Online Business with that "Buy Local" Feel

More and more consumers, with all good intentions, are embracing the Buy Local movement; however, according to Business Week, "Some question whether buy-local efforts really do help communities. 'It's easy to show that the local businesses benefit. It's very hard to show the costs,' says Russell Roberts, an economist at George Mason University and host of the EconTalk podcast. 'The costs can include higher prices and a narrower selection for consumers. The claim is it keeps the money in the community,' he says. 'The money in the community isn't the goal of economic life. The goal of economic life is to have the right access to the things we care about.' While Roberts says there's nothing wrong with shopping locally, he says there's no inherent economic benefit.

"But many consumers choose to buy local because the intangible benefits are precisely the things they care about: ...business owners who know shoppers' names. 'They find value beyond the economic value,' says Village Books' Robinson."

We at MyTimeCards pride ourselves on supplying products and services that aren't available from local vendors in every community, and doing so with the personal attention and customer care that has that "Local" feel. We offer a single point of contact for all sales, training and tech support, so each client has a direct line to our technicians and even our programmers.

With MyTimeCards, you'll get a system customized at no extra charge to your specifications, based on your company policies and operations. You'll get the power and convenience of sophisticated web technology and the individual attention of a neighborhood business owner.

Meet us here or at 845.705.0053.

Are You Running a Half-Automated Operation?

If you're using Quickbooks, Paychex, ADP or other payroll system, and not using automated employee timekeeping to enter payable hours, you're not getting the maximum benefit of automation. Manual and punchclock methods of timekeeping are error-prone and waste time and paper. Staff intervention is always costly.
The more staff functions you automate, the greater your savings.

Since 2005, MyTimeCards has provided virtually uninterrupted services to customers via secure servers and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption of data. Our suite of online employee management tools enables our customers to maximize efficiency and reduce cost of operations by building Internet accessibility and program customizability into fast, accurate, and simple-to-use records of employee attendance and work times. MyTimeCards modules – Timecards/Timekeeping, Scheduling, Time-off Accruals and Job Tracking - are tailored to fit your business needs, whether you manage one employee on one site or a thousand workers stationed globally.

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

Preview MyTimeCards

Help for Franchisees

For many people, franchising has proven to be a viable way to become business owners. For the most part it offers the lowest risks and the highest level of support including brand name and trademarks, marketing and advertising, web sites, toll free numbers, operations manuals and proven systems - along with thorough training in every aspect of the business. A huge attraction for some: You can totally change careers without years of schooling or apprenticeship or research. One day you can have a "job" as accountant or police officer and a few months later have a "career" as the successful owner of a business, which may be an auto detailer or a pet spa or a home improvement franchise.*

Are there drawbacks to owning a franchise? Of course. Franchisors don't supply everything, and they don't run your business for you. Most aspects of operation are your responsibility, including HR. Bookkeeping, payroll and record keeping are frequently left up to you, and your profits may rise or fall based on vendor selection.

MyTimeCards is the perfect employee timekeeping program for franchisees. It is web-based, fast, customizable, simple to use and requires no IT staff to install, maintain or to upgrade the system. Whether you have 2 employees or 2000, you get the same reliability, accuracy, free set up, staff training and unlimited tech support. Shop around - you won't find any timekeeping/scheduling package that offers the value we do. And there's no long term contract or commitment on your part. Get your free trial today.

Try MyTimeCards

Read more about franchises:
Franchise Disclosure Laws
Franchise Business Plans

Of Santa, Swine and Summer Vacations

How many other contingencies can find you short-staffed? Holidays can put a dent in productivity. And workers are finding they don't have to contract H1N1 themselves to be off the job - having a family member diagnosed is reason for most employers to tell a worker "Stay home." What can you as an employer do to keep your operation in the black regardless of absenteeism? Consider initiating a cross-training program for employees. It can increase productivity and employee satisfaction year round. Read more...

Cross-training Benefits

H1N1 and You

MyTimeCards Job Tracking module keeps up with clocked hours for an unlimited number of employees on a unlimited number of jobs.

Don't Know Much About Arithmetic

Mel Kleiman, North America’s leading consultant on strategies for hiring and retaining the best frontline, hourly employees and their managers says "Most employers are unsuccessful in their efforts to attract quality frontline workers in sufficient numbers and retain them long enough to realize a return on their investment. Because hourly employee turnover rates historically run from 70 to 120 percent per year in most industries, it’s easy to understand why their employers have wrongly come to assume that there is nothing they can do to control or mitigate the enormous drain on profitability caused by turnover."

Retaining good employees can be the secret to success for your business. Not only do you benefit from qualified, experienced and loyal workers, you save significantly by reducing turnover. Employers find it well worth the expense to offer incentives for employees to stay with their company, such as paid time off based on years of service.

For example: Employees have 2 weeks of PTO after 1 year, 3 weeks after 3 years and 4 weeks after 5 years. (This is the equivalant of 1 week of vacation and 5 paid sick days, for the first year.) A policy such as this requires careful, probably tedious monitoring of hours worked and dates of service, because you will also want to base an accrual on hours worked, rather than a flat award, so that an emloyee who normally works 35 hours per week has proportional PTO time.

MyTimeCards automates the entire PTO accrual process. It is 100% accurate, easily editable and customizable, based on your unique policies, so that someone working, say, 63% of your defined work week receives 63% of the defined paid time off. MyTimeCards makes it effortless to reward employee longevity. And there's no arithmetic to do!

For up to the minute HR help visit The Human Resource Blog.

Going Paperless - No One's There Yet

Even manufacturers of the biggest, most powerful document management equipment admit a paperless office is an elusive if not unreachable goal. But that doesn't mean you can't drastically reduce the amount of paper handling that is costing you money. According to Buyer Zone, "If it takes five minutes to retrieve and replace a paper file and an employee works with ten paper files per day, that's 216 hours a year - over five weeks' time - spent walking files around. At $20/hour, that's $4300 per year. A system that lets employees find and work with those documents without ever leaving their desks can instantly slash those costs."

MyTimeCards replaces paper timecards, sign-in sheets, schedules, time-off request forms and attendance records with automated, virtual records that can be edited and approved with just a couple of clicks. We have unlimited record storage, easily retrieved at any time from any Internet connected computer. And if you just can't quite let go of all paper, MyTimeCards reports, timecards and more may be quickly printed.

See Microsoft's take on a paperless office for more tips.

How Are You Performing?

Don't have all the business you'd like to have? If not, what can you do about it? Take a look at your own performance with this in mind:

"Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends."
Walt Disney, entertainment icon

“An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises.” Mae West, actress and sex symbol

“There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next level of performance. Miss that moment - and you start to decline.” Andy Grove, Intel Corp.

"Every timekeeping package we looked at would have required us to change our HR polices to adapt to the software. MyTimeCards 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." Phillip Whitford, MyTimeCards user since 2006.

In other words, performance is in the eye of the customer.

Customer Service vs Customer Care

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase "customer service"? What comes to my mind: product repair, answers to customer questions, sales and payment issues. Maybe it's just me, but "customer service" seems a lot like "problem resolution." There's an element of negativity to the phrase. How about when you hear the phrase "customer care"? You might not hear birds singing, like I do, but don't some nice things come to mind? Prompt and careful attention to your needs as a customer? Thoughtful and complete product or service information? Some "give" and not just "take"? A sustained relationship rather than one that ends at the point of sale?

Customer care is this and more and makes the difference in your profits because it KEEPS customers. Remember, it costs far less to keep customers that it does to get new ones.

How does MyTimeCards care for you?
Personal attention with 24 hour response guarantee
Free staff training
Free set up and badge encoding
Free unlimited tech support
Free software customization so MyTimeCards saves you the maximum in time and money based on how YOU work, not how the program works.

Get a free 30 day trial now.

For more on customer care see The Importance of Good Customer Care

Size DOESN'T Matter, Case #3

With 4 employees paid weekly, according to the American Payroll Association the time it takes to process traditional timecards costs you $30/mo. Automated timekeeping virtually eliminates that expense. Now I know what you're thinking - your payroll clerk is on salary, so saving a few hours a month doesn't save you any money. I say, why have salaried employees doing unnecessary tasks? With so many employers facing downsizing, instead of shuffling paper that employee could be picking up tasks once performed by someone else.

With these 3 cases in mind, automated timekeeping could save the small employer $215/mo. That's nothing to sneeze at.

See More Savings

Size DOESN'T Matter, Case #2

How else might you be overpaying employees by not accurately tracking time? Human error - the simple math errors employees make when accounting for their work times. American Payroll Association estimates the average error rate on manual time cards to be between and 2 and 8%. A modest error rate of 2% for 4 employees paid $10/hr costs you $128/mo. But, you may ask, if they are simple math errors, aren't the errors just as likely to favor the employer as the employee? Not according to the APA. The majority of errors in manual timekeeping favors the employee.

A reliable automated timekeeper eliminates errors at minimal cost.

Size DOESN'T Matter, Case #1

A popular myth around automated timekeeping is the one that says if you only have 3 or 4 employees, you don't need a timekeeping system. Maybe you don't need one, but why not be sure? Take a look at the potential savings vs the cost.

Any employer who doesn't accurately track work hours is probably overpaying. One factor is wasted labor minutes - extended breaks, overestimated work times, and more. Sure, it's just a few minutes here and there, but consider this: Four employees wasting 5 minutes a day, at $10/hour costs you $77 a month. That may not seem like much, but why pay for what you don't get? That's like buying coffee at a deli and telling the cashier to charge you for a bagel too. It just doesn't make sense.

Considering Independent Contractors

Employers faced with cost reduction and/or downsizing may find help using independent contractors rather than carrying employees on their payroll. They reduce their tax and benefit liabilities by using contractors legally and effectively. Before taking this tack, it's important to educate yourself. The IRS and DOL have regulations they are famous for sticking to! Don't get on their radar by making questionable employee classifications. Here are two excellent resources to get you started:

Help from SCORE

Contractor vs Employee

MyTimeCards accurately tracks classification and employee or contractor hours by job and client.

Plugging the Cash Leaks: Case #3

Automation - The Best Plumber's Helper

CASE # 3 - Manual Time Card Preparation

The average payroll clerk spends 7 minutes per timecard each pay period:

• Preparing and handling timecards


• Computing timecard totals


• Verifying timecard totals


• Computing shift and department totals


• Reconstructing lost or damaged timecards

The Cost: Preparing 100 timecards will take an estimated 11.67 hours to complete. Therefore, at an average clerical wage of $15.00 per hour, timecard preparation would cost $175.05 per pay period.

Automation cuts timecard handling down to seconds saving ANOTHER $170 per pay period – that’s $680 if you pay weekly!

Plugging the Cash Leaks: Case #2

Automation - The Best Plumber's Helper

CASE # 2 – Human Error

The American Payroll Association estimates that the rate of human error in timecard preparation is between 1% and 8%.

Your overpayment: Therefore, a conservative 2% human error rate on a $12,000 payroll would equal $240.00 in erroneous wages paid per pay period. Moreover, the cost to re-issue correct payroll amounts (if the error is detected and reported) further increases your cost of human error.

Automation eliminates errors saving you an additional $240 per pay period – that’s approximately $950 per month, if you pay weekly!

Plugging the Cash Leaks: Case #1

Automation - The Best Plumber's Helper

CASE # 1 - Wasted Labor Minutes

Did you know that just 15 employees receiving pay for merely 4 minutes of "wasted" time per day [untracked breaks, extended lunches, over-approximated punch times, etc.] will total 1380 minutes [23 hours] of additional pay per month?

Your overpayment: If your average pay rate is $10.00 per hour, then you pay an extra $230.00 each month for time not worked.

The right automated timekeeper tracks worked time as closely as a fraction of a minute. At a cost of $5 per employee per month, it saves you $155 per month for 15 employees.

Busting the No-Time-Clock-for-Salaried-Workers Myth

Say you have used the Exemption Test in the previous post and find that you do indeed have employees not covered by FLSA wage and hour regulations. Does that mean you don't need to track their hours worked? Absolutely not! There are many reasons an employer, and salaried employee, can benefit from using an automated timeclock:

• quickly and accurately maintain paid time-off balances
  
• track hours given to specfic projects, departments or budget lines
  
• monitor employee performance, so accurate documentation exists if attendance, late arrival or extended lunch issues arise
  
• have instant access to total hours available for FMLA and other leave
  
• Learn more...
  

Exempt and Punching a Clock

MyTimeCards has fast, accurate reports so you and your employees know how the hours add up.

Classify Carefully, You'll Be Glad You Did

In their whitepaper, "Total Wage and Hour Compliance: An Initiative to End the Wage and Hour Class Action War", labor law experts Littler Mendelson, P.C., note that employers are ever more the targets of wage and hour litigation. In the six month period from October 2007 to March 2008, over 75% of the class action employment law suits filed nationwide were wage and hour related: 1257 out of 1655 cases.

Protect yourself and your employees by declaring exempt and non-exempt classifications carefully. For the best results, consult a labor attorney. To read up on your own, try the following links.

Some DOL Exemptions

What About Your Drivers?

What If You Were Wrong?

MyTimeCards ensures the proper rate of pay matches each employee's classification.

It's Only Human

As good as we know MyTimeCards is, neither it nor any automated timekeeper can make your company totally compliant with federal and state wage and hour laws. Compliance takes more than accurate employee tracking. It takes people, more specifically it takes supervisors. There are assurances of compliance that only direct supervision can give:

• that employees are actually taking the breaks automatically deducted by the automated system


• that employees are not working before they are clocked in or after they are clocked out


• that employees are correctly classified as exempt or non-exempt from FLSA regulations


• that non-exempt employees with tip work are not spending more than 20% of their time doing non-tip tasks


• that employed minors are not doing prohibited activities...and more

Automated timekeeping brings many benefits to employers - significant savings in staff time, reduced costs, elimination of errors, but it cannot completely replace humans. Employers who rely solely on automation do so at their own peril. For a real-world case-in-point, take a look at the Applebee's Story.

Compliance Made Easy-er

The Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor is responsible for enforcing the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which primarily governs overtime laws, minimum wage laws, and child labor laws; however, by far the most frequently found violations the WHD discover are those involving overtime pay. By law, any employee is eligible for overtime pay, at time and a half, unless they are earn at least $455 a week, are paid on a salary basis, and meet at least one of the predefined exemption rules (see link below for summary guidelines. Visit the Department of Labor or consult a labor attorney for complete regulations). If a violation is uncovered, the company will be required to correct the pay for all current and former employees affected by the violation, and pay possible fines, damages, and legal costs. It could wind up costing millions.

The first step in making sure your company is in total compliance with FLSA regulations is to determine that all employees are properly classified as either exempt or non-exempt from FLSA overtime laws. Non-exempt employees must be paid time and a half their rate of pay for any hours worked over 40 per week. Try this:

Put all your employees to the test. Exempt or Non-Exempt?

Once your employees are correctly classified, it is imperitive that your payroll procedures accurately reflect any and all non-exempt compensation that is due. A correct employee record in an automated system such as MyTimeCards is a foolproof way to monitor employee type and hour type and calculate hours worked.

Staying on the Government's (and your employees') Good Side

Did you hear the one about the employer who had to pay out millions in back wages and fines because the company timeclock was wrong? Not funny, and not a punchline any boss would want to be. An employer's total compliance with FLSA regulations is more important than ever before. And don't forget, individual states have their own compliance standards you must follow as well.

The number of wage and hour class actions, and the payouts employers have had to make, have risen sharply. The number of cases filed in U.S. federal courts more than doubled from 2001 to 2006. How do you protect yourself from wage and hour disputes, and ensure your employees are treated fairly?

Total compliance requires careful attention to detail. In their whitepaper, "Total Wage and Hour Compliance: An Initiative to End the Wage and Hour Class Action War", labor law experts Littler Mendelson, P.C., name automated timekeeping as a key component in minimizing an employer's exposure to wage and hour litigation.

Automated timekeeping provides clear, accurate and instantly accessible records of hours worked by each employee, and many systems go much further, storing all the wage and hour records the DOL requires that you keep. Be ahead of the government auditors. These resources will help:

Have Just What They're Looking For Records You Are Required to Keep by the U.S Department of Labor

Preparing for the Wage Hour Audit A Basic To Do List

MyTimeCards.com's Employee Record stores essential info required by the U.S. Department of Labor. This, along with the virtual timecards which are stored and easily retrieved by MyTimeCards.com, helps you prepare for audits, internal and otherwise.

Welcome!

Welcome to the MyTimeCards blog! We'll post hints, tips, and useful information here, so check back often!