4 REASONS TO AUTOMATE YOUR TIME AND ATTENDANCE
Employees represent a company’s biggest asset to growth and profitability, but often the biggest expense as well. For this reason, maintaining accurate time and attendance records is critical to managing your workforce. An automated time and attendance system that meets your organization’s needs and integrates with your HR and payroll systems can yield a strong return on employee investment. Following are some of the significant benefits:
Reliable Accuracy
A manual timekeeping system requires employees to report their hours after the fact, which can increase your company’s exposure to the likelihood of inaccurate time tracking. Illegible handwriting can make determining actual hours worked difficult, and a process that relies heavily on the honor system can be abused, leading to time theft.
Increased Productivity
It is not uncommon for companies with a manual payroll process to spend five hours or more each pay period collecting time cards, re-entering data into a payroll solution, and processing payroll. With an automated time and attendance system, this task can be reduced to a matter of minutes.
Bottom-Line Savings
A reduction in human error, saved wages from productivity, elimination of time theft and overtime are all direct, ongoing cost savings. Indirect savings include better insight to your employees’ work and the time spent on their work, which can allow for appropriate labor allocation across your workforce.
Improved Regulatory Compliance
While an automated time and attendance system cannot guarantee employment law compliance, the data collected and available through your system can ensure that you have the information required to comply with labor regulations. Consistency in your timekeeping and the ability to quickly pull reports from your system can be your best tools, should the Department of Labor ever request an audit.
Web-based time and attendance tracking is one of the many HR solutions offered by a Professional Employer Organization (PEO). Employees clock in and out by using an online time clock that can optionally be accessed from a tablet or smart phone. The collected data is then transferred to the time and attendance system in real time.
Whether your employees are salaried or hourly, a good time and attendance system can help you manage labor costs and access comprehensive reporting. Timesheets may be integrated with the PEO’s payroll service through a streamlined approval process, eliminating the need for faxing or emailing paper timesheets.
Accurate timekeeping can help prevent costly regulatory compliance missteps, while positively impacting production and profitability, and using a PEO is one of the best ways to achieve this.