Thanks, Colette. Appreciate that. Beautiful demo. That brings us to the third challenge of the day here. So mitigating risk and growing adoption of digital payments. So one of the most common ways agribusinesses are electronically paying farmers today is ACH. We all know this. The challenge is, well, there's quite a few challenges. We've got low ACH adoption. Our typical customer sees less than ten percent of their payments going to farms and being received via ACH. So it's already a a poor sort of adoption level, continues to be the way that it it has been for a long time now, sub ten percent. It's cumbersome. It's takes a lot of time and inconvenient to to get the information collected. You'll see, from Colton here in a minute that, that paper process, as you probably know, is painful, the voided check, all that, becomes a challenge. And then when that farmer changes bank accounts the next year, they've gotta go through the process again. And then you have this, liability on your business of storing sensitive financial information, accounting numbers, account and routing numbers coming into your facility on piece of paper, you're putting into your systems, as just easy to access information, and that's a challenge. So what's the solution? We've launched direct deposit with Bushel. So if you are able to maintain your existing ACH workflow, let's say you've got an ACH tool set today to pay farms, you can do that while securely automating and authorizing those accounts to enroll right through their Bushel customer portal. So, you're fully automating it. You're authorizing the enrollment through our Bushel Wallet tool built into your customer portal. You've got a higher rate of ACH adoption. We're gonna be able to beat all of those ten percent numbers that we've been talking about for years. And then you're eliminating any kind of paperwork, and need for your customer to mail anything in and, again, using the same process you used today. So, Colton, pass it over to you to show us a bit about what direct deposit looks like this fall. Right on. Thanks, Jake. Happy to do so. Let me just quick share my screen here today. Okay. So like Jake said, the existing processes that a lot of folks use today, are ripe for, for improvement. So we at Bushel believes one of the best ways we can improve your ACH adoption, is just to build it within, the portal, within your customer portal. Today, most folks have a PDF or some sort of file that you instruct your producers to download on your standard business website. Not only is that cumbersome, it's it's very clunky. So having to download a file, fill out a bank account routing information, potentially even, attaching a a paper check on the bottom, and then scanning, faxing, or even mailing that back to your offices, is just a poor user experience. And so we came up with direct deposit by bushel. The benefit with that, of course, is a hundred percent digital enrollment. And so what that looks like is putting a banner on your customer portal. Front and center, when your producers first log in to, your bushel powered, white labeled app, they would see instructions like this that would just say, skip the postal service, receive your payments faster and more securely. And so that's a absolute fantastic way just to promote and, help with adoption in ACH. What your customers would do as soon as they click enroll now, they'd be taken to the Bushel Wallet interface to set up an account that typically takes around, around three minutes to enroll trading a Bushel wallet account. Once your customers enroll in Bushell wallet, we'll send you and your staff an email, telling them that they have enrolled for direct deposit. Once that email, does get triggered and sent to your team, I would suggest going to our new interface on the staff view of the portal. And let me just switch screens here, and I'll show you what that actually, looks like. Okay. Probably need to pause here for a second. Do you guys know how to switch to a different, browser? Like, I need to switch to, to Safari, not Chrome. Okay. I'm ready. Three, two, one. Okay. So on this side, the staff view of the of the portal, you would see a new menu option called direct deposit. So like I said earlier, if your customers, are clicking the enroll button and they go through the digital process to enroll in direct deposit, they'll show and display on this list view here. So as an example, we'll click this view ACH information. We would know the name of, the customer from your ERP or accounting system. So no changes from your perspective. You're still going to use, the accounting system that you use today. We're not aiming to change that process, but, really, you're just going to a different area to find an account and routing number. So if we click view ACH, we'll get a easy way to copy onto our clipboard, a routing number and account number. From that perspective, you're gonna go plug that into your accounting system, and they'll be ready to, receive payments through your standard ACH process today. The only difference is that your customer now will receive that payment to their Bushel wallet. The benefit to your business, of course, is that when your customers, enroll digitally through, through Bushel for direct deposit, we put them through what's known as KYB and KYC. So, really, that's just a fancy way of saying, we do our vetting against your customers to make sure that they are who they say they are. That might mean we're grabbing a copy of a driver's license, or extra verification information, but that helps protect you as a business to know that they are indeed the correct person that you're sending, those settlement payments to. But there is no change to your process. I cannot stress that enough. You're still using your, ERP or your accounting system like today. You're just changing where you're going to go grab the, routing number and account number. And so that's really the destination of, your customer's Bushel Wallet, account. And so the cool thing about that, of course, is if you send a settlement payment to your customer, maybe they have, multiple business bank accounts, They don't need to reach out to you to change where that direct deposit amount, ends up. For example, if they wanna send fifty thousand to one account, maybe a hundred thousand to a different business bank account, they can do that from their perspective, without reaching out to your team, and needing to update any sort of enrollment form. That's all handled from the customer's perspective, without extra work on you or your staff. So, what we would do is once I've confirmed, I've added this information into my account, I have a handy little way of keeping track of which of my customers have enrolled in direct deposit. And so I might say, yes. I save them, to my accounting system. Or if after further investigation, I find out that, maybe they have a lien, against those crops and I'm not quite ready to pay them with direct deposit yet, we can mark it as a HASLINK confirm and always return to that after maybe I have a lienholder waiver, on file, and then I can come back and fetch that information at any time. So as an example here, I have a HASLIN. Maybe I want to, go ahead and say, you know what? I have the waiver on file. I'm ready to start paying them electronically again. We'll come in here. We'll say yes, and then confirm. And at that point, I've added them, into my ERP, and this list is now up to date. So, hopefully, that makes sense. Really direct deposit. Think of it as a digital way to enroll your customers. No more paper form, with the, enhanced, KYB, KYC functions that I mentioned to you to make sure that your customers are who they say they are and that your funds, make it to, the right destination. So happy to, dive into that anymore, but I'll hand it back to you, Jake. Colton. Thank you. Appreciate it. I don't know that it gets any simpler than that. Not only are you dealing with whether they've got a lien, but your team's able to track who's put what into the ERP. Everybody's happy. So I think, that was awesome. Thanks for sharing, and excited to have all of our customers rolling out this tool for direct deposit this fall. So that brings us to the end. Thank you, Colton and Colette, both for joining us for the buddy seat. For more information on our solutions in ag for agribusinesses and farmers from Bushell, visit bushel power dot com. And if you wanna see more from the buddy seat team, all of our content's at bushel buddy seat dot com where you'll find all of our past webinars and recordings. Thanks for being here today, and thanks for being part of Bushel. Cheers.