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How can Chatter help the SMB?

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:30:00 GMT

Chatter is the latest in social media for the enterprise from salesforce.com. It is now generally available as of June 22, 2010. When people talk about the benefits of chatter it is generally in the context of a larger enterprise; Phrases like 'break down silos', 'increase communication', 'foster collaboration' are frequently heard. What is not as often discussed is the SMB market. At first blush you may think, why would I use chatter when I can just talk to the person beside me?

I can think of some good uses of Chatter for an SMB.

For distributed teams, even if they are small, it aids communication.
Updates on important accounts or deals
Collaboration on documents
Changes to important documents
Changes in company policies
Notification that an Expense report has been denied or re-imbursed

Some important considerations:

Chatter can be used to replace email provided all intended recipients are logged into salesforce.com on a regular basis. If it is an urgent issue it does not help if your users do not log in until the next day.
Don't use 'chats' in addition to email. People get frustrated with getting the same message via different communication avenues. Most don't have time to read things once, never mind multiple times.
You may need to define the 'chat-iquette' for your company. Some have found that users are 'self policing'. Someone told me of a co-worker responding to an inappropriate status update with 'facebook contacted us about a missing update'. A humorous way to get the point across without being heavy handed.
Like any new application there will be some learning curves.

Please share your experiences with Chatter

If you are not using Chatter, do you plan to?
If you are using Chatter did you have to defines 'rules of engagement' or were people well behaved?
Did most of your users intuitively know what to do?
Are you seeing any correlation between age and usage?
What other uses can you think of?

I spend how much time in meetings?

Tue, 11 May 2010 18:44:00 GMT

Everyone I know has had the experience of leaving work at the end of the day and wondering where the time went. Sometimes it is meetings or phone calls or troubleshooting. If you are not using a time tracking mechanism you may never know.

Time tracking has never been a favorite task of employees. For many jobs it is simple because the types of tasks the employee performs is minimal, think of a cashier at a supermarket. For others it can one of dozens of different tasks. Similar to expense management the difficulty comes in deciding how much detail. I recall a contracting job I had at a bank and in their time tracking system there was a time tracking code for entering time tracking data. Will you use a single code for meetings or differentiate between internal meetings and customer meetings? What will be the smallest increment of time used? As it is with expense management there is some trial and error and adjustments you will make along the way, A good rule of thumb is to base it on what you ultimately want to report on.

Another consideration is what will you do with the data. Implementing a time tracking system, or policy simply to say you have done it makes no sense at all, although I have seen that done. Will it be used for payroll? That is original use of the information (think punch time clocks for hourly workers). Will it be used to determine how much non billable time is being incurred by consultants? Will it be used to keep track of your contractors?

Some other uses of the data might be the following:

What external projects are profitable?
Are we recovering all the hours spent on customer projects?
What do internal projects actually cost?
How much time is spent in meetings?

Also, if you are looking to outsource specific activities it is important to know exactly how much time you are spending on an activity, like customer support, to determine if it really is a cost effective move. Often what is discovered is that large portions of time is spent on indirect activities.

Perhaps the biggest challenge can be reassuring employees that the information is not being collected for punitive or headcount reduction reasons. You can accomplish this by having one of the initial outcomes of instituting a time tracking system be having to attend less meetings!

Can we get more bang for our buck?

Mon, 03 May 2010 18:18:00 GMT

Previous blogs discussed how to get a handle on T&E expenses. Now that you know what you are spending these dollars on, how can you determine if it is money well spent? Equally as important, how you can these expenses be controlled.

If you are tracking expenses by project and activities you should be able to now see the full costs of these projects, not just the salary costs. It may bring to light efforts that really are not as profitable as they may have seemed.

Do you have a lot of expenses for hotel or car rentals? Perhaps you could you benefit by getting corporate contracts with hotels or car rental agencies? This is especially true if you travel often to the same client or location.

Are there expenses that should be restricted either by amount or frequency. This can be handled by a good corporate policy. Often this is a delicate balance between too restrictive and too lax. This generally is adjusted until a happy medium is found.

Are your people doing a lot of traveling for meetings? Does your company have a virtual meeting platform? More and more virtual meetings are taking the place of face to face meetings. Most applications support video, desktop sharing and VOIP. It is just like being there but without the travel hassles!

Do you have a lot of phone expenses? You may benefit from having a corporate cellular plan. Many companies offer free calls within the network. If you have international travel some wireless plans allow for adding international coverage for a week or two. You can give them the start date and end date at the same time so you do not have to remember to remove the option. If you have frequent international travel it may make sense to just sign up for the plan and leave it in place.

Finally, does your company spend too much time reporting, approving and reimbursing these expenses. Estimates have been as high as $50 per expense report. If you do not have an automated process in place there are lots to choose from. Many are web based on a subscription basis. After you have spent the time to understand what your T&E expenses are you can better evaluate the options and choose the one that addresses your particular pain points.

How much are we spending and on what?

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:44:00 GMT

Now that you have identified your expenses you can determine how much you are spending and what you are spending it on. Depending upon what automation, if any you have in place you can leverage the application's reporting capabilities. This process will also help determine what changes to make to how you capture your expense entries.

Here are a few things to look out for.

Are large a large percentage of the expenses in a general category like Travel? Depending upon the amount, it may be appropriate to break it down into sub categories like airfare, train, car rental.
Are you isolating those expenses that may have different tax implications? For example, meals for a consultant while traveling are 50% deductable, while meals while at a conference are 100% deductable.
Are too many expenses falling into the nefarious 'Misc' or 'Other' category. This can be difficult because you must balance the expense of having separate categories for smaller expenses with what value there is in having this information.
Are expenses captured at too granular a level? Similar to having too few categories, is it worth the effort?
Are there some projects (internal or external) that are costing much more than expected. many times when determining the cost of a project, people costs are the main consideration. This can be short sighted.

In general, when analyzing your expenses don't focus only on the high ticket items. In many companies there are controls in place to ensure those expenses are appropriate. However, there may be meaningful savings to be realized by taking a hard look that the expenses that are not under those controls. While the current economic climate is the impetus for this type of analysis, it makes good fiscal sense when times are good as well. In most cases trimming expenses is preferable to trimming headcount.

Look for the next blog for some tips on managing expenses.

Where do we spend our money?

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:42:00 GMT

It is a common question both in personal life and business life. 'Where did the money go?'. The first step is knowledge. You cannot manage what you do not know. For a business, the identification of T&E Expenses is easier if some automated system of collection is in place, but absent that it can be an onerous manual process.

If an automated process is in place, make sure that you are capturing the necessary detail. Do all expenses get entered? Are the expense categories too general (or too specific)? If the users do not enter accurate data because the system it takes too much time then it is not much better than no system at all. You should also keep in mind the level of detail that is necessary from a financial perspective. Are there expense that do not get classified at all (good old petty cash)? Are there expenses that are categorized too broadly (e.g. airfare, taxi, hotel and meals all categorized as 'travel')? Use the reports available in your system an verify that you are capturing all necessary categories.

If an automated process is not in place, you need to ask the same questions but summarizing the expenses and getting totals is a manual process generally done with a spreadsheet.

The next question is if all expenses are being captured? Are there company credit cards that have transactions not reflected in a report? Does everyone enter expense reports?

This is the time make any changes to the classifications and processes to ensure that all T&E expenses are captured and are valid expenses. Even those companies not impacted by Sarbannes Oxley should ensure that these expenses have the necessary audit trail. Another upside for an automated process.

Just for laughs some of the things people have submitted as expenses. Unrestrained Expenses

What is the craziest thing you have seen on an expense report?

Who is watching your expenses?

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:15:00 GMT

In the current economic climate companies are trying to trim costs where ever possible. This may mean reducing headcount, using virtual meetings or limiting participation in conferences or seminars. Many times this means looking at big ticket items as it seems that is the simplest way to make an immediate and meaningful impact, but is it the best? Spending that is done by the employee, generally T&E expenses, comprise one of the largest portions of controllable costs in many companies. Surprisingly most of these same companies exercise little or no control over these expenses. Sometimes there is a no company policy for these expenditures or if there is one adherence is sporadic. Generally, the more manual the process, the less control and oversight is realized. Having a comprehensive picture of what expense are incurred for different projects and activities can also provide vital information on what different business activities really cost and provide the data for determining the more profitable ventures.

T&E expenses can be a large number of transactions of smaller amounts so often these expenses fly under the radar as not have a significant impact. Nothing could be further from the truth. The challenge then is what and where to trim expenses. The old adage of you cannot control what you cannot measure certainly rings true here. The first step is to define a comprehensive process. This should include what expenses can be reimbursed and to what levels, what supporting information is required, the frequency of reporting expenses and how reimbursement occurs among others. The more that the process can be automated the better. There a a delicate balance between the complexity introduced and the degree of conformity. It is better to have everyone supplying the information than having very complex or rigid controls. This is also where automation can help. If the process ensures that all the necessary supporting information is included before it is submitted to a manager for approval the less resistance there will be to using the process. Additionally, time savings will be realized if there are fewer rejected or not approved expenses that are passed between employee and manager.

Once the process is in place you can then Identify the expenses, Manage the expenses and Analyze the expenses. Look for future blogs on each of these topics.

Salesforce Multi-Currency Expense Reports

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 20:39:00 GMT

Salesforce provides foreign currency management. You define the currencies and their decimal places and conversion rate. You need to request explicitly that Salesforce enables the multi-currency feature for your organization. You can enable the Advanced Currency Management yourself, which allows to update the currency rates for a specific date range (minimum: one day). If you want to use dated exchange rates, they are restricted to opportunities, opportunity products, and opportunity reports.

You enter the rates in the format of 1 USD = 0.73 EUR (at the recent peak of the Euro it was 1 USD = 0.66 EUR) - assuming that your organization currency is USD. In the financial press, you often find the inverse rate quoted for the EUR in contrast to other currencies.

Assuming, you created the initial EUR rate with 0.66 (1/0.66=1.52) and updated the dated rate to the recent of 0.73 (1/0.73=1.36) and enter a receipt amount of EUR 100 you will see in the Time & Expense Receipt Amount field "EUR 100.00 (USD 151.29)" whereas in the Expense Amount field will show "135.76". The cause is that Salesforce always uses the (single/base) currency rate for display - the dated rates are only used in Opportunities. Consequently, best practice is to update the base currency rate on a regular bases to minimize questions.

Nevertheless, we always use the dated rate (if defined) for converting the foreign currency amounts. The following table shows the different amount fields

Type	T&E Item		T&E Report
Currency Amount	Receipt Amount	(Foreign) currency amount	T&E Report Amount	Converted to Report Currency
Converted Amount	Expense Amount	Converted to organization currency	Expense Amount	Sum of the Item expense amounts

You would use the Expense Amount fields in Workflow decisions as they are in the (known) organizational currency. In a single currency environment, you still have the amounts above, but the values, e.g., of the Receipt and Expense Amount would be the same.

When creating expense reports, you can decide in which currency you want to create the report. If the report is in the organization currency, you can add expense items of any receipt currency. If you create a foreign currency expense report, you can add only receipt items of the report currency.

You can also update the exchange rates on a report and currency basis. Example would be that you want to use the currency rate from your credit card. Last but not least, you can update the report item expense amount directly. Example here is that you want to enter the exact amount on your credit card statement. Note that in the credit card statement import, the amounts are imported as converted amounts, the original foreign currency receipt amounts are not available in the statement import. You can secure the ability to update currency exchange rates by profile, e.g. allow only managers to update them. You can also report of the actual conversion rate to detect abuse.

The reimbursement of expenses is in the currency of the expense report.

Multi-currency management is always a challenge and we make it as painless as possible in Salesforce.