Before I started work on Time Clock MTS I’d worked at many different companies who thought that building a simple employee attendance database in preference to using paper time cards would save them a lot of time and money. Of course, when comparing the on-going costs of using a well-executed employee attendance database to those of using paper time cards these companies were exactly correct. They could justifiably expect to save time in the area of employee attendance data collection, save significant time in the processing of this data, and ideally good improvements in the reporting of employee attendance. Not only would improvements be seen in the actual labor expended but also, in the timeliness of data collection and reporting. This is because there’d be no more chasing up late timesheets from uncooperative employees by a harried payroll staff member.
These same companies also believed that they had unique requirements which meant that an off the shelf employee attendance software solution wouldn’t work for them. So in several cases I was engaged to develop a custom software solution knowing that in many cases their ‘unique’ requirements were no different to what many other companies required. The end result was that the on-going cost savings that an employee attendance database delivered were offset against high initial development costs. Thus a much longer time was required before a company saw a positive return on their software investment. In most cases they “unique” requirements of each company turned out to be just naming conventions, or reporting formats or report cycles, or the requirement to track (what turned out to be) fairly minor additional data or information along with normal employee attendance data.
After having been through this development process several times I resolved to build Time Clock MTS, a program that would deliver a simple feature set to allow for tracking of employee time and attendance data. The features would be broad enough to make the software suitable to a wide range of businesses of varying size. There would also be a degree of customization available within the software in targeted areas to allow companies to change it to suit what they believed were largely unique requirements. This has proven to be successful, with more than 10,000 companies currently using Time Clock MTS. These companies have from 1 to 1,000 employees and come from many different (and seemingly un-related) industry segments. As I expected, the time and attendance tracking requirements of most businesses are are similar enough that Time Clock MTS can be used to track their employee attendance without the need for a custom software solution for each company.
If it turns out that your company is considering developing a custom employee attendance database to suit what you believe are you own set of unique requirements then you’ll probably want to think long and hard before doing so. You might find yourself wasting hundreds of hours and months of elapsed time on a task that amounts to little more than re-inventing the employee attendance database wheel. Instead of doing this consider that a time clock system like Time Clock MTS can deliver on all or almost all of your requirements in one easy to use package for just $99 (US). Why not download free 30 day trial of Time Clock MTS and you will find that it can meet your employee attendance tracking needs.
