When companies support different avenues of business, or work on multiple projects simultaneously, being able to track and manage job costing accurately is of high importance. An employer’s ability to accurately predict job costing directly affects future budget planning, how teams will be built, and the planning of future projects.

There however can be a lot of challenges faced in relation to job costing. For instance: Clients may request changes to the project scope, which can affect the schedule, budget or both. Employees might work on multiple projects, in multiple locations and move in and out of projects at different phases. Schedules can change mid project, forcing managers to bring in new staff who work at different rates. That’s why it’s valuable to use a time & attendance software that is well suited for job costing.

Job Costing and Time & Attendance

Your ability as a business or manager to accurately estimate job costing can effect all opportunities of your business from payroll, to hiring new employees, to how much you invoice clients. The key to implementing a reliable job costing solution is generally dependent on how well your time and attendance software functions, as the two processes can be streamlined.

As you consider which time & attendance solution can help you manage your job costing challenges, some questions to consider might be: Does your current time & attendance system provide you with the kind of data you need to estimate the cost of future projects? What about tracking employees who work different schedules, or at different locations? These are some basic examples, but they do provide a small sample of analytics you’ll need to run for accurate job costing.

The data you receive from BundyPlus can help you shed light on costs of current projects, and can help you plan your next project bid. BundyPlus is also currently expanding towards a cloud-based Time & Attendance platform, which will provide an even more dynamic job costing and time & attendance solution to clients.

The Solution

When you’re able to accurately and efficiently track job and project costs, you can start to see where you are or where you could be maximizing resources, and where you may be putting a strain on project budgets. Using this information can help your business enhance its workforce, create new efficiencies, and take on projects in areas of strength.

The Growth of the Mobile Workforce

While technology has helped facilitate the mobile workforce and increased business efficiency, it has also increased the need for companies to be more precise and effectively competitive amongst each other. Empowering employees with more control over where and when work is completed increases employee satisfaction and engagement, improves business efficiency, while also making more efficient and effective use of all business resources. Mobile workforces allow businesses to reduce overhead expenses, such as the reduced need for physical office space/resources and less reliance on complex IT infrastructures as more data and processes are migrated to cloud platforms.

Importance of GPS tagging

When managing a mobile workforce, businesses might need to be able to track workers in multiple locations, including some staff who may be working outside the company’s offices.

Geolocation tagging or GPS tagging, is highly convenient for those employees who work out in the field or at remote locations. You may want to know which jobs staff are on or validate that they are actually on location and not down the road at the pub when they clock in or out.

How GPS tagging works

Geolocation tagging uses any one of several tools for tracking an employee location. With geolocation, a smartphone, tablet or PC uses the software and hardware installed on it combined with its settings to capture location data. At any given time and for various reasons, it may choose to use GPS, cell tower triangulation, WI-FI positioning, or even the device’s IP address to determine coordinates. Geolocation will work better on some devices and at certain times and places than others.

Modern mobile time tracking

Manual paper timesheets are becoming outdated and have less of a place in today’s modern, mobile work environment. Businesses that rely on these manual processes are subjected to inaccurate data due to human error and potentially fraudulent reporting due to unethical reporting practices by employees. This manner of reporting can make auditing a difficult if not impossible process.

When employees know that their location is being tagged, they are more likely to follow the rules. Even with the occasional presence of a low-accuracy entry, employees know that their location is known, overall, and that they can’t get away with clocking in and out from unapproved locations.

For this reason, companies are increasingly looking towards cloud-based time and attendance solutions to better manage time tracking of mobile workers. Mobile time tracking is highly efficient and has many advantages that makes it more accepted both by the employer and employees.

Maintaining accurate records

Any business can be subjected to auditing of their time and attendance records, especially if or when a labour dispute arises. Therefore, it is essential that companies maintain accurate records of time and attendance, locations, assignments, jobs etc. For businesses with a mobile work environment, cloud-based time tracking is essential to facilitate accurate record keeping as well as greatly simplifying the production of reports in the event of an audit.

The Solution

The BundyPlus cloud-based mobile time and attendance application is a great solution for businesses wanting to expand and stay streamlined with modern technological practices by improving business efficiency, enhancing employee engadgement and accurately tracking employee time and attendance.

Timeclocks are as old as the Industrial Revolution, and their purpose is essentially the same as it was then: to track the employee time and attendance so businesses can pay accordingly.

However, some elements of time and attendance tracking have evolved with the modern industry and workforce. A lot of today’s time-and-attendance systems still lack a way to verify that the data presented on a timesheet is accurate and valid. Two sources of labor fraud in particular are left unaddressed in today’s increasingly mobile workforce:

1. Time theft: Employees clock in without being present at the job location.
2. Buddy punching: Employees clock in on another employees behalf

One way for businesses today to avoid or solve the issues of time fraud is by using biometric-based time tracking. Biometrics offer a highly automated, accurate, and accessible method to employee time and attendance tracking.

Time-and-Attendance Fraud

Employers who compensate an hourly workforce are the most common victims of time-and-attendance fraud. These include workers in retail stores, warehouses, manufacturing, customer service, security, and other jobs that require on-site work.

However, nearly every industry has in some way been affected by a distributed workforce. Independent contractors, field service workers, transportation workers, and employees who work from a home office such as remote freelancers, participants in the gig economy and other transient workers represent a growing share of the labor force.

Biometrics and Time and Attendance

Biometrics like face, voice, and fingerprint use unique biological features to verify someone’s identity. By verifying identity, they can be used to confirm that time and location data being submitted by an employee is in fact being submitted by that employee at that time.

All biometric systems operate on the simple concept of comparing a stored record of a user's biometric data (hand, eye, fingerprint, etc) with data being supplied in real-time by the user requesting access. The real-time data is converted into a form which can be compared to the record, and if the two data sets match with enough certainty, the user is authenticated.

The process of first capturing the biometric data is called enrolling while the action of authenticating the user is called identification or verification. During the enrolment process, the original fingerprint image is processed, highly compressed, and stored on the device flash memory (or another storage system like the PC) as a template such as a unique ID number, name, and other information is added to associate a person with the template.

In this way, biometrics can be used to determine with accuracy and certainty that a person is who they claim to be at a particular time, virtually eliminating the possibility of buddy punching.

So biometrics for time and attendance are no used simply as a mobile authenticator for an employee to login and submit time and attendance data. They are used to validate time and location data, effectively automating mobile time-and-attendance tracking.

Security and Accuracy

Biometric time clocks store a mathematical representation of the users fingerprint. Each time a users finger is scanned by the time clock the mathematical representation of that finger scan is matched against the stored mathematical finger representations which are linked to individual people.

The mathematical representation that is stored with-in the time clock can not be used to copy or re-produce a finger image.

No graphical (bitmap) representation of any finger prints are stored or transmitted.. This ensures that biometric templates are kept under lock and key.

Furthermore, biometric-based mobile time-and-attendance eliminates the human error associated with timekeeping. In traditional data entry methods, a single typo can result in payouts that are over or below actual time worked. Biometrically validated timestamp submission eliminates this risk from the equation.