Why MyTimeCards?

HR Management Magazine says: "Implementing a time and attendance system can save most employers between 2-5 percent of their total payroll in improved efficiencies and staff reductions...These savings stem from a variety of areas, including paper reduction, elimination of ‘time theft’ (hours paid but not worked), managing leave liability, controlling overtime, fewer errors due to automated calculations, eliminating duplicate data entry, and elimination of fines and lawsuits. Overall, a payback period of less than 12 months is typical and is easily justified in almost every organization."

Accessible 24/7 in a simple, traditional looking format, MyTimeCards Web-based timecards automatically track worked hours and maintain accrual and usage of earned time off. Timecard periods are customized for you – whether you track weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, or otherwise. Each timecard allows one-click supervisor approval and easy entry of pertinent comments by employee or supervisor. Get a free trial now!

The Whole Picture

Say you’re considering automating a few time-intensive tasks. Good thinking. Such necessary operations as staff scheduling and timekeeping eat up hours and therefore dollars. Speaking of dollars, chances are your next consideration will be the cost of that automation, so you investigate. A cursory glance at your options will offer a choice: Do you go with a web-based application or client-server software? In other words, do you buy a packaged program you install and maintain locally, or do you subscribe to an online scheduling/timekeeping system? Your first reaction may be “Why should I take on the ongoing expense of any subscription service when I can make one purchase upfront, own the software, and be done with it?” For the answer, we suggest you assess your current operation (IT staff on hand, number of users you’ll have, potential for company growth or downsizing) and compare features of both options with that assessment in mind. The best choice for you will be the one that saves you the most in staff time and errors, requires the least staff intervention, and provides optimal automation of your selected tasks. Here are a couple of aids to help in your research:

Automated Timekeeping: Time to Choose

Automation Line by Line

Employee Scheduling and Timekeeping
Client-server Automation vs MyTimeCards.com (MTC)
	Client-server	MyTimeCards
Upfront Costs	Yes	No
License Purchase Required	Yes	No
Upgrades & Migrations	Customer’s responsibility	By MTC with no additional fee
Service Contract	Yes, up to 20% of cost/yr	No
IT Support	Reliant on customer’s staff	Unlimited at no charge
System Customization	Limited by product	Highly Customizable
Accessible by Multiple Users	With purchase of licenses	Unlimited # of Users
Accessible from Multiple Locations	Local network only	From anyplace w/ Internet
Record Storage	Limited by user server space	Unlimited
Server Speed	Depends on user system load	High speed hosted servers

Plumbing 103 for HR Managers

What about what I like to call the "fudge factor?" Do you have a means to verify and substantiate suspicions of employee abuse of your timekeeping policies – the early punch ins or the late punch outs – without human (and costly) supervision? Does your current system show employees' clocked hours compared to approved/scheduled hours, over one day or over one or many pay periods? Can you determine at a glance which employees may need a reminder of clocking policies, or would you need a supervisor to spend hours monitoring employees to substantiate the reminder?

The devil is indeed in the details, and the details you should be concerned about are irregular schedules, exceptions to policies, the need for staff intervention in timekeeping, and clocked vs. scheduled hours. So take a look at how closely your current tools and procedures actually match the reality of doing business the way it's done in your own company. If the fit isn't good enough to plug the hole, it's still a hole.

The minimum wage for covered nonexempt employees was raised on 7/24/09 to $7.25/hour. Remember, under FLSA, if time is clocked by a nonexempt employee, it must be paid, and if that time brings the total hours to over 40/week, it must be paid at time and a half. An accurate, automated timekeeping system that is customizable to match your policies and alerts managers to patterns of abuse is the best tool you can have to prevent the clocking of unauthorized hours.

Click below for useful information on potential cash “leaks”.

Coverage Under the Fair Labor Standards Act

Your HR Plumber's Helper

Plumbing 102 for HR Managers

Even if you have complete confidence in your employees, scheduling and time tracking equipment and monitoring procedures, you still could be losing considerable cash if the equipment doesn't adapt to all permutations of company policy. The permutations are the weak points just waiting to spring big leaks, and every business has them. For example:

Do your current equipment and monitoring procedures allow for pre-approved exceptions to the rules or varying work schedules without costly supervisor intervention?

How do you reschedule and track time lost due to closings, i.e. weather or outages?
Can your system automate these changes easily for you?

Remember, any time a human has to intervene to edit paper or tweak the automation, you've lost benefit of the automation and you've lost money.

The American Payroll Association estimates the average time spent on a correction to a timesheet to be 15 minutes. Using an automated timekeeping system, customized to reflect your company’s policies and anomalies, greatly decreases staff time required to produce accurate reporting of hours worked and leave earned and taken.

Plumbing 101 for HR Managers

Where are you losing money by overpaying non-exempt workers? Notice that I'm assuming you are losing money. EVERY employer has small, and often big- cash leaks in overpayments that can go unnoticed unless s/he looks carefully for them. These leaks don't have to be hard to find. Just spend a little time thinking about how your business operates-

What rules are prescribed for punching in and out?

How are these rules being monitored?

Are they being monitored at all?

If your answer to any of these questions is "I'm not sure," I'm willing to bet your plumbing is gushing dollars by paying for time not worked- and that's not fair to anyone.

To have your HR plumbing looked at, check out the following sources for help on how to stop and slow those leaks now- before you notice the flood.

Riding the Clock Tricks some employees may use to beat the timekeeping system, written by actual clock riders. How vulnerable to them are your policies and systems?

Time to Act
HR Management Magazine’s take on time and attendance automation.

Try MyTimeCards A chance to see automated timekeeping in action – for free.

There's No Business Like Your Business

Two businesses can appear identical on the outside - or even after you step in the door. Do most Subways or Dunkin Donuts stand out as unique? Well each is, because no two business owners do business the same way. They don't make identical policies or expect identical performance from their employees. That's why cookie-cutter time keeping systems are of practically no use to them. No system right out of the box will record time with each company's policies taken into account. Any business owner using such a product will wind up tweaking the records regularly, therefore losing any advantage automation could have afforded, or worse, changing their company policies to match the limited capabilities of the time keeping software.

With MyTimeCards, we change the tracking parameters to match your policies, at no charge to you. Our flexible program contains hundreds of variables easily selected and stored by you, to reflect how you record time worked and award time off. And that's not all. If you should have a policy not already reflected in MyTimeCards, we'll program it for you, so you get the maximum automation - and the maximum savings - from our software.

Take it from Phillip Whitford of Braswell Memorial Library, Rocky Mount NC: "Every time keeping package we looked at would have required us to change our HR polices to adapt to the software. MyTimeCards on the other hand adapted their program to meet our needs and our policies. For once the software changed to accommodate the people and not the other way around."

MyTimeCards...Getting it right around the clock!

The MyTimeCards Reputation, Case #4

What the MyTimeCards customer said..."Every time keeping package we looked at would have required us to change our HR polices to adapt to the software. MyTimeCards on the other hand adapted their program to meet our needs and our policies. For once the software changed to accommodate the people and not the other way around."

Why they said it...

Remember, any time a human has to intervene to edit paper or tweak the automation, you've lost benefit of the automation and you've lost money. The American Payroll Association estimates the average time spent on a correction to a timesheet to be 15 minutes. We take the time to learn how your office operates and customize MyTimeCards just for you, to reflect your company’s policies and anomalies, so we can greatly decrease your staff time required to produce accurate reporting of hours worked and leave earned and taken.