Time and Attendance Today

Should you move to a hosted attendance software model? Lots of companies are touting online solutions as the next thing. It seems very likely that networked time and attendance solutions will take over as the business’s new paradigm in the next three to five years.

It’s an attractive option for many companies, and it might just suit your needs as well. Depending upon the size of your business, looking after the care and feeding of servers for your attendance software and time tracking peripherals has a certain cost associated with it, and it’s much cheaper for companies like Kronos, who are providing the same service for thousands of customers - the efficiencies they can find reduces duplication and lowers their costs significantly — and yours, too.

If you choose an online model you will still have to purchase some hardware tools, and networked hardware is often pricier than standalone dataloggers or loggers that are wired into your building. But if they’re networked, you can pick them up and take them with you - this makes them much easier to change, move, and replace your equipment. What you’re saving in server licensing fees and maintenance will more than make up for the increased equipment costs (and prices will only go down.)

There are a few caveats, however. Make sure the company you’re working with addresses security in their offering - privacy legislation might apply, and if you’re accessing employee records over the Internet you’ll want to make sure that the application is secure, and is hosted in your state or province (so that the data is subject to the same laws are your employees.)

The other consideration is licensing. Most traditional software is still buy-it-once. You can pay for support, but most mid-sized companies don’t - they hire an IT staff who does that as part of their regular duties anyway. But once the data is on your computers and the software is installed, it is yours. Online attendance and HR software is licensed, usually on an annual basis, and this means that if you don’t pay your license fees you could lose access to all of your employee attendance information in one fell swoop. On the other hand, you’ll have to upgrade stand-your alone software too, as your computers age, and that won’t be free — so this probably evens out in the end. (And stand-alone software isn’t inherently secure, unless it’s on a computer that isn’t ever connected to a network.)

As with all software choices, be careful about tying yourself to a single vendor. The key is to make sure that your data can be exported in an industry-standard format, so that you can remove it and transfer it to another system. And make sure that all of the networked hardware you purchase adheres to ISO standards and, better yet, common communications protocls (like BACnet or DDE, for example.)