If you want to get a more accurate picture of your employees’ work hours, save on labor costs, and prevent “buddy punching” and other forms of time theft, consider implementing mobile time clock apps.
These apps harness the power of Wi-Fi and the ubiquity of mobile devices to create a unique timesaving tool for companies large and small.
To help you find the right software for your company, the experts at Sling have created a list of the best mobile time clock apps for businesses of all sizes.
How Mobile Time Clock Apps Improve Workflow
1) Save Time And Money
One of the main ways that mobile time clock apps improve workflow for businesses of all sizes is by saving time and money.
First and foremost, they reduce the time it takes to process employee time cards and calculate payroll.
Instead of you or your bookkeeper spending hours tallying your team’s time worked, applying withholding, and figuring taxes, the software does it for you. You can then spend the time you save on activities that improve your business’s bottom line.
These apps can also save your business money. They do this by:
- Automating collection and calculation
- Reducing errors
- Preventing timecard fraud
- Shifting the responsibility of keeping track of work hours to the employee
In addition to those large savings, a mobile employee time clock reduces (or even eliminates) the need for expensive consumable items, such as time cards and calculation forms.
These might not seem like significant savings, but over the long term, they can really add up.
2) Provide Real-Time Labor Cost Data
It’s one thing to have accurate reporting on hours worked, time-on-task, attendance issues, and other labor costs. It’s another thing entirely to have real-time data about all the variables that affect the way your business tracks time.
Modern mobile time clock apps provide that insight.
With software such as Sling, the level of labor cost detail you can produce is truly astonishing. For example, you can see:
- Which employees and departments are costing you the most in overtime
- Which employees, positions, and departments are using the most time to complete a task
- How your business’s labor time and cost per hour compare to the norms in your industry
- How your production compares to time spent on the job
Deep data such as this prevents guessing and estimating and gives you tighter control over production and labor costs.
3) Ensure Error-Free Payroll
Accurate payroll is essential for the success of your business and the engagement of your team members. Too often, though, the accuracy of employee payroll falls short because of confusing policies, human error, or banking issues.
Incorporating a mobile time clock app into your business’s workflow drastically reduces the likelihood that you will experience these problems.
The best mobile time clock apps, such as Sling, allow you to program your payroll policies into the software itself so that it — not you — has to keep track of variables such as:
Allowing an app to collate all of this information means that you’ll spend less time on payroll and more time on tasks that improve your business as a whole.
4) Reduce Attendance Issues
Top-of-the-line mobile time clock apps, such as Sling, allow you to create reports based on the clock-in and clock-out information the software records. These reports give you insight into attendance issues such as:
- Regular, repeated absences (e.g., employee A calls in sick three Fridays a month)
- Tardiness
- Time theft
- Long breaks
- Early clock-ins
- Late clock-outs
- Unapproved accumulation of overtime hours
Controlling attendance issues like these can save your business up to 21% of annual payroll costs. That’s a significant savings.
Another way that these apps help you with attendance issues has to do with interruptions to your workflow that can cost you money. Absences (scheduled or otherwise) disrupt the progress of your projects and can have a significant impact on your team’s productivity.
Software can alert you when employees are absent and help you redistribute the workload accordingly.
Finally, time clock apps prevent attendance issues from affecting employee morale. Habitual absences from the same team member means that other, more reliable employees have to pick up the extra work.
Too much of that, and your dependable employees may start to resent the absent employee for being gone all the time and you for allowing it to happen.
The information generated by a mobile time clock can help you keep motivation high.
The Best Mobile Time Clock Apps
1) Sling
Sling tops the list of the best mobile time clock apps for two very important reasons:
- It offers powerful employee clock-in/clock-out and time-tracking features
- It provides other tools that help you streamline a large portion of your scheduling, communication, and employee-organization work.
First and foremost, Sling offers a unique feature that turns any phone, tablet, or computer into a time clock. It allows your employees to clock in and out of their shifts without clogging up a central terminal. Sling even notifies you when an employee is running late or forgets to clock in.
And if you’re worried about your employees clocking in early, Sling gives you the option to set up geofences around your place of business. If an employee is outside those limits, they won’t be allowed to clock in until they cross into the defined space.
And that’s just the mobile time clock portion of the app. You also have access to state-of-the-art scheduling tools that help you build your employees’ schedules within minutes instead of hours.
You can manage time off, availability, and shift-trade requests without collecting, sorting, and collating a huge stack of paper.
Add to that the onboard artificial intelligence that will help you schedule overtime and avoid exceeding your labor budget, and you’ve got a powerful ally in keeping expenses under control.
Sling will even help you reduce absenteeism and late arrivals and keep track of overlapping shifts and double-booking.
2) Inch
Source: tryinch.com
Inch is a powerful, voice-operated workforce management and optimization app that seamlessly incorporates a time clock into its broad and useful suite of tools.
On the employee side of things, Inch gives your team the power to clock in and out of their shifts from their phone or a designated terminal mounted in a vehicle or at each location.
Remote and on-site team members can perform a wide variety of tasks right from their tablet or phone, including:
- Working from a shared task list
- Getting clarity on work that needs to get done
- Receiving voice-assisted reminder notifications
- Clocking in and out of tasks at different locations
- Completing work assigned to them
- Communicating with managers and each other
Like Sling, Inch gives you the option to set up geofences around your place of business or a remote worksite so that, if an employee is outside those limits, they won’t be allowed to clock in until they cross into the appropriate space.
That’s powerful control over when and where your team works!
On the manager side of things, the Inch app opens up a new world of control — not just as a time clock app, but also as a communication method, a distribution channel, and a payroll processing tool.
With the data that Inch provides, you’ll gain insight into how your team works and how you can improve the workflow so that they perform even better.
3) Replicon
Source: replicon.com
With the Replicon mobile time clock app, you can get rid of Excel spreadsheets and paper time cards once and for all. Centralized time data gives you the ability to run payroll, bill clients, and reimburse expenses from one place. This allows you to manage your workforce’s time and attendance whether you’re on the go or in your office.
While Replicon is a useful mobile time clock app, it lacks the expanded functionality that makes Sling the leader in the industry.
4) Boomr
Disorganized record keeping, inaccurate payroll, and inconsistent protocols can quickly become expensive burdens for your company. Asking employees to use a paper timesheet might seem to be the easiest option, but the reality is that this practice will hurt your business in the long run.
Using Boomr, you’ll avoid costly labor disputes, expensive overtime and never have to run a correction payroll again. Plus, the Boomr mobile time clock app is easy to use, so you won’t get pushback from your team.
While Boomr does offer messaging and communication features like Sling, it lacks the other organizational tools — like scheduling, artificial intelligence, tasks, and newsfeed (just to name a few) — that make the first entry on our list such a powerhouse.
5) Timesheet
Source: timesheet.io
With the Timesheet mobile time clock app, you can keep track of your on-the-clock mobile employees and receive instant alerts when they’re away from their job location.
Timesheet will even remind your employees to clock in and out so they never miss a shift when they’re available to work. Once they’re finished for the day or week, Timesheet allows your employees to approve their hours worked while they’re online, so there’s no delay in processing payroll.
Timesheet is great for managing individuals and teams spread across a wide area, but it falls short of the power of Sling in the scheduling, communication, and employee organization departments.
6) ezClocker
Source: ezclocker.com
ezClocker is a mobile time clock app for the job site or office. With ezClocker, there’s no need to buy a physical clock device or struggle to keep paper punch cards organized and accounted for.
ezClocker allows your employees to clock in or out from their own mobile device. It can also act as a central kiosk where your employees can clock in or out just by entering a four-digit pin. No complicated email addresses or passwords to forget. Just streamlined employee time tracking.
ezClocker offers the same basic functionality as Sling — they’re both mobile time clock apps — but Sling takes everything to the next level (many levels, in fact).
7) Harvest
Source: getharvest.com
Time tracking can unlock key information about your business, but remembering to do it can be a challenge. Harvest makes it easy to track time and expenses so you can access critical data without driving yourself (or your team) crazy.
Timesheets provide a wealth of information that can help you manage your diverse team more intelligently. Harvest collates this raw timesheet data into a visual summary of where your team’s time is going.
While Harvest does a great job keeping track of time on specific projects, it’s not an employee time clock app per se, nor does it tabulate attendance directly.
If you’re looking for an app your team can use to clock in and out and that will also help you with reporting, labor costs, and scheduling, Sling is the better choice.
8) Justworks Hours
Source: justworkshours.com
The point of all the mobile time clock apps on this list is to free up time during the workday — be it yours or your employees’.
Justworks Hours does this by giving you the power to:
- Set up automated reminders and alerts
- Customize overtime and break time rules
- Forecast tracking and shift management
- Establish geofencing for more refined clock-in/clock-out
- Sync data with payroll providers
But all that is for naught if the underlying foundation — your employee schedule — isn’t done properly first. For that, you need a more robust, flexible, and powerful solution such as Sling.
9) QuickBooks Time
Source: quickbooks.intuit.com
For employees who work remotely or switch jobs or locations regularly, there’s the QuickBooks Time time clock app.
Using the devices they already have and are familiar with, your employees can track time quickly and easily with convenient clock in/out reminders, employee breaks, and overtime alerts to keep everyone on the same page.
Employees can clock in and out on their desktop, laptop, or mobile phone using iPhone or Android apps, text messaging, or dial in. Even offline or out of service, QuickBooks Time accurately tracks time and automatically syncs when back in range.
What QuickBooks Time won’t do is help organize work and keep your team members focused. It also doesn’t offer built-in communications. And it doesn’t have a powerful, real-time task list. Only Sling has that.
10) Hubstaff
Source: hubstaff.com
If you have a business with a remote team, Hubstaff offers the basics to help you run your remote workforce better.
With Hubstaff, you get:
- Time tracking
- Online timesheets
- Productivity monitoring
- GPS tracking
- Headache-free payroll
- Team scheduling
You also get project budgeting and invoicing capabilities to help you manage the front and back end of all your activities.
However, Hubstaff is more of a project management solution, which means that it is nowhere near as powerful as Sling for ongoing, regular onsite and remote employee management.
So, if you’re looking for a more well-rounded solution that functions as an employee time clock and task-management channel, Sling is the choice for you.
Sling Takes Mobile Time Clock Apps To The Next Level
The best mobile time clock apps do much more than just track employee work hours. Sling, for example, has powerful scheduling features that make creating even the most complicated rotating or night shift a breeze.
No matter the size of your business, Sling helps you organize your employees’ work schedules in less time so you can move on to other, more vital tasks.
The benefits that make Sling a leader in the industry don’t stop with its mobile time clock app and powerful scheduling features. Sling also addresses the difficulty of labor costs. These expenses are one of the largest capital outlays any business has to absorb.
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And since you can’t manage what you don’t measure, Sling’s labor cost feature helps you optimize your spending while you schedule. That means there’s less back and forth trying to reconcile your employees’ work schedules with your labor budget.
Sling also provides several unique features that help you communicate with your employees, keep them engaged, and get more work done. Sling’s built-in messaging system makes it easy to send messages to individuals and groups alike.
You can easily reach employees within groups, locations, or even specific positions. Then you can share anything you want: files, photos, videos, links, or a quick “Hey, what’s up?”.
Sling’s newsfeed feature lets you set up pages on your own personal business social media space for any purpose you like. Share updates, files, pictures, and videos to create your own corner of the web where all your employees can interact and have fun.
You can even use Sling to assign tasks to groups or specific employees, set due dates, and then follow their progress through to completion. It’s a strong addition to an already-powerful suite of tools that you can use to streamline your workday.
For more free resources to help you manage your business better, organize and schedule your team, and track and calculate labor costs, visit GetSling.com today.