Making technology work for you is an essential part of succeeding in business. Luckily, thanks to customization features, it’s relatively easy to get the most bang for your buck from your business tech.
Time-clock software is quickly becoming one of the most effective and convenient methods of timekeeping for small businesses. But if you want to find an online time-tracking system that best fits your business, you need to make sure that you invest in a service provider with flexible settings and versatile configuration. Here are some of the ways that you can customize time-clock software for optimum use.
Understanding time-clock software
At this point, it’s pretty likely that you’ve heard of time-clock software — but you might still need more information to truly understand what it is. Before we get into the specifics of the latest means of time tracking, we’ll give you a brief overview of what, exactly, time-clock software is and why it’s such a useful innovation in the world of business.
So, what is time-clock software?
Simply put, time-clock software allows you to record your employees’ hours through cloud-based technology, which means that they can clock in and out from any Internet-connected device. Because time-clock software is an online system, it can easily be integrated with other software and applications, like the ones that you use to do scheduling, invoice-processing, and payroll.
How does it work?
An account will be made for each of your employees, which they will use to clock in and out before and after every shift. Remember when we said time-clock software is flexible? Well, it starts here — you can choose the login method that best suits your business. Some of the options include a username-and-password combination, scannable QR codes, and even facial recognition.
Customizing time-clock software
Time-clock software might be based around tracking time, but it doesn’t end there. Thanks to all of the different features and settings, you can do a lot more with time-clock software than record and view your employees’ hours.
Scheduling
As we said before, most time-clock software providers allow you to coordinate timekeeping with scheduling, and some even have scheduling features of their own. This means that you can streamline scheduling in addition to time tracking — which means fewer hours spent on tedious administrative work and better utilization of your small business’s human resources.
Time off and overtime
You can use time-clock software to process both time-off requests and overtime, which, again, means quicker and easier bookkeeping and fewer costly mistakes. This simplifies these procedures for your employees, too. Because they can access their accounts from anywhere, employees will be able to request time off from their devices at home (or, if your time-clock software has a mobile app, while they’re on the go). You’ll be able to approve and deny requests before they go through, and because your time-tracking system will be integrated with scheduling, you won’t have to worry about accidentally scheduling an employee when he or she is not available.
Geofences and IP locks
If you don’t have employees who work remotely, you can use geofences and IP locks to limit where your workers can clock in and out from. These features are customizable on an employee-by-employee basis, meaning that you can set different restrictions for each of your employees in order to ensure that everyone is where he’s supposed to be while on the clock.
A geofence creates a geographic radius within which your employee has to be in order to access the time clock. Similarly, an IP lock determines the IP address from which your employee can access the clock. If your business has multiple locations, don’t worry — you can create and assign as many (or as few) geofences and IP locks as you need.
Job codes
Ever wonder how much time is being spent on each one of your projects? With time-clock software, you can create job codes under which employees can log hours to reflect the number of hours that they’re spending working on a specific job or project. This is useful for a number of reasons. First, you can ensure that employees know exactly what they’re supposed to be working on during each shift. Second, you can review your employees’ hours with precision like never before. You can see the ratio of time being dedicated to each project so that you know exactly how your business’s time is being divided.
Get the most with customization
The days of tracking time on paper are over. Digital timekeeping isn’t just faster and more efficient — it also has greater functionality, especially in terms of the extent to which it can be customized. This maximizes your business’s investment by increasing productivity and saving both time and money.
However, when it comes to finding the best time-clock software for your business, you don’t want to settle for a provider that doesn’t allow you to take full advantage of everything that time-clock software has to offer. So, when you’re researching different time-clock software providers, make sure you consider the flexibility of their features and what will benefit your business the most.
Take control of your tech by customizing it to work for you!
This article was written by SmallBizViewpoints from Small Biz Viewpoints and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.
