Why You Need An Online Punch Clock To Manage Employee
Keeping an accurate track of employees’ work hours is vital for both employees and employers. Employees deserve to be paid for all the hours they work, and employers shouldn’t have to pay employees for hours they didn’t work. Thankfully, timekeeping has evolved past the days of physical timesheets to a more real-time method of tracking employee hours.
Millions of employees are living paycheck to paycheck. If their paycheck is short, it may mean that they are unable to pay rent, cover their bills, or buy food. Conversely, unscheduled absenteeism by hourly employees costs companies about $3,600 per employee annually. It’s in everyone’s best interest if employee time tracking at your business is streamlined, preventing time theft and making sure time on the clock is accurate by the end of the pay period.
One way companies can ensure that paychecks are accurate is to track employee time using the best time clock available for their business.
What is an online punch clock?
Online employee punch clocks are employee management systems designed to allow your team to both clock in and clock out of a job using a worksite terminal, smartphone, or some other device. They enable workers to punch in and out from authorized locations and have that data integrated for running payroll systems.
This type of automation reduces errors and hassles for both employers and employees when it comes to tracking time. Using this type of online time clock system as a homebase is convenient and flexible, and is growing in use in both small and large companies in many industries all over the United States.
Benefits Of Using Them
There are many benefits to using online attendance software and employee punch clocks instead of the traditional manual attendance tracking approach. They include being able to:
- Save Time
- Build Trust With Employees
- Make Employee Paychecks More Accurate
- Provide Usable Data On Attendance Issues
- Ends “Buddy Punching”
- Create A Sense Of Ownership Among Employees
- Review Pay Stubs Much Easier
These are just a few of the benefits both employees and employers enjoy when they opt to install online employee punch clocks to record the time employees sign into and out of the workplace. Let’s take a closer look at them.
Save Time
In business, time is money. Business owners and their staff usually have more things to do than time allows. Being able to automate a manual, repetitive, time-consuming task like calculating employee work hours frees up time, the staff and ownership can spend on the company’s income-generating core activities.
By using an automated online punch clock, you can improve employee-employer relations. Employers can trust that their employees are tracking time only for themselves and on a daily basis.
Builds Trust With Employees
Online time clocks automate the clocking in-process and eliminates the need for employees to remember to turn in timecards. Employees are trusted to use the agreed-upon digital devices to record the time they arrive at and leave work each day. No one has to enforce participation and honesty.
The employee is trusted to punch in and out using the system each day. The rules and parameters of the system are set, and if the employee’s paycheck is inaccurate, it will be because of their error in not clocking in and out as they are expected to do. Plus, online punch clocks are plenty accessible, usually available on iOS or Android as a mobile app or via web browsers.
Makes Employee Paychecks More Accurate
Both employers and employees want accurate paychecks. A tracking app can simplify complex payroll systems by automating them. The employee punches in their time online, and the system calculates their regular pay, overtime, payroll withholding taxes, and all other pertinent information and automatically determines the correct amount that should be on the payroll reports.
Attendance issues can quickly interrupt daily business operations. With the help of an online punch clock, you can see who is consistently late or calls in and take corrective action. Most time clocks also include spreadsheets you can export for a closer look at attendance and pay rate reports.
Provides Usable Data On Attendance Issues
Online employee time clocks enable employers to more easily identify and track tardiness, absenteeism, and other employee attendance issues. The system automatically sends out alerts, reveals absentee trends, and delivers attendance data to the business owner as user-friendly reports, charts, and notifications regularly. This eliminates the need to go into overtime and do research on employee tardiness and absenteeism.
Many of these employee time clock apps also include ways to verify employee hours, such as facial recognition, GPS location tracking, geofencing, and more. These functionalities exist to ensure your team members are where, when, and who they say they are so that no absence goes unnoticed – even at remote job sites.
Ends “Buddy Punching”
One way employees cheat their employers is by having friends punch their time cards when they are late or absent from work. This is called ‘Buddy Punching,’ and it costs employers about $373 million a year. Plus, it erodes the trust in employer/employee relationships.
To prevent ‘Buddy Punching,’ online employee time clocks use geofencing. This uses GPS to define and limit where employees can be located when they clock in or out using the online clock app through their smartphone or other mobile devices.
Creates A Sense Of Ownership Among Employees
Using an online punch clock can help employees to develop a sense of ownership. Younger workers enjoy being able to go online from anywhere to see and add their time, view their schedules, and compare their paychecks to their hours worked. It makes them feel comfortable because they regularly use apps in their personal lives. Being able to use their smartphones makes a mundane task like clocking in at work much easier.
Ensuring that paycheck information is accurate is vital for any business. Not only is it important to an employee so they have money to live, but also for an employer to ensure their labor costs stay as low as possible.
Makes Reviewing Pay Stubs Much Easier
Having the time clock information online can be very helpful for both the employer and the employees, should they need to review an employee’s paycheck for accuracy or if any questions about the employee’s past work time need to be answered. Instead of having someone go into the office find and pull the employee’s paperwork and files, all the information about the hours any employee worked is readily available from the online employee punch clock.
Accurate Employee Work Records Matter
Wages paid to employees who are absent and managing absenteeism costs employers a great deal. On the other hand, 49% of employees begin looking for new jobs when their paycheck has errors twice.
By using an automated time clock at your place of work, you can reduce the amount of wages paid due to errors and reduce your labor costs. You can also reduce the amount of paycheck errors that occur helping to ensure you keep your best employees and reduce employee turnover rates.
