Business success doesn’t come easy. Every business owner faces hurdles and challenges to survive for the long term. This is especially true of companies, like janitorial businesses, that manage remote employees. Brandon, the founder and CEO of Chronotek, learned this firsthand as he grew up in his parent’s successful franchise commercial cleaning business. He worked in all phases of the business and after college he spent 9 years supporting their 36 franchisees and listening to their struggles. He heard a common problem woven into all of his conversations with these other business owners: managing off-site employees. And employees are the most important element to the service industry and are the driving force behind the 3 big questions that the owner of a janitorial company faces:
The Big Questions
- Are my jobs getting covered?
- Are my employees really on the job site?
- Am I making money?
More Than Timekeeping
Brandon knew that he could help small business owners address these 3 big questions. His extensive experience in the service industry coupled with his computer programming education and background made him uniquely qualified to solve these remote employee management problems. His core purpose for creating the Chronotek system was to provide a proven way for companies to effectively manage their remote employees. It’s a pretty simple statement, but it carries a lot of power. Brandon knew it was more than just about timekeeping. He believed a focus only on timekeeping would miss the mark on other very important ways to help business owners. Companies need alerts when employees don’t show up to work on time, better communication between employees and supervisors, live data to prevent overtime before it happens and job cost reporting.
Issues To Solve
Tracking time on the job solely with handwritten timesheets made these issues hard to address. Just because a timesheet showed an employee at the ABC job for 3 hours on Friday night, was he really? Maybe it was 2.5 hours instead and that’s not enough time for a quality clean. A handwritten timesheet doesn’t let anyone know if the employee is a no-show. A nasty phone call from the building manager the next morning will, but who wants that and who can afford many or any of these phone calls? What about job reporting to determine if your janitorial company is making money on your cleaning contracts? You can use handwritten timesheets that you don’t 100% trust to painstakingly and manually enter the hours into a spreadsheet, but unless you commit to doing this every day (and you can’t because, well, you are dealing with handwritten timesheets), your information is like moldy bread-it’s too old to be useful. These were the issues that plagued all commercial cleaning and janitorial companies over 20 years ago and still do for the many who use handwritten timesheets.
Help Is On the Way!
We know that flawless timekeeping is the cornerstone to providing our customers with all of the other remote employee management needs they have. Industry experience makes Chronotek the leading solution for this timekeeping component. Chronotek was originally designed for employees to call from landline phones at job sites and the system captured and reported the caller ID to prove that employees were on the job site when clocking in. An exclusive linked phones feature was developed to make sure that employees could only clock in from the designated building phones and not from other phones. Simplicity is key. A simple call, which takes about 15 seconds to complete, creates a time card that captures the accurate time and the CID on clock in and clock out. Accurate time alone will save your business up to 10% on payroll. Over the years the mobile app was developed to help with sites that do not have landline phones.
To solve the no-show problem, Chronotek has a scheduling component that sends late alerts by text or email when an employee doesn’t clock in by a set time. Chronotek notifies the supervisor in time to get the job covered instead of an angry building manager contacting the company the next morning. It’s possible that Chronotek was the medicine that cured sleepless nights for many business owners.
It is no secret, one of the greatest benefits that small business owners gain from Chronotek is information delivered on-time as needed. Live access to the clock ins and outs means that reports can be pulled any time.” Know as you go” if employees work more than or less than budgeted hours. See who is approaching overtime. Be up to date about the jobs that have overtime. Compare employee scheduled hours versus actual worked hours. Now with our mobile app and GPS tracks you know right away if employees aren’t at the job when clocking in and out. Our proprietary Smart Tracks™ captures the GPS location and reports if employees leave the job while clocked in. Real-time visibility over your employees and jobs helps you see and prevent problems. It is the power to be proactive instead of powerlessly reactive.
Let Us Help You Succeed
We have over 20 years working with and talking with thousands of janitorial business owners. One thing that they have convinced us of is this: our online time card system helps them to prosper and grow, and is an indispensable part of their overall management process. If your commercial cleaning business needs a proven way to effectively manage remote employees, please try us free for 30 days. We believe that our answers will bring you success.