Webinar: Time & Expense Management for the Distributed Workforce

It's a topic we put together, really, in response to what we are seeing from our customer base out there, as well as organizations that have been reaching out to us here over the last two and a half, three months as it relates to adjusting to some of the areas they're looking to adapt to as it relates to the overall environment out there.

As far as quick housekeeping items here for this webinar, I'm sure many are familiar with the GoToMeeting application. You do have the ability to ask questions throughout this presentation. There's a question and answer component of that toolbar. Please feel free to enter in a question as I go through this presentation. And at the end of the conversation, I'll be happy to answer as many questions as possible. If I don't get to your question, we will certainly get back to you, either myself or someone else within the organization, sometime this afternoon. And we'll answer that directly out there. Other than that, looking to take probably 20, 25 minutes here this morning of your time and to really go through and talk about some of the challenges we're seeing out there and how organizations are looking to address that by combining their overall time and expense process.

Again, my name is Chris Harley. I'm with DATABASICS. For those who aren't familiar with DATABASICS, we've been providing time and expense solutions here for just under 25 years. We're headquartered in the greater Washington, DC area. For the last 25 years, we've really been specializing in organizations that are looking to combine time and expense and then also to track that data back to some sort of project activity, job number, client out there. So as you look at our customer base today, which is global, and ranges with organizations from as few as 15 to 20 employees to organizations that have well over 30,000 employees, you're going to see everything from professional services, not for profits, government contractors, staffing, architectural engineering.

But I won't spend too much time talking about us today, but rather the challenges that we're seeing out there as it relates to those. The other same part here as we talk about this here today is, you know, the topic that we will discuss, none of us are immune to. So even DATABASICS, some of the items we'll talk about here have been challenges that we've been looking to tackle here over the last couple of months out there. And as a member of the executive team, it's very interesting here that as we go through and talk about the questions we're getting from our customers and organizations reaching out for information are, again, the same sort of challenges we're seeing here within our organization as how we address these and make sure that we've got a process in place to support the key challenges out there.

So really, you know, how do we get to where we are here today? And I don't need to tell any of you what the last few months have looked like. But it's interesting to look at how quickly we got to the stage that we are. On March 13th, if you look at some of the data as far as what the remote workforce looked like, or work from home employees, within the US, we were at about 13% of the US workforce was working remotely. By Monday the 16th, so just over that following weekend, that workforce, of that remote workforce had almost doubled in size and had gone up to 28%. The US workforce had gone remote. And by that Friday, March 20th, so just a week after really that the real kind of ramp up of COVID, and looking at kind of how, you know, state and local federal governments were addressing it, up to 71% of the US workforce had gone remote.

So we very quickly had an impact of COVID out there. And if you look at some of that data, even if you look at some of the travel components out there, you know, looking at TSA stats, a typical day, TSA sees anywhere from about 2.4 to 2.8 million travelers moving throughout the US. At one point early in April, the low point of travel here within the US, that number had reached as few as 87,000 travelers. So roughly 3% of what the TSA was used to seeing out there. So, you know, we saw a very quick impact out there. And really that key impact was moving people out of the field, out of the office and into the home. And so that's really where we want to start talking about is looking at this new normal, and what the key challenges are as it relates to that. And then ultimately, what does that mean as we move forward and how combining time and expense can work?

Well, the first piece, of course, and again, this is something that even as I sit here in my house today is something we're looking to address, is, you know, how do we balance the new home work life now? There's multiple challenges, and we could probably spend an hour and we can all sit and tell stories about some of the challenges that we've, you know, dealt with on our own. Before I even started this, I had to announce to my family, please, no fighting for just 25 minutes so I can get through this conversation out there. But we start looking at really some of the just the core basic components out there, you know, do we have the ability to have an employee work remotely? Do they have the tools in place to handle that? What are the expectations as we look at these employees? How detailed are we going to or not going to track these employees out there? Do we expect them to be sitting in front of a PC from 9 to 5 or, you know, do we still recognize that they take a lunch and not expect responses out there?

So, the first thing we look at is just what are the expectations of the employee? And do they have the tools in place to make sure that they can actually handle that? And then the other question out there is what happens? And will we ever go back to the office? It's an interesting conversation I've had with a lot of my friends out there as they talk about and one of the first questions, are you going back to the office or when do we go back to the office? And what's that going to look like when we go back to the office?

The next component out there is obviously, and this relates to most of you sitting here on this call today is, you know, from an HR, an accounting perspective, did you have or do you have the tools in place to be able to manage what's taking place now? Again, there's multiple components of that. But in the initial days and hours, as we saw our customer base moved to more home based employees, we very quickly saw questions about how do we handle PTO, how do we handle any sort of adjustments to what's taking place as it relates to the, you know, if we have people caring for family members that have COVID or maybe people that in fact have COVID themselves and need to quarantine. So we just look at the physical component of do we have the processes in place? And then also how do we notify and do we have an ability to notify for changes that are taking place?

Interesting enough, we saw companies making very quick decisions, especially around the HR side, as it related to PTO. And then we saw them making new decisions just a couple days later. Even as we sit here today, again, I'm sure all of you will say, you know, it feels like it's kind of plateaued or leveled out out there. But we think back eight weeks ago how quickly decisions were being made. And the critical component as it relates to the tools like ours is how are we notifying and getting information out there to those users so they recognize what they're supposed to be doing so that they, in fact, are in compliance with what the organization is looking for.

And then really, the other interesting area out there is that we've seen this new normal has really created almost an identity crisis for many organizations. If we think about how many of us relate to our organization and we talk about, you know, why are we like working at X location out there, you hear a lot of those things about, well, we like the fact that they have a very friendly work environment out there. We've got beer pong Fridays, we've got happy hours, we got baseball games, we do community service. And so oftentimes how an employee relates back to the organization not only talks about what they're doing as it relates to their individual job, but how that organization operates as a whole and some of the extracurricular items that they're doing there within the organization.

Obviously, the last 8 to 12 weeks has really put a lot of stress on organizations. The other piece about that is that we're also seeing that it's exposing some organizations that have maybe not the strongest technology in place. And it's interesting that that can become part of your corporate identity. We have a staffing organization we were working with here. And, interesting enough, in the beginning part of February, they didn't have anything in place as it relates to the way they were doing payroll. They had basically Excel spreadsheets and manual processes around that. But, you know, they would basically when it came around to payroll, which in their case was every two weeks, it was basically a payroll week. And so it became all hands on deck out there. And when COVID had happened, they had yet to implement the tools in place to be able to do this remotely. They were faced with challenges of having to make people go into the office so they could actually collect those time cards, get that information keyed into the accounting system, in order to support the payroll process.

And then obviously now as we look at this new normal, we start looking at new policies and what's taking place as it relates to legislation and then corporate compliance. Obviously with the CARES Act came out. We have also started to look at, you know, what takes place as employees are going to come back to work, but then want to go on vacation. You know, one of the most popular questions we've had from our customers as they reach out to us about PTO is, you know, what are we seeing other companies do as it relates to, you know, when employees go back to work? For the most part, most of us have been, you know, locked at home since middle of March. And as restrictions are being eased and certain states are starting to open up, things like the beaches as we now approach summer, you know, are we suddenly going to have our entire workforce go on vacation because they have all these hours that are accrued and they have to use them by a certain date range out there? And so, you know, we're starting to see questions around, use it and lose it policies. Do we ease those? Do we force employees to take time off, which is something we're starting to see? We've seen a number of our larger customers, again, even in these COVID times, asking employees to go in and please take 4 or 5 days, so that they can start getting some of those hours off the books and also not have to worry with this massive use of PTO as again, as regulations and states ease up their individual controls.

And then ultimately, what can you do to address what the long term strategies are going to take place? As we look at time and expense, I've been talking about some of the components around leave and PTO. But what we're also seeing here are strategies around work from home. What type of expenses are we going to allow employees to expense? Are we going to allow them to ask for reimbursements of Wi-Fi? Are we buying them chairs? Are we buying everyone new PCs? And so it's interesting, as we've reduced some of the travel expenses out there, we're now looking at companies asking or employees asking companies to pay for some of those other items out there, which they traditionally do. And of course, do you have in place a system that will allow you to support that? You know, do you have if you are going to pay for WiFi, how do we make sure that we have a policy that the employees understand? Is it going to be a recurring expense? Do we have in place the controls to allow us to make sure the employees aren't, you know, asking for that reimbursement more than once? So on and so forth.

So the important piece here is to look at how we go back to work. And with that distributed workforce, do we have the tools in place to make sure it works? And so ultimately, what do we see companies doing? What we've seen is an interesting, you know, again, talking about, you know, COVID as it relates to DATABASICS as an organization where I work, you know, like many of us, we were kind of, you know, I would say, you know, we were trying to, interested in seeing what would take place as it relates to as employees made modifications and changes into the way their employees are working. And what we've seen is that we've seen a lot of companies coming to us and looking to combine processes and obviously looking to automate. What companies are looking for is to put in place the best possible tools and also to make sure that these tools are in place and will handle the contingency plans that may need to come into place in the future. And that's really what we want to talk about here today is how do we automate and put time and expense together to support organizations.

So when we go out and talk to an organization, either a prospect that may be looking for information about our solutions or from our implementation services team implementing a solution out there, we typically are going to look at three key user groups within every organization. We want to look at the individual end users to see what the impact of any of these items would be on their day to day process, how to make it as easy as possible, and then make sure we're getting the right information. We then look at the administrators. So that group of folks who are out there managing compliance controls, business policies, and the day to day processing from an HR and accounting and finance perspective. And then we look at the supervisors, executives, those that need to kind of get to data as it relates to making good decisions and being able to see the information that they need as it relates to the day to day operations of an organization.

And so looking at that, we really break the, you know, information into kind of five key pillars as we look at improving a process for an organization. The first piece out there is obviously providing a better experience. And a better experience, oftentimes companies are thinking about from a user perspective. But we talk about a better experience from not only the user side, but making sure as it relates to those folks that are approving as well as those that are needed and get to information and make changes to be able to have a quick, simple, easy solution in hand to be able to do that.

The next piece is making sure that we can combine all this data to give you better decisions out there. Organizations have to be able to see information as quickly as possible in order to make decisions. And especially as we look at what's taking place here over the last couple of months, we've seen the way money has moved as far as where spend is going and allows organizations to maybe free up and spend in other places out there.

Obviously flexibility. If anything, the last few weeks have shown is the ability to adapt and make changes to what you have in place. And then of course, making sure moving forward, you have a tool out there that will support that control. You know, people always talk about control out there as it relates to enforcing policies. We've also seen companies want to make sure we have control in place. And it kind of ties back to the flexibility to make sure that if they are implementing new rules or putting out new options for users, that the solution will kind of push them in the right path, so that again, we are making sure the employees understanding what the changes in place and that he or she is going to be able to easily provide the details that the organization is looking for.

And then the last piece, of course, is getting good value. By combining time and expense, many organizations are able to save as much as 40% as it relates to their overall costs out here because now you're taking two separate systems, your time platform, maybe your leave platform and your expense platform and putting it into one. And so instead of having to have multiple points of integration, multiple vendors in place, you're able to do that all with one.

So let's take a look at how that ultimately looks. So what I've got here is some screenshots of the DATABASICS platform. And the first thing you're going to look at as we talk about the experience out there. So what you're looking at is an end user dashboard as it relates to the ability for he or she to go in and enter their time, their leave and expenses. And really one of the, it's interesting as it relates to time and expense, one of the most important pieces is on the right side of that page. Whereas we talk about announcements and notifications out there. We've seen a lot of organizations make a lot of adjustments to their processes over the last few weeks, and the ability for someone to go out and see information as it relates to why PTO has changed. You'll see that on the right side of the screen, they can go in there and basically hit that link for the PTO update and what it'll show them all the new corporate policies out there.

The other piece here is all of this is being accessed via the web. So the user can go in from anywhere and enter in this information. See the approval workflows. If he or she's an approver they can approve. And then all that data is going to ultimately flow back over into the accounting, HR and payroll system to make sure this information is being uploaded without anyone having to touch this information or go in the office.

You know, one of the interesting things here I just mentioned, this is the web view. One of the things that, you know, if we were sitting here having this conversation six months ago, what would have been most important to many organizations would be the mobile view. And everything we can do here can be done through a mobile. But what's interesting here is that as employees have moved basically out of the field, travel has really been reduced and people's access to these tools from home. What we're seeing is that employees are now accessing these solutions more on traditional web and PC and obviously internet browsers, versus mobile devices. And so, we will continue to support mobile. We believe mobile is still the way to go as employees will start to travel again. But just an interesting note there that most employees are still accessing these tools here through a web experience out there.

And as we talk about that web experience, here's a view as we look at a timesheet here again, nice, clean, simple timesheet. But what's important here is as we look at time codes and pay codes as it relates to, you know, maybe we put in place a new time code as it relates to tracking for COVID. As it relates to companies, they're doing project work. And I know, looking at the list of organizations that are sitting here on this webinar today, you know, maybe your employees have been moved out of the field and from being on client sites to back to the office, and we've got a lot of questions about how do we track that? Do we create a new task? Do we create a new phase? Do we create a new project number out there? And so a flexible time tool will allow you to go in there and to manage and modify that information. And use this user screen to make sure that we're getting the right information. But then we're also making sure that we can enforce a policy at the point of entry to make sure the employee understands exactly what's taking place.

Now we talk about the user experience as it relates to the individual employee out there, those managers that are approving. But then the other piece out here is we talk about putting good data in front of those individuals that need to make decisions. This is an example of a budget dashboard for expenses out there. What a platform like DATABASICS will do is it'll give you big picture data. It'll give you big picture data real time. It'll also give you the ability to combine your labor project and expense data into a single screen if needed.

You know, we talk about, you know, the impacts out there. And again, I've mentioned a couple times that this is something that's impacted DATABASICS. You know, we're getting into what we call trade show season from a sales and marketing perspective. At DATABASICS, we spend almost the whole month of September and October traveling. We spend that time sponsoring some of our partners out there and obviously our sales and marketing team out traveling. At this point, it looks like most of that travel will not happen as these organizations have gone to virtual trade shows. So as I look at my budget and what was budgeted for that travel, I can now very quickly see what I spent in 2019 and 2018. I can project and see what I forecasted for 2020, and now I can take those funds and move them to different parts of the organization, to the marketing side, as we may need to reallocate what those funds look like while understanding kind of that big picture functionality out there.

From a flexibility perspective. What you're looking at here is an expense screen within the expense component out there. I mentioned earlier, we've had a lot of questions around, you know, new expense types. So as employees were moving to the house. And so an expense tool like this allows you to automate. I gave the example earlier of like a monthly recurring Wi-Fi reimbursement charge. A tool like this can set it up so you can say every month the employee can come in here and he or she can ask for the Wi-Fi reimbursement. I keep using that scenario. I'm sure you guys have additional ones and it'll go in. It'll basically ask you, is this the, you know, basically ask you what the expense is, it'll pre-populate what that amount is. And you can have different amounts based upon who that employee is. And it will also make sure that we don't have any duplicate transactions out there. So if someone accidentally tried to submit the same transaction twice over the course of, or it doesn't matter really over the course of what time, the application will actually pick that data up.

The other piece is on the bottom right hand side of the corner is the ability for that time, or for the expense solution to also pick up and track to some sort of project or activity. So if this again, is a purchase being done internally, someone wants to buy a chair. And we're looking at this as a COVID expense for the organization. We can have the employee track that against a COVID expense. So when we sit at the end of the year, we can look at all of those expenses that were COVID related versus our normal operating cost as it relates to day to day expenses out there.

Now, with that, ultimately you want to have control. And so what you're seeing here on this screen is this is an example. We didn't take you through the whole process here. These are just some screenshots. But this is an example of a hotel folio. If you had seen the front end of this process, this is actually leveraging our OCR technology where a user could basically drop a hotel folio. He or she could take a picture with their mobile device, or just pick up that folio as it gets emailed over from the hotel. But the nice thing is it will break out this information, it'll itemize it. And then again, if we want to go in and pick on an individual expense, let's just say, you know, we don't pay for internet access at a hotel. In this case, for $36, you can go out and build those controls right into the process to go out and automate those items that we are and are not going to spend.

And that control, of course, would continue over into policy enforcement. And so in this case, you're looking at the view of a basically our timesheet search utility. And what you're seeing here is that the organization, real time can go in there and query and find any timesheet, regardless where it sits in the process. So we go back to that scenario where I was discussing about the staffing organization, who was doing everything through spreadsheets or manually out there, this is a tool that someone could sit at home and very quickly see where those time cards are, see where it sits in the approval process. And it makes sure that the information they need can be readily available. And what you're also not seeing here is that I can also move this information around the organization freely through emails and other solutions out there.

And once you basically put time and expense together, and what you're seeing here is obviously the ability to access this on whatever device, wherever someone may be out there, you're going to have better value. The ability to combine time and expense. And again, it is critical to make sure that you've got a strong time piece and a strong expense piece. But the ability to combine those together is going to allow you to kind of leverage the ability to buy a single solution out there. Again, eliminate multiple integrations, have a single point of contact for support, a single app for the user to go ahead and access this information, a single place to get to information out there, to ultimately provide you better value.

And then the last piece out here is I did want to talk about integrations. I know we were specifically talking about kind of time and expense and why putting those together makes a lot of sense. We would ultimately integrate this application in with whatever accounting tool you have in place. And so here we have just a highlight of some of our key partnerships out there. Again, looking at the individuals that are sitting here on this webinar, I know there are other accounting systems you guys are looking to see how we work with and again, if we look at the SAP, the JD Edwards, the Infor, the other Sage products out there, we certainly do work across all platforms out there. And similar to this pillar, as we were talking about, we would certainly look to tightly integrate this application with your existing processes out there. And again, ultimately, the thought here is that putting these two tools together, making sure that they can, of course, meet your requirements individually in between time and expense that you should ultimately see a good deal of value out there.

And really, as we kind of wrap this up before I go into the Q&A piece, you know, one of the items that people always ask us is, you know, well, what does that savings look like? And I know there's some other components out there beyond just simply saving some additional money out there by combining it. You know what I have is I have my contact information here. You, of course, could reach out to DATABASICS directly through our info at DATA-BASICS.com. But we'd be happy to provide you additional information as it relates to, you know, what those costs are. And again, even if you want to shoot us over just some information, you know, as far as you know, this is the type of organization we are. This is how many employees we have. This is how many expense reports we're doing or I should say will expect to do as we certainly are seeing a drop off in the expense piece. We'd be happy to help you out in any way possible.

So with that, let me see what kind of questions we have here. And, again, I looks like I've talked a little longer than I planned on. So, you know, I'll ask a few questions and then probably, you know, stop the conversation here at the top of the hour. As I mentioned, if there are additional questions that you guys have or questions that I don't get around to, please feel free to, you know, or I should say I will definitely respond to those. Or again, I believe Amanda from our marketing team sent this email out. Please feel free to respond to her email with any questions that you guys have.

So with that, let me see kind of the first questions out there. First question relates to the delivery of the application. I should have mentioned that earlier. So DATABASICS is a software as a service provider or cloud based solution out there for all customers. We are going to give them two instances of the solution. But the access to the tool is 100% through the web. And of course, we would be creating integrations to whatever back end accounting systems you have there, whether those are in the cloud or not. We can certainly support that.

Question, and just looking into the questions here. Oh, pricing. There's always the pricing question as how does the price. And so, as a software as a service provider, we're going to price the application based upon users out there. So we would typically be combining the time and expense users together. And what you'd be looking at is a per user price that would be based upon the volume of users out there. So if we look at an organization, that would let's say we have, let's say 50 employees, just to give you a ballpark, you may be starting it at, you know, ten, $12 per user as that number of users goes higher, that per user cost goes down. The only other component you would have there would be an implementation and setup fee. And that's something there that we would scope out for you based upon the systems you have in place, to make sure that obviously the application is, overall, you know, we've integrated and set it up, trained you and all the rest out there. But once the application's up and running, all you're going to have is basically a monthly recurring fee for the service out there.

The question about global. Yes. So again, didn't, I obviously talking a lot about US here today, truly a global platform as it relates to multiple currencies, multiple languages, support for local work, unions, taxes. DATABASICS is truly a global organization and have done implementations all over the world. So this application, all the, again, obviously everything here was in English as you saw these screenshots, would certainly be supported in whatever language that you were looking for out there.

And then, you know, I'll take the last question and I said, well, what is implementation, for timeline or timeline implementation. How quickly can we get up and running? It depends on the size of the company, obviously depends on the complexities. We're going to say the fastest you're probably looking at about six weeks typically about 8 to 12 weeks. It does depend on the individual organization out there. I will say if you are using a tool already and you're just looking to basically make a transition over to an organization like ours, it's going to be much faster implementation out there. We would typically run you through, basically it's a six step methodology we have out there from business analysis to configuration training. We would go through a pilot and then roll out as we look at that overall process out there. But again, if you've got a specific challenge out there or a specific question about a time frame, time frame, or deadline you're trying to address, please let us know. And we could certainly talk to you, you know, talk it through kind of how that looks and how we can address that.

With that, it's just about 12:00 here on the East Coast. I would like to thank everyone again for giving us a few minutes here this morning. Again, as I've mentioned, if you have questions that I didn't answer, and I do see a few more here, I will make sure we will address those and get back to you here today. If those questions come up after the fact, please feel free to reply to that email. And Amanda or anyone else from marketing team will make sure it gets in the hands of the proper person to get the answer. And then the other piece here is, it does look like we have recorded this webinar. And so we will provide you guys a copy of that webinar.

So with that, I want to thank everyone for giving us time here today. Please stay safe. And if you have any particular challenges that you're curious about how we may be able to address that, please feel free to reach out to us. And we'd love to help you, but thank you very much.