Adding hardware to your business model shouldn’t be complicated. Reselling time clocks should bring nothing but a high upside for your business and your customers’ experience.
Including these devices in your business model can be completely seamless when you partner with a time clock vendor that does the provisioning for you. As an ATS resale partner using our provisioning services, we manage all the hardware logistics for you, giving you an easy, straightforward path to growing your business…fast.
The Basics of Employee Time Clock Provisioning
When companies first consider reselling hardware, their biggest concern is always whether they can manage the logistics required in handling the hardware without eating away too large a chunk of the companies’ profits.
It’s a reasonable concern. Handling hardware comes with a logistical burden that selling software and services doesn’t. That’s why we carry the logistics management burden for our resale partners. We make provisioning time clocks easy.
Step One: We Handle the Manufacturing and Inventory Management
ATS has been designing and manufacturing time clocks for thirty years. That means we also have thirty years of experience refining our inventory management process. We have the physical resources in place, as well as the institutional knowledge to ensure that we can deliver the right time clocks to your customers right when the businesses need them.
Because we’re equipped to handle employee time clock inventory management at scale, we can keep the logistical costs associated with physical device inventory and management low.
Your customer places their time clock order with you. When you let us know which time clocks and what configurations they’ve ordered, the ATS team will assemble the clocks per the customer’s specifications.
Step Two: We Configure the Employee Time Clocks to Meet Your Customer’s Needs
Our time clocks come with a variety of reader options so they can accept the type of employee punch your customer uses. The timekeeping reader options include biometric readers, swipe badges, proximity fobs, and keypads. Many of our time clocks also have optional communications features, such as an LED light indicator, camera, microphone, and speakers.
Your customer places their time clock order with you. When you let us know which time clocks and what configurations they’ve ordered, the ATS team will assemble the clocks per the customer’s specifications.
Step Three: We Upload Your Software onto the Time Clock
Once we’ve assembled the time clock hardware, we move on to the important step of installing and configuring the device software. If you have employee attendance data collection software, we’ll install it on the time clock for you. If you don’t have employee time collection software, you can have our employee attendance data collection application installed instead, as part of our cloud-based AccuCloud employee time and attendance tracking solution.
No matter the software option you choose, we configure the time clocks, hardware and software, to meet your customer’s requirements and make them ready to integrate with your workforce management software easily.
Step Four: We Test the Time Clocks to Ensure They’re Ready to Go-Live
We turn on and test every time clock in your customer’s order to make sure they’re all operational and properly configured. You don’t have to worry that your customer will receive a time clock they can’t install or one that’s not been configured for their use.
Installation of ATS time clocks is a breeze. In fact, once a time clock is connected to a power source and your customer’s network, it will automatically run its set up and be ready to use. We
test each time clock so you can be confident that your customer will be up and running and ready to accept employee punch information right out of the gate.
Step Five: We Ship the Configured Time Clocks Directly to Your Customers
After we’ve tested and confirmed each time clock is ready to go live, we’ll ship them directly to your customer’s location or locations. We can ship them to you if you prefer, but that adds major costs and time delays to deliveries that our resale partners would rather avoid.
With ATS shipping time clocks directly to your customers, they’ll receive the devices as quickly and cost-efficiently as possible.
Now that you see the basics of provisioning time clocks through ATS, you can start assessing whether you’re a good candidate to resell hardware. If you’re concerned that your systems’ offerings are lacking because you don’t have software to run on the time clock that can capture employee work hours, we can help you scale your offerings quickly to include software that will collect and manage employee attendance data.
How Provisioning Provides an Immediate Business Makeover
Because ATS handles the entire provisioning process for our resale partners, they can use the new service of selling time clocks as a high-speed entry point to repositioning their businesses as full-service workforce management systems that include the essential hardware and software.
There’s Low Overhead for Resellers
Typically, adding a new offering requires businesses to lay out time and money before they ever see any return. Then they have to account for the ongoing costs for providing and servicing the new offering when projecting how profitable it might be.
When that offer is a hardware device, they’re looking at a list of potential ancillary support services and logistics they’re not set up to provide as a software company. This would balloon their upfront and ongoing costs of reselling time clocks… if they had to provision the devices themselves.
With ATS doing all the time clock provisioning, our resale partners avoid the overhead costs and responsibilities for:
- Storing hardware and managing inventory that ensures they can fill customer orders in a timely manner. This includes paying for space to store enough inventory.
- Hiring people responsible for all aspects of inventory management, such as ordering the right quantities, tracking volume, testing time clock hardware and software, and providing security.
- Setting up the policies, logistics space, and workflows to handle inventory management, shipping, and returns.
Since our time clock resale partners don’t bear any of these costs or responsibilities, their resale revenue is nearly pure profit. The only new task workflows they have when they resell ATS time clocks are their billing and ordering processes for time clocks.
You Can Focus on Your Marketing Launch Plan and Selling More Software
With no overhead for reselling ATS time clocks, you can go to market and launch your hardware offerings immediately. You don’t have to pre-order any time clocks. You only pay for the devices your customers order.
Now that you have time clocks as part of your offerings, you can start targeting a broader market to include prospects that consider them as an essential part of the kind of comprehensive employee attendance and workforce management systems they need.
Provisioning Benefits Your Customers Too
Reselling time clocks has such great upside for your business because giving your customers the opportunity to upscale their employee time and attendance experience benefits them in multiple ways. Because ATS handles the provisioning, your customers’ experience incorporating time clocks into their workforce and business systems is as easy for them as it is for you.
Time Clocks Will Be Your Customer’s Payroll Department’s Best Friend
A payroll department with access to the important data collected through automated timekeeping runs a more accurate payroll cycle and does it more efficiently. When workers’ hours are collected manually or through cruder methods, like a mechanical punch card, payroll staff waste hours reconciling numbers and making manual corrections.
Using sophisticated time clocks to capture employees’ attendance information means payroll has precise punch records where a difference in minutes matters. With labor costs typically the largest line item in the budgets of businesses, overpaying workers, even by a few minutes each, quickly adds up over time.
Time clocks also make it harder for employees to “buddy punch” for each other, which inflates payroll costs. Time clocks with biometric readers virtually eliminate the opportunity for this form of time theft.
Employee Time Clocks Offer More Functionality to Workforce Management
Time clock software is an opportunity to extend the utility and value of your system to the time clock, if your customers use one that provides your company a development platform. Our stride®80 Android-based time clock and development solution makes it easy for your product development team to build time clock software quickly in response to customer demand.
Can your customers track the overtime employees work or the personal time they take and deliver that information to them at the time clock? How much time will managers and HR get back if they don’t have to field questions from employees about their payroll or how much vacation or sick time they have accrued or used? How useful will it be if employees can access their hours worked and scheduling information at the time clock?
When you get creative with the time clock apps you build to leverage the important employee data used in your systems, you can improve productivity of shift workers, managers, and back office employees. This is but two examples; get an overview of how deeply you can integrate your software into the time clock.
Make it Easy for Your Customers to Get Employees Off Hand-Held Devices
With the popularity of mobile devices, you may be surprised to learn that many employers and employees don’t want them used for employee timekeeping.
There are multiple reasons why a mobile device is a bad option to collect employee punch data. They’re not reliably available. They bring a host of policy and legal compliance requirements regarding data protection. Their use can create security risks for companies’ other systems. A time and attendance data collection device should improve payroll and operational workflows, not add new burdens.
Durable, high-functionality time clocks are more than a reliable alternative to mobile devices. They provide closed loop, two-way access to attendance and scheduling data shared with your software.
Benefits of Partnering with a Time and Attendance Tracking Expert
Employee time and attendance tracking is about more than collecting minutes and hours. When you select a time clock vendor as a partner, you want a partner that adds value to your
relationship beyond providing top-in-class time clocks. Managing the full provisioning lifecycle is one way ATS adds value to our reseller partnerships, but it’s not the only way.
You Have Immediate and Direct Access to Time Clock Acumen
The ATS team has decades’ worth of institutional knowledge on scheduling, payroll, employee attendance management, and other time clock-related issues. We share our experience and expertise with partners through educational materials and training sessions, both rapid-fire and in-depth.
Our resource library, filled with important case studies, and instructive white papers can help you take an advisor’s role with your customers to make the most of their time clock integration with your software. Here are a few of our favorite resources you can find there:
Time Clock Durability: A guide to understand the:
- Operational and financial value of selecting only time clocks with proven durability
- The benefits of being able to access a selection of time clocks designed to withstand rougher work environments, like factories and construction sites
- What to look for to assess a time clock’s durability
- Improve Reporting: Timekeeping data can be a treasure trove of actionable information, especially when you can integrate it with the workforce data in your systems. Help companies maximize the value of their data.
- Minimize Absenteeism: Excessive employee absenteeism is a costly productivity and scheduling problem for many businesses. Their time clocks are a tool they can use to improve their management of absenteeism.
You Can Relax
We got you.
As a leader in the timekeeping and time clock industry with thirty years of experience, ATS knows the ins and outs of time and attendance software and hardware. You can rest assured that your customers will receive the most durable, advanced time clocks on the market.
Get in Touch with Accu-Time Systems
If you’re not reselling time clocks or working with a time clock vendor that doesn’t handle all the provisioning, you’re leaving money on the table. You can dig deeper into the details and benefits of our provisioning process here or if you want to start the conversation, contact us today to set up a call with an ATS time clock expert.