Introduction Hubstaff Virtual Assistant Jobs

When choosing a time monitoring tool, it is important to understand the various types of tools out there. Tools like Mavenlink, Wrike, and Zoho Projects all feature robust time tracking features for professional services businesses. On the other hand, the time monitoring features in such tools are available only within bigger project management (PM) suites. As a result, you are paying much more money for things like file storage, in-app chat, progress reports, and change administration. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you will discover pure play time monitoring tools such as Hubstaff (which starts at $5 per month per user) and TSheets, our Editors’ Choice instrument for time tracking. Hubstaff Virtual Assistant Jobs

Attributes and Utilization

Hubstaff’s user interface (UI) was created with an attractive left-rail blue navigation bar that leaves plenty of room on the side of your display for data entry and analysis. When you log into the system, you’ll be taken to the main dashboard, which provides you an summary of how many hours your employees have worked this day and the number of hours they’ve worked over the past seven days. You will also find a list of every member, their latest tasks, and how active they’ve been over the past week. This is a strong PM data visualization which lets you instantly differentiate between workhorses and do-nothings, and it immediately calls to focus projects which are getting more than enough focus and projects that are being neglected.

There are two ways to put in time in Hubstaff: You are able to build manual timesheets with past hours worked, or you can use the stopwatch feature on Hubstaff’s native desktop app. With the timesheet feature, you log in your hours since you probably did with pen and paper during the analog age of time monitoring. Basically, if you work your shift, you add the time to your timesheet, and you also sign off on it. This is a pretty standard procedure of tracking time. Unfortunately, because Hubstaff doesn’t let you add future time, you can’t use the platform for a shift organizer. Administrators can let users manually edit previously submitted timesheets, and they can induce users to require a reason to ensure they’re really adding hours that they worked. Admins can also set the system up to remind users to begin monitoring time should they have not clocked into the machine in a little while.

The second, and most frustrating, way of monitoring time in Hubstaff is by using the stopwatch feature. In every solution we analyzed, this element can be found within the boundaries of your internet browserevery alternative that is, except for Hubstaff. With Hubstaff, you are required to download a native desktop application that lives within a separate window. In it, you can choose your job, press Start, along with your timer will start counting. When you are done, your action and your screenshots will be sent to the main hub. The native app will take a picture at random intervals of up to three shots per hour based on how often the admin wants to spy on workers. Screenshots can be partly fuzzy to not capture sensitive information on every catch, but a lot of the display is left unsullied you’ll still get a feeling of if the screen is really on work-related or play-related content. This can be an annoyingly complex and complicated means to manually monitor time, particularly if you’re jumping from task to task throughout the day. Hubstaff must discover a way to add the stopwatch and screengrab components to the cloud-based architecture to simplify ease of use.

Tracking time in real-time on Hubstaff’s Android and iOS apps is precisely the same as it’s on the desktop program. The mobile programs let admins monitor motions via GPS monitoring. This provides you an overview of how much movement was performed by your employee by capturing location data at distinct stages.

The Schedules tab enables you to assign times and dates for employees to work. You can set a minimum number of hours to operate, a lunch break interval, and you can allow it to be a recurring change. The program’s reporting applications is horribly basic: You’ll receive access to weekly, daily, project, and member view reports as well as a”custom” report that allows you filter information from the aforementioned reports. In comparison to the PM solutions within this class, Hubstaff’s coverage is utterly embarrassing consequently, if your goal is to learn and evolve based on if and how your employees handle time, you would be better off working using Zoho Projects, our Editors’ Choice for PM.

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Admins receive notifications once they’ve reached weekly staffing and budget limitations. Invoices are automatically calculated and created depending on the time each employee worked, as well as their associated pay rate. It is possible to set up automatic payroll through PayPal, which enables you to automate payments based on time tracked inside the application. Remember: Users don’t have to send time for acceptance, so automatic payments will be made whether workers were right or wrong concerning the amount of hours they worked. There is not any reminder for supervisors to double-check every timesheet ahead of automatic payments move out thus, if you are worried about making bogus payments, then it is possible to place PayPal payments to guide. Hubstaff Virtual Assistant Jobs

Cost And Alternatives

Hubstaff has been built to give you Big Brother-level oversight into when employees are working, what they’re doing while they work, and what you really want to cover them as soon as the work is done. The Basic $5-per-month program gives you access to simple time monitoring tools, an employee payment schedule manager, 24/7 support, and user settings that may be managed in an employee-by-employee basis. Moreover, this plan lets you keep tabs on whether or not your employees are operating by allowing you record screenshots while they work in addition to monitor keyboard and mouse activity during shifts. Of the five tools we’ve analyzed, Hubstaff is the only instrument which provided this level of insight into the way that workers are progressing. Although keyboard and screen monitoring are helpful (albeit over-reaching) features for a change monitor, Hubstaff’s implementation leaves much to be desired (more about this later).

The $9-per-user-per-month Premium plan includes all you’ll find in the Basic program, but you’ll also get access to Hubstaff’s application programming interface (API) to integrate the application with other third party applications. The Premium bundle also has a lightweight schedulingtool that gives administrators the capability to assign shifts and assign tasks from within the console. Premium customers may also use the tool to create invoices and create PayPal payments automatically. Clients that pay yearly will get two months free (for both price tiers).

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Compared to TSheets, its closest competitor in our roundup, Hubstaff is fairly priced, especially given the added tracking features that are unavailable in competitive resources. TSheets offers a basic free accounts, in addition to a $4-per-user-per-month account that costs a $16 base fee a month for groups with fewer than 100 users, and a $80 foundation fee monthly for groups with more than a hundred users. The base fee, which Hubstaff does not charge, makes TSheets marginally more expensive than Hubstaff, even at Hubstaff’s Premium level.

If you’re more interested in these hulky PM alternatives, then you’ll want to pony up a bit more money. Mavenlink’s cheapest plan that includes time tracking prices $39 per user per month. Zoho’s cheapest time tracking plan is $25 per month for an unlimited number of users (that is a pretty good deal if you want all of the excess PM attributes ). Wrike’s lowest time tracking plan costs $24.80 per user per month.

What Should Be Added

Editor’s note: Since our first review of Hubstaff, the company has released a major upgrade in late 2018 that specifically addressed specific feature weaknesses or omissions, such as adding a web timer, fleshing out reporting options, and adding activity levels and screen monitoring. We are going to be testing these features shortly and you’ll see the results in an upcoming update to this review.

Aside from its draconian screengrab and keystroke monitoring, Hubstaff doesn’t do an excellent job allowing for deeper change oversight. For example, Hubstaff doesn’t allow advanced tracking. If you operate a trucking business and you’re less concerned about the number of hours each trucker drove than the distance driven, then there is no way to manage this in Hubstaff. Users can add notes to a empty text field, but that data will not be mixed into reports. This means that you can not use it to learn about who is functioning, how they are working, and what they are producing (other than the number of hours tracked). TSheets not only provides you this choice, it gives you the ability to create six extra customizable advanced monitoring fields. You can also add a question for every clock-out (i.e.,”Was there an incident? Yes. No.”) And the system forces the consumer to reply to the queries at the end of each change or else they won’t have the ability to clock out.

As hardcore as Hubstaff is all about monitoring work, the application does not allow for IP address restrictions, which means your employees can say they are working from the workplace but they can actually be operating from a cruise boat in the Bahamas (unless they are using the mobile app to monitor time). This is a standard feature that’s available in virtually every other instrument we tested. Hubstaff also doesn’t enable admins to need users to snap a photograph when they report to work. I suppose it is overkill to generate someone take a selfie right before you start recording their screen and tracking their keystrokes, but TSheets enables you to place this as a requirement (which makes sense, especially if you’re tracking tasks done out of a computer, like retail, construction, or amusement work). The software also doesn’t allow users clock via a telephone call, which can be a component TSheets and other service providers make available for workers who do not have a smartphone.

Monitoring Employee Work

We have touched on how some of Hubstaff’s more Big Brother-like attributes factor into time monitoring. But the platform also offers a lot of the hallmarks of employee monitoring tools. Hubstaff’s employee monitoring attributes include keystroke logging, URL and application monitoring, GPS and location tracking, and activity screenshots.

As soon as you set your users and they download the timer app onto their server, the desktop program not only tracks time but will take screenshots randomly or at custom intervals, for example three screenshots per minute. This applies not just to the user’s most important screen but any attached monitors too. Hubstaff doesn’t log keys however, it will monitor the activity provided via the mouse and computer keyboard, giving companies a calculation of just how busy the employee is. This data all winds up on the Hubstaff dashboard in the Activity tab. This is where you can then select an individual in the drop-down menu to view their screenshots correlated with action data.

If it comes to program and URL tracking, Hubstaff goes beyond just tracking time to learn what websites and apps an employee visited or opened and how long they were there. The Reports section may then run custom queries on vectors such as app usage mapped against time and activity. Hubstaff integrates with project and job management tools such as Asana and Trello to filter reports by specific tasks or projects to track productivity.

One unique employee tracking feature offered is GPS location tracking through Hubstaff’s mobile app. While the mobile app can not take screenshots or capture mobile app and site activity, it allows you to monitor and log place for workers working in the area. While the thickness of monitoring data and surveillance features can’t measure up to a grid application for example Teramind, our Editors’ Choice for worker tracking, Hubstaff has a helpful choice of attributes for companies that want a little more oversight. Hubstaff Virtual Assistant Jobs

Summary

Hubstaff is an easy-to-administer, feature-rich, time monitoring tool. If you are diligent about monitoring employee behaviour while on the clockthen there is no better program available than Hubstaff. You will have the ability to log screenshots, track keystroke volume, and route moves via GPS tracking.

Unfortunately, if you’re looking for a platform which goes the excess mile to enable customization, atypical data entry, or even a more sophisticated reporting structure, then Hubstaff won’t be right for you. In addition, in case you choose another system, your employees will thank you for not needing them to download a secondary app for tracking time–particularly when you consider that every other instrument we examined makes this possible within the boundaries of their online UI. Hubstaff Virtual Assistant Jobs

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