Hi Blaine, 

Do you have a lot of crews that are working together on same tickets throughout the day? Do you have crews assigned to routes in the manage routes area of Aspire Desktop? 

We very rarely have crews working together on the same jobs. Our biggest time constraint with the times in the mowing department. We might have to shuffle a handful of guys around due to someone calling in and the crew member has already clocked in with the crew leader he normally works under. Now he clocks in with the updated crew leader and his times and tickets he gets clocked into show up on both crews.

Unfortunately there are no real quick or easy solutions for these problems. It was one of our largest hurdles when fully integrating into Aspire, and still remains a constant challenge 3+ years later. It involves having substantial training in place for crew leaders and the admin, reliability and consistency from the field staff, operations managers having all the correct tickets compiled and scheduled, proper ticket management each and every day, and (most difficult) an entire company culture shift with reliance on technology. Even in a vacuum these tasks are not easy, then throw in absences or crew leaders not accurately starting time on 20-30+ tickets (that’s how many our lawn cutting division will have per day on average), or any other number of normal operational issues (language barriers, tech illiteracy, apathy at changing software)  and it’s back to GPS tracking to verify everything. 

We have devoted training all the ops managers on daily time entry review, and have seen more success having them responsible since they know better than one office person tasked with approval, but it’s an imperfect solution because it takes them a while and sometimes can’t get to it every day. My suggestion is to limit the amount of approved devices and get into the mindset of not having crews go somewhere without the proper ticket being scheduled under their route. Much easier said than done, but having 1 crew leader responsible for logging in anyone working under him eliminates crew members clocking themselves in without knowing who to be with. Incentivize reliable crew leaders with raises, upgraded devices, and have the ones that are above average train new crew leaders or struggling ones. Refine the onboarding process for new crew leaders to have a larger emphasis on app training, and clearly outline expectations across all crew leaders. We have found success with the new hires since you can start fresh and they aren’t tainted by “how things used to be”. 

It takes a lot of research and tinkering with administrative features to find what works best for your company. We had to eliminate manually clocking out for lunch because that was doubling the chances people would forget to clock back in or out. We also enabled the Time Log change requests and edits when disagreeing at time attestation page, giving crew leaders more flexibility to adjust their times before it ever makes it to the office. 

thank you for the detailed response. This will help us save some time on the back end! 

One little thing we’ve done that has been extremely helpful is unfortunately one of those long term moves that won’t be much good to you right now. About half the crew leaders at the branch I’m at handle their own scheduling and time entries, because they are trustworthy and have good decision making. It has narrowed the amount of time entries that are needing to be managed.

At a previous company that used Aspire where I was responsible for all time entry approval, that situation was more in line with what you’re describing, sometimes an hour or two for half a dozen crews because the time entries were such a mess. The one thing that I found really got those cleaned up was asking the crews about every discrepancy. EXTREMELY painful for the first month, but those crew leaders got tired of answering questions, and figured out that if they cleaned up their time entries, they wouldn’t hear from me as much. I got it down to about 10 minutes a day within 2 months, and then strongly encouraged them training their crew members who didn’t know how to operate the app, so eventually there was a knowledge base sufficient to let crew members operate without their crew leader for a day or two.