Imagine a typical day at work that starts with checking Google Calendar to prepare for where you need to be and when. With engaging discussions, your teams create Google Docs to take notes on the important decisions coming out of the meetings and begin writing briefs to kick off your company’s next big project. Then you turn to Sheets to track the KPIs and leverage Slides to prepare the final presentation for your executive leadership by 4pm that day.

Do you ever feel like you’re missing information about your team’s work? You know tasks are being completed and that work is getting done—but don’t know if your team is operating in an efficient and sustainable way. With Universal Reporting, you get real-time insight into the state of your team’s work and know what actions to take, like requesting more budget, adding headcount, or redistributing work.

“Is SaaS the next big thing?” asked Eric Knorr in a piece for InfoWorld. The year was 2006. It was the year Amazon launched AWS, and Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie topped the charts. The aftermath of the burst dot com bubble left a sour taste in investors’ mouths. Still, a new generation of enterprises was offering something that had already been revolutionizing tech: Software on demand, centrally hosted in the cloud and subscription-based.

Operating as a business without consumer insights is like working in a library without knowing how to read. Just because you come across a lot of information doesn’t mean you necessarily understand it or know how to use it effectively. While any company can uncover customer insights, not every business is taking the opportunity to do so—potentially stifling their growth and their revenue in the long run.

Last year’s rapid and sometimes erratic transition to remote work left many businesses looking for new ways to understand employee behavior when working from home. According to a survey of 2,000 employers offering remote or hybrid work, 78 percent deployed employee monitoring software to track worker behavior in the past six months. As businesses emerge from the recent pandemic, it’s clear that some things will not return to business as usual.

As we’ve previously written, old-fashioned employee time tracking methods such as paper timecards or Excel come with several downsides. First, the payroll process is time consuming and error prone, as you have to manually tally hours and overtime. Second, you don’t know if your employees are in fact on the job when they’re punching in, rather than a coworker (and those extra minutes or hours that employees report working can lead to a significant waste of money).

Buddy Punch is an employee time tracking software where employees can punch in and out, and then all of the information needed for payroll (i.e. regular hours worked, paid time off, overtime, etc.) is automatically calculated and available in a payroll report. It’s easily accessible and takes just a few clicks to download (CSV, Excel).

In the eight years we’ve run Buddy Punch, we’ve had countless conversations with businesses about the challenges they faced when tracking time for their employees using traditional methods (i.e. paper time cards and timesheets, Excel spreadsheets, etc.). From those conversations, we’ve gathered that most businesses run into the same three problems: Turning to an employee time tracking and scheduling software can help you solve these specific challenges.

Your phone buzzes one Saturday afternoon. It’s a text message from an unknown number noting that there’s a big sale at one of your favorite stores. No pictures. No branding. Just a spammy-looking URL you’re told to click on to view more details. Now imagine getting that same text message, but this time, it’s a little different: It features clear and recognizable branding.