Moving your employee time and attendance management online

It's an attractive option for many companies, and it might just suit your needs as well. Depending upon the size of your business, looking after the care and feeding of servers for your payroll software and time tracking peripherals has quite a few costs associated with it. But what may cost you thousands of dollars a year is much cheaper for companies like Kronos or Attendance on Demand, who are providing the same service for thousands of customers - the efficiencies they can find lowers their costs significantly, and by extension yours, too.

If you choose an online model you will still have some hardware to deal with: you'll have to purchase some punch-card or RFID readers, and these will have to be networked. Networked hardware is often pricier than standalone dataloggers or loggers that are wired into your building, but if they're networked, you can simply pick them up and take them with you - this makes it much easier to change, move, and replace your equipment. What you're saving in server licensing fees and IT maintenance will more than make up for any increased equipment costs (and prices will only go down.)

There are a few caveats, however. Make sure the company you're working with addresses security in their offering - privacy legislation might apply, and if you're accessing employee records over the Internet you'll want to make sure that the application is secure, and is hosted in your state or province (so that the data is subject to the same laws are your employees.)

The other consideration is licensing. Most traditional software is still buy-it-once. You can pay for support, but most mid-sized companies don't - they hire an IT staff who does that as part of their regular duties anyway. But once the data is on your computers and the software is installed, it is yours to use (or not use) however you like. But online attendance and HR software is licensed, usually on an annual basis, and this means that if you don't pay your license fees you could lose access to all of your employee attendance information in one fell swoop. On the other hand, you'll have to upgrade stand-your alone software too, as your computers age, and that won't be free either - so this consideration probably evens out in the end. (And stand-alone software isn't inherently secure, either, unless it's on a computer that isn't ever connected to a network, so you'll still need to think about it before you continue along that road, too.)

As with all software choices, be careful about tying yourself to a single vendor. The key is to make sure that your data can be exported in an industry-standard format, so that you can remove it and transfer it to another system. And make sure that all of the networked hardware you purchase adheres to ISO standards and, better yet, common communications protocls (like BACnet or DDE, for example.)