Reasons Why Mobile App Matters


This is a true story. While I was taking a vacation on a beautiful island, indulging in its amazing view and clean air, my phone rang. My company needed to submit a very important application that only I could write about, and the application had to be submitted before the end of the day. I didn’t bring my lappy (like how the hipsters called it nowadays), so what was I to do? I could write on a few sheets of high-quality grainy Resort papers laying around in my room, snap a photo and send it over, but could they understand my near-doctor handwriting that even I had the problem reading? After a few moments of panicking, the genius in me kicked in and made me installed Google doc App on my mobile that made it possible for me to carry out my important task on a tiny little screen until the sun went down. Okay, forgive me for the incident's over-dramatization. I could simply go to the Resort’s business Center to finish my job but the fact remains that people do stuff on their mobile nowadays; it’s hard to even talk to these people and look them in the eyes, literally. 

Therefore, when TimeTec develops our cloud solutions, mobile App instantly becomes the focus of the development. So, why does app matter in today’s workforce? It’s because people no longer open their computers for facebook and people publish their selfies using mobile. But more importantly, today’s workforce have to deal with the fast pace of business and technology, that having things centralized in their mobile would make their life simpler and better.

Workforces are fluid these days more than not. Things need to get done faster and more efficient that they can’t afford to just stay in an office. Travels become common and when employees are not available in the office, they need to be given tools to complete the pressing tasks. With TimeTec TA, they can report their whereabouts accurately and TimeTec Patrol utilizes App as its patrolling tool. The technology of the mobile like GPS, NFC, Wifi, and the Internet make everything possible. Next, TimeTec Leave lets employee manage their work leaves from the App and TimeTec MW (Mobile Workforce) can trace the routes taken by the mobile workforce with great certainty. Irrespective of your employees’ locations, when they have the right tools to get things done, things will get settled without intrusive supervision.  

Nowadays also, everybody has his/her smartphone of choice and as long as they can install the Apps on their phone, the Company doesn’t have to be concerned about the type of phones they are using. And that’s why TimeTec apps are built on the common iOS and/or Android platforms for easy download.

Study finds that humans are naturally selfish, they like anything that is related to them. Hence, it’s very important for Apps to not forget personalization. TimeTec TA App has a dashboard that shows one’s productivity of the day and time management. i-Neighbour makes visiting your loved ones easier and TimeTec Leave is about your personal leave management. People love themselves, and if an app provides something that improves their lives and has something to do with them, they’ll definitely be using it.   

App like Spotify makes us listen to music without CDs, Whatsapp lets us communicate intensely in silence with so many people from around the world for free, Google presents Office on mobile in case we need to work at odd hours, and Waze shows us the way. The world has gone mobile and mobile is nothing if without its useful apps.


Install TimeTec App now for workforce time management in Google Play and App Store. 
Mobile

Effective Job Costing with TimeTec TA

Job costing is the process of tracking costs by tasks assigned, where employer gets to monitor the cost of each work completed by the employees. Having this information, company can evaluate its profitability and review its decisions based on the return-on-investment or cost-effectiveness of the work done. 

 3 Obvious Job Costing Benefits!

 Improve Profitability – Job costing is calculation of cost based on each work. It’s the process of quantifying each work into dollars and cents, allowing the management to calculate the monetary value for individual task. As the management reviewing the report on job costing, it’ll become apparent on which tasks that are hemorrhaging money and which tasks are doing fine, resulting in cost control measures that can bring better profits to the company. 

 Assess Work Performance – Through job costing, you will be able to assess your employees’ individual work performance, based on everyone’s productivity and efficiency. Always when dealing with a group of employees, there’s no accurate indication of who’s actually doing what and how effective this staff is. With this tool, you will be able to identify and justify employees who fail to meet performance expectation and recognize the ones that have performed well.

 Estimate Future Costing – By having the cost for each job, management can make estimation of the future costing that will incur and plan on their resources better. This will enable company to understand what the REAL cost for a job to be completed. 

 Regardless of the size of your company, job costing can deliver an efficient method to calculate the exact expenses required for your company’s production. Be in control of your company’s costing today! Try the job-costing feature in TimeTec TA through the steps below:

 1. Create the work code at Company > Remark/Workcode. 
2. Add in user work rate per hour in their Profile at User > Manage User.
3. Create flexi schedule and enable the work code in Schedule settings

4. Assign users into the schedule.
5. Make sure that users under this schedule choose their work code each time they clock for work.
6. Generate report at Report > Attendance Listing > Job Cost Analysis. 

 Note: We will enhance this feature in the future by allowing Admin to add in the rate per hour for each work code to provide a more detail job costing report. 
Attendance Automation

Overtime Fixes Your Business Requires


Ideally, a business should operate during regular work hours only on weekdays. Well, that’s in the land where customers do not need instant support and fast delivery, in the place where deadlines are unheard of and all services and productions happen during the day. Businesses need agility and one way to achieve business’s objectives is to implement overtime in the workplace. The truth is, if life doesn’t demand overtime nobody wants to volunteer for overtime. It’s undeniable that working overtime can earn staff some extra money but it also can take a toll on employees. 

 When work couldn’t be completed in the provided time period, but the deadline is nearing, overtime works as a savior. This happens when there’s a mismatch in workload and workforce; too much work to be done by too little people. This situation could be temporary for example, a company that needs to implement overtime to handle the incoming stock or a sudden surge of sales during festivity period. It could also be a permanent situation whereby your company does not employ enough manpower to deal with your business’s demands. While the first one can be corrected or managed by overtime, it’s much better for a company to resort for a better solution by employing more staff to match the requirements for the second scenario. Forcing your employees to work overtime at all times can lower down the morale and the overall productivity. 

 Overtime also can result from too many meetings, too many emails and too many distractions. At the end of the day, employees need to do what they need to do and when the time required for them to do their jobs is replaced by meetings, answering emails and office distractions, they will find a way to finish their job by taking overtime. In situations like these, managers need to pay attention to the activities assigned to their team in the office to make sure that employees get ample time to settle their required jobs. Overloading your staff with office activities that are not productive is not the way to go to achieve excellence. Cut backs on meetings, simplify email replies and identify areas of distractions in the office to make your staff more focused on their tasks. 

 However, in lesser circumstances, over striving staffs also like to take overtime willingly because they want to prove their worth to the company. My life is my work and my work time proves it, so please let me climb the (corporate) ladder. It wouldn’t become a problem if a company allows overtime and happy with these over striving employees. Nonetheless, various researches have proven that spending too much time in the office could be unproductive and shouldn’t be encouraged because it’ll cause the staff to overwork and not performing at his/her ideal rate. 

 Manage your workforce’s overtime by fixing its causes. The objective is not to eradicate overtime but to keep it at a minimum to control cost and to maintain employee satisfaction.

 TimeTec TA provides a tool to manage your business’s overtime by allowing you to set the rules and schedules that favor your company. Give it a try by signing up with us at www.timetecta.com and get 10 user licenses free for life. 

 Note: The writer does not apply for overtime to write this blog entry.
Attendance Automation

15 Do’s and Don’ts in Choosing Time Attendance System and Save Your Business Unnecessary Cost



1. Do track time because time in business is costly, it amounts to dollars and cents as the time ticking away. Leaving your business without a proper method to collect and track workforce’s time can expose your business to additional unnoticeable cost. With various time attendance solutions available in the market, choosing one suitable system for your company can be a tricky choice. TimeTec TA offers 10 user licenses for free when you open an account with us and you can link it to biometrics system, mobile clocking and web clocking all at one flat cost of USD2 per user per month. 

 2. Don’t invade privacy of the staff by prying on their activities during their free time. What an employer can do is monitor the use of time during the employees’ work time, and that’s how important accurate time attendance system that can detail the work time, break time, over time and etc for a company. 
Check the daily work rate in TimeTec TA to get the overview of your company's work performance.

 3. Do include staff participation in the solution. Certain time attendance solutions can be one sided whereby only the employer has the upper hand when it comes to staff’s attendance, in other words what employer says go. A system that can provide the employees a channel to request for change and to view their own data are the one you should be looking. Like TimeTec TA, not only the staff can view their data, they also can request for amendments if any irregularity found in the data. 
Staff can request for change if they found any irregularity in their attendance data in TimeTec TA

4. Do make it easy for all involved to use the system. TimeTec TA provides a few viable options like fingerprint system, clocking via mobile phone, clocking through web browser and in the near future customers can start using NFC and Beacon technology to track time easily without invading anybody’s space and privacy. 

 5. Don’t spend time on manual processes with the conventional time attendance system like punch card where your HR personnel have to spend a lot of time keying in the data at the end of the month. Subscribe with a solution that can provide you with automated and reliable data that is readily available for processing at anytime you want.

 6. Do have a flexible system that caters to all sorts of scenarios you require in your organization for example different scheduling, multiple shifts, different pay rate, various work codes, connection to payroll and many more.  

 7. Don’t ignore the past events just because they are over. Use the historical data of your company to improve your organization and remedy any issues you have with your workforce based on real data. With TimeTec TA, all past data is available and accessible to be used for system improvements. 

 8. Do have real-time flexibility that provides convenience to system user. In this time and age where waiting is a not an option, real time data is valuable for any company to process and view the required data instantly. TimeTec TA cloud solution provides real time data at its best.

 9. Don’t invest on a system that makes buddy-punching possible. While having a lot of buddies in your life is a plus point, having a buddy clocking in for you is definitely time theft. A system like TimeTec TA curbs buddy punching with its biometrics, and also GPS location tag should be the system of choice. 

 10. Do connect with Payroll or importation feature because having a system that can integrate with other important system seamlessly can eradicate a lot of work load and pressure in no time at all. With the readily available data in TimeTec TA, connection to third party software through SDK is made easy. 
Some payroll systems that is compatible with TimeTec TA. 

11. Do have positive UX or great user experience for users to feel familiar, at ease and can navigate through the solution intuitively without having to be guided or assisted by technical people. TimeTec TA made UX its priority. 

 12. Don’t be afraid to switch system because technology and system evolve through time and with time to present the market with the most feasible systems for the current conditions. Holding on to something that is not effective is just plain ineffective. Cloud system like TimeTec TA is the clear future and data accessibility is the crux of today’s workforce. 

 13. Do comply with the law of the country and the policy of the company because non-compliance is damaging and expensive. The time attendance system you choose must be able to match the law requirements and adhere to the company’s policy. 

 14. Do choose a system that has a future because things changed according to time and business needs. A trend doesn’t last long but a good and comprehensive system like TimeTec TA cloud is the need of today’s workforce. 

 15. Don’t forget to test before you invest in any solution. TimeTec TA provides an ample time for a company to test on the feasibility of the system before they commit to it. Plus, 10-user licenses free are available at your disposal. 

 Time attendance solution is an integral part of a company because let’s face it, while honesty is the best policy, time theft amongst employee still plaguing the workforce world even today and it is causing the company’s unnecessary cost. Choosing the right time attendance system could potentially save some excessive spending and the system could train the employees to be a disciplined workers that are worth the company’s investment.
Attendance Automation

Managing Your Roster the Right Way


A well-built rostering can potentially be the key to success for an organization. Being able to effectively roster your workforce to match your business’s demand will definitely ensure your company better production and services for your customers. However, managing your roster right can be challenging because it involves more than just selecting employee to work on a certain date/time, the rostering also comes with rules that they (employees) need to adhere to in order to be eligible for pay/claims and accurate attendance records. With better management of rostering, you can control your cost, better your productivity and provide better worklife balance for your workforce. 

 Here, we share 5 tips on how to manage your roster effectively.

 1. Play to Your Business’s Advantage 
You need to focus on what’s best for your company. Allocate the work hours, shifts, and responsibilities, and then work out the cost to build an efficient roster. DO NOT plan rosters that do not play to your advantage. Having a clear idea of your roster cost could be an added benefit to your operation. 

Setup your schedule in TimeTec TA by defining the work hours and attendance rules before generating the roster.

Set the schedule pattern and assign users to the roster.

 2. Share the Best Shifts
Sharing is caring, and sharing the best shifts is advisable when it comes to shift assignment. For example, in a restaurant environment, some shifts offer better tips than the other, while for other employees, some shifts are harder than the other. Allocate the shifts fairly to each employee to ensure all employees get their turns. A simple act of fairness could go a long way.   

 3. Automate Rostering Task
By automating rostering task; you’d be able to handle other important tasks at hand. You will be able to make employee replacements, change of shifts day and time easily.  With a few clicks in your cloud application like TimeTec TA, changes made will reflect at everyone’s roster instantly.   
 Changes made in your roster will reflect in the Roster Overview instantly.

4. Plan your Roster in Advance, so Your Employees can Plan their Lives
It’s always good to plan your roster so your employees can have the overview of their work shift pattern in the coming weeks. Also, if you happen to have employees taking leaves, you can plan for the replacement right away. This also would allow your employees to achieve the work-life balance and plan their lives better. 

 5. Roster is Staff-Friendly 
It would definitely be a pain-in-the-neck to call the office every time you want to check on your roster. Of course, pinning up the roster at the Memo board would work, but by simply making your roster accessible to all your employees at anytime will result fewer last minute scheduling changes. With cloud system such at TimeTec TA, employees can log to their account and check their own roster on the web AND also from their mobile phone through TimeTec Mobile app. 
In TimeTec TA, employees can check their full roster and also get to view their attendance history (work hour, short hour and over time hour) for the previous days, from PC or mobile phone. 

In any business, rosters can vary from the straightforward 9 – 5 working hours to the complicated shifts, thus it is important to have an efficient and well-organized roster to keep the employees in order. A messy roster can result in unhappy employees that may create more ‘sick’ absences and create a hole in your roster, and your pocket too. 

 Use TimeTec TA to help organize and manage your roster and workforce easier. Hop on the cloud and join us today at TimeTec TA. 
Attendance Automation
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