The Importance of Time and Attendance: 10 Benefits For Your Business

If you’re responsible for payroll at your company, then you know it can be challenging to accurately track employees’ time and attendance. And the task has become even more difficult with the rise of remote workers. While there are a lot of solutions on the market today that allow you to better track your employees’ hours, you may be wondering if you really need a time and attendance system. Here, we’ll try to answer that question.

In this article, we’ll discuss the top benefits your company will realize with time and attendance solutions. After reading this, you’ll understand whether the advantages make a system the right option for your business.

Top 10 Benefits of Time and Attendance

While you probably already know that a time and attendance system can make a necessary task in workforce management easier and more efficient, let’s dive deeper into the real reasons one may be the best approach for your organization. Here are the top 10 advantages of a time and attendance solution.

1. Time Savings: With a manual process, your staff has to spend time at the end of each pay period collecting time cards or other data sources and re-enter that information into your payroll system – whether you run payroll yourself or outsource it to a provider. Using a time and attendance system will automate this process and drastically reduce the amount of time required so you can focus on other, more strategic tasks instead.
2. Greater Control: Since you’ll have greater control over all your time and attendance data, you can gain insight into opportunities to optimize your workforce management. For example, you may run a report that reveals absenteeism is an issue with a particular employee and needs to be addressed. The information a system can generate can help you better manage employees, more quickly prevent or address concerns like overtime or early or late punches, and adjust how you run your business.
3. Less Paperwork: By going paperless, you’ll eliminate outdated processes that require collecting, sorting, and managing tedious paperwork. Not only will this save you time, you’ll also eliminate the costs of items associated with manual time tracking such as paper and printing and reduce your impact on the environment.
4. Enhanced Accuracy: US employers say they have to correct errors on 80% of the timesheets their employees submit. The mistakes can be due to things like:
• swipe errors
• illegible timesheets
• employees forgetting their hours when it comes time to log them
• workers not clocking in or out
• data entry errors in time calculation by managerial or administrative staff

No matter the reason, there’s a lot of room for mistakes with manual processes. With an automated time and attendance solution, however, the system keeps track of how long employees work each day, ensuring greater accuracy in the data and, ultimately, employee pay.

1. Lower Cost: By reducing staff involvement in time tracking, you’ll save on labor costs. Plus, if you integrate a time and attendance solution with your payroll system, you’ll realize even greater efficiencies and save hundreds of hours a year in manual processing time for activities like record management and data transfers. Lastly, since an automated time and attendance system can improve the accuracy of your time tracking, you could save by preventing things like unauthorized overtime or buddy punching.
2. Time Theft Mitigation: As we just mentioned, buddy punching and other time theft is more common with manual systems that allow opportunities for fraud. In addition, the conventional method of managers signing time sheets and approving overtime manually is susceptible to abuse and forgery. An automated time and attendance system can help you reduce the likelihood of time theft because you can see when people clock in and out.
3. Improved Transparency: Depending on the system you choose, employees may have some self-service functionality beyond just clocking in and out such as viewing their time card, overtime worked, and schedules. In addition, they may be able to swap shifts and request PTO through the system. All of this gives them greater visibility into their work hours and pay, which can build greater trust.
4. Better Compliance: With federal, state, and sometimes even local wage and hour and overtime laws in effect, and steep fines for violations, you’ll want to make sure you comply with the requirements. For example, under the FLSA, you need to pay employees at least 1.5 times their regular wage for all hours worked over 40 in one workweek. A time and attendance system can help ensure you follow the guidelines by accurately tracking time so your employees get paid for the work they did and you pay out the correct amount each pay period.
5. High Employee Satisfaction: When automating time and attendance, your employees will be paid accurately and on time since you won’t have to track and verify time manually, which can delay when you’re able to process direct deposits or paychecks. In addition, since decisions based on automated systems are much more objective, you’ll be more consistent in the application and enforcement of company policies. In these ways, a system can boost their satisfaction, which can translate into a better culture and retention rates.
6.  Better Management of Remote Workers: With manual time cards or clocks, it can be a challenge to capture remote workers’ hours. But automated time tracking gives you a seamless way to allow employees to track their time no matter where they work online or via a mobile app. Plus, some even have GPS tracking capabilities that allow you to pinpoint an employee’s location if you want to check that they’re actually on the job when they’re clocking in

How to Best Realize the Benefits of a Time and Attendance Solution

As you can see, an automated time and attendance system delivers several key advantages over a traditional manual method. So you may be wondering if there’s any reason you shouldn’t implement one at your company. For some businesses, the one potential drawback is the price. While costs vary dramatically, you can generally expect to pay between $2 and $10 per employee per month for a system. Read our next article on time and attendance costs to find out factors that can drive this figure up as well as ways your company could save on a solution.