Keeping it Simple

I am the payroll clerk for a busy cabinet making company. Most of the employees work away from the main office and it’s always a stressful task of gathering time cards in order to do the payroll. It is very time consuming and aggravating to have to figure out how many hours each person worked when they don’t actually come into the office and clock in or out. Most of them just write down their time and turn it into me; there are always those who forget to do that or forget to write down their time and they simply guess. After several years of fighting with the workers I insisted that my boss find a different system for keeping time. That’s when I suggested the telephone time clock system and I’m happy to say he listened to me and had it installed.

The old employee time clock system, which was really never used with our company, was not a system that made sense. If one of the workers needed to be thirty miles out of town to work on a job, it made no sense for him to come into the office and clock in on the time clock and then head to the job site. With the new system we have now, workers simply call the number they are given whenever they reach the job site as well as when they leave for lunch or leave at the end of the day. It is an excellent tracking system that has made my life so much easier and has eliminated 99% of the stress involved in doing payroll.

The telephone time clock works for our company because it keeps track of not only the time an employee works at a certain job but also where that employee is at any given moment during the day. We have over one hundred employees and can be working up to twenty different jobs every day. It’s almost impossible to keep up with where everybody is but with this system all I have to do is punch in their key code and it tells me the location of that employee when he/she called in. This system is an excellent tool to use to measure the length of time that employee spends on certain jobs which helps us to give our clients estimations as to how long it will take to complete a job. I’m very thankful my boss listened to me and made my job much easier to deal with.

Getting my Hours Straight

I work for a company that goes on the honor system for doing payroll instead of having a time clock system. We were to keep track of our hours and turn in our slip at the end of the pay period. For as long as I was doing this it always caused some kind of problem. I wrote down the time I walked in the door, what time I took lunch, and what time I left for the day. I never added more minutes to my time; I never even rounded up like so many other people would do. It seemed like every pay period they had some kind of question concerning my time. It was a never ending battle and I was getting very tired of it.

A friend of my husbands who owns his own business told me about the telephone time clock that he uses in his office. The employees just call the number associated with their employee number and their time in and out is recorded. At the end of the pay period the payroll clerk can have all the data sent to her and all the guess work is eliminated. It’s still based on an honor system but at least the information is in black and white and is hard to dispute.

I brought all the information to my boss and they finally installed the time attendance tracking program for us to use. It has been six months since we began using it and not once has there been a problem with my check. My life is so much less stressful now that I don’t have to keep up with my own time; I just make my call and forget it. More small businesses should consider using this type of program for keeping up with employees times; it’s been a wonderful addition to our office.