How to track, Record and Manage employee Time and Attendance Easily

In this age of data work, businesses are focusing less on keeping track of records and employee hours.

This is especially true for businesses that consist largely of salaried employees, meticulous employee hour tracking is usually a thing of the past.

However, quite a few businesses still need to understand how to manage employee hours tracking attendance and time. Businesses with hourly employees, for instance, got to track employee hours for accurate payroll numbers. And for businesses that bill by client or project, sometimes hours worked must be tracked to the minutes.

And even for workers who aren’t held to strict clock-in-and-out times, keeping track of how their time is spent at work can still be useful. By knowing what percentage of hours they spend on certain tasks, employees can make smarter, more efficient decisions about how they use their time.

Whether you would like to trace time spent on an employment site or shift or want to live how your knowledge workers spend their time online, multiple methods are available for tracking employee time. 

Table of content

1. Should you track employee hours?
2. Methods of how you can track employee hours worked
3. Conclusion

1. Should you track employee hours?

For businesses with hourly employees, tracking employee hours may be a must.

If you don’t, there is no thanks to skills. You ought to pay your employees for his or her working time. However, even businesses with salaried employees can find tracking employee time useful.

Knowing how employees, salaried or hourly, spend their time can assist you to make better staffing and scheduling decisions, track labour costs more accurately, and increase employee productivity. But it also offers a couple of other practical benefits, which I’ll discuss below.

Generate accurate payroll numbers

For businesses with hourly employees, tracking employee time helps you calculate payroll correctly. Tools like clock software can track employee time right down to the minute. Tracking time this manner ensures that your employees get purchased the work they did which you’re paying out the right amount for every pay period.

Ensure that you’re adhering to labour laws and a day off policies

By tracking employee time — whether through pen and paper or software — you’ve got a record of when and the way long your employees worked. Using these numbers, you’ll confirm that your non-exempt employees are working their allowed number of hours, that they are compensated correctly for overtime, or that they are taking days off if or once they need it.

Have a far better understanding of where employee time goes

By knowing when and the way long your employees have worked, you’ll better understand your labour needs. Restaurant owners, for instance, can compare sales numbers to labour costs during any given shift. These comparisons can help them understand once they could be over-or under-scheduling their teams.

Or if your business must track time by project or client, you’ll see how labour costs and employee hours pile up against your revenue numbers. Seeing which clients or which sorts of projects are more profitable, or are more of a time-suck, will assist you to make better business decisions at the end of the day.

2. Methods of how you can track employee hours worked.

1. Track remote employees with a Mobile Attendance Tracking system.

Tracking employee hours once they work faraway from the office or facility is difficult without a mobile attendance tracking system. This information is integrated with the payroll system for accurate working hours.

Global positioning satellite, commonly called GPS, works on cell phones. Employers confirm hours from data collected through a GPS-enabled company phone so movements are tracked legally.

2. Pen and paper

If you’re old fashioned or working somewhere with poor internet connectivity or patchy access to technology, you’ll use good old-fashioned pen and paper to start out tracking employee hours.

Have employees record the date of their shifts and their start and stop times, and you’re good to travel .

This analog tool won’t be every business’s preferred method of clocking in and out, but it is a no-fuss solution that needs little employee training.

Pro tip: albeit employees record time on pen and paper, put their hours into a spreadsheet tool like Excel or Google Sheets. Excel time tracking will assist you calculate hours worked and export numbers to your payroll solution so you do not need to roll in the hay manually.

3. Use wall mount Card Swipes.

Wall mounted card swipes represent the updated version of the punched card system. rather than a timecard, employees use their ID to punch in and out. Data automatically transfers to a computer where hours worked are calculated for employee attendance tracking.

4. Ensure hours are complete, accurate and current.

A best practice for tracking employee hours is to possess a system that streamlines the time-capturing process. This delivers accurate information for faster payroll and other reporting mechanisms. Whether the system is manual or automated, difficult aspects of tracking and approving employee hours become harder with a system that’s not followed consistently.

5. Have an automatic system for regulatory compliance.

Accurate tracking is additionally important for meeting the various regulatory requirements. Chief among these for U.S. companies is the Fair Labor Standards Act. Any tracking solution should make it easy to suit government regulations and internal policies.

Common causes of noncompliance is from inaccurate or inadequate recordkeeping. Using an automatic system to trace time and attendance tracker can help to scale back errors, and stop costly litigation that arises from noncompliance.

6. Biometric clock-in

Biometric identification uses biological features such as fingerprints or facial features to verify a person’s identity. Using biometrics to allow employees to clock in helps prevent buddy punching, where one employee clocks in for another. Once an employee clocks in using a biometric feature, your time clock system will track their hours until they clock out.

Pro tip: Biometric identification is still a pretty new feature in the time clock software market, so not all tools will offer it as a clock-in option. Furthermore, using biometrics requires purchasing other equipment, such as fingerprint scanners. So unless you really need to verify the identity of your employees, biometrics might be too costly as an option for tracking employee hours

7. Utilize Attendance tracker Software that employees can embrace.

Being able to look at and track attendance data in one centralized system provides tremendous value to a corporation . Employees can review their hours worked, also as accrued time and available leave . These features contribute to employees readily adopting the attendance tracking software.

Tracking time is the least favorite task for many employees. A simple system requiring minimal work and training will improve chances of buy-in that creates the choice of an honest investment.

Employees also appreciate a self-service system. This eliminates the necessity to contact HR with questions on pay or time-off balances.

8. Select a system that easily integrates with other applications.

Using software that’s dedicated to capturing data only solves a part of the answer when trying to find the simplest ways to track employee hours. The opposite part is the ability to share data with other applications.

This is very critical for payroll, day off and compliance needs. Ideally, exchange and integration of knowledge should be seamless.

9. Have a tracking system that creates it easy to finish reporting and administrative tasks.

The struggle for many companies is using time and attendance tracking software that’s difficult to use. Most systems accompany a free demo, which provides companies the prospect to check drive varying features.

The right tracking system should feel intuitive with daily processes. The simplest software solution features comprehensive departure functions that also are scalable.

10. Get software that’s hosted within the Cloud.

Accurate attendance records contribute to labor costs, but companies still have to have the simplest system without purchasing costly software. Expensive, internal hardware is becoming obsolete as more companies search for a less expensive solution. What works during this capacity is to host a time tracking system within the Cloud.

Cloud-based systems offer easy solutions for entering hours and quickly routing time for approvals. Results cover every aspect of employee hours: easy, timely and accurate pay, and regulatory issues are resolved.

11. Advanced technologies using Fingerprints and Retina scans help to stay offices secure.

Another popular method with large corporations is swiping barcode information on employee ID badges. Biometric data with fingerprints and retina scans became valuable for companies which will got to control access to and from departments and buildings, additionally to tracking employee time.

12. Keep Online Attendance records.

Some advanced technologies have adopted old-fashioned techniques like using a web clock . Employees keep record of their hours worked through an internet app which will also generate payroll reports.

13. Manually enter employee hours into a spreadsheet.

Some companies with a little staff might not want to migrate to the Cloud or a web system so quickly. Continuing to enter hours into a spreadsheet may go best, but it’ll also require workarounds for interacting with governing authorities or other businesses.

Conclusion

For individual employees, the insights they get from time tracking can often be an eye-opener. What proportion of time does one spend, browsing the online, rummaging through your inbox, or trying to seek out that one document during a pile of folders? These are often viewed as minor daily activities, but accumulated, they’re probably a number of the foremost time-consuming non-billable activities in your workweek – is that justified? Harvard Business Review’s survey on filling timesheets shows that the U.S. economy wastes a wholesome $7.4 billion each day in productivity just because of workers who haven’t recorded their hours.