Time & Attendance vs. Project Time Tracking - Where is the difference?

There are numerous online tools available for time management in organizations. However, they are fundamentally different in their purpose and their functionalities.
Roughly we could divide them into (1) Time and attendance and (2) Project Time tracking.
Our company offers both types of solutions:
- All Hours is an employee time and attendance app and
- My Hours is a project-based time tracking app. They work excellent together.
- We also have a complete workforce management suit for enterprises, but let's leave that for another post.
We’ve noticed that when deciding on which solution to use our customers tend to get confused between the two. They look for some functionalities of one app in the other and vice versa.
We’ve decided to help out with some practical examples of what each of our tools can do for you. At the bottom of the article, you will find a table comparing the basic features.
Let’s say you own a website design company with 30 employees. This means that you employ web developers, graphic designers, marketing experts, administrators, HR … Your company works for different clients, which you bill at different rates for different projects.
What would you use project time tracking (My Hours) for?
My Hours is a project time tracker. You can track time on tasks performed on different projects for an unlimited number of clients.
You can delegate tasks to your team members and monitor their progress. You will get detailed activity reports and be able to generate invoices for your clients at different stages of the project.
You can of course set different billing rates for your projects. For example, you can set a project-based rate at $20 per hour. This means that every hour tracked on this project will be billed at this $20 rate.
If you wanted the rates of your designers to be higher than the rates of your support team for example, you would set a team member based rate. The third option is a task-based rate, where you set different rates for different tasks. Your web developer Harry will do some website coding at a $40 hourly rate and website testing at a $20 hourly rate.
My Hours allows you to keep track of your remaining project budget – whether in total project funds or in total project hours.
My
Hours is also great for optimizing time since you can see exactly where time is ‘leaking’ – you might find that your employees spend 2 hours a
day replying to in-house e-mails. You might consider optimizing communications in that case.
What would you use time and attendance tracking (All Hours) for?
SPICA All Hours is an advanced time and attendance app. So you have a company with 30 employees and you need to prepare paychecks for them. You also need to comply with the state working time regulations.
This means being able to demonstrate that your employees do not work unauthorized overtime and that they are granted at least a legal minimum of vacation days and breaks.
In All Hours your employees use a Time Clock to register their arrivals, departures, and breaks. The sum of their total hours is calculated in real-time. When you set a daily hourly plan, you can monitor and record overtime. You can download timesheets when you need to prepare paychecks for your employees.
Employees file their leave requests (sick leave, vacation …) via the web app or mobile app, which are then approved or denied by an administrator. You can assign team administrators to different departments.
SPICA All Hours keeps track of remaining vacation days, available for the administrator and the employee to see at any time. It’s also easy to see who’s currently present at work.
You can set working time and core hours when you want everyone to be present at work (say for a weekly sync meeting) and get notified if someone is absent without permission. You can apply different settings for different departments and even personalize them by individual employees.
SPICA All Hours vs. My Hours Features
Let's look at the different features of project time tracking and time and attendance.
Feature | Time and attendance | Project time tracking |
Employee Time Clock | x | |
Payroll Timesheets | x | |
Vacation management | x | |
Sick leave management | x | |
Leave requests system | x | |
Presence information | x | x |
Overtime balance | x | |
Managing breaks | x | |
Work time settings | x | |
Daily hourly plan settings | x | |
Requested time settings | x | |
Importing holidays | x | |
Location monitoring | x | |
Audit Log | x | |
Mobile app | x | x |
Web app | x | x |
API | x | x |
Time tracker | x | |
Tracking time on Projects | x | |
Tracking time on Tasks | x | |
Tracking time for unlimited Clients | x | |
Project management | x | |
Budgeting | x | |
Invoicing | x | |
Billing rates | x | |
Activity reports | x | |
Delegating tasks to team members | x | |
Task monitoring | x |
After reading this you might find that you actually need both All Hours and My Hours – in most cases that’s true.