Time for a Change?
August 27, 2019

Time for a Change?

Jennifer Steffens | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Novatime

We are currently using Novatime across our whole organization. In one department, we have it set up as a kiosk for employees to punch in and out during their shifts as an electronic timecard. The nice thing is that we can put in our own schedules for employees and it will match up their actual hours to their scheduled hours. In another department, employees are able to put in the number of hours they work per day and Novatime calculates the hours per week and/or pay period. Another department of salaried employees does not need to enter hours at all as Novatime will fill in the salaried hours; nevertheless, it does give the employees a chance to edit hours for PTO request and/or holiday hours.
  • It has some really nice scheduling features that allow managers to see the difference between hours expected to work and actual hours worked as well as overtime, absences, and non-scheduled shifts.
  • There are easy ways you can transfer a manager's caseload/employees to another manager temporarily if that person is going to be out of the office for an extended period of time without giving away too much personal information - just what would be needed for payroll or time off requests (this can be customized by your administrator).
  • The program itself can be customized in many different ways to meet the needs of the company/organization that it is working with.
  • The charts/graphs on the new homepage are somewhat helpful and link to useful information.
  • You cannot write your own reports. All of the reports are canned ones and if you want one that is not included, you have to go through their design team and pay for it to be added to the list.
  • Since they have "upgraded" their tabs and added things to their pages, their site has slowed down and it takes much longer for some of their pages to load because of the amount of information that is now stored on each of their individual pages. It is nice to have all that information on one page, but it does take longer for it to come up.
  • The scheduling system is set up for organizations that have set schedules and/or multiple people on the same schedule (i.e. 3 people who work 9-3; 5 people who work 3-7; 4 people who work 4-11). If you have only one person who works each individual shift, the scheduling feature is not as helpful. It still works to show actual vs. worked hours and such; however, it will not work as easily to help fill in missing spots if one of your employees is on leave and/or absent.
  • It has helped us identify which employees have consistently had OT.
  • It has helped us identify which departments have consistently had OT and/or not utilized their staff to keep OT in check.
On the employee's side of things, Novatime is pretty intuitive and fairly easy to use. All they have to do is either press a button to punch in or punch out. If they are entering in their hours, all they have to do is type in the number of hours per day.

On the manager's side of things, Novatime is also fairly easy to use. It highlights in red any missed punches and in green any OT that the employee has. There are links on the homepage of the manager's page that will lead them to a list of all their employees' missed punches for a pay period and they can fix them all before payroll is due.

Novatime becomes a bit more complicated on the administrator's side. The issues I have run into with Novatime normally come after updates/upgrades to their system. They have been getting better, but the administrator's side is still a bit clunky and takes a while to find what you are looking for. It is not as intuitive as the other sides and takes a bit of computer knowledge to figure it out.
The customer support at Novatime has been incredibly helpful any time that we have called them for support. Whether it was in the beginning when we were setting up the system or later on after the system had been set up and we had questions because either a rule was not working correctly or something was not calculating right. They were very patient, thoughtful, and worked with us until the problem was solved.
I believe that Novatime would be well suited for a business that has multiple people working the same or similar shifts. I would think that such places like a fast-food restaurant, hotel/hospitality industry, movie theater, and/or retail store would be a place where something like this would be a place where this software might flourish. In small businesses who have personalized care settings and jobs where the hours may change from day to day, I would recommend this particular timekeeping software.