How Do Time and Attendance Systems Work

Using the right timekeeping strategy can help you monitor the expected duration of specific projects and identify time-consuming aspects. This enables you to mitigate potential challenges and optimise employee performance. And that's where time and attendance systems come in.

Contrary to popular belief, using time and attendance software isn't about micromanaging. The right employee management tool can empower your teams to take charge of their work schedules, boosting performance. As a result, enterprises are taking advantage of time management solutions, with over 88% automating their time and attendance data collection.

Workers can easily track their daily tasks, project milestones, and time-off requests. As a result, employees achieve a better work/life balance and avoid burnout while the company can streamline the payroll process.

What is a time and attendance system?

Businesses use time and attendance tools to track and optimise employees' work hours. With a time tracker, you can keep records of your workers' time on the job. But it does more than that.

It can also help monitor mobile employees using geofencing and geolocation, create employee schedules, provide a detailed labour report, manage paid time off, and provide real-time data on who those showing up ate and those due for overtime.

How does it work for an organisation?

If you're thinking of using the best time and attendance system in South Africa, here's what you should know about how it works:

Workers can clock in and out electronically via timeclocks, mobile apps, and web apps. Some time and attendance solutions also allow punching in and out via communication programs like Slack and social media programs like Twitter. These time management programs instantly transfer data to your payroll system.

The self-service setup of their time management system enables employees to perform many time-tracking tasks independently, such as reviewing their work hours and schedules. The data gathered from their activities are stored on servers within your business, while the cloud-based systems are located by your time and attendance provider, and you can access them online.

A time and attendance system can do the following:

Tracks time and attendance

Employees get their accounts with a user name and password. Whenever they log in, the system records their attendance. Thanks to the availability of multiple options to track time within the software, you can keep it simple and ask your team members to mark time anytime they go for lunch, bathroom breaks, or other forms of breaks the company allows.

This is useful in tracking how, when, and how your workers use their work hours. However, there might be exemptions in case of a dynamic work environment.

Absence management

According to a report, absenteeism costs companies in the U.S. about $3.6 billion yearly. With time management software, organisations manage and track employee time offs, including vacations, sick leave, and personal leave. You can get valuable insights about your employees by analysing time and attendance data.

You can also use it to identify the different time off trends in the organisation and locate absenteeism trends. And if there's potential, you can address it on time. Besides, this tool could help prevent employee burnout and feeling underutilised, as these are some significant reasons for absenteeism.

The absence management feature in a time and attendance tool can help:

• Manage absence requests and approval
• Track absenteeism trends and patterns
• Maintain compliance across multiple geographies per the laws
• Build the company's time off policy

Different technologies for clocking in and out

Different time management service providers have various options to help workers clock in work hours. An example is a Biometric Attendance System. This system identifies specific attributes of each employee using biometric data such as fingerprints, voice, hand geometry recognition, face recognition, and so on.

Research has found that buddy punching (whereby an employee helps another clock in) accounts for a loss of over $373 million annually in companies in the U.S.

Biometrics solves the concern of unethical employees logging in for one another by connecting proof of identity to each individual's body and activities pattern, delivering an optimal online attendance system. Other systems include ID card swiping, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), online timesheets, time cards, proximity cards or badges, and online attendance software.

Labour costing

Monitoring and controlling labour costs are simple with time and attendance data. A time and attendance tool's labour costing benefits allow you to plan daily and weekly tasks or projects, evaluate scheduled tasks' costs, and adequately budget for future projects.

That way, management can effectively determine the number of employees that should be working and the time needed. On the other hand, employees can record hours and shifts and switch between tasks seamlessly. Payroll processes, the timesheets, job, and labour cost codes will be automatically added to the workers' timesheet.

Mobile time-tracking apps on your employees' phones can become time clocks for employees in remote work sites. They can open the app, pick a task, clock in, record work hours, request time off, go on breaks, and clock out.

In conclusion

These time and attendance tools serve as a viable workforce solution, improving productivity and making it easier for firms and their workers to complete various work-related and administrative tasks from any device and at any time. As such, management won't have to spend much time micromanaging its employees.

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