Boone Brothers Commercial Roofing, one of the premier roofing companies in the Midwest, serves more than 500 construction worksites every year. Based in Omaha, Nebraska, the roofing company employs over 200 workers at about 15 jobsites a day.
When Boone Brothers wanted to improve its time and attendance tracking and streamline its payroll processing methods, the company turned to ExakTime. Implementing construction’s top automated time and attendance system not only lowered the company’s payroll expenses by about 8 percent, it also decreased its payroll processing time from several days down to a few hours.
PROBLEM WITH PAPER
As with many contractors, Boone Brothers relied on handwritten, paper time cards to track its hourly field workers. While this practice has been the norm in the construction industry for years, the company knew there was no way its employees were working exactly 50 hours per week, every week, but it couldn’t prove otherwise.
COLLECTION NOT EASY
Local foremen would have to drive from their remote jobsite to the company’s Omaha headquarters, every week, to deliver their crews’ time sheets. They would slide their paper time cards into a locked box and leave it for pick up.
And Boone Brothers’ Kansas office would have to FedEx their paper time sheets to Omaha every week, costing extra money and adding overtime hours to the company’s payroll.
Penny Jochimsen, human resource director for Boone Brothers since 1990, would collect all the time cards and manually process and approve every single one in her office—a task that she would begin Monday morning and not finish until Thursday every week.
“I spent most of my time chasing down everyone’s time and inputting all the time cards,” she says. “I run quite a few programs here, but I didn’t have time for most of them after payroll.”
AUTOMATED SOLUTION
When Jochimsen’s department manager called her in to talk about ExakTime’s electronic time tracking system, the human resource director thought there was no chance the system would be able to handle Boone Brothers’ payroll deficiencies.
A short time later, however, Boone Brothers implemented ExakTime’s rugged, portable time clock, the JobClock, and mobile time tracking app, PocketClock/GPS. Much to Jochimsen’s surprise, the system was easy to use and delivered the accurate time records that paper time sheets couldn’t.
Just a few weeks after purchasing the ExakTime system, Boone Brothers stopped using paper time cards completely.
TAKING CONTROL
Jochimsen says it’s a relief that her company no longer has to worry about worker-time theft. And she says that ExakTime saves her business over $8,000 per pay period during the busy summer season.
“The system’s a huge money-saver because employees who were constantly getting paid for exactly 50 hours per week are now around 40 to 41 hours,” she says. “To see them try to finagle the clocks is fun to watch because they can’t do it. They can’t cheat.”
Boone Brothers relies on JobClocks for in-town jobs and uses PocketClocks for distant locations. And in 2012, Boone Brothers replaced their older JobClocks with ExakTime’s new wireless time clock, JobClock Hornet. The company’s remote workers touch a green Keytab to JobClock Hornet to clock in, a red Keytab to clock out, and a yellow Keytab if they are traveling from one local worksite to another. Every hour, the time clock wirelessly sends records back to the office, automatically, so foremen don’t have to worry about driving in time records, and Jochimsen doesn’t have to chase down the records for payroll.
For most of Boone Brothers’ repairmen, mobile PocketClocks are a better fit than fixed JobClocks, because they’re constantly on the move between worksites, so it’s easier for them to clock in and out on their smartphones.
In addition to recording time, PocketClock also tracks Field Notes. So repairmen can wirelessly send Jochimsen text comments, digital images, or voice recordings—right from their Smartphone—letting her know if there’s an error in a time punch, if someone’s sick, if an address changes, or any other changes to worksite data.
“I don’t know what I’d do without Field Notes,” she says. “Anything my guys want to tell me, they can do it on the road. And I get to look at the notes in the software when I’m ready for them, so it’s not an interruption during my day.”
EFFICIENT PROCESSES
Jochimsen uses TimeSummit, ExakTime’s time tracking hub for the office, every Monday to begin processing the digital time records from her clocks. What used to take her 4 days to complete now takes just a few hours.
“The cost savings in payroll and the time savings for me as the payroll person are fantastic,” she says. “It only takes me about 25 percent of the time it used to for payroll processing.”
She says TimeSummit’s “Categories” make it easy to view the time records by employee groups and generate detailed, digital reports. She also emails PDF summary reports to each division head, so they can review the data at their own discretion—a much quicker task than standing at the copier and manually passing out printed time cards like she used to do.
After years of using the ExakTime system, Jochimsen says she couldn’t ever imagine going back to paper time cards.
“If anyone takes the system away, I’ll hurt them!” she says. ■
About The Author:
Casey Powers is the vice president of marketing at ExakTime, the leading time and attendance provider for the construction industry, and leads all marketing efforts toward increasing brand awareness in print and digital media. Powers can be reached at 818.222.1836 or at casey.powers@exaktime.com.
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Modern Contractor Solutions, August 2013
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