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