Bri-anna Ramsden   0:06
Hello and welcome to our latest webinar, how health and community organizations gain better visibility into workforce costs. Thank you everyone for joining. A few quick pieces of housekeeping before we jump into the agenda. We are going to have mics off during the presentation, but we will have a Q&A section at the end if you'd like to ask questions.
Throughout the session, feel free to throw those questions in the chat or Q&A, and we'll address them as we go along or at the end. And then a copy of this recording will be available within five business days.
Today we're going to go over the challenges behind managing workforce costs without visibility, what changes when you have a system that all connects to each other, and we're going to have time for a live demo of SparkRock.
And now time to meet the team. Gary, I'll have you take it away.

Gary Servius   0:59
Hello, everyone. Thank you, Bri. So my name is Gary. I am an account executive at Spark Rock. Been working in this space for over 15 years almost, right? And I'm really excited about today's conversation. Hopefully, I'll get to chat with some of you after the webinar.

Bri-anna Ramsden   1:21
And Aunt Kinley.

Kinley Graham   1:23
Hi, my name is Kinley Graham. I'm the director of pre-sales here at Spark Rock. I've been here for almost 11 years now. I spent five years before that working for a community living organization. So I've been in your shoes and I've been through all of this fun stuff. So I'll be here to talk for a bit and we'll be here to answer some questions at the end if you have anything.
During the presentation, if you have questions, you can also put them in the chat if you want. I'm happy to answer them.

Bri-anna Ramsden   1:51
Anybody?

Wendy Brown   1:53
Thanks. Good afternoon, everyone, or good morning, depending where you are attending from. I'm A pre-sales consultant here at Spark Rock. I've been working with ERP since 2019, so seven years now, but have been helping organizations like yours since 1997.
helping move from paper-based processes to digital experiences. So I look forward to doing your demo today.

Bri-anna Ramsden   2:30
And I'm Bri. I was muted while I started talking. I am the marketing manager here at Spark Rock, and I've worked with nonprofits for about 15 years. So just to get started, I'm going to work on pulling my poll up.
Because we want to hear from you on what your biggest challenges are today with your software.
While Teams is being silly, if you want to throw in the chat, what is the biggest challenge your team faces with workforce costs today? Some of the things we hear is limited visibility into real-time labor costs.
manual processes like your time sheets, reconciliation, payroll, finance when they don't align.
scheduling complexity, reporting that takes too long, and data accuracy.
See the wheel spinning? It's almost coming up.
Bye, there we go.
This is all anonymous, so we will have no idea what we're saying, but we're curious to see what the numbers are.
Looks like manual processes are coming out on top.
Gary, how do these kind of align these answers with what you see?

Gary Servius   4:57
Sorry, I was on mute over there. It's pretty aligned with what we hear. So when we talk to customers every day, we sit with them, we chat, he's exactly saying the exact same thing. So we see that every single day.

Bri-anna Ramsden   4:59
Yeah.
And now...
Hole #2 should be.
Popping up for you.
How long after processing a payroll can you run your financial reports and data today?
You see it immediately, a few hours, a couple days, a week, or maybe even longer.
Oh my goodness, look at those answers!

Kinley Graham   5:52
Longer than a week. Ouch.

Bri-anna Ramsden   5:56
Oh, if you immediately, that's good. That's always helpful.

Kinley Graham   5:58
And there we go.

Bri-anna Ramsden   6:08
Thank you for sharing. These are two pieces that I'm going to have Gary chat about.
And I will pass it along over to Gary.

Gary Servius   6:17
Awesome, thank you, Bri.
All right, so no matter what you do, labor is the largest expense of any organization. And if you are a nonprofit organization, workforce typically represents roughly 80% of your expenses, right? So it's a very critical investment. And yet, for many organizations,
understanding exactly where that money is going in real time and with the right level of details remain incredibly difficult.
And the way systems, teams, and process structure make that visibility extremely hard to achieve.
So let's start with the challenge itself, right? So non-profit operates in immediately complex environments, right? You are managing multiple funds, source at the same time, right, including grants, program and government funding, each with its own requirements.
But when we focus on the healthcare organization, the community care and the disability support in particular, right, you have to add even more layers to that complexity. At the same time, you are delivering services across different program and location with workforce that operates.
on schedule shift or time sheet and sometimes both, right? And because of this level of complexity, you need to have a very precise understanding of your labour cost. However, the structure behind it all is usually what makes that level of precision extremely difficult to
Achieve.
So the first thing that we need to acknowledge, right, is that there is some sort of almost natural silo that appears in most organizations. And this silo is between, well, you guessed it, right, the finance team and the HR team. So finance and HR really operate as a unified form.
So instead, they work in parallel. And there are very good reason for that, right? Those are both very different teams with very different responsibilities, right? When HR evaluate a new system, the focus is on employee experience, compliance, and talent management. When finance evaluates a system, the focus is on accuracy reporting.
and financial control, right? And the probability for both of those teams to be dissatisfied with their current system at the same time and also needing to change to a new system at the same time really rarely happen, right? So everyone focuses on their own system, making changes and decisions based on the needs of their department, right?
And that makes total sense, but there is a disconnect. And as a result, organization end up with systems that function individually, but not collectively, right? And this is why those silos actually happen naturally and remain very difficult to change.
But this approach is missing the full picture, right? The idea to look at the organization as a whole, because regardless of what your responsibilities are, your organization need to function as a collective, right? And not looking at the bigger picture have consequences that will impact you, your team, and also
your organization every single day.
Then on top of finance and HR, there's also payroll, which is sits somewhere in between, right? In some organization, it reports to finance, in others it reports to HR, right? And sometimes it just stands on its own.
So you can see that there is a trend that explains why organizations end up with fragmented systems, right? HRB, scheduling, finance platform are often selected independently. And sometimes if you're lucky, right, you end up with two different systems and in some scenarios you might end up with four or five different solutions.
But the bottom line is that those systems are really part of a unified strategy.
And because they are not aligned, this is not communicate effectively, even when those two claim to have some integration capabilities and do have some integration capabilities, those are often limited, right? So the data does not flow seamlessly. So instead, it requires intervention of some sort, right, of export, import, adjustment, right?
And the consequences, teams are forced into duplicate work, right? Data must be manually extracted from one system, reformatted and re-enter into another. Reporting is delayed because it depends on reconciliation across multiple source, right? And with every manual touchpoint, the risk of error
Increases.
And finance teams carry a lot of this burden.
And instead of focusing on analysis and strategic decision making, right, to spend a significant amount of time assembling data. For example, right, and there can be situation where payroll data is exported from the system, adjusted to align
with the shadow accounts and then uploaded into the financial system. And at the same time, those payroll figures must be reconciled against time entry or scheduling system to ensure that hours, rate, and allocation are accurate.
On the HR side.
Employee data must also be kept in sync.
Job roles, page rate, and classification, right, need to be correctly reflected in payroll.
Ann, because...
Those systems are not truly integrated, right? The change made in one place do not automatically flow through the others, right? Instead, people are responsible for moving and reconciling data across the system. And this create delays, risk of errors, and make real-time decisions nearly impossible, right?
And the challenge becomes even more complex in an organization that operates with multiple funding sources. Each funder often has different report requirements, different metrics, and even sometimes different year-end.
And without a unified system, right, this requires building custom report manually, pulling data from various systems, and reconciling all these data to ensure accuracy. So the consequences are really real and weigh heavily on your finance, your payroll, and HRT.
Yes.
So, before moving to the next slide, Kinley, let me know if you want to add anything to that.

Kinley Graham   13:18
Yeah, for sure. So, having been a customer and being in your shoes and doing these kind of things, and then helping organizations for the last 10 years, it's allowed me to see an awful lot of examples of exactly what Gary is talking about, and it gets way worse when you have multiple funders when you have...
multiple funders, they could potentially have year ends that are different. So my example is I had a district year end and I had a provincial year end. One was March 31st and one was December 31st. So I would have to make sure all the data was in sync and it was all moving and it was all in place to do reporting. Having those systems separate meant you had to connect multiple systems to one reporting solution in order to.
in order to get your reports out, or you were running reports out of each independent system and then combining them together. I had issues tracking costs at a granular level for that reporting, especially when the ministry came out with person-centered funding, where I had to actually track the time an employee was taking in a location.
right down to the individual they were supporting to report back to the government. There's a lot of manually manipulate, a lot of manual extraction and moving of data that sometimes requires manipulation. And as Gary said, that could result in errors. And when those errors happen, you go back and you're trying to track them down. And it's just.
It's a lot of work to try and figure out where that is. And it's so much time spent. We also had an issue with budgeting. We would want to be able to go into a union negotiation and immediately figure out what would happen if we made a deal with certain requirements. And it would take time to go forecast that out, figure it out, look at your FTEs, do all of your comparison and forecasting.
We also had things with self-service. This was a long time ago, but having people log in to multiple systems to go and get the pay stubs from one, go and get their schedule from somewhere else, find reporting or budget information, having to log into separate systems meant they weren't doing it. So they were always calling me.
and they'd always want to know how much budget do I have or things like that. That time is valuable because you're trying to get so much else done. It's one of those things where the separate systems all over the place eat up even more time than you would ever imagine and contribute to this employee feeling of, oh, I can't bother, oh, it's too hard, oh, it's too many systems, it's too many logins. That's where the unified solution.
really benefits you.
Yeah.
You're muted.

Gary Servius   15:53
Oops, sorry, I didn't realize I was on mute. Thank you, Kinley. All right, so as you understand and from what Kinley just said, right, a system that works for the entire operation is a fully connected, fully integrated system, right? And that's what SparkRock Impact is.
Sparkwork Impact is able to bring together, as you imagine, right, finance, payroll, HR, scheduling, and time entry into a single unified environment.
And with a connected system like SparkProc, right, instead of operating in silo, these functions share data seamlessly and operate from one source of truth. But what does that mean for you, right? So going back to the challenge that we just discussed, right, first.
it eliminates the needs for constant manual intervention. Data no longer have to be exported, we work and we enter across systems.
They all throw directly into finance.
Time entry aligns automatically with payroll. HR data update in real time across the entire system, right? And the result is a significant reduction in the reconciliation work and a much higher level of confidence in the numbers, right?
And this has an immediate impact on reporting.
Today, many organizations, right, maybe one of them, right, rely on complex worker.
In a connected system, that complexities replace and generate like the required report in minutes, like literally in minutes. What used to take hours or even multiple days, right, become a fast and easy process.
Operationally.
This change the day-to-day experience of every team member.
Finance moves from assembling data to analyzing it. Reporting is faster, more accurate, and less dependent on reconciliation.
HR Giann.
gains better visibility into workforce trends, staff costs, and resource allocation.
Operation and managers can see real time labor costs directly to schedules, programs, or location. And finally, leadership has access to timely, reliable information to support decision making.
But the biggest shift is not just operational, it is really strategic, right? That shift moves the organization from reactive reporting to proactive decision making, right? Where the data is not just about reporting the record of the past, but really a tool to actively guide the decisions.

Kinley Graham   18:53
So when I was purchasing this system and I purchased SparkRock as a customer, I put it in place and it was the full suite of products. It was finance, it was HR, payroll, it was scheduler, it was everything. And it created this unified experience. Now,
The lovely benefit to the end users is it's one place to go. It's one place to get everything and allowed me to fully enable self-service to my managers and even my end users. They only had to go to one place to get all the information they needed. It was all there. They could look at their tasks, they could look at their pay stub, their assignment, their schedule.
They could submit their expenses; it was all one place, one easy to use, easy to log in thing that would work on their phone, and it enabled them to get this clear picture, but that was the benefit to them. The benefit to me was that I could schedule a shift at a new location, and on that shift...
I could break down the people being supported and have them costed to the correct GLs, the correct programs, the correct funders. When they worked the shifts, I could process those shifts into payroll. I could pay those people and immediately post to the GL at that granular level. I could refresh my reports minutes after and have up-to-date reporting for.
whatever ministry I needed for CRA or whoever was out there that I had to report to. It made all the difference in the world because all the data was in one place. Again, I mentioned that whole union negotiation thing in budgeting, being able to pull out of 1 system, the cost that you had the current year, what people are paid,
adjust the payroll amount and figure out what the impact was while in the negotiation gave us tons of power when we were talking back and forth about what the impact would be.
It really allows you to take advantage of opportunities very quickly. So when person-centered funding came out, lots of agencies took a long time to adapt because they needed a way to add an admin fee, they needed a way to track the hours, they needed a way to invoice. The systems being tied together made it so I could do that immediately just by adding a dimension.
It included the individual supported and tracking those hours and expenses to that individual. I could run the reports and do all the things from one place. It made an incredible difference, and the data accuracy is always there because the system is flowing through one. There's no manipulation, there's no export of one place and imported into another.
It all flows quickly, efficiently, and allows you to get more done in your day because you're not stuck manipulating data or dealing with lots and lots of questions.

Gary Servius   21:41
All right, so now that you understand what a fully connected system can do for you, and we will also show you, by the way, in a moment in the demo, how the data flow from time entry to payroll and from payroll to finance. But before we get to that demo, I also want to give you a little bit of
Background on Spark, and we are as an organization.
Spark Rock is a Canadian organization that provides solutions to nonprofit organizations all across the US and Canada. And we are currently managing way over $16 billion in finance across our customers. And whether you are a Canadian nonprofit organization or a US nonprofit organization looking for
A financial need solutions or a fully integrated solution, we are able to help.
And you probably understood already from the team of this webinar and the talking point that we have here that we are fairly unique as we are an organization that is 100% focused on nonprofit organization, right? And like most ERP solutions out there that deal with everything and anything, we do not deal with for-profit organizations.
We do not get involved into the commercial side of things, right? So our solution is really purposely designed for the needs of nonprofit organizations.
I realize that I went a bit too far in the slide. There you go, that's the slide I want.
And we actually started in Canada a little over 23 years ago as we identified a gap in the market for non-profit.
health and the human services organization. And back then, it was an underserved market, to say the least. We're very unsophisticated product. And our aim is really to provide nonprofit with better solution that allow you to focus on your mission.
And in order for us to achieve this goal, we've partnered with Microsoft and worked any and with them really from the very beginning.
And when most people think about Microsoft, right, do not think about ERP, but Microsoft has been a huge player in this market for way over 30 years. And of course, over time, right, over the last couple of decades, Microsoft solution evolved, technology innovation, right? And as they grew, as they evolved, right, we grew along with them. And today,
We are built on top of the latest Microsoft solutions, Microsoft Dynamic 365 Business Central. And as you can see from the picture here, our solution sits and lives within the Microsoft Dynamic environment. And as a result, you are benefiting from the entire Microsoft ecosystem, right? All the security, the stability of the Microsoft infrastructure, right?
This is Microsoft Cloud, this is the privacy, this is the features, the interconnectivity within the Microsoft environment, right? With full integration, with Excel, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and so on, right? And of course, now the AI technology with Microsoft Copilot that is embedded in the solution.
But you may wonder, okay, what are you adding to the Microsoft ecosystem? What make the solution so unique?
So, as I mentioned earlier...
We have the unique particularity to be an organization that is laser focused on nonprofit, right? So what we bring to the Microsoft environment is really those layers of capabilities and features made for nonprofit that do not exist in the Microsoft environment.
and actually don't even exist in the vast majority of ERP solution out there, right? Whether we are looking at finance and procurement, HR, payroll, scheduling, time entry, right? All those modules have been thought and designed from the perspective of a non-profit organization. So out of the box,
All those modules were designed to work and connect together to cover the requirement that most healthcare, human services, community living, nonprofit in general would have.
And to go a little bit deeper, right, this slide here actually show you the modules that are available within SparkRock.
So, what you see there in purple?
The module that we have touched the list, right, meaning that they are pretty much the same as what Microsoft initially built.
In the blue, we have actually increased those initial functionality by more than 15%.
meaning that more than half of what those systems are capable of do not exist in Business Central. And finally, the part in yellow is the one that is 100% built by Spark Rock. And those modules do not even exist in Business Central at all.
right? So you can see looking at the finance and procurement on the top, right, we are talking about modules specific to non-profit with the fund accounting, the project and grant accounting, commitment and encumbrances, right, requisition management, financial analysis, and so on.
And then you look at the entire HR, scheduling, time entry, and payroll, and none of this even exists in Business Central either.
And you understand from what we already talked about earlier, right, that it is all one application with one source of true where your data flows seamlessly across the entire system, right? Again, time and tree align automatically with payroll, payroll flow directly into finance, HR bids, HR data bids, sorry, in real time.
Across the entire system, and so on.
And this really offer you a pretty unique ecosystem, specifically designed and optimized for your requirements.
And in order to support you, we have a team of about 140 wonderful, amazing, dedicated employees, right, with a little bit of expertise that you will not find anywhere else.
Those individuals that you see on the screen, right, those are your finance and HR consultant, your customer success manager, your project managers, your support team, right? And they are for the most part coming from nonprofit organization. They work in healthcare, community living, food banks,
specialty care organization, well, you name it, right? They were in your position, just like Kinley, right, doing your job. They understand your challenges. They understand how to solve those, thanks to decade of experience implementing and assisting organizations just like yours. That really make a difference into your success. And finally, I'm just going to end this introduction of our organization.
with the most important of all, our customer. So here on the screen, you just see a very small sample of some of our valuable Canadian customers that have trusted us and have made the choice to partner with us. And hopefully, maybe, right, in the near future, we'll have the pleasure to come to you as one of our customers as well.
Right, so now I'd like us to take a little bit of time so we can actually show you all solution in action. So I'm going to hand it over to Wendy for a demo of what a fully integrated solution could do for you.

Wendy Brown   29:10
Thank you, Gary. Hello again, everyone. So we're going to be kicking off our demo today. We're going to start from the perspective of your employees. As Kinley and Gary mentioned earlier, many
Customers that we work with are coming to us from systems that require those employees to access multiple systems to do different things, get their pay statement, enter time sheets, file an expense claim. What you're going to see from our perspective with the SparkRock solution
It's all contained in one integrated solution on top of the Microsoft ecosystem. So from that employee's perspective, we're then going to enter some time sheets, file some expenses, and then we'll look at the approval process. So now the manager of that employee is going to see those approvals come to their approval
Inbox, they can approve those, and then we'll put on our payroll hat, and we'll go through that end-to-end payroll process, and then from there, we're gonna show you how that flows immediately into the finance ledger.
given them full transparency into all of those transactions, allowing them to run reports and so on. So let me get started.
I'm just going to share my screen.
And somebody on the team, can I get a thumbs up that my screen is being shared? Thank you guys. Perfect. Appreciate that. So as an employee, I'm here, I'm in what we call my Spark Rock. And from the left hand menu, you're going to see that I have a
A whole smorgasbord of menus here to select from, for example, from the employee self-service, they're of course able to update their personal information, so if they've moved or want to get...
their emergency contacts updated, they can make those changes here and they go through an approval process. This employee is able to see exactly the position and assignments they're assigned to. They can see any benefits information, as well as any assigned items that might be part of their position, whether that's
in this case, a swipe card or cell phone or laptop, we make that easy for you to manage. As we continue exploring, your employee is also going to be able to access their pay statements from here. So once their pay has been processed, the pay statements are published up to the employee portal.
and they're able to download those pay statements or print them.
And so when it comes to the pay statement, you have full configurability, able to customize it to your organization or your province's requirements.
Now let's get into some of the good stuff. Let's enter a timesheet. So I'm going to come into my timesheet area, and it's always going to default to the current week, so we can see our current week here. If I had multiple positions, I would be able to choose which position I'm entering my time for.
And you can see that I also have the ability to specify which project, if you will, or which cost center these hours should go against. So, for example, I'm just going to come in here and I've been...
working on a grant project. And so I'm just going to enter my hours into the data entry screen that we see here, and I would save that. If I happen to actually work any overtime hours, I would, on the day that I actually worked the overtime hours,
I would enter that detail.
So once your time has been entered, and I can come back to this and continue working on this, but once I'm ready, I would select the lines that I want to send off for approval. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to click on Submit. Oh, and
There you can see that this particular employee is only allowed, we got an alert in regards to the number of hours per day. So it gives you instant feedback based upon this employee's position. So we'll come back to this as we move through this. Let's now move on.
to the expense claim. So if an employee had some out-of-pocket expenses and they needed to get reimbursed for that, they would do that here through the expenses. So again, typically we see in other solutions, this requires a whole other
solution for users on systems other than SparkRock. And so in this case, I have my accommodation. So let's say this is going to be my hotel. It was $190. It's telling me that an attachment is required. So I'm going to go ahead and
Upload that attachment.
And the expense type here is actually helps you control what the employee is able to choose for coding this expense. So you can see that I chose accommodation. So it's automatically defaulted to the appropriate GL for this expense type.
And then I'm able to further define this for using an account set, so this defining any special projects or dimensions that this expense might be applicable to. So I'm just going to go ahead and save this expense and finish attaching my attachment. We'll save this.
And we could continue adding additional expenses. For the purpose of this demo, I'm just going to go ahead and make a new claim with this one expense item here. And so when we submit the claim, I could have selected multiple expenses. In this case, I have the one.
We have different types, so this is maybe going to be a conference travel that I have needed the hotel for. I can have additional comments on that. And then once I've completed all the required information, I would be able to submit
this expense claim. And now that's going to go off for approval, just like my time sheet did. And now as we continue down, you're going to see in this self-service area, if I was a manager, I would have manager tasks, be able to see my team and
approve things. There is also the ability for scheduling. And so employees can bid on shifts, confirm shifts they've worked. And if I was a manager, I could approve as well. So let's go take a look now at what is happening from the manager's perspective.
So I'm just going to minimize this.
I'm going to bring over, put on my manager hat. And so what you're going to see here is I'm now currently logged in to the SparkRock back office. Here in my universal inbox under request to approve, we can see we have expense claims waiting for me as well as time sheet entries.
And so I'm able to, from this universal inbox, review and approve all of these. So I'm going to go ahead and approve the expense claim and any time sheet entries as well, I can open the record. And so you'll notice when you're approving that you have the ability
to also not approve, so not everything gets approved. I might reject it or I might delegate this to a different user.
So with that time approved, let's go and take a look at this from the payrolls perspective. So I'm going to put on my payroll hat and I'm going to come to what we call the compensation journal. And so you're able to segment your employees into different groups. In this demo, I have them
Segmented into hourly, salary, or scheduled. So, let's take a look at our hourly, and within that I can have different templates to work with. In this example, I'm going to work with my time sheets, and so this is going to default to the current pay cycle.
which right now is April 19th to May 2nd. If I wanted to select a different pay cycle, I could just select which pay cycle I want to work with. And now from here, simply what I will do is choose the Load Lines option.
And so when you're loading the lines, we have the ability for you to be very granular in selecting which employees you want to pay at this time. And so this can include the ability to filter by specific groups or even positions. And so I'm just going to work with my rec attendants
This demo perspective, and we can follow along.
with our time sheet entries. So here we have our time sheet entries. It's shown to us by each day, how many hours for each day, what is the daily rate, any multiplier. So where we have any overtime, we can see that the multiplier is, in this case, 1 1/2.
And so another tool that our customers like to use is the ability to actually compare this pay to previous pays. And so it's going to look at their regular earnings as well as overtime and look at any previous amounts and what the amount difference might be.
Okay, so this allows you to do that kind of sanity check on that, ensuring that nobody's, you know, going to be overpaid or underpaid. So what I'm going to do from here is I'm going to go ahead and send this over to payroll.
So send to payroll and when I send a payroll, I'm going to create a new payroll batch. So we're going to go ahead and do that. And when creating that batch, I am able to use some additional filters here.
And I'm just going to click on OK. And so this is going to create this batch for us.
Okay, we'll get a message. We can see that this payroll batch has been created. It's asking me, do we want to open it now? So let's go ahead. We'll go yes, and we can open this. You'll also see on the dashboard, we have a card on your dashboard for all open payroll batches.
And so as we're looking at this batch, we're going to see a summary on the right. So it's going to give us exactly all of the details, including any overtime or sick pay, garnishments, et cetera. And so from here, the steps are very simply, I'm going to
prepare the electronic payments. So this is creating my EFT file. So that's what's going to be sent over to the bank for this pay. And I'm also going to create my check, my pay statements. And so those can be email or print. So we'll just go ahead with print here.
And so for every employee within this batch, it will create the pay statement for them.
And that is what is also published up onto the employee self-service. So now from here, I'm just going to go ahead and post our batch. And there's various reports that can be run during this process as well. So let's go ahead and post this.
Okay, so now that that batch has been posted, we'll see here in the compensation journal the status has also changed to processed. And so I'm going to go ahead and post this compensation journal.
All right, so that's it. The payroll is done, and if we take a look at our payroll ledger entries, for example, we are able to drill down into any one of these. So, for example, I'm going to come into what we call navigate, and this is going to show...
All of the GL and ledger entries that have been created with this pay run, so, for example, we can see the GL entry. There's 120 entries, and if I want to drill down on those, I'm just going to click through to the number of entries here.
And it's going to actually show me all of the general ledger entries, including, as we scroll to the right, this can drill right down to your different projects and so on. And so, in fact, if I wanted to do a summary on this or a summary report, I could do that.
Or I could even drill right down to that GL. So here, the GL is our salaries expense. On the right, we actually have all of the detail, including our budget, the actuals, how much of our budget is available, and continue to
drill down and report on this. So at this point, we can see we have all of the detail, including any earnings, as well as the departments or GLs or programs that this would be
Four, and if I wanted to do a summary for, let's say, for example, I want to analyze this, and I'm just going to go ahead and say summary.
Total by program.
So this is using the included Copilot AI tool that allows you to create reports by just using natural language. You don't need to have extensive Excel experience.
So it essentially has created this pivot table for me just by using natural language. And if I wanted to expand this at all, I could do so, or I could continue building out this report and if I wanted any additional details on that.
So let's just come out of here now.
And I'm going to come back to our main dashboard page. And so again, as we're looking at this payroll ledger entries, I can generate reports from here as well. If I wanted to analyze this list, again, maybe I want a summary total by
department. Or I could even have it give me summaries by department by month or by quarter, for example. And so here we can see our summaries by department in this case.
Now let's take a look at that actual employee. So if we were to drill into the employee that we just did the timesheet for and so on. So here we have our employee, we have Jasmine Paula. And within the employee record,
you're going to see that we can get right to their compensation details. So for this employee, I could come to the compensation ledger. So this is going to show all of their earnings over time. And again, as we scroll to the right, we're going to see all the detail around any
special projects or other dimensions that they may have been recorded against. Now, what else you can do from here as we look at this and we think about the other related details, is we can get right down to their expenses as well. So we had just submitted some expenses for this employee.
We are able to see from those expenses as we look at this employee, we can see all payments that have been sent to this employee as reimbursement. So really reducing that barrier between HR and finance.
I mentioned that when you create a new employee and you assign them a position, oops, sorry, when you assign them a position, that's all based upon the position control. And so within the position control record,
Let me just find the one that we're working with here today. Within this position control record, this is where all of the attributes are defined that are going to drive their experience. So for example, who do they report to? So what position code do they report to?
In this position, what's my budgeted FTE? What's my active FTE? And being able to drill down to that directly from that position record. You're also going to be able to specify what the onboarding tasks
should be for employees in this position. And so, for example, if we look at the HR tasks, so when a new employee is hired into this position, these are the five tasks that are going to be either assigned to HR, their manager, or directly to the employee. And in that employee self-service, they have access to these tasks.
and when they would be due. Similarly, we saw on that employee self-service that they had received some things when they onboarded the swipe card, for example. So here, right at the position record, we're able to define
what miscellaneous items this employee should be assigned when they are hired. And so whether that's a laptop, a cell phone, or in this case, a swipe card.
All right, so this was a very high level quick overview of the experience from the employee's perspective, how they can, in one system, manage their payroll activities, entering time sheets, getting their pay statement,
entering absences, but also any financial responsibilities like submitting expenses, or if they are privileged to do so, they can also kick off purchasing processes directly from that employee self-service portal as well.
Then we moved over to the admin side. We saw in the universal inbox, everything for approval is coming to me in one area. I don't have some approvals coming by email, other approvals coming to another third-party application. Everything is contained.
within the SparkRock ecosystem. And then once those are approved, we saw how the payroll person can create the compensation ledger. They can compare it to previous pay runs to ensure that there's consistency in that pay. And then they send that
and create a batch for the payroll register, which is when you create your EFTs, you create your pay statements, and then post it. Once it's posted, it's tied directly to the GL. Your finance team has full transparency,
and are able to report on that. And so with that, I will hand it back to Gary and the team to wrap up. And of course, we can take any questions.

Gary Servius   52:01
Thank you, Wendy.
So with the time that we have left, we go to Q&A, see if you have any questions for us.

Bri-anna Ramsden   52:12
We did have one that Kinley was helping answer. So I think we should help address this for the whole webinar. So for after the demo, how can one turn better cost visibility into actual operational agility when we're often locked into multi-year funding that doesn't account for the labor market, staff and consultant?
Calendar spikes. Kinley want to go into that?

Kinley Graham   52:34
Yeah, it helps in a bunch of ways. My answer in the Q&A was...
was kind of quick. When you go and look at the situation, the benefit of the cost visibility isn't directly tied to those multi-year funding agreements. Those variances are quite difficult. I did find the cost granularity allowed me to see when those issues were going to crop up far sooner.
I could see like a string of sick calls at a certain time of the year and the impact on my budget, doing the budget to actual comparison. So then I could try to save money elsewhere, reducing staffing overnight, reducing staffing on key days for key things we were doing to try and balance out the budget.
The big flexibility that it adds, I found, the biggest time was at year end. My March 31st year end, I would get a last minute call from the ministry to say, you know, I had $30,000 to spend on a roof, but my roof was $60,000. I would have to get right to the last minute to see if I had the extra $30,000 available to spend both combined to go
and pay for that. The cost visibility and the timeliness of the data allowed me to make those decisions far easier. There's lots of things where it benefited. Another one was, as funny as it sounds, was on groceries for the group homes or on supplies, seeing if particular staff members who were there on certain days, their POs ended up
with less value for the money that they had and things like that. So the cost granularity and having it in one system, it just let me see a lot more detail, a lot quicker and a lot easier without having to connect a lot of different things.

Bri-anna Ramsden   54:23
Anyone else has any questions, feel free to add them into the chat. While we have a few minutes, Gary, how can they reach out to you if they have any more questions, want a demo?

Gary Servius   54:34
Yeah, so first let me say that I hope that this webinar was very insightful in showing how a connected system can help you. I hope that he told you to think about your own processes and what you can do, what need to be improved on your end.
If you do have questions or need more information or need require some clarification, please feel free to reach out. So you can reach out to me directly. My email is gary.serious at sparkrock.com. I'm going to add it to you on the chat so you don't need to take note of that. But once again, Gary.
dot Servius at Sparker.com. I will be very happy to chat with you and discuss with you.
There you go, so I just add it to the chat.

Kinley Graham   55:42
The.

Gary Servius   55:44
So I see those questions so far. Again, if you like me and you know those questions come to you after the fact, don't hesitate to reach out to us and we'll be here to help.

Bri-anna Ramsden   55:56
Thank you, Gary, Wendy, and Kinley. Another great session today. And feel free to reach out to Gary, or you can always visit us on our website, www..sparkrock.com. Thank you, everyone, and have a great day.

Gary Servius   56:11
Thank you.

Wendy Brown   56:12
Thank you. Bye now.

Kinley Graham   56:12
Thanks. Bye.