Engineers know that a flexible foundation is key to building earthquake-resistant structures. Today’s business environment has become like an earthquake zone – prone to tremors of disruptive competition and economic uncertainty. To protect your organization, you need to follow the guidance of the engineers and make sure your administrative systems have the flexibility to support you through the inevitable aftershocks.
Employee time tracking and expense reporting systems are foundational for most organizations. Your people have to be paid and reimbursed. In many cases, accurate, detailed billings need to go out. Leave must be managed, projects monitored, compliance with rules and regulations ensured—the list goes on. If new circumstances require changes, systems that cannot readily accommodate those changes can slow down your organization’s response. And as never before, time is of the essence.
If new circumstances require changes, systems that cannot readily accommodate those changes can slow down your organization’s response.
Here are two recent examples, one involving time tracking and the other, expense reporting.
Time Tracking
A DATABASICS’ customer who bills employee time got an unwelcome request. One of his customers no longer wanted invoices with cumulative hours by day. Instead, he wanted to see time-in/time-out. Was he going to have to go back to paper? With DATABASICS Time, he has the option to record time either way. Problem solved—before it became a problem!
Expense Reporting
In another instance (actually, there have been a great many like this one), a customer’s expense reporting changed, literally overnight, from a travel-spend-tracking tool to a home-office-provisioning system. Suddenly, there were new approvers, from IT to HR, and a host of new business rules to conceptualize and implement. More concerning was a new need for purchase authorizations. The customer could not have employees going out and buying whatever they thought they might need—lamps, carpets, their own choice of security software. DATABASICS Expense—along with our Support Team—took these urgent requirements in stride. As a result, the customer’s expense reporting system has been an indispensable catalyst in enabling his organization’s transition to a remote employee model.
When DATABASICS Time & Expense is implemented as a single system, customer reaction time to new challenges is drastically reduced. The user experience across the two applications is the same. This speeds deployment and eliminates the distraction and confusion of stylistic discrepancies between products of different vendors. With respect to administration, new project codes are added once instead of twice, and reconciliation of data shared between time and expense becomes unnecessary. Additionally, there is no longer a need to maintain redundant interfaces. If improving organizational responsiveness is a goal, time tracking and expense reporting are clearly Better Together.
In unstable times such as these, flexibility may be the greatest strength. Make sure your systems like time tracking and expense reporting can support your requirements even when things get a little shaky.