National Small Business Week 2019: How chata.ai Is empowering SMBs to get accounting answers using AI

National Small Business Week 2019 (May 5–11, 2019) is here. With over 30 million small businesses accounting for 99.9 percent of U.S. businesses, there’s a lot to celebrate – especially the entrepreneurs and innovators behind these small but powerful businesses. To properly highlight what these individuals do, we interviewed three app teams whose QuickBooks® Online apps have not only made them small business owners themselves, but have allowed them to help other small businesses succeed and prosper.

Kelly Cherniwchan, founder and CEO of chata.ai, is first up in our three-part series on National Small Business Week 2019. He epitomizes what this week stands for. You’ll see what we mean when you hear what his team’s app, chata.ai (check out chata.ai’s App Card here) does for small businesses and about the passion that drives it.

chata.ai empowers SMBs through AI

A Natural Language pioneer, chata.ai is a “conversational business tool” using Artificial Intelligence (AI). It gives users the ability to ask query-based questions and to receive immediate, real-time answers they would have otherwise had to divine from spreadsheets – after they first took time to export the data.

The innovative app seamlessly integrates with QuickBooks in seconds. Together, they provide users with customized dashboards and reports, on-demand visualizations, automated reporting, drill-down capabilities, digital collaboration with other users, and more.

“Many SMB owners lay awake at night trying to mentally work through their business problems, while others spend hours pouring over spreadsheets or trying to learn clunky new software applications in an attempt to get important answers about their business,” says Kelly. “All of this leads to a level of cognitive overload that is simply unsustainable (and stressful). The result? People stop looking at their data. And here’s the thing … we don’t blame them.

“When people stop looking at their data, they start making decisions based on prior experiences or from their gut,” he continues. “Ultimately, this leads to one of two outcomes: they either get lucky, or they’re wrong. At chata.ai, we don’t like those odds.”

Asking questions and using the answers to direct our actions is a human quality, and Kelly says chata.ai “empowers SMBs to interact with their data in this very same way. We believe in a future where humans interact with their business software simply by talking to it. It’s about making data access and analysis easy. And more than that, it’s about empowering SMBs to make their data work for them.”

Love for SMBs embedded in chata.ai produces big dividends

Gathering and analyzing data effectively can mean the difference between failing and thriving, and the chata.ai team is determined to support their customers to do the latter. “We hear incredible stories from (and about) SMBs every single day. Not only do we feel inspired by these stories, it’s also gratifying and humbling to know that we might have contributed in some way to another SMB’s journey to success,” says Kelly.

For one SMB client, success was growing his business, and chata.ai was exactly what he needed. The client and his QuickBooks ProAdvisor were discussing his working capital management strategy. When the ProAdvisor asked if he knew who his top customers were, the customer answered that he did. Digging deeper, the ProAdvisor asked him the metrics he used to define his top customer, and if he was purely looking at the customers from a sales standpoint, could he instead identify them from a “working capital” perspective. The client didn’t know.

“So, the ProAdvisor came up with a novel metric to showcase this information,” says Kelly. “Using chata.ai, she queried ‘Total sales divided by average days to pay by customer,’ which allowed the business owner to see who his best customers were in a new context; one that shed light on the exact problem he was facing. We love this story not only because it’s a great example of providing actionable insights to address a business issue, but also because it so clearly shows how simplifying access to data can ultimately lead to real client empowerment.”

National Small Business Week 2019 continues moving forward

National Small Business Week 2019 is the time where business owners and their innovative business solutions are honored for making their customers’ lives easier and for helping other SMBs succeed.

Continuing in that spirit, Kelly has some words of encouragement for other SMBs. “We all have something in common: our very existence depends on failure and failure is a catalyst for learning, adapting, and improving. Like Drew Houston says, ‘Don’t worry about failure, you only have to be right once.’ And to take that one step further…if you haven’t failed, you’re either lucky or you’re wrong.”

Excellent insight for every SMB, something our next two SMB success stories, QuickBooks Online apps G1VE and ClockShark, have experienced for themselves. Stay tuned to hear from them as we continue to celebrate National Small Business Week 2019.