How to Choose the Right Computer Monitoring Software for Your Small Business

If a single tool can help you oversee all your employees, track their performance, improve their productivity, optimize your business processes and even enhance data security, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that computer monitoring software is becoming more popular, not just among huge corporations, but also in small companies.

However, choosing the right PC software monitoring solution for a small business is different from the same process in enterprises. For one, you probably don’t have the same budget at hand to invest in employee tracking. This means that you’ll need to be more careful about what you’re looking for and whether it’s going to pay off. And secondly, your priorities and business goals might be different.

With this in mind, we’re going to go through some factors that you need to consider before buying computer monitoring software in order to ensure that you end up with the best choice for your team.

Installation and Data Storage

Small businesses might not have the manpower or the time to get their tech teams to work on computer monitoring software installation. This is why it might be useful to consider the implementation process as one of the key factors when it comes to choosing the best software to monitor computer activity.

For instance, if you want to install the system on all computers at the same time, look for the one that can do this using the active directory. Or, better yet, some of the more sophisticated platforms offer you the opportunity to just send an email invite to all your employees, who can then install the software with a click of the button. Basically, look for the most painless process.

As for data storage, you’ll run into cloud and on-premise solutions. For a small business, it’s probably best to stick to the cloud-based employee monitoring. It’s more than enough to meet the needs even of large companies. Plus, it’s cheaper, much easier to implement and your data will be just as secure.

Features and Reports

Another pretty important thing that you need to consider is what kind of features and functionalities you want your perfect computer monitoring software to have. And there’s a wide array of choices.

The basic functionality of every software PC monitor is to detect the apps and websites used and track employees’ time on tasks. But you can get so much more than that — attendance reports, productivity tracking, overtime, billable hours, screenshots, and so on.

In order to make a smart choice, you’ll have to think about what you want to accomplish with computer viewer software. Is it increased efficiency? Improved accountability? Better project estimates? According to your answer, you can match the features of your screen capture monitoring software to your needs and save money and time by avoiding the functionalities that don’t serve to improve your business.

Price

One of the biggest challenges is finding the perfect monitoring software that’s also affordable. The first step in making the right choice is considering the features, as mentioned earlier. Some systems have several different price plans according to the features they include. If you know that you won’t need some of the more advanced functionalities, you can opt for the most basic solution.

Now, in many cases, computer monitoring software is paid per employee and the individual monthly subscription is pretty low. This is great news for small companies as they don’t have a lot of employees, so the monthly fee should be affordable.

Another thing to note is that there are also free versions of this software out there, but they’re mostly very limited in terms of how many users you can have, which might be a problem for a growing team.

This brings us to the final consideration — scalability. You may have five employees right now but your company will grow and your team will get bigger. Freemium versions typically won’t allow you to scale, but most paid systems are able to accommodate an unlimited number of new users.

Conclusion

Implementing computer monitoring software isn’t just a matter of what’s trendy. It can offer a lot of benefits, even for a small business. The only trick is finding the right solution for your needs so that you can use this tool to accomplish your business goals and grow your company.