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Comment by yeuxardents | Hacker News Reader

In my experience its one of those solved problems where only a handful of products do it well, and well = pretty terrible for anyone SMB.

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Yes, speaking with experience from a public K-12, timeclocks and timekeeping is an industry where $$ gets you something that claims to do everything but actually does nothing but fail or cause problems, $$$ gets you something that's stripped down total crap that can be made to work after modest concessions, and $$$$$$$$$ gets you something that does what you want reliably.

It's not hard, but everyone who can do it well has noticed what their competition is charging and followed suit.

I worked for a vendor that charged $$$$$$$$$. The software itself was often not the biggest cost component, it was what it cost to get it working in accordance with federal/state/local labor laws, any relevant union contracts, and company policy.

It was a complicated software package that did nothing out of the box and everything required significant configuration of the rule engine to account for the customer’s needs. It shipped with some building blocks for the rule engine but often/always required custom code to facilitate things the customer needed.

My job was to fly out to customer sites and perform the custom implementation tasks.

SAP?

Or it's terribly expensive. We just ripped ours out when the cost got to $600 USD per month. We were just clocking in and out factory workers.

We now use a pen and paper. I've looked at open source options, the landscape is not great.

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