Posted on 09-Oct-07 by The Timekeeper

I just stumbled across two time tracking software products from Mycroft Computing that sound potentially interesting for small businesses. At least worth a look…

TimeOff

The first, called TimeOff, allows you to track, well… employee time off. (Duh!) Basically, from what I can tell, you input your company’s time-off benefit policies (like how many vacation hours are accrued each pay period or whatever), and when employees take time off, you enter the time they’re gone. This system automatically keeps track of how much time off they’ve got left.

There are two types of “licenses” — Administrator and Employee. The Administrator license allows you to do all the data entry and run all the reports and everything. Each system has to have at least one Administrator.

The Employee license allows you to let your employees enter and view their own time records. So, for instance, when somebody takes a vacation day, you can make it her responsibility to enter that time into the system. And employees can just look up how much sick time or personal days they have left instead of bugging your payroll person.

It’s nearly $100 for the (required) Administrator license. If you want your employees to be able to enter their own time, that will set you back an additional $90 for each 10-pack of Employee licenses. This is comparable with a lot of small-business oriented time and attendance tracking systems.

The difference between this system and a time and attendance system is that this focuses strictly on tracking time off. Most time and attendance systems put the bulk of their effort into tracking hours worked and may only have rudimentary time-off tracking. Many don’t calculate benefit time accruals at all. So if you’ve got a lot of salaried exempt workers and simply need to track their time off, not hours worked, this could be an appropriate solution.

The company offers a 45-day free trial so you can test it out and see if it works for you.

TimeCard

TimeCard seems to offer the same enhanced benefit-time tracking solution as TimeOff, but with the addition of being able to track hours worked for time and attendance, as well.

If you’ve got hourly or salaried non-exempt workers and need to track their hours worked for the purpose of calculating possible overtime, this could potentially be a good solution for you.

The software comes in two versions, Standard and “Plus.” The Plus version adds such things as shift differentials, individualized overtime policies and user-definable fields. The basic version would work well for small businesses that only run a single shift and only have a single set of policies to cover everyone. Companies that run more than one shift or that have more complex payroll policies would likely do better with the Plus version.

One thing to keep in mind — unlike other similarly-priced time and attendance solutions, TimeCard doesn’t automate the collection of time and attendance data. In other words, employees will still have to clock in and out or otherwise record their start and stop times somewhere, and somebody will have to transfer those start and stop times from their timesheet or time card into the TimeCard software. So this does leave open the possibility of clerical errors/typos in the data entry that fully automated time and attendance systems will eliminate.

So if you have a lot of employees (or a dyslexic payroll clerk), you might want to instead look at some kind of automated time and attendance system. There are several available from companies like Acroprint and Lathem, targeted at small businesses and priced very competitively with this product. You should at least take a look at the various features and benefits of these packages and decide which is most appropriate for your business.

Prices start at just under $100 for the Standard version and just under $150 for the Plus version. As with all Mycroft Computing software, a 45-day free trial is available.

Not right for everyone, but maybe for you?

These two packages are clearly not going to be appropriate for every business. But they do offer an intriguing set of features and are priced to be small business budget friendly. With the 45-day trials available, I’d say they’re at least worth a look.

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