What About Location Tracking On Cell Phones?

Cell phones and mobile devices increasingly utilize GPS (Global Positioning System) technology to track location. With the explosion of “location aware” applications for smartphones, and the rise in the use of GPS devices for navigation, people are growing more and more accustomed to their “smart” devices knowing where they are at all times.

As we are always working to stay on the forefront of development in telephone timekeeping, we wanted to let you know what is on the horizon. We recently launched Mobile Chronotek, and were open to considering new mobile location based technologies as well. With that in mind, we took the time to evaluate the state of location aware mobile technologies, and how they could be applied to the Chronotek system. This research has led us to two determinations:

First- the current location technologies are limited exclusively to the “smartphone” category, which is still a very small fraction of cell phone users in the United States. It is important to note that, for the vast majority of cell phone users without data connected smartphones, location aware services simply don’t work.

Second-Reliability. The Chronotek system is predicated on its ability to be absolutely reliable and accurate. Some of the location aware systems and applications that we tested had great features and were a lot of fun- but didn’t provide the kind of guaranteed reliability we expect from our own service.

So whats the takeaway from this? Technology is always changing rapidly, and at Chronotek we are very proud of how we incorporate these advances into our product. We also remain very committed to maintaining the extraordinarily high standards for reliability and usability that is the hallmark of our system. With these goals in mind, we will continue to monitor the development of cell phone location tracking, and move to incorporate these features when the time is right.

Pay, Performance and Telephone Time Clocks

Many managers assume that performance-based pay systems will be too difficult to implement. Some assume that they will sap employee motivation, while others aren't sure that employees will maintain the same standard of work if they are given incentives to push through 'more' product. However, the experience of many different companies tells us that performance-based pay systems are actually highly effective at getting employees motivated to do a good job, and keeping them that way! Today we check out how performance based pay systems can tie in with initiatives like telephone-based employee time clocks and time attendance tracking, to create a positive change in your business bottom line!

Pay for performance: A growing phenomenon

In the few years prior to 2008, a study found that while standard employee pay had risen only marginally in comparison to inflation, bonuses based on performance had hit a record high of 12% of the entire country's payroll figure. Given the massive number of businesses that haven't even considered performance-based pay, it seems that there are some companies out there paying quite a lot of profits directly back to employees.

There is a big 'But!' attached to that statement, though. Structured properly, performance-based pay systems don't cost a company extra. They simply ensure that the workers that are contributing most to profits are rewarded, while low-value employees have corresponding rewards.

Performance-pay and time attendance tracking

Performance-based pay and telephone time clocking-type systems are two sides of the same productivity coin. You can make the two strategies work together to achieve more complete and fair results, using techniques like:

• Starting simple by instituting bonuses for people following clock in and out procedure correctly
• Use your telephone time clocking system to accurately measure output for time present at work, and therefore identify bonus-worthy employees
• Creating a forfeit-system for any employees found not to be using the clock-in system correctly

Time Attendance Tracking: The Impact of an Outdated Browser

There are a lot of things that can impact on the productivity and profitability of your business. Many of them are actually out of your control ... market fluctuations, business risks, and employee attentiveness. If you've recently discovered the impact that taking control of time attendance tracking can have on your bottom line - congratulations! However, there are some sneaky hidden factors that can still impact on the usefulness of telephone time clocks. One of those is, surprisingly, your internet browser. Today we check out why!

The differences between internet browsers

The world of computing is changing pretty rapidly nowadays. We've come a long way in the couple of decades since 286 computers started appearing in peoples homes with monochrome green and black graphics! You can no longer depend on a single, non-updated program to perform its best in an internet-based computing environment. One of the areas where problems often show up is your browser.

Currently, Internet Explorer 8, the newest version of Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome are more than adequate for ordinary web-based tasks. But when it comes to doing

The impact of an old browser on your telephone time clock experience

The impact that an older version of a browser has on your experience with time and attendance tracking is the same as its impact with other websites. You'll find that:

• Features like drop down boxes might not display correctly
• Text might run off the edge of the screen
• The entire experience will be slower
• Sometimes the browser will crash when you're doing critical tasks like calculating reports or sending information
• Sometimes buttons randomly disappear

Support for older browsers

Every time a website is built, it needs to be tested and refined across all different browsers to make sure that it will operate properly in the different environments.

For most web developers, there is simply no point testing websites in older browsers like Internet Explorer 6 anymore. There are too few customers using the platform to justify the time and expense of testing and making fiddly modifications ... and there is a strong expectation that if any customers are still using IE6 or other similar outdated browsers, they will be changing over very soon!

5 Things You Didn't Know Telephone Time Clocks Could Do

You might be aware of the concept of telephone time clocking - the technology has the potential to benefit a huge range of businesses, yet is chronically underutilized! When we speak to many employers who finally ge fed up with time card padding and institute an employee time attendance tracking system, many of them say that if they'd known what telephone time clocks could do, they would have put one in years ago. So today we look at five of the things that you probably didn’t know telephone time clocks could do … apart from save quite a bit of money!

1. Usable with mobile web devices

Even if you’re on the road just as much as your employees, you can still ensure that everything is going to plan, and work is being done during work hours. Most good telephone time clocks have a dedicated mobile web version, making it easy to check on your employees from wherever you are.

2. Phones are caller-ID stamped
Even if you aren’t there to check on your employee's arrival times, you can ensure they are on site because telephone time clocks allow for recording of the caller ID of the phone. Some telephone time clock models won’t even allow an employee to sign in if it isn't done from an approved phone.

3. Automatic voice verification is available

Did you know a person's voice is as unique as their fingerprint? Voice recognition software can ensure the correct person is clocking in - no chance of a friend or workmate clocking in for a late employee.

4. Personal voice verification also available

You can also choose to record a message when your employee clocks in by voice, and personally verify that it is their voice on the other end of the line.

5. Calculation of overtime

You can actually see overtime occurring before it happens if you use a telephone time attendance tracking system. Overtime gets expensive, and if your employee tells you that they 'simply needed to finish a job before they could leave', there is little you can do after the fact. However, when you see overtime in progress, all it takes is a polite call to the employee to let them know that whatever they are working on can wait until tomorrow to avoid massive paychecks denting the budget.

5 More Things You Didn't Know Telephone Time Clocks Could Do

The name telephone time clock can actually be a bit misleading. This technology's main purpose is to allow your employees to verify the hours they've worked, to the minute … but in reality they can do so much more! Today we look at 5 more of the things that simple old employee time clocks by telephone can do, that you may not have known about!

1. Send you a no-show alert

You can have a text message alert sent instantly to your phone if an employee scheduled to clock in doesn't do so for a set period of time after their shift starts. Don't leave your business hanging indefinitely.

2. Send you check-in / check-out alerts

If you want to monitor things closely for a while, you can also choose to have text alerts sent to you for every clock-in or clock-out event on your telephone time clock system. That way, if somebody takes 15 minutes to clock out after their relief staff member arrives, you can question them immediately.

3. Account for different time ones

If you've delayed instituting a time attendance tracking system because you work across different time zones, and believed it wouldn't be able to handle that little niggle, think again. This is not a problem for modern telephone time clocks - employees always hear the correct time for their region.

4. Leave messages for your employees

You can leave messages for your employees and actually guarantee that everybody will hear the entire spiel at next clock-in! Simply set yourtime attendance tracking program so that clock-in can’t be completed until the entire message has been played back. If it's a long one, don't forget to set it so that your employees are listening on company time.

5. Track different activities
Your employees can actually enter different activity codes and almost fully automate your payroll process. This helps in your accounting, as well as in cost effectiveness reporting.

Many Reasons to use a Time Clock System

The telephone time clock system is a revolutionary system that can enhance and simplify your small business needs. There are so many positive reasons why it makes sense to replace your old time management system with this new system. Some of the reasons are:

· Simplification of time keeping

· To the second time keeping

· Less paperwork

· Uploadable data

· Removes the guess work

The old way of keeping employees time involved having to calculate the total hours and minutes. This system is time consuming and can lead to costly mistakes. The telephone time clock calculates all the time and sends the data to your computer; it takes all the guesswork out of the work involved and the person writing the paychecks simply has to input wage information.

There is less paperwork involved in this system which means less time spent filing and less storage space needed. It really does free up the payroll clerk to do other more important tasks besides spending hours on end figuring and writing payroll checks. The employee time clock is obsolete and all one needs is a phone to clock in and out.

Hundreds of businesses have begun using the telephone time clock system and have only good things to say about it. Payroll clerks praise about how easy it is to get the data they need in preparing payroll checks and how happy it makes them because it cuts the time they have to spend doing payroll in half. Because it is so simple to use and access, employees have found this system more convenient to use; especially employees who work away from the home office who no longer have to make a special trip into the office to clock in. Business owners have seen a sharp difference in money saved because of poor time management systems because this system keeps perfect track of all employees’ times.

Keeping Track of Time

Whether you have two employees or a hundred, it is vitally important to keep excellent records of the time your employees are working. One should never estimate the number of hours or minutes an employee has spent working for a certain week; this only leads to improper payroll figures the employee might not agree, leading to a recount of hours. That is why the telephone time clock has become such a hot item in recent years; it keeps perfect records and if there are any discrepancies concerning the total time, it is because the employee didn’t phone in as he/she should.

The old time clock method of calculating hours worked is an acceptable method but it requires somebody figuring up the total time and then calculating the pay. With phoning in, the time is automatically calculated at the end of the pay period and is ready to be used to figure payroll. It takes all the guess work out of the process and is a lot less stressful for the payroll clerk.

My company has been using the time attendance tracking system for over a year now and has found it to be an excellent method. Employees are each given a specific number to call and code in which they can clock in and out with. It takes less time than the conventional method as employees can make the call from their cell phones as they enter the building. There is a bit of honesty involved as an employee could call in and not actually be working but that is easily checked and is considered fraud which would lead to termination and possibly legal prosecution. We have never had an employee take advantage of the system nor have we ever had any complaints from employees about being shorted time on their paychecks.

I used to Hate my Job

I am the payroll clerk for a very large construction company that has over 150 employees. It is my job to figure up their time and print out checks every other week. It takes me at least two days to do this and sometimes three days because most of the time I would have to track down quite a lot of workers and find out what hours they worked for that pay period. Most of them work off site and don’t come into the office to clock in so they have to write down their hours. Finally, after years of pulling my hair out my boss got the telephone time clock system which has saved my sanity.

The system is easy to use; the workers just call the given number to clock in and out and the system records their time. When it’s time to do payroll I just download the information from the time attendance tracking data base and almost all my work is done. I just have to click “totals for the pay period” and just like that everything is added up for me.

Life has been so much better since we started using this method rather than the old style time clock and the writing down time method. Those systems didn’t work for us for many years but now I know things will be a lot smoother come payroll time. It takes me half a day to do payroll now instead of the two and sometimes three days it used to take me.

I feel like a brand new person not having to stress out about doing the payroll anymore. It used to be such a pain and would have me edgy for days. I used to dread going to work on payroll week because I knew what it was going to be like. Now, with the telephone time clock, I actually have time to goof off; but don’t tell my boss.

Always on Time

The company I work for has started a new way for employees to clock in and out every day. It’s called the telephone time clock system and it works really great. Many of us are field agents and spend most of our days in meetings with clients or in training. It’s impossible for most of us to go into the office to actually clock in and then go about our daily appointments. We had been just keeping track of our hours but there is always some sort of disagreement by using this process. The new system has stopped all the disagreements and is much easier to deal with.

Every morning as I head out the door to begin my day I will call the number to clock in with the phone time clock system. When I am off the clock for lunch I simply just call the number again and it clocks me out. Again, when I’m done with lunch and heading to my next appointment, I simply call the number again and I’m clocked back into the system. It’s a very simple process and takes less than a minute to do.

The accountant that does payroll has found it to be so much less stressful than the old system we used. She is able to pull the logs for the time attendance tracking which tells her exactly how many hours each of us have worked for that period. She doesn’t have to do any figuring at all; it has daily totals which takes away the guess work involved. In the past many of us who would forget to actually write down our hours were always making guesses as to how many hours we worked; this way the guess work is out the window. I’ve really found this system to be a big improvement from the old way of clocking in and out.

I Owe it My Job

A few months ago I had a major dispute with my employer who claimed that I was not reporting my time accurately. I was told to either pay back the money they said I was over-paid for or be fired. I knew I had not been over-paid and I had just the tool to prove it. The company I work uses the telephone time clock system and I used this system every single day I worked. I can not only prove that my time worked was correct but I can also prove that they actually shorted me on several pay checks.

I was able to get a copy of all the time sheets that come directly from the time attendance tracking system and it showed exactly when I phoned in and phoned out. The great thing is I use my cell phone to phone in so this showed my location as recorded by the cell phone tower. I work as an insurance agent and all of my appointments are held in my client’s homes. I phone in when I’m on my way to their house and phone out when I am done. I had all the evidence I needed to keep my job and recover the lost wages they took from me.

The standard employee time clock isn’t practical in my line of work and the telephone time clock is one of the greatest office tools to have come along in a long time. If it weren’t for this awesome device I’d probably be out of job. I’m very thankful for all the data that is stored on this system because it allowed me to show exactly how many minutes I was on the clock and exactly when I clocked out. I don’t know how companies such as the one I work for, keep up with their employee’s time without the phone time clock system.

Time Clock Saves Money

Since many small businesses have been hit hard by the struggling economy many small business owners are looking for ways to save money. This can be anything from cutting costs on office supplies or cutting back on shipping costs. Some business owners have even had to reduce the number of employees that they have on staff. But, many never think about reducing spending when it comes down to purchasing aTelephone Time Clock.

Using an efficient Employee Time Clock can help many reduce labor costs. This type of system works by having the employees clock in and out by using the telephone. This is a useful small-business tool for a company that has employees that have to travel for work or for those that have workers that have the option of working from home. All the employee has to do is call a special number that clocks the worker in at the beginning of the business day and then they call the number again when they need to clock out at the end of their shift. This is not only convenient for the employee, it also is great way for the worker to keep track of the hours they have worked during in a pay period. Employers also like this because it helps to reduce overpaying many of the employees and to keep Time Attendance Tracking accurate.

Business owners that have used this type of Phone Time Clock see a reduction in overpaying their employees. This can be anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to thousands that can be saved from using an accurate time tracking system in a small business. This keeps employees from padding a time sheet that can cost business owners money every month.

Not only is it an accurate way to track the time an employee has worked, it can also help reduce the cost spent on paper time cards or sheets. This can help to reduce the office supply budget since paper products are no longer needed. Since there is no paper being used, it also is good for the environment. With many small or medium businesses trying to go green, using a Phone Time Clock helps reduce paper that is used in an office.

The benefits of using this type of business tool can save many businesses money. No matter if the business is big or small, using a Telephone Time Clock can be a great way to start.

The 7/8 Rounding Rule: Why 2 Minutes on a Time Card Could Cost You 5 Hours!!

Ask any business what their biggest cost, apart from raw materials, consists of, and you will probably get the same response. In most cases, rental, mortgage, computers, electricity, and phones are all minor issues on the expense report. It is employees -- the cost of labor to complete required work -- that puts the biggest dent in the company budget. And strangely enough, the law actually allows people to be paid for time they haven’t worked, day after day and week after week! This is allowed under many state laws, and is hinted at under federal legislation regarding rounding. If you keep standard time records, you could be paying for up to 15 minutes a day of work not completed, for every employee. We look at why the 7/8 rounding rule allows this, and how to combat the situation with telephone time clocking.

The 7/8 rounding rule

This is so familiar to most of us that we probably didn’t even realize there was a name for it! This rule basically states that if your employees are paid in 15-minute increments, then for every start and finish time they can round up or down to the nearest fifteen minutes. If the actual time is seven minutes over one fifteen minute period, they must round down. If it is eight minutes over the start of a period, they must round up. For example:

• Your employee's official start time is 8:30. If they arrive one morning at 8:37, they can still fill out their time sheet to indicate starting at 8:30, with no applicable penalty. If they arrive at 8:38, they must state that they arrived at 8:45.
• The same is applicable at finishing time.

You can see that simply by intentionally staying for as little as one extra minute at finishing time, or by arranging it so they get to work 7 minutes late instead of 8 minutes, your employees can legally be paid for 15 minutes a day of work they don't perform! Over a week this adds up to an hour and fifteen minutes, per employee, and over a month's salary, your employees could have been paid for five hours of work they didn’t perform.

Assumptions of the rounding rule

In order to ensure fairness, the rounding rule assumes that employees will not deliberately try to manipulate their starting and finishing times to take advantage of this. Even with no deliberate malice, it assumes that the roundings-up and roundings-down will even out over time. Neithe of these assumptions is necessarily true; it is better to simply keep accurate, indisputable records of time started and finished, tally it up for the pay period, and THEN do your rounding! Telephone time clocking makes this easy, and can be implemented for both on-site and off-site employees.

Five Most Frequently Asked Questions About Telephone Time Clocks

Telephone time clocks are useful in almost all industries; the effects on the bottom line of time card padding and rounding on the company budget are oftentimes very surprising once analyzed. One simple and effective solution is to use telephone time clocking, where a toll-free number is dialled when the employee starts work, and again when they finish. The times are recorded and collated by an online system. As simple as the concept is, the process is quite foreign to many people and there are often a slew of initial questions! Today we endeavor to answer some of the more common questions about telephone time clock systems.

1. The system costs me money to use -- where are the savings over simply having people record their starting time?
   With a manual timesheet system, employees must record their times manually. There are always factors like time card padding, even by a few minutes, the difficulty of calculating very precise time increments, and there are calculation errors to be made at every turn. Telephone time clocking starts instantly saving you money by eliminating time card padding -- only the exact hours that are worked are clocked.
2. How do I know someone else won’t clock on and off for them?
   Some telephone time clocking systems have a Random Voice Verification feature, which will ask the employee to speak a phrase or their code in order to clock in. This does not need to be utilized for every call.
3. Why wouldn’t they just clock in and out from home, or leave it a while before calling?
   Patented caller-id technology is incorporated into many telephone time clocking systems to ensure that employees are clocking in and out from appropriate locations. If you consistently note that calls are made from the employee's home address, you can take whatever action is necessary.
4. Technology isn’t always accurate, though!
   In this system where time is of the essence, measures are taken to ensure the accuracy of time-clock records. The servers that support the process are synchronized to an internal clock daily.
5. How do I know if the system will suit me?
   Use the free trial of the software and platform to evaluate whether this is a good solution for your company, and to allay any process or operational concerns about telephone time clocking.