Jolt is a task and workforce management, with time & attendance, remote (selfie) login, scheduling, and simple tasking tools, from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah; useful for small teams that could leverage frequent communication.
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Novatime (discontinued)
Score 5.6 out of 10
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From Ascentis, NOVAtime was a set of workforce management solutions providing timekeeping, payroll, leave management, and employee scheduling needs. Ascentis was acquired by UKG in March of 2022, and along with NOVAtime, will be discontinued.
Jolt has allowed us to save thousands of dollars in food by identifying issues early. This has been accomplished from both the standpoint of trend analysis and identification of catastrophic failures. Our employees have saves hundreds of hours of labor by not having to write out each individual date label used during the day.
NOVAtime is an excellent choice for employers who need a timekeeping solution with an easy-to-use and understand user interface, great user experience, and great support from the Ascentis user support teams.
Timely reminders of when checklists need to be executed; The team is alerted audibly and visually when checklists are coming due or when they are past due.
Customized text message confirmations when audits are completed/incomplete; This feedback closes the loop with the Management Team confirming the status of the required daily checklists/audits.
Documented proof of completion through photos; Checklist questions/items can be setup to require photos to be taken as visual evidence that a task was completed. This adds a check-and-balance feature that deters pencil whipping tasks and eases the burden on the Management Team when it comes to auditing compliance and driving accountability.
Remote printing from any device setup with Jolt; We have iPads throughout the restaurant communicating real-time information with various functions within the store. It is very convenient when a Team Member in one department can print on the device in front of them, while calling out to another Team Member to retrieve labels from the printer when on their way to assist with a job function.
It has some really nice scheduling features that allow managers to see the difference between hours expected to work and actual hours worked as well as overtime, absences, and non-scheduled shifts.
There are easy ways you can transfer a manager's caseload/employees to another manager temporarily if that person is going to be out of the office for an extended period of time without giving away too much personal information - just what would be needed for payroll or time off requests (this can be customized by your administrator).
The program itself can be customized in many different ways to meet the needs of the company/organization that it is working with.
The charts/graphs on the new homepage are somewhat helpful and link to useful information.
Development Sprints: They are always improving, but the speed to the deployment of features could be faster.
Customization: The Dashboard is solid, but being able to brand the back end to look more like my company would help me gain buy-in from all department heads and help integrate Jolt further into the company.
Jolt is very user friendly and offers a lot of solutions to my companies needs. If it offered a Payroll piece and a Point of Sale piece it would make it a complete system that would solve 99% of my companies needs.
The overall satisfaction within the organization has been luke warm, at best. The software may be more conducive for a hospital but I believe there is a reason why we are the lone baseball team utilizing it.
The system itself is very user friendly and every one of our team members is able to use it easily. The only difficulty that we have occasionally run into is a lack of connectivity between the Bluetooth printer and the iPAD. There are only two or three of us on staff that are well versed enough with the product to be able to fix it when there is this kind of issue.
On the employee's side of things, Novatime is pretty intuitive and fairly easy to use. All they have to do is either press a button to punch in or punch out. If they are entering in their hours, all they have to do is type in the number of hours per day. On the manager's side of things, Novatime is also fairly easy to use. It highlights in red any missed punches and in green any OT that the employee has. There are links on the homepage of the manager's page that will lead them to a list of all their employees' missed punches for a pay period and they can fix them all before payroll is due. Novatime becomes a bit more complicated on the administrator's side. The issues I have run into with Novatime normally come after updates/upgrades to their system. They have been getting better, but the administrator's side is still a bit clunky and takes a while to find what you are looking for. It is not as intuitive as the other sides and takes a bit of computer knowledge to figure it out.
When I have had questions or needed technical support, I have received a very prompt response to my emails. The answers are concise and if there are instructions they are easy to follow and implement. All interactions I have had with the Jolt team have been a very positive experience.
The program itself can be customized in many different ways to meet the needs of the company/organization that it is working with. The charts/graphs on the new homepage are somewhat helpful and link to useful information. It has some really nice scheduling features that allow managers to see the difference between hours expected to work and actual hours worked as well as overtime, absences, and non-scheduled shifts. Processing payroll is quite simple. PTO request off is straightforward.
Before this, we used Namely for our training and Paper for Cleaning Lists. Moving to digital was difficult at first but has been well worth the effort put in the beginning. With our other system, there was no one to reach out to for help. Any time I have a question, our Jolt Representative will hop on a call and assist us in fixing the issue, or just to talk through how we can improve what we already have!
They actually ended up joining forces to make one platform for all timekeeping solutions. With Novatime and all other modules we have from Ascentis, everything flows very easily.
Increased accountability and cohesiveness of how all staff members are expected to clean our facility has allowed our facility to decrease the number of respiratory illness and communicable diseases that are passed around our dog pack. We feel this is a direct result of everyone being required to do jobs to the same cleaning standards and or ability to track when employees are not meeting that standard.
Barcode scanning has increased our ability to trust employees are getting the jobs done independently thus reducing the need for continual management oversight. We've been able to reduce the number of hours our managers work, allowing them to trust the staff more and utilize Jolt reporting to identify poor performance and spend their time addressing concerns and re-training verses just babysitting the staff on shift.
