5 Questions to ask about your Time & Attendance System
Thinking about Automating your Time & Attendance Tracking?
Five Questions to Ask Before You Begin:
1. How many employees do you need to track? Do you need to track all of your employees? Only one location? Just hourly workers? Most time and attendance systems have a way to track a blend of hourly and salaried staff and multiple locations. Do you have an organizational chart of your company that can help us understand your workplace? Are you ready to talk about roles and employee responsibilities-time tracking expectations of your staff?
2. What payroll service are you using? In house? Outsourced to a payroll company? Are you making a system wide change or implementing an ERP software system? A good time and attendance solution provider will be familiar with payroll processing, outsourced processing companies and ERP software systems. Make sure to make note of the version of any of this software you are currently using.
3. How are your employees clocking in now? Using old fashioned clocks? Hand written time cards? This is a great one to get you thinking about how many physical clocks or kiosks you might need and where you would position them in your facility. Do you have issues with buddy punching? Biometric time clock hardware options are a very effective and popular option for deterring buddy punching. Sierra Workforce Solutions carries everything from hand punch biometric time clocks to facial biometric time clocks and even finger vein reading biometric devices. Mobile options are becoming more and more popular. We have a great time and attendance app that allows you to clock in, log in and out of jobs etc. all as a self-service feature on your mobile phone. Have hourly workers at remote job site, roaming or out of range? Having them use the mobile app on their phone or tablet is a great option.
Also, do you need your hardware devices to be able to allow staff to clock in and out of jobs or tasks? Sierra has a bi-directional interface that allows you to bring job and task information down from your accounting system and, in turn, send transaction information back to your ERP software. Knowing how granular you need to get with job tracking software will help us determine how sophisticated a device you might need for time entry.
4. What information do you need to capture? Over and above basic clocking in and out of work, overtime documentation, real-time “who’s in” and accruals tracking are the top requests we receive for an automated time and attendance solution. Our time and attendance solutions come pre-built with a wide array of configurable reports. Think about the value of the information you will be securely gathering. Who should be included in the reports training portion of the implementation? Plan to implement running reports-business intelligence as part of your time and attendance implementation. Imagine how nice it will be to run approaching overtime reports or ACA reporting with a click of a mouse!
5. How many administrators-supervisors-managers will need access to the time cards? Think about your process now and how it could be. How many levels of sign off and approval do you want on time cards? Do you have a plan for who will have authority to authorize overtime and vacation requests?
Made it through the list? You are five steps closer to the automated time & attendance system of your dreams. Imagine being able to brag about the great return on investment you will see by automating your business processes. ROI for an average client starts at 34k a year!
Need answers to your questions? Pick up the phone and give us a call or email us and we will be happy to answer questions specific to your needs. The team at Sierra are Time and Attendance process subject matter experts. We live, breathe, eat and sleep time and attendance, time clock hardware and ERP integrations. We’ll gladly offer our guidance on how to build your new automated time and attendance system.