Over the past two or three decades, remarkable innovations such as personal computers, fax machines, scanners and smartphones have sped up the pace of business and led to tremendous increases in productivity and efficiency. Along with these constant hardware innovations, we have seen innovations in software that have massively changed the way businesses carry out financial, payroll, marketing and administrative tasks. Complex multifunctional business software such as ERP and CRM systems have further changed the way organizations run themselves.

On the other hand, some ways of doing business really haven’t changed that much. Employees’ time and attendance tracking at many businesses around the world are still carried out with manual entry into timesheets or spreadsheets. This post is not meant to go into all the reasons why companies need to change from manual to automated time tracking solutions. Rather, we would like to explain (in layperson’s terms) the process of transitioning from an old time tracking system—whether paper-based, spreadsheets, or online—to a cloud-based system like Replicon’s.

Set-up & Rollout

The simplicity and convenience of setting up user options in every Replicon solution makes them easy to rollout and implement. After a customer signs up for TimeAttend, our attendance and time tracking solution, our specialists will configure the system to suit the customer’s needs, and ensure that it is accessible by everyone who needs to use it. Every employee in the system is assigned a user name and password to let them log-in and enter their timesheet through any web browser. This makes the adoption rate very high right away and encourages new users to start using our time tracking systems without any training whatsoever.

Importing User Data & Codes

We import and enter all the relevant information from the customer’s existing system, such as employees’ names, designations, projects, tasks and other related data. This information is imported in the commonly used CSV (Comma Separated Value) format that many systems use. Data can also be imported using RepliConnect, Replicon’s web services platform that provides bi-directional data transfer, which is flexible enough to get reports in the output formats used by the customer’s business processes.

Transitional Outputs

Our developers can tailor the report data in the customer’s preferred format, with pre-selected values and different views according to the reporting needs. Since Replicon solutions easily integrate with all the leading ERP and financial applications, getting reports in the output format that the customer’s business applications use becomes very convenient, and mitigates any hassles during the transitional phase. In exceptional cases where there is no existing ability to integrate with a business application, our developers can also tailor reports at extra cost.

Training

To ensure that users are comfortable using their new time tracking system, Replicon hosts regular webinars to help them get the most out of our solutions and make the transition easier. The adoption rate among users is one of the factors that we look at to judge whether the transition to our solutions is being carried out effectively. It is usually observed that new users become familiar with our systems within a week or two, without having to read anything more complicated than a Quick Start Guide from our Support Center.

As we can see, it’s not difficult at all for most companies to transition from an older time tracking system such as logbooks, spreadsheets and online time tracking tools, to a real cloud-based time tracking system such as Replicon TimeBill or TimeAttend.