Hubstaff Review: Core Features, Pros, and Cons

Effective team management tools are key to improving operational efficiency, especially for companies where remote work has become the norm. Hubstaff, a tool focused on remote team management, has become a popular choice for many companies thanks to its comprehensive web and client-side functionality. This article will provide an in-depth analysis of Hubstaff's practical value from three perspectives: dashboard management, the strengths and weaknesses of its core features, and typical application scenarios and challenges, providing guidance for companies seeking a suitable tool.

Hubstaff Overview: Key Festures and Applications

1. Hubstaff Time Tracking

This function builds a complete system from recording to approval, covering time allocation, analysis, and compliance. Simply put, this function records in detail how much time employees spend on each project and each task, and then automatically generates a time report so that managers can see it at a glance.

Key Festures:

• Core Time Tracking: Record project or task working hours and accurately allocate working time.
• Online Timesheet: Record and view working hours in real time to support performance optimization and workload assessment.
• Multi-Dimensional Time Reports: 18 reports provide in-depth analysis of work-hour data and assist in cost and schedule control.
• Multi-Device Compatibility: Full coverage of Web/desktop/mobile (Android & iOS), supporting remote work.
• Timesheet Approval: Automatically generate timesheets and support online approval (view/approve/reject).

Enterprise Deployment Examples:

• For remote teams: Keep track of employees' work pace regardless of their location.
• For project-based businesses: Track employee time spent on multiple concurrent projects.
• For companies that require time reporting: Law firms and consulting firms, for example, require accurate time records to bill clients.
• For project costing: Clearly understand the exact number of "man-hours" spent on a project, facilitating cost calculation and quote generation.

Upgraded solutions:

Hubstaff can see what software employees are using, but it cannot know what employees are doing specifically in the software, let alone prevent core data from being copied, sent out, or leaked. If you want to upgrade your company's data security, AnySecura is a better alternative.

2. Hubstaff Work Productivity Management

With Hubstaff, companies can easily and automatically monitor various work-related metrics, encouraging employees to improve their productivity during work hours.

Key Festures:

• Customized Screenshots: Randomly capture work screens and automatically blur private information to ensure that work content matches work time while also maintaining privacy.
• Employee Monitoring: Clearly record software used and websites visited during work, allowing you to track work behavior.
• Employee Productivity Tracking: Keyboard and mouse activity is counted to generate a productivity score and quantify work engagement.
• Incentives and Fault Tolerance:
  - Incentives: Reward efficient employees with virtual achievement badges to boost team morale.
  - Fault Tolerance: Delete invalid work hours due to forgetting to close the tracker with one click, ensuring accurate statistics.

Enterprise Deployment Examples:

• For e-commerce customer service teams: Ensure customer service teams stay focused during response times and improve service quality.
• For content creation teams: Balance creative thinking with productivity and optimize work styles.
• For startups: Establish an objective efficiency measurement system to identify high-performing employee work methods.
• For freelancers: Track personal productivity patterns for more precise self-management.

Upgraded solutions:

Hubstaff only superficially monitors whether employees are actively engaged at work, but overlooks whether the company maintains a secure network environment during work. AnySecura's employee behavior monitoring is significantly more comprehensive and offers a superior solution.

3. Hubstaff Labor Management

Hubstaff automates payroll, invoicing, scheduling, budgeting, and other tasks to precisely control labor costs.

Key Festures:

• Automated Administration and Payroll Management: Utilizing automated payroll, you can accurately transfer payroll to local and international teams based on employee work hours within each pay period.
• Online Invoicing: Directly send online invoices based on employee work hours and corresponding charges, eliminating manual accounting errors.
• Scheduling and Shift Management:
  - Refined Scheduling: Customize shift schedules for each employee based on job requirements (e.g., rotating shifts, fixed shifts).
  - Real-time Alerts: Receive real-time alerts for lateness, absences, and abandoned shifts to reduce the risk of staff vacancies.
• Work Hour and Budget Limit Management:
  - Work Hour Level: Set daily/weekly work hour limits to avoid excessive overtime and wasted work hours.
  - Budget Level: Set project budget thresholds and automatically notify employees when they approach the limit to prevent overspending.
• Leave and Holiday Management:
  - Full leave process tracking: Record leave applications, approval status, and actual leave duration.
  - Unified holiday management: Centralize company holiday schedules and synchronize them with employee schedules to avoid work transition issues.

Enterprise Deployment Examples:

• For multinational companies: Centralize payroll management for multinational teams, automatically convert exchange rates, and avoid settlement delays.
• For service industries (such as customer service and retail): Flexible scheduling to accommodate shifts, real-time absence alerts, and ensure service continuity.
• For project-based companies: Monitor project hours and budget consumption, automatically alerting users of overspending to optimize cost allocation.

Upgraded solutions:

Hubstaff's automated administration and payroll capabilities provide critical benefits to local and international businesses. However, key risks remain at the heart of financial operations, potentially threatening the security of a company's funds. AnySecura provides further protection for sensitive company data.

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Hubstaff Dashboard Management

Let's first talk about the dashboard after logging in. Open the Dashboard Management Center. The left navigation bar is the core functional area, with a total of 8 sections, which are basically used for daily team management. Let's take a look at what they do.

Section 1: Hubstaff Dashboard

The Dashboard is a highly customizable data overview interface, allowing users or teams to flexibly configure and arrange various data components according to their needs. Hubstaff helps you to quickly understand where your team is today, how busy or idle they are, who is effectively advancing projects, and who may be facing bottlenecks. It also helps you understand how much actual value this week's work has generated. Freeing you from trivial inquiries, you can truly focus on management and decision-making.

• Map: This large additional widget at the top displays the real-time geographic distribution of team members.
• Core Metrics: Located below the map, this widget encompasses six smaller widgets: weekly activity trends, total work hours, total projects, daily work hours, current member status, and a summary of daily activity.
• Efficiency Analysis: Located in the center of the dashboard, this widget encompasses five core widgets: recent activity and screenshot history, project team time tracking, task time statistics, work efficiency analysis, and detailed time allocation for each project.
• Weekly Details: Located at the bottom of the layout, this widget includes four key widgets: analysis of inefficient activity, a history of open apps and web pages, salary information, and a summary of weekly activity.

In addition, the Dashboard supports more enabled components, all of which can be freely dragged and dropped, allowing managers to prioritize core data and improve monitoring and management efficiency.

Section 2: Hubstaff Timesheet

Focused on recording and managing employee work hours, this tool addresses the pain points of chaotic and inaccurate time statistics. Core features include:

• Time View: Clearly see how much time each employee spent on which project. Data can also be exported directly, allowing you to filter and check by person, project, or date.
• Time Edit: If you find that the records are inconsistent with the actual situation, you can manually modify, split or delete the working hours to ensure that the data truly reflects the work content.

Section 3: Hubstaff Activity

This module allows you to see the actual work dynamics of employees directly, instead of just listening to reports. It helps you objectively understand where your time is spent in three ways.

• Screenshots: Hubstaff regularly captures employee screenshots (e.g., every 10 minutes, but you can adjust the frequency as needed). Employees are notified each time a screenshot is taken, ensuring transparency. If you're concerned about privacy, you can also blur specific areas of the app, ensuring both management and privacy are respected.
• Apps Usage: The system will count the usage time and number of times each application is opened, and associate it with the corresponding project and task period, so that you can clearly see which software you spend your working time on..
• URL Access Logs: The web pages employees visit and how long they stay there are all recorded hourly and automatically matched to relevant work tasks. This helps employees focus more on work-related websites and effectively improves work efficiency.

Section 4: Hubstaff Insights

This module comprehensively analyzes client employees' unusual behaviors, marked events, work performance, time distribution, and work output for efficient team management.

• Highlights: Hubstaff automatically records employees' key operations and abnormal events, allowing you to understand the overall situation of the team at a glance and never miss important nodes.
• Performance: Hubstaff collecs data such as work hours, focused time, and activity type percentages, allowing you to assess employee productivity based on the proportion of core work activities.
• Timeline: Visualize daily activity distribution, including periods of active work, idle time, meetings, breaks, and vacations.
• Unusual Activity: Hubstaff automatically identifies and records behaviors such as malware use, unusually high productivity, excessively high operational consistency, and unusual keyboard activity.
• Smart Notifications: Hubstaff supports sending reminders via email or webpage. You can freely set the notification name, recipient, frequency and method. It also supports importing templates to flexibly adapt to your management habits.
• Output: By integrating with GitHub, Hubstaff analyze metrics such as code commits and pull requests to evaluate developer output.

Section 5: Hubstaff Locations

Hubstaff makes seemingly complex field staff management incredibly simple. Using geolocation and geo-fencing technology, it automatically identifies staff presence and intelligently timers, eliminating tedious manual verification and giving you peace of mind for on-site work and field management.

• Map: Employees who have installed the mobile app will have their real-time location clearly displayed on a map. This allows you to quickly confirm whether field personnel are on duty and whether their work routes are reasonable, effectively verifying their actual work status.
• Job Site: You can designate a work area (such as an office or construction site) in advance. When an employee enters this area, the system automatically starts recording their work hours or sends a reminder. When the employee leaves, the timer automatically stops or prompts them to leave, making it easy to implement intelligent attendance tracking and reduce manual verification.

Section 6: Hubstaff Project Management

Hubstaff Project Management helps you manage the entire project process, making management more worry-free. Employees simply select the task they're working on and start counting. Their work time and operational data will automatically be aggregated into the corresponding project. You can access this information at any time, easily monitoring team efficiency and gaining a clearer understanding of project costs.

• Projects: You can directly import existing projects or create new ones. Mark new timelines as "Billable" to automatically include employee time spent on the project in payroll. Set budget caps or total work hours limits for projects to ensure they're completed on time and within budget.

• To-dos: Adding to-do items to a project helps break down the overall task into smaller actionable units. Employees can select specific tasks during the execution process, allowing them to more clearly track the completion progress, timeline, and related activities of each task.

Section 7: Hubstaff Calendar

Administrators can manage employee scheduling, leave and vacation plans via this Hubstaff Calendar.

• Schedule: You can set work shifts and vacation schedules for employees in the calendar. Once the schedule is confirmed, the system will automatically notify the relevant employees via email, making it easier for them to plan their work in advance.
• Time off requests: You can set up different holiday rules based on your team's needs, such as paid/unpaid leave, annual leave, and sick leave. Each holiday can be customized with its name, accrual rules, and annual number of days. You can also set whether excess leave is approved and whether it supports year-end carryover. Whether you manually add special holidays or directly select from the system's pre-set statutory holidays, it's easy to do.
  

Section 8: Hubstaff Reports

With Hubstaff Reports system, you no longer have to repeatedly ask yourself questions like "Where is everyone's time being spent?" and "How much of the project budget is left?"

All the answers are intuitively displayed: everyone's work content, the spending progress of each project, and the team's attendance and salary status are all clearly visible. It acts like a 24/7 online management assistant, automatically organizing scattered information so you can focus on decision-making instead of data collection.

• Work sessions report: View the start and end times of team members' work.
• Apps & URLs: View the applications used and websites visited by employees during work.
• Manual time edits: View employee time records manually adjusted, including associated projects, tasks, and reasons for changes.
• Timesheet approvals: View the status of team member time submissions and approval progress.
• Expenses: Statistics of various expenditures by team member or project.
• Work breaks: View the number and frequency of employee breaks.
• Audit log: Tracks the details of who modified various content in the system, when, and how they were modified.
• Payments: View team member salary payments for a specified period.
• Weekly limits: View a member's weekly quota usage.
• Daily limits: View team members' daily quota usage.
• Project budgets: Real-time visibility into each project's budget execution progress in terms of funds or work hours.
• Client budgets: Monitor the amount used and the remaining percentage of client budgets.
• Time off balances: View the remaining available days for each type of leave for team members.
• Time off transactions: View team members' leave applications, approvals, and usage records.
• Team invoices: View the total amount, paid, and pending details of team member invoices.
• Team invoices aging: View the status and aging of outstanding and overdue invoices
• Shift attendance: View team members' shift completions, lateness, absences, and no-shows.
• Visits: View team members' arrival and departure time records.

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The Final Decision for Your Business

Hubstaff can help you efficiently manage your team's work hours, optimize workflows, and automate administrative tasks, but it lacks data breach protection for your company. Therefore, it's best to combine the two and let AnySecura provide comprehensive protection for your enterprise data security.

By integrating Hubstaff's efficiency management capabilities with AnySecura's security system, your company can not only improve productivity but also ensure that sensitive information, financial data, and core assets are fully protected, achieving a truly modern management model that prioritizes both efficiency and security.