Best-in-Class Workforce Management Software from Industry Experts
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Economists and financial experts are tripping over themselves on the state of the economy and thus far, many are unable or unwilling to predict whether we are headed for another global recession. Some are pointing fingers at countries loaded with debt and are asking if it’s going to flow in their back yards. At the same time, governments in many countries are telling citizens to watch their spending, while others are implementing austerity measures to curb a freefall in their economies.

Business executives do not like uncertainty in the market-place so when the economy slows, job loss tends to follow. There are many things that keep executives up at the night regardless of the health of the economy. Labour is the highest expense for most companies and the ability to trim that cost during an economic downturn is foremost on the minds of many businesses. One of the most effective tools for managing labour costs is a time and attendance system.

If one or more of the reasons below applies to your company, you need a time and attendance solution to help curb your payroll expenses.

Payroll:  If hours are manually keyed into your payroll software at the end of each pay period, chances are errors will occur. The ATS data integration is a seamless process and best of all, it saves time and money.

Reporting:   Your employees work on different projects during the course of a shift and you would like to know how many hours are spent on these projects. Using Excel spreadsheets and multiple hand written time sheets is a slow and frustrating process for supervisors and the payroll department. Instead of relying on employees to keep track of the jobs they worked why not switch to an automated time management solution? Our system creates precise records based on the hours that were actually worked.

Buddy Punching:   This is when an employee punches a time card for a friend of theirs. When this practice goes unnoticed it can costs a company thousands of dollars a year. The implementation of a biometric time and attendance solution is the answer.

Overtime: In addition to automatic tracking of overtime, an automated time and attendance solution will track: premiums, statutory holidays, multijurisdictional pay policies, vacation and personal time off.   

The large amount of evidence gleaned from years of studies, shows that companies who implement an employee time tracking solution receive an immediate cost savings on their annual payroll expense.

To learn more visit us online to view a demo of our time and attendance software.

Not all time and attendance solutions are created equal.  When shopping for workforce management software, one should not assume that they all look alike. While there may be small similarities in the fundamentals, there are enough differences in the functionality to warrant broadening your search. To quote a line from a TV ad from ING Bank, “Look out for bad apples masquerading as oranges.” Some important factors that should not be overlooked include: project management; service level and the expertise that will be facilitated during and after deployment. If you are merely comparing prices and that’s your only focus, chances you are you will end up with a “bargain basement price” solution that is riddled with problems. We often hear of cases in which a time and attendance solution is shipped to the customer in a box with tutorials, very limited support and at a price they simply could not turn down.

Here are 7 ways to tell if the price was too good to be true:

1)       You have to navigate through several screens to add a new employee

2)       The system requires frequent maintenance and upgrades

3)       Your payroll manager spends a tremendous amount of time manually calculating time cards and responding to employee inquiries

4)       Supervisors cannot produce meaningful reports because of rigid predefined templates

5)       You cannot track your mobile workforce

6)       Response time for support queries exceeds an hour

7)       Managers are frequently entering employee hours in the system

The ATS Workforce Management Software includes the following benefits:

Labour analytics: a variety of employee time clocks to improve job costing, employee and labor tracking

No software to buy: avoid capital expenses of purchasing and maintaining a software license

Invoicing is done on a monthly basis: you only pay for what you use and nothing more

Save time: allow payroll practitioners and HR managers to run payroll and get back to other responsibilities

Reduce manual errors: automatically calculates overtime pay, premiums, absenteeism, statutory holidays and hours worked

Buddy punching: eliminate the practice of employees punching in/out for each other with the use of our biometric time clocks

Absence request: the use of our absence request module allows employees to request personal time off via any web browser. The approval process from managers to employees is instantaneous

The ATS employee time and attendance system (Software-as-a-Service) automates time tracking. Our technical support team provides uncompromising service that is simply unmatched.

To learn more, contact Apex Time Solutions follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn group for updates on time and attendance solutions and workforce management software.

Customers today are so inundated by these buzz words it is not surprising there is so much confusion in the market place. We attended a recent user-conference where one vendor suggested that customers should become familiar with our industry acronyms. Now this is what we call arrogance. It is not the customer’s responsibility to understand different industry terms. Customers are always interested in, finding out how a product can help their business improve productivity and increase sales. Vendors, on the other hand, have to simplify their industry jargon in a way that is easily understood by the general consumer.

So, what are the differences between Cloud Computing Time & Attendance, Web-Based Time and Attendance, Software-as-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Hosted Time and Attendance? It all depends on who you ask. While some vendors will lead you to believe there are vast differences, in our view, they are very similar. It really all depends on how it is deployed or more importantly, who is hosting the software. If you are in search of a time and attendance system and run across these terms, ask your vendor to explain them in a way that you can understand. If it’s too difficult to understand, chances are the system itself might be prove too difficult to work in your organization. Look for a vendor that will take the time to explain industry jargon as it relates to a web-based or hosted time and attendance system.

To download a copy of our white paper on cloud computing time and attendance click here   or  go to our website.

Web-Based, Cloud Computing, SaaS or is it Hosted Time and Attendance?