It’s Friday; time to process payroll. You need to wait on phone calls from your crew to verify their hours for the week, hoping they all remember accurately. You also heard at the last minute that one employee was a no-show on Wednesday, requiring you to confirm and adjust his hours. Once you finally finish, which is way past 5 p.m., you print, stuff, stamp, and mail paystubs to each employee. Two weeks later, one employee calls saying he lost his paystub and needs another. Even later emailing the paystubs didn’t stop the requests for a new paper trail. You’ve lost hours in this process and still don’t have a secure record that could prove any compliance disputes.
This was the reality for Ad-In Inc., a California-based acoustical contractor. The 40-plus year-old company was using manual processes for time tracking, payroll, material tracking, and onboarding.
Office Manager Liliana Aldaz says due to its manual processes, the company was dealing with:
The company needed an integrated solution connecting field labor management, onboarding, and employee self-service and plays nicely with Sage 100 Contractor. Arcoro checked all the boxes. And Liliana needed it to dramatically reduce her paperwork.
One of the biggest time tracking issues Liliana was dealing with was a lack of accountability due to using a manual based system that was still reliant on paper.
Field employees frequently called in their work hours, creating uncertainty around labor reporting and project costs. Because there was no accountability, the year often started in the red, with project hours far exceeding the budget estimates.
“It was normal to have the guys call and say, ‘I worked this job and I worked eight hours.’ It made it hard to trust,” says Liliana.
Liliana's boss was initially skeptical, uncertain the system would actually change anything. That changed quickly. He now demonstrates the app to visitors himself, at times stopping by job sites on weekends just to show someone how a crew member clocks in and out.
"He's so proud of it that he shows it to people," Liliana says.
Implementing Arcoro Time (formerly ExakTime) allowed Ad-In to:
Arcoro Time’s GPS-enabled time tracking app gave Liliana visibility to who was on the job site while providing a secure system of record. No more waiting for phone calls and no more trusting the logged time was correct.
“When you see the green, that means they are inside of the job,” she says. “When you see red, that's because they clocked somewhere else.”
Once time tracking was accurately logged, the clean data was fed directly into Sage 100. Liliana no longer has to manually input data into Sage, saving at least an hour per pay period, mail or email time sheets to employees. Daily corrections are also a thing of the past. Arcoro Time allows them to directly access their own paystubs, eliminating the need to resend them and their mailing costs. Employees know by 10 a.m. on Tuesday that pay stubs are uploaded.
Not only did it improve transparency, but she has access to payroll records, necessary to comply with the union and provide compliance documentation.
Having accurate data also led to better labor cost controls. Prior to Arcoro, labor hours frequently exceeded budgets. Liliana says typically by the time a project was 75% complete, the hours were already in the red. Now, they’re in the green.
“Before, we started the year in a black hole,” Liliana explains. “We lost a lot of money because of the hours.”
Today, supervisors receive regular updates on labor consumption and remaining hours, helping improve project performance and budget awareness.
Liliana also set up a supervisor group within the app so that whoever is running a job can see, in real time, which crew members are clocked in each morning, without needing to call the field.
Every Monday, Liliana now sends crews a report showing how many budgeted hours remain on their job, a task that previously required her to manually track hours and communicate them individually.
An added feature of Arcoro Time let Liliana track materials, something that was costing the company money and time.
Prior to Arcoro, material packing slips existed but there was no system to confirm which crew member actually received materials, or that materials shown on an invoice were legitimately used on the job. This created real financial exposure. Liliana says one invoice totaled $1,500 and she had to personally count every carton because she couldn’t trust the delivery documentation.
The system has also helped catch discrepancies before they became costly. On one occasion, a delivery arrived mislabeled, and having documentation in place let Liliana address it directly with the crew rather than absorbing the cost.
Liliana has also seen the risk play out industry-wide: at busy supply stores, it isn't uncommon for someone to claim materials on behalf of a company they don't actually work for. Ad-In experienced this firsthand before implementing better tracking, paying for materials the company never used.
Arcoro Time offered:
“It’s amazing. I’m in love with Arcoro Time.”
Another manual process weighing Liliana down was onboarding. She was also providing paper onboarding packets to every new employee. The effort was slow and costly. Switching to Arcoro Hire, she was able to digitize the process, saving a tremendous amount of time printing, compiling, and stapling packets, all while getting employees set up to work much faster.
Arcoro Hire provided:
Now with Arcoro Hire, unreadable handwriting has been eliminated, and it created a much better employee experience.
“Employees don’t want to come here and waste their time filling everything out. Everything is now digital.”
Switching to Arcoro gave Liliana and Ad-In the technology and tools to revamp their time tracking and payroll processes, as well as get new hires on the job faster.
At A Glance: