What You Need To Know About Time and Attendance Software

Taking your business to the next level requires the implementation of modern tools that will help you streamline various business processes. One of these tools is time and attendance software.

Time and attendance software makes it easier to visualise where your hours are going and ensure your schedules are designed to maximise your business’s efficiency.

Below we discuss what time and attendance software is, what benefits you can expect and what are the most important things to look for in time and attendance software.

What is time and attendance software?

Time and attendance software (or time and attendance systems) are tools that serve to help you improve the efficiency of your business. Depending on the available features, you can use the system to see what your employees are working on and how much time they are taking to complete their tasks.

By using time and attendance software, you can get a better insight into your overall company’s performance and which types of tasks take the most hours to complete. Over time, you can use this data to further optimise your business’s efficiency.

Overall, time and attendance software allows you to track employee working hours, generate efficient schedules but also use the data to streamline payroll management. Implementation of time and attendance software is a way to look at your business from a completely different perspective.

What are the benefits of time and attendance software?

Using time and attendance software can bring many benefits to your business, including:

• Better financial management
• Greater employee engagement and well-being
• Valuable workforce insights and data
• Outstanding efficiencies
• Smarter inventory management

Your labour costs are often the biggest expense for your business. That's why it is essential that you ensure that those working hours are spent the right way. Within weeks of implementing good time and attendance software, you should be able to visualise where most of your money is going. As more time passes, you will generate more data (and hopefully regular patterns) which can be used to make better business decisions.

Time and attendance software can also lead to greater efficiency. You can create flexible, budget-covering schedules that will allow your workforce to tackle future challenges in the most optimal way.

At foundU, we have focused on bringing you all these benefits, but we have also taken other things into consideration. 

What happens if you don't use good time and attendance software?

Using poor time and attendance software can create issues for your company. Intentional or not, if staff are incorrectly clocking-in/out for shifts, or not tracking overtime or breaks, you could potentially face a fine. Likewise, if your time and attendance data is inaccurate, you also run the risk of overpaying staff.   

Without accurate time and attendance tracking, your business will also struggle to measure employee productivity. Good time and attendance software filled with accurate data ensures you know when your employees are at work, taking sick days or off on annual leave. If employees aren’t using their time off, you could end up with less productive employees in the long term. Likewise, you also want to ensure that staff are coming to work and being productive - and not taking too many days away from the workplace.

Using poor time and attendance software can also have long-term impacts on your business. The time and attendance data that your business collects can be used to help make long term plans and decisions. If these plans are based on inaccurate data, that could reduce the overall effectiveness of those future plans.

What should you look for in time and attendance software?

When it comes to choosing time and attendance software, you should look for a solution that:

• Is easy for you and your teams to implement and use
• Is the right size for your business, based on the number of employees, locations and services your business provides
• Can accurately track time and attendance of staff across multiple sites, with geo-location and clock-in features that allow you to easily see if someone has not attended a shift
• Allows you to make cost calculations and schedule adjustments in real-time to ensure optimal staffing levels
• Allows you to easily view schedules and ensure you are scheduling the right staff where specific certifications or skills are required
• Includes automations like fatigue alerts, that help ensure staff are taking the necessary breaks, and overtime alerts that flag when overtime will be due 
• Links seamlessly to employee data to ensure you are scheduling the right people to the right role every day
• Links seamlessly to payroll, which automatically calculates time scheduled, allowances, deductions, custom accounts, location, overtime and more, saving you time on manually generating or double checking payslips
• Can be easily scaled up or scaled down with your business as required
• Is affordable and helps you save further costs
• Is mobile-friendly and can be accessed from anywhere, anytime

All of these features are why Darren Winmill from Omni Recruit, a labour hire and recruitment firm, chose the foundU platform. Thanks to these features, Darren and the team at Omni Recruit are able to save $100,000 per year on payroll.

Want to know more about foundU? Book a Demo.