When considering a time tracking system, companies want to know that it will allow their business to run a more accurate and efficient payroll at a lower administrative cost.
Yet there’s more to consider. It’s equally important for these companies to consider how the time-tracking system affects employees. What will they experience with the time-tracking software? If employees don’t embrace the system, the potential business benefits won’t materialize for the company.
Here’s a look at how some different employee time-tracking solutions can improve the lives of different types of employees.
Time Tracking Solutions for Payroll Staff
The payroll department has one primary goal: Run an accurate, fast payroll every time. Whatever tool makes payroll staff life easier and helps them achieve that goal is a resource that will make them happy.
How Time Clock Software Can Track Data Beyond Employees’ Work Hours
All time clock attendance tracking software collects the date and hours an employee works. However, today’s payroll team needs more information than working hours to run an accurate payroll.
Time clocks operating with a programmable attendance data collection software can be set to collect other key data points payroll needs. For example, the time clock software can be programmed to:
1. Ask the employee to confirm the department for which the hours were worked, so inter-departmental chargebacks for project work can be automated.
2. Require employees to enter how much they earned in tips at the end of each shift.
3. Enforce break time punches to comply with local meal break laws so employees get the full amount of personal time required and companies don’t overpay for break time.
The more automated payroll processes the time collection software can facilitate, in addition to replacing timesheet tracking, the less manual work payroll employees have to do. The less manual work they have to do, the more they lower the risk of payroll errors.
Employee Self-Service Time Clocks Save Payroll Staff Time
The configurable time clock software should be the front end of a robust two-way integration that allows data from your scheduling and workforce management solution to be shared at the time clock. With this type of software and integration, the time clock can be transformed into a self-service kiosk for employees.
How does this help payroll staff?
It means employees can look up their own personal information at the time clock that they’d otherwise bother payroll employees about. They can find information about past hours worked without having to ask anyone in payroll.
Employees can also review current worked hours and flag any potential errors to payroll employees before that payroll is run.
Time Tracking Solutions for Managers
Any time tracking solution brought into the company should also provide managers with tools that help them succeed in their jobs.
Biometric Time Clocks Reduce Company Time Theft
Employee time theft is a result of buddy punching, which costs companies by bloating their labor costs. When managers have financial objectives and constraints they must meet, time theft can undermine their work.
Buddy punching is when one employee clocks in or out for another. This is one of the most common and costliest forms of time theft. A biometric time clock, such as finger print or facial recognition time clock, makes it virtually impossible for employees to buddy punch. With a biometric reader on the time clock, it becomes one of the easiest ways to help managers ensure their teams aren’t inflating company labor costs.
Using Time Tracking Solutions as a Tool to Improve Attendance Management
Managers are also held accountable for their team’s productivity. Poor employee attendance reflects poorly on the manager. An advanced employee attendance collection solution like ATS’s AccuCloud has tools that help managers identify potential attendance issues.
The AccuCloud web portal provides managers with reports on employee clocking patterns and time clock utilization. Managers can use both to identify which employees are chronically tardy, leave early or late, or don’t take their breaks. They can filter reports to find out who tends to have unplanned absences on the first or last day of their work week.
Time Tracking Solutions that Serve All Employees
If the employees who need to clock in and out every work day aren’t happy with the time tracking system, that limits the system’s potential to benefit the business. The employee time tracking system has to provide direct, observable benefits to the employees who use it multiple times daily.
No More Timesheets!
The most immediate benefit for employees is no longer using a timesheet to track time manually. Manual time tracking is time-consuming and error-prone. It takes time away from their core responsibilities and increases the chances that their paycheck won’t accurately reflect hours worked. Employees using a time clock to automate their attendance tracking get the right amount in their paychecks every time.
The best devices operate with a hardware and software combination that reliably and quickly collects every punch in and out. Reliability is important, so the time clock is always available when needed.
The processing power of the time clock and the efficiency of time collection software determine how quickly each punch is captured. Employees don’t want to stand in line at the time clock, waiting to punch in or out.
Every type of ATS’s time clocks, including the Android-based stride®80 and all three PeoplePoint models, all have significant memory and processing power, built to handle high volume of employees quickly and reliably.
Employee Self-Service Functionality Empowers Employees
Making time clocks into employee self-service (ESS) terminals benefits the employees who can look up their information at the time clock and the managers, payroll, and HR staff who no longer have to do that for them.
A time clock like our Android-based stride80, which can run your custom Android-based app fed by data from your system, enables your company to offer employees a range of ESS services. You can let employees submit time-off requests and track them at the time clock.
As a web-enabled time clock, you can also use the stride80 to streamline other employee services, such as collecting annual benefit selections and employee electronic attestations.
A Time Tracking Solution IT Employees Will Love
Introducing a new solution that includes hardware and software often adds a new support burden to the company’s IT team. The question is, how large is that burden? You and your customers should always consider the additional scope a new time-tracking system can place on your respective IT teams.
The best option for a low burden of internal IT support is a cloud-based solution like our AccuCloud system. Once we integrate with your back-end system, we’ll host your AccuCloud instance on our servers, which includes hosting AccuCloud’s sophisticated middleware layer that automates and manages the bi-directional flow of data, configuration changes, and software updates.
With the ATS support team behind the scenes, the AccuCloud tools help your IT team manage all your customers’ time clock deployments through a centralized web management portal. SOTA (secure over-the-air) software updates or modified time clock software configurations can be pushed to a customer’s entire fleet of time clocks in minutes. It’s a stress-free, scalable model that contains the support responsibilities of your employees while letting you offer a low-maintenance employee time-tracking system to your customers.
A Quick Review of each ATS Time Tracking Tool Mentioned
To make things easy, here’s a high level overview of all the ATS tools mentioned, to help you understand what’s what.
ATS Cloud-Based Software Solutions
The main software solution discussed is AccuCloud, our cloud-based, full service employee attendance data collection system. The components of the AccuCloud system are:
· stride®80 time clock
· middleware layer hosted by ATS
· web-based management portal
· AccuCloud Portal Page, which lets you track your customers’ fleets with real-time visibility into the operational and integration status of all their time clocks
We designed AccuCloud so our resale partners could scale up their software sales to include durable time clocks. AccuCloud allows our partners to unlock more of their workforce management solution’s value to their customers by extending its reach to the time clock.
The AccuCloud system also enhances their control to manage their customers’ time clock deployments and improve their customers’ experience without demanding increases on their support load.
Because AccuCloud works with the stride80 time clock, it can run your time-tracking app if it’s built on Android. Our time clock software, TimeCollect is a configurable, flexible time clock application built to integrate with your back-end system.
ATS Hardware Solutions
This is a more detailed list of ATS time clocks mentioned, plus a quick look at our facial recognition system (FRS).
- · stride80: Our top-of-the-line time clock and Android-based development platform comes with an advanced set of hardware features that enable your IT dev team to build any sort of workforce management app to run on it. The web-enabled time clock features include a wide-screen touch display presence sensor. They can be configured with a full range of peripherals such as biometric readers, cameras, keypads, proximity, or swipe cards.Our Only|You facial recognition system (FRS) is built for the stride80, it converts the stride80 into a biometric time clock by using its built-in camera to scan employee faces to authenticate their identity before punching in and out. Only|You facial recognition is an optional add-on that integrates with ATS’ TimeCollect or can be integrated with any Android-based time clock data collection software application.
- PeoplePoint Turbo: A web-enabled, Android-based time clock that can support a wide range of ESS applications.
- PeoplePoint Premium: This time clock takes the touch screen up a step with our largest wide screen at 10 inches. It’s available with either an Android or Linus operating system.
- PeoplePoint Plus: A compact, Linux-based time clock with high performance and a 7” widescreen.
All these ATS time clocks are compatible with a range of reader options, including biometrics.
Time Tracking Solutions that Serve Employees, Benefit the Business
It doesn’t matter how well-designed or architected a time tracking system is if your customers’ employees don’t buy into it. The more employees see and experience the value it holds for them, the more they will use it in all the ways that give them maximum ROI on your workforce management solution.
The greater the ROI your customers calculate from your full-service solution, including the employee time-tracking system, the greater ROI your company earns from reselling the right combination of time-tracking hardware and software.
Talk today with an ATS time-tracking solution expert to explore which ATS solutions offer you and your customers the best experience and value.