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The contractor time tracking app – Keep costs under control
Does your company hire contractors? A contractor time tracking app (or time clock app) is one of the easiest ways for your company to save money and track the productivity of your contractors.
It has been estimated that businesses could save about 2% of their gross payroll costs by using mobile timeclocks for contractors.
Getting your contractors to record their work hours with a cloud-based contractor time tracking app can make a significant difference. But how exactly?
Let’s be honest, most contractors seriously lack transparency when it comes to billing. It’s really hard to say what you are paying for and, if they are charging per hour, how many hours were actually put in.
Contractors often submit invoices without any transparency in their reported time. As a result, mobile time clock apps are rising in popularity with organizations that work with contractors often.
Requiring contractors to record their work hours for billing solves the problem of transparency and being over-charged. It’s one of the best ways to keep contracting costs under control.
A simple contractor time tracking app will assist you with this in many ways, by providing:
- More reliable data in real-time
- Greater payroll and billing accuracy
- Convenience, thus saving time
- Better expense management and budget planning
- Higher legal security
- An immediate return on investment (ROI)
Now let’s look closer at each of the above-mentioned benefits.
1. More Reliable Data in Real-Time with the contractor time tracking app
Mobile timeclock apps provide cloud-based reliability. It is known that frequently employees fill in their paper time cards retrospectively at the end of the day, or even at the end of the month.
This creates plenty of space for errors, guesswork, and over-paying. If you wish to gather reliable time and attendance information to use for preparing payroll, you will need to collect data in real-time. That’s where the contractor time tracking app comes in handy.
This is especially true for companies which employ contractors who work in different locations throughout the day or week. They need to be able to seamlessly register the start and end of their work at each location, rather than trying to keep everything in their head until finally writing it down.
With a contractor time tracking app like All Hours, which marks each registration with its GPS coordinates, this can easily be done. All they need is a smartphone, which they most likely already have.
Smartphones are typically connected online, so the application sends data to the cloud right away. This means there’s no need to manually download clock-ins to the main system.
Contractors can register from any location and the employer can view these locations and edit data in real-time from anywhere. Checking who is present at a worksite just got much easier!
This means cheating and rounding hours is harder and you will only be paying for hours that were actually worked and registered, meaning contracting costs can easily be saved.
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2. Greater Payroll and Billing Accuracy
Registering hours on smartphones provides a higher degree of payroll and billing accuracy. So, what problems associated with the old-school paper-based records can a mobile time clock app solve?
With traditional paper time cards, direct importing of data is not possible. This means whoever is preparing payroll needs to manually transcribe everything into the payroll solution.
Thus, everything from poor handwriting to transcription and mathematical errors can affect payroll data accuracy and result in accidental overpayments.
Paper time cards are usually filled out retrospectively, which means there’s a lot of guessing and rounding up of hours going on and this, of course, is not in the employers’ favor.
Contractors could even just put a random number of hours on the invoice to get themselves the desired pay.
Once contractors are recording their hours in real-time, they can only bill the actual hours worked. This doesn’t necessarily mean you will be charged less at the end, but it does mean they will need to put in all the hours they expect to be paid for, which you can review and check.
Our contractor time tracking app allows for much greater accountability than paper time cards, especially when geolocation services are used, which can tell you where and when the contractor clocked in and whether it was indeed at the job site.
This eliminates time theft on your bill. When contractors are able to clock in and out with their smartphone from any location, there are no more excuses for missing time cards or clock-ins.
3. Convenience, thus saving time
Most online time clock apps provide you with an automatically generated timesheet report which you can easily import into your billing and payroll software.
Besides eliminating the chance of errors, direct import of hours is a huge time saver when it comes to preparing payroll and billing. There’s no need for your administrator to collect paper timesheets and manually transcribe them anymore, as they have all the data available in the app in real-time.
Using a mobile time clock app is also super convenient for employees, as they can register their hours with their smartphone in a matter of seconds.
They don’t need to waste any time filling out paper timesheets and calculating their hours, and It’s much easier to keep records accurate and up to date this way, as employees can also register their lunch breaks.
With the employee / contractor presence overview, you get information on their availability and status without looking for them or calling them – you are always able to tell who is present at work, who is missing, who just went on a break, and who is absent and for what reason.
Using a time & attendance system is not only beneficial for contractors, but also for employees. Besides clocking in and out, employees can also check their work records and remaining vacation days in the app and even send vacation and sick leave requests directly to their manager.
Employees can be managed as a whole or formed into teams with team administrators granting and rejecting leave. The online absence approval system will save all the time that otherwise gets wasted on a number of phone calls and e-mails.
Anyone who employs contractors knows more than anyone that time is money, and by making use of a contractor time tracking app, you will save lots of both.
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4. Better Expense Management and Budget Planning
A contractor time tracking app allows you to access and analyze data with ease. Not only can you generate reports with one click, but you can also keep your eye on the real-time information on the dashboard.
This way you can avoid unplanned overtime and maintain control of expenses to avoid any costly time overruns. Real-time recording of time and attendance will help you stay on budget.
Data analysis will help you establish the true cost of a project. Not only that, but accurately recorded hours also allow you to plan better for future projects.
Looking into historic reports can be a huge help when bidding or predicting expenses for future projects. You could of course analyze data from paper timesheets just the same, but just imagine how much extra time (and money) this would cost you.
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5. Higher Legal Security
The reliability of your time and attendance records is in many ways critical for your business. Not only are you legally obliged to follow your state’s work time regulations, but if you have any employees working in the EU, you also need to comply with the GDPR.
This means you need a chronological audit trail of who processed (viewed, created, exported, edited or deleted) any employee data. It’s hard to demonstrate this compliance by using paper time cards.
In case of any dispute about payroll accuracy or workplace injuries, trustworthy records are the key to avoiding penalties and fines.
With a mobile timeclock app, employees are prompted to record their breaks, which provides a reliable history of work time to the minute. Also, when employees have the ability to check their personal record of hours at all times, disputes are often minimized.
In fact, the time clock app for contractors shows your employees exactly how much time they have left to work in a day, thus keeping overtime in check.
6. Immediate Return on Investment (ROI)
Two of the greatest benefits of a cloud-based contractor time tracking app are low entry costs and low costs of ownership.
Cloud apps are usually subscription based. This means no upfront investment is required – forget about buying the license, paying for upgrades or investing in company infrastructure. With cloud solutions maintenance and upgrades are already included in a monthly subscription fee.
A mobile time clock app for contractors can also spare you from buying (and repairing) costly hardware. There is no need to use time terminals to clock in in the field anymore.
It’s a good guess to say that all of your contractors own a smartphone these days. A mobile time clock runs on employees’ smartphones as an app, which can be easily downloaded from the app store.
Registering work hours in this way is inexpensive from the start and does not require any initial investment. This means you will immediately reap a return on investment (ROI) by saving money through all the various ways we have just discussed.
Are you working with contractors? Give our contractor time tracking app a try, and start your free trial. Our time & attendance app, All Hours, will help you to save money and keep contracting costs under control.
