The 5 Best Time and Attendance Tracking Software to Monitor Work Hours (2024 Guide)

time and attendance tracking software

The attendance software you choose to implement into your workforce could just as easily improve your operations as impede it. Think about your team members – how varied they are in their methodologies, mindsets, technology, and tastes. With that amount of variance in your employees, it shouldn’t be a surprise to realize that they wouldn’t all take to a time and attendance tracking app the same.

The key in making your choice between the many options of employee attendance software is finding those that balance 3 key traits in particular. In our opinion, a high-quality tracking system should:

  1. Improve Employee Accountability
  2. Maintain Simplicity (in usage and design)
  3. And Streamline Operations for business owners.

Note: this doesn’t have any impact on the number of features a time and attendance system can have. There are even some employee attendance monitoring systems that are able to offer industry-specific functions for particular types of businesses.

What we’re going to do is outline our Top 5 picks of Attendance Management Software, taking into consideration those 3 core attributes above. Hopefully, you’ll be able to find a time and attendance tracking system that fits your business thanks to this guide.

Time and Attendance Tracking Software Options:

  1. Buddy Punch
  2. eTimesheets
  3. Rippling
  4. TimeDoctor
  5. QuickBooks Time

1. Buddy Punch

We mentioned how accountability, simplicity, and streamlining are the three most important attributes for an attendance solution to adhere to. We wouldn’t be surprised if we faced some pushback on this idea. After all, you might think that a workforce management tool that focuses on simplicity and streamlining might limit the options and ability of managers to meet their business needs.

But that’s a misconception – something we learned while we were creating Buddy Punch as an all-in-one employee hour & leave management solution. While we were designing this tool (based on our own specifications as well as the feedback we got back from our clients) we learned that it was more than possible to include a wide variety of options for business owners without losing focus on intuitive design.

Features such as GPS Tracking, Biometric Facial Recognition, Geofencing, PTO Management, PTO Accruals, Notifications, Customizable Reports, Integration with Payroll Processing Systems, and more were all able to be added while maintaining an overall intuitive and easy-to-understand experience for both team members and managers.

Next, we’re going to dive into each of those features and give an overview of how they work.

Note: If you’d rather get hands-on experience with Buddy Punch, you can sign up for a 14-day free trial by clicking here.

GPS Tracking

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The GPS Tracking feature is perfect for business owners that are looking to maintain a level of employee accountability in the age of Work from Home. With this, you can track where employees and managers are when they clock in (in real-time). View GPS locations individually, or group employees all together on an interactive map.

Biometric Facial Recognition

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Worried about time theft or Buddy Punching? There’s no better way to ensure that employees are who they say they are than by taking a picture and comparing it to that employee’s face/photo on file. Never again risk being fooled by dishonest time entries.

Geofencing

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A Geofence is an area you create to designate where you want employees to have the option to clock in. With Buddy Punch’s Geofencing, anytime an employee tries to clock in outside of your designated area(s), they’ll receive an error notification. Let Buddy Punch’s automation take over some aspects of time and attendance monitoring for you.

PTO Management

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How can we talk about streamlining and profitability without touching on Paid Time Off and absence management? With Buddy Punch’s PTO management, you can choose from our selection of PTO types or create a custom one depending on your specific needs. Furthermore, you can give employees autonomy through a self-service option. Let them put in their desired time off for automatic approval. Otherwise, you’ll receive a notification when they request time off, and your decision to approve or deny will be sent back as a notification in turn.

PTO Accruals

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Most human resources departments know how difficult it can be to keep track of accruing PTO for every single employee in a workplace. That’s why they seek out HR Software and features specifically designed for it. Buddy Punch’s accrual feature lets you manage each team member, determining how their paid time off accrues, how much gets carried over, what their current bank is, and more. Reduce the chance of human error causing a team member to feel cheated out of what they’ve earned on the clock.

Notifications

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Buddy Punch’s notifications feature (which naturally works with many of Buddy Punch’s other features) keeps both team members and managers fully apprised of changes in the workplace (such as requesting time off, making schedule changes, or seeing when and where team members are clocking in). This feature allows you to be a lot more hands-off when it comes to time management.

Customizable Reports

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Part of the reason business owners track employee attendance is to be able to use that time data to improve operations later down the line. Buddy Punch makes that information easier to go through with customizable reports. You can get a summary for all billable hours, overtime, locations, departments, and more in an easy-to-understand overview. Export into Excel or PDF formats depending on your preferences.

Payroll System Integration

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Lastly, we want to highlight how Buddy Punch enables business owners to seamlessly export all of the data from employee work schedules into their favorite payroll software by the end of each pay period. It’s never been easier to handle employee payments. Buddy Punch integrates directly with QuickBooks, Paychex, ADP, and more. Click here to view the full list of Buddy Punch’s integrations.


Buddy Punch Offers Many Other Features

Believe it or not, there are still more features Buddy Punch was designed with, all while adhering to improving employee accountability, feature simplicity, and operation streamlining. Some of those other tools include:

Buddy Punch also offers additional features to improve employee management. For example, our help doc center contains useful information on how to utilize Buddy Punch and our blog section is constantly updated with new information to improve employee-manager cooperation.

Additionally, we have a responsive customer support team available to answer questions via live chat or to guide you through a personalize one-on-one demo of our time attendance program tracking system (which you can book here).

Buddy Punch’s Online Reviews

As of this article’s writing date, Buddy Punch has 4.8 out of 5 stars and 687 reviews on Capterra.

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Below, we’ll list just a few reviews that speak to Buddy Punch’s impact on time tracking and attendance. (Click here to explore the full list of reviews.)

Overall: Best solution to time tracking for our hourly employees, and it keeps me updated when someone forgets to clock out. Also, it allows my employees to make changes if needed, which I can review and approve.

Pros: Ease of use, for both employees and managers. The phone app with the clock in/out feature makes this the easiest for our company.

Cons: No cons so far, and I’ve been using it for almost a year now.”

Click here to read the full review.

Overall: I like the ease of having the app on my phone considering I don’t always go directly into the office first before I start working.

Pros: The thing I like most about the software is the geographical location requirement. Every time you punch in/out it shows your employer your location. Making time clock fraud one less worry as a business owner and the employee more responsible about time maintenance because you cannot get paid if you are not physically at work.

Cons: Because of the added security of the geographical location, I do not like that it prompts me to also take my picture as I clock in/out. ”

Click here to read the full review.

Pros: Buddy punch allows all Temp employees to punch in on one clock and it takes their picture so I can verify it was them. We have an IPad set up for this purpose only. At the end of the week I can easily run a report by staffing agency and send the reports to them so the temporary employee can be paid.

Cons: In the beginning we had issues with the IPad not not running the app correctly. I am not sure if the issues were on our end or if they were with Buddy Punch but we had to reload the program once a week it seems for the first couple of months.”

Click here to read the full review.

Overall: Overall its a great app!!! I was able to easily navigate the app and desktop app. The guys were able to easily use it! It was much more efficient than the handwritten time sheets we have been using.

Pros: This was so user friendly and easy to navigate. It is very affordable and breaks the individuals hours down to a report that I could merge with our payroll provider. Also you can put in the job address so the employee has to be on-site to clock-in or out.

Cons: Only other thing is I wish it had gps for the entire day. It does show where they clock-in/clock-out at though……. I know that would require more equipment and fees also though”

Click here to read the full review.

As these reviewers all noted, Buddy Punch and its many features were intuitive and user-friendly for both employers and employees.


Try Buddy Punch for Free  

If you feel that Buddy Punch might be the employee attendance tracking system you’ve been looking for, sign up for a 14-day free trial. You can also book a one-on-one demo, or view a pre-recorded demo video to learn more.

2. eTimesheets

eTimesheets is a web-based timesheet and labor cost management software with features including:

As of this post’s writing date, eTimesheets has a rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars and 10 reviews on Capterra.

“I love everything about the software. I’ve used some of the “best” timekeeping softwares at previous companies, and they just don’t compare to using eTimesheets.com. During the free trial period, it was quickly evident this was the perfect solution for me.” 

Click here to read the full review.

3. Rippling

Rippling is a HR & IT focused employee management solution. Some of its more powerful features include:

As of this post’s writing date, Rippling has a rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars, based on 1591 total reviews.

“I originally heard about Rippling when looking to integrate an HRIS with our accounting software and loved the simplicity of design and promise of easy employee onboarding. It wasn’t until now that I was able to experience that easy onboarding for myself. As a user, payroll setup and benefits selection was simple and took less time than our previous provider.”

Click here to read the full review.

4. TimeDoctor

TimeDoctor is an advanced employee attendance tracking tool that puts special weight on schedule adherence and workday activities. Some of its features include (but are not limited to):

As of this post’s writing date, TimeDoctor has a Capterra rating of 4.5 out of 5, with 410 reviews (see here).

“Overall, Time Doctor is great for productivity, time tracking, and project management. It has the best Leave-Tracking features that send notifications if the person is still working on a task. In all reality, it has great usability with many different cool options such as time-tracking, browsing history, breaks, and idle time reminders, etc.” 

Click here to read the full review.

5. QuickBooks Time

QuickBooks Time is a powerful software time tracking software with features such as:

QuickBooks, like Buddy Punch, can be used on any mobile device with an internet connection, and also integrates with many bookkeeping, payroll, and invoicing apps. As of this post’s writing, QuickBooks time has 4.7 out of 5 stars and 5636 reviews on Capterra.

“QuickBooks TIme makes my payrolls, job costing, and reports so much more accurate, efficient, and expedient. The time I save pays for the software over and over again. Not to mention, the customer service is stellar!!! .”

Click here to read the full review.

Choosing The Best Time and Attendance Tracking Software

There are a lot of different options you have when it comes to high-quality time tracking software. If you’re looking at swapping from manual timesheets to digital time tracking, eTimesheets’ features might be a comfortable adjustment for you. If you find it important to be able to monitor employee discussion, then TimeDoctor, with its Website, App & Chat Monitoring might be up your alley.

But, if what you want is a time clock software with a diverse range of options that can be enabled or disabled at will, one that never gets too complicated on the employee or manager side, then you can’t go wrong with Buddy Punch. It’s the focus on accountability, simplicity, and streamlining that makes our software extremely easy for anyone to use, on any device.

Try Buddy Punch for Free  

If you feel that Buddy Punch could be your ideal attendance monitoring system for employees, sign up for a free trial. You can also book a one-on-one demo, or view a pre-recorded demo video.


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