Tracking attendance can be an incredible time drain for management – a time drain that can be easily remedied with a reliable and accurate online attendance system. One of the biggest problems with traditional time and attendance trackers is that they can only be accessed from a specific network or on a company computer. This means that you are required to set aside time to manage attendance, something that can be difficult to do with constant interruptions at the office.
Online attendance systems are more flexible and let you track time when you have the time. This can help streamline your process, making regular management of these areas more productive.
Real-time Tracking
The first place where you will see improvement is with time entry. Because your employees will be able to enter their time as soon as they remember (instead of the next morning or all at once at the end of the week), the recorded time will be more accurate. By giving your employees a way to quickly enter their time from anywhere, you can decrease the number of requests to adjust the time later.
The task of dealing with time card corrections is easily one of the most frustrating and time-consuming aspects of managing attendance. When you have only a small handful of such requests, you will have more time to more important activities.
Easier Reporting and Tracking
The freedom to review time and attendance from anywhere at any time means that you can take care of little requests much more quickly and efficiently. Being able to fix things and make updates as you go ensures that you are less likely to miss something. This kind of simplification of tracking can give you better control over your reports.
With better tracking, your reports become more reliable. With more accurate reports, you can establish better schedules for employees based on their time and attendance. It also helps you project the number of hours worked for everyone, making it easier to determine who is going above and beyond.
Projecting Hours in the Future
With more reliable reports and accurate time tracking, you can begin to project how much time you will need covered over the coming months and year. This can help you to determine if you need to hire more staff because your current employees are working too much, provide better employee reviews, and see when you may need additional help (such as over the holidays).
As you see trends and patterns in your employees’ hours worked, you can establish better schedules to meet their needs. Whether they are working too many or too few hours, the schedule can start to reflect when you need employees to be at work. Instead of having three people working on slow days, you will be able to schedule fewer people for the same time period later. This is not only a way to make your attendance management more efficient; it makes your scheduling more financially efficient. You can also start prioritizing who will work based on their performance, including time and attendance.
Additional Protection
Too often companies leave their time and attendance programs open to hackers and those with malicious intent, falsely thinking that the data is safe simply because it is on a network. If your time and attendance system is managed online, it will have a considerable amount of built-in security that many offline programs lack. It also helps to minimize fraudulent entries by employees.