Time Tracking and Attendance Record Management Options and Evaluation

A simple time and attendance solution is one that offers practical functionality from beginning to end. The convenience of automated timekeeping will dramatically reduce the administrative work involved in collecting and calculating employee hours, managing PTO, and employee setup.  According to financesonline.com, managers can spend an extra 7 minutes per time card just totaling the number of hours worked.  An online version can cut that down to just one minute.  

Who’s time and attendance should you be tracking?

It may seem like an obvious choice to be managing employee time and attendance however, there are benefits to tracking a manager’s time, or even your own as an owner or a lead in an organization.  According to Paymo, there are seven benefits to tracking time and attendance:

• Identification of the non-essential tasks

Figure out what tasks are being done taking the most hours by looking at various reports to determine where efficiency could be improved.

• Goal alignment

Determine if where hours are spent is leading to the attainment of goals, or if a shift is needed.

• Defining goals

When you see where hours are being spent, it can assist in ensuring your goals are clear.

• Improve time spent on tasks

You may find that there are tasks taking much longer than expected, so track your time to find where improvements can be made.

• Create routines

Knowing your time is tracked can help develop positive habits and avoid putting things off until the last minute.

• Ensuring proper hours billed

Whether you or employees work by the hour or flat rate, tracking your time will provide insight into whether you are charging enough and completing work as expected.

• It’s easy!

This article discusses using the online method to track time in further detail.

Have you considered the use of an online time clock for time and attendance tracking?

Are you using paper, spreadsheets, or an older style time clock to keep track of employee hours and attendance?  If so, there is an easier, more efficient, and accurate way to track time and attendance with an online solution.  An online solution requires no hardware or installation, gives you the ability to track time for any type of work, whether it’s in an office, home, or the field, while providing the controls to know where employees are at.  You can easily run reports from anywhere to ensure the business is running smoothly.

Why should you manage your employee’s time and attendance?

Managing your employees’ hours is a critical part of controlling your business operating costs.  Additionally, you need to keep time card data for at least two years according to the Department of Labor.  A good timekeeping system will:

• Pay employees for actual minutes worked by accurately tracking arrivals and departures thereby increasing labor force productivity.
• Enforce uniform policies for breaks, meals, and overtime and eliminate wasted labor minutes from employees rounding punches.
• Automatically adjust for overtime (O.T.), handles carryovers from prior periods.
• Automated time tracking reduces the cost of labor and saves money.
• Reduce administrative hours spent manually calculating total hours; avoid simple mistakes in totaling employee timesheets.
• Ability to log in from anywhere in the world to easily view, edit and manage the data online, anytime 24/7.
• Eliminate employee “Buddy Punching” with the available fingerprint scanner option.
• Allow employees to view timesheets, request time off, and optionally record edits electronically thereby reducing time spent by management and HR staff.
• Simply Track labor specific to individual jobs or use our job and project costing option.

What do you need to effectively manage time and attendance?

Simple time clock setup and use

Time and Attendance solutions are designed with busy owners and managers in mind. Simple time-keeping solutions are easy to set up and effortless to manage, allowing business professionals to focus on their business.

A reliable time clock system to track hours and attendance

A reliable timekeeping management solution must include the ability to track punches and when people are working, however, the next must-have is reports. Even though the core function of a timekeeping system is to record employee punch data for payroll processing it is important to have effective and insightful reports that allow supervisors to understand and manage their employees.

Various ways to collect employee punch data

Our OnTheClock.com solution offers a variety of options for collecting employee data. It can be as simple as just collecting in and out punches, and sending to payroll to using all OnTheClock options and features.

Online options are extremely versatile. You have a choice of data collection platforms including the computer, phone app, group punching, and fingerprint punching, creating an automated system for tracking and calculating each of your employee’s time cards.

Timesheet reporting options

The Ontheclock.com system offers a variety of report types, with each report giving you the ability to filter and sort how the data will be displayed. Because of this filtering capability with each report type, there are many possible reporting views that can be created.

It is important to recognize that the Ontheclock.com timeclock settings and recorded data can vary greatly from company to company depending on their needs. The main function of the timekeeping system is to gather, organize and report the data that you need for your business.

A partial list of the reports Ontheclock.com includes:

• Payroll Report – PDF or Excel CSV file
• Single Day Report
• Multiple Day Report
• Employee Department Report
• Employee Job Totals
• PTO Report
• Job/Department Totals
• Job & Project Costing Reports

How and when can you get started managing time tracking and attendance records?

With all of these benefits and reasons to get started, you may be thinking about the time it could take to get a system like this in place.  It’s easy, employees can be set up in less than two minutes and you’re on your way to tracking time and attendance. Get started today by trying out OnTheClock.