Organizational Governance is a broad term used to define the set of rules, practices, policies and procedures by which an organization is directed and run. You put in place these rules to help your organization achieve its goals.
Startly was designed to allow your organization’s governance rules be implemented, enforced and monitored. Our solution is designed to help service organizations get up and running on our platform quickly, while also providing the tools needed to layer in your organization’s policies and procedures to establish the governance and controls as needed. Listed below are the governance categories you can establish for your organization, and choose only the ones that matter to you:
- Financial Controls
- Project Management
- Resource Management
- Invoicing and Finance
The help articles in this section describe the available governance controls available to you, and how to implement them. For your benefit, here are some common concepts that organizations may want to consider when implementing their governance “rules”.
Timesheet and Expense Approval Requirements
Do you want to determine which Team Members are required to submit weekly timesheets and which ones are not required?
For each Team Member you can set their timesheet requirement rules.
Do you want to customize at the project level whether timesheets are required, whether daily or weekly notes are required for that project?
Project settings allow you to define whether timesheets are required, whether comments/notes are required on a daily or weekly basis.
How about defining whether approval is required for timesheets and expenses at the project level?
You can define on each project whether the Project Approver must approve submitted timesheets. If you don’t require timesheet approval, the Project Approver can still reject a timesheet entry if needed. Otherwise, submitted time on a project is auto-approved when the accounting period is closed.
Expense Policies
Does your organization have a defined expense reimbursement policy (by expense category) with optionally expense per diem caps? And you want to enforce that policy through an approval process at the manager or project approval level?
Your account has been pre-set with a list of expense reimbursement categories (i.e. meals, travel, lodging). You can define your organization’s specific expense policies, along with per diem “caps” per category. These are soft caps, which do not prevent a Team Member from submitting any expense–however the manager or Project Approver will see the cap and expense amount when approving the expense.
Do your customer contracts have their own defined expense reimbursement policies that need to be honored as part of your service delivery of these customer contracts?
Startly allows you to set the customer’s contractually-defined expense reimbursement policies which are available for all projects related to that customer.
Financial Schedule Management
Do you manage your accounting records according to defined accounting periods, and do you want your service delivery software platform to align to those accounting periods? Do you require your service delivery platform to understand accrual accounting standards and ensure the transactions within your service delivery platform aligns with your accrual accounting practices?
You can define the accounting periods within your fiscal year, and open, restrict and ultimately close each accounting period within your defined accounting schedule. All transactions align with your organization’s accrual accounting practices.
Contract Management
Do you have complicated contract pricing models and invoicing terms, and need your service delivery platform to support those contract models?
Startly supports a variety of contracting models that supports most service organizations, including the most advanced hybrid pricing models that include a fixed/flat fee component and a variable fee component. Learn more about Pricing Models here.
Organizational Structure Management
Would you like to organize your information around your organizational structure and see all analytics, insights and reporting accordingly?
You can define the business units that represent your organization structure, and define the Team Members and Projects per business unit to gain the insights you need to run your business.