Top 4 Excuses for Not Moving Time and Expense Reporting to the Cloud

It’s 2016 and the shift to the cloud is accelerating! Time tracking and expense reporting are ideal candidates to move to the cloud if you are still running them in-house. The pay-off for moving them to the cloud is impressive and the time and effort may be a lot less than you think.

If your organization says they’re not ready yet, chances are you’re hearing at least one of these excuses:

1. We’re Too Busy: “We don’t have the resources to take on this project” You may be surprised at how little you really need to do. Look to your vendor (for example, us) to fill-in any resource gaps. Essentially all you should have to do is tell your vendor what is important to you, and when the time comes, review the system to make sure it’s doing what was intended. Leave the heavy-lifting to someone who does this kind of thing for a living.

2. It’s Too Expensive: “We looked at this before and it just costs too much.” Well, times have changed. With a cloud-based deployment, the upfront costs are minimal. The “pay-as-you-go” model of cloud computing can give you all the benefits of automation without the budgetary hit companies used to have to absorb. Think of the cost today as more like a friendly tap than a knock-out blow.

3. We’ve Got Bigger Problems: “The process seems to work okay right now.” You definitely don’t want to wait until Time Tracking and Expense Reporting move up in the problem queue. For instance, you may not know that if your expense system is judged by the IRS to be non-qualified, expenses by your employees may be classified as employee income no matter how obvious it is that the transactions were business expenses. This even applies to charges on a corporate card where there was no reimbursement (yes, OMG!). As for time, you don’t even want to think about what would happen if there was a bug in your leave balance calculations. And what if your labor billings were based on miscalculated hours or if you didn’t do overtime correctly?

4. It’s Too Difficult: “We aren’t very technology savvy” or “We know we have problems, but people here are used to our systems” Good technology reduces the need for “savvy,” it doesn’t increase it. And DATABASICS Time and Expense products are very good technology. Basically, the technical side is our issue. That is perhaps the leading reason why so many organizations are moving their applications to the cloud. They want to focus on their core business and stop diverting time, effort, and capital to computer systems maintenance. As for people’s resistance to change, when they see how fast and easy the new system is compared to what they have been enduring, you might even see a few smiles.