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March 30, 2011
8 Reasons to Use a Web Based Employee Time Clock Part 3
Online Time Clock MTS - Click to Enlarge
This entry concludes the 3 part series about my Top 8 Reasons to use a Web Based Employee Time Clock. I'll cover points 6 to 8 in this entry.
6. Low Ongoing Cost of Ownership
A good online time clock system shouldn't have any ongoing technical cost of ownership other than training of new start or up-skilling existing staff. This is simply because there's no software to keep up to date, no hardware compatibilities to deal with, no conflicting software issues to resolve, or operating system updates to worry about. This is in contract with installable software, where technical support is often on-going and costly because of hardware problems, driver issues, software interoperability problems, and various other issues.
Of course, there is usually an on-going periodic cost for a SaaS based time clock system. However, often the monthly cost is much, much less than the real cost of a single internal support incident caused by a desktop software product or the time wasted tallying up paper based timesheets.
7. Seamless Software Updates and Compatible Software Versions
We've been in the business of building and selling desktop time clock software for several years and one of the biggest problems we have encountered is ensuring that our users are using the latest versions of the software. A good time clock system should be continually improved and enhanced and desktop software usually needs someone to manually download and install updates, which just adds to the administrative overhead. It also leads to companies having mis-matched versions of the same software installed on different computers. This can often lead to data problems and timecard calculation errors. An Online Time Clock System avoids this completely, all updates are instant and complete, there's no need to download and install anything and often bug fixes are applied without the users knowing anything has happened!
A second advantage of seamless software updates is getting out of the support/maintenance/update cycle so common to the desktop software market. You won't need to worry if you're getting a free upgrade to the next release, you wont have to worry if your support and maintenance agreement is up to date, and you wont have to worry about your old data being compatible a newer versions of your time clock software.
8. Lower Hardware Costs
An online time clock system can considerably reduce the hardware cost requirements when compared with an installable desktop product. This is simply because if your computer can run a reasonably modern web browser then it will be able to be used as a time clock station for an online system. This opens the hardware arena to older PC's, tablet based computers like iPads, inexpensive netbooks, web enabled devices like iPods, and pretty much any smartphone with a web browser.
Compare this with installable desktop time clock systems that are tied to a certain operating system with hefty hardware requirements. Or software written in the latest incarnation programming language (like the various flavors of .NET) which require huge downloads and impose their own requirements in terms of memory and disk space.
This concludes this series of blog articles, as always if you've got anything to add please Contact Us with your thoughts and comments.
Posted by markn at March 30, 2011 1:18 PM
