Despite being one of the pivotal processes for a smooth business run,
attendance management
can be challenging if not handled adequately. Compliance with the
country's or federal
labor laws, handling time off requests, dealing with absenteeism, and so on—if
neglected or done traditionally, may cause severe damage to an
organization's reliability.
Luckily, time and attendance software backs you up, introducing a
modern approach to tracking and managing employee work hours and
attendance data.
Get to know:
-
What is attendance management?
-
How to manage employee attendance?
-
What are the challenges of attendance management?
-
What are the benefits of using time and attendance
software?
-
What is the best time and attendance tracking software?
The quick answer to the last question is:
it's TimeCamp!
Get your free account now and see how easily it scales to suit your
organization's needs.
What's attendance management?
Attendance management is a complex process of
tracking employee
presence and absence, their work hours, and time off requests for
various purposes, such as accounting, regulation compliance, or
scheduling.
In a nutshell, it manages who's present or absent, when, and why.
Attendance vs performance
Being present does not necessarily mean an employee is diligent about
fulfilling their duties during work. However, if their lack of
engagement doesn't directly jeopardize the project's success, and the
team is still on track with its assigned work, it's easy for managers
to overlook that some members contribute less than others.
The problem arises when their low interest level starts being
contagious, affecting the team's productivity and morale.
Combine the effort
That's why tracking employee attendance should be combined with
regular performance analysis. This approach helps identify the cause
of workplace negligence and categorize it as
time theft
or job dissatisfaction, allowing managers to administer the right
countermeasures to boost the team's performance.
How to track time and attendance?
How the company
records employee attendance
depends mostly on its size and industry.
However, we can group these ways into three main attendance
systems:
-
Manual attendance tracking: Physical
record-keeping methods, such as paper-based registers, punching
cards, or daily sign-in sheets. Obsolete, prone to human error,
may raise privacy concerns, and provide limited data insights.
Involve high time and paper consumption.
-
Semi-automatic attendance tracking: Methods of
employee verification based on physiological/behavioral
biometrics, RFID cards, or GPS with geofencing capabilities. It
helps prevent companies from losing time due to time theft, yet
their initial cost is high compared to traditional or online ways
of tracking time and attendance.
-
Online attendance tracking: Cloud-based time and
attendance recording tools. Allow the employees to clock in/out
using a web
timer, a desktop app, or an app for a mobile device. Often packed with
advanced features like paid time off tracking and robust reporting
capabilities. The most flexible option that adapts easily to the
needs of hybrid or fully remote teams.
As you can see,
attendance tracker
tools differ greatly. Punching cards, a biometric attendance system
with face recognition, or an automatic time and attendance tool fully
integrated with payroll software—they serve the same purpose yet on
various advancement and accuracy levels.
So, what could happen if you chose the wrong tool or method?
How would it affect the efficiency of attendance-related business
operations in your organization?
What are the common challenges in attendance tracking, and how can
they be solved?
Attendance tracking is a complex process that requires much effort to
ensure full law compliance and a smooth run at every stage.
However, a poorly managed and executed attendance system can put a
company at a disadvantage in many different ways:
-
Lack of clear policy in workforce management: Establishing transparent attendance rules and their execution is
the core of performing processes like absence management or
payroll law-wise. Done otherwise, it guarantees problems with law
compliance that are usually laborious to solve.
-
Poor time tracking: Traditional ways of
attendance tracking don't provide detailed records of employees'
work hours, so further usage, such as creating reports to analyze
data, is almost impossible.
-
Inaccurate data: Keeping track of time and
attendance hastily and without clear distinction leads to
documentation gaps that may result in payroll delays or
non-compliance penalties.
-
Insufficient data: Even if managers know
employees perform time theft practices like buddy punching or
excessive tardiness, it's hard to address this problem when the
company fails to track time and attendance adequately.
-
Lack of consistency: Using separate methods or
tools for attendance management and payroll may lead to
miscalculations or poorly created and assigned work schedules.
-
Remote employees' time tracking: Traditional
attendance management methods are not suitable for tracking the
time and attendance of remote employees, which often makes
companies avoid hiring remote workforce, even if the candidates
present the highest level of industry-related skills.
-
High costs: Tracking attendance manually or with
special hardware is a daunting task and usually involves
additional costs for office supplies or the maintenance of
biometric systems.
Sticking to traditional attendance tracking methods leads to data
inaccuracy and limited control over labor costs. But don't worry;
there's a simple (and almost free!) solution to keep the attendance
records accurate and available for performance analysis.
How to track attendance effortlessly?
All these pain points can be easily addressed and resolved by
switching to an online time tracking and attendance management tool.
The tool supports teams regardless of industry, size, or work models,
automates time attendance-related processes, and ensures the highest
legal compliance standards.
What are the key benefits of using time and attendance software?
As mentioned before, modern, thriving companies tend to automate the
laborious administrative tasks to squeeze the most out of their work
time for revenue-gaining activities. Attendance management is one of
these processes, and it can be easily handled with the help of time
and attendance software.
Let's split the numerous advantages of attendance tools into four
clusters.
1. Improve data accuracy
Implement an online time tracking and attendance solution to reduce
the risk of errors caused by manual data entry.
An attendance tracker:
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Streamlines administrative tasks: Use one tool to
let the employees clock in and out automatically, request time
off, and access their attendance records. The attendance tracker
seamlessly processes the data and prepares attendance reports and
payroll lists, saving managers time on manual time reporting.
-
Simplifies workforce management: Bring your
workplace structure into the attendance management tool, assign
employees roles and permission levels, and keep current staff data
in one place.
-
Keeps attendance data of an entire organization in one
place:
Keep employees' records in order thanks to easy access to time and
attendance document storage.
-
Keeps track of time off requests: Track and
manage employees' paid time off requests and keep them updated
with their accrual balances.
-
Facilitates employee-friendly work scheduling: Track and analyze data to create a work schedule tailored to
employees' availability and shift preferences. Post open shifts
for the staff to claim.
2. Enhance productivity
Time and attendance data is not just only a bunch of meaningless
numbers collected for documentation purposes. It provides managers
with data essential for evaluating employees' performance, addressing
violations of the company's attendance policy and expectations, as
well as promoting accountability among employees.
A time and attendance software:
-
Provides insights into attendance patterns:
Identify consecutive unwanted behavior, such as absenteeism or
tardiness, at its early stage to address these issues properly
with the staff and take proper countermeasures to prevent them
from occurring in the future.
-
Reduces time theft, such as buddy punching: Time
tracking and attendance software shows work time and computer
activity recorded between the first and last timesheet entry for a
particular day, so it's easy to tell if the employee performed
their duties this day or not.
-
Measures team performance: Generate custom
reports based on employees' time and attendance records to
determine if attendance issues may cause the lowered performance.
-
Promotes accountable and satisfied workforce:
Reduce the sense of micromanagement by enabling employees to track
time spent on their assignments and do regular performance
self-checkups. Having constant access to their own data increases
trust levels toward an employer, affecting their engagement,
morale, and positive contributions to the team's work.
3. Streamline payroll workflow
Monitor staff's attendance and track time spent across tasks to
simplify payroll and calculate job costing.
A time and attendance software:
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Helps track and approve timesheets: Introduce a
transparent timesheet workflow - your employees clock in and out
or
track work
activity with a time tracker, and once the time comes, they send
their time submissions for approval.
-
Enhances HR systems: Not every payroll software
offers native time and attendance tracking features. A seamless
integration with a time tracking tool extends HR suite capacity
and ensures proper billing of both salaried and hourly workers.
-
Minimizes labor costs: Optimize workforce
management with better insight into the team's performance to
reduce overtime expenses.
-
Provides better insight into job costing:
Estimate resource usage in projects and adjust it to your
employees' capacity to control costs required for projects to be
completed.
4. Simplify compliance
Align the attendance practices with current labor laws to avoid legal
issues and ensure the fair treatment of your employees regarding
accrual and accumulator balances, as well as other employment
benefits.
An attendance tracking software also:
-
Protects employees' personal data: Find a time
and attendance software that provides full compliance with GDPR
and other regulations regarding data privacy.
-
Helps establish a clear attendance policy:
Educate your staff on your company's attendance policies and train
them in using the chosen time and attendance software to reduce
the risk of compliance violations.
Believe it or not, we could keep going with the numerous advantages of
implementing time and attendance software into the organization's
workflow.
These key benefits provided above should have already convinced you
that switching to an online time tracking software to track attendance
is the only reasonable option to
keep the accuracy and consistency of attendance records, control
costs of the workforce and their jobs, and spot trends in attendance
data
to prevent time theft or employee burnout.
Now, let's dig deeper into how to implement the best employee
attendance management practices in your organization with the help of
automatic time tracking software.
What is the best time and attendance software, and why is it TimeCamp?
Ready to upgrade the attendance-related processes at your organization
to a digital level?
Allow TimeCamp to assist you in going through this transformation
smoothly. Save time and energy tracking and managing employees'
absences with a time and attendance app.
How to track work time and employee attendance with TimeCamp?
Let's take a quick tour through TimeCamp's attendance management
essentials:
+ How does TimeCamp track attendance data?
The core of TimeCamp attendance management are timesheets and computer
activity.
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Selecting Timesheets will display the records
based on time tracked across projects, such as total time worked,
time of first and last entry (and time between first and last),
vacation hours used, day type, and more.
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Selecting Computer activity will display data
based on time and activity entries registered by the desktop
application, such as
computer usage, the total time between computer turns on/off, break time, paid
time, and more.
Once you enable the attendance management feature, you can choose the
data input in Settings. Here, you will also set the default workday
length and enter holiday dates and the number of vacation days. Change
it for the entire organization or a specific group of employees.
Learn more: Attendance basics
+ Does TimeCamp time tracking offer attendance reports?
Of course, one of TimeCamp's greatest assets is customizable
reporting.
Attendance reports in TimeCamp differ slightly depending on the
selected data input:
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An Attendance report based on Timesheets shows
the average time tracked on each date within the selected date
range, the total time tracked between the first and last time
entries of the day, etc.
-
An Attendance report based on Computer Activity
shows active computer usage per day, hours of turning the computer
on and off, and total time between, etc.
You can export and download your reports to an Excel file.
Learn more: Attendance reports
+ Why generate attendance management reports, and how can they be
used?
Export and download an attendance management report:
For documentation purposes,
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To get a clear insight into employees' work hours and their
attendance patterns,
To streamline creating accurate payroll lists.
+ Can I change the day type in the TimeCamp attendance app?
Sure! TimeCamp allows you to report regular working and non-working
days, different types of leaves, remote work, holidays, and business
trips. Managers can also mark employees as absent on a particular
date.
+ Does TimeCamp offer a seamless integration with accounting tools?
TimeCamp integrates directly with Xero and Quickbooks. The integration
allows managers to import attendance data from TimeCamp to speed up
payroll processing and improve accuracy.
Check TimeCamp Xero time tracking and TimeCamp Quickbooks time tracking.
+ Is TimeCamp also a free time clock app?
Yes! Besides automatic time tracking, robust timesheets, desktop and
mobile apps, and browser extensions, TimeCamp also offers a Time Kiosk
App, allowing employees to simply clock in and out using the PIN codes
they enter into a Kiosk bar on a shared device.
Learn more: TimeCamp Time Clock App
Join thousands of satisfied teams and start tracking time and
attendance with TimeCamp.
Sign up for free today!