How to take employee Time and Attendance

It might sound like a school classroom tactic but taking employee time and attendance is a vital tool for any size business.

To begin, Time and Attendance taking gives your managers clarity of who’s at work – which is important for health and safety as well as production reasons.

It also helps your managers see labour costs for projects or days, track absence and generally lookout for your company AND its workers.

For employee’s, Time and Attendance offers transparency on pay, holiday and work rotas. No more guessing how much you were paid for the overtime last week, it’s all available in black and white (or on the App!)

In short – T&A helps keep your employees happy, both management level and below, and happy employees mean more productive employees.

What is Workforce Time and Attendance?

Workforce Time and Attendance is the process of tracking employees for the billable hours they work.

This tracking could be hours, days, or include breaks and overtime. It could be reported digitally or manually using a punching card/paper.

Time and attendance methods aim to give your business actionable data on the workforce, as well as help ease the burden of payroll and minimise human payroll errors.

Old school T&A methods vs Software?

As said above, time and attendance can be reported via manual clocking in/out (such as a punching clock on a physical card) or digitally, via a computer system or T&A software.

The old school methods of time and attendance (punching machines, paper timesheets and more) can leave your business open for issues, as physical timecards can be lost. There is also the issue of employee data safety.

Using a digital method of clocking, such as cloud-based software, will help irradicate the risk of lost data, as well as enable your business to cut down manual actions and automate the T&A process for improved efficiency. No more checking timesheets or overtime rates – it’s all added automatically for you.

Another benefit of digital clocking is the reduction of human error, as employees are only paid for what they physically clock. No clock, no hours, no payment.

What are my businesses clocking options?

Depending on your workforce location, site and needs you can choose a range of clocking methods.

Biometric time clocks are machines designed to scan physical unique attributes from your workers (such as facial recognition or fingerprints) to eliminate time theft and buddy clocking. With a Biometric time clock, employees are 100% on-site when they clock in.

Another option is contactless clocking, which is a popular option for workplaces handling food. Workers can clock contactless via Face (as above) or via an RFID card or fob.

For remote or travelling workers, you can also clock with a smartphone App, web browser or phone.

To make sure your employees are always able to clock, we thoroughly recommend choosing a time and attendance software that enables you to mix n match your clocking.

To find out more about an affordable, cloud-based time and attendance system and clocking machines, please get in touch.