We talk with Danielle Price, senior partner manager at Intuit, about Quickbooks Time, the company’s time-tracking solution, and some of the technology and partnerships behind it.
Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to People Tech, the podcast of The HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer.
Mark:
My guest today is Danielle Price, senior partner manager at Intuit. We’re going to talk about QuickBooks Time, the company’s time tracking solution, and some of the technology and partnerships that are behind it on this edition of People Tech.
Mark:
Danielle, thanks for being here. Can we start by asking what is QuickBooks Time? And, what makes it different from other products out there?
Danielle:
Right. So QuickBooks Time is a GPS-enabled time tracking solution that allows companies to track employees throughout the day, as they’re working with of course GPS, breadcrumb trails, a map, a who’s working window. And then, all kinds of other features such as geo fencing, so if an employee arrives at a location, and as they often do, sometimes forget to clock in, the mobile app will notify them that they’ve arrived at that job site and they can clock in. We also have a kiosk time clock which can be mounted on a wall and allow multiple employees to clock in at one access point.
Danielle:
That’s really why I joined QuickBooks Time. I’ve been in the space for about 15 years, and when I asked them during the interview process what their top industries were, it was construction and manufacturing. That told me that they could serve both remote workforces and static workforces with their solution.
Mark:
Right. Okay. Now, it’s been a pretty rocky year for businesses, especially small businesses. In the last, actually I’d say year, but I mean 18 months because of COVID. How has that impacted your business?
Danielle:
So I can speak specifically to QuickBooks Time and our relationship with ADP, because that’s the area I focus in.
Danielle:
When COVID first hit, we were seeing, from ADP, around 200 new request a month for us to engage in a co-sale process with them. We’ve been working with them about three years, in partnership. In March 2020, that dropped to around 50. Yeah, we were nervous. But, we did find, too, that with less leads, there was more time to nurture the ones we had, work with our sales reps and our partner reps at ADP who were recommending us, and better train and educate them. We were able to move from traveling every week, which you do when you go out with a partner organization and build that trust and that relationship, to get them to bring you into these deals that they worked really hard to get to this point with in their discovery, where they’ve understood that maybe their own solution’s not a good fit and they need to bring in a partner.
Danielle:
So we were able to pivot and just focus on better training of our reps. So now, even though we were getting 25% less leads, we found that they were highly qualified and that the buyers were actually ready buyers. We haven’t seen too much of a fall off in that and I’m happy to say that our lead lift has risen significantly as well, in the last six to eight months.
Mark:
Okay, great. Can you talk about the integration with ADP a bit? What are the two of you doing together? And, what power does that bring to your customers?
Danielle:
Yeah. When I first started in this business about 15 years ago, we were co-selling with ADP. At the time it was a different company and they’ve since be acquired. But, it was the onset of mobile applications and this particular one could collect time and GPS stamp. It would act as a time clock, out in the field. It was a GPS-enabled mobile time clock solution. It was an employee’s personal phone or a supervisor’s phone who could do a crew clock in.
Danielle:
At that time, we were just collecting raw punch detail. So 8:08 AM, the employee clocked in, 4:42 the employee clocked out. When you have timestamps like that, you have to apply your rounding rules. 8:08, for instance, might round to 8:15, 4:42 might round back to 4:30. Whatever those rules are, and your overtime rules and your pay rates, that all has to be calculated before it can be pushed into payroll. We had to use a third party vendor to do that. They would actually extract the punches from us and then push them into ADP’s time and labor management solution.
Danielle:
But since then, and again one of the reasons I joined QuickBooks Time, is that they have a full end-to-end solution. It’s a better fit for the customer because the customer doesn’t have to bear the burden of having to pay for the mobile data collection solution, which at that time was running about $17 per employee per month. But, you could still talk about an ROI there. If you’re paying an employee $30 an hour, there’s still an incredible ROI in a program that costs $17 a month. But, that data would have to be massaged, so to speak, before it could get into payroll, and massaged not within that time tracking system. By a third party, or usually by ADP’s time tracking system.
Danielle:
The thing I love about QuickBooks Time is it’s that all-in-one solution. It can collect the time. It can collect it on a kiosk time clock, which can be mounted on a wall. It can collect it in a crew clock scenario, where a supervisor’s clocking in multiple employees to their jobs, and phases and codes. Or, it can collect it on an individual device that the employee’s carrying with them. The QuickBooks time tracking system also then does apply all the rules for PTO, vacation tracking, rounding rules, overtime rules. And then, we can prepare the data so that the client can simply click a button, after they’ve approved the time in QuickBooks Time, and it would pass right into ADP’s payroll batch, ready to be processed for payroll.
Danielle:
Now, the caveat there is it’s summary hours only. Mark, you worked nine hours, I worked eight hours, those summary hours are going to flow to ADP. What we’ve found is that, often times, in the mid-market space especially, clients have unique pay rates. We just sold a solar company who pays an hourly rate, an installation rate when the install is complete and then, a gigawatt, it might be gigahertz, sorry, rate based on last month’s install. We can collect all that in those fields, but we don’t house the rates in our system. We recognize that, for mid-market, there is an opportunity to have this custom file built and they can get really complex.
Danielle:
We actually, leaning into an ecosystem partnership, we actually just onboarded a partner, they’re called Dapt, who can take that data from us, spin it up as needed for all these unique mid-market client segments, and then they will pass that to ADP, ready for payroll.
Danielle:
So we have two ways that we integrate, either directly to ADP, click of a button, summary hours flow over, or using a third party in our ecosystem, assistance integrator, that can handle those complex needs for clients.
Mark:
So these really aren’t simple integrations, if there is such a thing. You seem to have some capabilities with you, some capabilities with another company and then, some capabilities with ADP. Those have to be pretty heavy tasks to put together.
Danielle:
They are. You need sales folks on both sides that really understand the client need. I heard once that a good attorney never asks a question they don’t always know the answer to, and I think the sames goes for a salesperson. When you’re walking into a construction office, you’re mostly like going to encounter a really complex job phase code, paper time sheets, concerns about data validation and how it’s entered, and are they putting the correct code to the correct job.
Danielle:
But with our time tracking solution, we can build all that in. We can have cascading fields, which means if this, then that. If you pick a job and it has lot numbers, we can, in the background, identify what the accounting code for that lot number is. If you have a job and it has phases, like install, measure, demo, we can do the same thing, so that the employee doesn’t have to know all that. That’s one complex part of the solution, is really just not forcing the client to change the way they do business, but letting the technology adapt to the way they want to do business.
Danielle:
And then, yes, getting the data into the system. With a construction company, one out of seven construction companies is going to be doing certified payroll reporting. That’s a report that is required for the government by the construction company, in a specific format, the data has to be in the right place, all the fields have to line up on the report. We know, going in, that it’s most likely going to be an ecosystem sale. Not just QuickBooks Time, not just ADP payroll, but we’re going to be pulling in one of our ecosystem partners. We have other partners that are favored partners of ADP and have now become partners of ours, like Points North, who does certified payroll reporting. Makeshift, who does robust scheduling.
Danielle:
Often times, a client on the front end of the time tracking needs to schedule the employees and they need to schedule them by certification, or they need to allow shift swapping. We have a scheduling tool, but we are really best-in-breed time tracking. We’ve leaned into ADP’s best-in-breed scheduling partner, Makeshift, and they will create the schedule, push a button to publish a schedule. When they do, if they have our integration, it will land in the QuickBooks Time schedule and then it’ll push out to the mobile devices for the employees.
Danielle:
It is a complex sale, we lean into a lot of partners. Because of that, we just go out and establish these relationships, and get these salespeople working together first on deals and then, working together to figure out how they can help each other because they just had such a successful, complex sale. So it’s a really cool thing to watch evolve, with partnerships.
Mark:
Well, how does the whole decision making process work? I would think that, if a company’s approaching you to be a partner, they have to fit functionally but that there’s probably other criteria also, that helps you decide. Could you talk about that a little bit?
Danielle:
Yeah. A lot of it depends on how they can consume the APIs. That’s usually how the first discussion starts, is QuickBooks Time is the number one time tracking solution so if companies either have their own solution, or have worked with other partners and it’s just not meeting clients needs, they will come to us. We have a marketplace and we developed a toolkit, so we will share that. We give them a sandbox and a free account, so then they can start putting sample client data in it and then, testing the integration.
Danielle:
It does take about three to 10 months, I think is the longest I’ve seen for a partner to finalize an integration. And then, we determine how we’re going to go to market, and whose going to take on the marketing and whose going to take on the education to the partner. But, as long as they can consume the APIs and work in that sandbox, and then we offer them a dev person to work with throughout the process, it can be pretty straightforward.
Mark:
And, when you think about QuickBooks Time, what do you think it should be evolving toward? In other words, if you think about the product in five years, what kind of product is it? Much the same as it is today or is it more advanced?
Danielle:
You know, the QuickBooks Time product, like I said I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and there was one time in my career for five years, where I was just a pure consultant to ADP. They would come to me when they had a mobile time clock solution need and I had about 10 different partners in my bag. It was, does the client need true biometrics, fingerprint swipe? Does the employee not want the fingerprint to be housed with the employer, where they’re putting their fingerprint on record but maybe the employee wants a key fob that holds their fingerprint. Do they need this really robust GPS with breadcrumb trails? Or, do they need features like job site photos and signatures?
Danielle:
QuickBooks Time, very quickly, once I put them in my bag, which is back in 2009, became the number one partner that I would recommend. The evolution for them has really been, and for us on the Time product, has really been more behind-the-scenes in how we handle those rules. For instance, we just released projects tracking where you can track and input your budget on a project and then, track your hours and dollars to those projects within Time.
Danielle:
I don’t really see that we need an evolution to the product because it’s so robust. I think what we need is a recognition by the industry that payroll only works well if you have the right time tracking solution in front of it. It’s one thing to pay the employees on time, but if you’re not getting the time sheets in timely, what’s going to push back your payroll processing and paying your employees is the scramble to manually calculate the hours that are coming in on a paper time sheet, manually enter the hours into the time system so that the rules can all be applied. And, the American Payroll Association, at one point, set out a study that said there’s a 3% error rate in payroll associated with those processes, the calculation and the manual entry.
Danielle:
I think that the market needs to understand that time is a space. It’s not just a bolt on product or an afterthought product to payroll. It’s truly becoming its own space. Payroll’s a space, accounting is a space and it’s time for time tracking to be seen as having its own space. And, that clients are actually out asking for time tracking not necessarily associating it with payroll. Because when you can do more effective time tracking, that’s what’s going to improve the speed and the accuracy of your payroll.
Danielle:
We actually have a few marketing claims we boast. One is saving a company 5% on average, on their payroll, which can be huge. What’s a company going to do with 5% back on payroll? They buy new equipment, they hire more people, do more marketing. And then, we also have other verified claims that we can increase your billables by 11% and also save about three hours of payroll processing. I really think it’s just about elevating time in the conversation.
Mark:
Well, Danielle, thanks very much for joining us today.
Danielle:
Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Mark.
Mark:
My guest today has been Danielle Price, senior partner manager at Intuit. And this has been People Tech, the podcast of The HCM Technology Report. We’re a publication of RecruitingDaily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs, visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit The HCM Technology Report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
Image: Intuit
