Workforce management is an essential aspect of running a successful business. Companies use tools to track employee working hours, such as punch cards, access cards, timesheets, biometric systems, and attendance software.
An attendance management system is critical in human resource management and payroll. If you run a company, your business operations must comply with state and local labor laws, payroll requirements, and overtime rules. All these compliances must be met while ensuring no inaccuracies, tampering, or time theft in staff attendance.
These requirements highlight the importance of an attendance management system, as manual timekeeping practices can be detrimental to worker morale and productivity. In this attendance management system guide, we will explore how organizations can reduce the administrative workload of managers, improve the accuracy of attendance records, and save time by choosing the right attendance management software.
Table of Contents
What is an attendance management system?
Attendance management is the procedure within the organization to record, adjust, verify, and calculate the working hours of the workers and the time they spend away from work. With attendance management, employers can access the information on the total work hours of the staff for compliance and payroll.
An attendance management system is an application that tracks employee time and attendance, including breaks, leaves, active hours, and overtime. These systems ease the workforce management process by automating most of the tasks.
Modern attendance management systems technological evolution to ensure workers cannot tamper with attendance through buddy punching or time theft. For instance, cloud-based software solutions use face recognition to identify workers.
Importance of attendance management system
Every industry is benefited from an attendance management system. To truly determine whether you need such a system, you must be familiar with the importance of an attendance management system. Here are some reasons you need an attendance management system in your company.
1. Productivity
If your managers are busy completing tedious administrative tasks, they need more time to focus on matters that contribute to increased productivity and better revenues. An attendance management system can automate most attendance keeping, freeing the management from tedious administrative tasks.
It directly contributes to productivity as managers don’t have to handle repetitive administrative tasks. Also, automated time records are highly accurate and have minimal risks of human errors. This makes payroll calculation much more accessible and precise.
2. Workforce discipline
Labor management becomes unpredictable if there is no discipline in the work culture. If workers attend work late, often take leaves, or indulge in time theft, it is mandatory to address these issues. If some workers are not disciplined, it can turn infectious, influencing other employees to adopt such bad habits. This can wreak havoc on the company.
Hardworking and punctual employees must be protected against unproductive and poor work ethics. An attendance management system can help supervisors and managers keep track of workers’ attendance and identify any pattern of indiscipline.
3. Overtime management
Poorly managed over time can eat into your profits and ultimately impact the company’s bottom line. This is why you must be accurate with recording and calculating overtime hours. An attendance management system can help you track workers across multiple shifts and record overtime hours much more accurately.
When companies need to increase production or meet increased demand, they can utilize overtime to meet the requirements without hiring more staff. A proper worker time tracking system can help increase employee satisfaction by offering overtime to earn more.
4. Prevent time theft
The primary reason why staff attendance management systems came into existence is to prevent time theft by employees. With accurate timekeeping mechanisms, many workers can use the system and indulge in time theft and buddy punching. Biometric-based attendance management systems offer a foolproof way to track and enforce attendance and overtime policies consistently and diligently.
5. Accurate payroll
Nothing demoralizes workers more than receiving inaccurate pay. They expect to be paid when they put in proper hours at work. Inaccuracy can be easily minimized by deploying attendance management systems helping companies accurately measure and calculate shifts, attendance, and overtime.
6. Compliance
Running a business requires complying with various compliance requirements. With an attendance management system in place, it becomes easy to create and implement different policies about employee management, such as attendance, overtime, leave, etc. Also, the policies can be made available to all employees, and any changes can be conveyed directly.
Types of attendance management systems
You will find several attendance management system solutions, but you must pick the most suitable for your business type. Here is a quick view of the attendance management systems available for employee time tracking.
1. Manual Attendance Management
Paper timesheets and Excel sheets are the standard methods to record employee time and attendance at many companies. It can work for you if you have a small number of workers.
However, it remains an outdated technique that is prone to time theft and requires too much time to calculate payroll.
2. Web-based Attendance Timesheets Management
Automated timesheets are web-based attendance management systems that allow employees to access timesheets online to record their clock in and out. There is also an option to mention leaves, vacations, and overtime.
3. Punch Clocks
Most manufacturing and retail companies still use punch cards to track and record employee time and attendance. It offers automation over manual attendance management systems, but still, there are better ways to track work hours. Punch clocks have high scope for buddy punching, in which an employee can punch in for a colleague with his time card when he’s not present at work.
4. Biometric-based Attendance Systems
The most popular genre of attendance management systems currently in use is biometric systems. These attendance management systems have sensors to read the biometric attributes of workers. As the biometric qualities are unique and extremely difficult to copy, biometric attendance systems virtually eliminate buddy punching with fingerprint and face recognition solutions.
Features to look for in an attendance management system
Now that we understand the different types of attendance management systems, we must know what features to look for when selecting a solution for your company.
1. Clocking in and out
This is an obvious requirement from any attendance management system. While the level of information a system captures when clocking in and out can vary, at minimum, an attendance management system must log an employee’s ID and a timestamp.
If your company has an extensive infrastructure with multiple entry and exit points, you can choose a system that also logs door info and movement type (in/out). Modern applications like Truein allow mobile-based attendance recording. It is a fast, secure, efficient, and time-saving solution.
2. Biometric-based
As we mentioned, the manual and semi-automated attendance systems must be foolproof. Such systems can be compromised easily. This is why the attendance system you choose must be biometric-based. A biometric attendance system uses physical attributes like retinas, fingerprints, and face recognition to identify workers.
It is impossible to game the system with false information or commit buddy punching. This increases the efficiency and integrity of workforce management. You must deploy biometric attendance systems in your company for security, accuracy, and better employee management.
3. Reporting and analytics
The attendance management system must offer reporting and analytics for efficient workforce management. Managers can make insightful decisions when they have access to various attendance-related reports. Absenteeism is one of the essential data points to help identify a pattern.
It helps to determine whether there is a need for an intervention, and the employee’s behavior must be investigated and addressed. If employee absenteeism, too frequent time off, and shift switching are not addressed, it can read to productivity issues. An attendance management system must offer advanced reporting and analytics options.
4. Leave management
Another important feature that an attendance management system must have is leave management. It is required by law that workers are provided with a certain number of leaves. It includes paid leaves, maternity leaves, sick days, etc. To remain compliant with several labor laws, an attendance management system must offer options for leave management. It will help HR track leaves for individual employees and make payroll easier.
5. Mobile and cloud support
Modern technological advancements have improved the IT infrastructure, and companies can better use it for workforce management.
An attendance management system with mobile and cloud support will deploy easily. Most traditional employee time and attendance tracking systems are not portable. Therefore, before choosing any attendance management system, you must ensure that it has high portability.
Furthermore, its operation must be straightforward enough for workers to understand and use. Systems that support mobile and cloud infrastructure are best as they can be deployed without additional hardware and are often easy to use.
6. Payroll integration
There is no point in installing an attendance management system if HR still has to process payroll manually. A genuinely effective attendance management system must augment payroll by providing data for easy integration into the payroll system. You must choose an attendance management system that offers easy payroll integration. It will facilitate accurate compensation calculations by providing correct overtime and work hours.
Truein: A comprehensive attendance management software for every industry
Truein is an industry-standard product utilizing the power of AI and face recognition technology to deliver software-based attendance management solutions.
It features all the necessary functions that we listed above. Using facial recognition, it even identifies workers if they are wearing masks or glasses. Truein is a cloud-based employee time and attendance management solution that employers can deploy anywhere instantly.
It works on mobiles and tablets, so there is no need to invest in any peripherals, making it suitable to deploy at remote sites. You can have a real-time view of multiple sites, ensuring managers have transparent and centralized control over workers’ work and overtime hours, leaves, and shifts.
Additionally, Truein easily integrates with all major payroll systems and offers 70+ customizable policies that you can use as per the location and staff category.
Schedule a free demo today and see how you can automate the attendance management in your organization.
Conclusion
We hope you now understand the importance of an attendance management system for workforce management. Several types of attendance management systems are available, so you must choose a solution that supports biometric-based identification, overtime and leave policy management, payroll integration, and more.
