As mobile operations become more common across a range of businesses, thanks to the advances of connectivity and Internet of Things, making sure employees are accurately tracked for their time on the job has led to some new difficulties.

At Intuit Inc.’s QuickBooks Connect 2016 event in San Jose, CA, Matt Rissell, CEO of Tsheets.com, sat down with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to discuss the role of time-tracking in modern companies, the struggle against legacy systems and finding unexpected allies in employees.

Time and progress

To begin, Rissell laid out the fundamentals of his business. “TSheets is a time-tracking system designed for small businesses. So let’s say you had 20 employees, and you needed to either schedule the employees out or schedule jobs — TSheets does that portion — and then they need to track time, against projects, customers [and] task service items,” Rissell explained. “So that’s exactly what TSheets does. And then you take that time and you send it to a payroll system like QuickBooks Online Payroll.”

He also shared his perspective on the current state of time-tracking. “Time-tracking in general is an unsolved problem on the globe,” he said. “In the US alone, there are over 2 million small businesses that are still using spreadsheets and paper to track and schedule their employees’ time. But specifically, what Intuit has done is literally the first of its kind. They’ve built a plug-in architecture where TSheets functionality is actually embedded inside of QuickBooks Online. And what that does is actually completely blurs the line between where QuickBooks Online ends and where TSheets begins.”

Rissell noted that this has led to “decentralized data entry, because it’s the employees that are entering the time.”

Employee resources

“One of our largest referral sources, believe it or not, are the actual employees themselves,” Rissell shared. “When they go switch companies, and they have to use a different time-tracking system, they recommend TSheets to their employers.”

Asked about what he sees as the “secret sauce” of his company, Rissell paused for a moment before deciding. “The secret sauce is about relationships, it’s about building a product that works, and then it’s about delivering something that actually matters, that’s valuable,” he declared.

Rissell also offered his thoughts on what TSheets may be able to achieve in the near future. “One of the things we think we can do … [is] get so good at time-tracking and being able to predict when mobile employees want to clock in, what jobs they want to clock into, we think that we can start eliminating even some of their interactions with our product,” he stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of QuickBooks Connect.

*Disclosure: Intuit and other companies sponsor some QuickBooks Connect segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Intuit nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

Photo by SiliconANGLE