Reselling the perfect time clock system as part of your sales strategy increases the value of your software solution. A complete time clock system feeds clean, critical data to your payroll and other back office systems, leading to higher lifetime value and a broadening of your target market.
Yet to make reselling time clocks profitable, you need to be able to integrate, sell, deploy, and manage time clocks at scale. It’s no good if selling more time clocks just means exponentially increasing the support and management burden on your IT and Customer Service teams.
The “perfect time clocks” are those seamlessly paired with your solution through a sophisticated cloud-based middleware layer that makes time clock management simple. The combination of high quality time clocks and robust middleware ensures your customers reap maximum benefits
from your system throughout all the business departments that rely on the attendance, payroll, workforce management, and human capital management data.
With the “right middleware” paired up with the time clocks, they can connect with your system to make a cost-efficient, scalable, and lucrative combination.
How the Right Middleware Helps You Scale Your Business
You have numerous options if you want to resell time clocks to automate the collection of employee attendance data that reaches your software solution. However, no specific time clock model can get you to a place where you can scale your resell business.
For that, you need a middleware layer between the time clocks and your solution that makes it simple for your team to support every sort of customer – from a small business that needs only one time clock at its single location to a multinational business with hundreds of time clocks in locations operating in different languages. The right middleware empowers you to grow your customer base, regardless of your customer profile or variety of profiles.
Contact ATS
We make it simple for our resale partners to support and scale their customer base through our AccuCloud employee attendance data collection and management solution. The employee time clocks are one piece of the AccuCloud solution. Its middleware layer, which is the middleware described throughout this article, automates critical tasks, regulates data and communication flow between the time clocks and your software, and simplifies supporting your customers’ time clock deployments.
In addition to the time clocks and middleware, AccuCloud also includes the added bonus of a web management portal that gives your support team real-time visibility into the integration status of every time clock connected to your software.
The Best Middleware Lifts a Time and Attendance and Time Clock Solution Combo Above Your Competitors
The most effective way to resell more of your time and attendance software with ATS time clocks is by pairing your software with the best time clock system- if your customer wants to experience the maximum benefit your solution can offer their business. That message becomes more meaningful to your prospects when you can demonstrate to them the difference deploying the right time clock and middleware pair will have on their employee attendance systems, and related systems like payroll and workforce management.
We’re giving you a deep look at exactly how the AccuCloud middleware automates, streamlines, and enhances the value of an employee attendance tracking system. You may not need to get into all these details with prospects. However, when your sales team has a strong grasp of what the middleware is doing in the background, they can better educate your prospects on the benefits your system can provide to all the back-office systems they connect to it.
Ensuring Time Tracking Data Integrity and Security
The baseline requirements for any time clock integration with your solution is that they can reliably and securely share employee information and attendance data with each other. Without a two-way data flow to manage and track all the shared data, the system cannot ensure the data integrity.
The AccuCloud system offers two options for data integration:
1. Data loading, whereby selected data sets are downloaded from one source and uploaded to the other.
2. API/web services that run automated data sharing running on a short cycle.
When employee attendance records are sent from the time clock to the middleware, the middleware flags each record before sending it on to your solution. This action safeguards against the risk that a record is overlooked or sent multiple times, eliminating the need for manual attendance or payroll data cleanup.
Employee and departmental information funnels from your software to the time clocks, ensuring that all employees authorized to use a time clock – and only employees authorized to use it – can clock in and out. It also ensures that the time clock has all the data it needs to collect a complete and accurate attendance record, including identifying the employee’s department or role, if necessary.
Our time clocks and middleware combination also encrypts data while at rest in both locations, not just during delivery.
Time Clock Profiles Ease Configuration Management
As resellers, you select the time clock model, reader options, and time clock functionality you’ll offer your customers. Each customer selects from the options you, as a reseller, make available. The configurations you select are the basis of the time clock profiles the ATS team creates for customer’s deployments.
A time clock profile is stored on the middleware, to simplify and speed up time clock configuration updates. When a customer wants to add new functionality or automate a new business rule, we amend the time clock profile on the middleware. Then the middleware pushes out the updated profile to all time clocks that have that profile.
Let’s say a customer decides it needs to manage meal breaks better and it wants to use the time clocks to prevent employees from clocking in before their meal break is over. This is a common request, so meal break rule enforcement is functionality we have. We’ve already built the most popular time clock functions, and continue to add new ones, so most functionality configuration requests don’t require development time or costs.
When your team passes the request on to their ATS support partners, we can update the customer’s time clock profile to include meal break rule functionality. In minutes, the deployed time clocks will include a meal break button and the business rule logic that prevents an employee from clocking in early.
Without middleware to manage the time clock configuration process, somebody would have to visit each time clock and update it manually. This manual process would not only be time and cost prohibitive, but each manual update would be another opportunity for a configuration error to occur. The same is true when a customer wants to add new time clocks as they grow. The middleware controls the profile delivery to newly installed time clocks so they’re operational quickly and your customers can be sure their time clocks are properly configured. This process removes the risk for customers thinking about adding more time clocks and leaves only the rewards.
Managing Employee Biometric Templates
Our middleware takes a similar approach towards management of employee biometric templates. Biometric readers are increasingly popular with businesses. Without a dependable, secure, automated system for handling employee biometric templates, managing fleets of time clocks with biometric readers is very difficult.
An efficient biometric time clock system limits how many templates are stored on any one time clock. You only want the employee templates needed for that time clock stored on it so the time clock works quickly and leaves the employee with a positive time clock experience.
Thus, our middleware automates the installing and removing of employee templates on the time clock, based on business rules set by your customers. As employees change work locations, the middleware makes sure that their template is available at the new location’s time clocks and removed from the old location.
Since all employee biometric templates are stored on the middleware, it also operates as the backup system so employees don’t need a new template created if a time clock is damaged.
Simplifies Time Clock System and Attendance Software Updates
There are few support headaches more painful than having to support devices running with different operating systems and software versions. Even worse if some of the hardware is running on versions that lack security updates or patches.
The AccuCloud middleware handles the over-the-air updates to all the time clocks your customers have deployed. There’s virtually no risk that your team will have to bear the strain of supporting time clocks running with different software versions.
Use Case Solutions that Illustrate Power of the Right Middleware Linking your System to Time Clocks
We’ve shared a few examples, but let’s paint a bigger picture. Here are three specific use cases you can share with your prospects that illustrate the necessity and value of selecting a complete time clock system with cloud-based middleware.
Running Accurate Payroll – Every Time
In addition to flagging every attendance record delivered, ensuring that no duplicate records make it to payroll, the middleware can also:
· Logically groups time clocks by location so payroll knows exactly where the hours in that attendance record were worked. This location information is vital to trigger application of the right tax deductions and labor laws rules in payroll systems.
· Use the meal break rule to enforce breaks as unpaid time, minimizing bloat on customer’s payroll.
Give HR Confidence that Updates to Employees’ Information Get to the Time Clock Quickly
Any sort of employee status change saddles HR staff with tons of tasks and details to manage, including making sure that the employee’s information is updated in every system that relies on it. This includes the time clocks.
The middleware takes control of distributing updated employee information as soon as it receives the updates from your system. So the HR team only has to update one system – yours. This includes these scenarios:
· Getting a new hire’s information on the time clock fast enough so they can start using the time clock from day one, automating their attendance data collection immediately.
· Removing a separated employee’s information from the time clocks so there’s no risk they can clock in or out when they’re no longer authorized. Removing unnecessary employee information from a time clock also protects time clock performance and doesn’t waste storage space.
· Any employee change in working location, role, or department filters to the time clocks quickly so all attendance records are accurate. This includes ensuring time clocks are current on the department transfer options that should be available to any given employee.
· Collecting employee attestations on critical issues, such as daily reporting they’ve not been asked to work during breaks and as a tool promoting workplace safety.
Improves Employees’ Time Clock Experience
A positive employee experience at the time clock starts by meeting the employee’s basic expectation that automating the collection of their attendance data means their paychecks will be accurate.
After that, you want to consider the actual experience employees have while in front of the clock. Time clock functionality that empowers employees to access their own information, without having to go through an intermediary like their manager, payroll staff, or HR adds to the value employees associate with the time clocks. Here are two common uses:
1. View punches: Employees can see for themselves how many work hours and the date/time of those hours recorded by time clock. If an employee believes there’s an error, they can address it before payroll runs.
2. View hours worked: Choose to include it in the time clock integration, employees can check their ours worked for that week at the time clock.
Benefits for Your Business when You Roll Out the Right Time Clock System into Your Solution
The ability to scale is the challenge that determines whether your business can generate explosive growth or whether it gets mired down in heavier administrative burdens and higher transaction costs with each new customer.
Integrating your solution with a complete time clock system, like AccuCloud and its powerful middleware, offers you the opportunity to scale your business in a way that doesn’t just increase revenue, but makes it more profitable.
You always have the option to design, build, and maintain custom middleware in-house, but that is a complex, time consuming, counter-productive and expensive undertaking. You don’t have to put your market entry on hold while you redirect time and money to building your own middleware. Instead, you can go with a proven, reliable time clock solution supported by a vendor that continues to innovate its technologies to provide you and your customers with an increasingly valuable employee attendance tracking software solution.