Which product, and what it does
What does Computime actually do?▼
We record when people start and finish work, work out the hours against your rules, and hand the result to payroll. Around that sit absence management, visitor sign in, fire roll call and door access control. We have been doing it from Leeds since 1989 and we make the clocking terminals as well as the software, which is less common than it sounds.
What is the difference between Syncro Connect and Realtime?▼
They are two separate products, not two tiers of one.
Syncro Connect is cloud based with a mobile app, running in days, priced per employee.
Realtime is installed on your server or our hosted platform, quoted per installation, and goes further: job costing, HR and document management, banked hours and direct Sage Payroll integration. They do not share data, so you pick one rather than starting on Syncro and upgrading.
Which one should we choose?▼
Most businesses want Syncro Connect. Realtime is the answer if you need labour costed against jobs, HR records and documents in the same system, or a direct connection into Sage rather than an export file, or if you would rather the system sat on your own server. If you are unsure, a short call settles it faster than a demo of the wrong one.
What do you not do?▼
We are not a payroll provider: no payslips, no tax, no RTI submissions. We are not an HR platform in the full sense, not an ERP or MES, not a warehouse or transport management system, and not a school MIS. We do not do e-rostering or tachograph analysis, and we do not check anybody’s DBS status. If one of those is what you actually need, we will say so on the first call rather than the third.
Cost and commitment
How much does it cost?▼
Syncro Connect is £2 per employee per month excluding VAT, or £3 with the mobile app. Terminals are a one off from £395. Visitor management is £495 a year and fire roll call £395 a year, both flat rather than per employee. Access control is quoted per site, and Realtime per installation. Everything is set out on the
pricing page, including a calculator.
What is the contract?▼
A three month minimum term and 90 days’ notice to cancel. Annual billing is standard, monthly is available. We would rather put that on the page than let you find it in a document at signing. The free trial, by contrast, commits you to nothing and does not ask for a card.
Is there a minimum number of employees?▼
No. We have customers with five people and customers with several thousand. Small businesses often get more out of it than large ones, because there is nobody whose job it is to chase timesheets.
Putting it in
How long does it take to get running?▼
Syncro Connect runs in days, and you can start a trial this afternoon. Terminals need installing, which is a visit. Realtime takes longer. The part that takes time on any of them is not the software but your rules: shift patterns, when overtime starts, how breaks and lateness are handled. That is a conversation with whoever runs your payroll and it is worth doing properly, because rules set wrongly produce figures that look plausible and are quietly wrong.
How do staff clock in?▼
At a
terminal using a card, fob, fingerprint, face or palm; on the
mobile app; or in a browser. Most businesses use more than one, because a warehouse and a field team need different things. Which credential suits you depends mostly on what people have on their hands when they arrive, and we will tell you if fingerprint is the wrong choice for your site.
Will our staff object to it?▼
Less than most managers expect, provided two things are true: clocking is quick, and people were told what is happening and why before it appeared. Accurate recording generally works in the workforce’s favour, since the twenty minutes at the end of a shift stops being forgotten. Rollouts that go badly are almost always the ones where a terminal turned up on the wall without warning.
Payroll and data
Does it work with our payroll?▼
Both products export for
Sage, Pegasus and QuickBooks. Realtime also integrates directly with Sage Payroll, meaning the data passes across without anybody handling a file. For anything else, tell us what you run and we will be straight about what will and will not connect rather than promising integration in the abstract.
Where is our data held, and is it GDPR compliant?▼
In UK data centres with access logged and restricted, or on your own server with Realtime. On the second part, compliance is not something software can hand you: you are the data controller, and it is your lawful basis, your privacy notice and your retention decisions. What we provide is UK storage, access records and the ability to delete. If you are using biometrics, those templates are special category data and there is more to put in place. Our
data security page sets it out.
Support
Who do we ring when something goes wrong?▼
Us, in Leeds, on
0113 350 9043, Monday to Friday. Support and updates are included rather than sold as a tier. Because we make the terminals and the software, a problem at the door is one call rather than a manufacturer, a reseller and an installer each suggesting it is one of the others.
Can we try it before committing?▼
Yes. The
free trial needs no card and no commitment, and for a business with several sites the sensible route is to run one site on it and see whether people take to it before rolling it out.
