Best-in-Class Workforce Management Software from Industry Experts
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With all the hustle and bustle around here, we have not had the chance to let our customers and prospects know that Apex Time Solutions has updated its website!

Our blog page is also new and allows us to share updates about our software and other business intelligence with everyone. We intend to add more functionality to the site with the help of our creative team in the next several months.

The new ATS website contains user friendly content, and provides a better experience for our visitors. It is also easier to get information about our workforce management software and select solutions that match your requirements.

With the new design, we placed an emphasis on specific areas such as, the “contact us” page. We want prospects to be able to reach us quickly, and once they have completed their review of our labour analytics and absence management products.

ATS integrated time and attendance suite saves time, cuts costs and aligns employee performance with a company’s goals. Companies of all sizes are increasingly implementing employee time tracking solutions. It helps you plan, deploy and track your employees and their performance. The result is enhanced productivity and more informed decision-making.

So on behalf of all of us at Apex Time Solutions, we wish you a belated welcome to our new website. Stay tuned!

One of the hospitality industry’s biggest challenges apart from controlling costs is the ability to schedule the right people at the right to meet business volume. Whether it’s a quick serve chain, a large resort or urban hotel, the inherent challenges mirror each other. In a time of persistent economic uncertainty and intensifying competition, finding the right tools is essential to help control costs, increase revenue, and sustain customer satisfaction.

The ATS Time and Attendance Solution delivers real time activity based costing and helps to govern and automate the entire process from punch to pay. The pay rules library and flexibility allow for 100% automation of rules without costly changes to the core code. Hours and wage rule compliance is consistent and automated with alerts when a threshold for violation is approached – providing proactive reconciliation. The self-service capability of time and attendance increases productivity and managers will spend less time managing administrative tasks and more time focusing on customers.

The ATS Hospitality Workforce Management Software suite provides the following benefits:

  • Tracking of overtime, on-call shifts, premiums and tips
  • Labour forecasting and optimization
  • Employee scheduling by preferences, seniority and certifications
  • Tracking and managing split shifts and location of staff
  • Ability to configure and maintain various collective bargaining agreements through the software code
  • Schedule versus actual labour
  • Recognition of the real hours worked by individual employees
  • Elimination/reduction of manual processes e.g. timesheets and spreadsheets
  • Efficient processes through accurate transfer of data to payroll
  • On the spot human resources and labour reports
  • Accurate alignment of resources with the needs of the business

ATS Workforce Management Software for hospitality enables customers to accurately collect and report time and attendance data for payroll generation and benefits administration, produce enterprise-wide forecasts of upcoming business, calculate staffing requirements, automatically generate optimized schedules that meet forecasted workforce requirements, and extract key workforce and business data.

To read more about our hospitality time and attendance software suite or for a demo go to our website.

We are in an era of budget restraints, cost cutting and reduced work hours for employees. That’s a clear indication that many companies have not escaped the economic slow down.

When employees are asked to work reduced hours they want to be assured they are paid for every working hour. Meanwhile, employers want assurance that their labour costs are in line with expected business volume. Corporate culture notwithstanding, a manual time keeping system does not provide accurate attendance records. Manual collection and calculation of employee hours through time sheets is both cumbersome and time consuming.

Our Time and Attendance system helps you manage your workforce and track employee attendance more efficiently. ATS industry leading, integrated Workforce Management Software, takes into account your organization’s specific requirements, collective bargaining agreements, work rule policies, labour laws and shift patterns. Our software solution enables you to streamline payroll preparation, improve wage and hour compliance, and optimize your labour investment. That, in and of itself, is a tall order for any manual timekeeping system. 

Benefits to using an Automated Timekeeping System:

  • Minimize employee inquiries to HR for attendance and accrual information with Employee Self Service
  • Track and maintain employee attendance records
  • Cost savings through the automatic tracking of attendance,  overtime, and eliminating human errors
  • Eliminate payment for unapproved overtime
  • Accurate payroll calculations assure correct pay for actual hours worked
  • Minimal administrative tasks through the automation of processes
  • Identify exceptions such attendance and absenteeism

The ATS Time and Attendance solution helps simplify employee time tracking by giving you the tools to ensure workforce compliance and also helps streamline your labour costs.  Our workforce suite includes tools to schedule employees based on skills, preferences, availability or other demands of your business. 

To speak to an account representative call us at 1.866.294.2467. You can also join the conversation on our LinkedIn group for product updates.

Collecting and analyzing attendance data, reducing labour costs and improving compliance are strategies for industry leading companies today. Software as a Service (SaaS)-based time and attendance solutions offer strategic advantages to businesses in a variety of sectors.

ATS Time & Attendance is an integral part of our Workforce Management Software suite. This web-based solution captures time and labour and automates the most complex pay rules. With this hosted solution companies avoid costly server purchases on which to host the software, licenses and version upgrades. Instead, companies can free up internal resources to focus their time on the day to day operations of their business.

Web-Based Time and Attendance Solution Features:

  • Online time card captures employee time and management adjustments
  • Data integration to a variety of Payroll, HR and ERP application
  • Labour analytic reports cover all aspects of attendance, absence and overtime
  • Employee Self Service allows employees and managers access to data based on authorization levels
  • Overtime equalization calculates which employees are eligible for overtime and when
  • Tracking of attendance through time clocks such as: biometrics, smart phones and badge collectors
  • The automation of accruals accumulates; vacation, sick days, jury duty, etc.

ATS hosted Time and Attendance is an eco friendly solution that automates and tracks essential processes that include: work hours, overtime, sick leave, vacations attendance and absences.

To read more about ATS measures to reduce our impact on the environment go to our website. Follow us on Twitter or join our LinkedIn group for Eco-Time Management solution product updates.

Study after study is commissioned every year by a plethora of firms and institutions about the role women play in the world of business. These studies all arrive at the same conclusion; the executive branch of today’s workforce should be open to more women. It should be noted that today’s workplace is vastly different from that of 20 years ago. It is also important to recognize that while more women have “broken the glass ceiling” there is room for improvement on that front. 

One of the more recent studies we came across is by the Kauffman Foundation, titled “Untapped Potential for Expanding Women’s Entrepreneurship Holds Promise to Grow the U.S. Economy.” While the title references the US, it could apply to just about any country.

Here is an excerpt of that study:

“Research shows that startup companies – particularly high-growth startups – are the most fruitful source of new U.S. jobs and offer the economy’s best hope for recovery. However, despite the fact that about 46 percent of the workforce and more than 50 percent of college students are female, and that women have risen to top positions in corporate and university hierarchies, they represent only about 35 percent of startup business owners. Their firms also tend to experience less growth and prosperity than do firms started by men.

“Overcoming the Gender Gap: Women Entrepreneurs as Economic Drivers,” a new paper from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, explores the reasons behind lower business startup rates among women and proposes actions that would help to realize the promise of female entrepreneurs in escalating the economy.

“There are plenty of highly qualified women in science and technology – industries from which the majority of high-growth companies are born,” said Lesa Mitchell, Kauffman Foundation vice president, advancing innovation, and the paper’s author. “More women are entering these fields than ever before. However, while women have broken through the glass ceiling, they seem to encounter ‘glass walls’ that keep them from venturing out of big companies or structured academic settings to launch their own firms at the same rate men do.”

Studies like this one from the Kauffman Foundation and others will continue for many years. A diversified workforce with women in senior roles starts with cultural shift. Some corporations have elevated women to senior management roles and have been the beneficiary of growth and profits. In contrast, there others that “like things just the way they are”. Time has a way of catching up to those who abhor positive change.

Our blogs typically focus on the advantages of time and attendance software in an organization. However, we thought it would be a refreshing change to comment on a subject that is of great importance in today’s workforce.

To learn more about Apex Time Solutions, go to our website and to join our weekly workforce management software webinar visit us online.

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.

 John Edwards, a contributor to CFO Magazine wrote an article titled “A Sense of  Validation” In this article, he espouses the virtue of a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model   and it many advantages. On a few occasions, members of our team have spoken to small and mid size businesses executives who cannot afford a full time IT person, yet express the need to  have an automated time and attendance system.

ATS web-based time and attendance and employee time clocks help businesses reduce costs and stay compliant with labour laws. Our workforce management software provides improves accuracy in data gathering and generates a quick return on investment.

Benefits of ATS web-based time and attendance software:

Cost Reduction: Our employee time tracking software solution reduces IT and maintenance costs. There is no hardware to purchase or maintain. The ATS time tracking solution protects data with disaster-recovery capabilities. Our time and attendance management solution streamlines data and provides managers with a consolidated reporting tool. With an ATS hosted solution, you don’t need an IT person or department to maintain hardware or software.

Compliance: Using an ATS time keeping system helps managers keep accurate records of hours worked by employees. Accurate records include: overtime and absenteeism and provides assurance that applicable employment policies are followed.

Workforce Data: The ATS time and attendance software provides a flexibility which allows executives to gain control of day to day employee activities. This data and the corresponding reports can be accessed 24/7 via any browser.

To learn how other companies have taken advantage our integrated time and attendance software solutions to streamline costs, go to our website. To arrange a demo visit us online.

Technology is moving at an unprecedented speed. Your company is diverse, and may be spread over multiple locations with different pay policies. This presents a challenge in controlling labour costs, maintaining high customer service levels, and complying with provincial, federal and/or, state regulations.

ATS Workforce Management Software automates employee time and attendance and record keeping and significantly reduces the costs of error-prone, paper-based time sheets. Our integrated time keeping software provides managers with an easy-to-use product that eliminates the frustration and drudgery of manual processes and completes the “time clock to paycheque” solution.

Our Workforce Management Software will help you with:

Workforce Accruals—Automate employee balance accruals and time off requests to produce an accurate labour analysis.

Employee Attendance Management—maintains detailed attendance and absence histories for employees or patterns to notify supervisors when necessary.

Overtime Equalization—Automate overtime distribution to employees based on established business rules.

ERP, HR and payroll interfacesIntegrate time and attendance data with human resources and payroll systems to produce accurate payrolls and keep records up to date.

Training and Support—Users gain knowledge with our in-depth onsite or online training classes.

Employee Self-Service —Employees gain access to their personal information so they can request job changes, request vacation and personal time off.

Data collectionCollect time, labour and job tracking metrics quickly and easily to enforce time and attendance, employee scheduling and job assignments.

If you are still using paper time sheets or worse, the “honour system”, find out how our Workforce Management Software can save your company time and money. ATS Time and Attendance solution helps companies simplify employee time collection with our automated time clocks.  

Follow us on Twitter for product updates and releases and to arrange a live demonstration go to our website.

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.

We all know that time is not static and so, metaphorically speaking, sticking your head in the sand will not stop change. In today’s rapidly changing world almost every process is automated. In fact, most businesses would be hard pressed if they had to resort to paper and pen for all of their daily operations. It is still surprising to find a significant number of companies using paper based time sheets to track employee hours. Today’s technological advancements allow business executives, HR managers and financial controllers to be more productive and efficient. In a recent conversation with a business executive, he confessed that to change from the punch clock system, to an automated time and attendance solution would be a cultural shock to his entire organization. Change, in this instance, was just too painful to bear, despite the fact, the cost of tracking employees hours manually were insurmountable to their bottom line.

Managing your workforce’s labour should be the least of your worries. ATS Time and Attendance Canada offers industry-leading software solutions that provide the knowledge, tools and support needed to optimize the deployment of your workforce.

If your business is still using paper-based time sheets, chances are you have not been introduced to the advantages of an automated time management system.

Cost savings and benefits of an ATS time and attendance solution include:

Track and Manage Labour Costs
ATS web hosted time and attendance, measures labour ratios and reduces unnecessary costs.

Vacation/Personal Time Off
Personal Time Off with our TimeWork software synchronizes requests and approvals and ensures adequate coverage.

ERP, Payroll and HRIS Data Integration
ATS hosted time and attendance seamlessly integrates to any ERP, Payroll and HR system.

Data Synchronization
Employee time clock synchronizes in real time, with the ATS workforce management software. No more adding up of employee hours using a calculator.

Stop Employee Time Theft
Using paper-based time sheets or an antiquated punch clock can cost a company thousands of dollars a year in productivity and human error.

Notifications
Alert notifications trigger in real time to alert managers of issues requiring immediate attention.

Human Resources Information
TimeWork can be used to track employee information such as: certifications, uniforms, asset tracking, training and next of kin contact information.

ATS integrated workforce management software saves time, cuts costs and aligns employee performance with your operational business goals.

The ATS time management solution automates and integrates ERP, payroll, HR, scheduling, forecasting and labour analytics. Even the most cost-conscience organization can find ways to use their workforce more efficiently. Our time and attendance system helps you plan, deploy and track your employees and their performance on one single platform. The result is enhanced productivity, and better, more informed decision-making.

Here is what one of our many customers had to say:
“Once again I must commend the work and dedication of your support department. Jackie was waiting at 8:00 am today to help fix the problem in the system. She worked for a good 2 hours to get everything back on track and had me test it to make sure from my end. I do not know what I would do without her. I assume you must have other clients that feel the same. Please add my name to that list for anyone who is interested in discussing ATS commitment to servicing its clients”.
Sheila P, Director of Payroll Operations- L Building Supplies

To read more about our time and attendance and workforce management software go to our website. To join our weekly user group session register online.