Save Yourself a Headache With Live Timekeeping

Save Yourself a Headache With Live Timekeeping

Have you ever held a job where you had to manually keep track of your hours worked? Where you had to write down your hours on a time card, or insert a time sheet into a time clock, punching holes to show where you clocked in and clocked out for your job? If you’re an older millennial (or just older), you’ve been there. For most, it was just part of the job, but it wasn’t always a fun part of the job. It’s never fun to have to show your work, right? Why can’t your employer just trust that you’re doing what you’re supposed to do? Unfortunately, there’s a lot more fraudulent activity taking place when it comes to timekeeping, especially in the commercial cleaning industry. You could be losing money without even knowing it! If you’ve been in the business long, this is probably not a surprise to you, but if your business is still using a non-electronic format for timekeeping, you may want to take a closer look at the system you’re using – there are a few common scams and errors made that you should know about:

1. Time Inflation – It’s hard to track exactly when employees started work and when they ended it. Most employees faithfully record their hours on paper time sheets, but a small percentage will inflate the number of hours they worked so they’re paid overtime. If your company uses paper time sheets, you or your managers better be diligently verifying hours worked, or this “scam” could be a profit suck. The issue also extends beyond paper timekeeping to machine-issued cards – some employees may stop working at 5 pm, but wait until 5:30 to clock out.
2. Employee error – Errors in timekeeping happen innocently enough. If time sheets are filled out long after the hours are worked, it’s not always easy to remember how you spent those hours – and whether you came in at 8:00 last Tuesday, or 9:00. It’s the same for your staff – memory can be faulty, which often leads people to overestimate the amount of time worked.
3. Operator error – If time and attendance information is manually typed into a payroll system from time sheets, typos and other mistakes can happen occasionally, especially if the employees handling the information aren’t detail-oriented. Those types of errors can really add up in, say, a year’s time, which can be very costly for you as an owner. Little mistakes can cut into your profits big time, and we’re not even counting more nefarious schemes like “buddy punching” (when an employee’s friend at work clocks in for him or her) and outright fraud (purposefully inputting inflated hours into the payroll system).
4. Supply costs – While this may seem trivial, if you have more than a couple employees working in multiple areas, and you aren’t always in direct contact with them, your supply and organization costs could send your budget over the edge – costs for the proper paper time sheets, finding ways to get those time sheets and keep them organized, training your employees to make sure they’re filling things out the way you want them filled out, etc.

There’s a Better Way…

If your cleaning business needs a better system for tracking employee hours, look no further – start using the right janitorial software program! This type of software can revolutionize the way you do business in almost every way, but specifically for tracking time for your staff. When you schedule a work order, you can assign an employee to do the job, and you can see in real time when that employee clocks in and clocks out for that job, taking away any doubt about whether or not that employee is being honest in their timekeeping. Every manager wants to improve labor efficiency and productivity – having a live timekeeping feature allows you to stay on top of your employees, but it also gives them the opportunity to take ownership and pride in what they’re doing to keep your business successful.

If you’re seeing a rise in labor costs without a rise in income, janitorial work management software is the solution for you. For a lot of managers in the commercial cleaning industry, the struggle lies in either underestimating or overestimating time needed for a job – it happens to the best of us. But you can take the stress out of scheduling by having all of the needed information for each job available to you in the palm of your hand. You can rid yourself of the unnecessary paperwork required for manual timekeeping, saving you time and money!

Are you ready to upgrade your timekeeping efforts? Then contact us at Janitorial Manager! We can help you assess areas of your business where our work management software can make your life easier, more organized and more profitable. Let us provide you with a free demo today!