The Power of Automation Promotes Success
“Automation is good, so long as you know exactly where to put the machine.“ Eliyahu Goldratt
I knew exactly where I needed to put the machine – my mind. I like to be up early in the morning. Before all of the beeps, rings and bells, before people want to start talking to me, I like to be up, go to the gym and begin my day on my own terms. I just don’t like to get up. It’s a mental sparring match every day. Then I heard of a mental automation hack. Each night prepare for the next morning. Pre-decide that you are rising early, set your alarm and pick out your workout clothes so that they are ready. In other words, eliminate all of the obstacles in advance to make getting up early as easy as possible. It works. It’s a way to automate your mornings. I’m halfway to the gym before I’m awake well enough to realize what I’m doing. As a service-based business owner, it may be time for you to consider how the power of automation can remove the obstacles to optimal workforce productivity.
Is Workforce Productivity a Top Priority for Your Business?
SWC Technology Partners recently released “Tech Insights Report” and as you can see from the chart, the overwhelming majority of business owners surveyed identified workforce productivity as a top priority. 85% of the respondents confirmed that they will pursue technology within the next couple of years “that will enable effective and efficient workforce communication and collaboration.” Although greater workforce productivity is a top priority, “the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that overall productivity has only grown 1-2% per year during the tech boom.” Why is that? Let’s look at the next chart.
Chase the Right Rabbit
Businesses agree that big decisions should be based on data (because facts don’t care about your feelings, right?), but they are failing to back up their beliefs. “Only 19% are actively planning their analytics/big data initiatives.” 81% of the companies know that better data leads to better results, but they aren’t doing anything about it. It’s imperative to find and focus on accurate information when making decisions. As the saying goes, chase 2 rabbits and you won’t catch either one. In a service company with remote, hourly employees it’s extremely important to set your target on the right rabbit and that’s where we can help you.
17 Seconds Will Automate Your Company
Your service-based business supported primarily by off-site, hourly employees needs answers to a few very basic questions:
- Are you making a profit each month?
- Which jobs are making/losing money?
- Are jobs getting covered?
- Can employees be trusted?
When you have easy access to these answers, you are equipped to make the best decisions for your company. A 17-second phone call or a couple of clicks on our mobile app captures your employees’ accurate clock in, clock out times and automatically provides the information you need.
What Exactly Automation Gives You and How
More Money
That’s a good place to start. 17 seconds has a direct payroll savings correlation that can drastically boost your bottom line. We’ve written before about time theft with handwritten timesheets, but an article in The Washington Business Journal adds 2 more factors to consider: manual timesheet computation errors and the cost of your payroll admin’s time to manually process payroll. The errors from typing mistakes and misreading handwritten timesheets can cost your company 1-8% of its annual gross payroll while your admin spends 5-6 minutes per time card each pay period to process payroll. “For a company with 25 employees who are paid an average rate of $10 per hour, total savings add up to about $8,400 a year based on just these three factors. For a company with 50 employees and the same per-hour rate, the potential savings soar to about $16,800.” Your investment to automate and solve these problems is $1668 and $3168 respectively. That’s a 400% return on your investment.
Are You Making Money?
Our Weekly Labor Cost report shows by job how many hours and dollars you are spending each week against your budgets. Apply a fully loaded pay rate across the board (includes payroll tax and worker’s comp) to get a true, accurate cost of labor dollars. When overtime happens, the report knows which job the employee was on and applies the employee’s pay rate to the job at 1.5x. It’s a really smart report.
Happy Customers
An employee schedule on a spreadsheet can’t alert you when a shift is missed, but your angry customer will let you know the next morning. Create job schedules in our system to automate the oversight of your jobs. Get no-show alerts by text or email when employees don’t show. If the shift time is static, but the employee can vary, use our exclusive Any Employee option. You’ll be notified in time to get the job covered and keep your customers happy.
Easy and Streamlined Payroll Administration
Automated online time cards are ready when you are. You don’t have to wait until handwritten timesheets are collected to review them. Also, our Payroll Snapshot automatically captures overtime correctly for your pay period. If you have a semi-monthly pay period or are in California, this is HUGE. The Payroll Snapshot also works with our QuickBooks Integration for a seamless import of your time card data from our system into QB. Your payroll administrator will love the ease of payroll days with time cards automatically created and calculated.
Automate Compliance with Uncle Sam
According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s website, “Time spent traveling during normal work hours is considered compensable work time.” If you have remote hourly employees, it’s time to let the power of automation get you in compliance with governmental regulations. We have a feature called Travel Manager that automates travel trips and makes staying in compliance a breeze. It is integrated with Google Maps ™ and automatically creates a travel time card when your employee clocks out of one job and clocks into a different job. Use the actual time the trip took or use Google’s estimate. Google Maps ™ may estimate a trip to be only 14 minutes yet it took the employee 59 minutes. No sweat. Just approve it for 14 minutes.
Eyes In the Field
Are you paying your employees to not work? You are if your employees aren’t at the job site when they are supposed to be. Our clock in mobile app with location tracking will report live if an employee clocks in somewhere other than the job site. Check the clock event from the website or the supervisor’s mobile app. Job budgets are useless if payroll dollars go to dishonest employees. You also have to worry about the quality of work if all of the reported hours aren’t really being worked.
On-Demand Information
You need information live, not in the rearview mirror. You need it in time to self-correct right now, not let a bad month come and go and hope that your manual spreadsheet will uncover old information to help you down the road. In 17 seconds our telephony and app-based employee time clock gives you visibility to live, on-demand data about today’s workflow that influences tomorrow’s decisions.
It’s rare that any 17-second action automatically triggers so many positive benefits. This simple act of automation gives you easy access to workforce productivity that you can’t get with handwritten timesheets. It’s also the most direct and simple way to obtain the accurate information you need to make the best decisions. Automation is good and fortunately the necessary machine to make it work for you is readily available – the job site landline or the phones in your employees’ pockets.
Do you want to get the machine going for free for 30 days?
Stay tuned and stay in touch by following us on Facebook.
