It would be unfair to compare startups, post 2010 with that of its predecessors. Much has changed within a short span of time, ranging from the KPIs to marketing activities and even the way employees interact with a company. Nowadays, people work remotely without the need of physically sitting in an office space. While there are various KPIs to measure a business’ performance, but one indicator remains as relevant as ever, i.e. Employee turnover and satisfaction. It directly impacts the number of units and services produced by the firm.
Attendance and time tracking is automated by virtue of a time clock. Time clocks come in a variety of options. Attendance is recorded in various ways, including punch cards, bar codes, magnetic swipes and biometrics, such as facial scans or fingerprints. The stored data can then be transferred into softwares to manage payrolls and leaves, all automatically. Some well built devices even monitor mobile and remote employees via geolocation.
Types of Time Keeping Solutions
There are two types systems to keep track of your employees:
Cloud based systems- They are “softwares” which manage attendance remotely. In most cases, an employee has to log in and out of the software. In addition to accruing one-time purchasing cost, HR department has to pay per-user fee, ranging anywhere from $1 to $10. These costs are monthly and there are several other monthly base charges. However, it has an unmatched benefit of including software upgrades and other online support.
On-premises system- They are physical entities, where an employee has to enter credentials for correct timestamp. All the costs are upfront and one time, including charges for licenses and installation. There are various types of Employee Time Clocks, including biometric and other cloud integrated systems. They are fairly easy to set up and some services may include support and software updates for your machine.
Time clocks come in variety of options including manual on premises punch cards, magnetic swipes, bar code and other cloud based systems. But biometric systems are something, every up and coming firm must keep a track of.
What are Biometric Time Clocks?
Biometric systems are a means of verifying the credentials of a person by uniquely evaluating and identifying one or often more biological traits. These distinguishing traits may vary from fingerprints, hand geometry, facial recognition, Iris pattern, DNA or even voice waves. The implementation of biological assessment is not only limited to high-end services like banking, medical or “unlocking the phone”, but it is becoming a benchmark in companies, for managing real and error free attendance.
Biometric Time clocks offer high level of security, minimized error and duplicacy and a highly convenient way of identifying an employee which is otherwise manual, time consuming and poses a difficulty in management for the HR department. While the types of biometric time keeping solutions are many, but the most commonly used are fingerprint and facial recognition tools.
Pros and Cons
The biggest advantage of these digital systems is that it eliminates the need of keeping track of employees, manually. Attendance is collected electronically and right from the time keeping to salary calculation, is done automatically. In addition to automation, other additional benefits include:
Manages your finances- Advance tracking of job-costing and workforce distribution, including availability of real time data provides enhanced views of an organizations’ KPIs like hours and wages, employee count, working status, over time, pay offs etc. Many insurance companies need employee information like total work hours etc. Information stored in these systems is easily obtainable and are more precise than the error prone manual systems.
Easy Payroll Processing- Salaries are the most crucial part of any company. Use of automated system like time clocks and biometric systems has direct and huge impact on processing of payrolls. Time clocking is done to track employees, which can be directly integrated with workforce management systems. It prevents cost overheads by preventing unauthorized overtimes.
Improves ROI- It eliminates inaccuracies and loopholes of error prone old systems of manual attendance entry. It also saves working hours of HR and your staff by creating electronic data which is easily shareable and editable across various platforms.
Eases the access of information- Time and attendance keeping systems allow employees to manage time-related tasks, themselves. They can easily track their work time, paid off time and submit time-off requests, without the need of waiting endlessly for HR’s reply. All the attendance data is easily uploaded on cloud, which can be directly transferred into a payroll processing software. HR department has access to a fairly accurate and updated data, to minimize errors.
The only drawback is that these systems are more expensive than the old methods, where employees wrote down their work hours and punched there paper timecards. However it cuts down the cases of proxy attendance and ghost employees, saving a huge amount of money for a working corporation.
Gone are the days when employees used to note down their time and punched those cards to mark their attendances. The world is rushing towards an automated system and so are the ways to keep track of employees and their work hours. Use an automated attendance keeping system like time clock or biometric system, and let your business bloom.
