Work attendance can is a tricky subject that can wind up causing a lot of trouble. The corporate world loses enormous amounts of money each year due to attendance-related malpractices such as , buddy-punching and others. In this article, we’ll talk about how can you, a manager or a founder, employ better work attendance monitoring practices.
You pay your staff to do the job - naturally, you expect them to do just that. However, not everyone is genuine and, sometimes, you end up running into individuals that don’t keep up with their side of the deal. If spotted and resolved quickly, your damages will probably be limited to short-term trust issues. In a long run, however, you are subjected to losing money, business and clients.
Due to the dangers posed by poor work attendance, businesses have always maintained some sort of attendance tracking. This, in turn, made the offenders look for ways around them. Good news: there are some smart practices that are very difficult to trick and we are here to share them with you.
Digitalising Work Attendance Tracking
Tracking work attendance is vital to many organisations. Whether it’s to determine the wage of an hourly employee, invoice the client correctly or evaluate the overall business performance - visibility of staff attendance is a crucial metric. However, old-school solutions such as paper timesheets or card swiping are easy to tamper with, thus providing inaccurate data. The best solution is to adopt work attendance tracking software.
Online Timesheets
Traditional timesheets can get very time-consuming and are particularly prone to human error if they are complex. According to statistics presented by Workpuls, 80% of the surveyed employers admitted that 80% of the timesheets they receive need to be corrected. This, in turn, leads to delayed and sometimes incorrect payments.
The process itself is long - from timesheets being filled in, to them being handed to the employer, to being calculated. Online timesheets only require the employees to type their times in. The employer or a manager then gets to either approve or reject them, depending on whether the timesheet has been filled correctly. If rejected, this falls as the responsibility of the employee to amend inconsistencies.
Another advantage of digital timesheets is that wages and holiday entitlement are calculated automatically, leaving no room for error. Timesheet Portal even allows you to build custom timesheets, addressing specific needs and complex rules that may be unique to your business only.
Absence Level Calculator
Absenteeism, or missing work without a valid reason, is tricky yet costly malpractice. It is particularly difficult to spot as it only emerges through patterns of absence. And, if you were able to spot it - the damage has been dealt.
Digital work attendance solutions come equipped with absence level calculators. This module is designed to allow you to identify such patterns the moment they emerge, enabling you to address them immediately. Our software uses the Bradford Factor source to manage short-term absences and alert you when they become excessive.
Company-wide Benefits of Attendance Software
Adopting software that’s only good for one thing is a wasteful and rather poor investment, especially when the market is booming with multi-modular solutions that can serve across different areas of the business. With that said, attendance software can support other processes in your organisation. Below, we are going to provide some examples.
Payroll Integration
The main component of attendance solutions is timesheets. Traditionally, once they are approved, the payroll has to calculate the earnings of employees accordingly to the information displayed. This is breeding grounds for human error.
Timesheet software that integrates with a payroll platform ensures fluid transfer of the timesheets from one solution to another, this way enabling automation of wage and salary calculation. The better your solution is, the more detailed calculations can be made. Instead of only taking into account employee hours, more sophisticated solutions will be able to pass on data like differentiating rates, sick pay, maternity/paternity pay, expenses and others.
Holiday Management
A good quality work attendance monitoring software will always include a holiday management platform. This module alone is particularly handy for the entirety of the business. It saves employees time of going back on forth via emails to book time off, grants them better visibility of their holiday entitlement and keeps the team in a loop if someone is going to be absent.
For the managers, it provides better visibility for the upcoming future in regards to what staff they have on hand. Having these insights ahead of time then allows them to plan the workload accordingly, minimises the risk of understaffing and drives an overall improvement of the team performance.
Finding the Best Solution
To summarise, the best software isn’t all about attendance tracking - rather inclusive of it as one of the modules. This can pose a challenge when selecting a solution. You may not need the majority of other features offered, and paying the full price for the software you won’t fully utilise will reflect negatively on your finances.
Why Companies of Any Size Benefit from Timesheet Portal
At Timesheet Portal we have acknowledged the above-described issue, and how much of a challenge that is for smaller businesses or startups. This is why we have worked out a way to make our software available for organisations of any size by offering fair pricing. Since our solution is rich in features, catering to different needs and business maturity levels, we allow our customers to build their own functionality package.
This way they end up with software that is only inclusive of modules they need, and they pay only for the features they use. If with time they scale or find themselves in need of a broader range of functions - upgrading is an easy process. This way Timesheet Portal doesn’t hinder the growth of small companies by charging unreasonable prices or underprices themselves for corporate giants.
Summary
The best way to monitor work attendance is by utilising a digital solution. If chosen wisely, the software of your choice will also assist different processes across the company - so take your time to study the features, modules and integration options presented by different solutions.
What you invest in a digital work attendance tracking platform will be paid off tenfolds by saving the money you would otherwise lose to absenteeism and other attendance-related malpractices.
Are work attendance issues bleeding your budget dry? Timesheet Portal will be your band-aid.
