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16 December 2009: Happy Christmas

This year we’ve opted to move away from the traditional Christmas Card and limit the impact we have on the environment, by designing a more environmentally friendly e-card.

We will be pledging the money we would usually spend on designers, printing and postage to The Lincolnshire And Nottinghamshire Air Ambulance Charitable Trust. Additionally, we have purchased a tree to plant in our gardens at Software Europe head office.

(direct link: http://www.software-europe.co.uk/information/Christmas/expensesChristmasCard.html )

We hope you approve of our efforts to help reduce our carbon footprint and contribute towards a highly commendable charity that saves many hundreds of lives each year.

All that’s left to say is that I hope you have a lovely Christmas and a successful and happy new year!

From all at Software Europe

19 November 2009: NHS SBS partners with Software Europe to improve expenses management in the NHS

Download full press release (42 kb)

NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS), a unique joint venture between the Department of Health (DH) and Steria, has partnered with Software Europe to provide expenses2010 as part of its payroll service. Through this partnership, NHS SBS will deliver even greater value to its payroll clients by offering Software Europe’s robust expenses management solution.

Currently used by 24 NHS organisations and more than 18,000 NHS employees, the expenses2010 system was developed in accordance with NHS Agenda for Change and medical staff terms and conditions. It can also manage local terms and conditions and provides a straightforward means for employees claiming travel and subsistence expenses.

When combined with NHS SBS payroll service, the system offers unique functionality that works seamlessly with NHS Electronic Staff Record (ESR), eliminating the need for manual inputting and reducing processing times. It also transfers employee changes from within ESR, thereby updating expenses2010 and guaranteeing greater employee visibility.

NHS SBS is also now able to offer improved spend management reporting, giving transparency to its clients’ overall expenses and allowing claim data to be fully accessible and analysed.

John Neilson, managing director of NHS SBS, said, “We are very pleased to be working with Software Europe. The company’s track record with the NHS and its understanding of the specific requirements of the NHS were key factors in our decision to work with them.  This partnership enhances the service we are able to offer our clients, improving service quality, generating savings and delivering real added value”.

“Public sector organisations are under increasing pressure to streamline their back office processes and reduce spend, whilst maintaining a high quality of operations,” says Neil Everatt, managing director of Software Europe. “expenses2010, coupled with NHS Shared Business Services’ expertise in delivering payroll services to NHS trusts, will allow those using the system to gain excellent value and achieve significant savings from public sector expenditure.”

02 November 2009: Gartner Keynote Speech

Watch the Keynote speech from the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando:
http://www.gartner.com/technology/symposium/2009/sym19/keynotes.jsp

Synopsis:
“As global economies steady, priorities shift to growth. But there will be no return to the old normal. The new normal demands dramatic changes in what it takes simply to run the business, let alone continuing to innovate and responding to still-volatile market conditions. You face daunting challenges and will need superior vision and leadership to succeed in the coming year. An ensemble of the greatest Gartner minds will deliver an evocative perspective that will set the stage for a powerful week.”

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

13th October 2009: No Expenses Spared

The Daily Telegraph made history in May of this year when it broke with a story about MP’s’ expenses.  It was a fantastic piece of journalism and very much in the public interest. Robert Winnett and Gordon Rayner from the Telegraph released a book recently that tells the story of how it all came about, it is a great read and reveals how many MP’s reacted and tried to divert the stories. The book is called No Expenses Spared and is well worth a read.

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

9th October 2009: expenses2010

September saw the deployment of the new release: expenses2010. This evolution of expenses has proved most beneficial for our customers who are now enjoying additional functionality designed to drive even greater value from the solution.

There was one particular function that we felt could do even more for our customers, so we decided to form a customer working party to really understand just exactly what enhancements they wanted; this ‘party’ helped to shape the mileage validation service implemented in this release. expenses2010 now handles many complex journey calculations in addition to the “home and office lesser-of-the-two” validation. This helps our customers ensure claims are accurate and moves the responsibility of calculating the mileage to the system.

GreenLight was also announced at our user conference and already two customers have signed up for this service; this new solution takes any paper based form that has to pass through an organisation and puts it online, simple. expenses2010 already holds user and authorisation information so GreenLight is the perfect accompaniment and brings significant savings in so many areas. Users like it too, because they get swift responses to their requests. Car parking permits, holiday requests and even stationary orders are just some of processes that GreenLight is automating for these customers.

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

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18 September 2009: User Conference Success

Tuesday morning at 9:07 we welcomed the first attendee to the Software (Europe) Ltd annual User Conference; this year’s event also gave us the opportunity to celebrate twenty years in business with our customers.  

The conference was a mix of product updates, roadmaps and presentations from some very interesting third parties that provide complimentary services. We would like to thank the speakers from Software Europe, manorr Ltd Emporcom and HMRC who educated and entertained the delegates.

However, the big news of the conference was the new release of expenses and with it a new product, GreenLight.  Neil Everatt (Managing Director) will explain more about these exciting new developments.

On Tuesday evening our delegates helped us celebrate our anniversary experiencing fireworks, casino tables and good old fashioned music. I would like to wish congratulations to Niki McKenna who claimed victory (and a bottle of champagne) at the roulette table winning a total of £1210 (in funny money!).

Overall the two days were a great success and we’ve had some fabulous feedback from all who attended.

A Note from the Managing Director

I’d like to echo Tracey’s sentiments regarding the success of the User Conference and add my own personal highlights.

expenses2010:
This month we released expenses2010, the next step in the evolution of expenses. The new features were showcased to customers present at the User Conference and the overall feeling is that they were very impressed.

We will be putting up a comprehensive list of new features and functions shortly but highlights include a more comprehensive mileage validation service, we’ve also added a new bi-directional interface for one sector of our business and this was very well received.  Data can now flow in both directions automatically.  We have added a lot of visual enhancements that take advantage of new development applications and this will make the system even easier to use. 

Reporting in expenses2010 has always been a strong point and now there are even more standard reports available, a set of eight new reports that cover auditing and compliance alone.  expenses2010 is the most flexible, powerful and user friendly solution for expense management, even more tailoring and configurability is now available if you want to really fit a solution into your business.

Roadmap
The roadmap of expenses2010 was presented and contains some exciting new ideas for the coming 24 months, these new functions and features are not used in any other solution in the market today and will make the user experience absolutely incredible, further enhancing our user friendly approach that our customers enjoy today.

GreenLight
The latest solution we’re adding to our product portfolio is GreenLight. This new system plans to revolutionise the way any paper based approval processes are managed. The idea behind it will allow any workflow to be created electronically and the approval process automated saving your organisation time and resources, as well as helping your company work towards a paperless office.

After seeing GreenLight in action the delegates at the user conference were buzzing with ideas on how they could utilise it at their organisation and since we’ve been back in the office we’ve set up a number of meetings to discuss with them further what they could achieve. GreenLight moves an approval process such as car parking permit, holiday request etc and puts it online.

Tracey Turton, Marketing Executive & Neil Everatt, Managing Directo

12 August 2009: The future of Saas

It is a fantastic time to be in the SaaS industry, although those just starting out are going to find it tough for a couple of reasons. 

Firstly, it is not acceptable to deliver your services without a serious look at your security. I’ve said this before but a poor attitude to security has already caught out many; the news has reported some very big names who have suffered the embarrassment of having their systems compromised. 

Software Europe has gone to great lengths to ensure the security of our systems:  Read our Security Charter

The second reason is more fundamental, delivering a service through the internet does not mean that the customers’ expectations are any less.  You still need a support infrastructure that has depth and experience to support customers who will be remote.  Customers still want to talk to real people if they are having problems and that means you need a helpdesk that is easy to contact and understands how a remote user might see the problem.

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

17 July 2009: The next release

We’ve got a major new release inbound; and up until now we’ve kept the new functionality pretty close to our chests.  Our development and testing teams are about to deliver some of the most exciting updates we have seen in the expenses management world. 

Last year we broke new ground with our mileage validation function, which not only saves the claimant time but ensures accuracy of the claim.  The new release has heightened the scope of this feature and our clients in the health sector will certainly appreciate the added logic that can be activated.  We have a raft of new features that we will make a significant difference to our existing customers and new customers alike. The reporting engine has taken on a completely different look, although it was already the most comprehensive in the industry it has now been taken to the next level. 

We’ve added a major new bi-directional interface for one sector of our expenses business.  This means that expenses data not only passes up to payroll processing, but changes come down as well.  This change alone introduces a mammoth cost saving for a number of our customers.

Many more customisation options have been included; creating a system that can be optimised to fit your operation and provide a seamless migration from paper to digital.

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

22 June 2009: Leading the way - mileage validation

The mileage validation system we implemented in expenses2009 was a huge success. The feedback we have received suggests that they are saving thousands by simply switching this feature on. I say ‘suggests’ because a lot of our clients previously used paper based systems to track their employees expenses claims and didn’t have an easy method to record mileage related travel data; therefore comparing old and new data isn’t easy.

We’ve just started a project to analyse a sample of their paper based claims and comparing them to the data held within the new expenses2009 system. We don’t normally pay too much attention to released surveys; at best they are the authors interpretation and at worst merely a snapshot of historical data that is skewed by the commercial activities of those that have created the survey.

For this reason, we will not to publish our results to the general public, but utilise these statistics to help our own customers and potential customers with their online expenses system deployment. One thing I will say, is that the findings are proving quite enlightening in how many people both over and under claim the driven mileage.

We have another exciting release coming up with some unique functionality that will give one sector of the industry a major boost. This new release leads the way in further increasing the savings automation brings as well as delivering enhanced functionality. There’s going to be a big announcement which our marketing team are working on... so, as they say, watch this space!

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

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18 May 2009: MPs' Expenses - So where now...?

For those in the online corporate expenses business the last 10 days have been frustrating, I think we all wanted to shout about how our solutions prevent expense abuse, enable transparency of what is being claimed and take what is normally a very manual process and make it automatic. 

We had a small mention in the Daily Telegraph, a further one in our regional paper and numerous references on the internet which talked about our attempts to inform Parliament about our solutions.  It was also reported that we had received no calls from Parliament about how they could make things better, I can’t comment on the accuracy of this; but I can say that realising you have a problem with your expenses costs is the first step. 

Once organisations deploy our expenses2009 solution to manage their claim process a number of things happen:

1. Claims are lower.  This does not mean that every claimant is exploiting the system, far from it, most claimants are honest.  But what we provide is guidance for the claimant so that they can submit more accurate claims.  For example, our mileage validation function will offer the claimant an accurate distance for their journeys.  No need to round up just in case…
   
   
2. Heightened policy visibility. Most companies have a T&E policy, which in the case of Parliament is known as the ‘Green Book’.  With expenses2009 your corporate policy is clearly visible, which means claimants can submit their expenses secure in the knowledge that they are within the rules and approvers are alerted when these policy limits are breached.
   
   
3. TAX and VAT is managed correctly permitting the correct recovery of these costs.  The paper based expenses systems made this difficult and most organisations would rather waive the recovery of the more complex of these fees than risk the auditors or inspectors.
   
   
4. Calculate spend trends.  This is one of our favourites, but it does take a few months of data before you get some really useful information.  Being able to examine your claims means you can react in some very positive ways.   Finding out where is your money being spent can allow you to negotiate better deals, for example with hotel chains.   You could also check how much employees are spending on Wi-Fi and perhaps invest in a broadband dongle.
   
   
5. Fraud reduction.  The opportunity for claimants to make fraudulent claims is vastly reduced.

So where now? 
This situation is without doubt most unusual.  If the new Parliamentary expense rules are more stringent this would suggest a number of MPs' will need to adjust their lifestyle to accommodate less income or seek alternative means of funding; but only time will tell.

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

14 May 2009: Making the news!

Man with a “Trouble with expenses?” van has made the National newspapers. The “Vanman” travelled around Westminster on 12th and 13th of May referring passers-by to the website www.troublewithexpenses.com.  The picture made the back page of The Daily Telegraph’s Business supplement. The impact of the picture is incredible!

Check your local newsstand for a copy today or read online: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/citydiary/5320303/Prudence-and-The-Pru.html   

On Tuesday we sent one of our employees to film the van driving through West Minister and this footage has now been uploaded to YouTube.

Here are some of the comments from our customers and acquaintances:  

“This is excellent!”
“I am on the floor laughing but hey -  it had to be done”  
“I hope you got a call - I think they need something!!!!”
“Love it Deborah ! ... surely that one will make all the papers too ..... brilliant idea !”
“Love it!”

Adele Briggs, Marketing Manager

12 May 2009: Trouble with expenses?

It’s Tuesday 12th May 2009 and we have decided to make some noise about the ongoing “MP expenses” saga.  Yes this story is significant and involves many thousands of pounds, but we believe that this problem travels down to many organisations.  In a nutshell if organisations take a close look at their expenses they will discover a lot of ways to save money.  The problem is that many systems do not give you access to the data you need to monitor and make those decisions.  We’ll let you know what comes of this.

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

11 May 2009: MPs should be setting an example

Over the past few days the UK press have carried stories about expense claims that have been made by our Members of Parliament.  On the whole the claims seem to be compliant, compliant with the rules that have been created by the Members themselves of course.  This is not a political comment, and how could it be, the problem appears to spread from top to bottom and left to right.  What truly shocked me was a couple of things, the first being an expectation that this was acceptable from a moral perspective.  The second is that these people should be setting the example, when in fact they are perhaps (allegedly) some of the worst cases we have seen.

Yesterday Major Phil Packer finished the London Marathon, 13 days after the start.  Major Packer suffered catastrophic injuries but took the decision to raise over £600,000 for his military charity, Help for Heroes’.  I couldn’t help but compare this brave person trying to raise money when our Members of Parliament are seemingly taking money for anything out of the public purse.  At least we can see that this event will create change.

Tomorrow we’re going to do something a little unusual.  Pictures and an announcement will follow shortly.  

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

8 May 2009: User experience

Many years ago when mobile phones were first launched the network providers, at the time Cellnet and Vodafone, had an interesting problem to overcome.  This new technology meant that a call could be placed and routed electronically, and if you had a good signal on the analogue network that meant this call processing stage could be a silent event.  But users would often cancel a call and redial because they thought that nothing was happening.  Comfort tones were introduced to simulate the cackle and pops associated with a regular phone call.  Callers felt at ease because they had a feeling that something was happening, it was a backward step to resolve a problem.  Today, things are a little different -calls connect quicker and we are all now used to cellular technology.

As the world of online internet systems continues to expand we’ve had to deal with a similar issue.  In most cases the response times are so fast that there isn’t a problem, but if you want a report that covers the past 7 years of your spending patterns across your 10,000 users you will need to wait a few seconds for that to be processed.  We are looking at how we provide user feedback to ensure they feel confident that the request has been accepted and is working.  In particular, the “new user test”; this is simple and requires that we find a user who has never used or even seen our products and we watch them.  We ask them to complete tasks and evaluate what is causing confusion or what might be misinterpreted.  We also ask them to generate an activity that may take a few seconds to complete, and then watch how they react.  For our User Experience team this provides some incredibly useful feedback which is then channelled back to the development team.  If you have any suggestions on how we can further improve the way our solutions interact just let us know.

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

1 May 2009: MP’s Expenses

It’s very hard not to have a view on this topical issue, particularly when your business helps organisations address the very issues that the press are very keen to highlight.  You see, I believe that nobody expects that doing a job will cost you money, it’s the very reason why expenses is such an important part of an organisations operation.  The CEO who has to travel to build business opportunities, the sales person on the road every day or the engineer on call 24x7 to support a customer; they all need to recover their expenses, but how many actually use expenses to top-up their salary?  A lot?

There I said it...I believe a lot of people use their expenses as a top-up for their salary.  I’m not going to refer you to any surveys, although we have done them, but we often see some interesting changes when customers deploy our expenses product, at the heart of which is the company policy and some very clever technology that helps employers validate expense claims. 

Move from a paper claim system, often a spreadsheet , to expenses2009 and the results are very interesting.

So what about MP’s Expenses?  Transparency and fairness is all that is expected, just like in the commercial world.  As I said before nobody expects to fund the job, but at the same time expenses should cover just that.  Why they can’t adopt policies similar to those in the rest of industry is difficult to understand but history is probably partly to blame.  It’s interesting but I recall a recent deployment of our expenses system, the members of the board were delighted with the visibility the system gave them, they could see their big expense costs, look at doing better deals with hotel chains, and examine better ways of operating. 

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

14 April 2009: Our helpdesk really is open 24/7!

It’s nearly 8am in the UK and our helpdesk have just received a call from a customer who had forgotten their password, nothing major there you might think and I’d agree.  There is a password help option on the login page for both our SaaS solutions, but sometimes if you are in a rush you just want to talk things through with a real person, and have your query resolved instantly. 

The caller this morning wanted exactly that, and sure enough within a few minutes the password had been reset and the caller could happily continue using the system.  I’d like to point out that this caller wasn’t an administrator or a senior contact, but one of the many thousands of users that rely on our solutions to make their jobs better and easier. 

You see, we provide support for every level of user accessing our solutions, that means that day and night our customers and their ‘customers’ can access the help they may need.  Running a 24 hour support service is vital if you are providing a service to people working non office hours, or your system is an important part of your customers business operation. 

For over 20 years Software Europe has always been available, that’s approximately 7290 days our business has been open, with the closed sign having never been used.

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

13 March 2009: Security Security Security

Any visitor to our offices will see the impact of our security systems before they even get into the car park, not that we want to prevent our customers coming to see us. Far from it, we positively encourage them to come and see how serious we are about looking after their data and services. 

“Nibley House”, Software Europe’s Head Office, was built in 1995 and at the heart of the design was security; security in terms of access, data, and that of our personnel.  Obviously, I can’t share with you the exact specifications of our security deployment but we firmly believe we are entrusted with our clients data and services for a very good reason. 

Last week we had an inspection from the security team of a new customer, they are very major UK employer and needed to not just feel confident about our security but see it as well.  I got a very complimentary email shortly after the visit thanking us for hosting their visit and congratulating us on our attitude to security.  We of course will not be complacent, security is an ongoing project that will never be complete, but I believe we far ahead of many competitors in this world of Software As A Service and United Computing.

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

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12 February 2009: Analysing data saves ££'s

This month I have been on the road visiting some more of our customers; we have a very loyal following and this is absolutely down to our partnership/consultative approach to working with our clients.  The primary reason behind these visits is to check we are going the ‘right way’ for our customers, and it seems we’re on the right lines. 

One meeting I had recently was very interesting. We can provide detailed reports on any data held within our systems.  So with this client we examined one of Master reports and it was clear that another cost saving could be realised through a simple change in corporate policy.  Without doing the full calculations, we could clearly see that this small change would in fact cover the cost of the service for another year… and that’s on top of the current savings being created by the solution.

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

04 February 2009: Customers help drive functionality

Now that 2009 is well under way, myself and the Steering Committee have been discussing the direction for short and long term product developments. It is always interesting to look at the customer requested enhancements and ideas to see how they feel the products could be improved, and how they should evolve. We believe this sets us apart from our competitors but also shows our customers that we are not a ‘sell and run’ organisation!

Not surprisingly, there are not many requests around product usability and more of the ‘nice to haves’ and in an ideal world we would wave our magic development wand and the products would be doing the ironing and making toast by this time tomorrow morning!

Melanie Dickson, Account Manager

07 January 2009: Happy New Year

Well we’re a couple of days into 2009 and almost back into full swing; but we didn’t really stop  working throughout the holiday season. At 4pm on Boxing Day we had a support request, all was handled by the team within 10 minutes, and the client was very happy with the service they received.  When we explain our service levels to new customers you can see a little doubt in their mind who wonder if 24x7 support is really available, but here’s the proof.  We’re going to ask the customer if he would mind documenting his experience so we can share the reality of our support with new clients.

We’re expecting a really busy period now, a number of new customers joined us just before the Christmas break and our implementations team are already configuring the systems.  The sooner we get our customers live, the sooner they start to see the benefits!

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

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