Guest Post: Our True Time Journey

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Seven years ago, our district was drowning in paper, short on time, and lacking accurate time-keeping records. That’s when we decided to give True Time a try.
 
True Time automates the paper timesheet system. It captures weekly timesheets that are then submitted to supervisors, who then submit them to payroll. It’s an entirely paperless, date- and time-stamped process.

 

Watch the video! See what happened when Skyward visited the Middleton-Cross Plains School District (and the National Mustard Museum!).

 
 

A Paperless Process

We used to get about 300 timesheets every payroll period. We would walk back to the payroll area and see someone with a stack of timesheets eight inches tall. They would look at one, enter the data, flip to the next; look at that one, enter the data, flip to the next. Thanks to True Time, we’ve enjoyed significant savings in both paper and time.

 

Significant Time Savings

Since True Time has freed up our manual entry time, we’re now able to do so much more! We’ve been able to take a deeper dive into data analytics—we’d had limited time to analyze this data in the past. We’ve also had more time to do cross-training within our district and even lead some training for other districts.
 
It’s not just our department that has noticed the time savings, though. Principals and other administrators also had to spend time going through all those paper time sheets. So many people, from the main office to each of our schools, have more time because of automation with True Time.

 

Data-Driven Decisions

True Time gives us the data we need to make good decisions. Let’s say staff from one of our schools comes to us halfway through the year saying, “We’re drowning in our workload. We need to hire someone else. We need more help.” True Time shows us the data we need to make that decision and back it up. We can look at the data with the administrator(s) and make a well-informed decision. Before, we didn’t have that data available to base our decisions on.

 

Accurate Pay

With True Time, we have the data we need to process payroll correctly. Before, people might wait until the day before timesheets were due and then write down the hours they were scheduled to work. Now we are much more confident that we’re capturing their true hours.

 

Unexpected Benefits

Many of the benefits we experienced when we started using True Time were things we’d hoped for, but there were several unexpected benefits as well. One such benefit was the customization of groups. We didn’t realize how flexible groups would be—this has greatly reduced the amount of manual tweaking we have to do, again, saving us time. We also didn’t realize everyone would be able to see all their old timesheets. The visibility of these timesheets has been really helpful for staff throughout the district.

 

It’s Not “Big Brother”

Initially, when we were making the switch to True Time, we had some resistance, but that’s to be expected with any big change. We needed to explain to our staff that True Time is not a system designed to be “Big Brother” watching you. It’s not about us knowing when you’re in and when you’ve punched out. That’s not it at all. With True Time we can observe, “Yeah, you’re right. You’re not working 8 to 3. You’re working 7:45 to 3:15. And now, we’re going to make sure you’re getting paid for it.” We care about our staff and don’t want to take advantage of anyone. True Time helps us make sure we’re paying everyone what they earn.
 
 
True Time changed our district. It helped us save a significant amount of time and more confidently track our employees’ hours. It’s called True Time for a reason!
 
 

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