Best Time Attendance Software: Grow Your Business Now

It’s hard to change how you measure staff attendance, but Time and Attendance Software does a much better job of tracking it with more flexibility and significantly fewer headaches.

What is Time Attendance Software?

The software is usually hosted in the cloud, making it accessible to different people and managers based on permissions. The cloud also makes it more affordable for small businesses that lack the time and money to maintain the software on their own systems.

The software can generate automatic reports based on all the incoming data that you and your staff provide. It is not “dead” data locked away in files, folders, or old computer systems.

Based on this data, the best software has built-in approval options so managers can approve shifts, projects, or leave requests.

As with any software option, the best option for your business is based entirely on your needs and the number of workers. Before choosing software, consider why Time Attendance Software will help you grow your business.

Importance of Time and Attendance Tracking System

You might think you have some leeway with absenteeism built into your policies and that tracking attendance and time isn’t as important because it will all even out in the long run.

Well no. Simply put, your business can’t grow if you’re losing money and productivity.

38% of workers have called in sick to work despite feeling perfectly fine. How much does that cost the workers? According to Forbes, absenteeism costs companies around $3,600 per year for hourly workers (and $2,650 for salaried workers).

Causes of Time Attendance Software

You ensure that staff only get paid for the work they are actually doing. This is particularly important for hourly workers.

You ensure that workers do more than meet their minimum “quota”.

You see patterns of people abusing time off policies (for example, magically ill every sunny Friday).

Using software to measure attendance and time further enhances your savings, which we’ll cover in a moment.

Time to Automate

That Excel sheet for measuring time and schedules may seem like automation, but it’s not. It only works as well for the worker who remembers to write down their actual time instead of guessing.

If your business relies on a manual approach to attendance and time tracking it will “probably keep working” until all of a sudden, you’re at a point where it’s a total mess.

If you’re still using paper punch cards or Excel spreadsheets, you’re leaving the door open for system errors. For example, “buddy punching” is where workers flag buddies who are absent or late, not to mention basic human error. You’re also probably measuring the bare minimum since that’s about all you can handle with a larger system.

Good software takes the guesswork out of calculating time and attendance, and it also takes the opportunity for dishonesty. If you’re overwhelmed with managing your current time and attendance system or notice discrepancies in worker time, your next step should be to choose Time and Attendance Software.

Time is Money

In some large companies, when large numbers of workers come and go at the same time, they actually waste time waiting to get in and out. Think about it. You are literally paying them while they wait to punch in.

There are other big-time wasters that come from an old-school approach to time attendance tracking. For example, recording a worker’s working time is the most time-consuming aspect, but guess what’s second?

Payroll

Again, you are literally spending time/money calculating how to spend money for time.

After switching from a manual Time Attendance System to an automated approach, companies reduced the time it took to handle payroll from four days to one!

As a manager or owner, your time is valuable. It seems almost comical that so much of your time is spent calculating other people’s time. The right software can put an end to this.

Procedural and Legal Compliance

Manual time and attendance measurement rely on multiple manual methods. It can lead to problems with overtime, non-compliance, and internal policies. The more policies, workers, and laws you have to comply with, the harder it is to do everything by hand or use two disparate systems that don’t integrate.

By using Time and Attendance Software, you can eliminate some of the margins for error and also easily see if workers are not adhering to company policies.

Budget

Time and attendance software should give you the ability to see labor cost projections into the future. For example, if you have a peak season, you can export your data and use it to understand whether you’re over or understaffed during that time. Conversely, you can see your slowest times and determine if your staff is more efficient.

Growth

With a Team of 5 people, you can still manually operate, calculate and create schedules, but if you want to grow, you need attendance control software. You need it to free up your time to focus on growing your business, and you need it to scale once you grow. Spend more time thinking about the future of your business instead of wasting hours on administrative tasks.

Time and Attendance Software will save you time and money, but it will also give you a lot of information to help you make better business decisions.

The first part is easy to understand when you think about growing your business, but the second aspect is that data is always important but often overlooked. The software can collect data useful for future billing, budgeting, and planning.