How to Choose the Ideal Time Clock for your Business

Time clocks have clearly come a long way from the rather archaic design and technology which dominated the time monitoring landscape of yesteryears.

At the same time, time clocks have taken on critical hues today more than ever, where businesses tend to have full-time employees as well as contractual personnel working for them in various parts of the world, across multiple time zones.

In such a scenario, monitoring effective utilization of time becomes absolutely critical towards optimal deployment of business resources.
With that backdrop in place, let us look at aspects to consider while choosing the ideal time clock for your business.

Foolproof

Well, can any system of any kind ever be 100% foolproof? No, it cannot. But can suitable measures be taken to try and make systems in question as foolproof as possible? For sure that can be done!

Take card readers as a prime example. Although in their twilight stage of deployment, we still see card readers being used in various parts of the world for time monitoring purposes. The challenge with card readers, especially in large organizations, is that they are particularly prone to misuse; any worker can punch in a different worker’s card which invariably proves very difficult to monitor.

Therefore, this very aspect of “relatively foolproof” is absolutely crucial when it comes to choosing an ideal time clock for your business; whatever system is chosen, should not be prone to easy manipulation by organizational personnel (or anyone else).

It is under these circumstances that options such as a biometric fingerprint reader came to the fore since it negates human interference or the possibility of manipulation to a “nearly foolproof” extent. After all, as we will reiterate yet again, while no system can be 100% foolproof, one based on biometrics certainly helps bring down the possibility of human interference and manipulation to a nearly infallible extent.

XmartClock as an intuitive and capable employee time clock app clearly scores very well on this front since it is practically impossible to manipulate through human intervention by a non-authorized source.

Cost

Whatever you do, cost considerations simply cannot be put aside. Today’s business environment is such that every single expense is scrutinized. A costly time clock system is likely to witness reasonable frowns from the finance department. Therefore, keeping costs under check would be absolutely essential.

At the same time, this should not come at the cost of quality; an eclectic balance between costs and quality has to be maintained and ensured for the long run. In other words, besides the acquisition cost, running costs for the time clock system should be optimal such that they are not too high, without having any impact on quality.

Again, on this crucial aspect, XmartClock does a fine job since acquisition and operational costs are both truly reasonable. After all, what we are talking about here is basically a time punch clock app. There is no separate additional hardware which is required; existing smartphones, tablets or computers will do just fine for allowing XmartClock to function smoothly and do its job as intended.

Eco-friendly

Consciousness around eco-friendliness is at its peak today. There is simply no avoiding discussion around say environmental damage or sustenance, no matter what you do, especially in a business context. Given such a scenario, when it comes to a time clock solution, there is absolutely no leeway for a non-environment-friendly option; it has to be one which does minimal to no damage to the environment.

When we look at the historical, manual time card scenario, it was clearly not environment friendly since it would end up consuming a lot of paper on a daily basis, especially in operations that worked round the clock over multiple shifts.

Alongside, when we look at digital time clock options, choices would include ones that require additional hardware along with heavy duty software, both of which would end up consuming significant power – and thus not prove to be environment-friendly at all.

It is under such circumstances that an employee punch clock app like XmartClock proves to be the perfect panacea as far as environment-friendliness goes. After all, as we have already reiterated, there is no separate need for additional hardware. Further, since it uses the power (“juice” if you wish to use common parlance) already ensconced within devices it runs on such as smartphones, tablets, or computers, the question of consuming additional power-centric resources simply does not arise.

All-round Feasibility

This is an aspect which actually takes multiple points into consideration. Some examples will help you gauge the background behind this:

• Would you want to engage with a time clock solution for your business that requires each employee to gather around it, at least twice a day, as they punch in and punch out? Even at 10 seconds per personnel on an average – and a headcount of 600 personnel, we are looking at 100 minutes (or 1 hour, 40 minutes) going down the drain simply for this administrative task. Can your business really afford that?
• If you have a biometric fingerprint reader solution which each employee requires coming and physically touching in order to verify and confirm credentials, how soon will it be before the machine goes awry, not to mention the time factor touched upon in the previous point?

There are many such aspects to consider, all of which center around feasibility.

And ultimately, all of them clearly point towards the ideal nature of an employee time clock app like XmartClock, which ticks all the right boxes, without going anywhere near the wrong ones.

Conclusion

A competitive business environment like the one we see all around us today simply has no room for an inefficient and cumbersome employee time clock solution.

As pointed out in this post, aspects such as “relative infallibility”, optimal cost (without quality compromise), environmental friendliness, as well as all-round feasibility are all quintessential to the choice of an ideal time clock solution for any business.

Under such circumstances, a time punch clock app like XmartClock clearly proves to be the most effective time clock solution.