Managing Labor Costs with Virtual TimeClock Software

By Jeff Morrow
Redcort Software

Many of our new customers come to us with a common business question: How can I better manage my labor costs?

It is pretty easy to see how our Virtual Time Clock software simplifies payroll and provides worker accountability. A less obvious benefit is how the software brings simplicity and accuracy to the management of labor costs. The following questions will help you evaluate your labor cost management needs:

• Do you need easy access to reports that monitor labor costs for each business activity?
• Do you need to accurately track all employee time spent on each job?
• Do you need to track changes in job labor costs from job to job, or for designated time periods?

Perhaps you're involved with job costing in your business. Your process is something like the following:

• Prepare detailed estimates and quotations for prospective customers.
• Track labor, materials, purchases and resource usage against awarded contracts.
• Evaluate contract estimates to actual job costs to determine profitability for the job.
• Revise and update estimating metrics based on actual job costs.

Lather, rinse, repeat! Of course the dirty little secret of job costing is that it assumes you have the ability to accurately track the usage of each resource. While tracking materials and purchases related to a job or activity is pretty straight forward, manually allocating actual labor hours and costs on a per job basis can be a tedious and inexact science.

Whether you’re tracking labor costs to manage your business expenditures or using a formal job costing process, Virtual TimeClock Pro software makes tracking actual labor costs as easy as pressing a button. Here’s how it works:

When a worker ‘clocks in’ they select their first task for the day. An unlimited number of tasks can be setup, representing the various jobs, projects, or customers that you need to track time for. As the employee switches from one task to the next throughout the day, they just click the ‘Change Task’ button in Virtual TimeClock and select a new task. At the end of the shift the worker ‘clocks out’ completing the final task.

The key to tracking labor time accurately is to record task changes as the worker begins a new activity. Since Virtual TimeClock Pro software is easy to install and configure, it can be affordably deployed on any Microsoft Windows or Apple Macintosh computer at your business. This ensures real time task tracking is nearly effortless for your workers.

Using Virtual TimeClock with tasks provides you with an accurate employee timecard as well as instant reports on the total hours worked on any or all tasks. The program can also calculate employee gross wages in order to provide you with labor hours and dollar costs for any task, job or department! Virtual TimeClock’s powerful SQL database and versatile Report Writer enable you to quickly create, save, view and print your labor cost reports in the way that makes the most sense to your business.