Bri-anna Ramsden 0:10

Welcome everyone!

Meg Wilson 0:10

Yes, welcome. We've got a big crowd today. Super excited about this. So welcome to our Spark Rock Inside the Innovation Loop Customer Led Innovation in Spark Rock Ed webinar. We've got, as I mentioned, a big group, a combination of.

Customers and some prospects that are interested in looking at Sparkrock's solution and what we're doing on the innovation side. So we really appreciate you spending the next hour with us. I'm gonna keep things moving quickly because I know you really want to get to the key people that are gonna talk about what we've done and where we're going.

So quick overview on the agenda and then I'll just talk about a couple of housekeeping items. So we'll do some quick introductions and we're going to then hand it over to Brooks, who's going to speak to what we've done in the last year. What are some of the key features we've launched now?

This.

And everything, but these are the key features that will resonate to all our different customers across the country. We're then going to hand it over to Abby, who's going to talk about our product road map, where we're going. And then we've got a really exciting case management prototype that Wendy's going to present and we'll finish off with.

Some information around customer success that Brooks is going to lead you through in order to get to information that can be helpful for you.

So I've quickly mentioned everybody's names, but just to help you, we're on camera here. This is the team that's going to be presenting today. They'll each introduce themselves as they get into their respective section of this presentation.

So many of you know us, some of you don't. So just as a quick overview, you know across Canada, Spark Rock supports core K12 operations at a very meaningful scale from finance, payroll to HR and and then we also have.

A school cash solution that as many of you know, we acquired within the last year and so we're investing in that as well and super excited about what that's going to mean for our customers and where we're going with our whole Sparkrock ecosystem.

Again, we have customers across the country. Some of them I know are on this slide today, but very, very diverse requirements in terms of what each of you may need from a province to province perspective in terms of reporting and some very specific requirements. And I know Brooks is going to cover that today in terms of what.

What we've delivered for some of these specific customers and as I mentioned, we've got a whole suite of products now across our Sparkrock Ed solutions. So we've got our finance, our payroll, we've got the My Sparkrock.

Which is a really useful portal for both the finance side and the payroll side. With the acquisition of School Day, we've got this very fantastic Sparkrock pay solution. Many of our customers have been looking for alternatives for school cash, so we're getting great response to that and also related to that.

Is some really strong forms management to help manage things like signing up, making sure you've got the proper authority for students that are attending events. And all of this gets to leverage the investments we're making in AI and the investments that Microsoft has made from a copilot perspective and as we progress, you're gonna.

To see more and more of those tools available to help your experience with gathering information and getting to where you need to go quickly. And then last but not least, we have many clients that are also using our SIS solution with the family portal and the teacher portal.

So super high level for those who aren't familiar with Spark Rock. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to our president, Randy, who's going to speak before we get into the actual presentation portion. Randy.

Randy Lenaghan 4:20

All right. Thanks. Thanks, Meg. I did want to take just a couple minutes and and let everyone know that, I mean over the past year we've made substantial investment in our platform, right. And we continue to grow. We we bought a payments solution earlier in 2025. So we continue to grow both.

Organically and inorganically and I'm proud of what our team has done and the investment we've made in our platform. But that being said, right, new capabilities are great, but making sure that our existing customers realize the value and kind of we make sure that.

We're not just adding new capability, but we're ensuring that we make the product that we have today work the most efficiently, the most efficient way that we can and we want to make sure that our, our current customers and hopefully our future customers realize the value that we promised.

Right. We're focusing on listening better, we're focusing on prioritizing better and we're we're focusing on making our commitments and realizing and making sure that we estimate the time that we can provide the capability to you. And so it's important for us to to to to.

Worked with each of our customers and hopefully our prospects right to ensure that we're delivering the maximum value that we can for our solutions, right. So today is about the focus for today is about looking back over the 12 months because we think we've made some great progress and like I said.

We have to make more, but we've made some great progress. We want to let you know what that looks like. In addition, we want to kind of take a small look forward and look at the road map, look at our priorities and look at some new capabilities that we're thinking of delivering. So we want to give you that view. We want to talk about how we support you.

Going forward. But the most important thing here is for you to understand that we're not done, right? We have a lot more to do and we wanna work with our customers and our innovation is really driven by all of you, right? And the one most important thing for me is we get your feedback, right?

Listening mechanism is critical to our success and making sure that we get your feedback not just from this presentation, but from your experience with us, both our prospects and how we're engaging with you, but also as important our current customers. We cannot grow without our current customers being happy.

And we want to make sure that we're doing everything we can to ensure that happens. With that, hopefully that resonates with many of you. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Brooks to kind of take a look back over the last 12 months.

Brooks Duncan 7:12

All right. Thank you so much, Randy. All right, I've taken control. And so Abhinav is going to be taking us through where we're looking to go over the next 12 months. But like Randy said, we thought it'd be useful to kind of look back at what was released in 2025 and.

Pretty much everything I'm about to go through is coming from customer situations, things, customers request, or just ways we can make life better. And so we looked through and we did.

76 maintenance releases. So those are regular releases which are fixes, but also we put in new features. There were three major releases for Spark Rock Finance. These are generally tied in with Microsoft's Business Central platform updates and from that there were 86 new features released.

Through Spark Rock Finance, Spark Rock at HRP. Now I'm not going to take you through all 86 of those. What we thought we would do is just pull out some of those highlights that Randy and Meg were mentioning and just give you a taste of what was released in 2025.

So the kind of themes for the things we are working on over the year were first of all streamlining workflows. So if something is taking five clicks, can we make it 3? If something's taking three steps, could you do it in one? Are there bottlenecks where we're noticing that customers are running into and is there?

Way we can kind of like unclear those bottlenecks so they don't happen. So that's number one. Number two is about decision support and insight. So these systems, you know, it's Sparkbox Finance and HRP have all this data. Is there a way that we can?

Surface that and allow you to make better decisions. If you have a workflow where you're taking a bunch of information, exporting it to Excel, building pivot tables and stuff like that, can you do all that in the tool so that you don't have to be exporting CSV around and that type of thing?

And using as much as possible conversational AI when appropriate to get the answers that you need. So those are kind of like the main focuses over the year. So let's start with the first feature I want to highlight. This is from Spark Rock Finance and this is called Allocation Accounts.

And this is something that is again all about speeding up workflow. So if you have a situation where you have revenue or maybe an expense and you need to split it up between different organization units, departments, whatever the split is, allocation accounts allow you to do that automatically.

And so you can set it up so that it's fixed percentages. So I want X percentage to go here, Y percentage to go here, Z percentage to go here. So you can do that on a regular basis or you can do variable allocations. So it splits it based on changing values. So it could be a bank account amount, it could be.

The activity in a GL account or it could even be non financial information as well. And this all supports Spark rock's account sets just to make things a lot more efficient. Now I mentioned non financial information so you might be wondering what I'm talking about there and this is another new feature that was added to Spark rock finance in.

This is statistical accounts, so this allows you to set up and track non financial data. So it could be number of employees, it could be number of students, it could be square footage of buildings, it could be energy use, whatever it is that you want to track, you can track it in Sparkbox.

Finance.

You can report off it in Spark Rock Finance. You can add it to existing reports, but you can also tie it with those allocation accounts that I was talking about before. So if you had expenses that you wanted to distribute based on the number of students in different schools or different, you know, square footage based on buildings, maybe you want to distribute the.

Or something or the electricity or something. You can set all that up in SparkRocket Finance. And again, these statistical accounts support account sets. Another productivity enhancement that was made is making working with documents and specifically backups to things like purchase orders and that type of thing.

More efficient. So before you had to get a number of clicks to even get to the part where you attach backup, well now it's it's right there. Before you had to attach backup, attach documents one by one. Now you can just drag in a group of files or a group or even an entire folder.

And it will attach it right to the record in Sparkbox Finance. You can also preview attachments right in the tool. So before, if you wanted to view that backup, you had to download it to your computer, open up the PDF in your browser. Now you can view it. You can just click on it and view it.

Right there on the screen, so you don't have to go through all that rigmarole, but of course if you want to download it, you can still do that as well.

The next addition is related to organizations who do expense claims. So.

You can do expense claims in Spark Rock Finance. You can do expense expense claims in my Spark Rock which is our employee and manager of self-service portal and the the way that you've always been able to get in from track information is through comment fields or miscellaneous fields you could you could write.

Hey, this is the person I was traveling with. This is where I went. You know, all that type of thing. Well, now we've added the ability for you to define custom fields so you can do it in a more structured way. So if you needed to track, hey, this person is traveling with family or traveling with other employees or if they are going from.

From this place to that place, you can set up custom fields either text based, date based, number based or have the users pick from a list and set those up to be able so that it's collected information in a more structured way so that you can then report on it if you need to.

And again, these are added to both Spark Rock Finance and My Spark Rock.

Related to expense claims also is the ability to have a mileage claim lookup table. So as we all know, often mileage rates change over time and So what we don't want is for users to have to remember which kilometer rate to use when they're entering expense claims, but also we don't want to have to have administrative.

Go in and change the rates as they change. So now you can define a schedule of dates and rates so that all the user has to do is go in, create their expense claim, select the date and it will automatically bring in the correct rate.

So that's a a big productivity enhancement for people who do distance and mileage based claims.

Moving over to SparkRock at HRP, what we found a lot is that.

Our administrators would be working with employee records and there'd be shift change, there'd be schedules, there'd be shifts, there'd be leaves and these are all in the system. You can you can find all this information by going to the different screens, but this this was developed in in in conjunction with customers.

They said, hey, is there just like one place we can see this information. So we created what's called the employee work calendar and in the admin interface that's right on the employee's record that an administrator can just see the employee's schedule or the the supervisor can see the employee's schedule. But also in employee self-service portal, the employee can see it as well.

So it just brings all this information together and makes it a lot easier. Another productivity enhancement for approvers is instant absence notifications. So what that is, is what we found is that when somebody would go in and request an absence, it would go to the supervisor.

15:04

Yes.

Brooks Duncan 15:15

The supervisor would have to check the their list of absence requests and then go in and approve them. Well, now we've we've wanted to remove that approval bottleneck. So now as soon as somebody selects a supervisor, they send their absence notification. The supervisor will receive notifications.

Instantly in the product. If they're in at HRP, they'll see it right there and if not, they'll receive an e-mail as well and you can set up a schedule of, hey, I want to e-mail these supervisors every three days until they respond or whatever number you want. So that that is really made.

Made it faster for employees to get approvals for their requests, but also reducing the follow up emails that would go into these supervisors.

Also related to absence approval requests is we just made the actual approval process a lot more efficient. So we looked at where where people, like I was saying earlier, people would have to do multiple clicks to get into a certain record to approve. We've now made it so you can select a number of records and just.

You know, bang through them, approve, approve, approve, reject, you know, whatever it is. We just made the whole process much more efficient and removed a number of different clicks as as supervisors have to go through these processes because you know, we all have enough to do and anytime we can reduce clicks, maybe it doesn't seem like it saves that much time.

But if you're somebody who is using this tool all the time, these things add up over the course of months and years.

Some some more jurisdictional based enhancements we've made. So we've enhanced our online pay stubs in the employee self-service portal to be more in line with the British Columbia Employment Standards Act. So we have PDF pay stubs, but we have online pay stubs as well and so we've enhanced it.

Now so that the the online pay stubs, if a customer is a British Columbia customer, it will it will make the online pay stub interface more in line with the requirements for the Employment Standards Act.

For Alberta, we've adjusted the adjusted the the payroll to align with Alberta's the the ATRF full-time equivalent methodology. So this has been a a change we've been working through with our Alberta customers to get that in line so that everything's in compliance for Alberta customers.

And as new Alberta customers come online for Manitoba, very similar. We've added Manitoba specific support for TRAF, for HE levy, for division specific pension plans.

We've made it so that if if a customer is a Manitoba customer, all of a sudden this whole interface for Manitoba interface will will become enabled and they can go in and model the appropriate pension deductions and configurations and.

And we're in the process of releasing new reporting for all that. That's actually going to be coming out tomorrow. Skip, spoiler alert, reporting for that. So it must Manitoba customers have what they need to be able to report, to track and report all this stuff.

Moving into some of the copilot AI features that Meg mentioned earlier, one of the nice things about Sparkrop Finance being built and powered by Microsoft Business Central is that we whenever Microsoft makes enhancements.

Our customers are able to take advantage of them. So if you are interested in using AI features and able to use AI features, and if you don't want to or you aren't able to, you can just disable it with two clicks. So this is definitely an optional thing. However, if you do have it enabled.

This opens up the world of, for example, copilot AI chat. So you can open up a copilot interface, you can ask questions on your data, you can say how do I do this? You can say, hey, how much did we pay this certain vendor last quarter and how does that compare to the quarter before? You can just find.

Find out what you need and the information again is all there, but you can just find out what you need without needing to go through all your screens. You can just ask it in a conversational way. And just so you know, a user who is doing this chat asking copilot AI these questions.

They can only ask about data that they have access to in the tool. It's very aware of all your permissions and that that type of thing.

Another great feature that Copilot has added is the Summarize button. So when you're looking at a record in the right-hand column, there's a new Summarize button there. When you select that that button, it will take a look at the record that you're looking at and give you all sorts of insights that you might not even thought to ask.

It will give you all sorts of deep information on this vendor or this customer or this, you know, fixed asset or whatever it is you're looking at in the system. It will give you statistics. If there's numerical statistics you can see there, you can click on the number and it will show you how that number is being made-up.

If you will have further questions about this vendor, things you want it or whatever it is that you're looking at, there's a more info button where it will give you more information and then it opens up a copilot AI window where you can chat about this information that you're looking at and again it just surfaces.

Deep insights in the the information that you have in your system so you don't have to go and make a bunch of Excel pivot tables and that type of thing. And again, this is tailored to the user's role in the system. And the final thing I wanted to share final new enhancement related to this idea of not needing to export things to Excel.

Though you still can if you want to, is analysis mode. Now analysis mode is not new in 2025. This is a feature that's been in Sparkrock Finance for a while. And what that is, is it allows you to take a look anywhere there's a list of data in the system. You can put it into analysis mode, which means you.

You can then slice and dice the data. You can group it, you can sort it, you can, you can.

You can find out the insights that you want. You could also create pivot tables right in Sparklock Finance so you can group it. You can make columns. Everything that you might export to Excel and do you can do right there in the tool and you can save these analysis views and share it with your colleagues or have saved tabs to go through.

And look at your data from different perspectives. Now what's new in 2025 is setting up an analysis mode is easy, but it does take a lot of clicks. Well, now you can use Copilot and just say what you want. Show my vendors by city and by spend or something like that and it will automatically create.

Create that analysis mode for you and then you can just slice and dice from there or keep chatting to tweak it as well. So those are some of the features that we have released in 2025. Like I said, there is over 80 of them, so there's a lot more and we do have release notes pages where you can go through all 86.

if that's something you're interested in. But for now, I will pass it over to my colleague, slash boss, Abhinav, and he'll take you through the roadmap.

Abhinav Gupta 22:52

Thank you so much, Brooks. Hi everyone. My name is Abhi Gupta. I'm the Senior Vice President of Product Engineering and SaaS at Spark Rock. And as Brooks was kind of highlighting, we have delivered quite a few things in the past year. But we also recognize that there's a lot more work that is still in in the progress and.

Needs to be done and I'm thrilled to walk you through our product roadmap that has been shaped based on the feedback, the inputs from our customers. We have kept our ears to the ground and based on the needs of our customers, we have defined essentially 3 key themes.

That address the most urgent needs and reflect the the vision that we have for our K12 administration.

So the three key themes that we have are first, we're focused on connected experiences, deepening the Better Together value proposition that we could can bring to our customers across Spark Rock Finance, Ed HRP and Spark Rock Pay.

Second, we are advancing our K12 excellence, ensuring that we are able to meet and deliver on prevention compliance, driving efficiency and inclusivity across the board. And the third area that we are focused on is we are introducing AI powered insights to help you transform.

The raw data into smart, actionable decisions very quickly and easily.

So diving a bit deeper into connected experiences, it's all about essentially simplified operations. We are prioritizing automated data exchange between different parts of our portfolio and cross product workflows between finance and HRP.

To make your life simpler. So what does that look like in practice? Well, it means unified user provisioning across the products, a seamless payroll GL account sync, employee vendor sync between the products, and the ability to push payroll liabilities directly onto accounts payable.

But we also know that SparkRock doesn't live in vacuum. It lives within an ecosystem of other solutions that you also work with and that's why we are doubling down on seamless third party integrations. We are updating our finance APIs to be able to better talk to your budgeting tools.

And integrating pay directly with you know, SIS solutions and major payment processes such as Chase and Worldline. So those are some of the key investments that will drive the connected experiences for our customers and bring value.

The second key key pillar for our investment is advancing K12 excellence. Our mission is to make our provincial compliance and reporting feel effortless. And so towards that end, we are deepening our support for Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba.

Covering everything from EDAS, BC, Stackpay, ESA, ATRF reports to make the life simpler for our customers. We're also enhancing time and absence management with workflows that are designed for diverse and complex scenarios that you face.

Every day inclusivity is a major focus for us and so towards that end we have improved our French language support for our French school boards to ensure that we deliver a better user experience for all our French speaking customers as well.

And furthermore, we are empowering the managers to act on things like purchase invoices, requisitions directly from within My Spark Rock while simplifying the accounting for school generated funds in Spark Rock Bay, AKA School Day.

So that our clients can meet the Ministry of Education reporting requirements and standards. And then finally, we are going to be releasing some additional reports that help our customers align with modern accounting practices such as detailed trial balance dimensions, D4 Impacted GL reports.

And things of that nature.

And then finally, our third key pillar for investments is a bit of looking towards the future with using AI to power intelligent insights. We already have our Sparky, which is our conversational AI assistant.

Available on our website to make your work day easier and you can think of Sparky as your first line of support. You can ask it simple questions like how do I submit an expense claim and it'll pull up answers directly from the knowledge base.

Now we're essentially going to be enhancing Sparky to pull information directly, not only from our knowledge base, but also from your knowledge base, from the documents that you give it access to in a safe and secure manner so that it simplifies the process of searching for things like, you know, school policy document.

Ministry regulations easily and effectively so that you can get access to information that you need very quickly. But it goes much deeper than just help. For finance team, we are going to be enhancing Sparky to offer financial analysis.

And decision support so that you can actually do things like, you know, asking it to summarize your quarter's performance or check your current spend against for STEM programs against the budgets and get an answer in literally a matter of seconds. This would actually reduce a lot of operational overhead that you typically end up with.

You know, taking data out and doing some analysis on your own to be done by AI for you. We're even breaking in predictive budgeting capabilities where you can run what if simulations to see how a 5% increase in enrollment may impact your overall headcount and expenses.

For the next year and for HR, you're going to be automating and query responses so that your team doesn't have to spend hours answering the same questions for vacation policies and they can go to Sparky. Your employees can go to Sparky and get the answer and giving your HR.

All the bandwidth to focus on, you know, important things such as employees themselves.

So you know, seeing is actually believing. So I'd like to give you a bit of a sneak preview of what we are working on. So as you can see with Sparky, you can log in with your credentials. You're going to be taken to this portal where it introduces your itself. You can ask a question like how do I submit my expenses?

Based on our knowledge base, it will find out the right answer for you and show you the right steps to do that. But that's where we are enhancing Sparky to also look into information that is available in your knowledge base. So you know how do I become a principal as an example could be another question that can be answered based on documents that are in your.

And with that, Sparky is able to pull together all the right information, show you the right steps to get to that information as well. And this is essentially bringing together the information that lives in your realm in a very safe and secure manner to your employees alongside.

The information that lives in our knowledge bases together, and this is just a bit of a quick sneak preview of, you know, the things that are yet to come.

And well, everything that I've shared today is also available on our public roadmap. We update this monthly and provide a clear quarterly view of our deliverables for the entire year ahead and we're committed to bringing this transparency and to building the tools that you.

need to succeed. And you know thank you so much for your partnership thus far and look forward to your continued partnership. So with that, I will hand it over to Wendy.

Wendy Brown 30:58

Thank you, Abby. Let me just take control of that here.

Perfect. All right. Well, good afternoon, everyone. I'm a pre-sales consultant at Spark Rock. For those who have not met me before, what that means is that I get the privilege of traveling across the country, not always in person, but sometimes.

Remotely and showcasing our product. And during that process, of course, we come across situations where we find gaps in our product. So specifically today, what I want to share with you is a prototype that we're working on.

For a new features in the Assembly HRP solution that will help our customers with managing different types of cases. And so I'm focused on this slide here and I think this really encapsulates the problem really well is that our customers need.

To be able to track cases, whether that's disability claims, attendant support incidents or grievances or really any other type, other user defined case type. And so in the past, so so for some of those unique cases we.

Would partner with integration partners to help our customers achieve those goals. But with the ongoing requests, not only in person but through RFP processes, we have taken upon ourselves to tackle this.

I looking at the attendance list, I I saw that there are some people that we've already talked to about this. So as a prototype, we've been sharing what we're working on and and thinking about developing to gather feedback before it even gets into the developer's hands.

But ultimately, the goal in this new feature set for the HRP solution would allow you to more efficiently manage these use cases. So whether that's identifying attendance trends and putting employees on an attendance.

Support program or whether that's managing that disability claim and submitting those reports up to your Worksafe organization in your jurisdiction, improving reporting and insights, but.

Overall improving your employee Wellness. And So what I want to do for the next few minutes or so is share with you the prototype that we've put together and have been talking with customers across the country about. So let me just share.

My application here.

Oops, let me get signed in. So can I just have a thumbs up Meg that my my screen is being shared?

Meg Wilson 34:17

Yep, you're good.

Wendy Brown 34:17

Perfect. Thank you.

All right, so here I am. I'm logged into our HR payroll solution and so the prototype we have currently labeled employee support and I'm going to just quickly go through some of the main features. So I'm going to start off in the open.

Cases interface. And so here you can see we have multiple cases and I'm able to filter these by different case types. So for example, let's go through a few of these. I'll start with the attendant support.

And so here we can see all the different attendant support cases that have been created and what you're going to see as we go through the way that these cases are created can be manually. So I can manually create a case, but you also could automate this process based upon.

Specific thresholds that are determined by your organization. So as we look at this one here, we can see that the case trigger it was created by our risk monitor, which is teachers. Unverified sick is greater than three in the last 90 days. There's been no exemptions applied.

And when was this created? So this really gives us just a quick visual into why is this case even here in my case management module at all. And as we Scroll down, you're going to see the details of this case. So specifically we can.

See.

Have of course the employee ID and integrated with our HR payroll solution. This would allow you to move right through from the case management module into the employee spotlight. For example, some of the feedback we received from customers in.

In the field is that of course there needs to be tight security and privileges around this. Not everybody should be able to see the cases and the types of cases, but in some cases you might just want awareness and so that's where we see these flags so.

For example, in the employee spotlight for this employee 11256, we can see that this employee specifically has a grievance case, an attendance support case and a disability case. And so let's just come back to our case detail. Here you can see on the case information page we're also.

Also giving a nice visual of their attendance trends or their absences. So how many Fridays have they been absent? And this is looking for the contract year, so it's starting in September of 2025 and looking up to today's current date.

If I wanted to drill down on those absence details, I would just click on View absence details and that would bring me right into all of the absences that have been entered for that specific employee. And so from here we can actually see all the different reasons for these absences and.

If we wanted to review or modify them for any reason, we'd be able to access this detail right from this screen, provided you have the privileges. Of course, you can see right in this absence record we have the backup information. In this case it was a.

Duty. We also are asked to have additional information such as what court location and you can put additional notes in here. So for example, maybe this one should be exempt from that.

ASP program and so we could just mark that as exempt and add additional notes in that way. Now if you are working at changing those absence records on the fly, what you might want to do is then rerun the trigger. So with.

Those changes, does this employee still match the criteria to be part of the level one attendance support and so in which case being able to change this directly from the case and and mark them as an exempt for whatever reason and close.

The case right from here, as we look at other features of this case detail, you're going to see a notes history. So in the notes history, this is where you can track general notes, meeting notes or follow-ups. And when you do have notes, you are able to choose what.

Whether or not to share those with the employees. So you're gonna see that there's an employee self-service component to this as well and so improving that transparency and this is a prompt just to ensure that you really do want to share that information with the employee.

As we Scroll down, you'll also see from the e-mail notification. So we have an automated e-mail notification capability existing in the product today, and so this envisions enhancing that to include a copy of or a record of that communication.

Here in the case detail. So here we can see that this employee, Chris Robinson, received the Attendance Support Program meeting request e-mail and that would have been sent out automatically from the system based upon.

The variables of that absence and how many days they've been absent and the reasons that they've been absent as we look at the documents. So not only will you be able to upload documents, but you could also share those again with that employee into the employee portal.

And the last tab is the resources and this is probably one of my favourites. This this feedback came early on in in our our journey with the case management and a leader.

I believe it was from actually Manitoba, this specific use case. They're really struggling with attendance, teachers attendance. It's a big problem and I'm sure this resonates with you all. But one of the really big things they wanted to do better was to support their employees.

Those managers, those case managers who need to have that first line conversation with the employee. And So what resources could we provide to those managers to help them with those conversations? So you can see your organization probably already has.

These types of resources and I'll show you how we configured this. But essentially for now, for any attendant support case, when the manager is reviewing it, they can also review your policies or any training videos that you may have already curated to help them with those difficult conversations.

So that's attendant support. Let's take a look at a disability case. So looking here at my disability cases, now a disability case is obviously different than an attendant support case. It's going to have different details that are required to be collected. So you can see for example on this disability.

Case. I have a whole additional section where I'm documenting the details about the injuries or the incident information, any witnesses, time loss information or modified duties.

Who's the healthcare provider involved in this case and what is the employer information, including any work hazards that have been identified or corrective actions that have been taken. So this is kind of like a checklist letting you know that you've collected all the details you.

Need to make that submission up to your governing body. So if you have already created a submission, it would be here as an attachment. You could download that PDF. Or if I wanted to create a new submission again, here's our checklist. We have everything.

That's needed to make the submission. Here we can see that I still need to add the hazards and corrective actions. Similarly, you may want to use this to create those actual incident investigations and so when creating those investigations being able to do.

Determine is this a preliminary interim or full investigation, the employer incident details, including the investigation details and having this all.

Backed and supported with some AI tools. So you saw how in the case detail, what we've already entered, you know what happened, where happened. So perhaps there's an opportunity instead of having to rewrite all this information for your report, perhaps there's an opportunity to use the AI tools to.

Help you put that into the report that's needed to be shared out with other interested parties. Similarly, if we take a look at, for example, let's take a look at grievances. So if I take a look at a grievance.

Record. You're gonna see that different types of information again are collected for a grievance record. Now, as I said, the main thing in that first slide is that we should be able to support any case type, not just.

Attendance support, not just grievances, not just disability. And so the the vision here is that as a school district you would be able to configure your own. So here in the configuration templates I'm able to add my own case type.

And so, for example, as we look at one I've already created here, here's my attendant support case type. I'm able to specify whether this is actually an active one. Also, back to that feedback we got about being able to have a flag on the employee record, but not divulge all of the personal.

Details. So this is controlling whether or not that flag would show up on that employee spotlight. So when other users in the system are looking at that employee record, they would just see the flag, but not necessarily all of those personal details.

As we look to the right of that and we talk about that functionality for serving up the right resources to your team at the right time, this is all aligned to the case type. So again, this is an attendance support case type and these are the resources that we've curated for the team and so.

So you're able to add those, whether it's a PDF or a video that maybe even embedded from YouTube or just a URL and you'll see there is a toggle here. So here's the resources and maybe some of those resources are for your employees too, right? So helping them and.

Supporting them during that disability or leave of absence and so being able to share that based upon again the case type which is not just going to be you know a few or or one or two, you will actually be able to add your own case type.

With that, each case type will have different types of statuses. So often we hear when it comes to the attendance support, a status of step one or step two for example. So when you have different statuses, you would be able to specify which.

Case types those statuses belong to, so that when you're moving them through the status workflow, those would be the only options available for your case type. Now similarly we talked about how every case requires different information to be collected, so for example.

If this is an accommodation case type, I've determined here that the type of information that needs to be collected. If I wanted to add an additional field that needs to be part of that data input when an accommodation request is made, being able to have the control yourself.

About what type of data needs to be collected? Is it just general text input? Do you want them to be able to select from a predefined seeded drop down list, date pickers and checkbox and so on? So having said that, what this would look like from an employee's perspective?

If.

Think about the employee's self-service portal here and we go into the employee's view so the employee will be able to see all of their own cases. So as an employee in this demo I've got four open cases and I can drill down into.

One of those and see the details. So anything that's been shared with me, right? So any notes that have been shared with me, any documents that have been shared with me, as well as the resources that are shared with the employee.

As an employee, I should be able to kick off my own requests or submit my own case, whether that's a grievance or accommodation support or and So what is it I'm looking for? Maybe I'm looking for some assistive equipment. Maybe I need.

A special chair and then being able to just send that along through the workflow. I'll just put in some quick notes there. I could even attach documentation at this point, maybe a doctor's note and submit that request for it to go along the workflow.

So now that would be managed in the open cases area as we think about the type of reporting and insights that we want to provide with this. So of course in general, what types of cases are you working with in your school district? So case just.

Subution.

By type or status overview, as we continue down, we're looking at improved insights into those absences and attendance thresholds. So right now today we are already providing daily absences, monthly absences and so on, but how could we enhance?

That and surface some of the reporting is all this reporting is already in the software, but how can we surface it into a more efficient way of consuming it? So for example your absence trends. So as an organization, this is looking at all employees from the beginning of the.

School year to the current date. As we look below that here we have specific employees that are being tracked and so that's based upon what we're calling the monitors. So how do these cases get automatically created? So as we think of these monitors.

Really.

Able to configure different monitors using different elements of the database that we already have a great wealth of details when it comes to the absences and so you would be able to create these triggers. So when you're creating a trigger for example.

Attendance support level one. I've defined it. Do I want to auto create a case? And I'm gonna say yes. What type of case do I want to automatically create? I'm gonna automatically create an attendance support and I have all these different.

Reasons or options thresholds of what would constitute them to be added into the monitor in a case created. So generally speaking, if we want to look at the workflow, we can see that essentially you've got three main.

Or roles that would be using that. This would be your managers. So your HR administrators, of course, they're going to be able to create cases, assign managers, configure the system, view all the data and generate reports.

Then you have your case manager. So that's like maybe the principal or your head of your health and safety team or committee. And so they're of course going to be able to view assigned cases, update case status, add active notes, upload notes.

On documents and submit forms or then the employee submit requests, view their own cases, see shared updates and download documents and access resources. So there's three main ways that a case would be created. One is manual creation, two is the employee self-service and three is.

The risk monitor as we saw there some visions around the dashboard. So how can you really get a pulse on you know the health of your team from a dashboard. So this is just generally showing us our how many cases we've had, what's our resolution time.

Where are they in the workflow? So I've got 61 cases under investigation in this case, 17 cases pending review leading indicators, so allowing you to see identify issues before they could become problems. So for example, I've got 12.

Cases that are missing documentation, what are those cases? And being able to drill down directly to those. So if anybody from our previous conversations has been on the call, you've likely seen some of your ideas added.

It into our prototype and if you would like to also provide some feedback, please reach out to Meg, your customer's customer success manager. We'd love to book a one-on-one with you and get your input into this vision as well.

So with that, I'm going to hand it back to our team to wrap up. I believe that's to you, Brooks.

Brooks Duncan 53:33

Yes, ma'am. Thank you so much. And I, uh, realized I got so excited about all the new features last time that I forgot to introduce it myself. So my name is Burke Duncan. I'm the training manager. I'm back. I'm going to be shifting gears a little bit and talking about supporting customer success.

And what we mean by that is how do you learn how to be successful with Sparkbox products? How do you keep your skills current? And how do you kind of keep on top of what all those new features that we've been talking about? You know, how do you kind of keep on top of it when they're when they're coming out?

And The thing is, some people are readers, right? You you just want, you kind of have a general idea of what's going on. You just want the steps. Like Wendy and I went through this a while ago where there was something we were doing. We kind of generally knew, but we couldn't really, we just didn't have the exact steps. So we went to, we went, we found the steps.

We did put it into practice and we moved on with our day. So sometimes that's all you need. You're more of a reader. Some people prefer to watch. Some people like to have more context, like to see it in action. And so we know some people are in.

Camp as well. The thing is, we love both and we also know that it's context sensitive, right? Sometimes you're more of a reader, sometimes you're more of a watcher. So I'm just going to demonstrate some of the ways we think about this and how we try to love both at the same time. One of them is with our online help. So this is our text.

Space kind of more traditional help. It's more step by step base. It tells you what you need to know, gives you the step and go on with your day. That's at help.sparkrock.com. We also have video tutorials, so for the watchers out there or the times you want a little bit more insight into what's happening.

Happening. Maybe you want to learn how to do seniority service, right? That's not really a step-by-step thing, it's more conceptual. So you might want to watch some videos on it or doing purchase cards or something like that. That's at learn.sparkrock.com and that's the portal to our video tutorials.

One thing we've been experimenting with and really would love your feedback on this, like Wendy said, is more interactive training. So this is for like new users, right? If you had a new employee join the team, you know, sure they need to know how to run payroll, but they also need to know how to work in the system, like what it is.

What you do. So we've developed some more interactive training sessions for Sparkrock Finance and Ed HRP, where you can go in, you can practice doing some of the activities that are in the system in a totally safe way. So this, like I said, we have that for Sparkrock Finance and Sparkrock Ed HRP right now.

So in order to keep on top of what's happening, we have release notes. So these are for all of our products. We develop them. They have screenshots, they they describe what's happening and give you what you need to know about the new features that are coming out. And these are also on that help site help dot spark dot.

Com and our documentation team puts them out with every maintenance release and every major release too. Of course, we also have release videos. Now this is for every release, but when there's a new feature, when there's a change that we feel like it's better for you to see than just read, we create release videos that demonstrate.

The new features shows you what you need to know, what's impacted, how to use it, and we try to keep those as short as possible so that you can just like learn the new thing and get on with your day.

And one thing I'm really excited about is Abby mentioned this earlier. These are both indexed by Sparky, which is our A I which is improving every day. And so the transcripts from the videos and the help content is all brought together. So it's a great starting point if you're wanting to know how to do something.

You can ask Sparky, you can. It will give you the steps as it knows them, but it will also give you a link to that text-based help help article and also give you a link to the video-based tutorial so you can you can get right to what you want to do it in the format that you want to do it in.

So again, whether you're a reader or a watcher, we've got you covered. Both help.sparkrock.com and learn.sparkrock.com have e-mail addresses there. They don't go to a black hole, they go to a real person, AKA me. So if you ever have requests or feedback on the way that you like to learn.

With our products, just let us know and customer requests always go to the top of the pile. And with that, I will pass it back to you. Thanks so much, Mike.

Bri-anna Ramsden 58:16

Hey, you're muted.

Meg Wilson 58:22

Sorry about that. Thank you, Brooks. Thank you, Wendy and Abby. I always learn something new anytime you guys present. Before we wrap up, a couple of important things. As Randy mentioned at the beginning, we want your feedback. We want to hear from you. We're going to be sending out a form to solicit feedback in general.

General, but also anything that you saw in today's webinar, and we're gonna specifically see if anyone is interested in further exploring the prototype with Wendy. Wendy's looking for people, she's looking for feedback, so we're gonna capture that through that form as well. In addition, we're gonna send you.

Recording that should be ready within five business days. So wow, the timing worked out perfectly. Look at that. So thanks everybody. We really appreciate so many of you spending this hour with us. We hope that you have some great takeaways and we really look forward to your feedback.

Randy, anything else you'd like to add before we close off?

Randy Lenaghan 59:24

No, I think you've covered it, Meg. I think thank thanks for everyone for spending the full hour with us. It was, it was great to see.

Meg Wilson 59:34

All right. Well, enjoy the rest of your day, folks.