The time tracking services and software I've worked with make their money by scaring employers re: regulatory compliance ("Subscribe to our service and we'll keep you legal w/ local HR laws...") or by making time tracking part of a larger suite of HR products.

> The time tracking services and software I've worked with make their money by scaring employers re: regulatory compliance ("Subscribe to our service and we'll keep you legal w/ local HR laws...")

This sounds interesting. Can you link to any of these services or software?

What do you mean by "scaring employers re: regulatory compliance"? "Scaring" reads like you're implying some kind of manipulation, but "regulatory compliance" is something a company should already be in; what is there to fear?

What are "local HR laws"?

I can provide answers to the last two questions, based on my limited experence.

> What are "local HR laws"?

I think this refers to the fact that regulatory compliance is different depending on where your business is located. Which brings me to my anecdotal experience with:

> What do you mean by "scaring employers re: regulatory compliance"? "Scaring" reads like you're implying some kind of manipulation, but "regulatory compliance" is something a company should already be in; what is there to fear?

A company I worked for was located in a country where it was the legal duty of the employer to keep track of the people on the office premises. Most companies used a time tracking system for this, the punch-in, punch-out kind. The thing is, the purpose of the regulation was to make sure that when evacuated, there is always a list of people that were in the building - so it could be referred to after the evacuation to see if everyone is accounted for. This law did not require keeping track of the time someone entered the premises, or the time someone left - the requirement could be satisfied with a simple paper list with checkboxes - one for when you enter, one for when you leave. And that's exactly what was done in this office. Every month or two, the company got an offer from a business trying to sell a time tracking appliance or service, and many, if not all of those offers were using manipulatory tactics - "If you're not using a time tracking system, you might be violating the law" was a common phrase. The manipulation here was that it was true that a system like that would satisfy the legal requirement, but the offers strongly implied that a having a system like that was necessary to satisfy the legal requirement. Which was not the case.

> "If you're not using a time tracking system, you might be violating the law" was a common phrase.

This seems a reasonable thing to say. If anything it's helpful by perhaps providing the employer with information about requirements they were ignorant of.

> but the offers strongly implied that a having a system like that was necessary to satisfy the legal requirement. Which was not the case.

But coupling it with this is a sleazy sales tactic.

One can nullify the affect though by having at least one person on your staff tasked with being knowledgeable of all of your industry's employment requirements and your company's current state of compliance with them.

I don’t think it’s mentioned explicitly anywhere, but Bloomington Indiana is a college town and Indiana University has sought after computer science, informatics, business and public affairs programs.

I don’t know that this is the case, but I’d be surprised if this project didn’t have student involvement (aka cheap labor) that helped justify rolling their own.

Personally, I've had a few software engineering jobs in the past and the distribution of requirements for time tracking is basically bimodal:

* A company is legally required to do time tracking. They usually have a shitty excel sheet to fill out (and every fills in the defaults), or at best a single "check in"/"check out" button that someone coded 10 years ago and still works.

* A company does time tracking to bill 7 different customers for the 12 different tickets each engineer is assigned. The software used to track this was made by 30 full-time engineers and requires a 200-page manual to administer. New employees have to take a 2h course to understand how to fill in their time sheet.

A 2h course is an understatement.

I think I had a week long training for ConnectWise to do all the modules.

Well, that was for basic functionality.

How to book vacation time is extra.

I wonder if this is the College in Breaking Away. Great movie.

Fun fact - the quarry in the movie is real and in fact a local swimming hole. Over the years though they’ve really been cracking down on trespassing.

I believe they have filled it in now :/

Wow, I did not know this and am honestly a bit emotional finding this out. Those quarries were iconic and a magical way to spend an evening at a time in my life when I felt absolutely free, for better or worse.

On the bright side, Bloomington has other hidden gems (for now) that elicited similar feelings.

It is the same.

Probably. I know my university has a custom built time tracking website that relies on student ID cards, it was likely built by students as well.

As someone who wrote an 2 attendance apps (in PHP and Rails) for my church, and a time-and-attendance app (with a checkin/checkout page) for a previous employer (which I've heard is still being used, many years later), let me say that I think there are 2 things at work here.

First, you can't underestimate the value of software that works EXACTLY like you need it to. At both my church and my job, the software I wrote did something very specific to those organizations, and NOTHING else. At the church, the key was making a great interface on a small device, and various people would use Palm Pilots to quickly and discreetly mark people as having attended. At the job, the key was in making the online form work exactly like the paper sheet that people had been filling out, and then making a single page for the person who did the billing, which had 2 pivot tables for time, one for employee hours, and one for customer project hours. Both systems were very fast, and you could do your thing in seconds.

Second, any T&A system you buy/rent is trying to be all things to all people, and violates the first point, which makes them hard(er) to use, and adds friction to your internal process. I think you'll see the problem if you rephrase your question like this: "I thought general ledger was a solved problem." It was. 40 years ago. And 90% of IT in the 90's was in customizing off-the-shelf systems to work like companies needed them to.

I work for one company, wholly-contracted to another. The first company uses Workday, which I guess is taking over the world now. It's perfectly awful in an expected way. The parent company has just written their own time tracking tool, and it's predictably terrible. It takes several seconds to click through each project number, and there's a lag on entering hours in each day. But, this is what you get when you're stuck in the outsourced, waterfall development mindset from 25 years ago. I expected nothing else. In my opinion, both of these decisions were the opposite of what needed to happen. My small consulting company should have used an internal resource or 2 to roll our own, and the mothership should have subscribed to Workday.

In my experience its one of those solved problems where only a handful of products do it well, and well = pretty terrible for anyone SMB.

Yes, speaking with experience from a public K-12, timeclocks and timekeeping is an industry where $$ gets you something that claims to do everything but actually does nothing but fail or cause problems, $$$ gets you something that's stripped down total crap that can be made to work after modest concessions, and $$$$$$$$$ gets you something that does what you want reliably.

It's not hard, but everyone who can do it well has noticed what their competition is charging and followed suit.

I worked for a vendor that charged $$$$$$$$$. The software itself was often not the biggest cost component, it was what it cost to get it working in accordance with federal/state/local labor laws, any relevant union contracts, and company policy.

It was a complicated software package that did nothing out of the box and everything required significant configuration of the rule engine to account for the customer’s needs. It shipped with some building blocks for the rule engine but often/always required custom code to facilitate things the customer needed.

My job was to fly out to customer sites and perform the custom implementation tasks.

SAP?

Or it's terribly expensive. We just ripped ours out when the cost got to $600 USD per month. We were just clocking in and out factory workers.

We now use a pen and paper. I've looked at open source options, the landscape is not great.

Doing stuff like this is how you create the seeds for a knowledge economy in an area.

Worked in Higher Ed for years, we had a home grown time keeping system. Cost less for us to source and hack together physical time clocks and a web app than paying ADP, no question.