Webinar: 7 Latest Trends in Time & Expense Tech

You know, we spent the last couple of years as we were dealing with Covid, dealing with some of the items that Covid kind of forced upon the time and expense space as it related to the hybrid workforce in some of those areas. But what we wanted to do today is to take you through the process and show you some of the other technology that's important out there, and where we are seeing organizations start to move towards, to really take advantage of what they're doing here from a time and expense solution. At the end of this presentation, we will definitely share with you this deck. We'll also share with you the recording if you have any questions.

I'm sure you guys are familiar with the GoToWebinar solution, but you certainly have the ability to ask questions as I go through this. And we will make sure to follow up whether it's myself or someone from our organization, to follow up with any sort of specific questions that you guys may have as it relates to some of the items that we'll talk about here today.

For those of you who aren't familiar with DATABASICS, we are a global provider of timesheets and expense reporting solutions. We've been doing it here for well over two decades. Headquartered in the greater Washington, DC area. And if you were to ask us what sort of organizations we specialize in, we would say we really do support all industries and verticals, but you will definitely see a good number of organizations that track details back to some sort of project or activity out there. So if you look at our customer base, we certainly work with a lot of non-profits, professional services, government contractors, oil and gas. So really kind of cover all industries and verticals. But we definitely do see some organizations, again, just being based in this area that do focus on the more project and cost orientation out there.

So with that, let's kind of talk about the agenda here. We're going to take you through time and expense, and looking at the organizations that are attending here today, I know some of you are looking at more specifically on the timesheet side, others looking at the expense reporting side. And so there certainly are some items that relate specifically to those areas. But really, what you're going to find as we go through the agenda and what we're hearing from organizations is that kind of overriding focus on the complete customer experience. And that's going to be the big thing we're going to focus on today and looking at how technology is addressing that complete customer experience is really looking at the entire workforce. So everything from the end users who may be entering this data to the folks that may be doing approvals and processing it to other individuals out there that may be looking to get to data to do their own sort of analytics and other reviews out there.

And oftentimes what we're seeing is certainly technology is important as it relates to the software and the solution that you have in place. But there are also supporting technologies around that, email and some of these other things that also will certainly make life easy out there on the individual user.

So with that, let's get to the really the first trend we'll talk about here today. And that's mobile technology. Now, mobile apps have been around for at this point a good long while as it relates to the time and expense space. But what we are seeing with mobile apps and really where the technology is taking these is first and foremost the focus on the ability for the user to do everything on their mobile app. So what we talk about here is no longer the need to have a lite version, but rather the ability for someone to, if they so chose to, not have to ever go sit in front of their PC or their workstation, and to be able to enter everything they need from a time and expense side, push it off into the approval. Obviously, have users go out there and approve those, that technology. And again, any sort of communication that takes place, the user can do it while on their mobile device.

And again, it really depends upon the type of organization and how these apps are used. Now, there are some other technologies that we'll talk about that have certainly stemmed from mobile apps. So as we get further in this presentation, which also are changing the way people leverage their time and expense solution, the other area out there is, as we look at mobile, is we still do see some organizations that operate in areas that may not have a very strong internet, or may not have strong cell coverage out there. And so offline technology is one of those areas that we continue to see organizations asking for. And again, it depends upon the type of industry you're working in. But as we look at organizations like International Development, Oil and Gas and some of these field services customers out there, we are seeing organizations going back to the ability for someone to enter data offline. And then when they have connectivity, go ahead and upload it back into the solution. So the first thing we're going to certainly talk about here is again, it's just the fact that we have mobile devices that continue to do everything that the user is able to do on their PC.

The second trend, and this is going to be more expense focused, relates to OCR or optical character recognition. What optical character recognition is, is the ability for a software solution to read data off a document, and basically bring that data into the application. OCR is very popular these days as it relates to expense reporting as we look at traditional travel expense reporting. So if I happen to have a Starbucks receipt, I have the ability for me to go and take a picture of it. And then when I go to either upload it into the app for the solution to do my expense report, or if I'm sitting in front of my PC and I upload it, the solution will actually read the data and bring all that information right into the expense report.

We also do support organizations that are trying to do invoicing and so on the invoice side, you have the ability for the application to go ahead and read data off the invoice. Now, OCR has been around for a while. And the technology certainly varies by vendor. And I think that's one of the things that you start talking about. Some of the newer trends around OCR. And that's really what I wanted to focus on, is that, you know, if you look at when OCR first came out, what you were seeing as organizations were doing things like batch uploads. So if you as a user uploaded all of your invoices or all of your receipts, all your pictures into the application, the application may take 15, 20 minutes to go out and basically do a batch upload of this information.

Today, OCR is getting to the point that I'm going to say it's almost real time. So users should be able to basically take a picture and have that data read and pulled over into the expense report. But what the other pieces here as it relates to OCR, which are also becoming some of the new trends, is taking this OCR data and allowing it to do things like match up against a corporate card transaction. So if I, going back to my Starbucks example, if I had actually purchased Starbucks with my corporate card and I need to obviously bring all that data and get it together within my expense report, the application will allow someone to go out there, take a picture, have the solution bring that data in, match it up against that corporate card transaction, and then bring all that data together. So the first thing is certainly making sure it can match up with corporate card.

The other big piece here, and again, this relates to the complete customer experience, is on the compliance side. OCR is traditionally and almost has always been leveraged as something there to make the end user's life easier. So again, on the Starbucks side, I can take that picture and upload it in the solution. Where we see the new technology coming out is leveraged on the back end of the process. So when we look at those individuals that are trying to do audit and compliance out there, whether that audit is taking place prior to someone being reimbursed or post to be reimbursed, the solutions these days should have the ability for you to go ahead and to basically go in and look at those expenses and basically have them almost auto approve themselves, at least when there's instances where we have some of those receipts out there. So the big trend that we're looking at from the technology is how OCR is really moving beyond giving the end user an advantage, but now also giving those processing data an advantage as well.

The next area we're going to talk about for trends is support. Now support as we talk about trends and technology, is an area which is kind of funny that technology is certainly helped support. But we also do see that technology has hurt support in a number of areas. On the helpful side, as you guys are very familiar with, when you deal with vendors out there, is that you now have better visibility into support tickets. You have the ability to go out there and to, you know, find frequently asked questions. There are wikis out there. So for organizations that are looking to get a quick answer, certainly technology has leveraged that.

Where we think technology has kind of hurt on the support side, it's for those vendors that are deciding that they're trying to do all their support via chat or some of these other technology windows out there where you don't really get the full interaction with the vendor. So when we look at the trend as it relates to support, it's not so much technology that's starting to change out there is that we are seeing organizations and vendors going back to some of these processes, where they are putting people in place for those support phone calls. And again, this goes back to the complete customer experience out there, is that the focus from the vendor side should be beyond just basically what the user is doing. But now making sure that you have the ability to talk to people on the vendor front and experienced individuals when you have questions to be answered.

And again, so it's kind of one of those interesting areas. I said the word technology, we certainly see organizations trying to make technology automate their entire support area, but it just doesn't work that way. And so it's one of those areas that we are seeing organizations go back to bringing more of that human interaction as it relates to addressing concerns and just general questions from a customer perspective.

So the next area we talked about as we're talking about new trends is integration. Now again, integration as we talk about time and expense is something that's been around really since the first web based time and expense solutions went out there. That was really where the advantage that these organizations and these solutions provided to companies was the ability for that data to flow between whether we're talking about time or expense between those individual solutions back into the accounting systems that organizations deploy.

When we talk about the trends these days, we're really starting to talk about going beyond your traditional payroll and accounting type of integrations out there. And what we're looking at is organizations that are starting to touch different solutions and bringing in other pieces of data to give them a better picture of the complete process. Now, the slide I have up here is kind of a traditional technology stack that, you know, when we would look at a DATABASICS solution being tied into someone on the time and expense front, there certainly is going to be something there on the accounting side. So something like a Dynamics 365 or a Sage Intacct. There's typically going to be some sort of payroll integration, whether you talk about ADP or someone else out there. And then on the expense reporting front, most organizations are using corporate cards out there, regardless of whoever the bank may be out there. There's the ability to get that.

But when we talk about integration and new trends, what we are seeing is that organizations are looking for their vendors to provide APIs so that they can talk to some of those, what I'll call nontraditional tools out there. Power BI is something we find very often when we go out and talk to organizations. And so what we see is that they ask us, hey, you know, we know you guys have a reporting tool, but our team would like it if we could get a poll of your data so that we can use Power BI to do some of the things that either we've been doing or we're looking to do out there in the future. So when we look at trends, what I would say is the ability to kind of go beyond your traditional integrations and start looking at some of those other tools in place.

The other thing we see is maybe organizations don't have a tool like a Power BI, but maybe they've been working off some sort of homegrown database for years out there. And so they want to be able to get that data either into a solution like ours or get the data out of a solution like ours into that environment out there. So certainly the API is something there that it's going to be very common as you go out and talk to vendors here in the next few years.

And then the last piece here is single sign on. And single sign on is really the ability for an organization to not have to have different passwords for all the different solutions they have in place. Single sign on from the IT perspective just allows a user to authenticate through an individual organization's portal. So that again, a user can hopefully have one password to get into the organization's portal and then be able to quickly access whatever other tools are in place. And again, the idea here is twofold. One is that we provide something that the users don't have to remember additional passwords. The other piece is on the IT front. It does allow the organization to again make sure that they have proper security and controls in place, and that they are able to control all the different systems that the users need to authenticate against. So in the event you have turnover with employees, you're able to again control where that access takes place.

So the next trend we're going to talk about here is leave management. We talked about leave management. And it's probably one of the most common areas that we see that organizations are still manually doing, and the reason that most organizations manually manage their PTO is because they believe that there are so many individual requirements as it relates that they have trouble being able to go out there and actually see what's taking place. And so we talk about leave management. And this is definitely something that's specific to the time area, is that we see that organizations are starting to automate leave. And the reason they're automating leave is that they see that there is the ability for the solutions out there to actually understand and to put in place all the different processes they have.

And these processes often vary by the amount of time someone's been at the organization. The amount of, you know, maybe they've come in from a merger acquisition, or maybe we have someone that was hired and we made basically a special compromise for that person based upon that. So there certainly is the ability to do that with the automated tool. The other piece about this is that we can integrate the leave into the time solution. So if a user goes out there and requests time off, let's say mid-July and they do it now, first and foremost they can see how much time they will have accrued by then. The other thing they can do is that when it comes to mid-July and they're going to go enter that time, they can certainly go out there and see that information and pull that and have it automatically integrate into the time piece.

And then the other area to look at this is the ability for us to have team views. So from a user perspective, if I'm managing a group and I want to see how many people are going to be out of the office for that particular time in July, I can very quickly get in there and see that information as it relates to that group of users. And really the last piece here is the flexibility around that. I mentioned earlier that this is by far the most manual process that we see when we go into organizations. And the reason for that manual process is that, again, they just don't believe the flexibility is out there, and there definitely is the flexibility out there.

So on the sixth trend, we're going to talk about here today is geolocation. Now geolocation, this technology trend really comes off of the mobile solution that we were talking about back in the first trend. And what organizations are looking to do is the ability to go out there and to leverage the GPS functionality that sits within these mobile devices to enhance what's taking place on the time and expense entry. The first area is on the clock in and clock out functionality. If you look on that screen there, the screenshot on the right side of those two individual boxes shows the ability for someone actually showing the output of the ability for a user to go in there and clock in and clock out on his or her mobile device.

Now, what that geolocation can do is, I should say what the geolocation allows an organization to do is to put in place a geofence to make sure that we are restricting where someone clocks in and clocks out. We're also going to be able to alert that person if they go outside of that geofence. So if for some reason someone forgets to clock out at the end of the day and they leave, the application will notify the user to let he or she know that you know they may have not clocked out and that we can go ahead and capture that.

The other important part about this is that it allows organizations to deploy a clock in and clock out functionality at a very low cost. And again, whether it's a bring your own device sort of process with an organization or you are actually providing devices to users, it is much cheaper to leverage the mobile technology to build a clock in and clock out than it is to put those old clunky clocks in the wall. As organizations have done for many, many, many years. And that also includes support side.

So the first area as we look at that technology is certainly supporting what's taking place in the clock in and clock out. The other area on the expense front is looking at mileage tracking. So for those organizations that do want to use mileage tracking, most vendors like us are going to use something like Google Maps, which we certainly do to pick up from point A to point B to point C, but if the organization doesn't, or if the user doesn't want to have to enter that data and they want to basically, you know, start, stop, they certainly have the ability to go ahead and do that there with the geofencing output. So geolocation, which again, is kind of a subset of the mobile area, is certainly a technology that is really starting to catch on, and also an area that is certainly going to disrupt in the timesheet side, especially as it relates to what's taking place with time clocks out there.

Now, I will say there are still organizations out there that use traditional time clocks on the wall that leverage different things. Whether we looked at biometrics in some of those other areas on the security that we still think they may be looking to leverage some of those traditional clocks. But there are a lot of organizations out there that are able to take advantage of what's taking place there on the clock in and clock out using the geofencing there within the mobile devices.

So the seventh trend we're going to talk about here is reporting and analytics. And again, reporting is something that has been around forever. And so as you guys look at this you may say, hey, you know we've always been able to report the trend. And this really comes from what we've seen in the market, is that we see that a lot of organizations don't leverage reporting the way they had initially planned on it. And again, DATABASICS, we could even speak to that from our personal experiences that when we go out and talk to organizations, they're always saying, hey, you know, part of this, we want to make sure we can get to this sort of data or that sort of data. And then for one reason or another, they never get around to really deploying the reporting tool in the way that they had hoped.

And so there's a couple of things that are happening from a technology side to make that process better. The first thing is making reporting tools easier. And certainly you will see out there as you look at what's taking place on the reporting front, I know I can speak to what we've done is we've worked on the reporting tool to make sure that it's able to be managed based upon the individuals that are typically going to be touching these solutions. So someone on the accounting and finance side, maybe payroll and HR out there, but to give them tools that allow them to quickly and easily get to data.

The other piece around this is also making sure that they can get to better data out there. Budgeting is one of the items out here that in the last few years, we get that question all the time, is that organizations, as they have automated these time and expense processes, now want to be able to go ahead and run budgets through it. So if we think of it on the expense reporting side, if you've got a budget set for, let's just say, a trade show as we start to get back to travel within our application, you can go out there and put a budget in place. You can do an authorization against that budget to see where those estimated cost or committed costs might look like, or you can just simply look at it on the back end of the process to see what those costs came out to be. So there certainly is the ability to manage budget there through the solution.

And then the other piece there is going back to the API front. I mentioned that as we were talking about the integrations out there is the ability for the solution to go ahead and to give you the ability to push data from a tool like ours into Power BI.

And then really the last trend we're going to talk about here, and just because of course we were talking about time and expense, is organizations starting to combine solutions out there. As it relates to what we see with a lot of our customers, is that they come to us looking for a solution that will allow them to do both time and expense together. Now, the reason they do that is for a number of reasons. One, it gives a single point of entry for the user as it relates to how they get to data. It gives you a single integration point. So if you're pulling over data like projects and cost center details, you can go ahead and do that. You can combine the data as it relates to reporting and looking at that. So as we talked again about, you know, data around a particular event, we can see the labor cost as well as travel cost and other expenses out there. And then ultimately it's going to give you a cost savings out there.

Now why is that, kind of why we put this in the technology trend. And the reason I put this as a technology trend is that traditionally, organizations in a best of breed approach have looked at single solutions to provide that particular solution. And the reason was because maybe you had an application that did time well but didn't do expense well or vice versa out there. With the technology getting better out there, we believe you should be able to go to certain vendors out there and be able to get a good solution or a great solution that does both time and expense in one solution. And if you can do that, obviously there are cost savings out there as you're not having to pay for two different vendors. And of course looking at a single point of support out there.

So with that taking just about 20 minutes or so, so hopefully not too long today. But I did want to wrap up and say thank you for giving us some time here today. The big focus as we look at trends is really the complete customer experience out there. And when we look at that, it's looking at organizations trying to address everything from the end user to the folks making decisions, to those folks processing these time and expense reports. It's no longer an environment out there where organizations are just simply focusing on what the end users are doing.

And as we talk about technology out there, there's still continues to be areas of improvement. I tried today to talk to you about some of those kind of those newer technologies, some of those fringe things that organizations aren't really looking at leverage, like automated leave process or taking advantage of an API out there. So there continues to be trends and technologies out here that certainly will provide you advantages and cost savings.

And if you did have any questions, my contact details are there. As well as you can reach out to DATABASICS directly and talk to other folks within our organization. But again, if you have any questions, please feel free to enter those in the questions. I want to thank you all for the time here today. And again, we'd be happy to answer any specific questions for you. So thank you and have a great day.