6 features to look for in your time and attendance system

Tracking employee attendance and working time effectively is essential to maintaining smooth business operations. It allows you to issue accurate customer invoices for the services you offer and can help you ensure compliance with local and federal labor laws. Similarly, if your employees are paid hourly, a great time and attendance system can make payroll processing a breeze.

If you are planning to implement a new time and attendance system for your organization, here are six features to consider:

1. Attendance management

The time and attendance system that you select should automate and simplify attendance management. Employees should be able to check in and check out every day as a way to mark their attendance. If you have employees working from customer offices, selecting a system that enables them to mark attendance only from these specified locations could be really helpful.

The system should also automatically mark employees who don't check in for the day as absent. However, sometimes employees may forget to mark their attendance, or they may even mark the attendance by mistake on their day off. In such cases, your attendance system should allow you to adjust attendance entries. Further, if you have a biometric system in place already, it's better to go for a system that integrates with your existing biometric system to avoid additional work.

2. Leave management

Because your employee's leave and attendance are closely related, having to leave management features in your time and attendance system could simplify core HR operations even further. The system you select should enable your organization to configure leave policies based on the leave laws applicable to your organization. Your system should help your employees check their leave balances, raise leave requests, convert absences into leave, check their holiday schedule, take compensatory time off, and more. It should also enable your HR team and managers to approve or reject employee leave requests. Further, the leave management module in your time and attendance system should be customizable so that you can manage employee leave the way you want. For instance, if you want to allow employees to roll over their leave balance into the following year, the system should support this function.

3. Employee schedule management

Your time and attendance system should take the tedium out of employee scheduling and make the process simple and transparent for your employees. The system should enable you to create multiple shifts at the same time, as well as define time boundaries and shift allowance effortlessly. It should automate shift rotations so that there are no shift conflicts or errors. Whenever there's a change in their shifts, the system should be able to instantly notify employees so that they are able to plan their schedule in advance. This prevents any last-minute hassles.

4. Timesheets

A great timesheets feature is essential in a time and attendance system. Timesheets let your employees record the time they spend on different projects and tasks, and they enable managers to monitor progress easily. With the timesheets feature, your managers should be able to assign jobs for your employees and approve or reject timesheets, while your employees should be able to record their time,  send it to their managers for approval, and assign jobs to themselves as necessary. Your time and attendance system should also be able to use timesheets to generate error-free client invoices.

5. Integration with payroll system

Your time and attendance system should integrate with your payroll system for simplified, error-free payroll calculation. This integration saves you time and decreases administrative burdens, as you won't have to manually import time and attendance data into your payroll system. Other data pertaining to employee working hours, like loss of pay and overtime data, should also be synced between systems to avoid payroll errors.

6. Reports

The system you choose should have excellent reporting capabilities so that you have a clear idea of what's happening at your organization. For attendance, your system should be able to highlight the list of employees who are present, absent, late, or leaving early for the day. When it comes to time off management, your system should be able to provide you with a list of employees who are available on a given day. Your system should also give your managers a clear picture of pending jobs and completed jobs, scheduled versus actual logged hours, and other related information. Having these details handy can take a load off your HR team.

Selecting the right time and attendance system

Implementing a time and attendance system that is consistent with your organizational needs is crucial to getting the best out of your investment. We hope this blog gave you useful insights on the different features you should look for in your next time and attendance system.

Our HRMS, Zoho People, comes with an built-in time and attendance system designed to make time tracking easy. It can automate time, leave, and attendance management for your organization, leaving no room for manual administrative tasks. Learn more about Zoho People.