Trust in your employees is essential, even necessary, to ensure smooth operations. But if your workers start taking advantage of your trust, or they routinely defy the company attendance and work policies, you need to take stringent action. However, you need evidence to confront your employees for time theft or playing fast and loose with the company policies.
Fortunately, attendance apps can easily help you track your workers’ time and attendance. Time theft causes US employers a staggering $373 million per year, which is why it is required to nip the evil in the bud.
An employee attendance app is a simple yet highly efficient solution to ensure that the workers work for the hours they are paid and are present exactly where they are supposed to be. These apps come with additional HR features for workforce management.
In this article, we will share the best attendance app for employees, but before that, let’s look at what features you should focus on.
Table of Contents
What to look for in an employee attendance tracker?
Some of the essential features to look for when choosing an attendance tracker app for employees are:
Easy to deploy: An employee time and attendance app should be easy to deploy with negligible dependence on additional hardware.
Ease of use: As the attendance app will be used by workers and management alike, it should be easy to use even for workers will lesser technical acumen.
Features: Employees must easily clock in and out using the app. It should let employees log in quickly without struggle.
Automated alerts and reminders: It should send workers, supervisors, and managers automated alerts for important updates such as leaves, absents, and shift changes.
Management options: The best attendance app will have leave, absence, and overtime management options to easily track work hours.
Payroll management: The app must be easy to integrate with existing payroll software at the company.
Price: The app must be a cost-effect time and attendance management solution that suits your budget.
Support: Finally, the team behind the app must be able to offer good customer support.
Based on these factors, we picked the best employee attendance trackers on the market.
Let’s take a look.
1. Truein
Truein is the best attendance app that has over 300 customers from 25+ countries. Its customers include prominent brands such as Compass Group, Godrej, Tata Projects, Schindler, UniSpice, and Dominion Global. Companies use it for tracking attendance of regular, contractual, and distributed workforce.
It is a hardware-less, cloud-based employee attendance tracker app with a mobile-first solution for companies across industries. It features several HR options to manage attendance, overtime, shift schedule, leaves, and alerts.
Key features:
- Geofencing and GPS-tracking run on mobile/tablet devices.
- It can be deployed for multiple sites and gives centralized control to managers
- Automated notifications and alerts
- Auto attendance audit to ensure no time theft is committed
- 70+ customizable attendance policies to automate shifts, overtime, late marks and more
- Time off and holidays
- Contractual and distributed staff use case
- Insightful reports and analytics
- Integration with payroll/HRMS
Pros:
- Hardware-less mode makes it more suitable for organizations with roaming staff and distributed store
- It can be deployed immediately on Android or iOS phones of employees with minimal setup
- Fast customer support
- Easy to integrate with any payroll software
- Highly affordable attendance app
Cons:
- There is no free plan
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Another competitive attendance app is Timely, which allows managers to track employee time and attendance in a single dashboard. It has a fundamental KPI tracking feature to monitor team performance in the context of key metrics like capacity, overtime, etc. Not as versatile as Truein, it features a customizable tagging system to know how workers spend their time. However, the limitations of this attendance tracker app for employees make it suitable for specific industries like salon and spa businesses.
Another competitive attendance app is Timely, which allows managers to track employee time and attendance in a single dashboard. It has a fundamental KPI tracking feature to monitor team performance in the context of key metrics like capacity, overtime, etc. Not as versatile as Truein, it features a customizable tagging system to know how workers spend their time. However, the limitations of this attendance tracker app for employees make it suitable for specific industries like salon and spa businesses.
Features:
- Overtime documentation for managers
- Timesheet sharing option
- Payroll system included in the app
- Option for performance reviews
- Invoicing feature
Pros:
- Quite straightforward to use
- Mobile and desktop apps available
- Decent customer service
Cons:
- The features are basic
- No advanced reporting to scheduling
- No option to include text or SMS alerts
- Only available in English
Connecteam is an online time and attendance system that can be deployed on workers’ phones. It is also a complete attendance tracker app for employees like Truein but comparatively is very expensive and not suitable for smaller businesses that are looking for an attendance app for better tracking efficiency.
It features the Breadcrumbs technology, similar to Truein’s geofencing capability, allowing managers to see employees’ locations to prevent potential time theft. To allow more coverage, the features such as GPS-empowered timestamp and map view make it suitable for frontline workers and remote employees.
Features:
- Desktop and mobile access
- Geofencing, GPS tracking
- Timesheet and payroll management with Quickbooks
- In-app chat
Pros:
- Efficiently manage time and attendance
- Responsive customer support
- Easy to implement
Cons:
- Limited functionality given the high price
- Not suitable for smaller businesses
- Free plan only allows 30 users
Workstatus is the leading time tracking and attendance management software used by numerous organizations globally. Companies use Workstatus to accurately record attendance and hours worked by regular, remote, and field employees.
It is a user-friendly cloud-based solution for comprehensive workforce management across industries. Workstatus provides powerful features to track time, manage shifts, verify attendance, boost productivity, and streamline payroll.
Key Features:
- Precise location tracking using geofencing and GPS running on mobile devices.
- Centralized dashboard for managers to oversee multiple team members and sites.
- Automated notifications on attendance, timesheets, and violations.
- Time audits and random screenshots prevent attendance abuse.
- Flexible shift scheduling with calendar sync.
- Detailed timesheets, reports, and analytics for insights.
- Direct integrations with payroll platforms.
Pros:
- Improved payroll accuracy with automated time tracking.
- Oversight of remote and field employees through location tracking.
- Robust employee monitoring features.
- Easy to set up without extra hardware.
- Free plan available to try software.
Cons:
- Can seem invasive with location tracking and monitoring.
Harvest is a simple time clock app that you can use to monitor the employees’ attendance, absences, and work hours. It is a lightweight app with limited features allowing managers to track employee time and attendance. It is suitable for retail and delivery businesses and focuses on the requirement of these domains.
Its features include accessible expense records by snapping photos of the receipts. It helps you track the invoices and their status and can record payments directly from your phone. A delivery agent can use the app to track mileage for reimbursement later on.
Harvest can record employees’ online and offline time as an employee attendance tracker app. It can set task timers and allows timely reminders to submit time (timesheet approval). You have to enter the attendance data into your Harvest account manually.
Features:
- Track expenses and billable hours
- Timesheet approval
- Automatic reminders
Pros:
- Suitable as an invoicing app
- Easy to use
Cons:
- Not a fully capable employee attendance app
- Poor customer support
- Interface is not intuitive and looks outdated
TSheets is also popularly known as the solutionTSheets, now branded QuickBooks. It is a widely used tracking software at enterprises allowing companies to track work hours, projects, and labor estimates. Even after its mass adoption, it is not the best attendance app because it has limited features.
While you can easily integrate QuickBooks with Xero, Square, Dropbox, and Salesforce, it is more like a project management app offering payroll reports, workforce visibility, and detailed timesheets. It is suitable for both smaller and larger businesses.
Features:
- It can be used as a desktop or mobile app or as a kiosk
- GPS time stamps
- Real-time tracking and reports
- Alerts and approvals
- Easy team management
Pros:
- Detailed reporting
- Easy to use
Cons:
- Customer service is poor
- Advanced features are not simple to use
- No free plan; you have to pay $8/user per month
Another attendance app that features some advanced features is Hubstaff. The unique features included in this app are automated payments and time tracking with screenshots. It allows management to track work hours in real-time with GPS location. Among other features, it offers payroll, invoicing, and report generation. If a worker loses internet, this employee attendance tracker app tracks hours offline and syncs back up once the connection is restored.
Features:
- Hubstaff is the best employee attendance tracker for field workers
- It offers detailed reports
- Online timesheets
- Expense tracking
- Works as a central Kiosk app if needed
Pros:
- Easy productivity management
- Better user interface
- Advanced reporting features
Cons:
- Inbuilt payroll options are minimal
- There are limited customization options
- Some users reported bugs in the productivity tracker
Bonsai is marketed as a suite of tools for freelancers and can be used as a personal time tracker. But you can still use it as an employee attendance app. However, you will notice a significant difference in its features as it is not a comprehensive and dedicated time and attendance app like Truein. It is more suitable to automate and streamline business workflows to monitor project progress and employee productivity.
While Bonsai offers features to keep track of work days, managers need a 360-degree view of employees’ time and attendance as with other apps. You can use it to track time on projects, include time in project timesheets, and invoice hours accordingly.
Features:
- More suitable as a personal time tracker
- Includes templates for proposals, and contracts
- Can manage clients, projects, files, documents, and payments
- Customizable forms and questionnaires
- Allows easy collaboration with clients
Pros:
- With some customizations can be used as an employee attendance tracker
- Auto invoice generation
- Time and attendance tracking capabilities
Cons:
- Not a versatile employee attendance tracker
- No central dashboard for managers
- Limited options for workforce management
- No free plan is available
Conclusion
A time and attendance app is a requirement for businesses today. As we embrace digital transformation, you cannot rely on traditional paper timesheets or Excel to track employee attendance. It is essential to embrace software solutions to boost productivity and simplify workforce management. We hope the list of attendance apps we have shared above will help you choose the best solution. Ensure that you choose a product keeping your business requirements, features, and budget in mind.
