Lumiere Guide to Selecting and Implementing Time and Attendance Solutions

Efficient tracking of time and attendance is critical to managing most businesses. Besides helping facilitate efficient payroll processing and client invoicing, time and attendance solutions can provide insights into your business’s profitability that leads to better decisions and efficient management of your human resources.

Lumiere has helped our clients adopt time and attendance solutions resulting in significant benefits, including:

Profitability Analysis

• Project costing and profitability insight

• Streamlined client invoicing for service industries

• Departmental costing reporting

Resource Management

• Efficient integration into payroll solutions

• Improved resource management and expenditure control

• Employee tracking through geolocation and geofencing

• Compliant management of  paid time off (PTO) policies

Before You Get Started - Involve the Stakeholders 

The first step to determining the best software solution is to understand your requirements are. The best way to do this is to work with internal resources and stakeholders that would benefit from or interact with the platform. Start by answering the following questions from resources in the following areas:

• Finance - Are analytics the finance department performs to track departmental or project costs or other critical metrics for profitability?

• Operations - What workflows involve scheduling, forecasting, or reporting needs?

• Payroll - What are the requirement of the existing or proposed payroll platform?

• Technology - Are there management, hosting, integration considerations for the new system?

This collaboration also helps deliver stakeholder buy-in and better adoption of the implemented solution. The requirements gathering phase is also an excellent opportunity to evaluate, propose, and implement changes to your current workflows, policies, and procedures. 

Make your Selection

Lumiere recommends you evaluate the following features in a time and attendance solution:

• Usability - The interface should be intuitive and easy to use

• Configuration - Should be straightforward and rule or macro-driven

• Integration - Choose a solution that has integrates with the existing solutions

• Compliance - Management of compliance rules should be automatic and proactive

• Auditable - Transparent and accessible logs of who did what and when are critical

• Comprehensive - Your solution should cover all your time and attendance related needs 

Solutions to evaluate 

For our own utilization and our clients’ benefit, Lumiere is always evaluating the best-of-breed cloud-based time and attendance solutions available for companies managing groups of employees. Here are a few of our favorites.

• TSheets - Easily integrated into Quickbooks. Enables resources to track time on multiple devices and managers to see who's working, where, and on what, all in real-time

• Harvest - Simple online time-tracking software that allows the tracking of resources and projects and the efficient creation of client invoices

• Deputy - Platform that supports numerous industries and allows for budget based scheduling

• Zenefits - Allows resources to record their time from any device and managers to approve time submissions in seconds. Syncs employee hours directly to payroll

• Homebase - Assists with employee onboarding, schedule creation, and forecasting. Great for service-based industries

• Ximble - Web-based time tracking solution that delivers IP restricted and GPS time clocking through text or phone, a mobile app with GPS tagging and geofencing

• FreshBooks - Helps track hours spent on clients or projects for accurate billing and job-costing

• Run powered by ADP - Offers small businesses the HR and payroll services they need to run their business, every day and every step of the way

Ensure success

Following our guide by establishing solution requirements, involving key stakeholders, and selecting a solution that integrates well into your existing business will go a long way towards a successful implementation. By following strong project management methodologies, leveraging your vendors’ implementation support, and providing training to your users will also contribute to your efforts’ success.

Every period of your company’s growth can bring both challenges and opportunities. Growing your business to the point that time and attendance solutions are required is strong evidence of your firm’s success. Take advantage of the contributions time and attendance solutions will provide to your business and continue your success.