Paul Wnek Podcast Transcript
Paul Wnek joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Paul Wnek. Paul Wnek is a 14 times Salesforce certified B2B solutions architect and founder and CEO of Coalescence Cloud, a Salesforce consulting partner and ExpandAP, an expense AP and corporate credit card automation application built natively on the Salesforce platform.
Paul is well versed in CRM, ERP, PSA, billing, CPQ, and other business system topics, including enterprise software, expense management, Salesforce integration, and more.
Well, good afternoon, Paul. Welcome to the show!
[00:00:49] Paul Wnek: Thank you so much, Brian.
[00:00:51] Brian Thomas: You’re absolutely welcome. Love this. Like we just talked about just, I get so jazzed. I have goosebumps right now because I get to jump on and meet somebody. That’s amazing. It has an amazing story and willing to share their story with our global audience.
So, thank you, Paul. Jumping into the first question with your impressive 14 X Salesforce certifications and roles as the CEO and founder of Coalescence Cloud and Expand AP. Could you share what inspired you to start your journey in the Salesforce ecosystem and ultimately led to founding these companies?
[00:01:24] Paul Wnek: Sure. So just to give a little bit of background, I guess, around what the two companies do generally to frame the story. Coalescence Cloud is a Salesforce consulting partner. We do implementations on the Salesforce platform, both major digital transformation. So re-platforming or consolidations as well as just managed services and things of that nature.
Expand AP is an accounts payable and expense automation application that’s built on the Salesforce platform. It’s the first of its kind. And how did I get into the space and decide to build these two companies? So I actually got started working for a couple of non for profit, about eight years ago or so, the not for profits were affiliated with George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia.
During my time there, I was on the accounting team and initially started out in accounts payable. Now, When I started there, they were undergoing an ERP implementation on the Salesforce platform. Implementing financial force is what it used to be called. It’s now called Certinia. So really got into the technical side of things through that role.
I transitioned into more of a systems analyst slash accounting hybrid role during my time there. From the accounts payable role during my time on the accounts payable side of things. I saw a bunch of – it was very repetitive processing vendor invoices and expense reports, very much the same thing, looking for the same sort of miscodes or whatnot, and figured there must be a better way to do this sort of thing.
And pretty much from that moment, I started thinking of building something like Expand AP. With regards to Coalescence Cloud. I really just got more into the system side of things during my role and ultimately made that transition, got very involved in the financial force ecosystem, the community, just sort of answering questions and sharing ideas and so forth.
And ultimately just got recognized in that community. There are some live events in Vegas and so forth, and ultimately got in contact with an Australian consulting partner of theirs and started working for them. So did some ERP implementations and other Salesforce implementations during my time.
Ultimately, what happens is COVID hit things dried up in Australia and New Zealand and had a little bit of a struggle finding. Another employment opportunity in the States quickly enough and decided to start Coalescence Cloud with maxed out credit cards at the time and a six-month-old baby. But that’s how I’m here.
[00:04:08] Brian Thomas: I really love the story. Talk about that on every podcast. There’s a story that leads up to it, a unique story. And a lot of times the story is fraught with challenges or a traumatic experience. And you obviously stepped into this a very scary time doing what you did using credit cards, new baby on the way, that sort of thing.
Just love the story. Really do. I appreciate that. And it certainly will resonate with some of our entrepreneurs in our audience. So, Paul switching gears, if you could briefly just touch on Expand AP is highlighted as an application built natively on the Salesforce platform for automating expenses and AP corporate credit card transactions, et cetera.
Can you talk about the gap you saw in that market that led to the creation of Expand AP and how it integrates with Salesforce?
[00:04:53] Paul Wnek: Yeah, absolutely. So, Expand AP, as you mentioned, is the first of its kind, a native built expense and accounts payable automation application on the Salesforce platform. So, during my time working for the two not for profits affiliated with George Mason, As I mentioned, I started out in the accounts payable function, and that just involved reviewing expense reports, vendor invoices, sending them through the approval process and so forth.
The majority of the accounts payable function really is just being details oriented, and basically confirming that the data and expenses categorized to the correct category, or that a vendor’s invoice hasn’t been already submitted or paid out. So, it’s these kind of minute things that are repetitive and can be automated.
At the time, and for a little while now, there have been other applications. Like Concur and Expensify, that do expense processing. However, it’s been an untapped space, underutilized. It hasn’t been taken on by companies enough as a key thing to address. You have your CRMs, and those are staples nowadays for all organizations to manage their Rolodex.
But from an expense management standpoint, there’s a significant gap, like over 40 percent of companies don’t really have a better process than spreadsheets and even paper in some cases. And some of the more mature options in the market like Concur are, they haven’t gotten the sort of love and investment that they should have been getting.
So, considering the fact that Salesforce doesn’t have an expense management tool on platform, I saw that as a big opportunity, especially given my experience in that space.
[00:06:46] Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I do appreciate that. I think a lot of us can appreciate that, the gap that you saw in the market there and really, you’re providing a solution to a problem and what we like about that, there’s a good end of the story here, meaning that you were able to successfully come up with that particular solution and create really what the market needed.
And so, I appreciate that. I really do, Paul.
[00:07:08] Paul Wnek: There is a little bit of a reaffirmation of the need, just even from the Coalescence side of things. Coalescence Cloud, we do a lot of financial force now called SIA implementations. That includes PSA or professional services automation, and ERP is another product of theirs with the professional services automation tool.
It’s basically for consultancies for, time entry, project management, and so forth. So, from the CRM side, you can manage your connections, close an opportunity, close a deal, and then spin up a project on the PSA side, have your consultants log in time. And so forth into that system. So as part of that, obviously expense entry is a big need.
And most of our clients are in a transitionary period, like considering whether they’re just jumping into this and they’re stuck with manually keying everything in. So, I would say about 90 percent of our clients have had that need and it’s reaffirmed Expand AP place in the market.
[00:08:08] Brian Thomas: Thank you again. Appreciate that. And Paul, given your experience in CRM, ERP and various other business systems, where do you see the future of these technologies heading, especially with the rise of AI and machine learning?
[00:08:21] Paul Wnek: With AI and machine learning, I mean, just expecting a lot more noise. So right now, we’re in the early days from the perspective of like mainstream AI and machine learning. It’s been, the concept has been around for several decades already, but now that chat GPT is a big thing, everybody, meaning all the big, well established SAPs and Oracles of the world feel compelled to say that AI is baked into their products when in most cases it’s really not, or it’s some slightly evolved version of process automation, but where process automation improves with machine learning is rather than simply doing the same sort of tasks repetitively and having to build additional code for new use cases, the systems can actually learn from what they’re doing on a repetitive basis and apply that to newer emerging processes and situations. So, I see a lot more data being produced, but also more enhanced ways of working. So the administrative side of things being reduced and it being handed off to more of this machine learning automation, errors being reduced. We see this, the same sort of thing with autonomous cars and so forth. So, I think the future looks like there’s more time for people to do thoughtful work as opposed to the manual stuff that nobody enjoys anyways.
[00:09:49] Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate you highlighting that. And you’re right. You talked about some of these big players that say they’ve got a completely integrated AI platform. It’s not always the case. And I know this because I’m in this industry and I talked to a lot of people, and I see a lot of demos.
So, I appreciate you highlighting that. And again, it’s through no fault of anybody’s own that they’re not there yet. But misleading obviously can be a challenge. Trying to sell that product, or platforms appreciate that. And Paul, last question, if you could briefly share what’s next for Coalescent Cloud and Expand AP, are there new innovations or expansions you’re particularly excited about here?
[00:10:27] Paul Wnek: Yeah. So, Coalescence Cloud, we’re ramping up to really support, expand APs launch. We have a couple of clients that are looking to close contracts. And in the next month or two, so we’re excited about that, but Coalescence will be supporting expand AP from a services perspective.
So, implementing the product for our clients specific needs, but also coalescence is expanding into more of the Salesforce data cloud, as well as the Einstein AI platform. This one’s actually AI-centric. So I know I just said that the big guys are not may or may not have AI baked in, but, and then on the Expand AP side of things- very excited about our launch, which has been a soft launch, but in the next month, we’re doing an official launch and rolling out some very exciting innovations beyond just the automation, the data extraction from these vendor invoices and expenses. We’re also rolling out outbound payments. And vendor risk assessments and things of that nature. So that should be released in the next quarter or two.
[00:11:31] Brian Thomas: That’s great. I love to wrap up a podcast, learning what people are focused on as far as R and D or what the next rollout is. That’s absolutely exciting, especially the folks that are in this space trying to come up with more effective and efficient processes around their AP work.
So I appreciate that. And Paul, it’s been such a pleasure today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:11:54] Paul Wnek: Thanks so much, Brian.
[00:11:55] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Paul Wnek Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
