Multiple time entry and clock-in issues/ errors

Hey Sterling, I work with Miri Consulting, and would be more than willing to hop on a call and see if I can help you. keenan@miri-consulting.com

​@Sterling, we intermittently experience the same issues and take the same approach to resolve. Sometimes it works and others it doesn’t. Have you gotten any answers from the community on a legitimate fix or from Aspire Care?

Same issue with our company. Often times part time help who only work a few days a week can’t have time reconciled because it won’t show their clock out times even after multiple days have passed of them not working. Our office admin will have to text that person individually and have them resync their app. That isn’t really something our office admin has the time to be doing every time they want to complete times, especially when we have multiple people that have the clock out error happening with. It’s been fairly frustrating on our end to try and sort through these issues. It makes the time management side of things take WAY longer than it should.

I would like to bump this. 6 months later, still an extremely frustrating process for our team. The person who manages our time currently is a very patient person overall and is visibly frustrated having to spend COUNTLESS hours trying to reconcile something that should take minutes. I find it hard to believe this is not a priority as it effects all the way down to payroll.

​@LegacyOutdoor - 

I want to be sensitive to how frustrating this can be, and I definitely don’t want to suggest that you haven’t already tried everything possible to fix it. I can only share what ultimately worked for us.

We’re in North Metro Atlanta, where we have strong cellular and Wi-Fi coverage basically everywhere we operate. I mention that because I do think reliable connectivity plays a role. We also make sure the crews leave Wi-Fi turned on so their phones automatically reconnect when they return to the office. That gives the devices a chance to sync properly and receive automatic software updates overnight.

That said, we were experiencing many of the same problems you’re describing when we first started. At the time, our crews were using older Android tablets. We tried working through the issues, but ultimately we decided to replace the tablets and move everyone to new iPhones.

That was the turning point for us. Once we standardized everyone on newer iPhones, the reliability issues essentially went away. I can’t say that switching devices will solve the problem for everyone, but in our case, it was a game changer.

So, based solely on our experience, I’d look closely at three things together: device age/quality, reliable cellular connectivity, and keeping Wi-Fi enabled so the devices can regularly reconnect, sync, and update.

​@swirtholg
I appreciate the feedback. All of our employees are responsible for their own time. We don’t use the clock in/out the way Aspire designed by having one lead guy clock in 2-3 guys. We move guys around way to much for that to be an even remotely efficient setup for us. 

Most employees, probably 95%, have iPhones. In today’s day and age, everything is “right now.” So, an employee clocks out, closes their app, and goes home. Well, that doesn’t give the app enough time to sync back to Aspire. Sometimes it’s 1 second, sometimes it’s 5 seconds, hard to say. Regardless, as a system and software that is heavily dependent on time tracking, you would think Aspire would have a better solution to this.

 Our administrator sometimes has to way 2-3 days to reconcile time if they either don’t hear back from an employee, or it takes that much texting back and forth to get the times figured correctly for an employee.

I’d be willing to bet that our administrator spends close to 10-15 hours a week trying to reconcile time simply because the times are not generating properly on the time entry sheets. No one at our company has the time to be spending that much effort into resolving this. I can’t imagine we’re the only company that struggles with this.

​@LegacyOutdoor 
I have definately found that when attempting work arounds things can get hairy scary. We have a lot of crew member movement as well. I could see how each crew member clocking in and out on their personal phones would cause a problem. Early on we solved it with a designated device in the office, basically a wall mounted time clock that connected to Aspire.  Now each crew member clocks in on the company owned phone in the mornings, after the foreman has clocked in, and after their assigment has taken place. If your guys are clocking in at 0650, then getting their assignment at 0700, and trying to reclock after they are getting their assignment I can see how that creates a dumpster fire. 

Our process as it stands is foreman logs in, clocks in. Then he logs out and hands it to the next crew member. That member logs in and clocks in, logs out passes back. etc.  Each team operates time entry off a team phone instead of individuals. I’ve also found this controls man hours and clock in and out locations better so guys are clocking in on their way to work and clocking out when they get home.  

​@swirtholg 

And then once they’re in the field, they just clock into the tickets as the day goes to track job time? Every once and a while, an employee will meet on site or leave early, which would could take case by case.

But having everyone use a shop device to click in/out could help that flow a lot, especially with the syncing of time. I’ll have to run that by my team and see what they think. Definitely would get rid of any “time theft” issues.

​@LegacyOutdoor Yes- they clock into the tickets when they get to the jobsite. This does take some training. Once we moved to crew iphones, the shop device became irrelevant, but it worked as a stop gap during the training and adjustment period. 

We’ve had crew members uber off jobsites before, typically the foreman on the job will clock them out and report they left early to ensure accuracy. 

Another hint to reduce time theft is to ensure your property geo fences are set up, including at your office. Our crews always clock in and out at our office which means if i see an indicator that is anything other than green, there is an issue to look into, they weren’t at the office when they clocked in or clocked out. 



 

​@swirtholg 

Definitely good food for thought. Appreciate your thoughts on the matter.