Recently, we met with the owner of a construction company, battling some pretty significant timecard issues. He was struggling with employee time cards that were showing 80% of their hours as prevailing wage. He knew for a fact that the prevailing wage hours should be averaging no more than 50% of the work. With the company paying close to $15 more per hour for prevailing wage, he knew something had to be done.

Rural First was able to provide a unique yet simple solution. Employees are now automatically clocked into prevailing wage when they enter the site and then returned to their regular hourly wage the moment they exit the job site. With the ability to build a virtual geofence around the prevailing wage site, the workers are now paid down to the second for the time they spent on a prevailing wage job.

If you are still having your employees report time on a sheet of paper they turn in, then you are most definitely leaving a lot of cash on the table. With today’s advances in technology, this process has been streamlined.

Construction companies, along with many other commercial enterprises often battle over reporting of hours. Even if it’s not intentional. Small “fudging” of hours adds up. Let’s say the employee worked from 8:17 am to 4:36 pm, but logged it as 8 am to 5 pm. That’s almost an hour being reported that was not worked. This can add up very quickly.

Many contractors loathe payroll, and the shuffling of time sheets. A good time and attendance system can end those headaches. You may not care if a good worker arrives a little late as long as the work gets done. But if you saw the actual, factual totals, you’d be shocked by how many work hours you’re losing each week to fudging and rounding.

The American Payroll Association states that as much as 8% of total payroll costs are lost due to errors in the recording of hours worked, employee theft, and time spent by payroll/admin staff gathering and calculating time cards. And these numbers go up with mobile employees keeping their own time manually. That is equal to 38.4 minutes per 8 hour day. At $20 per hour, that equates to $3200 per year per employee or $64,000 per year for 20 employees.

How much can we save you? Let me show you what this can mean for you when you switch from paper time sheets to a web-based time tracking system such as Rural First. Your labor costs will shrink by 5% or more. Take your monthly payroll, multiply by 5%, then multiply that by 12, and those are very conservative numbers.

With our RFID feature, employee time is easily tracked, and time cards are a thing of the past. Essentially it is an onsite time clock. Each employee will have a key fob that they swipe in the vehicle, recording their hours on site down to the minute. Not only does it cut down on over reporting. But you will no longer be spending money on man hours for someone to go thru handwritten time sheets, and try to make sense of them. The RFID time clock feature and Geofence ability are just 2 ways of many that Rural First can make a difference in the way you do business. We offer the correct turn by turn directions, reports, alerts, maintenance, and tracking.