You can now continue to use your existing JobClocks and PocketClock apps but you can push the data to the cloud.

Why push your labour costing data to the cloud?

Simple really, you can now give access easily to project managers on site, any person in the office who needs access without any additional costs. Access is part of the cost of the software.

Want to book in a demonstration

Book in a demonstration or training – http://meetme.so/petermorrissey

Dear Friends,

Thank you for your support, it has been a great journey so far. Unfortunately, our adventure is taking a new direction. 

Starting March 1, 2016 Locqus will no longer be available for use. 

We know you loved Locqus, and so did we. Sadly, it has become difficult to grow Locqus as a standalone business. We encourage you to use this time to migrate your business operations over to a different solution. 

For those of you with one of our Vehicle Trackers, we will make sure to cancel your billing. Please send your units back to this address when you get the chance:

6080 Evangeline
Dearborn Heights, MI 48127

They will not be operational once Locqus goes offline. 

Taking a moment to review Locqus 12 months on and I wonder if they tried to do to much in one product, why would you build in invoicing when Xero is taking the world by storm as a cloud invoicing system. Would it not make more sense to integrate with Xero?

Cost to integrage Xero 2-5k?
Cost to build complete invoicing system 30-300k

Locqus had some really cool features, but would good are they when the company folds after chewing up hundreds of hours of your time locking you into their software…..I bet there are some very cranky Locqus customers right now with only one option….find another solution.

How can you find the right solution?

You should dig deeper beyond features and price or you will get caught out again. Some great questions to ask while completing your research for a cloud labour costing solution include…..

1/ How long has the company been trading for? less than 3 years without suitable funding and you could be in trouble.
2/ How many dedicated people work in support?
3/ How much funding does the company currently have and what funding can be secured in the future?

Good luck on your search, it is tough out there with more and more products hitting the market.

I remember growing up in the bush in western NSW where any of the farmers would need to call in a plane and pilot to get an overview of the farm. Planes and pilots cost a lot of money, imagine how low cost it would be in comparison to send in the drones…

Identified Technologies’ Drones Will Automatically Map Your Job Site So You Don’t Have To

Mapping a job site – be it a construction site, oil field, or giant human battery pod factory – is a tough job. That’s why Identified Technologies’ Dick Zhang wants you to send in the drones.

His company, which is funded to the tune of $2 million, allows you to send a quadcopter around your job site to create a topographical map of the situation. It is completely autonomous, and the batteries can be hot-swapped as the drone maps. The system comes with a base station where the drone comes to roost when its done.

Read more

Joe originally made contact at the end of 2013, he mentioned the JobClock system looked perfect for his requirements utilising the PocketClock mobile app. Joe’s employees move around a lot from job to job so having a mobile device was paramount to the success of the solution. After we completed a demonstration in early 2014 Joe made the decision the JobClock solution was the best solution that he had looked at to solve his issues.

Joe started the system at his Emu Plains location near Sydney.

During the implementation Joe loaded his employees, jobs and cost codes (activities) into the database and the employees started to sign in and out electronically into the Job and into the cost code.  With multiple offices and many jobsites running at the same time the electronic system started giving Joe instant visibility on what people were on what jobsite, something that in the past could only be established by picking up the phone and calling the employee to ask where they were.

I met with Joe and his admin staff in Melbourne at his head office at the end of 2014. Joe gave the solution the big thumbs up, the electronic reporting was awesome and now available with a couple of clicks.

More about Pezzimenti Tunnel Bore

The Pezzimenti family have been associated with pipeline construction in Australia’s Water Industry since 1956. A strong foundation of hard work and hands-on solutions was manufactured during those early days of hand excavation in the backyards of residents, hand tunnelling, machine excavation and pipelaying.

Smarter and safer ways to lay pipes were always pursued and this spirit led to the conception of Australia’s first microtunnelling system in 1986 by Pezzimenti Laserbore™.

Precise, efficient, economical, innovative- the Pezzimenti Laserbore™ microtunnelling system is manufactured in Melbourne and through Pezzimenti Tunnelbore operates in NSW, Qld, NT and WA.

Exaktime, the only company to offer 3 proven workforce management solutions that work at any jobsite to bring employee and contractor start and finish times back into the office removing all manual time sheets have released SiteHub at World of Concrete 2015.

Instant Job Site Oversight

Accessible via the ExakTime Mobile app, SiteHub provides you with an instant, bird’s-eye view of everything that’s happening at your job sites. You can choose to view the site that’s nearest you or any of your current work sites.

Scrollable Live Feed

When you open SiteHub, information from the job site fills the screen of your smartphone or tablet, including a scrollable live feed of real-time clock-ins and clock-outs, Field Notes, and equipment or materials updates.

Workers, Costs & Weather

SiteHub displays a list of all workers clocked in at the site, and a helpful budgeting aid shows you the hourly labor cost for the site. The National Weather forecast* and alerts for the area are visible as well as relevant local information.

With SiteHub, better workforce management and peace of mind are just a few taps away.

*weather currently not available in Australia, New Zea,and or PNG

Book in your demonstration today

• Time sheets don’t come in on time
• Time sheets are very difficult or impossible to read
• Crucial information is missing off the time sheets for employee labour costing or cost centre tracking

I spoke to a customer last week who explained how before going electronic the boss insisted payroll was to be completed each week with or without time sheets arriving on time. What happened in this situation was the payroll was completed each week as requested by the boss at every week the payroll staff had to deal with issues from the previous week where time sheets were incomplete or not delivered at all. This weekly process not only cost several hours every week in time to correct the previous week but it stressed out the payroll staff. Who wants to work under this type of stress week after week when technology today can remove these issues.

I have spoken with customers who previously spent several hours every Monday calling employees and contractors trying to collect all the time sheets so payroll can be processed. What a waste of time this is!

What employee time sheets do you want every week? Easy to read employee time sheets or hand written employee time sheets?

How about giving the boss a total hours on each job report each week at the same time by running a simple report

What if employees could easily sign into the job and the cost code or activity each time they started and finished each day from any smart device? Imagine seeing all of the data from yesterday today!

Imagine being able to answer the question from your boss or your customer ….where is David and how long has he been on site?

Book in for a 30 minute demonstration and make your boss happy!

With all these new smart devices out in the field our single biggest issue behind battery power is the protection of the smart device itself. I have a 22-year-old son who washes boats for living and has gone through more phones in the past couple of years than I’ve had in my lifetime, I hope he reads this blog. As more smart devices have been released companies have come along and invented ways to protect the device.

Another project that I have worked on recently involving almost a hundred smart devices had a situation where too many devices were having the front screen smashed or cracked. The customer requested a solution so we went searching the Internet for shatterproof protective covers for smartphones. These protective covers started at around $45 each and were as much as $100 each, with the cost of smart phones anywhere from a couple of hundred dollars to $1000 investing in a protective cover can be a small insurance policy price to pay.

I will list some of my favourites below and welcome your feedback on any other devices that you find or are using to protect your smart devices out in the field.

Otterbox Cases

Otterbox smart device protective cases are the case of choice for USA and Canadian JobClock customers, they now ship to Australia and New Zealand.

The Otterbox website says….
Starting with something as simple as a box, OtterBox was created in 1998 and built upon fundamentals of hard work, creativity and perseverance. Our cases are dedicated to all the klutzy, spontaneous, chaotic, graceless individuals who have broken a device or valuable due to their active lifestyle and like our customers, we’ve been there too!

Camouflage back                                                                                                       Functional front

Tough and waterproof

AMZER Shattterproof – this is hot!

AMZER ShatterProof Screen Protector is super thin urethane film at only 0.2 mm thick, ShatterProof certified by the ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) having passed D1004 Tear Strength, D2240 Hardness and D4329 UV Light Discoloration Tests. The protector is scratch resistant, stress resistant, drop resistant and a has special self healing capability with dissipative functioning embodied – it is virtually indestructible making your device unbreakable!

Watch an amazing video here on the AMZER Shatterproof protective cover including hammers, power tools, grinders and more.

 Gumdrop Marine & Industry Cases

iPads are being used in more and more Marine and Industry applications. There are few environments more inhospitable to electronic devices than the active marine environment or construction job site.

From government and industry to individuals with active lifestyles, Gumdrop has answered the requests of its customers who are using iPads equipped with navigation, weather and monitoring apps by providing a weatherproof rugged enclosure that will dependably stand watch.

The Gumdrop Marine Series for iPad Air features a weather-tight enclosure that clicks and locks into an optional robust quick-release mount.

The PocketClock app allows easy collection of employee and contractor start and finish times on the job and against cost codes or activities. Get your employees and contractors start and finish times live back into your office and throw away the time sheets for ever.

The JobClock system allows companies to move away from manual time sheets into electronic time and attendance improving every apsect of the process including employee time collection, employee time collection from remote locations, employee time collection from multiple locations culminating in the centralising of all of your employee data giving you access to instant reports on employee labour and jobsite profitability.

The Location Executive Summary report lets you monitor how many total hours are being spent at each of your job sites over a week, so you can take action if the hours on a particular project seem excessive.

Other standard reports include…….

• employee executive summary
• expenses by employee
• cost code by employee
• cost code by location
• employee approaching overtime
• employee time card by week (most popular)
• equipment by employee
• equipment by location and many more

Extract the data out into excel or integrate with the SQL database into your existing job costing or payroll systems.

Existing JobClock customers have known for years the JobClock system is the ultimate employee time keeping solution for remote locations. The JobClock system has 2 ways to collect data both without internet and both without telephone. Of course in any remote location to go electronic you will eventually need access to internet or telephone if you want to push the data back to a centralised location. I will run through some recent scenarios below.

Scenario 1 – The job site is in a place where the internet and 3G or 4G coverage is intermittent. Any cloud only time and attendance software will fail as the internet just drops off constantly.

Scenario 2 – The job is miles from anywhere, the workers are staying at a local pub and drive 90 minutes to the jobsite and back each day. By the time the employees get to the work site they have no internet and no telephone service. Only way to communicate is back at the local pub each night.

Scenario 3 – The job site is so remote a site shed with beds is taken to location, the workers work through the week only coming away from the job site each weekend.

We have 2 ways to collect the data

JobClock Hardware

The JobClock hardware can go onto any long term job site. The device is weather proof, can be chained to a fence or site shed.

Collection Method

Any supervisor or manager can stand in front of the JobClock hardware and collect the data with a blue tooth phone. You can then drive back to the local hotel, main office, remote office or nearest place where you have 3G or 4G coverage including any free wifi locations to send the data back to the office.

PocketClock App

The PocketClock app loads onto any iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Mobile, Blackberry Smart Phone. This is one of the rare apps on the market for employee time collection that actually works offline. Nearly all cloud solutions fail when the internet is lost or not available.

The PocketClock app will hold all the data being collected until you can give the device to the nearest wifi, internet, 3G or 4G connection.

Collection Method

Any supervisor or manager can push the data back to the office at the end of each day, week, fortnight or month when near a wifi, internet, 3G or 4G connection.

Book in a demonstration

The no-fee-GPS feature of ExakTime Mobile will help you keep an eye on your workers and job sites. GPS time tracking gives you the features you need to manage time more efficiently, saving you money now and later.

Here are three ways our GPS feature will help your business excel.

Keep an Eye on Employees
All contractors have employees in the field, but it can be hard to keep track of who is where. When you use ExakTime Mobile as your time clock, each worker’s clock-in and clock-out will be GPS stamped. You can go back and make sure employees were actually at the job site when they said they were. If they weren’t, a red flag will appear in their time record.

Easily see the history of an employee’s clocking’s with the option of turning on the feature to take a photo each time the employee signs in and out at the start and end of the day as well as when they change tasks or cost codes.

With a PIN required for clock-in and a photo biometrics option available, time card fraud is no longer an issue.

Supervisors and Managers get access to a company wide map giving instant visibility on the map showing where every worker last clocked in. This tool is a great feature in the office when you get the call from the customer asking where Sam is. You can simply look at the “Team View” mapping software and you can see if Sam has already left the last job and how long he has been traveling for.

Efficiently Dispatch to Sites
When a job site needs help, it’s easy to dispatch a crew to that location with GPS tracking. If location A needs an extra worker or two, you can quickly check nearby job sites to see how many employees are at each one. If location B is close and has a surplus of workers, you can dispatch a few of them to the new job site.

What normally might have taken a few phone calls and some mapping now takes just a minute.

Supervisors or managers can manage this out in the field while admin staff in the office can also have access to manage these situations.

Deliver Supplies Quickly

You can efficiently deliver supplies to your crews using GPS time tracking because you’ll know exactly where they are. Crews are often on the go, and when they message for more lumber or equipment, you’ll know where to head.

Your time is valuable. GPS time tracking will increase the efficiency of your business, saving you time and money. You can watch your company grow from your smartphone thanks to the easy-to-use GPS feature on ExakTime Mobile.

Book in a demonstration