EcoTime - Powerful Time & Attendance

I had been investigating time and attendance systems on and off for about 3 years. During this time I had looked at many products on the market, but nothing ticked all the boxes in terms of price, functionality, flexibility and ease of use. We had some quite specific requirements that had to be met. Clocking Systems were asked to look at our needs and were extremely confident that they could provide exactly what we needed, without it costing a fortune.

The solution we now have in place runs on our store EPOS terminals and has been trimmed down to exactly the features our managers need and use. They can easily monitor employees’ hours, attendance, lateness, absence, holidays, sickness trends, leave and employee rosters can also be managed extremely easily.

There have been countless benefits of having the system over the last few years, which have far exceeded our initial requirements or expectations. It has been transformative in how we are able to manage our ever growing and dynamic workforce. We now have an extremely efficient payroll process as the software automatically calculates the actual hours to be paid for each employee against their often complex working patterns. We are able to monitor employees in real-time, including exception reports which are automatically emailed to department heads on a daily basis.

‍There have been instances when I have used the online support provided through the excellent ticketing system CS provide. More often than not, one of the engineers would dial in to my PC and make changes for me to sort small problems, or show me how to make changes to the system to get more from it. With almost constant support at times from the support team I have been assisted with, and now trained to write macros that take the package from being an excellent time and clocking tool to an awesome part of our payroll and management reporting.

When I arrived in the department, I could see that the process of preparing the payroll was extremely time consuming and inefficient and paper based. There was a quadruple handling of data in the chain, from employees filling in their time sheets, to supervisors checking them, passing them through to clerical staff to type on to spread sheets and finally on to the payroll department to type into payroll.

‍Since installing the system, we have realised many benefits. In fact, more than originally anticipated. Firstly, the manual work involved in the payroll process has been all but eliminated; we are saving 5 managers one day per week each. This is allowing them to get on with more important work than number crunching, and increases overall efficiency within the department.

We employ approximately 25 staff and in 2017 with changes within our company ahead of us, which were due to impact our payroll and reporting process, we decided we needed to move away from our manual system.

We went out to tender on the project and looked at many companies nationally. This was during the business process changes and we were literally on the clock ourselves to select a supplier! We chose Clocking Systems for a number of reasons:-

• They were competitively priced – not the cheapest, but still within budget.
• During the sales process, they quickly understood exactly what our requirements were and spent a lot of time specifying the set up with us before installation.
• We looked at who else was using their systems of a similar size, including their feedback on Clocking Systems. This reassured us that they could deliver a scalable solution and look after us moving forward.