Getting Timekeeping Right: The Technology Tools You Need for a Distributed Workforce

For commercial cleaning and security companies, labor costs are often the single largest expense, and the complexity of managing a distributed workforce can quickly erode your razor-thin margins. Effective timekeeping is a necessity, not a luxury. It’s the critical link between field operations and back-office financials, ensuring you pay employees accurately and are profitable on every job.

Here are the essential timekeeping functionalities your business needs to reduce risk, control costs and drive efficiency in the field.

The Foundation: Accurate Time Capture & Verification 

In a high-turnover, distributed environment, the technology you use should simplify the clock-in process for the employee while eliminating opportunities for fraud and error.

• Mobile Time and Attendance: Give your frontline workers a seamless way to handle all essential timekeeping functions — like clocking in/out and managing breaks — directly from their mobile devices. This dramatically reduces data entry and errors, increases transparency and gets time records ready for payroll and reporting faster.
• GPS Location Verification: Ensure employees are at the right job site at the right time. Your system should use GPS location verification during clock-ins and clock-outs, along with continuous tracking, to provide irrefutable proof of presence. This mitigates time theft and provides verifiable data to deliver clear proof of service to your clients.
• Compliance and Break Management: Support built-in compliance and safety with optional features like periodic checks to confirm employee responsiveness, controlled punch sequencing, and detailed tracking for paid meal and rest breaks. Automated prompts can also manage break period compliance, including reminders for missed clock-ins and confirmations for early meal returns.
• Photo Verification: Capturing photos of your employees when clocking in and out at job sites is another way to ensure the right employee is at the right place at the right time, providing a peace of mind for your customers with proof of presence. The ability to review the photos during time clock punches, with options for advanced biometric validation, also helps eliminate time theft and buddy punching.

Eliminating Costly Loopholes 

Technology continues to evolve to better combat common industry challenges like connectivity gaps, high labor costs and identity fraud.

• Biometric Validation: The highest level of assurance comes from advanced validation with biometric technology, like optional facial verification. This feature seamlessly confirms the right employee is at the right place at the right time, virtually eliminating buddy punching and providing peace of mind to protect your bottom line.
• Offline Functionality: Connectivity can be unreliable at various job sites. Your solution must have offline functionality to capture time punches and GPS locations even when there’s no cellular connectivity. Data automatically synchronizes and validates once service is restored, ensuring no information is lost and providing complete time record coverage for your distributed workers.
• Kiosk Mode for High Volume: For large teams at a single location, a multi-user kiosk mode allows multiple employees to clock in and out efficiently using one device. This streamlines the rapid collection of time punch data at the start and end of shifts and eliminates the need for expensive, specialized hardware.

Connection to the Back Office and Employee Empowerment 

Effective timekeeping must integrate seamlessly with your core business functions and serve as a tool for employee retention, which is critical in high-turnover industries.

• Integrated Payroll and Job Costing: Accurate time data must feed directly into your back-office systems for error-free payroll processing and, most importantly, accurate job costing. When clocking in, workers should also be able to enter jobs or work tickets to improve job costing accuracy and simplify project tracking.
• Employee Self-Service: Provide mobile access to employee information, including paycheck details, benefit balances, timekeeping records, and tax forms, to boost engagement and productivity. This self-service capability is proven to dramatically reduce administrative requests.
• Earned Wage Access (EWA): Offer EWA as a financial wellness benefit. By allowing employees access to earned wages on-demand before payday without disrupting your payroll (or requiring them to ask managers for an advance), this benefit works to provide greater financial flexibility and improve employee retention. In addition, EWA improves timekeeping accuracy as it directly links a worker’s time punches to their ability to access their wages – which saves time and labor as well.

Data Intelligence for Strategic Decision-Making 

The right intelligence tools will transform the data generated by your timekeeping and field operations into clear, actionable insights.

• Data Warehouse and Analytics: Utilize an enterprise-grade data warehouse system to clean, curate, and deliver your operational data that is ready-to-use out of the box. This foundation, combined with advanced analytics, allows you to easily track your most important metrics with pre-built dashboards designed for specific roles. These data intelligence tools are designed to make your business data work for you.

Effective timekeeping is the engine of efficiency and profitability for every cleaning and security business. It requires an innovative, holistic software solution that connects the field to the back office, turning every clock-in into actionable, accurate data.

When your timekeeping, job costing and payroll systems don’t talk to each other, you waste time, money and opportunities. The market leader in industry-specific ERP solutions, TEAM Software by WorkWave brings it all together in one platform, built specifically for businesses like yours.

Talk to our team to see what integrated labor management really looks like. We’ll show you how the right system can give you an edge over competitors still juggling multiple tools.