As a manager, you would want to manage your employees efficiently and ensure that they are all paid fairly, according to the laws. How many hours do they work per day? How many hours do they spend on a particular project, or for a specific client? How many days do they report to work in a month? These are some questions for which you should have quick answers if you don’t want any disruptions in the payroll processing or compliance procedures when it comes to your employees.
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“How do I track my employees’ time and attendance?” Well, you are already on the right track if you have started finding answers to these questions. Today, there are many ways to keep track of your employees’ time and attendance, regardless of the nature of your business.
If you have been looking for some efficient solutions to the question, “How do I track my employees’ time and attendance”, you have come to the right place. Here, we take you through some points on the following lines – why tracking the time of your employees is important, what are the best ways you can do it, and how to choose from the different time & attendance tracking methods available at your disposal.
Tracking your employees’ time and attendance – is it important?
Most companies have now understood the importance of tracking their employees’ time and attendance. Apart from aiding in efficient payroll processing, tracking these details can also help you understand your employees’ productivity, and use them for the right projects to improve the overall productivity of your business. Before you understand what is the best way to track employee attendance and time, it is important to understand why you need to do so.
Here are a few reasons that will tell you why it is a great idea to track your employees’ time and attendance:
- Error-free payroll processing
You want to be fair and accurate in your payroll processing. That’s the primary reason why you look for answers to the question, “How do I track my employees’ time and attendance”. Payroll for each employee can be calculated correctly, only when you know the number of hours he or she spends working in a month. You want to be sure that you pay your employees for exactly the number of hours they put in every month – not a second more, and not a second less! This can be done only if you make use of some tools (manual or automated) to track their attendance and time.
When you keep proper track of your employees’ time, you can protect yourselves from common problems like time theft, buddy punching, errors in payroll calculation and more. Apart from regular wages, you can also calculate the compensation and other benefits correctly only when you maintain a record of your employee’s productive hours.
- Abiding by the laws & regulations
Every company has to abide by the fair labor standards prescribed by the legal authorities of a particular country. These laws require you to maintain a record of your employees’ time & attendance for a day, week, month and year. Authorities can conduct surprise checks on your company, and ask for these records to check if you have been following the rules of paid time off, overtime charges, lunch breaks, safety of employees and more.
When you follow a proper method of maintaining and tracking your employee’s time and attendance, you can be sure of abiding by the labor laws & regulations of your country. This way, you can save yourself from hefty penalty charges, and in worse cases, cancellation of your license to operate in that particular country.
- Perfect planning and forecasting of timelines for projects
If you have found the answer to the question, “How do I track my employee’s time and attendance”, you are close to mastering the art of project planning. Your tracking system will let you know the time taken to complete a project, the number of hours put in by every employee of the project team, the most productive employee of the team, shortcomings or low productivity in any stage of the project and so on.
A deep dive into these records will help you understand how much time you would require for your next project to be completed smoothly, identify the apt resources for the same, and forecasting deliverables correctly. This will help you earn a good reputation among existing and prospective clients.
- Better staff management and setting proper goals for them
A good leader grows along with his people. He constantly looks for ways to improve the productivity of his team, and gives them challenging opportunities to grow in their careers. Similarly, you can improve your employee’s performance & productivity by tracking their time and attendance.
Manual or automated timesheets of employees help you understand the challenges faced by them in different stages of the project. Absenteeism, when extends beyond the allowed hours, only indicates the reduced morale of the employees. A huge gap between the expected hours for a project and the actual logged-in hours tells you that employees need more training to face the challenges of that project, and finish it at the agreed date and time. You can then tailor-made goals for each individual depending on their productivity, skillset, hours taken to complete complicated tasks in a project and more.
As you can see, there are many compelling benefits you can enjoy with your team, when you use the proper tools for tracking your employee’s productivity. So, the next time when the question, “How do I track my employee’s time and attendance” pops into your head, don’t ignore it. Explore it further by thinking of all the ways that are there to do this.
How Do I Track My Employees’ Time and Attendance – Automated and manual methods
If you have decided to find out the answer to the question, “How do I track my employees’ time and attendance online”, you are not alone, Millions of other companies all over the world are looking for effective answers to this one. So, here we tell you some of the best online methods to track your employee’s performance.
Today many companies resort to using fully automated software for tracking their employees’ time and attendance. These have useful features like logging in hourly, weekly and monthly hours, applying for leaves, automatic notifications from managers, updates regarding changes to the project, and more. If you have been thinking of “how do I track my employees’ time and attendance free version”, software tools are the best answer for you.
These come in the form of easy-to-download apps, and employees can clock in their hours in the respective columns of this app. They can also request leaves from this app, and the manager gets notified of the same. The manager, on the other hand, needs to open this app on his mobile, and accept or reject the leave request of his employee.
Since the employees’ hours and leave records are automatically recorded on this app, their productivity can be calculated accurately for payroll purposes. The best thing about these time & attendance tracking apps is that they are very easy to use. They are reliable, error-free and efficient. These apps have friendly features for recording billable and non-billable hours as well, which go a long way in helping you plan for your projects properly.
Which software can I use to track my employees’ time and attendance?
After reading the above paragraph, it is quite natural for you to get curious about which time-tracking software you should use for improving your employees’ productivity. Each company has different requirements and reasons for clocking their employees’ working hours. We have listed below the top 10 time-tracking software for 2023. You can choose the one that suits your requirements the best:
#1- Clockify
It is considered one of the best time-tracking software of 2023, because it is great to use for big businesses and small freelancers & businesses. Apart from offering free, unlimited time-tracking for all projects, Clockify also presents employers with a screenshot feature. This helps employers take a screenshot of their employees’ screens, even as they work on or complete a specific project.
#2- Paymo
If you want to know how to manage the time and attendance of employees, especially when it comes to generating invoices and bills, look no further than the Paymo software. You can record all details of a particular task like start date, completion date, project particulars, hours taken to complete, and more on this software. The Kanban Boards Gantt Charts of this software help to streamline projects and monitor them effectively.
#3- Toggl Track
Considered to be the best for small businesses and freelancers due to its free version, Toggl Track is packed with many features even its basic version. These features include automatic time & attendance tracking, time tracking even when offline, detection of idle time of employees and more. Unlimited time tracking is available for unlimited projects and clients on this.
#4- RescueTime
Aimed at improving employees’ productivity and focus, this software has an interesting feature called a focus session. Once that session is turned on, employees will find that all other notifications and messages are turned off in their systems to help them focus better on the project. Employees can record how many hours they will need for a task, sources they need to browse for that task and more on this tool to keep them focused when doing a particular job.
#5- QuickBooks Time
This time-tracking software is one of the best options for you if you have been looking for ways of “how do I track my employees’ time and attendance”. This is even more helpful for mobile workers, as they can just open this app and clock their time automatically. The data from this software is automatically synced with the company’s payroll software, thereby ensuring accurate payroll processing.
#6- TimeCamp
This software not only automatically tracks your logged-in hours and attendance correctly, but it also keeps track of the websites and apps you visit. This is to assess your productivity and understand where more time is being spent by each employee.
#7- Time Doctor
Considered one of the best time-tracking software tools for 2023 to increase employee productivity, Time Doctor works very well for companies that have a remote or hybrid workforce. This software automatically records the start and end time of completion of a project. It also allows employers to take random screenshots of their employees’ screens when are they working. This app can also track the sites that employees visit during the completion of the project. This will help companies understand where mistakes happen, and how they can be corrected.
#8- ClockShark
This software is very useful, because it helps to track employees’ time and attendance even when the power is off in the middle of a project. An employer can intimate all his employees about a change in shift timing, just by using a drag & drop feature in this software. It also sends out automatic emails and notifications to employees whenever there is a change in the dates or work timings of a project.
#9- Deputy
This is one of those tools that help you save time & costs, but also motivates you to abide by all the labor laws of your country. Here, you can automatically track the employees’ time and attendance, account for breaks, overtime, paid time off and more.
#10- TrackingTime
Time-tracking and attendance-tracking are done very meticulously on this software. It comes with a real-time tracker system that helps employers assess the exact potential and productivity of their employees.
Though there are many such time-tracking software tools to monitor the performance and productivity of your employees, it would be a great idea to pick from one of these top 10, as these tools are known for their exceptionally easy-to-use and automated features.
#11- Manual tools
Though manual time & attendance tracking systems are not in vogue today, you may still find them being used in very small businesses, small stores, factories and the like. Some of these manual tools include”
#12- Spreadsheets
Here, employees and employers manually record their in-time and out-time. There are specific fields allotted to track break time as well. At the end of each day, these manual timesheets are signed off by employees, and sent to their managers for approval. Their managers assess these manual timesheets and then send them to HR for syncing with the employees’ payroll records.
Failure to enter the information about hours spent on the projects, deliberately accounting for reduced break hours and time lapses in HR receiving the approved timesheets are some errors that companies may commit when maintaining these manual spreadsheets. This will lead to discrepancies in the payment to employees.
#13- Attendance Registers
In this case, a register is placed near the front desk of small companies. All employees must sign in this book along with the time, when they enter the office. After their work, they should again sign in to the register with their out-timings. However, the biggest problem in this manual attendance & time-tracking method is that employees working in remote locations or from home cannot sign the registers daily. So, this can lead to mistakes in the payroll processing for those employees.
How do I track my employees’ time and attendance in the best way?
In today’s modern, tech-savvy world, it is almost a given that you would choose automated software when it comes to tracking your employees’ time and attendance. Manual spreadsheets and attendance registers have become a thing of the past now.
With so many attractive software tools available for tracking your employees’ productivity and performance, how can you choose the one that suits you the best? Here are a few tips you can follow to get the best out of these automated tools:
- Know your business requirements fully well before choosing time-tracking software. Have answers to these questions -is it enough if you only record their time and attendance, or do you need the software to also send you random screenshots of their system when they are working? Do you want the software to keep track of your employees’ browsing history as well?
- Choose software tools that are easy to use, attractively designed and have quite a lot of features in their basic version itself. Don’t go for the bells & whistles, as in most cases, the basic features will do the trick for you.
- Choose software tools that give you at least a 30-day free version trial, so that you can understand the features well before you proceed to buy them.
