Building Stronger ERPs: Community, Innovation, and the Future of Accounting Tech

Mark Smith: 0:19
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Houston, Texas in the United States, one of the first states I went to when visiting the US for the first time. He is a lead ERP advisor. His first award is MVP in 2024. He has been a champion of Dynamics 365, Business Central and the NAV user group community, which has over 26,000 members, which I did not know since 2011. He has 26 years of experience working with NAV or Narvision and Business Central 12 years working with users and 14 years working with Microsoft partners. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Rob.

Robb Delprado: 1:29
Well, thank you very much, Mark. Looking forward to chatting with you today.

Mark Smith: 1:33
Same here. I always love to start with food, family and fun. What do they mean to you? What do you do outside of tech around those kind of three core topics food, family and fun?

Robb Delprado: 2:01
to be a sous chef, so I always like to experiment with spices, seasoning and things. I will tell you I'm pretty good with Mexican food, you know. I will also say I have some Mexican heritage. So being from Texas and having some Mexican heritage, that's a good combination. So always good. I don't and, by the way, I also don't mind chasing it down with a little tequila, maybe a margarita or two. So that's the food side. I will also say, here in Texas and I've lived in about 10 different states the one thing I miss outside of Texas is good Italian food. I like Italian food too and I will tell you there's nothing like some New York food, new York City food. I like Italian food too and I will tell you there's nothing like, you know, some New York food, so New York city food. So that said family.

Robb Delprado: 2:43
So I have a daughter who followed in my footsteps. I'm a, I'm a well, people call me a recovering CPA cause I don't practice anymore. But my daughter went out and got her CPA and then, you know, then, a few years after being drug through the trenches with one of the big poor, she decided to do consulting, like I do. The difference is she went out and worked on her own. So I'm proud of her and very happy that she went out and found a niche for herself. And then my daughter, my wife. So my wife just retired and she's telling me that I need to retire, or I should have retired when she retired. What I find is that she thinks her time is my time now. So it's like every time I turn around it's like we're going somewhere. So she's got next year planned out. So, in terms of part of the fun is going to be traveling next year with her.

Robb Delprado: 3:40
I've I've been to all 50 States. I think I've been to, um, probably about a dozen countries. I've even been down to Australia. Have not been to New Zealand, mark, but uh, it's on the list, um. So I I've certainly done a lot of traveling, uh. But the other thing I do for fun right now I play ice hockey. I play two to three times a week, depending on whether or not I'm in town. I enjoy the combativeness of that. I play with a lot of young guys. I play in one league where we have a 72-year-old and the youngest guy in the league is 18. That's quite a diverse range there. So that's my plan.

Mark Smith: 4:21
I've never associated Texas with ice skating or ice hockey.

Robb Delprado: 4:27
That's a big misnomer here and I'll tell you why. We are a very big energy-producing company or state, and I should say country. Well, we're a former country, but a lot of uh expatriates come down from canada to work down here and, of course, that's the recreation, um, so we, we have a lot of canadians down here that uh, uh, come down and play ice hockey. The other thing is I will share this I play in a tournament and I've played in that tournament for uh, probably about 15 years now. They have 64, 64 teams every year coming down from all over the country and from other countries, so it's one of the largest and it's a four-day event during Memorial Weekend, our Memorial Weekend. So, yeah, we get a lot of hockey down here, not as much as we would like, but we get a lot that's so cool.

Mark Smith: 5:17
A couple of things to unpack there. What's the hottest spice you've cooked with?

Robb Delprado: 5:21
So I have tried habanero. I find that a little bit too excessive.

Mark Smith: 5:27
I do use serrano peppers and that's probably about as hot as I'm willing to go.

Robb Delprado: 5:35
Now that I'm a little older, I'm a little more cautious about what I put in my stomach.

Mark Smith: 5:40
Nice, nice. For this last 12 months, I've grown habanero red and habanero yellow peppers myself, and I've also grown Carolina Reapers.

Robb Delprado: 5:53
I've heard about those, I've never. You know, I went to a Mexican restaurant one time and they had this sauce and I had to try it because it was like eat it at your own risk. And I will tell you two beers later I was still cooling my tongue.

Mark Smith: 6:09
Wow, wow. Now I've not eaten either of them. I grow them and I give them away. You know I got people that want them and for me I enjoy the growing experience. I grow them and I give them away. You know I got people that want them and for me I enjoy the growing experience. I've grown them three ways I've grown them in a greenhouse, I've grown them hydroponically and I've grown them out in the garden. And the greenhouse hydroponic ones is where I got the biggest yield. I got a heck of a lot of fruit, yeah.

Robb Delprado: 6:44
You know I'm not. I'm not a big fan of uh gardens. I mean, I just don't have the first of all, I'm busy and I never think about oh, by the way, we have a pool in the backyard and I think, uh, so we've been in this house. Uh, probably about 10 years now. I think I've been in the pool 10 times. I'm not a big swimmer. I spend more time cleaning it. Wow, wow.

Mark Smith: 7:03
So I'm interested. Business Central, narvision, nav. 26,000 plus members, that's a big community.

Robb Delprado: 7:13
It has really well. You know it has grown a lot since I joined the community. It has really well, you know it has grown a lot since I joined the community and part of it is, you know, microsoft has decided that we're sunset and Great Plains. People got to go somewhere, so they're coming to BC. And I'll say this Mark, why not? You know, we have this big user group every year, our user conference every year, and you know, in the past GP and BC would go their own ways in the conference. But you know they were very familiar with each other and you know, hey, if that's what Microsoft is touting and I got to say, having spent 26 years in the product, I think it's not a bad choice if you've got to go somewhere else.

Mark Smith: 7:56

I've always found it's the community that's really carried this product. I feel you don't see Microsoft giving a lot of fanfare to BC. They seem to prioritize F&O and the various variances there. But I see the success of NAV and now BC really coming about because of the community, as in particularly in recent years. It seems to be the community and partners that lead the charge with BC more than you will see Microsoft marketing to that effect.

Robb Delprado: 8:31
Well, it's twofold and I think part of it has to do with and we'll come back to my journey in a moment but I think there's a lot of people like me. We were and again I'm different where I started with a partner and then went to the user side, but there's a lot of people that have been pulled from the user community into the partner channel or community into the partner channel, and you know we still are those. I can think of. You know dozens of people like myself that left the user group to user side to go into the partner side, but we're still empathetic to all of our friends and the people we left behind. So we're trying to make this better. And that brings me to my thought, or how I got into this, or whatever.

Robb Delprado: 9:20
You know, in 1999, I had spent 20 years in a retail industry, retail service type of thing, and I had put in a lot of different accounting systems because, you know, back in the day, you know people had, we were converting. I had one company I went to right out of college. They showed me ledger cards, I mean, at the end of every month. It took us 21 days to close the freaking books because they had to post the entries onto these ledger cards. And then somebody ran a 10 key to get the totals from all of that stuff and when they were out of balance or made a mistake, oh my God, it was forever. And then we had intercompany and you had to match the intercompany. So we put in a mainframe based accounting system and I got my real taste on. Wow, this is what it's like to actually live in the real world, the new world, if you will. But I spent 20 years doing that and it was almost by accident. I went to a company to help them come out of Chapter 11. We got out of Chapter 11, and the whole reason they went into Chapter 11 was they had acquired a company that they shouldn't have bought. Well, after we came out of chapter 11, they bought another company. I'm like whoa, I got to get out of here. This is deja vu all over again. And I replied to an ad in the newspaper that said we need somebody who is interested in implementing accounting software and can present to people. And I'm like, well shit, I've been doing that 20 years. I applied for that job, I got it and I was hooked. I remember the first week on the job. They said, hey, we need you to learn how to do account schedules they're now financial statements and I was like, oh, this is cool, how you can just build your own. And it was like in my mind it was a piece of cake. And 26 years later, I'm still at it. But I left. You know, I say this all the time.

Robb Delprado: 11:19
When I left, after about 12 years there, I went to work for an end user one of my clients. About 12 years there, I went to work for an end user one of my clients and at that point I realized that a lot of people don't use all of the functionality. I had to know it because as a partner, you never know what you're going to be called upon to put in or to help with the system. And we also had a rental vertical. That's how I got over to Australia and things like that. I was going all over the country putting in these rental implementations and in order to do that, you had to do fixed assets and service, two areas that I'm really, really strong in.

Robb Delprado: 12:00
And when I came to the user side, that's how I got involved with the user side. I went into a webinar and people were talking about whether or not to use fixed assets. And I said whoa, whoa, whoa, why aren't we using fixed assets? Why aren't you using fixed assets? I thought everybody used fixed assets and they drew me in. They said well, wait a minute, if you know so much, why don't you present? And Mark, I was reeled in real fast and you know that's how I became a part of the user group and when I went back to the partner side I was like I can't leave this all behind. So I'm very passionate. I think anybody who goes and presents for the user group is a very passionate individual, because you have to know your stuff and you have to be willing to learn.

Mark Smith: 12:50
I learned.

Robb Delprado: 12:51
Every time I go to do a presentation, I learned something new. Either A Microsoft has put something new in that I didn't know about or, holy crap, I never knew that was there. There is so much functionality. It is so deep, so rich.

Mark Smith: 13:05
So if you go back to that example, you gave of 21 days to close out the book of accounts, and I probably want to look just one step above the software at this point of view. How much has accounting timelines as in the time it used to take you to do something early in your career to what it takes you now because of software being in the mix?

Robb Delprado: 13:29
Well, let's go back to that situation. It took us 21 days to close the month. And then, if it was a quarter, you know we spent that whole time doing all that stuff. We had financial reports that we had to put out to our parent company. You know we were behind the scenes. When I say we were closing the books, we had to reconcile all that stuff. Yeah, we reported maybe in 10 days, but we still had all the reconciliations to do behind the scenes.

Robb Delprado: 13:56
And then, if it was like I said, quarter close, added an extra week and then a month in or a year end hell, we were two, three months down the road before we could actually give a number no-transcript. And now here's the other thing, the way Business Central is designed and I tell people this and they don't realize it you can close your books in Business Central the day after you find, let's say, it's the normal month end and it's the end of the year too. You can close your books at that point, get at least a preliminary closing entry and BC lets you continue to close the books multiple times thereafter, like when the auditors come in with their AJs and everything like that. So I'm just amazed at how quickly things happen, actually, mark. What really amazes me is the people who don't pay attention to that and it still takes them 10 days to close the books because they think that they have to have every nickel and dime you know certified in there you know, certified in there.

Mark Smith: 15:07
How much do you see things changing with um, with, with ideas like uh, accounting system to accounting systems talking to each other so you have a supplier and rather than them emailing you a pdf invoice things like that, god forbid still sending paper-based invoicing. Are you seeing a move in the industry to electronic system to electronic system? Is that already mainstream? Or is it coming online where that's just uh, you know what back? You know we would have called edi electronic data interchange in the past, but how much is that happening at the bc level these days?

Robb Delprado: 15:36
I think it's happening. It could happen more than if here's the I don't want to say this People are still doing the way things they did in the past. That's, you have a mindset that, oh, we want to get there but we can't move too fast, or you have money constraints, People don't want to invest in that end of it. And, mark, you say now, but I remember I had a project it was 2003, and we were working with a. They manufactured equipment I'm not going to mention the name, but they manufactured equipment and we were obviously a rental company that we were working with their dealers and one of our requirements was that when a shop, when an item came in for repair, these pieces of equipment that were being rented, they had to be able to download from the dealer's service center what potentials were the issues and we had to be able to transmit claim information back and forth.

Robb Delprado: 16:44
And that wasn't EDI, that was just okay. We need a file, okay that we can reach that file and get into, pull it into. And back then it was Navision. So what you're talking about has been evolving for a long time and I see it happens. Now you can actually import documents into BC and there's ISVs out there that did that. I'm wondering, as Microsoft continues to put more and more functionality into the system, how many of these ISVs are going to run into problems where? Ooh, that's what we do and what's our fallback.

Mark Smith: 17:20
Is there any talking about ISVs? Is there any ISV that you know? If you, from a point of view of the implementation, works you've done, you always add, you know two or three ISV solutions in. Do you have any kind of go-tos that or that you might not be using now but across your career you've definitely, you know, used specific ISVs because, because I come from the CE side of the world, um, we've been very limited in in the ISV add-ons, where in the finance side I've always seen a very good, robust ISV ecosystem, it seems.

Robb Delprado: 17:55
So, uh, let me, let me pause the call and see if I can get some monies for this advertisement. But you know I'm going to say this. You know I've always been impressed with InsightWorks. They have a whole boatload of free. So that's the thing. They have a boatload of free apps that you can download into BC, but then they also have, like, if you need additional functionality and maybe that's a. You know Mark always does a great job on his webinars, like talking about the free stuff, but he has some really great add on features that help boost the productivity out there. So you know that that's one that comes to mind. I have some other smaller things out there, but you know he's a pretty big ISV that a lot of people use. So hats off to you, martin.

Mark Smith: 18:42
Very good, very good. What about hardware integration? Have you had many of those type of scenarios, whether it be kind of like I don't know, barcode scanners in specific environments, or even you know where it's used in manufacturing? Do you have any kind of hardware have you come across that in your career where data has been ingested off manufacturing lines and things like that? Counters maybe.

Robb Delprado: 19:11
You know I've done one implementation with hardware.

Robb Delprado: 19:14
By the way, I also step back and say you know, I've got a lot of specialties in Business Central but manufacturing is one of those areas where I never got involved Because I spent 12 years with a rental vertical.

Robb Delprado: 19:26
We didn't do manufacturing, so I was never exposed to it and by the time you know, I came out and got out of the partner like 12 years with a partner, 10 years with the user that was 22 years into it where I didn't actually spend any time in manufacturing.

Robb Delprado: 19:41
So I tend to stay away from that because my bread and butter I will tell you, if somebody is a service company and there are very I'm going to say this there are very few partners out there that really do well with service, the service management piece in Business Central. And I'm amazed I get phone calls from third-party ISVs that say hey, can you do a presentation for us? Because this partner doesn't know the service side of it. And I've actually won some deals for people where they say you sell it and you can do the service side, we'll do the rest of it and that's fine, because and you can do the service side, we'll do the rest of it and that's fine because you know, as I said, I'm a CPA recovering from that and I don't mind if I don't have to do the debits and credits.

Mark Smith: 20:26
Yeah, we're almost at time. My final question to you is what was your journey?

Robb Delprado: 20:33
to becoming an MVP. So, just like the rest of my career, I was kind of late to the show. You know I mentioned that I'm a CPA. I didn't get my CPA until I was six years out of the school. Most people they want to apply all that right there. Then I was 20 years out in the industry before I said, oh, hey, I can do this implementation stuff.

Robb Delprado: 21:01
Well, 24 years later, whatever years later, I become an MVP, I didn't really know much about the program and I owe it to my friends who have recently become MVPs to say, hey, you should be one. I didn't know much about it but I will tell you this, very impressed about what I've learned and what I know, and you know I will also say that I'm very thankful because I had an opportunity this year to go out to Denmark and speak to the product team out there again about service management, some of the functionality that I'm like near and dear to me, that I put in as extensions because the functionality isn't there yet. I hope that before I retire I get to see many of those ideas come to fruition.

Mark Smith: 21:47
Rob, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Robb Delprado: 21:50
Mark, it has been a pleasure. So thank you very much for asking the great questions hey, thanks for listening.

Mark Smith: 22:08
I'm your host business application mvp mark smith, otherwise known as the nz365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom forward slash. Nz365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you.