How time and attendance software can keep your business out of trouble

alex-kotliarskyi-361081.jpgSometimes, your company is going to get into trouble despite all of your best efforts. While getting into some trouble may be inevitable, for the most part you can avoid problems before they happen. When you use the right kind of software, often it makes these problems a non-issue. Automatic warnings let you know what could happen before it has a chance to happen. The software does the math for you, so you can focus on more high-level intellectual tasks than tracking employee clocking and hours.

Doing the Math

Often, running your business involves a lot of numbers. While your accountant can do much of the heavy lifting, running the numbers on hours worked is often outside of their purview. Every dollar counts, and avoiding trouble financially begins with your operation and its workers. The math on how many hours a given employee works tends to be less important than determining the highest and best use for your company's overall resources. Nonetheless, you do need to have payroll and time worked information available to you, so you can make the best decisions. The software can do the math for you on which employees have worked however many hours, and even determine the optimal path for maximizing payroll capital by pay grade.

Avoiding Illegal Overtime

It is surprisingly easy to get in trouble for over-working an employee. In many municipalities, there are limits on how much time anyone is allowed to work, let alone attempting to coerce your employees into working with implied threats such as dismissal. Further, younger employees may have additional restrictions on how much time they are allowed to work over a given period. They may even be limited to what times of the day they can work legally. Staying out of trouble involves being aware of how much you can and do work your employees. Using attendance software ensures that you will be warned before you accidentally schedule an employee when you should not do so.

Quantifying Equal Treatment

Sometimes an employee feels as if you are mistreating them. This causes their morale to lessen, which can cause them to become passive-aggressive and harm your company. Further, if the employee's morale lessens far enough, they may file suit against you or your business for discrimination. This can lead to an expensive court battle, being investigated by the authorities, and to receiving negative publicity that can impact your future sales. In all of these cases, your ability to easily quantify and present that you are treating your employees with equality is vital. Time and attendance software makes the quantification process a simple one.

Mandating Time Off

Sometimes, mandatory time off is either a legal requirement or part of an employee's contract. If the employee has PTO, and you have them work through it, you get in trouble by paying them twice for the same time. In the same vein, sometimes the law mandates that employees receive a certain amount of time off each year. You can easily get into trouble if you deny your employees the time off the law requires. Using time tracking software makes it easy to avoid this potential pitfall.

Automatic Warnings

Automation is one of the best ways to ensure that a given action occurs. What you automate happens, and what you request may not happen. Time and attendance tracking software allows you to focus on the higher level tasks of your business, and issues automatic warnings. If something you set is going to happen if you do not change it, you can briefly focus on correcting the problem instead of obsessing over it.

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