Name: How I Vibecoded a Dashboard to Replace Our Commissions Spreadsheet
Uploaded: 2026-08-27T18:15:07.404Z
Duration: 43 min 40 s
Description: How I Vibecoded a Dashboard to Replace Our Commissions Spreadsheet

Transcript for "How I Vibecoded a Dashboard to Replace Our Commissions Spreadsheet": Hello, and welcome, everyone. Please put into the q and a where you're calling in from. I'm Kat. I work here at Campfire. I'm calling in from San Francisco. I have here today, Jacob. Jacob, would you mind introducing yourself for the folks who are floating in and where you're calling in from? Yes. Absolutely. Can you hear me okay? Am I coming through? Perfect. Yeah. Okay. Hi, everyone. My name is Jacob Martin. I'm a CPA and the controller at FlexBase Technologies. We're we're a fast growing fintech startup. Little bit about me. I'm calling out of Houston, originally from Oregon. Obviously studied the county and started my career at worked at other various fintechs and startups and, found myself at Flex, which is honestly, like, my dream job. I love it here. So yeah. Yeah. Very compelling product. I actually don't didn't realize that you're from Oregon. Oh, yeah. I'm. from Oregon. too. I'm from Grants, okay. Nice. Yeah. I grew up a little outside of Portland, so I was a bit of ways away, but been through there. So, yeah, Pass. Oregon's awesome. Yeah. Beaverton or something else. Yep. Beaverton. Exactly. Nailed it. Yeah. Your parents worked at Nike. I'm sure. No. No. My dad worked right next to the campus, but, yeah, no, no Nike parents. But plenty of Nike friends would get us into, like, the factory store and stuff. So, yeah, you know. all about that. Yeah. We have somebody on staff whose brother lives in Portland, works at Nike, and my one recommendation. was, like, go to the employee store any chance you, get. yeah. Yeah. It's insane. Alright. Well, if you're just joining us, I'm Kat. I work at Campfire. I'm here with Jacob, a well known figure here at Campfire, and we're gonna be talking about how we built this. The subject today is going to be commissions. And, Jacob works at Flex, very strong, product led growth team. So if you're curious about the Flex product, you can go to flex.1 and check it out. So we're gonna be getting started. And where you're calling in from into, the, q and a. We actually have Abhika, who is also, going to be co presenting. And, and so we're really excited to get started. So, Jacob, tell me about what Flex does, and let me get a handle on, like, how you're looking at, bringing in the big bucks, how you're thinking about paying out the salespeople or pushing that revenue over the line. I'd love to hear just from the top. Yeah. So, we operate in the fintech space. We offer, like, cards and banking services for SMBs, high net worth entrepreneurs. People's first instinct is a comparison to, like, like a ramp or bricks. Right? And so but, we kind of look at ourselves very differently from them. You know, there's a whole market of of SMBs and entrepreneurs, solopreneurs that, don't get enough love. And so that's really the heart and soul of our customers and who we wanna serve. And so, like we've discussed in the past, like, we aren't your typical SaaS company. Right? We're not you know, we don't have recurring revenue contracts. Right? Most of our revenue is derived from, our fintech products and and card swipe, so, like, interchange. Right? So high volume transactions every month, thousands, if if not millions of lines being logged. Right? And, that needs to get into our ERP so we can report on revenue and COGS of all the sort. And so and that revenue data, that processing data is what fuels also, like, our sales commissions as well and and other other, p and l items. And so all the data lives in the big data warehouse in the cloud, and then it's transformed, via our business intelligence tools. And then I take that data, right, and pretty much configure it to build our sales commission statements. And we were doing this from scratch, last year and earlier this year. A lot of copy and pasting of tons of rows and, like, manual references and seed files, like, oh, these customers belong to this rep, so on and so forth. And then whenever a new customer, a new rep was added, it was always fun to try and track that down and make sure we had completeness right. It we we got it pretty fine tuned, but it was you know, there's definitely some efficiency to be had. And so our team, you know, we run pretty lean. Our goal is to make sure we're AI forward as much as we can as a finance org. And so our our head of finance, Brian, was like, you know, whatever AI tools we need at your disposal to to improve these processes, you have them. And so we started with, of course, Campfire and Claude, to really figure out how to refine this process. So we got to a point where it's much better, like, Claude and Campfire were ingest our files, transform them, and then create the journal entries I need, the sales commission statements, which we would foot and tie out using, like, analytical procedures and tying out to our data cloud, but still wanted some efficiency. So finally, this these past couple months, I Vibe coded a platform, where I could push our seed files and our raw data in there, create an interactive dashboard, not only for finance, but for sales managers and the reps themselves all with, like, different views and and user, rights and views, they're really just one place where we can kind of host the sales commission flow instead of me building files, generating PDFs. And then every time we make a small edit, I have to redo the PDFs and send them in Slack. Right? It was just a very disjointed experience. Not not a good way to consistently document controls or approvals and, very subject to manual, error, right, which we're all prone to being human. Yeah. So I'm hearing a lot about, like, controls, sign off, documentation, tying out. Are you subject to audit today? Yes. Yeah. We are we we go through a yearly audit. Right? And, yeah, we're doing that right now as we speak. So which, which, just for context. Right? Like, I joined this org late last year. We're doing our 2025 audit, most of which, you know, I wasn't I did work at the company. Right? So Campfire has been, like, super invaluable for us for this. Like, almost every PPC we generate, I'm leaning on Campfire's AI to help me make those. So, like, insane time savings and help and, you know, even being able to ask Campfire, hey. Give me more context on this account, and it can read the descriptions of of the JEs. Right? It's, like, it's insane. Like, never you know, when I was at like, 2020, right, like, it would have been or other companies would have been amazing to have this. Right? So, definitely makes my life a little bit easier and shortens that learning curve. Yeah. I love that. Last week, we actually I'm not sure if you caught it, but we were talking about using AI to help with the audit. I think that the approach we were taking on the last call is going to be a little bit different than what we're going through today. Today, I think to your point of, like, getting the sign off, getting the tie out, like, all of those pieces do help you complete the audit. But I think for you, a big part is, like, you know, commissions and, like, pay is so important to an organization. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I I'd love to to see what you've actually, like, developed and to kinda just, like, For in. And folks who are on the call, we have the q and a open. So if you have any questions for Jacob as we move through it, sure. we'll leave them in as they, as they, like, make sense. So just put in any question that you have into the chat and we'll or into the q and a, and we'll get we'll get to it. Cool. Where is the share screen button? I don't know if I'm seeing it. In the top left. All top left. Okay. Cool. I see it. Awesome. Let me get my windows sorted when I'll share the screen. Cool. Can you see I think I I can see it on Goldcast, but can you see my dashboard? Cool. Yeah. And and for the viewers out there, you can actually zoom in. So if there's something on particular on the screen, you can, like, zoom in, move it around, kinda make changes there. Cool. Awesome. So, yeah, I let me preface this by saying I have no software engineering background. Right? Like, I, very much lean on Claude and and Campfire and, other LLMs that help me navigate this stuff. But, I've always wanted to, like, build my own app, and I figured, like, let's start with some low hanging fruit, like, the sales commission, right, which, like I said, most of this process lives in PDFs, Google Sheets, and and Slack. Right? So three different apps with disjointed conversations and such. So, it's pretty straightforward. This is all obviously dummy data. Right? But, we created this app with three personas in mind. Right? So we have, like, our finance lead, which, you know, I'll be role playing as and also our managers and also our reps. Right? And so, we're you know, I was able to configure this so that based off the username and email, right, that'll they'll create a login, and then they'll have certain provisioning available to them in the app. Right? So me as the finance leader, I have my dashboard with our latest commission run. I can see all the reps and drill down into into their items. I can see their attainment and their payout for a forecasted payout, which is based off of the raw input I would put in for my, for my data cloud. We have reporting here. So this could be really useful for, like, my head of finance or our FP and A team who need to, like, see in real time, like, what's going on, and do some forecasting, see how we're doing with budget to actuals and such. And this is broken up by AE and BDR team. This is where I can import my data. Obviously, some of this could use some polish. I'll maybe I'll get together with our product designers and see how we could make this better, but being an internal tool, not too worried about it. But I can just upload my files here. Here we have an audit trail of, like, anything that's going on. So, like, any approvals or data being loaded. Right? This helps me see, like, what's going on so I can make sure, like, there's no unauthorized action or I can trace everything that's being done. And then here's, like, my user management, right, where I can see people who've logged in. I can control their role and, like, what team they're on and add or remove users as needed. So, like I said, I've never done engineering. I just told Claude, like, hey. I want this in here, and it wrote the code for me in parallel, and it was insane. It was really cool to see happen live. So, and just to show you, like, if I, you know, if I go to the head of sales role, you know, here I can or the sales manager role, it changes my view, and I can see my team specifically and my reporting. I can drill down into here. And then there's, like, you, I created, like, feedback threads. So, I think the hardest part about sales commissions for us was, like, feedback and going back and forth, and making sure, like, data was correct. Because every time we make a small adjustment, that's a new PDF that I then have to send the sales manager and the rep, get their feedback. And so this this kinda gives us an opportunity to, like, centralize all that conversation happening here. It gives us an audit trail and just makes it a lot easier and faster. You'll notice, like, as the manager persona, like, I can't edit any of these fields. Right? Just so we have some controls in place and nothing's changing. But if I go here, I'm able to, like, override these in the finance leader persona, which sometimes that happens. Right? Sometimes there's bonuses. Sometimes something was it wasn't accrued correctly or we need to, like, change attainment, and so we're able to do that. And that's documented as well. So if I go back to that sales manager role, another thing we want wanted to, like, get centralized and, is approvals. Right? So if I approve this, you can click approve as manager, and then, it's waiting for that final step, which is the finance final approval. As the rep themselves, they just have access to their own statement, and they can download it here. If I download this, let me open this up. You know, it'll show, okay, it was manager approved. I'm still waiting my final approval and such. But this is just so much faster and easier for us. Like, you know, it just makes this workflow way, you know, way way cleaner and and, just removes a lot of the lag that comes with the manual work for this. But it breaks it down by their deals, their results, their attainment, so on and so forth. So, Yeah. I oh, sorry. I'll stop there. Oh, no. I I like the documentation of this. Talking about, like, tech stack. So you have, like, maybe an internal platform that you're using to look at all the transactions that are going on. What. happens after that in the direction of sales commissions? Like sorry. How do you mean, like, once I pull data and import it into here, what happens next? Or So I remember we talked about using HECS, and. this information, is is that coming from HECS? Yeah. So HEX is one of our business intelligence platforms. That's where, like, it all the data being fed into theirs from, like, it's transaction data that lives in our in our data warehouse. And then and so we have confidence that, like, both the revenue data and the sales commission calculations living in HEX are they're coming from the same source of truth. So we know, like, that revenue the revenue numbers aren't they're, like, immutable for for lack of better terms. Right? And so PEX, our business intel platform, creates very general import files for us that I then put into, like you know, before this, I was putting into a cloud script that is making all my statements, and it would take forever. Right? It would just buzz and buzz and buzz. I'm I'm sure everyone's had that experience where Claude takes its time. Right? I mean, you know, you don't wanna touch it or break anything. But yeah. So HEX gives us our file. So now I take those same files, and I can show you what that looks like. If I come here and go to import data, I can upload a CSV file. And And then here's, like, my commission batch from Hex for September. I upload that. It gives me, like, a little preview, right, of their targets versus actuals, their OTE. All the OT so all the commission calculations, and I'll talk about this in a second, but, like, mission calculations, OTEs, rosters, those all come from what we call seed files. We had to give it, like, a a static file that says, like, here's my BDR roster. Here's my AE roster. Here's how we calculate commissions for AEs. And I gave it a bunch of rules that Claude helped me format, and Claude wrote that into the code of this app. So I don't have to, like, tell this app how to calculate commissions. It knows. Right? And then you'll see here this roster is actually a little bit bigger. So the app knows, like, oh, if there's a new AE listed, it's just gonna add that person as a user. So I don't have to, like, edit the seed files after the fact. Right? I was trying to think of, like, what are all the ways this workflow would break. Right? And then so, like, new reps is always one of them, you know, that we deal with in current state. So we added logic to make sure, like, that's accounted for. So if I confirm this, it'll give me a little status. Okay. That's updated. It says two new reps. All the status is reset to prepared by finance. And then I have a new dashboard. If yeah. You'll see in the recording these numbers change a little bit. So well, they're new numbers. Right? So Yeah. Yeah. It seems like everyone's really hitting their target. Maybe Owen's newer, yeah. but everybody else is, like, over a 100% attainment. Yeah. Oops. Let me delete this. Yeah. Maybe that's the optimist in me. Like, our teams are crushing it. Right? But, yeah, definitely some good looking numbers. So Yeah. I even Romina agrees. This is a very impressive, platform that you've created. I see Jones in here asking, how do you validate the model? I know you mentioned using Claude, but what are your validation steps? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so the first couple, I would say, like, you you have to do some manual reperformance. Right? Like, you like, the first couple times you launch an app like this or whenever you launch an app like this. And so when we put this out, right, like, the first thing I had to do is, like, okay. I'm gonna recreate commissions, you know, my old way, right, and foot everything and tie it out and make sure the revenue so, like like, for the AEs, right, let me go here. Right? We have a breakout of, like, revenue generated per deal. Right? So I could see their revenue target, their actual revenue, and their attainment. Right? So I will manually re manually re perform that, like, in my old spreadsheets, with the same source data to make sure I'm getting to the same numbers. Right? And so, and the way like, with Claude, I can always in the background have it run that same validation check for me, you know, for future periods. But I would say, like, that's a really good call, and you have to, like, you you have to do some kind of manual reperformance anytime you find code anything. Right? We're accountants. Right? You know, our model's, like, trust and verify, so we need to, you know, make sure we live by that. So that's that's the yeah. That's how we check the figures and work and, yeah. What was the other question? I think that that that was that was it. It was just, Okay. you know, the share that this is a very impressive piece. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I think I think the other part of it is also, like, maybe people on the call have spent a lot of time just like you did to make the spreadsheet so good. Yes. I think that it's really hard when you've spent hours and hours, like, Yes. reading in a process, and then you, like, get to this, like, beautiful spreadsheet to, like, workbook to then to get rid of it. Did you did you ever have those feelings where it's like, I put so much effort in here. How can I go on to, like, a new platform? Yeah. Well, totally. Yeah. And like I said, like, the first few months I was here, we didn't we weren't using a ton of AI. Right? So I was doing everything old school, got it nice and polished, dynamic references everywhere, clear audit trails for my head of finance review. Right? And so, definitely had those feelings. And I think, like, one miss, one way, like, AI or Vibe codings misconstrued is, like, oh, I spit up this app, and I'm good to go. Like no. Like, those spreadsheets still have a ton of value. Right? Because that's essentially my validation check. That's what's gonna give me confidence in the new app I built. And so, those definitely shouldn't be discarded. I, in fact, plugged I gave Claude our, like, commission workbooks and said, like, analyze this, like, review the math, like, so we can get an understanding of how I'm actually, calculating these. And so definitely have those feelings, but, like, I don't think any of that work goes to waste because it's, like, the foundation of anything, like, we're gonna build as accountants using AI. Yeah. That's a good one. What platform is does the code live on? Yeah. So there's three for our tech stack that for this, there's three parts. Right? So number one is GitHub where all, like, the code it's like our co our our code repository. So, like, everything I wrote in clogged code, it pushed to GitHub, and that's where the code's living. And then the second part is our database, which is an app called Supabase. We're on the free free plan for that. So that log like, whenever I upload data, it's storing that. Right? So that way, like, if I just have an HTML, like, website, right, and I'm uploading data, it just disappears into the ether when you close the browser. So you need a database to maintain the seed files, the rosters, the calculations, and past and future uploads. Right? So that's what Supabase does. And then we do hosting on Vercel, which is, like, $25 a month. There's a free plan. You don't need the the, the paid one, but the the pro plan allows for, like, quicker deployments. Right? So you you, like, push when you push updates like GitHub, right, you redeploy the site on Vercel. It basically refreshes the app. And so, we just like that. It's a little bit faster, and you can make a custom, URL instead of using, like, the ugly, you know, hyphenated Vercel one. So Yeah. That's that's a that's a really good I feel like GitHub is so common these days. People are never, used GitHub before this. Also, sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt you. I never knew what any of these tools were. I asked Claude, what is the cheapest and most sustainable way to do this? And it gave me three suggestions. Right? And so, of course, I talked to my bosses and teams to make sure, like, all data is secure. Right? So that's a huge part of it as IT governance. yeah. Right? You don't wanna do any of this without getting, like, proper approvals and stuff. And so, but, yeah, I, like, I knew what GitHub was. I had never opened it before this. And so it's, like, it's a pretty incredible experience, and I think accountants are natural builders. So please, like, go try this because it'll, like, blow your mind. It's, like, super fun. So Yeah. Yeah. If anybody has questions about, like you know, maybe somebody on the call is, like, super keyed in here. Are can they, like, contact you on LinkedIn, or or are you open. to questions? For sure. Yeah. Yeah. I'm so I'm very active on LinkedIn and such, and I wanna be an influencer one day. Just kidding. But, like, yeah, I'm I'm pretty active in that platform. And then I'm in, the Campfire community as well around the Campfire. So you can DM me on Slack if, and you can find me in there. But, yeah, I did see There's a couple of other questions. questions. Yeah. Yeah. I think the big one I for me personally is, like, especially when it comes to wages. Did your salespeople accept this, out of the box, or were there any concerns when when you were trying to, like, up adoption? Yeah. So it's still, like, in the rollout phase. It's very, like I think so we started with, like, one team, the BDR because BDRs because their commissions are, like, the simplest. Right? And so but I think with anything like this, right, like you said, it's wages and it's sensitive information and, like, people care about getting paid timely and in the right way. Right? Like, you have to, like, take a measured approach. I think it would be would have been foolish of me to say, like, okay. We're a a PV in this process. Like, I'm gonna do this for the entire sales org, and we also have a partnerships team. Right? That's, like, you know we're talking about almost 30 people, right, in our entire sales engine. So we've done, like, a slower slower rollout. Like, I showed it to our BDR manager prior to this and such and got her thoughts. And and so yeah. Like, it's I I think, like, you know, when I showed it to the manager at first, they're very excited. Right? They don't want they don't like the back and forth in endless Slack threads and in PDFs. And, you know, they being good sales teams, they're also, like, keeping track of their calculations on the side too. And so there's always, like, a little bit of a comparison regardless of whether we're using a Vibe coded app or a PDF method. And so that's already kind of built into the process. And so I don't think there is any missing trust in terms of, how things are being calculated. They just want, you know, the same kind of validations in place, which which we which we have. So, but yeah. So it's not fully rolled out. We're taking it piece by piece with teams with with our teams, but so far, like, perception from, like, managers have been have been good. And, like I said, the more the less Slack threads and PDFs we can use, the better, I think. So, Yeah. So is it fully deployed with the BDRs? not fully. It's with a handful of them right now and such, and we're also looking to push down to the other teams. So Okay. pretty soon. Yeah. Yeah. So, Brian, maybe we we can say it or Brian's asking how long did it take to get to a beta version. Yeah. So I think, like, there's there's two answers to that, I think. So number one, like, beta isn't like it's working internally, like, and I'm comfortable with it. That took, like, a day, right, like, of building the app. Right? I was literally, like I think, yeah, I did it I did it during July close and or not July close. It was June close. It was a couple months ago. So I was doing, like, June close, and I was like, oh, there's gotta be a better way to do this. So I was, like, prompting Claude and Campfire in the side while I was doing, like, my close process, and, like, I get a little ding every time Claude gets to a stopping point. And so I was like, I was literally doing this on the side, and then, like, in the evenings, I would just you know, it was fun. So I was, like, checking the work. Like, my wife's like, what are you doing? Like, why are you still, like, working and such? But, it's like I'm making apps. But, yeah. No. It's, so, yeah, I did on the side. So it it took me, like, a day to spin up and then probably another couple days to, just validate. Right? But, so which is nuts. Right? You can go from concept to deployment. But like I said earlier, like, you really do need to have a strong, like, foundation in place if you want something like this to, like, be deployed faster. Right? So that's where I, you know, that's where the spreadsheets and the processes you already have today have immense value. Right? Because I was you know, we had a very refined process. We had a document to SOP. I had all the calculations ready to go. I could give that to Claude, and it knows how to build the code for this. So, in turn and then in terms of, like, beta externally, it's it's almost like private beta right now. We're slow rolling it. So but, hopefully, that helps, Brian. Yeah. And then we got another question. This seems to maybe be from, like, a a different customers because we do have a lot of customers on the call today. Is there a plan to move this within Campfire and the data is automatically always synced, Or are you kind of thinking of this to me, this feels like you have controls in here in this process and, like, different access maybe who compared to who has access to the ERP. I'm not sure. Like, how are you thinking about, like, maybe cutting out the tech stack or cutting down the tech stack? Yeah. I think, like, I would like you know, the benefit of having this app, right, is I can put it in front of sales teams. Right? So it'll never be fully like, it's not like I I don't wanna deprecate this app fully. Where I do wanna automate is, like and I think this is very doable because Campfire recently launched the custom MCP connector, but HEX has an MCP. Right? So our goal and we're working with our data team on this because they own that platform. It's like, let's connect Campfire to HEX, use Amber to pull in those sales commission tables that already exist, and then my JE drafts are ready for me to go. Right? And, like, I can adjust them as needed as we finalize things. But and with Amber, I can make you know, we already do this. I do this for, like, my accruals already, but we can make a monthly accrual script that runs where we tell Campfire, hey. Pull these tables, formulate the JE. Right? And then it'll queue up the JE for my approval. Right? I don't have to book anything automatically. So that's, like, the ideal future state for the actual record to report process of this. But we'll continue we'll wanna use the app because I don't wanna make 50 PDFs a month, you know, and do the back and forth. That that's where you know, it's as accountants, I'm sure you all can relate to a lot of our time. You know? We have to be really good at context switching. So if if there if I can remove as many distractions with admin tasks as possible, like, by using apps like this, I'm Yeah. I'm all for it. you are on you and I are totally on the same page with that. Like, cut down as many admin tasks as possible, automate it as as streamlined as as much as we can. I. I internally, you know, because we do have such robust APIs, you're talking about connecting the MCP to HEX, which is maybe not an out of the box one that Campfire is, like, you know, sought to get the MCP on already. I personally always joke that, like, you can connect your you can create an MCP to anything for Campfire because of those APIs that are open. Yeah. Like, realistically, if you had trust in the in in the APIs that you were create API calls that you're creating, you could probably by code something with Claude on that. Of course, there's, like, a lot of check trust but verify when you're when you're doing. Yeah. it yourself. And and talking to IT and making sure they're on board and they're aware. Right? Like, that's you know, any good org. Right? You need to make sure you're having those discussions. So Exactly. I think we also got another one from Brian in here. What was the conversation with the auditors around rolling out AI? And then, how do they test these areas differently versus the old school way of preparing and calculating? Yeah. That's a good question. So to be transparent, like, we're this is we're doing our f y '25 audit. So, like, none of this is a concern right now because all all sales commission was done the old way. Right? So to to be honest, like, we haven't had that discussion with them yet. They'll come up next year. So, Brian, you can add me on LinkedIn. We'll talk about it, like, next summer and such. But, but, yeah, no. It's, I'm sure that'll come. Right? And once again, like, you as an accountant, me as an accountant, I always need to be able to recalculate these things and provide detail. Right? Like, I you know, being at a start up, I have the benefit of being able to use Frontier AI tools with much more freedom than someone in a a big four or or, middle market firm. Right? There's a lot more red tape around that, rightfully so. Right? This is reporting we're talking about. So, those discussions, you know, we're we're definitely bracing for those, but that's where the value of, like, you being able to rebuild these workbooks from scratch with the with the help of AI is is still gonna be extremely relevant. Right? We I, I think AI is an amazing tool. It is gonna, like, automate a lot of manual tasks, but I I don't buy the idea that you're gonna be able to remove the challenge with AI. Right? It'll just enhance the work we do, and, it's for that reason I just stated. Like, we need to be able to pass audits. We need to be able to provide detail, so on and so forth. Yeah. And did you say that you had an example of the prompts that you had got in your iterations with Claude as well? You know, Yeah. just kinda how the sausage is made. We'd love to see that. Yeah. So I, let me see if I can find this. I obviously had to scrub, like, the back and forth, right, to make sure this is, you know, safe to to share and such. But, I took, like, the entire transcript from, from Claude and myself, and I, built this transcript so you can see, like, what I said to Claude and what it said back to me and such. And it's not as visually appealing as I would have liked. Right? But this kind of gives you the gist, like, I mean, I was it was very simple. Like, this whole thing sparked because I had a sales leader ask me, like, hey. How can we let me zoom in a little bit. I know it's small. How can we build Captivate I or can we buy Captivate iQ? And I was like, probably not. Like, I don't think we have any plans to buy a sales commission tool. And so that's what sparked the idea. It's like, you know, how do I build this? Right? And so I gave it a hand off doc. What that that means is, like, I already had a Claude skill and a Campfire skill on how to handle sales commission JEs. Right? Like, whereas feeding it raw data in is building a pediastomy. And so I gave it that. I gave it my sales commission workbook. I gave it, like, our SOPs, like, our our outline of how we do the process. And I said, you know, I wanna burn it build the internal clone of Captured Data IQ for our company. How can we do this? Right? And then, you know, Claude because it's Claude speak where it talks about, like, well, you know, what are the requirements of this? And, you know, I say I wanna give the reps and managers a portal. You know? I'm not sure. And you can be very open with with the AI. Right? I was like, hey. I don't know how to build this. Like, tell me. Right? I saw one question is, I think, Romina asked, how did you start giving you you mentioned you mentioned you have no experience using some of the tools. Like, this is how I started. I was I told the AI, like, hey. I'm, you know, I'm not sure how to do this. Like, our data comes from our BI tool, math lesson spreadsheet spreadsheets. Like, teach me the way. Right? Show me the way. Right? And so, they wrote, like, a big big roadmap in MD. I reviewed and approved it. And then I said, you know, hey. Build the engine and the portal prototype. It used Python to build the commission engine using the rules I gave it and validate. And then, like, that's that's one thing I love about AI is, like, I it's never been faster to run validation or read performance checks. And so it takes its Python code, compares it to what I built for, like, June or May for my commissions, and then ties and flips it completely per rep. Right? So, so, you know, yeah, I this is a this is seven pages. I don't know if everyone wants to read this. I you know, if it's a but I'm happy to, like, double click on any of this. So Well, I think the fact that it's seven pages gives us, like, a pretty good insight that, like, you know, telling Claude make my life perfect is never going to give you the answer. It's. like, no, it's never gonna make your life perfect. It requires your spreadsheet. It requires your hand off doc. It requires, like, a full understanding of the process to actually, like, give you something that is usable. Yeah. And, yes, Brian. Let me let me make sure it's all safe and good to go, and then I can I can hand it to Campfire, and they can, distribute it? But, that's, of course, up to Campfire. This isn't my demo. This is theirs. But, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We well, we will include this. We'll we'll include this in our fault. We'll send out a follow-up email. It'll be a recording. of this call as well as this attachment and anything else that feels relevant. Yeah. Oh my gosh. You said something that I wanted to hit on, and then I got I distracted myself with the the chat. What did you say right before I answered Brian's question? Oh, Claude, make my life perfect. Oh, yes. Okay. The best advice I've gotten with AI as an accountant is, like, you should talk to Claude like you would talk to a staff or a junior. Right? Say, hey. Go build this file. Here's exactly the outcomes I want. These are my requirements. And then the I don't I don't know why this is helps, but I always tell Claude or Campfire. And Campfire can do the same thing in ember. It's it's nuts. Like, the parody is crazy. But, I always tell them, like, hey. Ask me any questions you have. Right? Like, I like, please ask me follow ups. Right? Like, don't make I was told, do not make any assumptions. Right? Because that's you know, as human accountants, right, like, you know, that's the worst thing we could do is make unverified assumptions. And so I treat AI the same way. Please do not make because it will. If you do not tell it to make. to not make assumptions, it will make up math. It'll make up tons of stuff. Right? And so you have to, like, put guardrails around it and talk to it like you would, you know, a colleague or or a junior or staff on your team. And I've found, like, that when I do that, you know, the results are a lot better. So, yeah, that's, so like you said, you can't just say, hey, hey, Clotter, Campfire, build me this app. No. You have to take a measured approach. And once again, if you're an accountant who's documents your processes, has thorough work workbooks, you know, and does your, you know, your tieouts and your your checks, like, it makes your life way easier for rebuilding this stuff. So, props to my boss, Brian, for running, you know, good good strict checks when we do our monthly close because it's ingrained this in me. So Yeah. We'll have to give him a shout out after the. call and make sure he knows how well you've done. Oh, jeez. Yeah. So did I see another tab on your web browser that you wanted to share? Yes. Yes. I for I almost forgot. So this is where, like, we you know? And like I said, this is the part that I wanna automate, you know, in the very near future using APIs and MCP, all of which is, like once again, I am not a data engineer. Like, Campfire and Cloud make this very easy for me. But the goal is to get the j's posting automatically. But current state, what I do is, like, if I go to my commissions, right, let's say, let me go back here to my dashboard, and then, I have two things right here. So I have, like, export my GL data right here. I think this is the one I want. So then so I do my I run my export that has all my reps' attainment data there. I'm gonna come into Ember, which is the LOM built inside Campfire. I'm gonna go ahead and attach my j export for August, and then I'm gonna tell, you know, please use my commissions skill to generate my August sales, JE. So so just like, Claude, I love this. You can build skills for repeatable tasks. Right? Like, no one want you know, no one likes no one likes telling AI how to do, you know, the same tasks over and over again. And so anything you feed into Ember, you can, you know, you can say like, if you have it doing accruals or AR or AP checks. Right? Like, hey. Build this into a skill. It'll take what it's learned in the chat, and then make a repeatable thing. And so now, like, instead of having to describe, hey. This is how I build my commissions file every month. Amber has a skill already saved. It knows what to do exactly when I exit when I prompt it to. I just have to prompt it just like this. So now it's built in the file. You can give it a second. But, cool. So this I love this. Right? This is this is super. sick, but I I it it builds my j for me. Right? So a lot of, like like, if I do this in Claude, it's great, but then I have to go copy and paste everything into a j template and then immediately import it, which is fine. It's whatever. I'm used to that. But, like, I love in the LLM or in the chat being able to just create the j right here. So I can book my j. It has everything in here. It has, like, nice descriptions for me. I told it, like, hey. Like, I told it, hey. When you read this file, all the a's are mapped to sales department. All the BDRs are mapped to be, business development department. Populates the dates for me based off the entry and such, and then boom, I just saved the transaction. It it hits my, my general ledger. So, we're very excited to get this automated, but I do, like, you know, it does not take very long for me for me to export from the app and then throw it in Amber and then create my journal entry from there. So it's great. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely the building blocks. And I can see your, like, future automation on this too. It's like, you know, maybe the do you create an agent that pulls this on a cadence, or do you have, like, a sign off where you're ready and that's, like, a little bit more of a skill where you're like, okay. I have, like, everything's been approved. Go through, make sure everything's approved, and then, like, just import the journal entry because we know that now is a good time. Yep. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. So we're we're very close. Campfire team, like, I, you know, I sound shameless, but always shout out their customer success team because they are always willing to, like, build and get feedback and and take care of us and such. And we've been implemented for, you know, well over we're on our we we renewed this year. So, like, it's not like we're brand new customers. So they always, are proactive about seeking feedback. And anytime we have ideas, like, hey. We wanna build x y z. They're willing to pull in resources when available to help us. So shout out to to those guys. Yeah. We really stack our implementation and customer success team with, like, bunch of CPS, CPAs, former big fours. So, Yes. they sit. right next to engineering to get it right too so that they're getting it right too. 100%. Alright. Yeah. I I think this looks really great. Any other questions from folks? Even if it's something you're just kind of maybe you're working through something and, you wanna see how maybe maybe Jacob would attack it. Happy to kind of, like, pick your brain if there's something that somebody in the audience has a question about. Yeah. Any any anything I can help with, I can. Like I said, I'm no expert. I still have a ton to learn both as an accountant and AI, person. But, yeah, happy to help how I can. Yeah. I'm I really like what you've come up with. I think that for us internally, we pay out commissions as well, and we're still in that kind of workflow of, like, Excels or probably a Google Sheet and then. Slack channel and then some sort of, like, sign off, but yours is so much more, concise. And and what I'm thinking to do personally is to actually get your PDF of the chat that you sent. I always find it nice to have, like, a nice beautiful prompt that somebody else has been successful with and then just iterate on it myself. You know? Maybe I'm gonna upload the PDF, say, hey. Ask me, like, a dozen questions at least to get a good answer, because this is somebody else's work. I wanna make this my own work and might have it I don't I don't use HECS. Maybe I'm using, like, a different tech stack and pulling. Yeah. in the information from different places. Yeah. Yeah. So, Brian, we also got a question. What other areas are you using similar tools at FlexBase, and how has it sped up your close or taken up the manual tasks? Great question. Yeah. Yeah. Great question. So, this is my humble brag for the day, but, like, when I first started here, our our head of finance is running accounting and finance solo, so he's very busy. So that's why he built out the team. So it's me and a staff accountant. And our first close was, like, thirty days. It was not good. It was faster before we joined, like like, our my boss had a great but he, you know, to his credit, he kinda let us run with it, let us make mistakes. Right? Let us, you know, and learn the process. And so our first close was, like, yeah, thirty days, like I said. And then, June was eight days, and then July was four days. So we've we've cut it down, like, by 75, 80%, which you know? And that's all thanks to, like, the AI tools embedded within Campfire, and clawed to an extent. Right? So, like, those are the two main tools we're using. Right? And one thing I love about Campfire is how AI tools and the chats and the skills are all embedded in the ERP. I don't wanna, like, I don't like, you know, using multiple apps when it comes to my accounting. Right? I wanna use the source data as much as possible, which that's all living in Campfire. And so for us, like, Brian, answer your question, like, I would say, like, 75% of our our recs and tieouts for the month end close at least are running through Campfire. Right? Like, the so that includes, like, APA gene, prepaid recs, intangibles, accruals. Like, they just launched a new accrual tool, which is insane. Right? Like, it's doing running estimates for me. Like, we have a we have a ton of accruals. Like, it's my it's my probably top three least favorite things to do every month. And as you know, it, once you enter in enough data and you, like, train Ember and the AI, like, it does a pretty darn good job, like, estimating your accruals, noticing which ones are missing that you may not have booked. And filling in the gaps, it'll read PDFs. Like, the Amber tool can read the PDFs of my bills that are attached and see, like, hey. You booked this in this date. It's actually dated here. Should you approve for this? Right? So, you know, it's a it's a little like having a built in auditor nudging me all the time. Right? So, which is good. You want that. So so, yeah, like I said, accruals, helps with our receivables. It helps with, you know, nearly everything on the p and l and the and the balance sheet. And so, we rely heavy heavily on those tools. And, like I said, the good thing about having it in the ERP is, like, you know, if I use cloud to run my reqs, that's great. It's it's it's it's awesome, but it gets still hallucinate. Right? I have a lot more trust using the tools embedded in Campfire because it's connected right to my general ledger. So I have confidence that it's not gonna, like, make numbers up or or accidentally pull something from a different data source. Right? When you have your cloud instance that's plugged into, like, five, ten apps depending on your org, you always run that risk, right, if you don't prompt it right. So, yeah, I would so, hopefully, I answered your question, Brian. But we're using AI heavily, and a lot of that is thanks to, like, the Campfire platform itself and all those tools being embedded. Yeah. People, people always ask me, how long does it take to close? And my answer is, well, I could post everything on day one, but I hate accruals as well. And the amount of people who send me an invoice on, like, day one, my gosh. day two No. Day 15. Right? You know? It's yeah. It's like no. Yeah. day, 15. no. If. you send me an invoice. on day 15, you are gonna get a stinky email for the next. time. I might have to withhold payment. I. don't know. We're gonna have to move you to net 60 or something if you do that. So but, yeah. No. You're right. Like, you we could, like, get everything done, like, day one or two. Right? But, like, we wanna do a good job and, like, take a measured approach. And so, I think we will eventually get to a two or three day close. But, but, yeah, like, we're we're pretty happy with four and five. So angel lawyer said an invoice three months later. Oh, Yeah. yeah. I gotcha. I just feel. that. I just growled. Yeah. The only the only way I get through those, like, three month delays in invoicing is by, believing that the amount of time that was delayed, I was able to accrue interest on that. And so. Yeah. my cash real. flows Definitely. They're helping out our treasury income. So yes. Exactly. Exactly. Well, Jacob, I have really enjoyed talking to you today. It was a great presentation, very top of mind for a lot of people who are, you know, working through those those workflows. You know, it's just we have revenue coming in well. We figured that one out. It's automated. But then, like, the sales commission, that's a piece that it requires a different workflow because more people are involved in sign off. More people, are, like, really committed to getting the exact numbers right. And there's, like, a lot of more bifurcation and ways for it to go wrong, which even if you have it all buttoned up, how can we make it more concise? How can we make it easier for the whole team? I really appreciate your presentation today. And I think everybody in the audience was, like, really commenting. I love the interaction. So if this is your first time joining, we're this is a weekly webinar that we're going to be, working with different people about how they're building, how they're vibe coding. If you have any requests for areas or things you want to share, please reach out to the events email, and we would love to get you included. And also, like, if you want to reach out to Jacob and ask him what he's working on, he's available by LinkedIn and always available. Yes. Thank you, Jacob. Well, thank you everyone for coming. I hope to see you again very soon, maybe next week. Alright. I see you got your email up there too. Perfect, Oh, yeah. Jacob. Just don't spam me. Just kidding. No. No. Happy to talk to any of you. So thanks, Cap. Yeah. Have a great day, everybody.