Is An Attendance Tracking System Worth It?
Thursday, November 9th, 2006By Rick Hendershot
When wrestling with the decision whether or not to install an attendance tracking system, a business owner’s first question will invariably be, “how long it will take to recover the cost of my investment”.
Estimates range from six months to one year, depending on many factors, including the size of the company, and how much or little information gathering they did prior to implementation.
Actual returns on the investment, after five years of use, can add up to an impressive two hundred and fifty to five hundred percent, due to increased efficiency. The very fact that attendance tracking is in place can give a company peace of mind when wading through complicated labor regulations. Just being able to comply with labor rules and regulations reduces fines and the risk of litigation.
Here are some very sound reasons as to why employee time clock and attendance tracking is a good thing for businesses large and small.
Tops on the list is that fact that payouts will be lessened due to fewer data entry errors. In other words human error will no longer be a factor.
Administration costs can be greatly reduced by implementing a self serve feature for your employees. Hours worked and breaks taken will no longer be an estimate or a guess. Workers themselves will be entering accurate information each time their fingerprint is scanned, or their personal access card is read.
With modern digital technology, actual paper time cards that require re-keying of stamped information into a separate payroll system, will be eliminated. Gone will be the associated storage costs and printing bills.
With tight controls over start times and end times, unauthorized leave will be reduced. Such things as paid time-off, vacation, and sick days can be controlled more efficiently, making manual tracking a thing of the past. Managers should be mangers, not data trackers.
Imagine the saving that can be achieved, if a company could recover a half day, or even a whole day of unrecorded leave per year for every person in their employ.
Companies can even reduce the number of personnel they need in their payroll departments when calculations are done at the time data is collected rather than after. Payroll supervisors now will have the luxury of viewing entire pay periods prior to their close.
Attendance tracking systems can be programmed with the appropriate software so that hours worked, leave taken, and labor data can all be collected through time clocks, telephones, web browsers, or other input devices.
Such flexibility becomes very important when a company has more than one location in a town or branch plants in other cities. Data can be input from almost anywhere.
While it is of the utmost importance to input data correctly, it is equally important that corrections to any given time period be easily rectified. Such things as variations in time worked, a simple keying error, an employee who forgot to punch in or out when coming in after hours, or a union contract that is renegotiated retroactively, are all examples of fairly common glitches that could throw an old manual record keeping system into chaos.
In this day and age of complicated union agreements, complex government payroll rules and deductions, an automated employee time tracking system is definitely the best strategy to shore up a company’s bottom line.
See a full range of time and attendance systems at Wasp Barcode. In the UK see a full range of time and attendance systems for UK business and stock control software.
