Time tracking and call centre monitoring
Hours you can put in front of a client, an auditor or the person who worked them.
Records that stand up when somebody asks where a number came from, collected in a way the people being recorded know about and can see. For a comparable approach to transparent work visibility, see Monitask.
We already have timesheets. Nobody fills them in.The common case
Timesheets fail for a reason that has nothing to do with discipline: they ask somebody to reconstruct a fragmented day at five o'clock on Friday, and the reconstruction is a guess.
What works is capture close to the work, in a form that takes seconds, and a weekly review where the person confirms rather than recalls. The entry point matters more than the reporting.
What does not work is making the entry harder in the hope of accuracy. Every second added at that moment is paid for in blank cells.
How is this different from watching people?The question everybody asks
Two things are being confused, and the confusion is the reason this category has the reputation it has.
A record of time against work answers where the hours went. Your client, your auditor and your own margin analysis all need it, and the person who did the work usually wants it too, because it is the evidence their week was full.
A record of a person's activity answers what somebody was doing at eleven o'clock. It is a different thing, it produces a different relationship, and most of the harm attributed to this software comes from the second being sold as the first.
Everything recorded is visible to the person it concerns, in the same detail their manager sees.
Nothing is collected that they have not been told about, and the page on what people see sets out exactly what that is.
Does it take screenshots?
No, and the answer is a policy rather than a gap in the feature list.
Periodic screen capture, keystroke logging and covert collection are the parts of this market that generate the lawsuits, the resignations and the news coverage. They also produce a poor record: a screenshot shows an application, not whether the work was good, and it collects a great deal that has nothing to do with the employer.
Screen capture, keystroke logging and any collection the person has not been told about are not offered and will not be built. If that is what you need, we are the wrong supplier and it is better established now than in month three.
We are an agency. The question is billable, not hours.One of four
Correct, and it is why a general time tracker disappoints agencies. What you need is an hour attached to a client, a project and a rate, with the write-off visible before the invoice rather than after it.
We are on sites. Nobody has a laptop open.
Then the entry point is a phone at a gate or a tablet in a site office, hours attach to a site and a cost code, and the records have to be the kind a payroll audit accepts.
We hire virtual assistants and we have never met them.
Then the problem is trust between two people, and the wrong answer is surveillance. What settles it is evidence the assistant produces and can see, which is a different arrangement with a different effect on how long they stay.
Our engineers will not fill anything in.
They will fill in something that takes four seconds and matches how the day actually went, and finance needs the split between what is capitalised and what is expensed regardless of anybody's preferences.
We run a call centre. Recording is the requirement.The other half of this site
Recording is straightforward and consent is not. Which parties must be told, and whether the customer's consent is required, depends on where the customer is rather than where you are, and in the United States that varies by state.
Getting this wrong is not a compliance finding; it is a statute with a private right of action in several places.
What call centre monitoring involves →
Agents see which of their calls were recorded, which were scored, and the score with its reasoning.
Announcement of recording to the caller is configured per jurisdiction and the configuration is auditable.
What does it cost?
Pricing depends on the product and configuration; use the pricing page to review the current published information.
Where a figure has not been confirmed for publication it is shown as outstanding rather than estimated, here and on every page.
Who is behind this?
BuzbyTime is an independent resource about transparent time tracking, call-centre monitoring, and the records managers use to explain hours and work.
What happens if we talk to you?
A walkthrough of the actual product against your actual situation, and an honest answer about whether it fits. If your requirement is covert collection, or if a spreadsheet would serve you better, we will say so in the first conversation rather than the third.
Does anybody actually get value from this, or is it a tax?Worth asking early
Both, and which one depends entirely on what the data is used for.
Used to answer where hours went, it settles invoice disputes, shows which accounts are unprofitable, evidences a payroll audit and makes the case for hiring. Those are real and they accrue to the business.
Used to compare people, it produces attribution that flatters the person recording it, and every number downstream becomes unreliable. The organisation then has a reporting system it cannot trust and a team that resents it.
The determining choice is made in the first month and is almost never revisited, which is why it is worth making deliberately.
Why should a supplier tell us what it will not sell us?The reason this site reads oddly
Because in this market the thing a buyer most needs to establish is what a supplier will do when nobody is looking, and a feature list cannot answer that.
Every capability described on this site is one the person being recorded is told about. Where a page describes something that touches a legal obligation, it names the obligation and says the page is not advice. Where a claim about this product has not been confirmed for publication, the page shows the gap rather than filling it.
That is unusual on a site of this kind and it is the whole of the position: the argument for buying from us is the same as the argument for how the software behaves.
This address used to be a burger restaurantAn honest note
It did, and that business is unconnected to this one. Nothing from it is reproduced here and no traffic is redirected to it, because sending people from a domain now used for something else to somebody's operating business implies a relationship that does not exist.
If you arrived looking for a hamburger, our apologies for the disappointment.
What this software cannot tell you
Whether the work was any good. Whether an hour recorded against a task was well spent. Whether somebody thinking at a window was working or not.
A time record answers where hours were allocated. Anything sold as measuring productivity is measuring activity and calling it something else, and the distance between the two is where this category earns its reputation.
Knowing what an instrument does not measure is the difference between using it and being used by it.
Tool shortlists
Three practical software shortlists
Best employee monitoring tools
Transparent monitoring and workforce visibility options compared.
Best time tracking tools
Tools for reliable hours, client billing and usable reporting.
Best call-centre workforce tools
Workforce visibility, scheduling and contact-centre platforms.