If this is a question your software company hasn’t addressed recently, now is the time to take another look. Offering time clocks is an untapped opportunity to better serve your customers and grow your revenue.
At ATS, we make it easy for our resale partners to start offering time clocks quickly once they make the decision to partner with us. The decision making process whether to add time clocks to your portfolio can take longer. Here’s what to consider.
The #1 Sign You Should Add a Timekeeping System to Your Solution
Your product development team is constantly enhancing your software suite to increase the value of your solution to your customers. If your system can offer more value to your customers when it’s paired with hardware then it’s time for your company to offer time clocks.
The business value a company can extract from its labor or attendance solution depends on the quality of the attendance data it has. That’s why every time tracking system should collect employee attendance data through a time clock system. Automated time collection should be non-negotiable for your customers. Time clocks are the attendance data gateways to your software. How well your software will serve your customers depends on this data flow.
Customers and prospects that still use inefficient, unreliable, or manual attendance time tracking systems are placing barriers on their ability to experience all the benefits your solution offers. That puts your relationship with them at risk.
So the question is how much influence do you want when your customers select a timekeeping system they’ll use with your software?
The logical (and smart) approach to ensure that your customers use a time clock worthy of your system is to pre-select the range of time clocks for them. It’s the only way to be certain they’re working with a time clock that optimizes your solution’s capabilities and increases their ROI.
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Another sign that it’s time to offer a timekeeping system:
Pay attention to when prospects and customers begin dropping hints that they want a vendor that offers a complete and integrated solution. Some customers will want to know the integrations are reliable, and that all parts of the solution are designed to achieve maximum benefit.
When your company is providing all the major components, including the time clocks, it relieves their stress. They won’t fear having to work with multiple help desks that each tell them to talk to another company.
Your Business Systems are Ready for a Timekeeping System
As your company starts to attract larger organizations with more complex labor management and scheduling needs, you will most likely begin scaling your systems to serve these markets. Part of scaling your business is being ready to handle offering a wider range of services and packages to the variety of customer demand.
ATS helps you scale by making reselling time clocks easy. Our software partners don’t have to handle the timekeeping hardware. They only need to incorporate billing and oversight of their customers’ deployed time clocks into their operations. We make that easy too. Our AccuCloud time collection and time clock management system gives your company direct visibility into the integration status of each time clock deployed by your customers.
Revamp Your Business Model with a Timekeeping System
Reselling time clocks is a high-profit revenue stream for any business when the time clock vendor handles provisioning, as we do. The best way to go to market quickly with a high added value service to your workforce management suite is to offer a timekeeping system, including the hardware.
How to Know if Your Prospects are Ready for an Automated Timekeeping System:
Your Prospects are Still Using Manual Time Tracking
Companies that use manual time tracking or manually download the data to spreadsheets are setting themselves up for failure and that frustration will blow back on your system. Manual time tracking inevitably results in a slow, error-prone data entry process that undermines your solution’s value.
Your software can only benefit customers if the data is accurate, complete, and arriving in an automated and timely manner. Garbage in/garbage out isn’t an operational model that serves your customers or your bottom line.
If you tell customers they can better manage their overtime with your solution, can they really do that if a customer isn’t accurately collecting their overtime hours?
As long as these customers continue with their slow, manual data process, their business can’t benefit from the value your workforce management solution can provide.
Their Employees are Using Their Mobile Phones for Time Tracking
It seemed like a good idea at first – what employee doesn’t have a mobile phone?
Well, it turns out using mobile phones for time tracking isn’t as reliable as your customers’ businesses need. Time tracking with mobile phones is a game-change for employees who work in the field. However, for onsite employees, mobiles devices are not the best option to collect accurate attendance data. Here are some drawbacks to employees using their phones:
- Mobile phones are unreliable. They get lost. Batteries run down. There are numerous reasons an employee won’t be able to punch in or out on the mobile phone. The result is that the company still has to use manual time tracking work-arounds. A reliable automated time keeping system allows employees to clock in and out even if there’s a network or power outage. ATS time clocks can store employee attendance data even when not connected to the network. Once connection is re-established, the ATS time clock sends the employee data to your system as normal.
- Employee mobile phone usage for work purposes raises a variety of HR, IT, and legal issues many customers don’t want. For example, there can be a legal question about whether the company can force employees to install work-related apps on their personal mobile devices. If employees can opt out of installing the time-tracking software on their mobile phones, then how is the employer getting their attendance data into your system? Regardless of whether the employee uses a personal phone or the company provides it, each phone is another entry point and security risk to the company network (and your system).
Your customers can avoid all these challenges by installing time clocks for their onsite employees .
Your Customers are Tired of Dealing with Multiple Integration Partners
Your customers want the integrations among attendance and other business solutions to work. If a problem occurs, they don’t want to get bounced around between help desks to get it resolved. The same holds true if your company partners with a time clock system vendor. Create the best support experience for your customers by working with a timekeeping system partner that works directly with you, and that also integrates their customer support between your software and the time clocks for a transparent support experience.
What to Look for in a Time Clock Vendor
The time clocks your customers use are a critical gateway to your system. You want to make sure that the time clocks you offer represent your attendance management system well. The vendor you choose as a partner should be able to show exactly how their time clocks and support will serve you and your customers. Here are some clues:
The Time Clock Vendor Offers Provisioning
Handling time clocks takes time, money, and experience in managing hardware inventory. A well-oiled time clock vendor already has the hardware inventory management process down to a science. There’s no reason the vendor should burden a software vendor with the costs and resources needed to store, configure, and ship out time clocks.
ATS handles all the provisioning for partners. Our team configures the time clocks to your specifications and then dropships directly to your customers. When you work with us, you never have to touch a time clock.
Timekeeping Systems Offer Seamless Integration to Your Software
There’s a wide range of workforce management software systems, most of which continue to evolve to provide businesses with more resources and solutions. The time clocks you offer need to integrate seamlessly with all of them to be able to expand the scope of the integration as the solutions grow. Providing two-way data integration that’s easy to set up and maintain, amplifies the business value of your software throughout their entire organization.
Automating data delivery to payroll, HR, and other business departments that rely on attendance data saves money by replacing manual processes. Yet even greater added value of a seamless data integration comes from the enhanced analytical and business decision-making capabilities. The more data your solution can share between the time clock and the workforce management systems, the stronger role your solution plays in your customers’ success.
ATS time clock data can integrate with external systems either through flat files or web services. We keep it flexible so businesses with different levels of technology can easily integrate their time clock punch data with their other management software. For our partners who prefer attendance software to operate on the cloud – our AccuCloud monitoring portal gives direct visibility into the data integration status of each time clock in a deployment.
The Time Clocks are Durable
It turns out lesser quality time clocks can get expensive. Your customers aren’t going to like having to replace their time clocks every few years. It will cost them a lot of money, from the price of the new time clocks to the resources to install the replacements to costs associated to any business disruption. If they’re buying their time clocks from you, they’re going to wonder why you aren’t offering them a more durable time clock.
Ask every potential time clock vendor the average lifespan of their time clocks. ATS time clocks are designed and manufactured for durability. An ATS time clock can last up to ten years. This includes the simple time clock that only needs to accept time punches to ruggedized time clocks that withstand tough work environments like construction and manufacturing.
Your time clock vendor should offer a range of time clocks to meet the needs of different types of customers. As you compare the time clock options offered by the vendor, ask about the durability of each model.
The Timekeeping Systems are Manufactured and Supported In-House
The materials used and the manufacturing process ultimately determine whether the time clock in your customers’ workplaces will operate for a long time. Ask the time clock vendor about materials used in different time clock models and where they’re manufactured.
All ATS time clocks are manufactured and supported in the United States using the highest quality materials and skilled employees. Having U.S.-based manufacturing means that our customer service is also in-house (a very rare feature in the time clock hardware industry). Any questions that pop up about hardware and functionality can be swiftly answered by our team. Our in-house customer care continues to be a key reason why our partners choose to stay around for years.
You Should Be Selling Timekeeping Systems
If you’re ready to scale your business and want a fast road to market with a solution add-on (and new revenue stream) – then offering time clocks is the easy answer. Adding a timekeeping system will augment the value of every part of your solution.
Schedule a call with a time clock expert to take the next steps.
