Putting Tech to Work, on the Cheap

Here are ways to get more out of the technology you already have.

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NO FAKING IT Rather than punch time cards, workers scan their fingerprints to give the boss a record of their hours.

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PUNCHING THE FINGER CLOCK It's a trick as old as the punch clock: you want to sneak out of work early and, promising to return the favor in the future, ask a co-worker to punch out for you at the end of the shift. No one is the wiser.

Except, that is, for employers who realize they are losing many hours of productivity they are paying for.

Now many of them are ripping out their punch clocks and installing time and attendance systems that require a fingerprint scan. Clarence Stewart, a podiatrist in Raleigh, N.C., installed a such a system three years ago for his practice, which employs 24 people in four offices, replacing another PC-based system that required an ID number.

Dr. Stewart says his workers' time sheets now reflect the hours they have worked more accurately. "I'm in a big practice, and some people work here for a long time and they become friends," he says. "They know how to beat the system. But no one can fake a fingerprint."

The product he uses, from a company called Count Me In, in Mount Prospect, Ill., can feed information to QuickBooks and other payroll and accounting programs. Rules can also be set in the system's calendar so that an employee cannot clock in unless he is scheduled to work at that time.

Neal A. Katz, a vice president at Count Me In, acknowledges that some workers may be skittish about providing a fingerprint. But he says that his system does not store fingerprint images. Rather, it converts a fingerprint into a mathematical code based on the distance between the lines and curves on the print. "Your fingerprint can't be given to someone else," he says.

The product starts at 0 for up to 50 employees.

AVERTING DATA DISASTER Donna Childs remembers ordering the evacuation of her 14-member Wall Street firm on 9/11. Even when they returned a week later, there was no electricity or water, and ash had gotten into their computer hard disks, destroying some data.

Fortunately, Ms. Childs had learned about managing in disasters from her professional experience with risk assessment in the reinsurance industry, and from living in Battery Park City during the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Well before 9/11, her technical people set up servers off-site with a mirror image of all the company's data.

Her business, Childs Capital, which raises money for entrepreneurs in developing countries, resumed with minimal disruption. Since then she has written a book, "Contingency Planning and Disaster Recovery: A Small Business Guide," with her chief technology officer, Stefan Dietrich. She also gives talks on disaster planning to small-business groups, without pay. She does this, she says, because she sees so many small companies that are one tiny disaster away from disappearing.

"We realized we were very unusual," she said. "Even large corporations don't think that way, but they have the excess resources to waste. Small businesses don't."

The trouble with conventional disaster planning is its focus on catastrophes like hurricanes and dirty-bomb attacks, she said. "Most people think, if you prepare for the worst case it subsumes all lesser examples" like computer crashes, she said.

Ms. Childs's advice is to plan for more routine causes of computer outages first, and build from there. That may mean starting only with the data that is vital to keeping the company running - financial records and customer orders, say - and using a cheap online service to automatically back up the data over the Web a few times a day.

FREE CONFERENCE CALLS? Now you can make free conference calls, and you don't even have to put up with sh-sh-shaky voice quality.

Despite its name, FreeConferenceCall.com doesn't send calls over the Internet; instead, it routes calls to portions of the phone network that don't get much use. The phone companies pay FreeConferenceCall.com a fee, and they recoup it through long-distance charges on portions of their networks that are idle.

Dave Erickson, the company's chief executive, said: "The lunch is free, but there is a cost to get to the restaurant."

The basic service allows unlimited calls, each with a total of 96 callers and a six-hour call time. If you don't want certain callers, like clients, to incur toll charges, you can provide an 800 number for six cents a minute per caller. Calls can also be recorded, played back and streamed to listeners over the Internet, all free.

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