Webinar: Data Is Your New Best Friend Webinar

Secondly, on upcoming events, we have some webinars. One of the webinars we have is on benefits for members with offices based in Africa that will be held on November 16th. And then we have another webinar on localized talent that will be held on November 30th. Also a reminder, as part of our members, you are always welcome to join our roundtables. You are entitled to various discounts and to connect with the community.

A few housekeeping notes: All attendees are currently muted, but please feel free to type your question in the chat box. You can access the chat box by clicking on the chat bubble at the bottom of the screen, and then we will do our best to answer your question either during or after the presentation as needed. Subtitles are available for this webinar. Just click on the caption on the Zoom toolbar and show or hide based on your preference. Lastly, a recording of today's webinar along with additional materials will be emailed to you later this week, so be on the lookout for that.

And with that, I am very excited to hand it over to today's speaker. Today's speaker is Torbjorn Nilsen, who is the Director of Business Analysis at DATABASICS. Thank you for sharing your expertise with us today. Over to you, Torbjorn.

Thank you. Let me just see here, I am just trying to figure out how to show my screen for you guys. Give me one second. I'm not sure why I lost that in all the excitement, but thank you guys. Thank you, Helena, Jessica. And good morning, good afternoon, good evening to everybody joining us here. Thanks for joining me on this adventure in data. Let me just see here one more time. I'm going to make a concerted effort to be able to show my screen. I am not sure why I have lost that. I have the chat.

Here we go. All right. Sorry about that. I was so well organized, I've lost my organization. I appreciate your patience with me. All right, you should see my screen now. I'm Torbjorn Nilsen. I'm the Solutions Architect and the Director of Business Analysis at DATABASICS. We are a time and expense software provider based just outside of Washington, DC, in Reston, Virginia.

And I suppose you can call me a time and expense reporting nerd in the very best sense of that word. We've been a Humentum partner for a few years now, and that really was the culmination of many years of intentional focus on the NGO, humanitarian and development space. When I first joined DATABASICS, coming up to 20 years ago next year, my very first implementation was with one of your members. And I have had both the joy and the challenge, I suppose, of working with a large number of your members since then. I may have a funny name, but my kids may disagree sometimes. I'm largely a normal person, and hopefully the only thing that will distract you, and only just a little bit in the next hour or so, is a slight Norwegian accent.

Fun fact: In Norwegian, the word nonprofit translates literally as an "organization of ideals." And so before we get started here today, I want to say that it is really your ideals and your idealism that brings me back invigorated in every engagement. So thank you for what you guys do. And please don't hesitate in reaching out either during this presentation or after if you have any questions or if there's anything that I can help with.

Right, let's go to the next slide. So now that we have made the bold statement that data is your new best friend, our agenda looks like this: We're going to talk about data. We're going to look at why it is important and what can make it a challenge sometimes. We're going to talk about the requirements associated with data for organizations like your own, common requirements. And then we're going to look at automation and how that can be a powerful ally in your management of data. I'm happy to take questions in chat as we go through the presentation, and if it fits at the time and is pertinent to what we were talking about, I'll try to include it as we go through the presentation itself, or we'll make sure we cover it in the Q&A at the end. Of course, if there are bigger questions, specific questions associated with your organization, I'm happy to also follow up after this presentation with you individually.

All right. Why do we track data? And I suppose this is the basics of DATABASICS. We track it because it supports your mission. It's an essential resource, probably one of the most important resources for any nonprofit. But we recognize, and you recognize, I suppose—and that's one of the reasons why you're here today—is that it can be difficult to organize, to collect it, and to manage it.

Having said that, it supports all the aspects of your organization's process from the very inception, from the founding of your organization. The question asked at that time is: What is it that we do? Why do we do that? And that's based on data, you know—poverty, lack of water, whatever your organization's focus. That is based on data.

The next step in the organization process is then the mission. What do we want to achieve? Once we have identified the why, we look at the what. And then we look at the strategy: How do we go about doing that? Now, on a day-to-day basis, it affects everything that you do. It affects your fundraising. It affects your marketing. It affects your operations, including your financial reporting and your audits. And all of this affects it. It helps you manage your mission or your ideals.

At its core, time and expense is really, you know, the number one expense that any organization has in their operations. Labor is the number one expense, and tracking it back to a funding source provides transparency that all sources of funds not just appreciate, but some of them require it—whether it is a big foundation, a government entity, or grassroots.

In addition to the funding sources, you also have to abide by regulations and requirements for tracking spending that is established by governments, whether it is international governing bodies like the UN or individual countries where your organization is based or where your organization is working in the field. All of this has to happen inside of established agreements and laws. And of course, your organization needs to comply with this. So rather than thinking of data as your enemy, I want to—and it's my goal here today—to encourage you to consider it a friend and to make this data better available to you and to empower you to make decisions as you move forward as an organization.

There are huge challenges in tracking data. In our industry, we talk about a sea of data. I mean, it is a literal sea of data. And the reason why it is so complex is because there are so many stakeholders. There are so many rules. There are so many sources of data, so many targets for data to go to. And then, of course, there is an element of cost. So let's look at our proverbial sea of data.

Let's talk about the stakeholders first. The stakeholders are many. The stakeholders include the founders of your organizations. It includes the funding sources for your organization. It obviously includes the leadership of the organization. It includes local and global governments. And then it includes you, whether you are in operations, payroll, accounting, whether you are a program or a project manager, whether you are an end user in the field, whether you work for IT in your organization. All of these are stakeholders. And one stakeholder that we really should not lose track of is the beneficiary, the people who are affected by the work that you do.

And all of these stakeholders benefit from tracking of data, but they all come to the table at slightly different angles, right? What the funders of your organization need to know or are interested in is different from what the end user, the person in the field, and their interaction with data. But it all needs to come together. It needs to be in a hub so that the data that is presented to each of the stakeholders is relevant and is meaningful.

When it comes to the rules, any of the stakeholders can impose rules. And I'll talk a little bit more about that a little bit later. But think of it, you know, really from the very most macro level, whether your organization is a for-profit or a nonprofit organization, down to really the teeny tiny micro elements of data—how do we handle something like alcohol purchases? These two extremes and everything in between will have rules associated with it. And they can be rules that are set by any of the stakeholders, including your beneficiaries.

When we talk about sources, we really want to always, in our conversations about sources, consider what is the master record. Now, in our industry, the software industry, we talk about master records of users. So that's the people that use the application. We talk about demographics, as we call it. And that could include things like your organization structure as well as the contractual relationship that you have with people working for you, whether they are employees or contractors or volunteers. This data would typically be housed in what we call an HR system. And an HR system could, in some instances, be a spreadsheet, or it could indeed be a file cabinet in your head office.

Let me talk about the source for who you are working for. We could refer to this as the CRM system. So that is where you are managing the sources of data, potentially, as well as the people that you are serving. The next source that we are talking about would be an ERP or an accounting system. And in the ERP or an accounting system, what is important is, of course, the financial reporting, the chart of accounts, the way that you report and stay compliant with the rules, whether they are local rules in the field or global rules at headquarters or indeed internationally.

Payroll is, of course, a very important source as well. That is, hopefully, where you are processing most of your reimbursements, whether that is pay or travel reimbursement. And so that is an important source. And as it relates to travel expenses, your credit card company or indeed your travel agent may be a very important source of data. So all of these different systems, all of these different sources, think about data in their way. They support your specific requirements, the way that they are kind of orienting themselves, if you like, in the universe.

And DATABASICS, as a time and expense provider, we think of ourselves as the master record of data as well as a source of data. And the specific data that we think about ourselves as being the master record of is the transactions—it's the timesheet and the expense report. Now we get data from the other systems, and we all play together nicely. And we all need to define our relationships because we will use data across these systems and integrations to facilitate for your requirement, which is what you are focusing on—your mission, your ideals.

Once the data comes out of a time and expense reporting system, it goes back. And typically it would go back to your ERP accounting system for the accounting of those charges. Again, typically labor is going to be your number one cost. And therefore it needs to be accounted for appropriately. And payroll is another target for data, again, for the providing of pay as well as reimbursement of expenses.

The final challenge I have on the slide here is about the cost. And the cost is important. And we already talked about the cost. We talk specifically about the human resources cost aspect because it is your number one expense. The challenge, I would imagine that you have, is how do you want to manage that? What do you want your human resources to focus on? And my guess is that it's going to be the mission. It's going to be what you do as an organization that is the most important for you to focus your costs on, not pieces of papers floating around in your headquarters or in your field offices or indeed in your field end users' housing, temporary housing. You want to focus and you want to manage as effectively as possible the cost associated with your human resources.

There will be other costs, specifically around infrastructure, of course, and the travel, moving resources into the field. So there are all the costs. It's not just labor, but also maintaining and making efficiencies in the management of these resources is really key. And I presume one of the reasons why you have joined us today.

The other thing about costs that I also want to highlight before we move to the next slide is the fact that you have internal and external costs. There are costs that are fixed associated with employees. For example, the salaries are being paid, they are fixed. And then there are costs that don't have that same fixedness associated with contractors that you may hire on a temporary basis, etc. The external costs would be for third parties like your industry partners that Helena shared at the beginning here—best practice providers, essentially, that can support your overall mission in doing the thing that you have deemed to be the drivers for your organization.

So let's dig a little bit deeper into the importance of time and expense data. The one thing that both of these have in common is that they are associated with work, and they rely on the employee reporting it. So if you think of you spending your time, I would imagine that you may all be tracking your time to a funding source of some sort, possibly not a project or a program directly, but an overhead funding source.

Time and expense reporting is really an extension of your accounting system. And as I said already, it is your system of record, specifically of the time and expense transactions, whether that is time that you report on the timesheets or expenses in an expense report, in whatever form that takes. Managing these costs are key, not just for your operational success, but also for very basic requirements that are put on you by government in terms of auditing or by your other stakeholders to support what you are doing and to be transparent.

So the time and expense data that you are collecting can be used to communicate back to the stakeholders, whether that is back to the funding sources to communicate program and financial information in a clear, concise, and efficient way. This is obviously key because what you want to do is you want to maintain those relationships, and you want to secure more funding for your organization in the future.

Time and expense data also helps you communicate with the leadership, specifically your organization's leadership. How are we doing in supporting our mission? It helps in the communication with project and program managers. How are we doing on a tactical level? Are we as efficient as we can be in pursuing our mission? Are we hemorrhaging money somewhere? Is there something, you know, do we have to go in and actively plug a hole? Do we need to step in and redirect or rethink the way that we are doing what we are doing?

The communication with the end users is, of course, a primary concern here. And what we need to think about here is that communication is two-way, right? It is the organization communicating with the end users, but it is also the end users communicating back to you. You know, how much time did this take to achieve our project objective? How much did it cost to travel where you wanted me to travel? These are important questions. And the importance is such that in today's age, you shouldn't need to wait until next month to find out. You should really be able to find that out today.

Communicating with your beneficiaries is also important. How are we doing for you is the question there. And again, it's collected data, and it can be collected and it can be reported back into the organization directly if you have the appropriate tools. And finally, of course, the communication with the operations, the running of payroll, your accounting cycle, whether it is the budgeting or the reporting or the auditing of financial data or operational data, these are important elements of communication.

The efficiencies: If you have an accurate time and expense data record, you can better allocate your resources so that programs are aligned with grants and the intentions of those grants or private donations, while we minimize the expenses that don't support or aren't part of your overall mission.

Staying compliant is important, of course, for the founders, that their vision is maintained. It's important related to the funding sources, that the money or the resources that you have stewardship of is indeed doing what they intend for it to do. It's important in the compliance with the leadership—are we supporting the mission?—is, of course, important also related to governance, laws and regulations, and statutory rules that are there. And they are going to be different from each individual country and the way that these governments interoperate in a global setting like you most probably are. You have more than one government stakeholder. And, of course, you need to be compliant with operations, whether that is financial or organizational audits and things that are happening. And that has to happen in order for you to remain doing what you are doing.

So time and expense data collected in an efficient way will allow you to know almost instantaneously who did what and when. You can identify things like what makes up the total cost, what makes up the labor cost versus travel costs versus all the other operational costs. You can look at what costs are allowable or unallowable. You can define what costs are reasonable. You can manage things in the accounting process like cost allocation and credits. You can account for unallowable costs. You can track and monitor direct cost versus indirect costs. All of these elements of data, all of these different perspectives of how to look at your time and expense data, will be more easily supported and managed in an application that is made for this particular purpose.

So if you have all of this information in one system, it's a huge win for you. It creates a hub where all the pertinent data sits and is available to the people that you want to have access to it across the globe. Because very often your funding source, your project, is the same for both labor and expenses. Having the two of them in one application is a huge win, but having just one of them in one application is also going to benefit you.

So what is this data? We talked a little bit about already the demographic data. We talked about the people that are in your organization, what kind of person they are—not whether they're friendly or unfriendly, but whether they are an employee or a volunteer or a contract person. There can be many different classifications that are important for you. Demographic data also includes things like their position. What are they there to do? They can have more than one position. You know, they can have a 50-50 split. But also your organization structure comes into that. So whether you call it a company or you call it an organization, whether you are organizing your company or organization into departments or call centers or any other way that you are thinking of your organization and the people in that organization.

Activity data is important because that is what is linked back to the funding source most often, which we can use many different labels for, but let's use the one that is commonly recognized. We can talk about that as projects and tasks. But it could be more data, it could be more granular, and it could certainly have different labels. In addition to that project and task data, it could also be different types of time. Specifically, if you are a non-exempt employee, if you have a local statutory requirement that requires the collection of overtime, for example, that needs to be different because it has a different cost than your regular work time.

Type of time is also things like leave, whether it is annual leave or just a regular leave or sick, or it could be statutory, like breastfeeding time is a statutory requirement in a number of countries. All of these types of time can also and should be collected. The collection of this data is typically associated with units. So for time, that would be hours. But those hours obviously have a monetary value as well. And then when it comes to your more ordinary expenses, I suppose, your travel expenses and office supplies expenses, we're talking amounts. And those amounts are going to be in many different currencies. And what all of this data together then supports is, as we talked about already, the accounting and the payroll processes.

So managing this valuable data has really three elements to it. The first is providing this data in the first place. We talked about them as data sources. The second is the collection of the data. So that's the timesheet and the expense report. And the third is the reporting. And whether that is a formal reporting that is linked directly with your accounting system, or it is reporting against that data right now, so even before it reaches the accounting system—how are we looking compared with the budget on any specific task that we are working on?

Meeting the requirements: And I'm pulling out here specifically your funding sources and internal organization requirements. But let's also bear in mind that we spent a fair amount of time talking about government requirements. As it relates to your funding sources, whether they are big foundations or small foundations or government entities, they will have requirements, very specific requirements in the disbursement of funds. And your number one, I suppose, objective in your relationship with these is to manage those relationships and maintain those relationships and keep them strong so that you can maintain the trust to secure further funding.

It's a common wisdom, I suppose, that it's easier to retain funding than it is to seek out new funding because you have that relationship there. That's obviously important in that relationship, but it's also important in terms of your end users. So what we want to do, to the extent that it's possible, is chaperoning your end users to make sure that they are reporting their time and expenses in the appropriate way associated with your funding source.

So let's say that you have a USAID project. And let's go back to the alcohol that we mentioned earlier. The government does not reimburse any contractors for alcohol purchases, which is fine, but it's very important because it is the law. So does that mean that your users shouldn't purchase alcohol? It could be, certainly, if you are a religious organization and it is one of your values, then you don't want the users to even consume alcohol. But it's interesting—I worked very recently with a consulting firm that provides consulting for religious organizations. And they had very interesting requirements around alcohol because it's not just what the individual funding source is about, you know, the customer. Each customer, even though they may both be the same religion, they may both be Christian, one church would say that alcohol is fine, we will pay for alcohol, and other churches are saying, no, that's not an okay expense to be reimbursed for. So the chaperoning of the individual end user as it relates to how to report these types of expenses is very important.

It's also important from a transparency perspective for you to make a distinction between what's an indirect and a direct cost. And again, whether that is government funding or it is because you want to score well in transparency reporting, the fact of the matter is that this is an important element. And what you want to do is you want to make sure that the user knows what he or she is doing and is reporting that correctly.

Internal organization requirements is really—it would go along the same lines, of course. If you are a Muslim organization, I would imagine that alcohol would not be something that you even want to have mentioned. And that's okay. And so you would have an organization policy that you want to support the enforcement of.

In the same way, what is critical is, of course, the mission success, and how you get there takes work from everyone. It doesn't happen by magic. It happens by hard and diligent work, by thoughtful approaches and respectful approaches in the field. But the reporting of the time and the expense really needs to be as simple as possible for the end users. What you want to do is you want to support that sea of data and whatever complexity comes there from whatever stakeholder, and you want to make it as simple as possible for your end users to report correctly what is happening and what needs to be essentially reported back.

So this chaperoning, which we achieve through policy and validation in the application, distributes the sense of stewardship not just as a headquarter concern, but to the people in the field. They feel ownership of the success of your mission.

So what is the power of automation? The power of automation is to support the visibility and the compliance. Processes and the data itself can be very complex. But if you have access to the data, then that's not a problem, right? Because you can just look it up. It could be complex, but once it is in place, once the structure is in place, you can get access to that and it can be an actionable snapshot of data at any given point, for whatever reason, whether it is the funding source wanting to know what's going on specifically with their funds, the operations team wanting to get a sense of where we are and how we're doing against a given budget at a given time.

And what we want to do is we want your users, your organization, to focus on that mission, because that's what you all have in common, right? You as an end user, as a funding source, as the funder, as the organization itself, you're all driven by an ideal, you're all driven by this mission. That's the one thing you have in common. And so what you want to do is you want to reduce the administrative burden, and you want to focus on the mission.

What we want to talk about here is that the automation or the technology, also at this moment in time, is at such a place that it can really benefit you in ways that were really hard to maybe imagine just a few years ago. So this would be by having technology in place, specifically maybe mobile technology, you can really empower the field personnel through a smartphone to capture a lot of this data and to make sure that it is clean and that it is appropriate from the very beginning of the process.

So an example of that would be a receipt image. If you incur a cost, whether that is, let's say your washing machine broke and you now need clean clothes and how can you do that? So you have to go and buy a washing machine. It would probably be a specific funding source that that would be related to. Or you buy a bike, and let's say you buy that bike because you want to use the bike—that could have a different funding source than if you bought the bike to help the beneficiary get to and from work. The bike is still a bike, but the question is, who is going to pay for that bike, essentially, I suppose?

The receipt image technology available today will allow you to capture that data associated with the transaction and for the user to then be chaperoned to making the correct allocation of the cost that has been incurred.

Offline functionality is very important, particularly for your kinds of organizations where you very often are operating in places with limited connectivity, whether that is because of limited electricity or if the government will turn off the internet, whether you operate in Myanmar or Ethiopia or Russia or Iran, for that matter. Limited connectivity, yes, it continues to be a challenge even in our very connected world. And so having offline capabilities and automating the collection of that data and not relying on an internet connection or an electric outlet is important as well as it relates to the automation and the efficiencies that can be supported.

Audit trails: What we're talking about when we talk about audit trails is it can be on a number of different levels. Obviously, the financial audit is key. Your funding source may have specific audit requirements. You may have operational audit requirements, transparency requirements in terms of how you are stewards of funds. What you want to do is manage this process as much as you can. You want to manage the authorization of costs, the enforcement of requirements specific to the funding source or to other stakeholders. So we have talked about already, you want to manage the reporting of those costs, the timesheet and the expense report, and then that has a second step. And that's the reporting of the time that has been reported, right—what we would call maybe a management report. And then on top of that, an audit trail needs to be created that will manage what has happened and who did what when, who approved the expense. Was the expense reported unchanged from the outset to the reimbursement and the accounting, or did it go through changes on its way to be fully approved?

The compliance is important and it really should not—it should be enforced, of course, but it should not be obtrusive to the reporting itself. So what you want to do is you want to associate your cost with the applicable account, the applicable project, the applicable overhead pool, and you want to support the end user in easily and accurately reporting their time and expenses. And the way that that is achieved has to be configurable and flexible. Configurable because not every funding source has the same requirement. Flexible because things happen, things change. If you have no more budget and you have a person out in the field, that person still has to at least be able to come back home. So you have to have flexibility. You have to have an audit trail of what happens for posterity, if nothing else.

Let's recognize on this slide that we are all on a journey. We're all at different places in this journey, and the journey I'm talking about now specifically is the global recording of time and expenses. Some of you may have been on a global system based in the cloud for many years now, and that's good. Some of you may still be on largely paper-based processes with disparate systems, potentially not connected very much beyond your monthly or quarterly or yearly reporting with amendments.

I think we have to also recognize that this journey, then, may not be like one big step. It may be baby steps at first. It may be, you know, can we make this work for us, feeling out what is going on. But what we are wanting to do, what your end goal should be, is that you have one central system where users can access the system anytime, anywhere, on any device, whether or not they have connectivity to the internet at that given time.

And what that gives you is real-time data, real-time data across both time reporting and expense reporting, which will allow you to create and maintain accurate budgets and reporting of actuals against those budgets inside one system. You can track everything that is pertinent to this in one system. You can control access to funds for individual users. You can control access to different types of expenses. You can control your approvers. Who needs to approve a certain expense? Under what circumstances? And you can control that the approval takes place according to your policies, all in one system. And then, of course, the final thing that is important and a big benefit that you should see is the support the organization that you partner with need to provide support for all levels, for all stakeholders, all the way from the administrators in your global headquarters to the administrators in the field office to the end user. They need to feel supported in this initiative.

So the benefit of precise data tracking: What it can help you do is focus your efforts. Focus you on what's important to you. Focus on what is meaningful engagement in the pursuit of your mission, of your ideal, if you like. In that process, what you will do is you will gain support from your stakeholders because you have a shared goal with them. The reason why you are partnering with your stakeholders is that you have a shared mission. And so ultimately, what that means for you as an organization is that your mission is supported.

And that brings us to the end of this presentation. Any questions that you have, I'm happy to take them now. I'm going to move to chat on my side. I didn't see anything popping up as we were going through.

Thank you, Torbjorn. There are some questions that have been sent privately. I don't know if I can read them. I can read them through, and then you can answer if that's okay.

That's fine.

Okay. One of the question is: Do you have recommendations for parsing data to get the most important points?

Yes. The recommendations for parsing data to get the most important pieces of data is, yes, of course. That is a key deliverable in any engagement with a customer. And that the fact of the matter is that that key data, the way that that is defined for an individual organization, is really important to them, but it's not necessarily shared across everybody. You know, when we talked about the stakeholders, it's important to acknowledge that each of the stakeholders will have their own expectations coming to the table for what is important, right? And so what the organization has to do is they have to standardize, and they have to kind of come up with a global response to each of the stakeholders' requirements.

And when I say standardize, I don't mean everything has to happen in US dollars, right? That's not what standardization means. What standardization means is that everyone has to be able to access and provide the data in a way that is meaningful to the individual organization. And that is, by and large, the architecture of the solution—the first thing and the most important thing in any engagement that we make with our customers.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. And before I proceed with the next question, to all participants, if you have any question that you would like to ask, please feel free. You can unmute because we are a small group. You can unmute and ask your question, and I'm sure Torbjorn will be willing to answer.

In the meantime, I can ask the second question: Do you have recommendations for ensuring people complete and/or collect the data that is needed for quality data?

Absolutely. Very important part of the automation is the notifications. When you put together a system that automates the collection of data, part of that, the central part of that, would be a notification engine which will help remind the user, you know, your timesheet, you should do your timesheet every day. Your timesheet is due. Make sure that you have enough hours on there to reflect all the time that you have spent on the task. So that notification engine of any solution is key to successful participation.

I call myself a time and expense reporting nerd. You will not believe it, but I have a hard time doing my own expense reporting, mostly because I get so excited about other people's expense reporting, maybe. So I need notifications. I get notifications when there are transactions from the credit card that I need to put on to a report, for example. Similarly, for approval purposes, I don't have to look at my queue every day to see what is there for me to approve. I can get a notification to remind me, and that could take me directly to the application for approval or, for our users with limited connectivity, it could be an email. And your response to that email could be your approval. That email, of course, would be containing all the information associated with the given timesheet or expense.

You also have push notifications. Sorry, one final thing. In our mobile application, there are push notifications, just like you can think of that for WhatsApp or any other application that you have on your smartphone.

Okay. Thank you. Looking at the participants, I'm not sure if—I see you have unmuted. I'm not sure whether that's by default or you wanted to ask a question. So I don't want to put you on the spot.

Okay, so maybe we can continue to the next question: What is the uptake for this? What is the uptake for this for organizations that are implementing projects in multiple countries?

What is the uptake for this application? The uptake? What it looks like, not the uptake. How many organizations are using it? Organizations that are implementing projects in multiple countries and sometimes multiple projects in multiple countries.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's a great question. Sorry. Yeah, it's, as part of the collateral that we are sharing, we have some case studies and some white papers of organizations that are part of Humentum that has successfully rolled out these solutions globally. I think one of the most impressive one is one of your members rolled out this application for 1,500 users in less than a month. It's possible they were exceptionally well prepared for that, and it's certainly not the norm.

Implementations can take a very short time if it is a small organization that is in one country. We have customers that have started with small implementations. So they started, let's say, with their headquarters, or if they have dual headquarters, with their two headquarter locations. And then once they have them back, they can go from location to location to location. There are many different approaches for successful rollout of these types of solutions. And whether you go big bang and have 1,500 users go live in a month, or you take it one step at a time, whether you do time and expense and leave management, or you do just time because that is the most pressing item, whether you go, you know—and so the scope of the work is really up to you. And what we want to do always is to ensure that we fulfill our customer's objectives. And so it's very important to have those stated and clear at the outset of the engagement so that we can help you meet those objectives. That's the nice thing about the objectives, I suppose, is that it focuses the mind.

Yeah. Thank you very much for that. And then we have two more questions. We have a question on: How do you get people excited about data? You've talked about how important it is, and, you know, not everyone, especially for people who are not data nerds. So how do you get those people excited about data and always to be able to keep track and to keep track of their data and make sure they input the data that is needed in the system?

Yeah. I think one of the most fascinating things about this space specifically, the organizations that are members of Humentum, is the idealism, the stewardship that I see, you know, clearly on display in your membership. It is just—it is night and day from our commercial clients. Let's just say that. How about that? So the fact of the matter is that if you are in—if you're a member of Humentum and you work for one of the member organizations, you are probably driven by this sense of stewardship. And what the data collection in a solution and an automated solution, what it allows you to do is to take better part of that, to feel a higher level of ownership and to feel the focus on your mission rather than the paperwork, right?

So if we simplify as much as we can the collection of data, which is important because without the data you will not get funding, you will not be able to measure success—it is important. I'm not saying, far from it, that data is not important. All I'm saying and all I'm suggesting is that your mission is most important, and that should be—and that's what we see as the driver for the success of rollouts of these types of engagements.

Having said that, all organizations, whether they are in the development space or they are commercial entities, all organizations have difficult users, right? That is a fact of life. So the question is then: How do we deal with those difficult users? We deal with them through the chaperoning, and we deal with them by making it as simple as possible, right? Because if they can—and again, appealing to their sense of stewardship, to their sense of ideal—if they can focus on what's most important, the mission, by making the reporting as simple as possible, then we have taken great steps towards success.

Thank you very much for that. And lastly, we have another question: Do you have recommendations for managing levels of access to data for transparency that still protects privacy?

Yeah. Very good question. Yeah. You know, there are—and again, these are government rules. GDPR, the privacy rules of the European Union, has been a massive challenge for organizations. And in time and expense reporting, like in everything else, what's important is that you have access to pertinent information. The recommendation and what you have to insist on, because it is the law, is that you should be able to segment the data in such a way that only relevant people see the data that is available.

So in a global solution, what you need to do is you need to create a firewall so that data that belongs to one entity is only available to one entity. Now, of course, that data—again, there could be rules around that. And this is important again from an auditability standpoint as well, that you will need to have someone with access for all the data globally, but it should be segmented and it should be—it must be, actually, not just should be, it must be a way for you to control access to pertinent data.

And what is pertinent is different from country to country as well. For certain EU countries, there's very little, if any, personal data at all, down to the point for some of our customers where, you know, we're talking about aliases and, you know, obviously things like gender, for example, is not necessarily a piece of data that you can collect in all countries. And again, flexibility within the system needs to facilitate for that.

Okay. Thank you very much for that. I think those are the questions that we had for this session. And yeah, unless anyone else would like to unmute and ask a question.

Yeah. I think those are the questions that we had for this session. So thank you very much. Thank you, Helena, and thank you, Jessica. And thank you for all of you who participated. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you, and I look forward to hearing from you with specific questions that you may have as it relates to successfully managing your data.

Yeah. Thank you. And I think with that, I would like to end this webinar. Thank you for having us. Thank you for coming. Thank you for staying. And thank you for listening to this. We will share a recording and all the case studies that have been mentioned will also be shared in the follow-up email that you will receive later this week. Thank you very much and have a wonderful rest of your day, from wherever you're joining us from. And see you next time. Thank you. See you then. Bye-bye. Thanks, everyone. Thank you so much.