Tag Archives: Unique Selling Proposition

What makes TimeControl unique?

Stand alone, TimeControl, Chris Vandersluis, Christopher Vandersluis, Christopher Peter VandersluisWe talk about what makes TimeControl unique all the time but we’ve been doing some internal training lately and thought it might make sense to lay out what HMS considers TimeControl’s Unique Selling Propositions.  This is a common concept in sales to identify what makes a product unique or makes it stand out among it’s competitors.  So, here are what we focus on when we describe TimeControl to prospective clients:

TimeControl is a Multi-function timesheet

That’s surprisingly (at least to us) rare.  Most timesheet systems are designed with a primary purpose.  By far the most popular is a Time and Attendance timesheet organized to use with Payroll.  The next most popular perhaps the Time and Billing timesheet that is organized by client to use for invoicing.  Think they’re the same? They’re not.  Somewhere down the list of timesheet types is a Project Management update timesheet to put the Actuals into Budget vs. Actuals.  The focus there is activity based costing to compare against a plan.

TimeControl was designed since its inception to fulfill multiple roles at once and that carries through every design decision we’ve made with the product.  Using the same timesheet data, you can get auditable down-to-the minute attendance for Payroll and multiple rates for billing and updates of not just actuals but also task progress for Project Management and numerous other processes.  That leads nicely into the next aspect of what makes TimeControl unique.

TimeControl is the most flexible timesheet in the industry

As a multi-function timesheet TimeControl must, by extension, support multiple business processes.  That means, TimeControl is going to have to be flexible.  That has been a center point of the product design since 1994.  Some of the many ways we do this include:

User Defined Fields

Every TimeControl Table, the Timesheet Header and Timesheet Details and many other aspects of the product allow an unlimited number of user-defined fields.  These are used to condition data for many possible purposes.  This might be used for reporting, for grouping or filtering data and for grouping or filtering data differently for different purposes.

Changeable menu, fields and reports through User Profiles

TimeControl’s User Profiles allow you to determine who can see what data is available to each user profile.  There are an unlimited number of User Profiles that can be created so some profiles might be geography specific, some user authority specific and some department or role specific.  In each profile you can decide what menu selections are available, what data can be entered, what data can be viewed and this security extends all the way to the field level.

That’s unprecedented.

Free TimeControl Mobile App

It’s not enough to have all that power in our web application or to say that TimeControl is available both for on-premise deployment and as an in-the-cloud subscription service but we also include with every license the ability to use the free TimeControl Mobile App.  The Mobile App is also unusual in that it’s not just for timesheet entry.  You can also use the Mobile App for approvals, timesheet review, materials and equipment entries and even for mobile-specific reports.

TimeControl is the most Integrate-able timesheet in the industry

Unlike some systems where integration is a concept or something external that you pay extra for, TimeControl comes with pre-built integrations for numerous products such as Oracle’s Primavera, Microsoft Project, BrightWork, SharePoint, Contruent and more.  There is also an ability to import and export data either on demand or on pre-planned automated schedules.

For those looking to weave TimeControl into a more extensive corporate process, TimeControl includes a full bi-directional API which allows clients to establish coded integration to virtually any other system.

There is lots more of course, the extensive way we accommodate rates, our multi-lingual interface, the multiple ways to report on TimeControl data, the ability to create libraries of dashboard templates and so on and so on.