Choosing Between Products

Small businesses evaluate attendance products in an afternoon or not at all. An afternoon spent well is enough.

Before looking at anything

Write down your five awkward cases.

Typically: the part-timer on irregular days, the variable-hours person, public holidays, someone who joined mid-year, and carry-over.

These are your test. Any product handles the full-time person on five fixed days.

The trial

Set it up yourself, with your own people and your own rules. If you cannot configure it without help, you will be asking for help every year.

Enter your five awkward cases and check the balances by hand.

Book leave, approve it, cancel it, and see what happens to the balance.

Record a sickness absence and see what fields it demands.

Run to the end of a leave year if the trial allows, because year-end rollover is where products differ.

Two hours per product, maximum.

Questions to ask

How is part-time entitlement calculated, and can it be in hours?

How are public holidays handled for part-timers?

Can a leave year be rolled without losing history?

What does the export contain, and in what format?

Is there a mandatory reason field for sickness, and can it be turned off?

Does it include any monitoring feature, and can that be disabled permanently?

What to check in the account

The defaults, before changing anything. What is switched on when the account is created is what tells you about the product.

What an ordinary employee sees, by logging in as one rather than as the administrator.

Whether people can see their own balance and history without asking.

Price

Per person per month, and what happens at your next size tier.

What is extra: additional approvers, integrations, extra sites, support.

What happens at renewal, which for small subscriptions is usually an automatic increase nobody reads.

Annual against monthly, where the discount is real and the commitment is the cost.

The decision

Score against your five cases, not against the feature list.

Prefer the one you could configure yourself.

Prefer the one with a clean export, because it is the one you can leave.

And if neither beat the spreadsheet on your five cases, keep the spreadsheet — which is a legitimate result and the one no vendor will suggest.

Log in as an ordinary employee

The check almost nobody runs during a trial.

Administrators see a different product from the one most people use.

Check what an ordinary person can reach: their balance, their history, how to book, how to report sickness.

Check they cannot see other people's details, which some products default to showing.

If the employee view is awkward, that is the view ninety percent of your team will have, and it decides whether the thing gets used.

Turn the principle into a test

For an example that can make this requirement testable, consult employee monitoring software pricing. Treat the page as a starting point rather than proof: reproduce the workflow with real roles, exceptions and permissions.