Employees are the most valuable resource for any organization. Managing their time and attendance and creating payroll are integral tasks carried out by the management or HR personnel. To this end, businesses use an attendance system that can track the time and attendance of each employee and keep a record of it. With manual time and attendance systems, paper time cards or sheets were used that led to duplicate data entry or recording and reporting inaccurate data. It also consumed many billable hours to manually produce reports for payroll purposes. When automated time and attendance software gradually replaced the traditional time and attendance system, it made way for efficient and streamlined workforce management.
6 Advantages of Using Time and Attendance Software
The article will help you understand the benefits of implementing time and attendance software in your organization.
Increases Efficiency
A paper-based attendance system may work for a small organization. However, managing a huge workforce in a growing business means there is more information to track, record and process. Using time and attendance software for accurate employee attendance tracking can help managers to detect any issues with attendance like absences or misuse of time. It can also help them by making it easier to review and approve leave requests of employees. Employees can also look at the data and determine how they have utilized their time at work. This can instil a sense of accountability and help them eliminate inefficiencies in the workplace.
Prevents Time Theft
Are your employees taking long breaks? Are they punching out a few minutes early? If employees are paid for the time they do not work, it is considered time theft. Time thefts can range anywhere from leaving early to buddy punching, where an employee punches in on behalf of another employee. Whether an employee steals time from the company unintentionally or deliberately, it costs the company. An employee engaging in an unnoticed time theft can be negligent at work, thereby affecting the morale of other employees as well. An automated time and attendance software can help you keep a close eye on an employee’s working hours; it helps prevent time theft by accurately tracking and recording employees’ time and attendance.
Saves Time Spent on Creating Payroll
Today’s organizations employ a dynamic workforce that uses multiple clocking in systems. Flexible time, remote logins, paid leaves and work from home options are available to the employees. Creating payroll by manually tracking each employee’s time and attendance, recording and processing those with time cards can be a formidable task. With time and attendance software, all the data can be imported into the system, thereby making it easy to create payroll for the employees. The administration can use all the hours saved by the software to focus on other tasks that are more important and productive to the organization.
Eliminates Human Error
Manually tracking employee time and attendance consumes a tremendous amount of time. Additionally, it is susceptible to human error even after using a computational device. No HR employee wants an approximately correct report; an error in computing can result in employees being overpaid or underpaid for the hours they have clocked in. An efficient time and attendance software eliminates payroll errors and inaccuracies in data by accurately tracking and recording employee time and attendance.
Saves Cost
A payroll error is not the only consequence of inaccurate data. Inaccurate data can cost the company when an underworked employee is overpaid; it can also lead to the loss of employees’ morale when an employee who has worked overtime is underpaid. Time and attendance software can help managers to accurately calculate pay as they have the exact data on hours spent by each employee at work. Since it also reduces the chances of time thefts, late arrivals and buddy punching where an employer loses money, it can be cost saving for a company.
Forecasts Workloads
Time and attendance software provides managers with transparent and accurate data on the leaves an employee has for the rest of the year. They will also know when each employee is absent or will be on vacation. With the available data on resources, they can easily forecast workloads and meet requirements of the company by allocating the right number of employees, resources and budget for any task. Balancing workforce supply and demand can lead to seamless and efficient operations. Time and attendance software also makes it easy to comply with the company regulations and federal and local regulations with respect to employee working hours and overtime.
Employee attendance tracking is an integral component of every organization irrespective of its size. Automated time and attendance software can help track employee time and attendance with great efficiency, thereby making it one of the best investments for any organization.