Monday morning, and two people are missing
One called at six to say she's ill, another simply didn't turn up, and you're already ringing round to cover two sites before eight, while on the desk there's last week's pile of attendance sheets waiting to be sorted
The crews move around, the sites are spread out, and the office is the place where everything that happened outside has to become a line written down somewhere, with the right hour, on the right job
The work that takes your hours away
It isn't organizing the crews, that's the part you know how to do and the part that keeps the company standing, it's the steps around it, always the same ones, that somebody has to do anyway
- The attendance that comes in from the badge reader, from a sheet signed on site, from a WhatsApp message sent at eleven at night, and all of it ends up entered by hand in the same place
- The last minute cover, arranged on the phone, that then has to be remembered and written down when a week has already gone by
- The reports for the clients, one wants the monthly sheet with the hours by area, another wants its own form filled in a certain way, and neither of them is going to change for you
- The clients' portals where you upload reports, staff documents and attachments, each with its own screens
- The invoicing, which has to reflect the real hours and not the ones somebody remembers
- The staff documents and their expiry dates, to be asked for, then asked for again
The margin is in the hours, and it disappears quietly
On a cleaning site the profit is the difference between the hours you sold and the hours you paid for, so when an hour is written down wrong, or written down two days later from memory, the margin walks out without anyone noticing, no alarm goes off
A site losing half an hour a day is something you find out at the end of the year, if you find out at all, and in the meantime you keep renewing it convinced it's fine
Examples of what the system can do
These are examples of jobs the system can do, not jobs already delivered for some company, we started recently and we'd rather say so
- The system collects the attendance from the files that reach you, puts them into the same format and loads them into the staff management software you already use, site by site
- It compares the hours recorded with the hours the contract for that site calls for, and sets aside for you the days that don't add up, instead of letting them through
- It prepares the report in the format that client asks for, taking the data from the business software, and leaves it ready to look at before it goes out
- It logs into the client's portal with your credentials, uploads what has to be uploaded and files the receipt with the name and in the directory you use
- It keeps an eye on the expiry dates of the staff documents and prepares the list of who needs chasing
The staff management software in your office may well have no technical integration to the outside world, and that's fine too, the system opens the screens and fills them in the way an operator would
What stays with the people
The system does the mechanical steps, the decisions stay yours, who you send to cover a site when somebody is missing is your call, because you know who gets on with that client
When something doesn't add up, an hour that makes no sense, a site with nobody marked on it, a file that arrived half empty, the system invents nothing, it stops and leaves you the case to look at
You can decide how much autonomy to give it, at the start it's worth keeping it on a short rein, with more confirmations, then you widen it on the cases you have seen work
Why you come out ahead
The hours that go into transcribing today come back free, and you use them to keep on top of the sites and the clients, without putting another person in the office to key in attendance
Hours written down when they happen, and not from memory on Friday, are hours you invoice in full, and that's the point where this work pays for itself
How we start
I'm Antonio Fuccillo, I write the automations myself and I answer the messages myself, so you talk to the person who does the work
You show me how you sort out a week of attendance, a short screen recording is fine, I look at whether it can be done and I tell you the monthly fee before we start, that figure stays and you approve every addition yourself
If you want an idea before you write, you can put your company's numbers into the calculation or see how the work goes from the start, then we talk it through