Reduce Remote Employee Babysitting with a Phone Time Clock

What could be more aggravating for a manager than the following scenario? You're safely home and ready to sleep when a night shift manager at a remote location calls in to say she's ill. Since her crew is relatively new, you check in with that office only to find that no one is answering the phone. Panicked, you climb out of bed and drive across town to find everyone working peacefully!

How could this scenario have been improved? Three words: Telephone time clock. Had your company already had in place a phone time clock system, the scenario would have been much different.

For instance, not every manager remembers to call in immediately when she's ill. Not to worry; a telephone-based time attendance tracking system can alert you by email when someone fails to report. Even if the manager hadn't called, you would have been aware of the situation.

The second way things would have been different with a phone time clock is that, rather than calling frantically to learn if employees were on the job, you could have learned their status online.

Telephone time attendance tracking systems are linked to an online interface for management. Once you learned of the manager's absence, a simple glance at the location's logins by phone would have told you that everyone was in place.

These terrific timekeeping systems, can't, of course, deal with the issue of employees who don't answer the phone! But in this case, you could have made a different decision about whether to race across town in the middle of the night.

This is all possible because each employee calls in to a central number and their time in and out is logged immediately in a web-based database. As a manager, you have employee time information from every office at your fingertips. Dealing with employee shortages is made so much easier when you learn, real-time, who's absent.

What a sane, orderly way to do business! If your company has remote locations and you're struggling to know if they're always fully-staffed, a telephone time clock can definitely restore your sanity.

Finding the Perfect Employee Time Clock

When my best friend and I decided to open up our small web design business, we did not expect to grow into a huge company. With the growth of our computer-based business came new and larger responsibilities. Many of the new responsibilities entailed keeping track of multiple clients to keeping accurate records of employee time recording.

My business partner and I were fine at first with juggling all of our clients, but we were having problems keeping accurate records of our employees who wanted to work from home. This problem was a big thorn in our side. We tried several different methods such as the traditional punch time clock to even having them write down their times in a log book. None of these methods were accurate and we ended up overpaying several of our employees that worked at home. We were on a search to find a solution to this problem.

One day during a business lunch with a regular client, the conversation turned towards finding new and innovate ways to increase employee productivity and also save money while doing this. The client informed me about a great company called Chronotek that he had been using to keep track of employee hours. He said that it was a service that is a

telephone time clock that uses a toll-free phone number that employees use to clock in and out from home. This grabbed my attention immediately and I could not wait to check this innovative service out and share the information with my business partner.

When I shared with my business partner what the client had been using for time attendance tracking in his business, she was intrigued. We went to the website and did a little research on this service. After checking everything out and reading the testimonials, we both knew that this was the perfect solution to our problem.

The Phone Time Clock has now been in use in our web design business for six months. Our employees now find it much easier to clock in and out with this groundbreaking invention. My business partner and I have also noticed that all of our employees are much happier using this simple system. The ease of access of the system makes it easier to keep track of payroll and has saved us thousands of dollars over the past six months. We could not have found a better solution to our problem and recommend it to all of our clients dealing with the same type of problem.

How Telephone Timekeeping Improves Response to Official Requests

Complying with official requests for payroll information can be very difficult with a paper-based timekeeping system. For example, if an employee files a complaint with a government agency about the way they are being paid, timecards must be gathered and copied at that agency's request. Using a telephone time card system with online access to records makes compliance much simpler.

You may not have yet experienced a request of this kind. Many companies, however, have felt the pain of responding to an official request for records for workers compensation reviews, wage and hour disputes or even an audit by the home office. Another reason an official request might be received is in the event of a lawsuit, when payroll records for a specific employee or group of employees are subpoenaed.

Firms with far-flung employees who bring in handwritten timecards are especially vulnerable when this type of request is received. Another possible obstacle is that those timecards might be sent to yet another location for storage. To determine your own exposure, why not take a quick look at how your payroll records are being collected, calculated and stored. Within your present system, would you be able to respond quickly to such a request?

Your payroll manager may reply with a terse, "I know where everything is stored, don't worry about it!" The problem is that filing systems tend to change when managers leave. Having the ability to retrieve records from a phone time card system does two things; it creates a backup to physical records being stored, and it counteracts the quirks (and failings) of individual employees.

Believe it or not, many companies that thought they had a system in place for quick retrieval of original time records have been stunned to find that records have been damaged or misfiled. In compliance situations, you must also be able to produce proof that records have been stored in a way that prevents tampering. A secure online database from which only specific employees are allowed to retrieve and print time records makes this much easier.

Simply put, a telephone-based time attendance tracking system is one in which an employee calls into a phone system and reports her stop and start times for each shift worked. From those phone calls, an online database of time records is created from which timecards can be printed and real-time payroll data managed.

None of us who own or manage a business wants to believe that we might be the subject of a regulatory audit or investigation. In today's highly-sensitized workplace, however, compliance with a whole host of payroll and benefits regulations is a formidable job. Knowing you have at your fingertips the records you need lessens the load significantly.

Why wait until you're unable to provide verifiable employee payroll data quickly? A phone time clock system with online storage of employee time records can easily keep you ahead of the curve.