The WorkForce Suite, by WorkForce Software, is a mobile-first, cloud-based modern workforce management solution with integrated employee communications and collaboration capabilities. The WorkForce Suite aims to help global enterprise organizations optimize their labor, protect against compliance risks, and maximize productivity while building a highly engaged, resilient, and agile workforce.
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Homebase
Score 7.1 out of 10
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Homebase in San Francisco offers restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and retailers their employee scheduling and time tracking tools with scheduling optimization and team messaging for coordinating shifts; service includes a free time tracking app.
EmpCenter is really well suited for companies with minimal variety in time keeping needs. Certainly somewhere that has fairly regular work schedules and operational needs the system would be programmed for and meet those needs quite well. I think they assert themselves as a product specifically for those more complex companies, and I believe it is one of a few products available for companies with many employee types and complex work schedule and pay needs, but because of those complexities each have their own specific customizations I feel it is difficult for the company to then manage the different products that end up existing. Each ends up being unique so applying large scale changes doesn't work well as something we may request and need if applied over EmpCenter in general may cause problems for another company. Therefore everything has to be done on an individual basis and is more time consuming and costly.
Homebase is a very cost-effective program that does a good job tracking employee hours as well as what employees are working on. It is extremely easy to use and has a lot of self-service features, which give employees information at their fingertips. Homebase integrates well with our payroll provider.
works well with other systems. We were able to collect data from another time system, Avaya phone systems and even a point of sale system with not a lot of difficulty.
They know their product and integration points. They were able to troubleshoot problems with hardware time collection devices quite quickly. We found the devices they sold to be quite durable.
Out of the box they have more reports than I would have anticipated. Creating new reports was sometimes a task if it was complex but there were usually similar reports you could use as a starter template
The messaging features in Homebase are not consistent across the platform. In the app you can mass message everyone, however using the website you cannot, at least not at the price point that we are using.
The roles for employees and how to navigate them can be confusing especially when trying to schedule one employee in two different departments.
The separation of departments is a bit rigid and makes it difficult for universal employees to be scheduled easily.
After spending close to 5 years to decide on which payroll product to acquire for our University, I cannot image we would switch now that we have it in use.
Homebase is very easy to use. Not a lot of training or direction is needed to get it going. Easy feature to track employee hours. Able to use centrally located tablets for employees to clock in and out. A very cost-effective system that also saves time when processing payroll. Employees love its features.
EmpCenter is a new software to the company however, I only trained on the old software for a few months before EmpCenter was introduced. I think EmpCenter has a smoother data entry process and can run more in depth reports, but since this is the system I know best I cannot accurately compare it to previous software.
Homebase is simpler to use. Easier to navigate and is much cheaper than other alternatives! We had trouble when I worked as they were harder to reach our ROI. Deputy was too expensive and it was the reason we decided on Homebase! Employees also find it easy to use on their end!
EmpCenter has reduced the amount of time administrators are spending on payroll. Certainly it has made our entry to our pay system more efficient since we can simply load the data from the time keeping system and we are not collecting actual physical signatures and paper timesheets that must be reviewed for accuracy and completeness. The system does this for us and some automatic calculating of certain pay due that we were hand adding. However the feedback I am getting is that the supervisors feel their work has been increased greatly. They are spending more time correcting and approving time. Essentially the work we were doing in our central offices to review and correct time the supervisor must now do as they approve the time. We have now asked them to be more responsible for proper reporting and use which requires they know more about the rules and many different aspects of pay than they had before. We have employees who are union represented and get some benefits from the contract others do not receive, contract employees who have certain pay aspects in their contracts that must be known, as well as temporary employees and students who get very different pay from the other employees. While some things have been programmed for the system to know and handle, some things must be added to the time sheet to pay properly or the way time is reported is different (some clock out for lunch some don't) supervisors must now know these differences while that used to be a role that was more mine as an administrator. Now I just help them and audit and review.
Homebase has made the day to day management of employees easier, freeing up time for management to work on other things that help secure customer satisfaction.
It has also made payroll easier since it's implementation and allowed for fewer mistakes than the previous manual method, leading to less monetary mistakes and happier employees.
Homebase has made monitoring hours and overtime, as well as completion of internship and volunteer hours, much easier to monitor, leading to less confusion and more satisfied volunteers, interns, and payroll managers
