Attendance Counts® for Essential Time

Automation, from start to finish

With AttendanceCounts, you’ll never miss another disciplinary notice. That’s because AttendanceCounts alerts you as soon as disciplinary action is required. It also prints those notices for you — automatically.

And that’s just the beginning. AttendanceCounts can automate your entire attendance policy, from calculating point totals to recognizing outstanding attendance. It can even print point balances onto ADP paystubs. No more manual entry. No more cumbersome spreadsheets.

And no more guesswork. You’ll know once and for all that attendance policies are being administered fairly and accurately, without human error and without supervisory favoritism.

Are you still printing reports?

We have a philosophy at Metropolitan Software: if you have to run a report to get the information you are seeking, we have failed.

Answers to almost any question you might have can be obtained from your dynamic dashboard with just a few clicks. Key attendance data is pushed up to your home screen before you even ask about it. Information is displayed graphically wherever possible, with color-coded icons and interactive charts. Attendance Counts learns your preferences over time and becomes even more useful the more you use it.

Make no mistake, Attendance Counts has a powerful and flexible reporting engine. But we won’t mind if you don’t use it.

Start putting your data to work for you

Have you ever wondered how absenteeism varied among different shifts or departments in your enterprise? Or over different calendar years? Is absenteeism higher on Mondays than during the rest of the week? How about in the Summer vs. the Winter? What if you could measure the effects of a recent policy change on absenteeism rates, or identify which incident types caused the most infractions?

AttendanceCounts goes beyond simply automating your policy. It gives you the ability to drill down and analyze your data. With AttendanceCounts, you can identify attendance trends across departments and over time. You can see how much absenteeism is costing your company. You can even compare your company’s absenteeism rates with an industry average. Armed with this information, you can make more informed staffing decisions, focus on particular departments that are under-performing, and fine-tune your attendance policy to maximize productivity.

FMLA-tracking that monitors itself

Don’t risk noncompliance with state and federal FMLA regulations. AttendanceCounts tracks all types of leave, including intermittent and partial day FMLA, and gives you the ability to quickly and accurately determine an employee’s usage and eligibility based on federal law and your company’s own policies.

You won’t have to poke around or run reports to get key FMLA data; we push important information right up to an FMLA panel on your dashboard. We maintain “watch-lists” for you, so you won’t be surprised by an FMLA event or milestone. You can set up workflow items to track ongoing cases, print official D.O.L. forms, and upload supporting documentation.

And you don’t have to worry about employees exceeding their mandated annual allowance of FMLA, because we’ll alert you — on-screen and by email — as employees get close.

What about your work-rule policy?

Does your company have a safety policy? How about guidelines for dress-code, conduct or quality? AttendanceCounts lets you define and record an array of non-attendance violations, so that you can use it to manage your entire “progressive discipline” policy.

Once entered, these discretionary work-rule violations are tracked alongside attendance violations. They will appear on-screen and in reports, and will be linked to form letters which can be printed from the software. You can enter public and private memo text, attach documents, and write rules that trigger additional disciplines based on these manually-entered work-rule violations.

Win unemployment hearings

Want to win unemployment hearings? You’ll need a paper-trail of progressive disciplinary action up to and including termination. You’ll need to demonstrate that all of your employees are treated uniformly, that there is no supervisory favoritism or discrimination.

The workflow engine built-in to AttendanceCounts ensures that you’ll have everything you need. We record every step of the disciplinary process including infractions, notification, and sign-off, and retain that audit trail forever. The next time you find yourself in an employment hearing or wrongful termination suit, you will finally be prepared.

How it works

AttendanceCounts works by capturing schedule and timecard data from Essential Time and applying your policy rules to that data. There are no buttons to push or imports to initiate. Data flows seamlessly from Essential Time to Attendance Counts in a manner that is completely transparent to you.

Within Attendance Counts, your rules dictate when and how you should be alerted to policy violations.You might have a rule, for example, which notifies you when employees reach six points in a twelve-month period. Another rule might reward employees achieving three months of perfect attendance by dropping a point from their record. You could have other rules that track missed-punches or No Call/No Shows.

Our rule engine continuously processes timecard data and triggers alerts and violations based on your rules. Alerts can be associated with customizable notices that can be printed or emailed right from the software. You won’t overlook anything because we will alert you on-screen and by email to any events or status changes that require your attention. A daily email summary distils the most important information you’ll need that day, so you’ll know what to do, even before you login. And your interactive dashboard in Attendance Counts oganizes information in a manner that’s best suited for you.

Attendance Counts has a lot going on under the hood, but that’s where the complexity stays – under the hood. The UI is strikingly simple and elegant. Most of our clients are off and running with just two hours of training. And the HR professionals that use Attendance Counts consistently site it as their favorite application in the HR organization.