Employee timesheets and other wonders of the world


Posts tagged staffing

A Timesheets Story with a Happy Ending

Jul30
2011 Leave a Comment Written by ct_admin

You’ve looked at Clocktower, you’ve seen the demo, and it’s all great. But you’re asking one simple question. “Why should I use Clocktower?”

Let me tell you a story.

A mid-sized employment company is reviewing their bills for the time tracking software they use.  They have 200 employees for the month in question. For each of those employees, they paid $5.50 to allow those employees to access the software.

Do the math; (that’s right $1,100!)

Now, where this story gets really gloomy is when the company realizes, about 10% of their employees logged less than five hours each week for the month.

Now, the company might think, “We’ll just track the time for those employees someplace else.” Nice solution, till they have to reconcile their numbers!

And let’s not even think about giving access to their 300 different clients, some of whom didn’t work with the company for the month in question. (Because, that would cost the company another $1,650, just to let someone sign off on an employee’s time.)

A Better Approach

Let’s step back for just a moment and think about something. What is the resource that is really being tracked? It’s not a trick question; and I know you’ve got the answer. It’s not people, it’s time!
Let’s look at some numbers. We’ll start off with the same 200 employees.
180 of them actually billed 40 hours/week for 4.2 weeks.

Total number of hours: 30,240
And that remaining 10%; they worked 5 hours/week for those same 4.2 weeks.
Total number of hours: 420
Total hours for the month: 30,660

Using Clocktower:

  • The company pays $.03/hour for the first 5,000 hours: $150.00
  • The company pays $.02/hour for the remaining 25,660 hours: $513.20
  • Total for the month: $663.20
  • Total additional charges for the 300 clients to use the site: $ 0.00

And if we dig a little deeper, we see something very interesting. Let’s compare the two approaches for those low hour employees:

20 Employees, 5 hours/week, 4.2 weeks on Other System – $110.00

20 Employees, 5 hours/week, 4.2 weeks on Clocktower – $12.60

It is time to stop wasting money and start saving time with Clocktower Time Sheets.  Read more about the benefits here.

Posted in TIME SHEETS - Tagged , , ,

Price per user?

Feb15
2011 Leave a Comment Written by ct_admin

Price is usually a pretty straight forward concept.  We know the prices of a lot of things.  The price of a candy bar, the price of a car, the price of a song download.  We have the ability to compare those things because we are familiar with them.  We even have a way to predict what a price is based on experience.  Candy bars and cars are familiar items.  We know how much a song is worth to us, and we even have a way to compare those prices to see if they are fair.  But modern technology has blurred the pricing lines somewhat.

Now we are learning to understand things like prices for data downloads, prices for apps, prices for licenses.  These new things can sometimes create complications because the things being purchased aren’t all that familiar to us.  Take the pricing for Basecamp, a popular web based project management tool, as an example.  If you visit their pricing page you will see that their prices are primarily based on the number of projects you need.  Well, what if you have no idea?  What is a project worth?  What do I get from a project?  They do a wonderful job of explaining what a project is, but the point is this is a new unit, and an unfamiliar one.

This same situation arises for staffing agencies when they price online timesheet applications.  Everything is priced per user.  But what is a user?  Does that refer to the internal staff, or is it everyone that tracks time?  If my client has access to approve timesheets is she a user?  How many users do I have anyway?

Staffing companies by nature put a lot of new people to work every week.  If over the course of a month you averaged about 100 employees, it doesn’t necessarily mean you had 100 employees.  The first week perhaps 10 people were hired by the client, and the next week 20 new people were put to work.  Now how many users or employees is that?  The point is it is hard to track, difficult to predict and it is not a metric staffing companies are used to.  I know you don’t send reports to your recruiters telling them how many users they need to have.

Posted in TIME SHEETS - Tagged , ,