Sports fans devour statistics, no matter how far afield the data goes.

How many cows does it take to make all the footballs the NFL goes through in a season? What’s the new midfielder’s passing rate? How many possible plays are there in a baseball game? The thirst for data inspired an entire form of statistical analysis called Sabermetrics, which drove the Oakland Athletics’ remarkable 2002 season and later inspired the Academy Award-nominated movie “Moneyball.”

But team performance isn’t the only thing sports data illustrates; it’s also a window into what some athletes earn. For example, the recent World Cup winning U.S. women’s soccer team has been embroiled in a debate over pay equity in recent months. The debate comes on the heels of an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) rule revising the EEO-1 report, which requires employers with 100 or more employees to report a range of salary data, broken down by gender race and ethnicity to the EEOC.

The rule was the result of a six-year process begun by the EEOC in 2010, along with the National Academy of Sciences and a group of business representative and human resources professionals.

Snapshot: How Statistics Drive Public Debate …

In April, a lawsuit filed by the National Women’s Law Center, who were joined by the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, resulted in a ruling requiring the reporting rule to be enforced. Organizations like the NWLC believe the data collection will boost efforts to shrink a gender wage gap estimated to leave U.S. women earning 80 cents for every dollar earned by male colleagues across 97% of occupations in 2018 – a gap that is bigger for women of color and doubles when employment gaps are factored in.

A 2018 study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research that compared women’s wages over a 15-year period to include the effect of time spent out of the workforce while caring for children or other family members, found women earned only 49 cents for every dollar earned by male colleagues.

However, the reporting requirement is opposed by business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who questioned its effectiveness and said it would impose “a massive recordkeeping burden.” In a statement about the EEO-1 from 2016, the group said the total hourly burden for employers filing the EEO-1 report would total well over 200,000 hours each year.

“Not only is it a massive recordkeeping burden—3,360 cells in a spreadsheet—but amassing that data won’t even help EEOC in fighting pay discrimination.” – U.S. Chamber of Commerce

…And What That Debate Means For Employment Pros

In July, the EEOC opened a web-based portal to facilitate reporting of the additional data, which includes hours worked and pay information from W-2 forms sorted by race, ethnicity and sex, for calendar years 2017 and 2018.

The rule applies to any employer, including federal contractors, who had at least 100 employees during an employer-selected “snapshot” payroll period in either calendar year, and is expected to cover over 63 million employees.

Additional information, including a sample data collection form and an instruction booklet, can be found on the EEOC’s website.

While good news for the pay equity effort, new government reporting requirements – no matter what the goal – don’t always generate the same enthusiasm that Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill showed onscreen in Moneyball.

Reporting Requirements Multiply for Franchises and other Multi-Location Businesses

Although additional compliance reporting can create a headache for businesses of any type, for certain types of businesses the difficulties can be especially daunting.

Take staffing agencies, franchises, health care centers and other multi-location businesses: The burdens associated with reporting requirements are multiplied by the challenges of trying to create centralized reports from multiple sources.

Whether it’s the task of tracking hours worked for compliance with the Affordable Care Act, or the detailed payroll-based journaling (PBJ) time and attendance accounting the ACA requires of nursing homes and health care facilities, each new reporting requirement can create its own set of challenges.

For staffing agencies managing employees at multiple locations, at varying rates of pay, for varying periods of time, data can be a constantly moving target. Construction, health care and hospitality businesses also have to manage multi-vendor, project-based reporting for a variety of needs, including the detailed reporting required for compliance on government contract work.

In particular, the relationship between an employer and staffing agencies presents unique challenges. Employers – particularly who work with more than one agency – have to manage both their own employees and the agency’s employees. If they’re relying on disparaging systems, or worse, trying to do it manually? The challenge can become impossible.

Meanwhile, staffing agencies need some sort of system to track both job opportunities for their staff and the needs of the employers their staffers may be working for. They also often need help with invoicing and people tracking.

The good news is that the right system can smooth the process for all of your compliance reporting while also providing transparency into business data that can do even more.

A centralized system of data collection and reporting capability is more than a compliance tool – it’s a tool for growing your business.

Lorenzo Herrera, business development executive with BaronHR, a Southern, Calif.-based staffing company, says the ability to produce a wide range of custom reporting for clients is a key differentiator that has contributed to the company’s growth.

“Baron has had huge growth and some of that can be attributed to the fact that Timerack allowed us to grow,” says Herrera.

Timerack software has allowed BaronHR to create reports around different KPIs for different industries, from reporting that helps clients control overtime costs to historical data that can be used for forecasting.

With a strong footprint in the third-party logistics industry, as well as food manufacturing and hospitality, BaronHR has been able to offer custom reports in a variety of formats that integrate with its clients’ systems, Herrera said.

Among other requests, Herrera said Timerack software has enabled BaronHR to create reporting that makes it easy for food manufacturing clients to create and track incentive programs around attendance and enabled clients in the 3PL space to increase their profit margins with analytics that let them factor warehouse space availability into their labor planning.

“I consider it a value-added service,” said Herrera. “It really creates a wow factor. Baron has had huge growth and some of that can be attributed to the fact that Timerack allowed us to grow.”

That’s by design. Timerack’s time and attendance software was built to meet the multi-location, multi-vendor challenges of industries like staffing, hospitality and healthcare.

It evolves, too – one of the common challenges faced by staffing professionals are fill rates taking too much time. Vendor management systems are increasingly being adopted by players in the staffing industry. “It would definitely be a game changer,” said Herrera about Timerack making such a move. “Not only with fill ratios, but other KPI’s such as turnover. It would also assist in the reconciliation process between Timerack and other applicant tracking systems used.”

Multi-Location, Multi-Vendor, Multi-Project Reporting Solutions

With a wide – and growing – array of customizable features, a successful platform provides comprehensive visibility and consolidated reporting designed to streamline processes and eliminate the risks created by inconsistent or incomplete reporting across job sites, locations and vendors. Also, it’s ideal to have solutions that can simplify the process of managing temporary or seasonal employees, and it can do it in a way that shares visibility with your vendors.

Increased visibility into your data is more than a compliance solution, it’s an opportunity to innovate, brainstorm and identify new paths for growth and improvement.

So to find the right platform, it’s helpful to know exactly what you’re looking for to turn unwieldy data into consolidated reporting that saves time, cut costs and cures compliance headaches in a few clicks. Here’s a checklist of some of the things franchises, staffing agencies, construction firms, hotel chains and other multi-site clients need from their software platform:

  • Review and manage overtime costs by location, by project, by client
  • Drill down into position-specific costs
  • Calculate FTEs for ACA compliance
  • Manage costs by project or job site
  • Calculate costs for DCAA compliance
  • Capture salary and wage information for EEOC reporting
  • Track hours by location and position for PBJ reporting
  • Streamline seasonal scheduling
  • Create consistent tracking and reporting practices across multiple vendors or locations
  • Provide client visibility into billed hours
  • Streamline invoice tracking
  • Manage HR tasks like onboarding, benefits, performance reviews, workers’ comp and applicant tracking

With the right platform in place, you can turn unwieldy data into consolidated reporting that saves time, cut costs and cures compliance headaches in a few clicks.

Because ultimately, the right platform can give you what any pitcher, linebacker or hardworking goalie wants – a level playing field.

Time and Attendance Expertise is Just the Beginning

If you’d like help finding your path forward, we can help. Timerack clients have the added benefit of additional solutions provided by our partner companies. Call us or click on the link below to learn more about our all-in-one solutions for consolidated time and attendance reporting, vendor management and HR tools.