The time clocks your customers choose have a significant impact on the value they experience from your solution. Knowing which types of time clocks will be most useful to your customers while also providing you the tools to manage time clock deployments at scale, is critical to making their integration with your software a success for everyone.
You need to assess the time clock capabilities, but also whether the clocks are part of a larger system that supports your team’s ability to manage them without eating away at the revenue from the time clock sales or leasing fees. That’s why we recommend our partners resell ATS time clocks as part of our AccuCloud solution.
AccuCloud is a cloud-based time clock data collection and management system that ensures your customers select a time clock that enhances the value of your solution and that you have the tools needed to support the integrations and deployments.
This article details what to look for when evaluating what type of time clocks you want to resell for maximum value to your customers and your business.
Time Clock Hardware Features and Functionality Your Customers Expect
Let’s start by looking at the time clock itself. These are hardware features and functions that you need to consider when deciding how sophisticated and adaptable you want the time clocks you offer to be. Different businesses may want a different scope in functionality. So you want time clocks that give you the flexibility to meet a variety of requirements.
Employee Card Reader Options for Clocking In and Out
The best time clocks will work with a variety of reader options and employee cards. The common card reader options available include:
- Swipe cards are cards with either a bar code or mag stripe. Some prefer bar codes because they can be printed on stickers and attached to any sort of employee ID card. Using magnetic stripe requires cards that have the magnetic stripe already embedded.
- Proximity cards are popular because employees don’t need to get as close with the time clocks. The time clock reader emits an electromagnetic field. When a proximity card comes within range of the field, it automatically shares the employee information on the card with the time clock.
Contact ATS
You also want the time clock to have a physical or virtual keypad as a backup method for employees to use when clocking in and out. If the employee doesn’t have their card or if there is a card reader malfunction, you want a time clock that can still collect the attendance record for the employee at that moment.
Many companies don’t want the headache of having to issue new employee cards to use a new time clock. That’s why you want to select a time clock that works with a variety of card types. Of course, some businesses will want to take advantage of the new time clocks to upgrade to a biometric reader and do away with employee ID cards entirely.
Handling Biometric Readers and Employee Templates
Biometric time clocks offer significant advantages, but also come with some unique needs that would be useful for you to understand so you can resell and support customers in accordance with best practices.
Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when offering time clocks with biometric readers:
- Select time clocks that have the storage and processing power to sort through the employee biometric templates quickly as they’re clocking in and out.
- Use middleware, like our AccuCloud middleware, that can manage employee biometric template distribution to the time clocks. You only want a time clock to store the biometric templates it needs for the employees who use that time clock. Especially in larger businesses, not every time clock needs or can store every employee’s template. The middleware can add and remove employee templates to any time clock as needed. The middleware should also have backups of all biometric templates so employees don’t have to re-enroll in case their template stored on a time clock gets corrupted.
- Recommend to your customers that they collect prior consent from employees who agree to participate in a biometric reader option, and have a clear way for employees to opt out of participating. Having a time clock with the media hardware and software functionality to gather consent and opt-outs from employees simplifies the biometric consent management process.
- Always have a backup option to collect employee time at the clock for employees who don’t consent to using the biometric reader. The physical or virtual keypad is always a good option.
High Value Time Clock Features and Functionality
Every time clock needs to have reader options and the time clock software that covers the basic clocking in-and-out process for payroll. However, many businesses need and expect more from a time clock.
Popular added-value hardware features:
- Media hardware such as camera, microphone, and speakers, that provide the means to the time clock device to handle additional functions like capturing visual record of person clocking in or delivering company messages.
- Web-enabled, high definition touchscreens, along with media features, can be used to provide short employee trainings, collect consent or opt-out forms, and gather attestations.
- Presence sensor that puts the time clock to sleep when it’s not being used makes the time clock energy efficient and when programmed appropriately, offer employees some privacy so their personal information doesn’t remain visible on the screen after they walk away from the time clock.
Popular configurable software functionality:
- Allow employees to specify which department or role they’re clocking in for. Allowing employees to select a department transfer at the time clock is a powerful function for any business that needs chargeback information, tracks labor costs by department, or pays the same employee different rates for different work.
- Enforce a meal break rule at the time clock to ensure that employees aren’t getting paid for meal break time and that they’re taking their full meal breaks.
Important Technical Details to Know About Your Time Clock Choice
Here are a few other important considerations to keep in mind when selecting time clocks to serve your customer base:
- What types of power source can the time clock use? Do you have customers that need time clocks that work on battery power or at least have a battery as a back-up power source?
- How many communication options are available? Does the time clock only operate through ethernet cable, or can it connect via cellular too?
- How durable are the design, materials, and manufacturing of the time clock? Our time clocks are built to last, while other’s time clocks made with less durable and with inferior materials may only last two to three years.
Taking a Closer Look at What Sits Behind the Time Clocks
Time clocks sit at the leading edge of the employee attendance tech environment. Each one needs to integrate with your solution and be managed and supported. That’s why you can never just look at the individual time clock features when selecting the best time clock software and hardware combination.
You also need to look carefully at how easy it will be for your team to control the integrations, communications, and maintenance of the time clocks. That’s where the middleware layer comes in.
It’s impossible for your teams to support time clock integrations and deployments at scale without a robust middleware layer controlling and automating much of the work for you. You always have the option to build your own middleware layer.
However, our resellers prefer to take advantage of our time clock management expertise and resell the AccuCloud system with our time clocks.
AccuCloud – Our Cloud-Based Middleware
Our AccuCloud environment includes the ATS-compatible time clocks, the cloud-based middleware that manages the deployments, and a web-based portal that gives your support teams direct visibility to integration and operational status of every ATS time clock you have deployed.
What any middleware can do depends on its design. The descriptions we share below are what we’ve designed the AccuCloud middleware to achieve.
ATS Time Clocks Compatible with AccuCloud
We offer our most sophisticated time clocks that you can easily deploy and manage with the support of our AccuCloud middleware:
Stride80
An Android-based time clock that allows you to easily build employee self-service applications that extend your solution’s functionality to the time clock.
PeoplePoint
A line of three time clocks that provide a range of features and flexibility that allow you to offer just the right amount of time clock for a variety of businesses.
Head over here to learn more about which integration option is right for you.
How to Seamlessly Handle Every Customer’s Time Clock
The most common concerns we hear from VARs as they look into reselling time clocks are wondering what their ongoing costs will be and what operational burden will be added by:
- Handling the hardware
- Supporting the time clock software
You can select a time clock that seems to fit perfectly how your customer base needs to track employee hours, but if you can’t configure, deploy, and support it at scale – it won’t matter. You’ll lose money and customers.
You need to know how you’ll handle the support for any specific type of time clock, especially when you’ll have thousands of them to deploy and support. This is a threshold question- whether reselling that particular time clock will be lucrative or a costly headache.
Here, we break down what configuration, deployment, updates, and providing support looks like for time clocks when they’re backed by technology and a vendor designed for business growth. Our AccuCloud middleware operates at each phase in a constructive, cost-efficient way that supports your team and your profitability.
Configuring the Time Clocks for AccuCloud Customers
The ATS team works with you to design the scope of integration and time clock functionality options you want to offer customers. We create time clock profiles for each of the options you’ve made and that you want to offer your customers. Each customer’s time clock profiles are stored on the middleware.
Our team embeds a string identifier on each time clock that’s used by the middleware to install the correct operating system, our AccuCollect time clock software, and selected time clock profile.
This configuration process makes it easy to ensure each customer gets the right time clock profile installed on future clocks as they grow. It also makes it easy to add new and modify existing time clock profiles en masse.
Deploying and Installing Each Time Clock
We send the time clocks directly to your customers’ locations. You never need to touch a time clock or manage inventory.
Our time clocks are simple to install. Most businesses use their own facilities team. Once the time clock is fixed to the wall, it needs to get connected to a power source and the business’s internet. Once these connections are made, the time clock communicates with the middleware using the profile string and the middleware pushes out the right operating system and software versions, and configuration to the time clock.
For most reader types, the time clock is now operational and ready to accept employees clocking in and out. If the time clock has a biometric reader, then employees consenting to use it will have to create their biometric template at the time clock before they can use the biometric reader to accept punches.
To emphasize a key point that makes all this so easy for our resellers: At no time do our resell partners have hands-on involvement in the handling, shipping, deployment or installation of any time clocks. Unless you really want to.
Updating Each Time Clock in Your Fleet
This is where middleware management really shines.
It pushes out updates for operating system, time clock software, and security updates through a secure over the air (SOTA) process. It doesn’t take your team much more effort to update the software on 1000 time clocks as it does for ten. And that’s not much effort at all.
When a customer wants to add new functionality to their time clocks, our team will teach you how to take care of that through the middleware. It often only takes minutes, allowing you to respond quickly to customer requests.
Providing Day-to-Day Support
The AccuCloud web-based management portal lets you proactively manage time clock integration and connectivity by giving you real-time visibility into each clock’s operational status. The portal also provides your support team with a direct link to the ATS support team/ticket creation system for fast response and resolution when you need some extra assistance.
Pairing the Right Time Clock with Your Solution is a Game Changer
Time clocks do the heavy lifting needed to automate time and attendance data collection. You need to offer the quality, features, and functionality customers want with flexibility to grow with them as needs change.
Yet, if reselling time clocks is going to be best for your business, you need the right partner supporting you. Otherwise, any profitability and value derived from the time clocks will be undermined by the high costs and resources you’d need to spend managing them.
You might consider building your own middleware, but first take a closer look at what AccuCloud offers you – a suite of tools that automate and simplify time clock fleet management at scale, and enable you to get to market with your time clock system resale offers quickly.
