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.)

• No paper time sheets!
• Web based applications
• Better control over employee attendance and the ability to track unemployment costs
• The ability to integrate complex rules to manage employees groups
• A client/server architecture solution, if you want to manage centrally.

The big name is, of course, Kronos. They have automated time and attendance software that can improve reporting accuracy, which will go a long way to increasing your business’s productivity. Kronos has 30 years of experience, and they’ve worked with all sorts of industries from gaming to health, manufacturing to retail. Their mission statement is to empower small and mid-size organizations to effectively manage their workforce.

Kronos provides different time and attendance tracking software solutions which are appropriate for different business sizes and staffing requirements. The four major products in their Workforce Central Suite are Workforce Timekeeper, Timekeeper Central, ISeries Time Keeper and WebTA. They even provide a guide to help choose which offering is right for your payroll processing and labor management.

Another recommended product is Pacific Timesheet, which offers payroll (Lawson, Intuit, etc) and iPhone sign-in support, and is a web-based software solution rather than a client/server solution. Pacific integrates with a few hundred different payroll systems, from the specific and obscure to a few industry-standard ones. Pacific Timesheet’s customers include a few Fortune 500 companies, middle market, emerging growth and small cap firms. They have similar industry-covarge to Kronos. The best part is that they have a demo version, and the best way to figure out if you’ll like it is to go and give it a try!

Functionality

• An attendance calendar: You want the ability to keep an attendance calendar for each employee.
• Data collection: It should have basic time in/out - is it manual entry, RFID, web, a punch clock wired to the internet?
• Time accounting: The ability to apply flexible rules about overtime, breaks, etc.
• Cost distribution: Allocate time worked by project, location, or other categories - for instance, if you have two different groups of employee contracts.
• Scheduling: An intuitive way to schedule time on and off by either group or individuals.
• Tracking: A method of recording employee requests for vacation and paid time off, and enter sick time.
• Payroll integration: The ability to convert data into QuickBooks or another payroll service.

The two most important things, in my opinion, are the reporting and integration stuff, and the data collection method. If you have more than 15 or so employees, I highly recommend getting some kind of automated data collection system, rather than a data-entry-via-the-web or data-entry-via-a-desktop. It simplifies everything enormously, and saves you bundles of time.

Cost

Small business time and attendance tracking systems can run anything from $50 / yr / employee, to $300 - $3000 for a package. It all depends on the functionality that you want, the interoperability you want, etc.

The best advice I’ve heard is that, if you’re getting any kind of hardware integration, all the webinars in the world won’t take the place of a site visit. Make sure the company is able to scope out your requirements, ask questions, and make sure all assumptions are accounted for in their quote!