Using a mobile phone for time tracking is an unkept promise. It sounds good in theory, but ends up being an impractical and costly option in practice. A cloud-based timekeeping solution is the better alternative to unreliable mobile devices that require more resources to manage.
For employees who work off-site, mobile time tracking is necessary. But a mobile-only approach to employee time tracking doesn’t serve your client with on-site labor.
You can help them by introducing a cloud-based time clock to their payroll and workforce management system so they can benefit from its reliability and functionality.
Cloud Computing: Better than Mobile for Collecting Employees’ Attendance Data
People often lose or forget their mobile phone or they forget to keep them charged. Mobile devices are easily stolen. This all adds up to the mobile phone time tracking not being available when needed. When that happens, employee time tracking regresses to manual reporting and all the time-wasting, costly payroll errors endemic to it.
In many industries, such as food services, health care, and manufacturing, employees aren’t allowed to have mobile devices with them while working.
If you want to offer your customers a timekeeping option based on advanced technologies, choose a cloud-based system like our AccuCloud solution. It streamlines and automates employee attendance data collection through cloud-based time clocks supported by ATS-hosted middleware
Mobile Time Tracking Can Undermine the Network Security of Your Customers’ Business
Every mobile device, whether employees’ personal device or provided, is another end point through which hackers can gain access to your customers’ entire network.
According to Verizon’s Mobile Security Index (2022), mobile is growing in popularity as an entry point for cybercriminals, with nearly half the surveyed companies saying they suffered an attack involving a mobile device in the past 12 months. And 73% of those companies described the scope of the mobile-related compromise as “major.” Considering that the average cost of a data breach in the United States in 2022 is $9.44 million, mobile usage is a costly risk to you and your customers’ business.
Hidden Costs when Employees Use Mobile Devices at Work
Regardless of whether the company provides the mobile devices or employees bring their own (BYOD), there are significant costs to adding the monitoring tools and personnel needed to improve the security around them.
In contrast, cloud-based timekeeping systems reduce operating costs of an automated attendance tracking solution, in part by making them easier to install and manage. With AccuCloud, ATS is responsible for hosting and managing the system. Our team sends out time clocks to your customers fully configured for a stress-free provisioning process. The AccuCloud middleware makes handling updates easy through an automated process that your team can kick-off for entire time clock fleets with just a few steps.
Below is a general overview of the typical additional costs companies incur when using at mobile-based time tracking systems
Security, Legal, and Cultural Costs of a BYOD Program
A BYOD program seems like it saves money since the employers aren’t buying the hardware. Personal mobile devices present a great security risks because they’re hard to secure reliably. In a Samsung survey on mobile enablement, 48% of respondents with a BYOD program reported that malware entered their network through an employee’s personal phone.
The cost in resources and time needed to provide oversight and enforcement of the company’s BYOD policy on hundreds, if not thousands, of mobile devices, it doesn’t control or can be considerable.
There’s also a cultural cost in the tension that can arise through IT oversight and enforcement, which requires company personnel access to people’s personal devices and everything stored on them. Companies running a BYOD program take on more legal obligations to comply with the data management, privacy and tax requirements associated with employees using personal mobile devices for business purposes.
Access to Mobile Devices During Working Hours Reduces Productivity
A mobile business app is only a boost to productivity if it makes a system available to an off-site employee who couldn’t have access to that business app in any other way. Otherwise, personal mobile devices are highly distracting for on-site employees, leading to wasted work hours and higher risk for workplace accidents.
Incorporating an On-Site Time Clock with a Mobile Workforce
Having on-site time tracking hardware maximizes the value of automating employee time collection while allowing each supervisor to confine mobile timekeeping and its limitations to only those employees who truly need a mobile option.
It optimizes the value of your solution by ensuring employees always have a time clock available where they can punch in and out so the attendance data used to calculate payroll and manage other workforce issues is always accurate.
Including mobile devices as part of your timekeeping ecosystem can help to automate time collection for mobile workers, but make top-tier time clocks available to help onsite employees so your customers can take full advantage of a cloud-based time tracking solution.
Cloud-Based Time Tracking Solutions Provide Reliability, Scalability and Profitability
A cloud-based system like AccuCloud lets you scale a reliable, secure employee time tracking solution to any type of business, of any size, without incurring any of the disadvantages and costs of using mobile devices to collect employee time. Your customers can integrate mobile timekeeping for off-site employees into the cloud-based time tracking system.
Our reliable, flexible cloud-based time clocks and management solution serves on-site employees and simplifies support needed from your IT team.
The AccuCloud environment includes:
· A web-based management portal gives your IT team real-time transparency into the integration and operational status of every cloud-based time clock deployed at your customers’ locations.
· Our top-of-line time clock, the stride80, which has an optional biometric reader for customers that want to eliminate buddy punching to calculate payroll based only employee time actually worked.
· A middleware layer that cleans data flowing between the time clocks and your solution, automates application of complex business rules, and simplifies keeping time clocks updated with latest security patches, and software and operating system versions.
Set up a personal AccuCloud demo with one of our experts to see how quickly it can help you start offering your customers an advanced employee time collection system that scales easily for increasing profit margins as it gets deployed to more customers