The company is one of the forerunners in the commercial landscaping sector. Established in 1978, it has grown from a one-man-band to more than 120 members of staff based in four different locations, with an annual turnover of £6million.

 

Before adopting the cloud-based data capture app WorkMobile, field workers relied on paper forms and cameras to record their necessary data on landscaping and maintenance projects. This led to 3-4 days waiting for paperwork to arrive in the post, and then at the office the information needed to be typed into their CRM and the originals filed away. It was an extremely time-consuming process. 

 

When upgrading their company mobile phones to smart-phones, the company looked around for a phone-based way to manage data more effectively than they had been doing. 

 

Thanks to the app, field workers can now send information and photographs immediately from work sites back to the head office, where it automatically integrates into the CRM. This saves many hours of time and reduces the chance for data entry error. 

 

Other areas which have seen improvements are searching for data within the system, which has reduced from an hours-long task to seconds, and ease of incorporating the data into reports.

 

Neil Pix from Grace Landscapes said: “Once we realised how much time and money our previous method of data capture was really costing us, we made it a priority to find a more sophisticated, digital solution.

 

“We pride ourselves on being an environmentally responsible business, and even established our own on-site recycling facility over 10 years ago, so the major reduction in paper waste is a fantastic added bonus.”

 

Colin Yates, chief support officer of WorkMobile, said: “We’re delighted that Grace Landscapes has seen such immediate, tangible benefits from using our mobile data capture solution.”

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Here at Time and Attendance North-West, we regularly solve similar paperwork-overload workplace issues by introducing companies to a computer-based centralised data system. 

 

Our niche is attendance management and measurement, and the main low-tech inefficiency which we can transform is the use of paper timesheets to record attendance and hours worked. 

 

To start with, let’s address the usual process of dealing with paper timesheets, from start to finish. 

 

First, the employer gives the employee a deadline to hand in their timesheet. This could be at the end of the week, or at the end of the month. 

 

Employees often forget to hand these in on time, needing supervisors or accounts staff to waste time chasing them up. Employees with variable schedules may also struggle to remember the exact details of their shifts, particularly on a monthly timesheet. This could lead to inaccurate payslips, and extreme cases accidental violation of the European Working Time Directive.

 

If you avoid those complications, then the next stage is for the supervisors or managers to check and approve the recorded hours. In many companies this step is not taken, and although that is understandable because it takes a lot of time, not checking timesheets is an open door for time fraud.

 

Once the timesheets have been approved, the data on them needs to be used for payroll. This is usually done by typing out the numbers from each timesheet into an Excel spreadsheet, then using that to enter the data into the payroll program. Not only can this process be extremely time-consuming, it is also very, very likely to results in entry errors thanks to typos or misreading. 

 

To make a final point: the amount of paper wasted every single week in order to create timesheets for thousands of employees is mind-boggling. 

Our time and attendance management software, combined with clocking system, can improve performance and results in all of these areas. 

 

Employees can either use a physical clocking system, if they are on-site, or our web-or-mobile-phone-based Self-Service Module to log in and out. 

 

1. The software collects employee clocking data in real-time, so there is no need for employees to try and remember to hand anything in, or to remember their hours. The information is already recorded.

2. It is quicker for most managers to check hours neatly laid out on a screen than it is for them to leaf through pages of badly-written records. 

3. Since the working hours’ data is already on the central software, there is no need for staff to waste hours upon hours typing anything out. They don’t even need to transfer the data into an Excel file, since our WinTA.NET software can produce the relevant clocking data in a csv file which is accepted by all major payroll programs. 

4. Our process requires no paper at all!

 

Studies have shown that every single step of the manual timesheet process can take more than 15 minutes per employee, so it is obvious how much time we could save you. Once your staff have more time in their working day to do meaningful tasks, rather than data entry, they can become much more motivated, engaged and productive.