Automated Time Attendance Tracking - An Overview

Many small businesses still operate on an honesty-based system for time attendance tracking, where employees are simply trusted to have the right amount of breaks daily, and that they are working every minute from the time they clock in to the time they clock out. What these companies probably don't realize is that they can have a much more reliable attendance tracking system, at a very comparable cost to the honesty-based system. And that any investment will actually save money in the long run ... as timecard creep can affect even your most honest employees! Here we take an overview of what makes phone time clock systems such a blessing, even to small businesses.

Advantages of telephone time clocks

Compared to either time-punch cards or manual recording systems, there are several inescapable benefits of phone time clocks with a big influence on the bottom line. These include:

• Enabling pay calculations on a minute-by-minute basis, but without increasing payroll complexity or costs
• More accurate time recording
• Reduction of human error- even honest employees are prone to seeing the wrong time on a clock occasionally
• Easily accessible activity data for employees
• Fast and simple report generation
• Exportable data can be moved to payroll systems without manual re-entry in many telephone time clocks

Components of a phone-based attendance system

Your telephone time clock works on an interaction between the following elements:

• Employee ID number
• Reader (which you would pay an access fee for)
• Communication interface - usually your PC
• User interface - which allows you to access data
• Data storage, which may be on a server, or your own platform

Security elements

There are also optional elements such as voice recognition services, GPS location and caller ID. Few people realize that voices are like fingerprints - they are completely unique - and there is no possibility of forging attendance in a system that checks that caller ID of the phone, pinpoints its location with GPS tracking, and ensures that the person calling is the person being paid.

Extra features available with some time attendance tracking programs

Time attendance tracking systems have been advancing just as rapidly as the rest of the technological world! They are now much more than expensive ways to look over your remote employees shoulders. You can:

• Decrease HR's workload by having employees enter project codes for activity tracking
• Check employee status from any smartphone, using interfaces that are designed for mobile devices
• Use manual voice verification techniques
• Get text alerts at check in and check out if necessary
• Send voicemails to remote employees to ensure that everybody receives critical business information.