Time and Attendance Blog, Workforce Management Software

An Effective Time And Attendance System Will Stamp Out Time-Card Fraud

A recent article about a time-card fraud investigation by UMass resulted, in some employees resigning, and others being placed on administrative leave. At ATS, our solution engineers are often asked to explain the benefits of a time and attendance solution to corporate managers, who, at times, do not fully understand how such a system, can increase productivity and eliminate time-card fraud.

An effective time and attendance takes the guess-work out of calculating employee hours, vacation, premium pay, statutory holidays and overtime. In fact, just about every study that has been conducted about the benefits of a time and attendance solution– all arrived at the same conclusion, and that is –companies using an automated time and attendance solution, on average, save 3-5% on payroll costs. For most senior executives, these are the kind of numbers that will make them take notice and, most likely, immediate action.

An Effective Time And Attendance System Will Stamp Out Time-Card Fraud

ATS Time and Attendance Solution will help your company to:

Get Rid of the Chaos
ATS Time and Attendance captures employee hours in real-time –into clear, and actionable information. In the world of paper-based time sheets, manually counting employee hours is simply a time-wasting exercise.

Gain Access to ATS Time and Attendance Anywhere, Anytime
ATS TimeWork OnDemand is easy to get up and running, easy-to-use, and is scalable with your business. There are no barriers, no fuss – just one complete, cost-effective cloud-based workforce management solution designed to deliver up-to-minute analytic results, streamline payroll costs and increase employee productivity.

Enjoy Painless Integration
You can go ahead and do your “happy dance” or do some back-flips, if you feel so inclined. ATS TimeWork OnDemand is an open database designed to integrate with a range of other payroll, HR, ERP and other systems in a seamless fashion. That’s right, those countless hours spent keying data manually into spreadsheets and other software programs is now a thing of the past, once ATS TimeWork OnDemand is deployed.

ATS TimeWork OnDemand is trusted thousands of customers, in a wide range of industries and supports business processes in many locations and across many regions, including; Canada, United States, Europe and South America. ATS TimeWork OnDemand has a proven track record of driving competitiveness and streamlining business processes.

To learn more, call 866.297.2467 or download a demonstration from our website.

An Effective Time And Attendance System Will Stamp Out Time-Card Fraud

Analytics, Overtime, Payroll, Premium Pay, Statutory Holidays, Time and Attendance

Infractions: Poor Record-Keeping, Unpaid Overtime and Holiday Pay

A recent article in the Toronto Star newspaper, based, on a blitz by the Ontario Ministry of Labour into workplace violations by some companies, revealed, that a staggering number of these violations had to do with poor record-keeping, unpaid overtime and holiday pay. The issue of unpaid overtime is one that has lingered over some companies for the past several years. ATS cloud-based time and attendance was designed with built-in Canadian work-rules, can be deployed in only a matter of weeks and will help your company eradicate manual paper-based time tracking. And the best part, overtime is tracked and paid in accordance with jurisdictional pay policies.

If your company is considering deploying a time and attendance solution but remain ambivalent about its advantages, below, is a list of the three top benefits of an ATS time and attendance solution:

$Infractions: Poor Record Keeping, Unpaid Overtime and Holiday Pay$

Labour
Reducing costly calculation errors is just one reason to consider automating time and attendance management. Recent surveys from Aberdeen, Canadian Payroll (CPA) and American Payroll Association (APA), report that human error in manual time-card calculations is likely to cost a business between one and one-half to eight percent of its gross annual payroll. The manual calculation of employee time sheets takes an average of five minutes of administrative time per time sheet, equating to a loss of more than eight hours of productive time per pay period for an organization with 100 employees. These are alarming statistics, and frankly, not many companies would want to use valuable resources to track employee time manually, when this time could be spent with their customers, generating revenue.

Reduce Compliance Risk
ATS Time and Attendance has a set of built-in Canadian work rules to ensure pay compliance through automated wage and hour rules. ATS time and attendance will improve transaction times and information access through an intuitive user experience, thus, increasing profit margins while enhancing employee productivity. In other words, the tracking and paying of the appropriate; overtime, vacation, and other time-off request can be managed by our cloud-based time and attendance with ease.

Savings
An ATS time and attendance solution provides both direct and indirect investment returns. Automating your time and attendance process results in ongoing cost savings, such as a reduction in human-generated payroll errors, elimination of time theft from “buddy punching” through the use of biometric time clocks and overtime costs, as saved wages from enhanced productivity.

For example, when tracking time manually through spreadsheets or outdated methods, it’s not unusual to have employees claiming missed overtime and hours worked on their pay. Attempting to rectify this issue by counting hours collected on paper time-sheets can lead to additional errors. Perhaps the answer to this prevailing issue; is to automate the collection of employee hours, thereby gaining valuable data analytics, to help your organization, make effective business decisions that impacts, payroll cost and the bottom- line.

$Infractions: Poor Record Keeping, Unpaid Overtime and Holiday Pay$

Through the use of an ATS robust time and attendance solution, organizations are able to fully automate pay rules, work rules and benefit accrual rules as well as leave management, collective bargaining agreements (CBA), and exception-time (such as overtime) reporting. By having up-to-the-minute access to this information, organizations will gain complete and accurate visibility into their operations, thus, enabling them to meet production, forecasting and scheduling demands and stay compliant with the many federal and provincial, municipal and state laws, as well as company policies.

To learn how ATS time and attendance solution can help your organization keep accurate records of employee hours, pay overtime hours based on company’s pay policies and assign the requisite statutory holiday, you can download the white paper titled “Benefits of an ATS Automated Time and Attendance Solution”. And to view a demonstration, go to our website. To reach one of our account executives, call: (866) 294-2467.

Aberdeen, American Payroll Association, Benefit Accruals, Biometric Time Clocks, Canadian Payroll Association, Collective Bargaining Agreements(CBA), Labor, Ontario Ministry of Labour, Overtime, The Toronto Star, Time and Attendance

How’s That Spreadsheet Working Out For You?

Over the last several years, the issue of overtime has become, somewhat of an albatross for some companies but, in reality it does not have to be. When you consider how easy it is to automate employee attendance. And, with the advancement of cloud computing it has now become inexpensive and faster to deploy a time and attendance solution that will accurately track overtime hours. So, why do some companies consistently rely on paper time sheets when they can save costs by using an attendance system?

A recent article written by Eric B. Meyer for Eremedia says that although, the new overtime rules by the department of labor may not be enacted until the end of 2016, there are some steps that companies can take ahead of this law. They include:

 “Ensure that non-exempt employees receive minimum wage and overtime when they work more than 40 hours in a work week.
 Double check employee classifications to confirm that exempt employees truly are exempt (and vice-versa).
 Do you have independent contractors? Or are they employees whom you’ve simply labeled independent contractors? Now, may be a good time to vet that.”

Tracking employee overtime through the use of spreadsheets is a time-consuming process, but don’t fret, there is a better way. ATS TimeWork OnDemand is a cloud driven time and attendance application that delivers, on-the-spot predictive analytics, of employee attendance at your fingertips. And with ATS TimeWork OnDemand, you get:

Benefit Accruals-Choose to accrue employee hours daily, weekly, or bi-weekly—or even monthly—and based on time passed or employee’s time logged.

Alerts-You can get automatic alerts sent to your mobile device so you know when an employee punch in or out and warnings about employees that are approaching overtime so you can take necessary action.

Leave Management-Your employees can now request any time-off from their mobile device or any workstation with Internet connection.

We’ve only scratched the surface of the many things that ATS time and attendance can do. If you are interested in learning more, register for an interactive webinar, ‘Controlling Overtime Pay through Automation’ on Friday, November 27th at 1:00pm eastern.

To download brochures, go to our website or call (866) 294-2467.

How’s That Spreadsheet Working Out For You?

Accruals, Cloud Computing, Leave Management, Overtime, Time and Attendance

Top 5 Signs Your Company Needs a New Time and Attendance System

As hard as you try, it’s taking longer and longer to process employee time-sheets at the end of the week. Tabulation of employee hours are based on guesswork instead of solid figures and your CFO is having a hard trying to figure out the company’s actual payroll cost, that’s somewhere within the many spreadsheets you provide each week. If this sounds like your business—or close to it—then it may be time to consider a modern time and attendance solution.

Based on our years of experience, we have come to realize that the companies who benefit most from a time and attendances system usually face problems that are similar in nature. If your organization is experiencing the issues mentioned above, then read on, here are the top five signs that you need a new time and attendance system.

Top 5 Signs Your Company Needs a New Time and Attendance System

1. You Have a Time and Attendance and you are also using manual time sheets
Spend a few minutes thinking about how your employees record their attendance. For example, if you have a time and attendance and employees are also using time-sheets you should get rid of the system. If you are using an effective time and attendance system there shouldn’t be a need for manual time sheets. Next, figure out how long does it takes payroll and HR staff to process employee hours and then manually key them into your accounting software.

ATS time and attendance integrates into a various system including; ERP, payroll and HR providing your organization with a single point of entry one that contains accurate, up-to-the-minute business intelligence data. ATS time and attendance helps staff make better decisions more quickly and frees up their time to work on more high-value exercises like increasing workforce production.

2. The Difficulty in using multiple systems
One of the biggest challenges with using multiple systems to track employee attendance is the amount of time it takes. Conversely using an ATS cloud-based time and attendance, managers and employee alike, have access to real-time information on any workstation or mobile platform in real-time. For example, employee can see their schedules, hours of work and also request time-off. Supervisors get an email alert when a vacation request is submitted and can respond in real-time.

3. You have limited access to information about your organization
Do you know how your company is performing against budget? For example, do you how many employees that should be on the work schedule today or even next week based on business demand? Without solid key performance indicators (KPI’s) in place, some companies rely on spreadsheets that need to be constantly updated and reconciled manually.

4. Payroll processing is taking too long
Sometime the first signs that your company needs a time and attendance solution will come from the payroll department. When employees record their time on manual time-sheets or antiquated punch clocks—after that, a supervisor goes over the records to make sure it’s accurate. Afterwards, this information is sent to the payroll department, who spends hours on a weekly basis, calculating and then manually entering the data into different systems.
5. Your business is growing
No business executive wants their company to remain stagnant so why use a system that’s not growing with you? And, it is safe to assume that if your company has a time and attendance in place, then your business has probably matured a bit since that system was installed. As the business has matured, the time and attendance system has probably been added to and cobbled together with other components to help with the changes in process and direction. Spreadsheets don’t cut it and most antiquated time and attendance systems don’t have the capabilities to support today’s growing businesses. An ATS cloud-based time and attendance has a plethora of analytics to help you see the big picture, will enhance workforce productivity and provide you with greater financial visibility and insight.

In conclusion

Replacing your time and attendance system has a number of benefits, from better workflow and mobile technology interface to increased efficiency and real-time reporting. So what’s holding your company back from ditching that antiquated system?

To learn more register for one of our monthly webinars, find us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest. To reach us by phone call (866) 294.2467.

Analytics, Mobile Technology, Payroll, Spreadsheets, Time and Attendance System

How Does Your Company Determine The True Cost Of Doing Business?

March 4th, 2014 | Posted by Apex Time Solutions in Labour Costs | Overtime | Time and Attendance Blog, Workforce Management Software - (Comments Off)

In today’s economic climate, businesses need effective tools to help determine their true costs against productivity, hours spent on these jobs and their actual profits. Asking employees to manually record time spent on each task, during the course of a shift, will lead to errors and, inevitably lost profits.

ATS Job Costing creates up-to-date view of all projects by streamlining the collection of hours worked on each tasks by employees- and creates accurate and timely business analytics for your finance department.

With up to six user definable grouping levels, the system automatically records and calculates employee attendance for payroll processing and tracks all job costs to the minute. It tracks job performance for review and compensation planning, provides visibility to actual costs for accurate quoting and job estimation, and tracks detail for lead-time improvement.

Job Tracking terminals support numerous input devices such as CCD barcode and laser scanners for rapid, accurate, on-floor data collection. The job costing report generator allows sorting on all grouping levels, producing thousands of possible report combinations.

Solution Benefits:

Employee grouping levels, with up to 15 alphanumeric characters each. Dynamic structure (number of characters for field IDs can be adjusted at any time).
Application of different calculations to a single transaction can generate unique cost allocations for financial, or payroll outputs.
Job transfers can be tracked at up to six levels. Module can be set to one of two configurations, allowing single jobs or multiple simultaneous jobs at any period.
Barcode or CCD scanner can be used for level transfer input. Function keys can be programmed to accept up to 6 different level transfer combinations.
Accumulation of hours, monetary amounts, and rates facilitates the distribution of direct and indirect labour of charges across multiple data codes. (e.g. the distribution of overtime across all employee departments and job functions.

ATS Job Costing uses a true service-oriented architecture costing tool that enables real-time connectivity, and intuitive business intelligence.

To learn more about this modern approach to project costing and labour allocation excellence go to our website to see a demonstration. You can also join the conversation, through our social media feeds; LinkedIn, Face Book or Google Plus.

Job Costing, Overtime, Reports

Automate and Grow Your Business

Small and medium sized businesses are confronted by different challenges each day, chief among them is, growing their businesses and staying profitable. Studies have shown that companies who automate their business processes have seen an increase in productivity and revenue. ATS unified time and attendance solutions for small and growing businesses improves business performance with real-time workforce analytics and role-based dashboards.

If you are tired of struggling with paper time cards from the old punch clock that’s hanging on the wall, it’s time to make the switch.

Solution benefits for your small or mid-size business:

Employee Time and Attendance
Collect, analyze, and take immediate control of your employees’ attendance and labour allocation in real-time through the cloud. ATS time and attendance eliminates the burden of manual processes, saves time and money, and minimizes your compliance risk.

Workforce Analytics at your fingertips
ATS workforce analytics improves your business capabilities, is easy to use, and provides the insights and tools you need to take action.

Employee Self-Service
Enable your employees to request time off, review schedules, update contact information. ATS employee self-service is delivered via the cloud and designed for today’s workforce. The easy-to-use tools empower employees and managers, whether in the office or on the move. No more calling to your HR department, employees can access and review information regarding time off, current benefits, and current job details—anytime, anyplace from any device with Internet access.

Employee Data Collection
ATS offers a range of employee time tracking data collection devices designed to improve accuracy and integrate seamlessly with ATS time and attendance software. Your company’s choice of data collectors include: biometric time clocks, badge-based readers, smart phone data collection, telephony and web-punching.

Payroll, CRM, ERP and Talent Management Data Integration
Extract, transform, and load data from applications, databases, and other data stores – for a complete view of structured and unstructured data across your enterprise. Our data integration software can help you build an agile, trusted data foundation that meets your organization’s complex information needs.

If you are ready to manage your business with an integrated workforce management system-that will lower costs and streamline business process, view a demo on our website. To speak to an account executive, call us at 1.866.294.2467.

Employee Self Service, Employee Time and Attendance, Labour Allocation, Talent Management, Workforce Analytics

How Can Big Data Help Our Company?

Big data, workforce analytics and data intelligence are part of today’s conversation when it comes to time and attendance, payroll, HR and ERP. Organizations, both small and large need tools to run efficiently and a big factor in making that a reality is the company’s ability to gather relevant employee data. Business executives want to know if they are profitable and need access to up-to-the-minute workforce management data.

Webopedia defines “Big Data in these terms:
“Big data is a buzzword, or catch-phrase, used to describe a massive volume of both structured and unstructured data that is so large that it’s difficult to process using traditional database and software techniques. In most enterprise scenarios the data is too big or it moves too fast or it exceeds current processing capacity.

While the term may seem to reference the volume of data, that isn’t always the case. The term big data, especially when used by vendors, may refer to the technology (which includes tools and processes) that an organization requires to handle the large amounts of data and storage facilities.

The term big data is believed to have originated with Web search companies who had to query very large distributed aggregations of loosely-structured data.”

Benefits of Time and Attendance and Big Data:

Best-Of-Breed Workforce Analytics-Sophisticated built-in workforce intelligence thus, enabling operational managers and employees alike to access real-time reporting data. With ready-to-access data at their fingertips, organizations can make factual decisions, and at the same time, increase productivity while streamlining payroll costs.

Payroll and Labour Costs Intelligence- Real-time visibility into workforce attendance so, that issues can be addressed on the spot. Labour cost intelligence provides alerts as a barometer against events as they occur so they can be addressed right away.

Workforce Management-ATS TimeWork provides visibility into business process management. The application is preconfigured with industry specific key performance indicators (KPIs) for your core time and attendance processes.

Big Data represents a large and growing opportunity for growing enterprises to improve their data capture and improve their workforce management capabilities.

ATS time and attendance Big Data Workforce Analytics are purpose built and industry specific. The application manages everything from employee time capture, job costing and data integration all designed to enhance performance metrics on a single platform.

To gain access to a demo on our workforce management analytics go to our website.

Big Data, ERP, Labour Costs, Payroll, Workforce Analytics

Construct Canada was a roaring success

Each year, ATS attends and/or exhibits at several tradeshows. This year was no different at the Construct Canada which happened to be its 25^th edition and is viewed by many exhibitors and visitors alike, as one of the most prominent tradeshows of North America. The show was held at the Metro Convention Centre and as usual, was packed with exciting displays featuring current and some of the most innovative products in the industry. The event organizers of this show, is by all accounts, top notch.

This year’s exhibition featured 7 shows held concurrently which included: PM Expo, DesignTrends, Concrete Canada, HomeBuilder & Renovator Expo, and National GreenBuilding Conference. In short it was a delight for the marketing and production departments of ATS Canada.

ATS workforce management solutions help companies manage operations in complex and capital-intensive projects – smoothly and cost-effectively – with our solutions for engineering, construction and operations. The solution boost profit margins, drive more efficient financial management, and supercharge project performance.

ATS Engineering and Construction Workforce Management Software Benefits:

Budgeting and workforce analytics modules identifies and analyzes talent gaps
A robust time and attendance that streamlines business processes with increased visibility and helps reduce labour costs
Helps indentifies fewer unexpected project cost over-runs
Provides faster decision making with access to real-time insights
Consolidate HR and payroll processes into one unified software solution to meet compliance

To join the conversation, visit us on our LinkedIn group page or follow us on Twitter. You can also view a webcast from our website or call us at 866.294.2467.

Budgeting, Business Intelligence, Payroll, Time and Attendance, Workforce Management Software

Small and Mid-Size Businesses are Slowly Adopting Cloud-Based Time and Attendance

When cloud-based time and attendance made its foray into the marketplace, large organizations took advantage of its ability to improve their business process. On the other hand, small and mid-size organizations were not sure if this would be a viable and in some cases, affordable solution for them.

Today, more than ever, there are numerous employee time tracking solutions that small and mid-size enterprises (SME) can harness for, business intelligence, employee scheduling, benefit accruals, job costing, labour tracking and payroll and HR integration. Sometimes finding a scalable and affordable solution is like “looking for a needle in a haystack” By using ATS TimeWork On-Demand companies will streamline processes and up-to-minute data that senior executives can use to run their daily operations.

How A Hosted Time and Attendance Solution can help
ATS hosted time and attendance solution allow small and mid-size businesses to realize tremendous cost savings while improve production and payroll processing hours. ATS TimeWork On-Demand has been designed to be flexible and easy to use and that’s what we have been hearing from our customers over the years. The solution adapts to your needs with no unnecessary or expensive extras and you will see the immediate improvements in ROI and lower payroll costs.

Transition to the Cloud
As businesses understand the low cost of ownership, they are apt to transition employee time tracking operations to the cloud. With your time and attendance system hosted by ATS, you will need fewer IT personnel to provide support as the cloud allows for software to be automatically upgraded and checked 24/7, 365 days a year.

The Beauty of the Cloud
Small and mid-size enterprises (SME) can benefit from a range of features and functionality that can be combined at anytime during and/or after the initial implementation to create a solution that’s specific to your business. This type of flexibility means you get what you need when you need it.

To learn more, go to our website or call us at 866.294.2467

Benefit Accruals, Job Costing, Payroll, Time and Attendance, TimeWork On-Demand

Have Economic Conditions Improved for the Manufacturing Sector Since 2008?

Impatient shareholders, increased economic uncertainty and rapid globalization are creating continuous pressure for today’s manufacturers. To compete effectively and win, manufacturers must reduce costs and increase service levels with fewer resources.

ATS workforce management solution for manufacturing provides strategic tools that manufacturers need to transform their operations to become industry leaders. ATS TimeWork helps manufacturers streamline payroll costs more efficiently and optimize their supply chains in critical operational areas. The application helps manufacturers with; employee data capture, budgeting and forecasting, job costing, labour allocation, overtime equalization, employee self-service, business analytics, CRM, ERP and payroll integration.

ATS TimeWork workforce management software is designed to meet the needs of progressive manufacturing companies. The application is delivered ‘out-of-the-box’ with a built-in business workflow processes that enable manufacturers to manage the order cycle of their time and attendance operations. ATS TimeWork time and attendance solution can help manufacturers improve their operations while reducing costs, improving visibility and enhancing business operations.

ATS TimeWork workforce management solution helps manufacturers improve response times and increase customer satisfaction by maintaining detailed analytics in real-time for the purpose of tracking labour dollars. And through better time management and labour controls, you will prevent and reduce failure and thus, increase your company’s profit margins

Business Analytics, Employee Self Service, Overtime Equalization, Payroll, Workforce Management Solutions

An Effective Time And Attendance System Will Stamp Out Time-Card Fraud

Infractions: Poor Record-Keeping, Unpaid Overtime and Holiday Pay

Top 5 Signs Your Company Needs a New Time and Attendance System

How Does Your Company Determine The True Cost Of Doing Business?

Automate and Grow Your Business

How Can Big Data Help Our Company?

Construct Canada was a roaring success

Small and Mid-Size Businesses are Slowly Adopting Cloud-Based Time and Attendance

Have Economic Conditions Improved for the Manufacturing Sector Since 2008?

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