Online Time Clock for Amusement Parks (In-Depth Post)
Amusement Parks and theme parks are a whirlwind of activity. From open to close, park hours are filled with working the front gates, issuing tickets and passes, managing a high volume of people, and maintaining safety, cleanliness, and inventory standards. There’s a lot of work that goes into ensuring family fun for your guests, and your team members might understandably struggle with maintaining this around the clock.
At least, that’s how it is if they don’t have help. Not help from you as an administrator, and not necessarily help from fellow staff members, but help from something that never wavers, is always accurate, and won’t get overwhelmed by a large crowd or upset family yelling in their face. We’re talking about help from a time & attendance software designed to help amusement, theme, and water park attendants juggle their wide variety of tasks, all in one.
There are three main attributes that we think a high-quality time clock should have:
- Employee Accountability. Any feature included should help encourage team members to make the most of their time while on the clock and also save time when it comes to sending reminders or keeping people on task.
- Design Simplicity. There’s a real problem some time tracking software options have where they overload on features and end up creating a software that’s difficult for newcomers to learn and use. That’s precisely what we want to avoid. Your amusement park workers should be able to easily understand the software, and easily make use of it in between helping park visitors.
- Payroll Streamlining. Lastly, time tracking software should make it easy to handle the end of each pay period, either through integrations or a built-in system for handling billing, invoicing, and payments.
Now, without further ado, let’s go into our top picks of software – and hopefully introduce you to one that sounds like a fit for your business.
Options for Online Time Clock for Amusement Parks
1. Buddy Punch
Kicking off our list of time clock software for amusement parks, we have our very own Buddy Punch. We first began to develop this software after deciding to make the switch from manual timesheets to digital time tracking and being disappointed with the options on the market.
So, we set off to make our own tool.
With features such as Job Codes, Drag & Drop Scheduling, Shift Trades & Covers, Managers Delegation, Notifications, Overtime Calculations, PTO Management, Customizable Reports, a Built-In Payroll System, and more – Buddy Punch gives amusement park owners everything they need to optimize their operations.
Now let’s dive into each of these features to elaborate on how they’re useful when it comes to running an amusement park.
Note: If you’d rather get a hands-on feel for Buddy Punch, you can start a 14-day trial by clicking here.
Job Codes
The Job Codes feature gives amusement park managers a greater degree of transparency in their park. With this, you can create custom job codes for your employee tasks (running group events, upselling season passes, roller coaster maintenance, etc.) When your team members clock in, they’ll be able to choose a job code to indicate that they were working on it (and can easily swap between them during their shifts). Then, when you check their timecards, you’ll get a complete overview of what they’ve been doing.
Drag & Drop Scheduling
Buddy Punch’s Drag and Drop Shift Scheduling lets you overhaul your shift management. Rather than going through a typically painful process, you can easily create a shift by simply clicking on an empty space in Buddy Punch’s user interface, then drag and drop as needed until you’ve created your ideal schedule. Once satisfied, you can publish your shift – which will send a notification to all of your employees.
Shift Trades & Covers
The Shift Trades feature allows an employee with granted permissions (or manager or administrator) to initiate a shift trade with another employee. Meanwhile the covers feature lets employees swoop in and take over for a shift that one of your team members is no longer able to work. Big theme parks like Universal Orlando or Disney Parks don’t run thanks to one person handling everything – it’s a team effort, and features like this are what put the magic in a magic kingdom.
Managers Delegation
The managers delegation allows you to put employees in a position of power over each other in order to help delegate the management and verification of certain tasks. This doesn’t have to be accompanied by a real-world promotion – Manager is simply a title in Buddy Punch that gives one employee “View” or “Approval” status over the employees assigned to them.
With View Status, they’ll be able to see what team members are putting on their timecard. With Approval status, they’ll be able to make edits. (Was Julie really onsite from 8-830? Wasn’t it Becca that was handing out wristbands and routing people towards the animal kingdom at 12:15, not Ben?). This feature lets you focus more on administrative tasks (memberships, subscribers, advertisements, etc.)
Notifications
The Notifications feature has an indirect (but positive) impact on your workforce. With this, your team members and administrators will receive alerts for major events (punch change emails, time card approval status changes, PTO changes, and more) which will alert them whenever something needs their attention. The inverse of this is employees knowing that if they aren’t being alerted, they can focus on whatever task they’re currently completing, whether that be checking lines for thrill rides or investigating the latest additions to walt disney world resort to see if your business can borrow from their strategy.
Overtime Calculations
The Overtime Calculations feature lets you choose from more than a dozen different overtime types to determine how your overtime (regular, overtime, and double overtime) pay will be calculated. If you ever need us to add another type, don’t hesitate to reach out and we’ll get it added.
PTO Management
Buddy Punch’s PTO Management lets you overhaul a normally tedious system. In addition to having the most common types of paid leave built in (Personal, Holiday, Vacation, etc.) Buddy Punch lets you create custom PTO types at will. But it gets even better. You can also enable a self-service approach to PTO, meaning that when employees put in a leave request, instead of you having to approve or deny it, they’ll be automatically approved. With this, business owners can spend less time managing sick leave, more time setting up special events or figuring out a strategy to cut down on wait times.
Customizable Reports
Buddy Punch offers a wide range of customizable reports you can generate on demand to get a closer look at the numbers and data driving your business. This sort of step can be critical to making changes at your amusement park that promote profitability and longevity, and Buddy Punch makes it simple to parse through that data. Click here to view the various different types of reports Buddy Punch can generate (as Excel CSVs or Adobe PDFs)
Built-In Payroll System
Buddy Punch takes a normally tedious process (processing payroll) and makes it easy with the Built-In Payroll System. This feature, which you can add to any of Buddy Punch’s paid plans, lets you manage payroll from anywhere, gives you accurate and in-depth employee data, and cuts down on errors and time. You can read more about this system here.
Buddy Punch Offers More to Amusement Park Managers
So far, we’ve highlighted a select few features – but there’s more to consider with Buddy Punch. We have a wide variety of options that you can enable or disable depending on your personal style, such as:
- PTO Accruals
- Punch Limiting
- Kiosk Functionality
- Time Card Approvals
- Multiple Punch and Login Options
- Adding, Editing, or Deleting Punches
- And so much more. (Click here to explore our comprehensive feature list.)
There’s also our Blog Section to consider, which is consistently updated with new information and strategies for workforce management. There’s also our Help Doc Center which contains useful articles on how to best utilize Buddy Punch, and our Support Desk, where you can get in direct contact with our team to ask questions.
Buddy Punch works on any device with an internet connection, including Desktops, Smartphones (iOS or Android), and tablets. You can book a one-on-one personalized demo here.
Buddy Punch’s Online Reviews
As of this post’s writing date, Buddy Punch has 4.8 out of 5 stars and 731 reviews on Capterra.
Below, we’ll list just a few reviews that speak to Buddy Punch’s impact on workforce management. (Click here to explore the full list of reviews.)
“The system is easy to use and our employees can operate it on their cell phones so we have more accurate time keeping as they travel to several properties and do many different types of projects in a day. The system allowed us to be able to add all the properties along with all project tasks so they simply have to just punch the buttons as opposed to having to type it all in themselves.
Click here to read the full review.
“Buddy Punch is easy to use and user friendly for all ages, I clock in and out using buddy punch daily. I can go back and change my time if need, it shows when you have PTO, the exact time you clock in and out down to the second. I can clock in from my phone, laptop or desktop! Very convenient”
Click here to read the full review.
“There are several things I really enjoy about this software. It is incredibly intuitive and easy to learn. Hours are logged by IP address and makes use of integrated cameras. Review of past pay periods is simple. Requesting time off is easy.”
Click here to read the full review.
“I will say I truly do like working with Buddy Punch. Any time I have an issue, its immediately fixed and it seems like Buddy Punch is constantly taking customers issues and using those to fix the system overall. Every business is going to have issues, it’s a matter of fixing them and improving”
Click here to read the full review.
As these reviewers have noted, Buddy Punch is easy to use, user-friendly, and comes with fast-acting customer support.
Try Buddy Punch for Free
If you feel that Buddy Punch might be the right fit for your amusement park management, sign up for a 14-day free trial. You can also book a one-on-one demo, or view a pre-recorded demo video.
2. Findmyshift
FindmyShift is a time tracking app with a wide variety of features including:
- Staff Scheduling
- Time and Attendance
- Reporting and Payroll
- Reminders and Notifications
- Time Off Management
As of this post’s writing, FindmyShift has a rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars, based on 744 reviews. Here’s what one of its users had to say about this tool:
“It’s simple. It achieves what I was trying to do in a very clunky spreadsheet or database. It gives us reports that help us make sure we are meeting minimum and maximum shift durations, and our total weekly hours. No other scheduling software addressed our needs in this way. ”
(Click here to read the full review).
3. Sling
- Employee Scheduling
- Time Clock
- Task Management
- Labor Costs
- Multiple Work Locations
- Communication
- Integrations
Sling has 115 reviews and 4.6/5 stars on Capterra (as of this post’s writing date).
“Sling is excellent! I have been using it for several years and it’s getting better every year. I highly recommend it. It allows real time scheduling for team members as well as time off requests, shift notifications and several more options. It’s extremely convenient and easy to use.”
(See the full review here.)
4. Clockify
Some of its key time management features include:
At the time of writing, Clockify has a total of 4295 reviews on Capterra with an average of 4.7 out of 5 stars.
“My overall experience is excellent and it’s a tool I have recommended to all business owners even at the initial stage when it’s a one person business. It was a game changer for me as it allowed me to focus on profit, delegate time consuming tasks and be more efficient.”
Click here to read the full review.
5. DeskTime
At the time of this post’s writing date, DeskTime has a total of 345 reviews on Capterra with an average of 4.5 out of 5 stars. Some of its key features include:
- Automatic Time Tracking
- URL and App Tracking
- Document Title Tracking
- Idle Time Tracking
- Project Time Tracking
- Automatic Screenshots
- Absence Calendar
- Shift Scheduling
- Invoicing
“ It’s a great way for us to track time and productivity. As a remote workforce, that’s very important to my organization. There was some employee pushback, as they felt we were “spying” on them, but that has gone away the longer we use Desktime.”
Choosing the Best Amusement Park Time Tracking Software
While we’ve been able to narrow down the total choices of time tracking software, you’re still going to have to make the choice of which one you think will work best for your business. Luckily, taking a close look at the features offered can help.
For example, if you’re a fan of reminders for your forgetful team members, you might like Findmyshift. If you manage multiple parks, you might Sling and its capabilities for multiple locations.
Otherwise, if all you’re looking for is a high-quality time tracking software that’s easy to use and comes with a responsive support team, you really can’t go wrong with Buddy Punch.
Try Buddy Punch for Free
If you feel that Buddy Punch could be the right fit for your business, sign up for a free trial. You can also book a one-on-one demo, or view a pre-recorded demo video.
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