My daughter recently gave me a tip that saved my pride. I was routinely getting thrashed at Words With Friends by my 12 year old son. She asked if I used the helps. Helps? What are you talking about? I learned that WWF has helps you buy with virtual coins you earn as you play. Helps such as Swap, Hindsight and Radar. It was a game-changer and I’m not too proud to use them. My son is a smart rascal. As we approach the end of the year, we have a few tips to help our online time card customers in gathering key EOY information. Along with these tips we will tell you about the “helps” we have to get the information you need.
The Help You Need For End of the Year
- Determine for Obamacare purposes if you have full-time (FT) or full-time equivalent (FTE) employees. Full-time isn’t 40 hours and companies with 50 full-time or FTE employees are penalized if they don’t offer affordable health coverage to their employees. A penalty of $2,320 per full-time employee (less the first 30 employees) will be incurred if the employer fails to offer minimum essential coverage to 95 percent of its full-time employees and their dependents, and any full-time employee obtains coverage on the exchange.
Chronotek Help: Our ACA reports under Reports>By Employee crunch the numbers to show you how many FT and FTE employees you have. This report also show all employees, active and terminated, who worked for you this year along with your total labor hours for the year. Also use this report at the end of the year to determine who needs a W-2. Bonus Help: Use this report to get month by month total hours worked for each employee (and monthly totals of all employees) during the year and see the last month that an employee worked. It also shows the employee hire dates and termination dates. - Looking for your Chronotek invoices for tax time? You may not know that you have access to print them out and you certainly don’t want to hunt through emails.
Chronotek Help: Find your invoices under My Account>Account Activity. You can export each invoice as a PDF. - Did you make money on your job contracts? We suggest that you monitor this on a weekly or monthly basis with our Weekly Labor Cost report or Budget Manager so that you can make adjustments all along, but what if you didn’t? Have no fear.
Chronotek Help: With electronic time cards stored on our servers you can pull this historical information at any time. Use Budget Manager to create your 2018 job budgets and then we will do the heavy lifting with the math. We will report the budgeted numbers by week or month compared to your actual hours as captured by your employees using our clock in, clock out system. This vital information will help you reevaluate and renegotiate your job contracts for next year. - Archive annually. Your time card data is valuable. It has every clock in, clock out for every employee you’ve ever had since you started using our online time clock system. This is information that you want to preserve for a long time and we will safely store it on our redundant cloud-based servers as long as you are our customer. This data may be needed for labor disputes, tax purposes, workers’ comp claims, etc. Go ahead and do annual back-ups. We make it simple.
Chronotek Help: All of our time card reports can be exported to a CSV file for manipulation depending on how you want to view the data-by date, by employee, by customer, etc. The Payroll Snapshot Detailed CSV export is the best report to run for annual date range. Find more helpful information about the Payroll Snapshot on our online help site. - Let’s get personal. My friend, Daniel, owns a trucking company and reminded me that while data back-ups, profits and ACA compliance are important, there’s another very significant factor to consider-personal relationships. Your customers are people and people make decisions, especially with their money and how they feel spending it. Does one of your customers have a daughter going off to college in the Fall? Has his wife been sick for a while? Pick up the phone periodically to inquire about these things and only these things, not business. It shows that you view this customer as more than a row on your Profit & Loss statement and hopefully will give you sticking power if he ever has to make decisions about his vendors.
Chronotek Help: Use our job notes to record important details about your customers. The notes are time and date stamped with custom labels and you can make as many notes as you like. Review them occasionally, especially at the end of the year to determine what lessons you learned from and/or about this customer. Any actions you need to take? Do this for your inactivated jobs as well. You may learn more from job contracts you lost. Another related help is to export your jobs list to access customer contact information, including addresses. It’s time to send out Christmas cards.
We hope that these end of the year Chronotek “helps” are as valuable to you as Swap and Radar have been to me in Words With Friends.
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