Time & Attendance Guide

Benefits of Tracking Time and Attendance Accurately

If you track time and attendance carefully, you will only pay your employees for the hours they actually work. You could also use the technology to ensure that your clients receive the services they expect and are billed accurately for any work performed. The latest timekeeping solutions could help you to avoid payroll mistakes that can leave valued workers feeling cheated, and they could uncover inefficient workflows that are holding your company back.

Increased Trust and Transparency

Nobody likes to work with somebody looking over their shoulder, so time management software should be as unobtrusive as possible. This is especially true when employees work remotely. Remote employees should know that their work is being monitored by the system, but they should not be asked to check in at regular intervals just to prove that they are working. Horizon Payroll Solutions is committed to transparency, and we make sure that your workers always know what kind of data is gathered and tracked.

Bill Your Clients with Accuracy

A good time and attendance solution should help employees to manage their time more effectively, and it should also make sure that common tasks are not overlooked when client bills are drawn up. When researchers studied account executives at professional services firms, they noticed that only 40% of them kept track of the more than two hours they spent each day answering emails. Failing to add in this time costs employers an average of $52,500 per employee per year.

Added Revenue

An effective time management system can improve the bottom line by highlighting areas where efficiency can be improved and money saved. Workflow analysis features could reveal overstaffing that is draining your company of valuable resources and keeping track of productivity could reveal underappreciated employees who contribute a great deal but do not draw a lot of attention to themselves. Timekeeping software will also tell you which tools your workers use daily, which could help you to identify and cancel costly applications and services that few people actually use.

Improve Employee Productivity

The modern workplace is constantly evolving, and many employees now work in the field or from home. Keeping track of the hours worked by remote employees would be impossible with a traditional punch card system, but a cloud-based solution makes it easy. When remote workers want to report for duty or sign off for the day, all they have to do is use a connected device to access the cloud.

Produce Better Project Estimates

Preparing pricing estimates can be a delicate process when there are several unknowns to consider. Time tracking systems can take the worry out of creating project estimates because they provide instant access to data about similar projects. They can also be used to prevent what is known as planning fallacy. This is the term used to describe the tendency that many people have to underestimate the amount of time it will take them to complete tasks.

Potential Consequences of Poor Timekeeping

The consequences of not tracking time and attendance can be severe. Employees who are not paid correctly can become angry and quit, and they can also initiate lawsuits and file grievances with state and local authorities. A well-designed time management system can prevent these problems, and it can also help your business in several other ways.

Reduced Business Productivity

If you want your business to be more productive, you can either hire additional workers or get more out of the employees you already have. You could ask your administrative staff to spend several hours each week tracking hours and pay manually, or you could automate the process and free them from these repetitive and monotonous chores. Automation also eliminates mistakes, which improves productivity even further.

'Buddy Punching' and Time Theft

When hours are tracked with clocks and timecards, workers who plan to arrive late, leave early or take some unauthorized time off can ask a colleague to punch them in or out. This is called buddy punching, and experts say that it costs American employers almost $400 million every year. Eliminating timecards makes buddy punching impossible, which means these systems can sometimes pay for themselves in time theft savings alone.

Missed Project Deadlines

Looming deadlines pile even more pressure onto employees who may already be working under a great deal of stress. We usually find ourselves in these situations because tasks we thought would be easy took us a lot of time to complete, which is exactly the kind of mistake that time management solutions are designed to help you avoid. When projects run into unexpected snags, the software adjusts timelines automatically to keep things moving and prevent panic as deadline day approaches.

Investing in a Time and Attendance System

Wage and hour laws are strictly enforced, so all employers subject to these regulations should track time and attendance accurately. A cloud-based electronic system takes care of this automatically to avoid regulatory issues and take the stress out of pay days. These systems can also pay for themselves by keeping workforces energized, providing valuable insights and eliminating errors.

What Features Should You Consider for a Time Tracking Solution?

Your time tracking solution should do a lot more than tell you when your workers clock in and out. It should also provide you with insight into how they spend their time while on the job and identify areas where efficiency can be improved. The system you choose should be easy to use and flexible, and you should look for a provider that understands the challenges entrepreneurs face and offers solutions that can be tailored to meet their needs.

Automated Timekeeping Brings Advantages for Businesses

Moving simple and repetitive tasks to the virtual realm reduces expenditure on office supplies and allows managers and administrators to concentrate on more important work. According to the American Payroll Association, it takes a payroll clerk about six minutes to manually audit and total a single timecard. An automated system completes this basic task in a matter of seconds. Switching over to this system could save a company of 50 employees at least 65 hours or more each year, depending on the frequency of the pay period.

Reduce Human Error in Timekeeping

We all make mistakes from time to time no matter how hard we try to avoid them. When workers forget to punch in or out or payroll managers make mistakes, paychecks are inaccurate, and the ensuing disputes can become heated. When things have calmed down, the mistake must be corrected, and a new check issued. This wastes more time and valuable resources, but these problems can be all but eliminated by an automated time and attendance system.

Provide Valuable Business Insight

Business owners make important decisions almost every day. When those decisions contend with staffing levels or productivity, a time and attendance system can provide important information and useful insights. If preliminary data suggests that understaffing is causing an issue, a time management solution could dig a little deeper and reveal further training would solve the problem more effectively than additional workers.

Engage Your Team

Employees are happiest when they feel appreciated and find their work challenging. Time tracking allows employers to analyze workflow patterns and identify bottlenecks, which can eliminate drudgery, boredom and wasted time. Automated systems can also reveal how productive each team member is when they are on the clock. Employers can then use this information to identify and reward top performers and provide training to workers who are struggling.

Time and Attendance Tracking Options

All employers are expected to track the hours worked by their employees, and they go about this in several ways. Some traditional businesses still use time sheets that are completed by hand, but most large companies employ more sophisticated methods. These methods range from time clocks that allow workers to punch in or out to electronic systems with biometric features that track employees automatically. Let’s take a closer look at these different approaches to assess their pros and cons.

Old-School Pen and Paper Time Tracking

Using a pen to log hours on a paper time sheet may conjure up images of a Dickensian counting house, but this is still the way things are done in some businesses. Time sheets are often used in professional settings to both calculate pay and compile client bills, but they have several drawbacks. This is a laborious system that cannot be automated, and the information found on time sheets must be entered manually before it can be used by any computer programs. Deciphering the handwriting on time sheets can also be challenging, which can lead to mistakes and payroll disputes.

Punch Clocks

Punch clocks have been the preferred way to track worker hours for more than a century, but they are rapidly being replaced by electronic systems with more features. Time clocks are very good at keeping track of when workers arrive and leave, but they are simple machines that cannot tell who is actually punching in or out. Punch clocks make employers susceptible to time theft, but they remain a popular solution in the construction sector and other industries where workers do not always have access to computers.

Digital Time Tracking

This approach is basically an electronic alternative to a time sheet. Employees are still expected to keep track of their own hours, but they maintain their records on spreadsheets instead of pieces of paper. This makes it easier to send the information and eliminates problems caused by poor handwriting, but it does not do much to address other time sheet limitations. There are no checks and balances to prevent employees from padding their hours and moving from a pen and paper to a spreadsheet does not eliminate human errors.

Time and Attendance Software

The latest software solutions bring tracking time and attendance into the information age. Employees can check their hours in real time using a computer or connected mobile device, and managers and supervisors tasked with creating schedules can check sick leave, vacation requests and accrued paid time off for each employee. Punching in and out is done electronically to prevent time theft, and discrete cameras can be placed at entry points to improve security even further.

Biometric Time Clocks

Time clocks that use biometric identifiers like fingerprints or facial features have become extremely popular in recent years because they provide the last word in time theft prevention, but they are distrusted by many workers and are not legal in every state. Employees react more favorably when biometric time clocks do not feel intrusive, so Horizon uses devices that are touchless and work in seconds even if workers are wearing masks.

Horizon Offers Trusted Time and Attendance Solutions for Small and Medium Sized Businesses

Technology has leveled the business playing field, and small and medium-sized companies can now compete with global behemoths. Horizon Payroll Solutions has helped hundreds of companies to seize new opportunities and become more efficient, and we deliver our solutions with a personal touch. If you want to cut costs, eliminate mistakes and stay on the right side of the Fair Labor Standards Act, our trusted time and attendance solutions could be just what you are looking for.

Digital Solutions for the Modern Workplace

Data that is stored digitally is easier to analyze and share, and information only has to be entered into a computer system once when business tools work together. Horizon understands this, which is why we strive to ensure that all our solutions will integrate seamlessly with your existing IT infrastructure.

Contact Us Today for More Information

If you want to take the hassle out of calculating payroll and are ready to make time and attendance headaches a thing of the past, our team of dedicated industry professionals is standing by to assist you. You can call us on (888) 434-8244 or use our online form to ask us a question. Additionally, you can request a free sales quote.