Tracking employee time is a powerful business tool to boost productivity and improve efficiency. Time and attendance reports are treasure troves of information that can help managers optimize staffing, address issues like burnout, and improve resource allocation.
They can also help identify potential compliance violations, such as buddy punching, where one employee clocks in or out for another.
Timesheets
If you’re a business owner, you likely know the value of time tracking and how it helps with billing clients, managing projects, and improving payroll processing. However, getting employees on board with filling out timesheets can be challenging.
Timesheets are typically used to log the number of hours an employee works for a given period, such as a day, week, or month. These spreadsheets are also helpful in keeping track of leave or holiday allowance, accruals, and other adjustments required for running payroll.
Most modern businesses use a dedicated, purpose-built timesheet solution accommodating various tasks. These solutions offer various automation and data analysis functions that save time and effort. They also help ensure compliance with government regulations.
While timesheets are an excellent way for employers to work out an employee’s pay, they’re also helpful for performance management. By capturing an accurate snapshot of how long it takes employees to complete tasks, they can identify areas where workflows need improvement.
Using Gusto integration makes it easy for employees to log their daily work hours. This information is then collated into a visual summary, allowing managers to pinpoint productivity bottlenecks quickly. It’s an excellent choice for freelancers or contractors who must closely monitor billable hours.
Payroll
Payroll is a complex and time-consuming process for businesses. Manual tracking using physical time cards or spreadsheets is not only prone to errors (like honest mistakes, buddy punching, and other types of time theft). Still, it requires significant employee efforts to prepare, review, approve, or correct erroneous data.
An integrated time tracking and attendance solution eliminates the need for paper timesheets, streamlines payroll processing, and reduces manual tasks. It also aggregates expense information like mileage, entertaining clients, and supplies, which can be automatically fed into payroll so that employees are paid accurately.
Employees can use various devices to clock in and out, such as mobile apps or web-based dashboards that sync with the cloud. Some systems include biometric scanners to record onsite employee attendance, while others offer productivity tools such as dashboards and reports with high-level and granular insights for managers.
Some systems also log time spent on projects and client tasks for project-based businesses to support billing or invoicing. Other features include leave management tools to simplify the application, approval, and tracking of vacations, sick days, and holidays. Streamlining these processes frees employees’ time to focus on more important work. In the event of a compliance audit, having accurate and detailed records of employee hours makes it much easier for organizations to provide the required data.
Employee Self-Service
A well-designed employee self-service (ESS) portal can reduce the burden on HR leaders and save employees time when handling work-related tasks. A robust ESS can help employees manage their paychecks, file leave requests, pick up open shifts, and view their performance ratings and pay stubs.
ESS can also streamline the process of tracking time worked, which is vital for payroll and reporting purposes. This can be a challenge with traditional methods, where human error is often the culprit. For example, if an employee’s schedule is incorrectly recorded or they fail to clock in when they should be at work, this can result in time theft—a practice that can cost your business money and damage morale.
To avoid this, choose a time and attendance system that takes care of your needs in one place. Look for a platform that offers all-in-one HR solutions, including applicant tracking, workforce management, timesheet automation, and payroll integrations. This ensures that all your data is in one place and that information is instantly updated across all applications.
Some systems can even provide additional features, like performance notes for employees and managers, job-tracking logs to determine how much time an employee spends on a project, and invoicing capabilities for companies that bill clients based on time spent working on projects. And to prevent time fraud and absenteeism, consider using a geofencing or GPS tracking feature that records an employee’s coordinates when they clock in and out.
Analytics
The right time and attendance system will allow employees to track their work hours and make the data available for advanced analysis. For example, some solutions offer alerts to notify managers and employees when they fail to clock in or out, when they are close to their maximum daily or weekly hours, or when a job requires overtime pay. Others provide labor reports that reveal detailed information on workers’ hours, wages, and schedules.
In addition, automated systems can allow managers to align schedules with workload projections to increase efficiencies and meet production goals. They can even compare projections to actual results and identify any issues causing a dip in productivity.
Taking the time to carefully consider the needs of your business and evaluate the features offered by various applications is an essential part of making a well-informed decision. Creating a spreadsheet to house your findings can be helpful, as you can easily highlight the must-have tools and add other options to a catch-all box that includes any remaining features important to you and your team. Once you have all the data at your fingertips, the decision-making process should be much easier and less stressful.