The cloud is now part of standard operations for almost every organization. You’d be hard-pressed to find a business not using some cloud-based applications. Expanding your portfolio to include cloud-based products that appeal to your market is a logical path for new growth.
Why Time Tracking Using a Cloud Based Time Clock is Good for Your Business
A cloud–based time clock solution is more than great technology, it’s also smart business. Let’s look deeper into why:
1) It Allows You to Stay Focused on Your Software Solution
Taking a cloud–based time clock approach to an employee time tracking vendor search reorients your perspective. Now you’re looking for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) partners with specific expertise. Time clock manufacturing isn’t part of your mission any more than building servers are, neither is continuous development and optimization of employee time tracking software.
When you can lean on partners that are the experts in these hardware and software domains, you can keep focus on the product development and customer value delivered by your own software solution.
2) You Can Deliver Your Customers a Top-Notch Time Clock Experience
With seamless integrations between your software solution and your customers’ new time clock deployments, you can expand the services available to employees at the time clock. With the right cloud–based time clock software, you can deliver new functionality to the time clock. Upgrade the employee time clock experience for your customers by letting employees check their schedule or submit vacation requests at the clock.
When you offer ATS‘ time tracking system, AccuCloud, you can also improve the experience of your customers no matter how big or small their business is, by simplifying the software update process. You can roll out software updates over-the-air (OTA). And with the portal, both you and your customers can have peace of mind knowing exactly which clocks are online at any given time.
3) A Cloud-Based Time Clock System That’s Efficient and Easy to Manage
Rolling out a cloud-based time tracking solution like AccuCloud can make it easier for you and your team to manage a large fleet of time clocks. During the implementation process, your team can create a series of logical groups (time clocks within a group) based on features like time zones, and time clocks using biometrics and those that do not. Using these types of logical groups can easily help your team perform maintenance and software updates to time clocks, instead of tracking individual clock IDs and manually updating each time clock.
These logical groupings also allow for a level of customization for your customers. It gives their employees exactly what they need for how they access and use their clocks for a particular work site. You can deliver a superior and user friendly experience when compared to an average clock that only has factory installed features.
4) Use it as an Entry Point to Several New Revenue Growth Avenues
A web-based employee time and attendance system gives you infinite possibilities to expand software services and hardware options. With these opportunities, you get access to new and bigger markets and a host of software and hardware offerings that each represent a different billing opportunity.
Get to the Cloud Quickly with the AccuCloud Time Clock System
AccuCloud is Accu-Time Systems’ time clock ecosystem solution for Value Added Resellers that integrates smoothly with your software solution to give your customers all the advantages of cloud computing for their employee time tracking and time clock management.
View the AccuCloud Components
The AccuCloud environment contains three components all of which integrate smoothly with each other and external software systems.
- An AccuCloud compatible time clock, the stride80.
- The ATS-hosted middleware, which manages data validation and integration among all AccuCloud components and your software solution.
- The web–based Monitor management portal, which provides the direct visibility into your customers’ time clock deployments and integrations, and manages communication among ATS’ support team, your team, and your customers’ IT teams, if you want to give them access to the Monitor portal.
Our time-tested deployment process works in four easy phases:
- Build: Our team works with you to design and implement system configurations based on the workflows you offer, for their time clocks and AccuCloud middleware.
- Test: Together, we run through a systemic testing plan to ensure full functionality.
- Deploy: We start with training you and your customer’s teams and then launch into a go-live environment.
- Deliver: Whether through the AccuCloud or Time Clock monitor portals, we’re with you and your customers to provide launch and on-going support.
Package and Price AccuCloud Components as You Want
Our AccuCloud system is also designed to give you maximum flexibility for how you package and price it to your customers. Here are a few examples:
- After purchasing the time clocks from ATS, resellers that want recurring monthly revenue can lease the clocks. Resellers that want immediate profit can sell the time clocks outright to customers.
- Resellers have full access to the AccuCloud Portal. You can decide to license access to an end-user as a separate add-on, make it part of an enhanced support package, or include it in your standard monthly fee.
However you are planning to package your resale of AccuCloud software and services, talk with your Account Executive about putting your logo on the time clocks, so your company remains front and center with your customers.
How Cloud Based Time Clocks Benefits Your Customers
Getting your customers online with a cloud–based time tracking system is good for your business because it delivers serious benefits to your customers.
Online Employee Time Clocks Provide Better Data Management
Running an efficient and accurate payroll is the baseline achievement for any employee time tracking system. The data collected at the time clock must be clean and secure. It also must flow quickly and reliably to the back office departments, like payroll and HR, that rely on it to meet their objectives.
Only a cloud-based time clock solution can provide real time transparency into the data integration and operational status of each time clock. With quick alerts, IT teams can resolve any issue before employees have to revert to a manual work around to track attendance data.
A cloud environment also provides data redundancy that protects data integrity and availability, so payroll teams don’t have to engage in manual reconciliation processes. ATS time clocks have the storage capacity that provides another layer of data storage redundancy. Even if the time clock loses network connectivity, employees can still use the time clock, which stores the data locally until reconnected.
Increased Level of Support for Employee Time Clocks
Online monitoring portals arm support teams with maximum insight and oversight, enabling them to proactively monitor and resolve potential issues before they disrupt payroll data collection or other operations.
Allow Your Customers to Stay Focused on Their Core Services Too
The great value in all SaaS administration solutions is that they give customers access to expertise outside their core services, expertise they can use to enhance their internal administrative operations.
Instead of investing time and resources into developing expertise to build automated payroll, scheduling, or other management tools in-house, they can invest in refining their own services or product to deliver maximum value to their customers.
Answers to Common AccuCloud Questions
Won’t reselling hardware bring high logistical costs?
Not the way we do it. ATS takes care of every aspect of the time clock provisioning for our resale partners. Since manufacturing and managing hardware delivery is part of our core business, we have the experience to do it at scale and cost efficiently.
We want our software vendor partners to focus on their core business, so we take care of building, configuring and shipping time clocks to their customers. With ATS, reselling time clocks is a high value, hassle– free revenue stream.
How is data secured with cloud–based time tracking software and hardware?
Time tracking software has such a high upside in terms of efficiency, flexibility, and accessibility. As a cloud–based time tracking system, it also comes with high responsibility to ensure that customers’ data is protected.
Our AccuCloud middleware-software solution and employee time clocks encrypt your customers data both at rest and during transmission. Typically, web–based software only encrypts data during transmission. With AccuCloud, employee data collected at the time clock gets encrypted on the time clock as it waits to be sent to the AccuCloud middleware and on to your backend software applications.
What types of employee badges work with ATS cloud–based time clock hardware?
Proximity, swipe or bar code reader badges replace the need for your customers to use their old time cards. With the AccuCloud solution, your customers can use their preferred badge with their ATS employee time clocks. Badges makes it easier to capture accurate time stamps.
Fortunately, ATS time clocks work with the broadest variety of badges. The chances that one of your customers is using a badge incompatible with any of our time clock readers is minuscule. You can be confident that your customers won’t have to roll out new badges to employees when they deploy ATS time clocks.
How will our customers get their time clock software configurations on new time clocks as they grow?
Every AccuCloud customer has their own software instance hosted by ATS. All of a company’s time clock configurations are stored within their AccuCloud instance. When new ATS time clocks are deployed to your customers, you control which configurations gets pushed to the time clocks and when.
This time clock configuration process also makes it easy for you to update your customers’ configurations to reflect new time tracking and payroll data needs. When they need a new configuration, you can roll it out to their time clock fleet on the schedule they choose.
What can our customers do with the AccuCloud Time Clock Monitor?
The online time clock web-portal gives you and your customers a lot of visibility into how each time clock is working. It also lets your customer view punch data for individual employees.
- Time clock connectivity: The monitor dashboard presents a clear red flag visual that tells your customers’ IT teams if a time clock has lost connectivity to the network. This lets them restore connectivity quickly while the ATS time clocks store the data they continue to collect locally.
- Time clock utilization: The monitor web portal provides graphical and tabular data that shows companies time clock usage so they can see where bottlenecks might be. Nobody wants long lines at the time clock during shift change. Smart distribution of time clocks can minimize wait time and the total number of time clocks a company needs to get.
- Employee punches: The monitor reporting also shares the date and time of each employee punch, along with the time clock used. Being able to track employee punch and time clock usage makes it easier to identify employee attendance trends that deserve accolades or send up a red flag.
What time clocks work with AccuCloud?
Our stride80 time clock is the perfect partner for the AccuCloud software. With the stride80 time clock, your customers get wide screens to display rich graphics, large memory storage, speakers, and microphone.
It works with a wide variety of badge and biometric readers. The Android-based stride80 also includes an LED scanner and light bar, plus an energy-efficient presence sensor.
Cloud-based Solutions are a Strategy for Growth
Reselling cloud-connected time clocks is but one part of offering a full-service, scalable cloud–based time tracking solution. When time clocks are online as part of a comprehensive collection of cloud–based time and attendance management tools, then it becomes part of a revenue growth strategy that enables your customers to optimize their installation of your software.