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David Leary

Automation in Payment Management: A Game Changer for Accountants

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For decades, accountants have had to schedule payments days in advance, juggle multiple bank logins, and painstakingly track every invoice and bill to ensure vendors get paid on time. That outdated process is rapidly changing, thanks to new platforms that leverage real-time payment rails like FedNow and RTP (Real-Time Payments). These innovations promise to streamline payments, reduce risk, and free accounting professionals to focus on strategic advisory services.

During a recent Earmark Expo, Forwardly CEO Nick Chandi joined hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary to showcase how accountants can tap into these instant payment rails. Below are the highlights from the conversation, illustrating how a platform like Forwardly can upgrade your payment processes—without requiring a drastic overhaul of your accounting systems.

FedNow and RTP: The Dawn of Real-Time Payments

The U.S. payment infrastructure is evolving. FedNow is the Federal Reserve’s new service enabling near-instant settlement—often in under a minute—while RTP (offered by The Clearing House) also provides real-time capabilities. According to Nick, about 77% of bank accounts are already covered by one or both of these rails, making real-time payments more accessible than ever.

But what if a payer’s bank doesn’t support instant payments yet? Forwardly’s fallback is same-day ACH—at no charge—ensuring no disruption in payment flows. This approach guarantees the fastest possible route for every transaction without complexity on the user’s end.

A Single Dashboard for All Clients

One of the biggest challenges for accountants is managing payments across multiple clients, each with their own bank accounts and approval chains. Forwardly consolidates all this data into a single dashboard, showing:

  • Real-Time Bank Balances: Aggregated balances across each client’s accounts, updated continuously (via Plaid, when available).
  • Outstanding Bills and Invoices: Pulled from integrated accounting systems such as QuickBooks Online, Xero, FreshBooks, and Zoho.
  • Approvals at a Glance: Quickly see which bills need sign-off and where each payment stands in the workflow.

No more guessing whether there’s enough cash on hand—Forwardly’s system checks and balances before processing bills. The platform sends a warning if a payment is scheduled but funds are insufficient. For accountants, this level of visibility is a huge step toward proactive cash flow management and strategic advisory.

Four-Way Sync and Flexible Integrations

For those who already maintain invoices and bills in QuickBooks Online or Xero, Forwardly automatically pulls those records into its dashboard. Conversely, if you create an invoice directly in Forwardly, it syncs to your ledger. Nick described a “four-way sync” feature that can even pass invoices from a QuickBooks user to a Xero user, bridging two different accounting systems.

What about clients on QuickBooks Desktop or those without a formal accounting system? Forwardly allows you to accept or send payments by connecting directly to a bank account. This flexibility means you can standardize real-time payment processes for all your clients, regardless of their tech stack.

Auto-Payments and Approvals

Recurring invoices can be an accountant’s headache—especially if payment amounts vary. Forwardly addresses this with “auto-payments.” After requesting client authorization via a white-labeled form, the platform automatically collects any invoice that appears. You can also schedule future payments or pay right at the due date, minimizing the float time and optimizing cash flow.

The system enforces proper controls via robust approvals. You can set multi-step thresholds (e.g., payments over $5,000 require two sign-offs). Only when the last designated approver clicks “okay” does the money move. In a nonprofit or multi-partner environment, this ensures checks and balances without bogging you down in manual processes.

Simple, Transparent Pricing

Forwardly’s pricing reflects its focus on instant payments:

  • Instant Payments (FedNow or RTP): 1% of the transaction, capped at $10 per payment.
  • Fallback Same-Day ACH: Free when instant rails are not available.
  • Credit Cards: 2.99% + $0.25 per transaction to get paid on invoices. You can choose to pass through the credit card fee to your customer.

Because same-day ACH is free, you only pay a fee when an instant transaction goes through. This keeps costs low while delivering the speed your clients want—no monthly fees or subscription costs are required. Also, another added benefit is that paying bills with Forwardly is free and it takes only 60 seconds. 

Enhanced Role Permissions for Accounting Firms

Firms often need to assign different levels of responsibility to staff. In Forwardly, an Admin or Advisor role carries “superpowers,” meaning they can bypass approval workflows if necessary. A Payment Manager can schedule or initiate payments but cannot override set thresholds. A Reviewer can view details without being able to approve or send money. Each user can be assigned different permissions for different client files, making it easy to stay compliant and maintain sound internal controls. You also get an unlimited number of users at no additional cost.

Transforming Accountants into Payment Strategists

In the demo, Blake and David underscored how real-time payments free accountants to offer more proactive advice to clients. Instead of guessing when to cut checks or dealing with delayed receipts, you can precisely time cash outflows and inflows. You’ll know within seconds whether a transaction succeeded, and you can immediately confirm the date and time in the ledger.

With manual drudgery reduced, accountants can shift their focus to cash flow forecasting, budgeting, and even advisory on optimal payment timing—turning what used to be a cost center into a high-value service offering. By adopting real-time payments, you enable your clients to pay (and get paid) at the speed of modern business.

Looking Ahead

Currently, Forwardly caters exclusively to B2B transactions. Nick explained that personal (consumer) payments are not yet part of the platform. However, expansions to other ERP systems like NetSuite and Sage Intacct and potential consumer capabilities are on the roadmap.

Ready to Upgrade Your Payment Process?

Payment automation isn’t just about moving money faster; it’s about transforming how accountants serve their clients. From centralized dashboards to auto-payments and real-time visibility, modern tools like Forwardly make handling everything from daily bills to large, time-sensitive transactions easier.

To learn more and earn Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credit, watch the full Earmark Expo session. Once you see how effortless real-time payment management can be, you’ll never go back to five-day lead times and manual checks.

How an Engineer’s Approach Is Transforming AP Automation for CPAs

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An accounts payable solution now exists that seamlessly processes complex, multi-page invoices, interprets various formats, and applies intricate accounting rules without human intervention. For decades, this has been a distant dream for accountants. Traditional software often struggles with irregular documents and requires endless manual corrections. However, an unexpected innovator—a manufacturing engineer—has made this dream a reality.

In a recent Earmark Expo webinar, we explore how treating accounts payable automation as an engineering challenge enables CPAs to achieve truly hands-off processing of complex financial documents with confidence in their accuracy.

From the Manufacturing Floor to Back Office Revolution

How does someone who builds glass-dimming technology for Boeing aircraft revolutionize accounts payable automation? The answer lies in a fundamental frustration many manufacturing companies face: despite sophisticated engineering capabilities, they struggle to track and understand their costs accurately.

“Though it sounds kind of trite,” explains Charley Howe of MakersHub, “when he reduced down what the ultimate limitation was, it was back office and finance related.” Charley’s co-founder, Phong Ngo, had built a successful manufacturing company producing advanced equipment for major OEMs yet couldn’t scale the business as expected. The limiting factor wasn’t engineering capability—it was the inability to truly understand cost structures and bid competitively.

This challenge led to a crucial insight: while manufacturing processes were optimized through engineering principles, back-office processes were stuck with traditional accounting software approaches. The engineering mindset—breaking down complex problems into solvable components and building systematic solutions—had never been adequately applied to accounting automation.

Engineering Solutions for Real-world Complexity

The actual test of any AP automation solution comes when it faces the messy reality of real-world documents. Consider processing a 68-page document from Home Depot containing 63 separate bills and credits, many with faded text or handwritten notes. Traditional OCR tools would find this impossible. For MakersHub, it’s a 60-second task.

“Invoices are like snowflakes—they’re all a little different. It’s hard to do it perfectly,” says Charley. MakersHub’s engineering approach has cracked this challenge by building intelligence into the system. Rather than just looking for numbers on a page, the system understands context—distinguishing between list prices, multipliers, and net prices; recognizing when items don’t align with descriptions; and automatically validating that line items sum to totals.

What previously took hours of manual data entry and verification can now be accomplished in minutes. Users report time savings of up to 95% on complex document processing tasks. When line items don’t sum to totals or required fields are missing, the system flags these issues automatically, preventing incorrect entries in the accounting system.

A System That Learns and Adapts

Perhaps MakersHub’s most powerful aspect is how the system learns and improves over time. Unlike traditional OCR tools, which require users to draw boxes around fields and hope future documents maintain the same layout, this system uses artificial intelligence to understand document context and learn from user corrections.

Take the example of processing invoices from a glass company. When the system initially missed a surcharge field, teaching it the correct location took seconds. “That one-time fix took five seconds. And now, for the perpetuity of using MakersHub, that problem is fixed,” Charley explains. The system doesn’t just memorize field locations—it understands what the field means and can find similar information even when documents change.

Users can use an integration mapping tool to capture rules for how different purchases should be coded. Whether routing office supplies to one account and manufacturing materials to another or handling multiple expense categories from the same vendor, the system learns and applies these rules. For accounting firms handling various clients, this means maintaining different rules for each client while ensuring consistent treatment across all transactions. And if an employee leaves or is reassigned, the knowledge of how to categorize transactions stays in the system, making it easier to train their replacement.

The Future of AP Automation Is Here

Applying engineering principles to accounts payable automation represents more than an incremental improvement—it’s a fundamental shift in how we approach accounting automation. By treating AP automation as an engineering challenge rather than just an accounting problem, MakersHub has achieved what traditional software solutions couldn’t: hands-off processing of complex financial documents with confidence in their accuracy.

For accountants, this breakthrough means finally delivering on the promise of automation to clients while shifting focus to higher-value advisory services. The system’s ability to handle complex documents, learn from experience, and maintain consistent accounting treatment creates a competitive advantage in an increasingly automated profession.

See the Revolution in Action

Want to see this revolutionary approach to AP automation in action? Watch the entire Earmark Expo webinar to learn how engineering principles could transform your practice’s approach to document processing and free your team to focus on what matters most: serving clients.

Unlocking Capital: How CPAs Can Lead the Small Business Lending Revolution

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By Blake Oliver & David Leary

As a CPA, have you ever watched helplessly as a promising small business client struggles to secure the capital they need to grow? You’re not alone. In today’s complex financial landscape, many entrepreneurs are trapped in a maze of loan applications, high interest rates, and opaque decision-making processes. But what if you could guide them through this labyrinth?

Enter Lendflow, a groundbreaking platform revolutionizing the small business lending ecosystem. In a recent Earmark Expo webinar, Jon Fry, founder and CEO of Lendflow, unveiled how this innovative technology is changing the game for borrowers and opening up new horizons for CPAs.

Lendflow’s platform empowers accounting professionals to streamline small business lending. By offering efficient processes, enhanced security, and expanded revenue opportunities, it enables CPAs to provide clients with better access to capital. This isn’t just about facilitating loans; it’s about positioning yourself at the forefront of fintech innovation and adding significant value to your client relationships.

Get ready to discover how you can evolve your practice, better serve your clients, and play a pivotal role in their financial success. The future of small business lending is here, and CPAs are at its center.

Revolutionizing the Lending Process with Technology

At the heart of Lendflow’s innovation is its embedded lending infrastructure—a central hub that connects credit bureaus, lenders, banks, and factors. This interconnected network allows for a seamless flow of information, dramatically simplifying the loan application process.

This technology translates into a revolutionary experience for small businesses. Instead of submitting multiple applications to different lenders, businesses can now apply once through Lendflow. This single application is then matched with multiple lenders, increasing the chances of approval and often resulting in more competitive offers.

Consider a client who needs a line of credit to manage cash flow during seasonal fluctuations. With Lendflow, you can guide them through a single application process that connects them with multiple potential lenders. As Jon noted, “We have several options for instantaneous decisions where the client can see offers immediately.”

This unified, efficient process saves time and reduces frustration. No more juggling multiple applications or comparing disparate offers; Lendflow brings clarity and efficiency to what was once a chaotic process.

Empowering CPAs with Advanced Tools

Lendflow provides CPAs with powerful tools to enhance their advisory roles. Jon demonstrated how the dashboard offers a bird’s-eye view of all your clients’ deals, including their stages and progress. “You can click in to see available offers, review rates and terms, and help clients upload any necessary documents,” he explained. This visibility lets you proactively guide your clients, offering timely advice and ensuring all documentation is in order.

With robust customization and integration capabilities, you can tailor the lending experience to your practice and clients’ needs. You can create a custom lending marketplace, selecting which loan products to offer based on your clients’ requirements.

Integration is seamless. As Jon pointed out, “With one line of code, you can embed it anywhere.” This means you can easily incorporate Lendflow’s functionality into your existing website or client portal, providing clients with a smooth, branded experience.

Communication is key in any financial advisory role, and Lendflow includes integrated communication tools and notifications to ensure you’re always in the loop. Additionally, the platform prioritizes security and compliance. Lendflow undergoes annual SOC 2 compliance audits and regular penetration tests, ensuring your clients’ sensitive financial information is protected to the highest standards.

Expanding Revenue Opportunities

Enhancing client services is a significant benefit of Lendflow, but the platform also opens new revenue streams for CPAs. Jon explained, “You’ll be able to earn a percentage of the success of the program, and you’ll have full insights into what’s being earned.”

In practice, for every loan funded through your Lendflow platform, you’ll receive a portion of the origination fee. For example, if you help a client secure a $100,000 loan with a 2% origination fee, and your agreement with Lendflow allocates 20% of that fee to you, you’d earn $400. Over time and across multiple clients, this can add up significantly.

This model allows CPAs to monetize their role in the lending process without compromising their advisory integrity. As Jon emphasized, the incentive structure aligns with client interests. It’s not about pushing high-interest loans but about finding the best fit for each client’s needs.

Looking ahead, Lendflow has plans for expansion. “We’re seeing this being popular in a number of different industries,” Jon shared. This expansion into industry-specific solutions opens more opportunities for CPAs to specialize and add value.

Imagine offering tailored lending solutions for clients in construction or specialized financing options for tech startups. As Lendflow develops these niche offerings, CPAs can further position themselves as industry-specific financial experts.

Conclusion: Embracing the Future of Small Business Lending

Lendflow is transforming small business lending by streamlining the process, empowering CPAs with advanced tools, and opening new revenue streams. By embracing this platform, you can become an indispensable financial partner, helping clients secure capital quickly and efficiently.

This evolution allows you to offer more comprehensive services, from traditional accounting to sophisticated lending advisory, enhancing client relationships and boosting revenue. As the lending landscape changes, those who adopt innovative solutions like Lendflow will thrive.

Ready to lead the revolution in small business lending? Watch the Earmark Expo webinar to learn how Lendflow can transform your practice and empower your clients. Gain deeper insights into the platform’s capabilities and see firsthand how you can make a significant impact on your clients’ financial success.

How Modern Inventory Systems Help CPAs Unlock New Advisory Roles

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“I don’t deal with inventory clients.” If you’re a CPA, you’ve probably said or heard this before. The complexities of tracking materials, managing production processes, and maintaining accurate costs have long made manufacturing clients daunting to serve. But what if the very challenges that once deterred you could become your next big opportunity?

On a recent Earmark Expo, Kendrick Hair, Chief Evangelist at Fishbowl, showcased how accountants can help their manufacturing clients navigate their digital transformation while maintaining financial control and compliance. 

Traditional manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to omnichannel sales—selling through platforms like Shopify, Amazon, and even TikTok. Amidst this transformation, they face new hurdles in maintaining precise cost accounting and regulatory compliance. Modern inventory management systems like Fishbowl are bridging the gap between complex manufacturing processes and digital commerce, creating unprecedented advisory opportunities for CPAs. 

Understanding Modern Manufacturing Needs: From Complexity to Opportunity

Kendrick explains, “I talk to accountants all the time who say, ‘I don’t deal with inventory clients.’ The reason is they find it too difficult to handle. Inherently, inventory isn’t that hard; it’s all the moving pieces that make it complex.”

These “moving pieces” vary by industry:

  • Food and Beverage Manufacturers: Require lot codes, expiry dates, and recall reporting to meet FDA standards.
  • Healthcare Companies: Need serial number tracking and HIPAA compliance.
  • Government Contractors: Must track specialized labor costs for different task categories, with negotiated rates for tasks like welding and painting.

Understanding these industry-specific requirements for CPAs presents an opportunity to provide strategic guidance. Modern inventory systems can manage these complexities while maintaining precise financial reporting and compliance accounting records.

Enabling the Transition to Digital Commerce

The complexities of traditional manufacturing are now intersecting with new challenges as businesses expand into digital commerce. Kendrick notes, “What we’ve seen—and probably what all of you are seeing—is that folks aren’t just selling one way. Traditional manufacturers who for 20 years have done what they’ve done, now they’ve hung a shingle, and they’re selling on Shopify, Amazon, TikTok Shop—wherever and however they can promote their business.”

This shift creates new inventory management challenges. Consider a Fishbowl client who sells vintage Nike shoes. When a rare pair sells on eBay, it needs to disappear instantly from their Amazon listing to prevent double-selling. Real-time inventory management across multiple platforms requires sophisticated integration—something traditional manufacturing systems can’t handle.

Fishbowl addresses this through native integrations with major e-commerce platforms, enabling real-time inventory syncing across all sales channels. The system handles everything from order receipt to shipping label generation while maintaining the detailed tracking needed for regulatory compliance and cost accounting. Mobile integration for warehouse operations allows efficient picking and packing, ensuring accuracy across all channels.

Understanding these e-commerce capabilities is crucial for CPAs advising manufacturing clients. The transition to digital sales introduces new accounting considerations around revenue recognition, sales tax compliance, and inventory valuation across multiple platforms. Modern inventory systems like Fishbowl provide the control and visibility needed to maintain accurate financial reporting while enabling business growth.

Maintaining Financial Control and Compliance

As manufacturers expand into digital commerce, maintaining precise financial control becomes more critical and complex. This is particularly evident in how modern inventory systems integrate with accounting software like QuickBooks.

Consider a manufacturer of flight control systems for Cessna jets. Their bill of materials contains 37 levels, with each movement requiring tracking to a different asset account for bank reporting requirements. Traditional accounting software wasn’t built for this level of complexity, but modern inventory systems bridge this gap.

“We support more costing methods than QuickBooks does,” Kendrick explains. The system handles standard, average, LIFO, FIFO, and actual costing methods while maintaining detailed audit trails. This capability extends from primary distribution to complex manufacturing scenarios—even NASA’s Johnson Space Center uses Fishbowl to manage supplies heading to the International Space Station every 90 days.

This intersection of manufacturing complexity and financial control presents a strategic advisory opportunity for CPAs. While Fishbowl maintains the “inventory truth” and handles complex tracking requirements, it seamlessly posts appropriate journal entries to QuickBooks. This enables manufacturers to maintain the precise costing and compliance requirements of traditional manufacturing while embracing the speed and flexibility needed for digital commerce.

The Strategic Role of CPAs in Digital Transformation

The transformation of traditional manufacturers into omnichannel sellers represents both a challenge and an opportunity for CPAs. Modern inventory management systems are bridging the gap between complex manufacturing processes and digital commerce, enabling businesses to expand while maintaining the precise cost accounting and compliance capabilities that CPAs demand.

Understanding these systems is crucial for accountants looking to expand their advisory services. From NASA’s space station supply management to vintage shoe sellers managing real-time inventory across multiple platforms, the ability to handle traditional manufacturing complexity and modern e-commerce requirements opens new possibilities for strategic client service.

Watch the Webinar to Learn More

To see these capabilities in action and learn how you can help manufacturing clients navigate their digital transformation while maintaining financial control and compliance, watch the entire Earmark Expo.

The AI Revolution That Frees CPAs for High-Value Advisory Work

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Is your firm still spending 10–15 minutes assembling each tax return manually? What if you could reduce that time to 3 seconds while enhancing your client’s experience? Thanks to AI-powered tax practice solutions, this is now a reality.

AI transforms how CPAs manage document collection, processing, and client interactions. By automating routine tasks like document classification and assembly, these solutions eliminate traditional pain points such as forgotten portal passwords, manual document naming, and time-consuming organizer preparation. This allows firms to focus on higher-value advisory services without sacrificing efficiency.

In a recent Earmark Expo webinar, we showcased how AI reshapes tax practice management and creates opportunities for firms to elevate their service offerings.

The Current State of Tax Practice Management

Surprisingly, over 75% of accounting firms still mail paper organizers to clients. Even firms that utilize advanced technologies in other areas often rely on outdated document processes.

Steven Lyon from SafeSend, an award-winning tax automation solutions provider, shared an eye-opening experience: “I was with a firm in California doing demonstrations, and they said, ‘We fly a bunch of remote and seasonal employees out to the office for a week. We take over a conference room with papers all over the desk, and they form a line and just go down.’ I thought, ‘You’re using so much software at your fingertips, and this is how you’re still handling organizers?'”

Steven continues, “What we’re trying to fix is the disparate solutions for delivering items to clients and gathering items from clients. We want to provide a single solution that gives them the ability to upload, download, and interact all in one location.”

Modern AI-powered solutions like SafeSend One, SafeSend’s flagship tax automation product, integrate with major tax software platforms like Thomson Reuters UltraTax, Wolters Kluwer CCH Axcess, and Intuit. This seamless workflow reduces manual processing time from 10–15 minutes per return to just a few seconds. The efficiency gains free up capacity for higher-value services and allow firms to focus on strategic client advisory work.

AI-Powered Document Management

The traditional tax organizer faces a fundamental problem: less than 30% of clients complete them. The cumbersome process of filling out extensive forms and manually organizing documents contributes to this low completion rate.

SafeSend One is an example of how AI is revolutionizing this experience through intelligent automation that benefits both firms and clients. Rather than sending lengthy organizers, SafeSend One’s Next Gen Gather AI tool analyzes returns from previous years to generate customized document request lists automatically. “A lot of firms are moving away from the traditional organizer and moving towards asking specific questions and requesting specific source documents,” Steven notes. SafeSend One leverages AI to examine prior-year information and create a tailored request list, eliminating hours of manual preparation time.

The transformation is equally significant for clients. Instead of carefully naming and organizing each document, SafeSend One allows clients to simply drag and drop their entire tax document folder into the system. The AI automatically recognizes and categorizes each document, matching W-2s, 1099s, and other forms to the request list. SafeSend One provides real-time progress tracking, showing which documents have been submitted and what’s still missing. This automated categorization achieves a 36% completion tracking rate, helping firms identify missing documents and begin work on returns sooner.

By eliminating manual document management tasks, firms can redirect their professional staff toward providing strategic tax planning and advisory services that deliver greater client value.

Enhancing Client Experiences with AI

The common tax portal password problem exemplifies issues with traditional client interfaces. Steven says, “This is the biggest issue with portals—that one-time password. Clients end up calling the firm saying, ‘Hey, can you reset this?'”

Modern AI-powered solutions like SafeSend One are reimagining these pain points to create more intuitive client experiences. Instead of annual password resets, the platform uses smart authentication methods with a 97% success rate. Clients can review documents on any device through a mobile-friendly interface, and the system automatically places signature blocks. It also handles complex scenarios like joint returns through a single email, unlike traditional solutions that require separate emails for each signer.

SafeSend One introduces intelligent payment tracking and reminders. Automated voucher reminders ensure clients never miss a payment deadline, and when integrated with payment processors, the system can require payment before return access. For entities with K-1s, the system allows electronic distribution to all shareholders or partners with a single click. These automated features eliminate hours of follow-up work, freeing staff to engage in more meaningful client conversations.

SafeSend recently released its Client Portal feature within SafeSend One, a comprehensive taxpayer dashboard that further unifies the client experience by providing a single access point for all tax-related tasks and documents. This represents the future of client interaction—seamless, intuitive, and easy to use—where routine tasks are automated, and firms can focus on delivering high-value advisory services.

The Future of Tax Practice Management

The transformation of tax practice management through AI represents a fundamental shift in how firms serve clients. While the efficiency gains are remarkable—reducing return assembly from 15 minutes to 3 seconds—the true revolution lies in how these solutions free firms to focus on higher-value advisory services.

By automating routine tasks like document collection, return assembly, and payment tracking, SafeSend One creates capacity for strategic client relationships while improving client experience. The results speak for themselves: 97% authentication success rates, 36% document completion tracking, and hours of saved administrative time that can be redirected toward advisory services.

AI is not just a technological advancement; it’s a catalyst for redefining the role of tax professionals. By embracing AI-powered solutions, firms can transform from document processors into strategic advisors, offering clients greater value and positioning themselves for growth in an increasingly competitive market.

Watch the entire Earmark Expo webinar to see these revolutionary capabilities and learn how AI could transform your practice.