Core concepts

Company

In MobiClocks, companies represent your organization's subcontractors that provide you with a workforce. Therefore, each employee must be assigned to a company. Additionally, each company can have its pay rates and a number of additional settings that are applied to company employees.

Some of MobiClocks integrations use the term "vendor," which is equivalent to the term "company" in MobiClocks. Therefore, when setting up the integration, the vendor entity in the integration needs to be mapped to the company entity in MobiClocks.

See Companies for more details.

Cost code

A cost code is an identifier used to differentiate between different types of work that have been completed by employees. Cost codes help categorize the accomplished work and calculate its cost and are, therefore, an essential part of payroll generation. Each cost code has a unique identifying code and a description to characterize the type of work ("welding," for example).

Cost codes are set up for each individual job site and are applied to timelogs that have been logged under that job site. You can also create standard cost codes that are shared across all job sites in your environment.

See Cost coding to learn more.

Face liveness

Face liveness detection is a technique used to establish whether the source of a biometric sample comes from a fake representation or from a live human being. MobiClocks uses this technique when analyzing punch photos of employees to make sure that the photo is taken from a live human being. The output is a liveness percentage that is assigned to the photo, and there is a face liveness check setting that you can use to specify a face liveness threshold below which the photo is qualified as face spoofing.

Face recognition

Each time employees punch through the Personal App or Kiosk App, they are asked to take a photo of themselves, which is then compared with all the employee photos in the system to match the newly taken photo with one in the system and identify the employee. In order for the match to happen, the similarity needs to be above the threshold defined by the face recognition algorithm.

Geofence

Each job site has an address, but, in order to determine if an employee is within the boundaries of the job site, you need to define those boundaries. You can achieve this using the geofence zones feature, creating specific areas on the map and marking them as the job site's geofence zones. As a result, you can see whether the employee has made a punch within or beyond the job site's geofence zone. Additionally, you can allow employees to punch only from within the geofence zone.

See Job site settings for more information.

Job site

In MobiClocks, a job site refers to the physical location where employee activities take place. In case of the construction industry, job sites are the construction sites where construction work occurs.

In MobiClocks, each job site has its distinct set of settings and rules that are applied to the work accomplished at the site. The following is a list of the key job site attributes:

A unique ID (code) to identify the job site
A list of employees assigned to the site
Cost codes specific to that job site
A working hours policy that specifies the working hours of the job site
Various rules and settings applied to the employees of the site
Pay classes

Learn more in Job sites.

Lunch policy

The lunch policy feature is used to account for the time that employees spend on a lunch break during the day. You can define a lunch policy duration for each job site as well as for each individual employee if needed. Lunch Policy is applied, either manually or automatically, to a timelog and subtracts the defined lunch policy duration from the timelog duration.

Module

In MobiClocks, the core entities of your environment, such as timelogs, employees, companies, cost codes, and others, are referred to as modules.

Organization unit

Organization unit is an optional entity in MobiClocks and is activated only if your MobiClocks environment is converted to an enterprise structure. Being converted to an enterprise structure means that your organization consists of separate divisions (organization or business units). As a result, entities such as job sites, employees, companies, and so on, are all assigned to their respective organization units. Therefore, whether you need this feature or not will depend on the structure of your organization.

Learn more in Organization units.

Pay ID

Apart from regular work, employees can sometimes work overtime, work during the weekend, ask for a day off due to sickness, or go on a paid vacation. So, pay IDs are used to account for different circumstances under which an employee has accomplished the work or has been absent. Further on, pay IDs can be used to set different pay rates for each case.

There are two types of Pay IDs:

General. General pay IDs include regular work, overtime work, holiday work, and so on.
Leave. Leave pay IDs indicate leave request reasons such as vacation, bereavement, excused, and so on.

Learn more in Pay ID.

Payroll

Apart from tracking the accomplished work, you can use your MobiClocks data for calculating employee payroll. The payroll module generates payroll reports for the specified period of time (the previous week, for example) based on the timelogs for that period and cost codes attached to those timelogs. As a result, the system generates payroll reports that can then be processed by accounting, payroll, or other specialized software.

In MobiClocks, you can either download payroll data as a file (a number of report formats suitable for different accounting systems are available) to then import it to third-party software or directly send it to your accounting system if it's among MobiClocks integrations.

Learn more in Payroll.

Punch

When employees enter a job site, they are supposed to punch in (similar to check in) through their Personal App or Kiosk App at the job site to indicate that they have arrived at the job site and start logging their work progress. Similarly, when employees finish their work at the job site (or they finish a particular type of job and need to proceed to another job), they punch out. Punching through the Web App is possible as well, but the above-mentioned scenarios are the most common use cases.

All the punch information is added to the daily timelog, which is then used to track the amount of accomplished work. Throughout this documentation, you will encounter the terms punch in, punch out, or simply punch if the type of punch is not important.

Timelog

Timelog is one of the essential modules in MobiClocks through which employee time management takes place. Several other modules, such as cost coding or payroll operate based on timelog data. In short, a timelog indicates the time and date an employee has worked at a given job site (or the reason the employee has been absent) with a relevant pay ID attached to it. Therefore, all the timelogs are grouped by the job site they have been logged at. Lastly, the timelog's date and time are recorded through employee punch in and punch out.