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Company Job Costing Management

Make it easier to monitor your staff’s working time by introducing a job costing management solution.

HR software and clocking terminals ensure reliable monitoring of your staff's attendance time, absences and activities. These solutions allow you to achieve a balance between adherence with legal obligations, manager performance and staff satisfaction.

What is Job Costing Management?

Job Costing Management includes all the processes of monitoring and checking work durations within an organisation. Its aim is to consolidate the payroll variables required to prepare payslips at the end of the month, such as the number of hours worked, leave taken or acquired, or absences.

Workforce Management is often equated with staff attendance over a given period.

But in reality, it covers all the interdependent processes of a company’s working time management including working time monitoring, absence management, hourly planning and overtime monitoring.

Similarly, the term 'Job Costing Management' is commonly used to refer to HR software solutions that enable the complete monitoring of your staff’s working time and absences within an organisation.

What is the objective of Job Costing Management?

As its name indicates, there are two objectives:

  • First of all, it allows you to collect, monitor and calculate staff's working times
  • Secondly, it allows you to monitor these working times by breaking them down by activity, section, project or any other form of organisation.

Job Costing Management is therefore much more than simple attendance monitoring software. Workforce management systems have evolved to optimise human resources through the use of tools for planning assistance, activity profitability analysis and company absence management solutions.

Time and attendance management is now a major concern for HR departments. It allows an organisation to adhere to its legal obligations and to streamline its organisational management of personnel. The objective is to make efficiency gains and to support well-being in the workplace.

I want to monitor my working and activity times

What are the features offered by workforce management solutions?

Job Costing Management solutions include 'standard' features such as:

The most advanced job costing management systems, such as Kelio, offer additional features:

  • Attendance declarations of managers on a fixed daily rate, without a timestamp
  • Remote working monitoring, by individual and shift
  • Management of advocacy hours among employee representatives
  • Business leave management
  • Advanced customisation for leave acquisition, bonuses and TOIL.

Job costing is often just one part of HR management software suites, which generally include recruitment management, training, job titles and skills, expenses forms, talent management, HR documentation workspace.

The acquisition of an integrated job costing management system allows you to efficiently digitalise many HR processes within the organisation, with or without approval phases involving managers and HR administrators.

I want more information about the Kelio job costing management suite

Which organisations is Time and Attendance management important to?

Job costing management is useful for all types of organisations, regardless of the size of their workforce or their activity sector. Private and public organisations, small-sized companies and multinationals or associations are all subject to the same requirement to monitor and measure working times.

Beyond the 'working time monitoring' aspect, the analytical monitoring of time spent per activity is particularly useful to the following organisations, especially when analysing their profitability or their invoicing:

  • Industry
  • Consulting firms
  • Design offices
  • Personal care services.

How useful is job costing management and why implement a workforce management system?

A time and activities management solution offers many advantages. There are generally five objectives when introducing a job costing management system in an organisation:

A tool to ensure that HR is in compliance with labour law:

  • Rest times respected
  • Overtime quota limits
  • Automatic monitoring of working times with alert if exceeded
  • Monitoring for changes in legislation and updates.

HR software ensures that working time data is collected in a secure manner:

  • Payroll variables are reliably calculated with no risk of error
  • Extraction and transfer of payroll variables, without having to re-enter them manually
  • Option of managing different types of contracts or collective agreements in one centralised tool.

Software to simplify daily human resources management:

  • Digitalised management of administrative tasks and HR processes (often carried out on paper)
  • Centralisation of information
  • Shared view in real time.

A job costing management solution to carry out the analytical activity monitoring:

  • Breakdown of working times by activity, project, cost centre, client or any other distribution key
  • Performance analysis table reports.

An HR solution to optimise quality of life at work:

  • Sharing and distributing information that builds employees’ trust in their management and in the organisation’s HR
  • Employees can independently consult their accounts or manage their HR processes
  • Improved shift management using working time planning assistance tools
  • Fairer distribution of tasks and working time, ensuring social cohesion
  • Increases staff loyalty.

I want more information on Kelio job costing management software

Who uses time and activity monitoring solutions?

Job costing management is aimed at all employees at an organisation. It is one of the only tools that everyone uses, whatever their level of responsibility.

Employees interact with time management solutions in order to:

  • Clock or declare their attendance times
  • Indicate the amount of time spent on an activity
  • Consult their plannings
  • Make leave requests or provide notification of an absence
  • Consult their accounts, their employee file or any other document provided by HR
  • Transfer balances or carry out another HR process.

To do this, employees access the workforce management system via an HR portal. Also called HR self-service, employee portal or employee screen, it is a location in the software dedicated to the employee that takes him or her through all the digitalised time management processes. It can be accessed on a PC, smartphone, tablet or digital terminal, allowing users to remain mobile.

Managers use job costing tools to:

  • Monitor their staff’s attendance times and absences
  • Create work plannings
  • Monitor activity times
  • Validate leave requests using the overview of the plannings of their shifts
  • Receive anomaly alerts: late clocking, unplanned absence, overtime exceeded over a given period.

Job costing solutions make management tasks easier for HR administrators and the heads of organisations, especially in terms of:

  • Monitoring working times within the organisation
  • Monitoring analyses and profitability
  • Calculating leave allowances, bonuses, individual time accounts
  • Implementing payroll.

Discover the customisable HR portal

How to choose a job costing solution? Four little-known yet essential criteria

It is very important to choose a good job costing management solution, especially given that such a system will serve the organisation for a long time and will affect your entire staff.

The most obvious selection criteria have to do with software functions and options. But there are four lesser-known criteria that are also critical when choosing a job costing management tool:

  • The capacity of the system to be set up according to your management methods. Regardless of size, each organisation has a legal context and its own practices (collective agreements, branch or organisation agreements, etc.). The tool must therefore be able to adapt to your organisation and any changes in it over time. The setup of the chosen solution must therefore allow your HR administrators to adapt it and manage it according to the requirements. This will ensure reliable data retrieval over time.
  • Ergonomics: a time and attendance management solution is one of the rare tools that is shared by the entire staff at all levels. The user experience must be optimal in order to ensure smooth implementation among the employees and managers. The actions must be simple and practical so that the chosen solution is adopted by the entire staff.
  • The capacity of the solution to integrate with Payroll and ERP software and to open onto your existing IT system is essential for optimising the administration of your organisation.
  • Associated services: audit, feature selection, setup and deployment, training, helpdesk – there are many services that require high quality support. You don’t change your job costing management system every month, so you should rely on the experts whose job it is it every day and who will prevent you from making mistakes.

How to implement an efficient and practical T&A management system?

There are several essential steps to implementing a job costing management solution. It is important to follow all of them in order to enjoy all the benefits.

Step 1: Dedicate time to defining the requirements.

Before you start looking for the service provider who will support you, you must ask yourself what you need and expect from a workforce management system.

Here is a list of questions that will help you with this step:

  • Who will use the job costing management system? What will their role be? What actions will they need to take?
  • How is working time organised within your organisation? Are there different profiles, working times? Are you an organisation operating under multiple agreements?
  • How can you integrate this system into the software and procedures already in place?
  • Do you have the internal skills and knowledge to lead and monitor this project?
  • Which features interest you the most?
  • Which benefits do you hope to acquire? Time spent, costs, quality of life at work, fairness, etc.

This thinking phase will help you to develop an initial set of specifications.

Do not forget to identify the obstacles and risks linked to your project.

Go ahead and note any sensitive areas and/or risks for your organisation that could jeopardise the implementation of the job costing management system. For example, a lack of knowledge about the working time regulations of one of your organisation’s agreements could lead to errors and create major legal risks.

Step 2: Acquire an adaptable, flexible and powerful tool.

Many companies do not take the time to do their research and end up with a service provider and tool that poorly match their profile and fail to meet their expectations.

When contacting service providers, do not hesitate to ask them about the day-to-day use of their system and the features it offers. Ask for a demonstration of specific cases that reflect your particular requirements.

Our teams are available to present you our solutions with customised demonstrations and to answer all your questions.

Take the time to get to know the teams and services proposed by the service provider(s).

While the technical features of job costing management software are important for your decision, they are not the only elements to take into account when choosing a solution.

If customer service cannot provide you with the right support, a tool will not be of any use to you, no matter how powerful. You should therefore ask to meet the teams that will support you when using the software. Check their availability, the communication channels they use, whether their existing clients are satisfied, and also which services are included in your subscription (assistance, updates, troubleshooting service).

Step 3: Take the necessary time and resources to set up your tool.

The step of deploying and setting up the job costing management software is not the easiest and the HR teams might find it tedious. But it is the key to the success of your time management and monitoring project. You must absolutely seek the support of the editor of the software solution during this critical phase for your return on investment.

We have been supporting organisations since 1987 with proven procedures. We ensure that the solution is set up in accordance with the legislation and your branch agreements, and we carry out tests to check that the results obtained are in line with expectations. Finally, we provide training on the use of the tools to give you all the autonomy you need to manage your job costing management system on a daily basis.

Step 4: Communicate and support employees in learning how to use the job costing management tool.

Your HR teams must take the lead on this project and promote and communicate it internally in order to ensure its acceptance and integration by the employees of your organisation.

Some good practices for getting your staff on board with a workforce management system:

  • Appoint a head of job costing management
  • Initiate a change management process for employees
  • Organise presentations on the time and attendance management solution
  • Select employees to be ambassadors who will test the established procedures and will then be able to coach their colleagues
  • Raise awareness among the employees about the importance of the job costing management system and the immediate benefits for them: independent consultation of their working times, faster validations, transparency.
  • Open a Q&A workspace dedicated to the implementation of the job costing management system.

How to estimate the ROI of a job costing management solution?

It would be oversimplifying and even misleading to imply that the return on investment of a job costing management solution is calculated based on a calculation formula. In reality, it depends on various parameters: the baseline situation of the time monitoring (entirely on paper or partly digitalised), the complexity of the organisation (multiple agreements, multiple sites, number of staff), specific attributes of the activity (annualised hours or complex plannings).

However, experience shows that the return on investment of a time and attendance management system is very fast because it automates time-consuming administrative tasks for HR and the managers.

  • Optimised organisation with up-to-date, shared plannings
  • Precise monitoring of completed times
  • Faster alerts.

You will achieve greater profitability after just a few months of use.

Apart from the purely financial gains and time savings, other benefits can be expected from the optimisation of job costing management: improved social environment, greater fairness, quality of life at work, trust in the management, etc. HR administrators can then devote their efforts to higher-value tasks and focus more on optimising human capital.

Kelio adapts to the specific requirements of your organisation

The result of five years of R&D and an investment of five million euros, time and attendance management solutions address all of these criteria.They will bring you foresight, efficiency and responsiveness, thanks to their numerous features.

For more than 35 years, the organisation has been developing innovative and professional solutions adapted to your requirements, so don’t wait any longer!

Discover the Kelio time and attendance management software