10 Key Benefits of Time and Attendance

Staff are the most important and often the most expensive resource for most businesses. It is important to manage your workforce effectively to get the most out of your investment. Effective rota planning and ensuring your employees are doing the right job at the right time will maximise productivity. Businesses around the world have been recording time and attendance of their staff for decades. Gone are the days when individual cards need to be punched by a machine and a team of administrators had to pay cash to people based on their hours worked.

In this digital age, sophisticated time and attendance solutions can manage everything from your advanced rota planning and job planning, ensuring you have all of your required resources in place, right through to automatically and accurately calculating an individual’s pay. This article looks at 10 key benefits of time and attendance.

1. Save hours of planning and eliminate spreadsheets

If you are using, or have ever used spreadsheets to plan your staff shifts, you will be all too aware of how time-consuming they can be. An effective time and attendance solution will have a simple to use rota management screen that will allow you to create shift patterns and plan your rota in advance. This enables managers to plan, based on demand and within budget.

2. Ensure your rota is being planned within your budgets

Leading time and attendance solutions allow you to easily manage your staff budgets. Whether budgets are centrally-controlled or managed by individuals who are responsible for their own budget planning, a time and attendance solution can ensure that you stay within forecasted budgets, and planned versus actual budgets can easily be reported on.

3. Reduce the time spent on administration and communication spent liaising with employees

A time and attendance solution and rota planning solution can dramatically reduce the time your HR department and managers have to spend communicating with employees. Once a rota has been planned for the coming weeks or months it can be published. Each employee can see their planned shifts, upcoming holiday and even the job role that they have been assigned to. This can put an end to the “Can you see if I am down to work…?” phone calls and emails. More advanced solutions allow the organisation to publish un-filled or available shifts, allowing employees to put themselves forward for extra shifts.

4. Reduce the cost of your payroll by accurately monitoring your staff time and attendance

A key benefit of tracking time and attendance is the ability to make sure that staff adhere to their contracted hours, and this in turn, is a crucial element in controlling costs. There are many ways for employees to clock in or out, whether it is a PIN/Card/Fob reader, a biometric scanner or a mobile app. Whichever method is used, a time and attendance solution can effectively report on whether contracted hours are being worked, and calculate over-time based on company policies. Intelligent time and attendance solutions can even manage automated rounding rules so that managers are only notified of exceptions that are deemed important.

Staff pay and overtime is automatically calculated by the system, based on your organisation’s pay rates and overtime rates. Not only does this reduce time spent on manual calculations, it also mitigates the risk of human error, both of which can be costly to any organisation.

5. Increase employee trust in your organisation

It has been perceived, historically, that time and attendance systems were used only to reduce the cost of payroll, and as a result, some employees and trade unions have been opposed to the use of time and attendance systems. In recent years many employees and trade unions have not only accepted the use of such systems, they have demanded their use in order to protect employees from being exploited. In a recent ruling of the European Court of Justice, all businesses within the EU must implement a time recording solution in order to protect employees.

6. Protect your sensitive data

There is a good reason why the offices of HR and payroll departments are kept locked when they are unattended. They contain sensitive data including employee contact details, contractual information and most importantly, individual pay rates. HR and payroll personnel are highly trusted to maintain the integrity and confidentiality of this information. An innovative time and attendance solution can be configured so that users of the system are restricted to the data that they can see or edit. User permissions should be an important consideration in any time and attendance system.

7. Reduce the cost of absenteeism

Effectively managing all types of absence is a way to significantly reduce costs and increase productivity. In most organisations, there are staff who never take a day off sick and are always being asked to use up the last of their holiday entitlements at the end of the year, and there are those who take a significant time off sick. Managing absence effectively and fairly can be a challenge for any business. A time and attendance system can be configured to adhere to your company’s policies and give indications of patterns of absence that may need investigating or early intervention. Real-time and scheduled reports can empower HR teams and line managers to address any issues and easily manage all types of absence.

If you haven't already done so, take a look at our top tips for how to replace absenteeism in the workplace.

8. Prevent time fraud or payroll abuse

Manual processes such as time sheets or manager-approved overtime are open to abuse, fraud or just simple, honest mistakes. With a time and attendance system, everything is transparent, accurate and fully-audited. Businesses can even install biometric readers, such as a fingerprint reader or iris scanner. This eliminates the possibility of buddy punching.

9. Easily integrate with other applications

Time and attendance systems can easily be integrated with other applications. For example, if you have an electronic access control system installed, when your employees arrive at work and go through a door, they are creating an event in the access control database that states the time and location at which they arrived. Time and attendance systems can be integrated to read this information and therefore reduce the cost of installing separate terminals for staff to clock in/out on.

10. Get reports at your fingertips

One of the key benefits of a time and attendance solution is the ability to be able to generate a report at the touch of a button. A good system will allow you to configure a suite of reports that can be scheduled to arrive in the inbox of managers whenever they need them, and dashboards can be set up to see live data on all of the metrics that are important to your business.

Modernise the way your business works by taking advantage of these 10 key benefits of a time and attendance system.

1. Save hours of planning and eliminate spreadsheets.
2. Ensure your rota is being planned within your budgets
3. Reduce the time spent on administration and communication spent liaising with employees
4. Reduce the cost of your payroll by accurately monitoring your staff time and attendance
5. Increase employee trust in your organisation
6. Protect your sensitive data
7. Reduce the cost of absenteeism
8. Prevent time fraud or payroll abuse
9. Easily integrate with other applications
10. Get reports at your fingertips

RotaOne is a world-leading time and attendance solution from Thinking Software. It is highly configurable which means it can fit to meet the requirements of any organisation. Whether you are a small business wishing to simply record the time and attendance of your staff, or a global enterprise wishing to centrally manage complex workforce policies, RotaOne gives you all the tools you need.

If you are interested in seeing how RotaOne can automate your processes, reduce your costs, increase your efficiency and mitigate the risk of human error, then book a demo with one of our team who will be happy to show you the power and simplicity of our solution.