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Question

Biometric Time tracking to interface with Quickbooks

May 22, 2015 12:59AM PDT

Hey! My name's Evan. I work with an IT management/consulting company. I have recently been tasked with finding a biometric solution for employee time tracking that can be presented to one of our clients. I apologize if I have not provided enough information, and to be honest could probably use some guidance on what questions I should be asking.

The information that I DO have is that the accounting software being used is QuickBooks, and the goal of this change is to streamline/reduce the cost of payroll operations. The company has 25 employees. That there is a preference for facial recognition although, thumb/fingerprinting would also be acceptable. The actual biometric device should connect to the network, and with this there is a preference for a wireless connection.

Thank you for reading this far into the post. If there is further information you would require I can obtain it, but as I said being very inexperienced I could probably use advisement in exactly what information to gather. Thanks again!

Discussion is locked

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Answer
That will do fine.
May 22, 2015 1:02AM PDT

If I was to work on such a project that's a fine start. Later we can get into the gritty details of hardware and more of the IoT areas but you presented it well enough for the folk I know to start talking about it.

--> But here's the rub. Some folk think all this is written, made and ready to ship. Are you thinking you will find this product good to go?
Bob

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Possibilities
May 22, 2015 3:26AM PDT

Thanks for the reply. With QuickBooks being used by so many organizations for accounting I think it's possible that a software\hardware system has been developed to handle this relatively generic task. I do understand that it may not be plug and play, especially when our client actually begins to deal with it hands on and starts to develop requirements specific to their needs.

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Here's why I wrote that.
May 22, 2015 6:28AM PDT

There are how many versions of Quickbooks and then you have versions across countries. It's not standard enough for an off the shelf shrink wrap system. I guess you'll figure this out when they have QB 2006 and the system you find only works with the latest.

Now you'll get to know first hand what most companies do. They won't change that.

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Answer
Maybe you don't know who to call?
May 22, 2015 2:02AM PDT

1. Intuit.
They have an entire legion of developers in and out of house that make such code. They will know if such a product is out there ready to deploy.

2. You mention biometric and such. We know this hardware and installation is not cheap. The usual payroll is usually 1 person in a 25 member company so there will be no reduction in that staff so where's the savings? It's not as if you will remove the payroll department. This is why you may want to not over invest a lot of time in this project.

3. OK, who else to call? The mother of all HID access system companies. HID Global. They have a dizzying array of products for facial, thumb and ID plus another dizzying selection of software. Between Intuit and HID, if there is a ready to use system, they know.

My background involved such work but all were custom 7 figure systems owned by other companies. Not one dared interface directly to Quicken for a very simple reason. Let's see if you know why.
Bob

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A good place to start
May 22, 2015 3:47AM PDT

Thank you for the suggestions on who to call. Contacting Intuit should at least bring me in the right direction.

As far as where the savings will be, I was not the one who was contacted initially. In fact the amount of information I had to go on from the get go was equivalent of the title of my original post. I have no idea how their payroll\accounting is handled, or structured. Clearly that's information I will need to obtain, and maybe I will find out that this is not something that is worth pursuing either by them or myself.

As for why no one would dare to make software that interfaces directly with Quicken; I am in my second year of an InfoSec degree with about 8 months of "professional" IT experience. Most of what I have to do is virus removal, system pre-deployment configuration, desktop support, and hardware upgrades\replacement. So I am going to plead ignorance.

Evan

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Answer
It might help you
Aug 26, 2015 4:22AM PDT

We are using uAttend in our organization for bio-metric time tracking that easily integrate with QuickBooks for payroll processing.

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Thumb impression
Sep 7, 2015 10:18PM PDT

we are using thumb impression for time tracking.