Webinar: Top Trends in Time & Expense Management & What Nonprofits Need to Know

Chris Harley is VP of sales at DATABASICS and Enterprise grade time and expense management solution provider recognized by leading global organizations for its deep expertise, next gen technology and customer focused platform, including such nonprofits as associations and philanthropy. As Curtis Sam of Oceans, the trust for Public Land, Pathfinder International, National Quality Forum, PR Health Sciences, and Academy of Physician Assistance.

Since joining the team in 2000, Chris has held numerous roles. And today he manages business development, sales and partner activities. With such a long tenure at DATABASICS, Chris is a true time and expense expert and can provide valuable guidance and advice to organizations seeking to find a better solution for time and expense management. Chris, I'll now hand it over to you.

Well, thanks, Jordan, and thanks, everyone, for joining us here today. I guess it could be I guess this point should be, early afternoon or maybe late morning, depending on where you are in the country. You know, as, as Jordan mentioned, the topic today is to talk about, you know, top trends and time and expense management and the impacts and what we're seeing taking place as we move into 2021.

The agenda, that I was going to run through, was to really just for first start and talk about, you know, some of the key challenges we're seeing out there. And then talk about the technology that's put in place that can help organizations address that. I do have a quick, you know, case study, that relates to an organization that here in the last 18 months or so, has deployed a time and expense tool and what their issues were and challenges were before they looked at that solution. And then, of course, what what they're now able to do with an automated tool in place. We'll talk about the trends, and what we're seeing in 2021. And of course, that continues to change, looking at the, the environment around us. And then we do have some time here at the end to talk about or to do some questions and answers.

And, as Jordan mentioned, if at any point, during this presentation, you have a question, feel free to go ahead and, and entered in into the toolbar there and we'll make sure we address that at the end of this presentation. And if we don't get a chance to get around to those questions, I'll definitely make sure we address it sometime this afternoon, either myself or someone from our team can reach out and answer any questions that you guys may have.

As far as timewise looking to take probably 25, 30 minutes or so and then get into the Q&A. So hopefully not take up too, too much of your time here today. But definitely want to provide you guys some insight as far as what we're seeing out there. And really kind of as we look at the key areas that we're going to talk about addressing here.

You know, as we look at nonprofits, the big areas that people look to, tackle here is, of course, the ability to quantify and look at grants and projects out there as certainly look at the resources we have. Organizations are, as we talk about time and expense, specifically looking to streamline some of the accounting responsibilities and the roles out there, for nonprofits. You certainly have an environment out there where, depending upon your funding source, you're required to provide information and details as it relates to where labor and other expenses are going. And ultimately, what we're trying to do is to create efficiencies. And so, we'll certainly get into that.

Now, as Jordan mentioned, I've spent a good amount of time here at DATABASICS just about 20 years or so. For those of you that aren't familiar with DATABASICS, we're based here in the greater Washington, DC area. Being based here, you know, going back to really our first iteration of our platform, which came out in the late 90s. We've always worked with a good number of not for profits out there. Part of our core functionality is the ability to go out and to track information to grants and projects, and that not only relates to the time platform we have, but also the expense reporting platform. And over the last 20 years or so here. I certainly have worked with a few hundred, nonprofits. Really of all sizes, and of and of all kind of different missions out there, to support them from a time and expense perspective. And so certainly help to provide some insight. To how we're addressing those. And, of course, you know, at the end here, answer any questions there that, that you guys may have.

As far as nonprofits out there, you know, it makes up a very large pool of workers out there. Actually, looking at some of the research out there, nonprofits, are actually the third largest workforce in the United States. And that's only really behind retail and manufacturing. And looking at some of the details as far as how broad the nonprofit workforce is. If you look across the United States and when we go out and categorize organizations and industries as major industries out there, in over half the states within the United States, the nonprofit workforce makes up 10% or more of the private workforce.

So without, you know, needing to tell you guys this, there certainly are a large number of nonprofits out there. And again, the mission and the look and feel of each one may vary. But you still do have some common challenges. And that's what I want to address here. And as the other note I have on here, is that what we are hearing from nonprofits, is that, you know, as, as money is, is provided out there that we're finding that organizations are asking for more and more visibility. And more and more information about where that and how that money is being spent out there.

So with that being said, you know, I always like to kind of start these conversations with just looking at some of the key challenges out there. And as I look at, at organizations, they typically have, you know, four key challenges. The first one starts as it relates to nonprofit. It's just the overall management of your workforce. And so when I think of managing the workforce, I think of federal, and state laws. So and when we look at time and expense, what that really comes down to, is the ability to go out and to track your labor.

So we look at just the daily operations as a, as it relates to a user as far as what information do we need to capture so that we can pay these employees, whether they're exempt Nonexempt, maybe they're interns, maybe they're contractors out there. So the overall process of just going out there and finding a way to go out and track our labor out there. Now when we start tracking labor, what that also starts to bring into, as, as it relates to a payroll component is, of course, leave in PTO. And so it's not always as simple as we have an employee out there who salaried, we pay them on a, you know, whatever reporting schedule it is, and they get a paycheck.

We do need to go out and to track, PTO leave. And as we go out and talk to organizations, we oftentimes see that they may have one tool in place to capture time. They may have another tool in place to capture or leave, or maybe they have another process in place as it relates to, the approvals and the workflows out there. So I always start with kind of the first challenge out there is the ability just to simply track what's taking place as it relates to our resources, whether those are employees or contractors or or other resources out there.

The next challenge out there is, something there that is definitely part of our nonprofits out there is how do we go out and track information as it relates to projects and grants out there? And so I call this kind of project and grant compliance. So, as we look at an individual user out there, not only are we tracking what they're doing as it relates to hours for labor, but we do need to go out and track this information as it relates to projects and grants, because ultimately we need to report this information back.

Now when it relates to a timesheet module, that is something there that you see within a lot of time. Platforms is, of course, the ability to go out there and to track information to a project or grant when it gets into the expense reporting side. It does create some more complexities out there because as people go out and travel, or maybe there are events that you are putting on where you want to go ahead and track information against, again, either, a grant or maybe it's an internal project or activity. Organizations want to come up with a way to streamline and and simplify the tracking of this information within a time and expense. And then, of course, the audits out there, with most non-profits, what we see is the ability for an organization to, need to show they're compliant and to be able to show that they have the controls in place to make sure that those funding sources continue to provide information. So how do we do those audits? How detailed can we do those audits, and what sort of information can we look at now beyond just simply looking at kind of federal and state roles?

And of course, are project tracking the next piece of your challenge, as I see, is what I call organization requirements. So this is really just looking at the individual organization and the personality it has and what we look for from the individual users. And when I look at that, the first thing is of course internal policies out there. So, you know, what are the rules and demands we place on our employees as it relates to time entry, as it relates to the type of leave they have and as it relates to the expenses that they incur out there. And that's going to vary, as you all know, as I'm sure you've worked at numerous different organizations, as you see that as you move between organizations, different organizations have different internal policies. And of course, the challenge for most of you is how do we go ahead and enforce those policies and what happens at those policies change.

The next piece is what I call user demands. And so this is as we start looking at all these pieces, you know, what sort of feedback do we get from our users as it relates to one, either our policies or the tools that we have in place out there? And again, this gets into, you know, how, you know, what do they have to enter a timesheet every day? Do they go into Excel? Do we get a lot of pushback that we don't like the way the form works? Do we get pushback from the organization that they feel that they're cracking down too much on us?

And then the last piece here, which relates to individual organizations, is what I call the technology infrastructure. So these are the tools that you've put in place to manage the organization now as it relates to time and expense, we're typically we talking about maybe a payroll tool and an HR module. Of course, the accounting platform, maybe a travel booking system out there as it relates to travel. And the question is, what are those pieces, and how do they talk to each other or do they talk to each other? And when it comes to time and expense, that's always the first thing organizations are looking for from a tool is how do I take a time expense tool and make it work within the ecosystem that I have in place? And I've got some examples. As we get to the end of this presentation to talk about, you know, some of the more common tools we see out there from the accounting side, these are the payroll and other pieces out there.

And then really the last piece, as we look at the individual industry, is what I call or industry challenges, what I call external factors. And, you know, nothing has probably, shined brighter as it not in a positive sense in the last, ten months or so than Covid 19. You know, one of the things that we've seen here since middle of March last year is a lot of organizations really scrambling, a lot of organizations having exposure, to what they either did or didn't do as it relates to the time and expense side, there's some pretty interesting stats as it relates to, you know, the workforce, with Covid 19.

I don't need to tell any of you on the phone here. You know how it has impacted our life. Both professionally and personally. But one of the interesting stats is that, on March 17th, which is really kind of the Friday of the as the, you know, Covid 19 was really coming online within the US, roughly 82%, of the US workforce, was working in offices, by the following Friday. So by March 24th, that number had dropped from 82% to 17%. So, America, very quickly, went remote. And being remote put a lot of stress, on organizations as it related to what they were doing on the time and expense front as it related to the policies that organizations had in place. And also as it related to the, platforms that that an organization was leveraging to capture this information. And then the other piece I call miscellaneous now, truth being told, Covid 19, that's kind of a very big example of what is usually those miscellaneous factors out there. And as we know from an organization, perspective, there's always those things that come up that we don't really have complete control over. And it certainly impacts the way we do that.

So as I look at the, you know, industry challenges out there, I always say we've got our federal rules and regulations. We've got our internal policies out there. In the case of organizations similar to you guys, we've got our our project and grant tracking piece, and then we've got really external factors that come into play, to impact that.

So with that being said, you know what, what do we do to to address these items and is there a way to address them? And the short answer, we always say yes. And the tools that that organizations are using is really using new technology to, to go out and do that and when we look at technology, we do the same sort of in the same capacity. We're talking about the challenges. We do the same sort of thing as it relates to how we address organizations. And for nonprofits, really what we talk about is automation. Is what part of your process can we go out and automate? We then look at what we're going to call web and mobile. So what tools are in place to make life easy on the user out there?

And then the last piece of that process is looking at integration. And integration is how do we make the tools that we're putting in place that will hopefully give us automation. How do we get those to work within the ecosystem that you have in place? And again, as we talk about that ecosystem, it's going to vary company to company as far as what pieces you have in place and what pieces you need to talk to each other.

And with that being said, I really break it into a number of key goals out there. The first goal is to be able to go ahead and quantify and see what we're doing as it relates to our projects, and grants, and our resources. You know, how do we go out and see if the organization is operating appropriately? As we look at budgets in those areas, the other piece is, streamlining accounting responsibilities. Again, I don't need to mention too much about how Covid 19 has, has impacted organizations, but certainly as as organizations went remote, how much of the accounting process was streamlined, how much more does need to be streamlined? And how can we go out and and streamline this as much as possible?

It's interesting on the time and expense side, how many areas that we can go out and actually automate, and streamline. And I'll talk about that here in the next couple of slides, that organizations don't think about. And then even as you get into some individual features and functionality, how we can automate some of these things that, again, organizations didn't think much about. One of the big ones I talk a lot about is, risk management, is, you know, what OCR technology allows an organization to do? It's, you know, ten years ago or even five years ago, organizations were happy with just the fact that they could digitize a receipt. Well, today, we have the ability to have a user take a picture of a receipt, have us extract the data off that receipt and pull it into the application so a user can technically be doing an expense report by simply taking a picture of a receipt and nothing else. Basically, the application will read that information and map it back into the, accounting solution.

And then better reporting. I think one of the biggest areas that we talk about when we go into organizations is what sort of data are you able to get? How quickly can you get that data, and what does the data give you? One of the things I've mentioned here is, of course, we're talking about time and expense. And I'm going to talk about putting time and expense together. But many organizations say we have reporting but that reporting is in multiple systems. And so again, I need to go one place to get time information. I need to go somewhere else to get project information. I need to go somewhere else to get expense reporting information. Well, how do I get all that information together? And again, you may even think of your accounting tool. So your accounting tool ultimately gives you that information, but it may not have the detail that you guys want.

And then the last piece here is creating efficiencies. And when I talk about efficiencies I'm really talking about the end user side. You know, how do we make it to those users can very quickly easily get in, enter information, understand the information they're supposed to be providing and quickly get it put off into the process. So that the accounting and finance team and the team can go out, get that information, do what they need to do with that information, whether it's just simply approving it. And then make sure that we push all that information over into the accounting or payroll system out there so that we can complete our corporate processes out there.

So if we look at those goals and again, as you know, I know we've got different organizations sitting here on this call here today. And there may be some additional goals that you guys have. But as I look at an organization, what I always tell them, as I look at the user, I look at the accounting and finance group, or the managers out there, and then I look at kind of the executives and if we can figure out how to, you know, create a, an efficiency for each one of those groups, we'll typically have success as it relates to these, these projects out there.

So, so the first piece here is I talked about, you know, what can be automated. And so, you know, what we have here is, you know, some of the key components that we're looking to address as it relates to time and expense. Now, it's interesting, as you guys look at these individual items, you may have multiple systems to do this. And one of the key things we're going to talk about here is looking at a single solution to go out and do that.

So when we look at this, a good time and expense system to give you the ability to go out and automate the payroll process. So of course, the ability to capture, again, whether we're talking about exempt or nonexempt employees, the ability to capture hours, the ability to capture exceptions of those hours, to track time and, and of the information as it relates to what you need to capture from a payroll side, the next area is paid time off or absence management or leave management out there. So, if we have, a process in place, if employees are accruing hours or whether they're starting the year off with a bulk sum of hours out there, most organizations have an approval process as it relates to leave and absence management. So the big question is, is that process automated and integrated into your time tool?

And if it's integrated your time to what you should be able to do is have a user go out there, request time off. He or she should be able to go in and very easily see the hours that they have accrued if they're accruing or the hours they have remaining, they should be able to see what categories that relates to. They should be able to quickly go out and push that off into an approval process, get approved. And then when they come in to do a timesheet, to see that, all that information there, right in the timesheet, the next piece is project or grant tracking. And again, I kind of interrelate those terms just because I know, you know, and working with organizations similar to you guys, you know, sometimes use the term projects sometimes grant. It depends.

Is, you know, how detailed can we track this? Do we have the ability to restrict who sees what information? What happens if we have a project that has an effective date? Maybe it should only have time allocated against it. For a certain time period. Maybe we have a budget. Maybe we're only, should only be allocated a certain number of hours or a certain amount of funds against that particular project. So how do we go on and track that? And then the same thing on the, expense reporting side, you know, if we have someone traveling and we want to allocate those hours against a particular project or grant, how do we go in there and get that information?

Compliance. And compliance relates really two areas when I look at internal compliance. So, you know, what are the rules we put in place, for an individual organization, you know, are we allowed to, expense alcohol if we take, for example, an expense reporting tool? Are we allowed to. Yeah. You know, take vacation and half in half day increments. Can we take more than, ten days of vacation in a row? You know, those sort of things, which may be internal rules out there. How do we go out and capture that? And then we look at also compliance as it relates to, you know, federal and state laws or even project compliance out there. How do we track that information integration? How do we make this tool operate within the, within the ecosystem? We have and I'll talk about that here in a second. As far as that.

And then reporting to analytics, how quickly can we get the information? Who has access to information. Does that include both time and expense in a single tool? What sort of notifications can we push those reports out to people? And again, how easily is it to to use reporting tools? I think one of the, toughest things you see from a technology and especially, you know, talking to, from the, from a sales of an organization, what I've seen over the last 20 years or so is that a lot of times when organizations buy a technology tool, you have, the vendor come in, someone shows you a very slick, demo on how the reporting works, and people go, oh, this is great. We're going to be able to go out there, run all these reports and get up to all this data. And then what they find is that, when the tool is finally given to them and it's been deployed and put in production, is that, in fact, the reporting tool that looked very simple when the person was demonstrating it to us, is it in fact very intuitive, and so that organizations aren't able to get get to the information they want to get to. And so, when I about reporting to an analytics, it's making sure that you can not only get to the data, but the people that need to get to the data are able to do that in a very easy to use fashion.

And the last piece is employee satisfaction. You know, it's under my tab here of why automate. But ultimately employees are expecting more from the technology they deploy. Again, I can tell stories about being around organizations, you know, 15, 20 years ago, and they didn't really care about the employees input. But today, as employees go out and use their phones or their mobile devices for really everything, they start to ask the organization, well, why can't I do my timesheet on my phone? Or why can't I, capture receipts more easily on my phone? And so, certainly putting in place a tool that raises your employee satisfaction, is critical. And then the other piece out that is that, you know, we continue to see organizations are starting to look at the technology they're using, as part of the really their their corporate personality out there. You know, they want to be cutting edge, they want to make sure that they're showing the employees that they care about the tools are putting in place so that employee satisfaction is really important.

So, you know, so how are so once we automate, you know, what are we able to do. And so I've got a couple of things to look at here. So first and foremost let's talk about how we improve the user experience. A good time. And expense tool that's deployed for a nonprofit is going to give your employees the ability to access, and do timesheets and expense reports from anywhere on any device. There's no need for a user to have to drag a laptop around or go into the office to be able to enter time or expenses. They should be able to get to that, again, no matter where they are in the world. And what it should provide them is a very simple and clean user experience out there.

Now, beyond just simply being able to access that anywhere. You know, of course, we look at employees going remote, you know, that is critical, but also employees being out there on the road, in addition to be able to access anywhere, they should be all the solution should also be able to do push notifications. So again, if we've got a question about someone's expense report, if someone is curious about whether they're going to be reimbursed in a certain time frame or they their leave was, approved, we should be able to have real time notifications that go out to these users so they can very quickly and easily see that information.

The next one is the repopulation of data. You know, I think that's probably the number one thing I hear when I go out and talk to organizations that are, looking to automate their time and expense solution, which is not only do we want to make it easy for the user, but why can't we just put it in front of the user, the information that's critical to them? And make sure that we're not put in a place, a process that, you know, is kind of, you know, as a user goes in, I shouldn't have to see all the grants within the entire organization. I should only see the grants. And I need to see and make sure that quickly gets the information in there.

And then also talk about simple project and grant tracking. Again, why, you know, we should be able to have the ability to have templates in there to pre-filled information. We should have the ability to quick type information. And I should have should have the ability to also see what my lead balance is. If I'm going to go in and submit a, leave request. So ultimately what we want to provide is a better user experience out there. And we can certainly do that with the time and expense, solution today.

The next one is better control. So this starts getting into, you know, as we start looking at, you know, an organization deploying, a solution, how do we go out and make sure that the users understand what the rules are? And then the other piece is, how do we enforce those rules out there? And so with an automated time and expense platform, what we can do is we can automate notifications, we can capture information real time. So as we sit here on a midday Wednesday, I can go out and I can see exactly, the number of hours that have been put in for, you know, an individual project or grant, I can open up and I can very easily see who's on leave this week or who was on leave last week.

I can also go out. And as it relates to budgets, I can see, you know, what are my committed funds and what are my outstanding funds as it relates that information. So when you put time and expense together, you're going to get much better control, but you're also going to be able to see this in a 360 degree view. And you'll be able to set information in real time. And then what you're also going to be able to do is to go out and to run very quickly and look at compliances and audits. And so, you know, one of the big areas we talk about is, of course, if people go in and make modifications to timesheets, who made that modification, when was it made? Or on the approval side? You know, someone says, well, I submitted my timesheet. I don't know why it hasn't been approved. Well, you can very quickly go into the application and see exactly who's approved it when it was approved. And again, there's, there's no, you know, there's no way to go in there and say, oh, well, I did it when, when in fact, I didn't actually do it. So you can see all the information.

And then the other piece there, and this depends on the type of organization where you're going to work is the localization out there? If you're, you know, again, it may be as simple as having employees in the US and Canada or other parts of North America. Or you may be a truly global organization out there. The ability to go out and to put in place an application that's going to be localized, that individual user. So if you've got someone in the UK, and they're doing their expense report, the expenses are being imported in British pounds. The date formats match up to what they're used to seeing. Or maybe if you've got users in Mexico, they can go ahead and access the application in Spanish so you can automate all this. And ultimately it's going to provide you, better control, better visibility, which will ultimately create a streamlined process and efficiencies.

And then the last piece there is integration. And I've got just kind of a sample and some of the common tools that we look to integrate. You know, I mentioned the term, the, you know, IT ecosystem or your IT infrastructure out there, you know, with time and expense. We're always going to be integrating this application into this ecosystem in a place. And so if I talk, let's just talk just about a time tool. What we would typically do with our platform is we would look at where employee and project information originates within an organization. So you may be using a tool like you know, Microsoft Dynamics, or you may be using in TAC or black bot or someone else out there.

We would typically integrate our application so it could pick up that information from that tool, pull it into our application. Within our application, the user would have the ability to go in and and again allocate hours, allocate their time, into their expenses, capture their receipts and then what. And then it would then go off to improvements in our platform. And then we would turn around and push that information back into a back end tool, whether that would be someone like an ADP or so already in our workday, for payroll purposes, maybe for reimbursement purposes. And of course, it would typically go back into the accounting solution, for any of the data that you need to track back into the ledger, or your chart of accounts out there.

So as we look at this process, there's no need or no reason that your time and expense platform shouldn't be tightly coupled with all the other pieces you have in place. And when I say tightly coupled, that doesn't mean that someone has to manipulate data, between interfaces. Or someone needs to go in there and delete columns before they upload it into the accounting tool. But in fact, this application and this process should be completely streamlined from beginning to end.

Again. So if we look at like for example, I'll just take for example, the DATABASICS platform, if we're working with a nonprofit that's leveraging, let's just say Microsoft Dynamics and maybe they've got ADP for payroll. The idea is that, a user or the organization should have the ability to set those users up, within either ADP or within dynamics. That information is going to automatically flow to our tool. Our tool is going to go out there and give the customer, the ability to go out there and to capture their leave, have the workflows, capture the labor, and then once it's approved, it would automatically flow back into ADP and to dynamics. And no one's having to manipulate data. It's a matter of just basically doing reviews and then moving that information automatically back into the accounting solution.

So, ultimately, you know what? Why are we looking to automate time and expand? We keep coming back to the fact we want to provide a better experience for your users and your administrators. And when we talk about the users, that doesn't simply just mean employees of the organization. Oftentimes the nonprofits, you've got board members, you've got interns, you've got, contractors out there. It is possible to go ahead and put those users on the platform as well. So if you're bringing board members in for, quarterly conferences or meetings out there, which I know right now are mostly done being done remotely, but but when we go back to the point that we are doing that, it is possible to go out there and have a board member submit his or her expenses, through the platform. So you don't have to have a separate process out there.

Again, I talk about, you know, interns or or or, you know, somewhere, you know, help out there. You have the ability to do that. If you can get all that information into the solution, you ultimately have a better decision making tool, where you can see information as it relates to budgets, labor, policies and all the rest of that. The other piece about this is the tools also to give you flexibility. So I, I didn't talk too much about that. But you certainly would have the ability to make changes and adjustments to see the impact, those changes and adjustments and to let those users know what those changes and adjustments are. And we get into trends here in a minute. I'll talk about some of the flexibility, especially as it relates to what we're seeing here with organizations, you know, over the last ten months or so.

Better control. That really kind of goes back to the better, decision making tools out there. Again, if you can get the information, get to detailed information, get information in the hands of the people who need to see that information, you're ultimately going to be able to, make better decisions out there. And then really, the last piece here, is combining a time and expense and lead tool into one platform. Many organizations that we go talk to are using two different solutions for time and expense. And so if you can take a put that into a single platform, not only does it give you the ability to, you know, have the user have one app out there and allows you to combine the data to see that data better. But then there's just general overall cost savings. So you're not paying for two solutions. You're not paying for two different maintenance plans. You're not having to deal with two different support groups. You're really just using a single vendor, and a single view as it relates to that. That application.

So, with that, I want to kind of do a just kind of a quick case study, because we were we've been talking about, you know, the challenges that are out there. And again, these challenges aren't, you know, really kind of grow across the entire industry out there. But one of them, that I wonder a quick case study on that. I've got some details on here is life Works and, DATABASICS activity guys looking for more detailed information here? We're happy to provide you, you know, we've got a more detailed case study. Are we right in life force? But there are nonprofit in, Minnesota. They employ, a couple thousand employees out there. They actually do what is almost like a home health care. They provide a service where, their employees go out, into individual houses, and provide assistance, and daycare for, elderly staff, for, you know, let's say, if one of us, had a, an elderly parent, living here and we needed to go to work, what life works does is they provide someone who can come in here and provide that in-house daycare. While other folks in the organ as well as people in the house, go off to work out there.

And their challenge was that, they had, they were trying to capture that information. Very basically just just trying to capture time information as it relates to individual users. Now, the challenge with those users is, they were all over the state. And what they would do is they would go out to a house, which they basically looked at as a client, and would spend, you know, a few hours there. And the challenge was that those users were basically capturing that that time and either put it into an Excel spreadsheet or put it onto a piece of paper.

And so the, you know, to say the least, the system was not user friendly. But ultimately what it didn't do, for the organization, is it didn't have any integration into their accounting and finance system. And so as, as users went out and captured that time, they may also had expenses. So they may have mileage or they may have, meals and not not huge expenses, but they had expenses out there. What would happen is someone would have to capture that information collected and mail it into a home office for a user. They would have to go in, key that information into, solution and then ultimately upload that into their accounting platform.

What DATABASICS did is, is we came in and showed them the ability for us to go in and actually enter all that information on a mobile device. Now, what they didn't think about at the time, but they ultimately deployed, was that not only were they able to go in there and quickly and easily capture the hours user, but on the mobile device, they could also see the location of the user. So someone was clocking in at a, at a, at a person's house at eight in the morning. They could actually go in there when they would clock in on their mobile device, it would actually capture the location of it. So they had an audit trail. If anyone ever come back, came back to dispute those hours, they could say this is exactly where that person captured that hour. Here's how long they were there.

They were also able to go in and enter expenses with the mileage. And within our mileage platform, they could get the, Google GPS, basically tracking. So we picked that information up and they were basically able to take the time that a timesheet went from being submitted, which is basically being mailed or collected by someone regionally. And then ultimately input at that. That time was basically taken about a week to week and a half. They went from doing, you know, basically 7 to 10 days. From the time of submitted to the time it was entered, and, and an ability to do it within a matter of hours, where they could basically tell the users on, you know, X day on Friday afternoon at 5:00, these timesheets tend to be submitted. The user could do that. And they were basically ready to post that information within a matter of hours out there.

And again, you know, there are some additional details I can certainly provide you on this. We've got a more formal, case study that will be coming out. And so we're happy to share that with you. And so ultimately, you know, we came back, and asked, you know, life works. You know, what was the response from the users and the administrators of the system? You know, of course. And again, there's some of this is kind of, you know, understated to say. It's more intuitive and easier. You know, what they were ultimately, most proud of, is that they felt that they were taking their user force, and instead of burden them with, administrative tasks and duties, what they believe is that ultimately they were able to go out there and to allow their users to go back in and focus on their core mission, which was to provide this service, to this, in, in home, you know, daycare, for these users, again, without being burden on having to go through their processes, which were mostly made up of of Excel and paper processes out there.

So again, I won't spend too much time talking about that here today. But really just want to wrap up here with, with a couple items here as we always talk about trends for non profit. So you know, this is what we're hearing, from our customers out there as far as what they're focusing on here. You know, as we come into 2021 now is sure enough, a lot of what we are seeing from our customers, is a result of, you know, Covid 19, and some of the challenges that that imposed on individual organizations.

And so, you know, the first part is being connected. And when I say stay connected, you know, what they want to be able to do is to make sure that, their users and their employees, if they are home, understand that the organization, understands, the challenges that are out there and that, that the organization is making sure that they're putting in place the proper solutions out there. So when we say embrace innovative solutions, you know, what we are hearing is organizations are coming to us to say, hey, you know, we want to put these tools in place because we want to make life as easy on our employees as possible. We want to make sure that, again, they're not being bogged down with archaic processes as it relates to time and expense.

But in addition to that, they as we talk about the stay connected side, they do also use some of our messaging technology to again, make sure employees understand, you know, hey, this is what we've done. You know, we made some changes and adjustments. And this is why it's taking place. And then of course, the focus on transparency, you know, one of the things that we saw from a leave management perspective is that a lot of organizations struggled, as you know, as Covid 19, impacted us more and more, as they struggled with, you know, what do we do with leap? You know, are we an organization that has a use it or lose it policy? Are suddenly all of our employees going to go on vacation for the last six weeks of the year because they haven't been able to go to the beach or take vacations? Are they suddenly going to use it and so as they were making adjustments to their processes, one of the big things that we were seeing as is make sure you're transparent with their users, open with their communications, and make sure they understand why those changes are being made.

The next piece out there, is, you know, we say remain agile while staying true, staying true to your mission, and increase flexibility and move new platforms. Again, we see a lot of organizations that have come to us here in the last ten months or so, that are looking to leverage, some of the changes that they're taking place, but they don't have the technology to do that. The leave management one is probably the one that we had most questions about and most support inquiries about over the last, you know, I say the last ten months, because organizations were saying to users, hey, you know, what we'd prefer to you guys to do is maybe take, you know, take two days off every month so that you're using some of that leave, even if you're just spending it with your family in the house or locally.

But we'll make it up for you in 2021. Will allow you to roll over more hours out there. So, you know, but as they were making these policy changes, the challenges were the technology they replaced wouldn't support that. And so as we look at that, you know, let's make sure we have the technology in place to be able to support that. And again, that's where we look at kind of increasing the flexibility and telling the users, hey, this is why we're making that change. And this is how we're going to support it.

And then really the last piece here is revised expense and time policies. You know, I mentioned, you know, leave management was probably the number one question that we, we had, our number one inquiry we were getting, you know, in the last ten months or so as it related to organizations looking for, ways to better manage their leave, make adjustments to their leave, implement new accrual models, figure out a rollover, or even as we sell challenges with employees who maybe had Covid or had family members had Covid, they were looking for ways for employees to go ahead and to share leave. You know, maybe I was going to take, you know, take three of my days off and give it to another coworker so that that person could have additional days off to support, with some paid time off.

So, leave was number one. The next one is revising expense and time policies, and especially around the expense reporting side. Again, I probably don't need to tell you guys this, but, you know, as employees move to the house, there and stop traveling, we saw new expenses taking place. We saw organizations that were providing per DMs to users, for, buying, you know, items for their home office. Maybe they're buying paper money. They're buying printers. You know, maybe they need to buy a chair or a light, or a camera or a new laptop. So we're seeing a lot of new expenses that are being incurred within organizations.

One of the interesting things there, as you look at expenses, you know, we were just looking at, you know, I saw a report at the end of, December of where our expense volume was in March. Our total, expense reporting volume had dropped to about 49% of what it was. The prior, I should tell you, by April had dropped about 49% of what it's what it was the prior April in December, our expense reporting volume was back up to 78% of what it was for December of 2019, which is interesting. And it's not so much that people are traveling. We're just seeing a lot of home expenses coming through the application. And again, those things may be things like paying for home Wi-Fi, allowing employees to get Grubhub or some other item out there. So definitely look at your new expense policies and make sure you have a tool that, that can that can leverage those, emphasizing the mobile apps.

Again, from mobile platform, everything I've talked about today can certainly be, done on, on a mobile piece. And then ultimately figure out how to, to gain savings out there. When we look at automating time and expense, it's a very easy sell as we go into organizations, because the ROI is, is very quick because ultimately we can see that there are hard, cost savings as it relates to reducing, labor, and effort as it relates from the accounting and finance side. But then there's also soft savings as it relates to reducing that effort by the user. And then ultimately creating, you know, not only efficiencies but increasing the user satisfaction.

So, you know, to kind of wrap this all up, you know, the challenges you guys have, you know, our our I won't say are 100% unique to, to nonprofits, but certainly, you know, what you're looking at from a, from a grant and compliance perspective, it is is somewhat unique out there. But the other pieces out there definitely relates to, you know, again, looking at your organization requirements. There certainly is technology out there to support everything we've talked about today. There are ways for us to automate the process from beginning to end, which will provide efficiencies for users, for your administrators, and as well provide visibility for executives.

And again, those benefits are going to impact each one of those groups out there. The user is going to have, increased satisfaction. The folks that are administering this process are going to have increased satisfaction. And ultimately the individuals that want to see data and see the end get compliance will be able to have satisfaction as well. So with that, let me turn the floor over to any questions that you guys may have, and also take a drink of water here because I've been talking to you for a bit. So, so let me turn over. I don't know if Jordan's on or at least is on now moderating, to see if there's any questions there that, that the group may have.

Thanks, Chris. We've got, some attendees writing in, so we'll just give them a minute or two. I do see one coming through. And that is. Do you have any examples of good transparency?

Yeah. So so check. And then again transparency comes at a couple different areas. We typically talk or talk to organizations. So you know we look at transparency from the perspective of the application perspective. So you know when our users enter any information who's approving, everything that takes place and I can speak to our application, has a time and date stamp as it relates to when something takes place. So we look at transparency from that side. The next piece out there is looking at overall reporting and details. And again, you can look at this, and dig into both time and expense. So as we look at expense reporting, you know, and again I'll use an example of transparency into, you know, what did we spend for, you know, our annual conference, you know, when organizations go into the expense tool and track all those expenses back to in this case, we'll talk about the annual conference. We can see, you know, what was the air for the hotel? The cars, the meals, the mileage, the tips, and all the rest of that. So we can very quickly and easily get into that information and see, you know, the details down to the individual user as far as who is spending what, where. And again, you can say the same sort of thing on the time set.

So I know the transparency is kind of a broad term out there. You know, and and again, if whoever's asking that question, if you, you know, I'll certainly provide my, my contact details that we could, you know, have a separate conversation, but we typically see the transparency. It depends on what you're looking for. Transparency. But again it comes in a couple different flavors out there. But the big thing that we're trying to do is to make sure that and again, it depends on who the person is and what they're looking for, that they should be able to see everything that took place as it relates to time, projects, expenses, labor and leave, from really the beginning of the process to the end of the process out there.

Thank you. Chris. We've got another one here. How much should a small company budget for automated services?

Yeah. Good question. So, as you look at the and again, there's a lot of different pieces in there. But as you look at if you're curious, kind of like, you know what our, you know, again time and expense would be part of your automated process out there. But just you look at a small business just to give you guys kind of a ballpark pricing figure. So, for someone that has, let's say, you know, 40 employees out there, that would be using our application for time and expense, that would be looking at roughly, you know, 10 to $12 per user per month. Let's just say 4 to $500 a month. For the application. Now, there'd be some initial set up and improvements, as it relates to that. But the ongoing process out there, you're looking at roughly 4 or $500.

Now, again, as you look at time and expense. Now, what that would also be eliminated from you is, of course, you know, how much time it takes the person right now to enter that information into an Excel spreadsheet. How much time it takes someone to basically go through and review all those compliances? Because we would expect that the application should be able to go through and, very quickly see if something is in or out of, you know, policy. And then of course, how long is it take someone to turn around a key, that information into the accounting system, or the payroll system out there. So, as you look at that, you know, a lot of these, you know, there are hard savings and then there's some soft savings out there. And we do have some ROI calculators that we can share with organizations. As a as you look at kind of what that overall savings are, but again, the goal should be that it would eliminate any sort of, you know, math, you know, people are mailing receipts to the home office and things like that, all that can be digitized this day.

So, so again, there's, it's not a huge expense as you look at it out there. And again, the the benefits should, should definitely, outweigh whatever the cost is. And that pricing that I mentioned again, that's roughly for about, I would say organization with 40 employees, as you add more users that that per user cost goes down. And I should have also mentioned, typically these tools are gonna be deployed in a software service. So it's going to be a monthly recurring fee as it relates to those users.

Awesome. Thank you. It looks like that's all the questions we have for today.

Okay. Well, I want to thank everyone for the, for the time here today. I believe my information is shared. So if there are any additional questions that you have, or would like to see some additional case studies, you can certainly do that. You can also go out to the DATABASICS website, which is, www.data-basics.com. We certainly have some have some case studies out there, and some additional details as far as how not for profits or leveraging time and expense tools. But again, I want to thank everyone for their time here today and, and have a nice, nice rest of the day.

Thank you. Chris, this workshop has come to a close. All materials from recordings will be available on our website. Thank you so much for participating in from virtual to events and more. The top trends in time and expense management and what nonprofits need to know in 2021. Again, thank you, Chris, for educating our community.

Thank you.