Essential Features In A Time And Attendance System
A time and attendance system is used to track working hours and attendance of employees which plays a very important role in an organisation. These systems record every leave and break taken by your employees throughout the working period. Although most systems have similar functionality for different types of organisations, some businesses use them differently depending on their requirement. There are varied types of attendance systems, ranging from manual registers and time cards to spreadsheet, timesheets and online attendance management systems. Whichever system you choose, make sure that it has certain features to produce the data accurately. Let’s have a look.
Common Features
Some of the common features that most attendance systems have are:
- Management of leaves: Management of leaves is the area in which your time and attendance system should be proficient in. It must also understand that missed days do not automatically register as absents. Instead, it should send an alert to the employee to apply for a leave or make a special request for attendance, like half-day.
- Registration of working hours: The system that you use should allow your employees to register their entry and exit times and break periods. Personal phone numbers or magnetic card readers may be used to register these times. Card readers are the best, as they have no risk of fraud, working time theft, buddy punching, and proxy registers.
- Link with payroll: A time and attendance system that is linked with payroll will be able to calculate your employees’ compensation as per their working hours, paid time offs, working overtime, and approved leaves. Payroll is not limited to daily wages. A good attendance system will be able to support flexible payments and hourly compensation as well.
- Records maintenance: Many organizations dedicate an entire HR team to create and maintain their employee attendance records. These records include the working hours of the employees, missed days, overtime, etc. The attendance system should be able to provide this report in detail whenever required.
Expected Features
In addition to the above-mentioned common features, here are a few expected features that a good time and attendance system must provide:
- Alerts for missed punches: Sometimes, your employees may forget to punch in after coming back from a break or while leaving the office in a rush. To avoid such missed punches, the system should send automated alerts to your employees to request action.
- Biometric attendance: If you have a huge workforce with a particular punch in and out timelines, then a biometric attendance system would be of the essence. These systems use your employees’ fingerprints, face recognition, or other identification metrics for authorizing attendance.
- Integration with calendar: Outlook, Google Calendar, and other digital calendars can be integrated with a time and attendance system so that everyone can be informed about an employee’s availability. This feature is especially relevant if you have teams working in remote areas. Using this, you can just check an employee’s attendance through a shared calendar.
Extraordinary Features
There are emerging features that give better support to optimise and streamline your HR tasks. Some of them are:
- Cloud support: An attendance system that is cloud-based allows access from any device. Such support can not only boost the productivity of your remote employees and field workers but also ensure accurate attendance from any place.
- Self-service: This feature allows your employees to log in using an app or browser while sitting at their work desk instead of punching at the doorway. Leave requests and corrections can also be made with it and doesn’t require the assistance of the manager or the HR.
Adopting a feature-rich time and attendance system can drastically change the way you manage your employees. The above-mentioned features play a great role in preventing errors, hassles, and challenges in office management. So, do your research, and based on your requirements, make an informed choice that can turn your complex processes into straightforward activities.
Tags: time and attendance system, time clock machine, time attendance machine, online timecard system
