How do you view employee attendance and why track it?

How do you view employee attendance? Also, what is the importance of keeping track of your employee attendance? These questions form a basis from which to further explore how HR automation solutions can be a force multiplier for small businesses.

What does employee attendance tracking entail?

Employee attendance tracking involves the use of manual or automated methods to keep track of the time employees work in a typical work day. As such, managers can view employee attendance records and make decisions based on the available information.

Manual tracking of employee attendance can include the use of attendance registers and time punch cards. Automated tracking of employee attendance on the other hand can include the use biometric attendance systems or cloud-based attendance tracking software with self-service technology.

Manual attendance tracking methods can be simple and cheap to implement. However, they are prone to human error and behavior. The limitations of time and attendance tracking methods include: buddy punching, manipulation of attendance register, payroll fraud, burden of administrative work and difficulty in managing a remote teams.

Why automate attendance tracking?

As already highlighted, manual time and attendance tracking can leave ugly gaps in your human resource operations. Hence, as cheap as it may be  to start and implement, limitations such as payroll fraud and buddy punching can have adverse effects on the health of a business.

With that in mind, an attendance tracking software automates repetitive processes around employee attendance data. Thus, no more manual attendance registers and time punch cards limiting insight into attendance data. 

With automated time and attendance tracking software, businesses can be able to get more insight into their workforce. Features such as lateness flagging can give managers attendance trends helping them make data-backed decisions.

The ability to view employee attendance on the go, also allows HR managers and business owners to easily and conveniently manage remote teams. Hence, employees don’t need to have physical contact with a business contact to clock in, take breaks or clock out.