The retail industry is one of the most dynamic sectors employing a large number of people. From customer representatives to order fulfilment executives, retail stores require employees to be distributed over a large area. This requirement poses challenges such as attendance maintenance of all employees & several other compliance issues.
Most retail brands have their store’s distributed over a large geographical network, employing a varying number of people. While the traditional attendance system like card punching machines offer a solution that is not efficient at protecting against problems like buddy punching.
To overcome these challenges, the retail market is embracing modern-day biometric attendance systems. As these attendance systems allow for faster, secure and efficient business operations, they can benefit any retail store. If you still haven’t adopted a biometric attendance system for retail, you must have your questions and doubts about their effectiveness.
In the ear of technological sophistication, you don’t have to settle for less efficient and legacy systems. This article is all about explaining the advantages of biometric attendance system for retail stores.
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Biometric Attendance System For Retail Industry
Biometric attendance systems have witnessed a huge demand from the retail industry for several reasons. From improving the accuracy of attendance management to boosting the productivity of employees, these systems are truly game-changers.
At present, there are three main types of biometric attendance systems available for retail stores.
- Fingerprint Technology For Retail Industry: The fingerprint recognition system recognise the ridges and valleys (minutiae) on the surface of the finger to verify the identity of the person but sometimes it take multiple attempts to scan the fingerprint because of cuts and sweat on the fingers. Fingerprint recognition systems are useful and effective against time theft, but in the post-pandemic era, the focus is on minimising contact. As such these systems suffer a drawback.
- Eye Recognition Systems: As an alternative, the retail industry has the option to employ eye recognition systems for attendance marking. These systems have two modes of operation at the core. Some systems use iris recognition to identify an individual while others rely on retina recognition (they raise the patterns of veins in the back of the eye to identify an individual). Problem arises from their implementation as they require dedicated hardware installation and it is expensive as compared to other biometric attendance system.
- Face Recognition Systems: The best biometric attendance system for retail, a face recognition system eliminates the need for contact to mark attendance and it is more accurate than other type of biometric attendance system. Such attendance systems analyse the facial patterns by using Artificial Intelligence to identify an individual.
Why your retail business needs a biometric attendance system?
As a retail business owner or store manager, your time is best invested in mentoring and training your staff rather than wasting it juggling personnel to fit open shifts, keeping track of employee productivity and scheduling working shifts from scratch.
By adopting a time and attendance manager software you can free up a lot of time that can be invested in interacting with your customers and improving your business. With biometric attendance systems like the one offered by Truein, any outlet, wholesale or factory store can considerably reduce the time spent on scheduling and marking attendance.
Such software can also drastically improve your workforce efficiency, reduce labour costs and optimise staff planning. This is not only beneficial for you as a business owner, but also benefit your employees to have a better work-life balance.
1. Higher level of accuracy
Manually recording attendance and time leave scope for errors and inaccuracies. Even, employees are found to log their attendance timing wrong on purpose (time theft). The legacy attendance systems like card punching machines are also susceptible to such behaviour from employees.
However, when you use a biometric attendance system you do away with such errors eliminating any possibility of time theft. Furthermore, such systems allow employees to monitor their own time, work schedules and appointments online via their smartphones or other devices. As the entire attendance system is cohesive, any schedule changes are updated live for all employees.
2. Higher Productivity
Retail stores with a lesser number of employees can manage with less efficient attendance systems, but when you have a larger workforce, it can be a problem. At the end of the day, if employees have to manually enter time into the payroll software or you have to gather up time cards, it puts in an enormous amount of effort, not to mention a lot of time wasted.
With a biometric attendance system, you can cut attendance marking and payroll processing tasks from hours down to minutes. As retail employees have a scheduling app, they do not have to wait for their turn to mark attendance.
3. Track Employees Easily
Retail stores require employees to be scattered over a large place which makes it difficult to track employees. With biometric attendance systems, you can easily track field-based and remote employees when they clock in/out using systems or mobile devices with GPS tracking.
As the software can track the GPS location of mobile devices, you do not have to invest in any additional hardware. You can put up geofencing to prevent time theft and mandate employees to be within a defined distance to be able to clock in. Furthermore, face recognition attendance systems use facial features to verify and record time, hence employees cannot game the attendance system through buddy punching.
4. Manage flexible work schedules easily
A retail business has requirements beyond just storekeeping. There is logistics, inventory and security involved. This is why the retail industry employs part-time, full-time and contract employees. The clocking options vary depending on the type of employee.
The modern-day attendance management software allows managers to deploy and monitor employees regardless of where they are working from or what type of schedule they are on. This deletes a lot of overhead and makes it infinitely easier to manage flexible work schedules and allot shifts to employees easily.
5. Happy employees
A biometric attendance system not only benefits businesses but also helps employees to be paid accurately on time. All the human error that occurs when timesheets are filled out manually is eliminated. The attendance is logged accurately and updated in the system that makes payroll processing a lot easier.
At the end of the day, it ultimately results in happy employees who are paid for their hard work without any delay. There are already several biometric attendance systems for retail stores available offered by different manufacturers, but Truein stands apart.
6. Truein biometric attendance system can help
Truein offers the most advanced Touchless Face recognition Attendance system on the market. The biometric attendance system they offer is based on artificial intelligence that can be implemented by any retail store without requiring any complicated hardware.
Why use Truein Touchless Face Recognition Attendance System?
Whether you run a small-scale retail store or own a franchise employing dozens of people, Truein is offering an easy way of attendance management.
1. No additional hardware requirement
Truein time and attendance management software can be deployed out of the box. As it is a mobile-based attendance system and the software works with smartphones and tablets, there is no need for additional hardware. It saves a lot of cost and time to upgrade the attendance system of your retail business.
2. User-friendly interface
The software is designed to be user-friendly irrespective of the device it is accessed from. With no complicated steps or manual actions involved, your employees will easily adapt to Truein, requiring minimal or no orientation.
3. Cloud-based attendance system
Truein stores the attendance data on the cloud, enabling anyone to access the employees’ data from any location using their verified devices. The HR managers can easily upload employee data in bulk using spreadsheets that make it a lot easier and efficient to manage organization-wide attendance data.
4. GPS and Geo fencing attendance
The attendance system comes with GPS and Geo-fencing technology, allowing you to mark attendance only from approved locations. Truein features selfie-based geo-fencing making it possible for employers to mark attendance from their mobile phones. It is a perfect solution for retail shop staff and contract workers.
5. Give different roles to different users
User-role management is possible with this biometric attendance system. You can assign different access to different users, based on their employment type and management position.
6. Flexibility to have different policies for different stores
If your retail business has different policies for different stores, still you can store them in the central database and customise them as per the requirement of individual stores.
7. Audit Punching
A highly useful feature of the Truein biometric attendance system is its audit punching capability. This feature randomly generates a punch notification for a random employee to check the location of the employee. This is an excellent verification option to eliminate time theft.
Conclusion
No matter how many stores make up your retail business or the number of employees you have, using a reliable biometric attendance system can help you avoid situations that cost you money. Such systems can eradicate time theft, improve business productivity and make attendance management highly accurate, thereby improving business as well as employee satisfaction.
