Keeping track of your employees’ hours is an intricate part of running a business. Not only do you have to deal with shifts, overtime, annual and sick leave, but you also have to know about employees who regularly stay away from work, or only work a small amount of hours.
Back in the day
Companies used to have an intricate manual system where employees needed to fill in an attendance register when commencing and leaving work. This took up many HR resources and created a great deal of paperwork. Cost efficient? Not at all.
Next steps
Then came punching in systems, where employees had cards that they needed to punch into a console in order to record their arrival and leaving times. This system could be cheated easily, as anyone could punch in a colleague, without management knowing. Later came access cards, and pin pad clocking in systems. These were more secure and also helped with reports on hours worked, but their data still needed to be captured and integrated manually with other business systems such as payroll and leave tracking software.
New era
Today this is a thing of the past. With the new generation of time and attendance software all systems ‘speak’ to each other with ease. No more need for hundreds of manual processes – as the system is able to automate its output and link directly with your payroll system.
This saves time and therefore money. Fewer HR resources are required, freeing up time for other, more important things.
Multi-functional
These time and attendance systems are quite clever – as they are capable of handling clock management, overtime (even preloaded overtime), shifts, leave, direct communication with payroll and delivering detailed reports.
Secure and accurate
When it comes to security, there are various ways to ensure that your system is accurate. You could, for instance, use fingerprint readers to recognise your employees. Such a system, in conjunction with a time and attendance system can work well in perfect conjunction.
Should you require somewhat less serious security, you could opt for an access card or token to be used when clocking in and out.
Trend watching
Either way, by using a time and attendance system, you are in a position to understand the trends of your employees’ work hours and habits. With the system it is easy to track late-comers, regular absenteeism, employees that work shorter hours than they’re supposed to, and much more.
Even more
It is also simple to capture any exceptions on the system, such as special leave, or meeting attendance off-site.
Win-win
All in all this system will save you time, money and effort, and it might just make you sleep better at night.
