Best Time Clock Software

Regardless of the organization's size and type, accurate calculation of employee attendance and time tracking is required to process payroll, measure productivity, and ensure compliance with the labor laws. Historically, the timesheets were maintained manually using registers or spreadsheets. But, very soon, the companies realized that manually tracking each employee's work time is time-consuming and monotonous. Moreover, this method lacked accuracy and increased the chances of time-theft.

Currently, business organizations prefer using time clock software to register time-in and time-out of the employees, track their working hours, process payroll, and generate attendance reports. If you are in search of a time clock system to streamline employee attendance processes and ensure high productivity in your organization, this buyers' guide to time clock software can help you choose one that best suits your business.

The company requires tracking employees' attendance and monitoring their time spent on different projects to ensure that they are paying them accurately. Overpaying employees can impact the profitability of the organization, and underpaying employees can create disputes between employees and management. To avoid both these situations, tracking the time and attendance of each employee becomes highly significant. 

Employees are the most valuable assets of an organization and, if not appropriately managed, can negatively impact the individual performance and profitability of any business. Tracking the employees' time and attendance helps in determining and rewarding the employees that are disciplined, performing well, and contributing to the organization's growth. 

Precisely, tracking the time and attendance of each employee can help accomplish the below-mentioned tasks that play an imperative role in the success of a business organization -

• Processing payroll accurately
• Monitoring the performance of the employees
• Planning the budget for each project
• Ensuring high productivity
• Staying compliant with the local labor laws

Being a business owner or manager, you must be knowing how monotonous, time-consuming, and prone to errors it is to manage all the above tasks manually. Especially if you are handling a large number of employees or billing your clients based on the hours spent on particular projects by your employees, tracking attendance accurately & quickly becomes critical. The best time clock software working based on robust technologies like biometrics & RFID can solve these issues.

To gain more information let’s just go through the detailed information about the time clock tool below -

Time clock software is a tool that allows employees to electronically record their presence at a particular location or work time for a specific project. HR professionals and managers use a time clock app to calculate the employees' attendance, streamline payroll tasks, and measure productivity. The time clock solution stores the number of hours worked by the employees in a database, which can be retrieved in the form of reports at any time.  

The most common ways that employees use to record their attendance is logging into web/mobile applications, fingerprint, and ID Card. The time clock app captures this punching information from biometric or RFID systems and calculates the hours every employee has worked or has been present within particular premises. This information is then transferred to the payroll system to calculate the remuneration of the employees.

The types of time clock solutions may vary depending on their functionality, deployment, and cost. So, let’s have a look at each one of them.

A. Functionality

I) Task Allocation

The companies that need to track billable hours use time tracking software that includes task allocation features. It allows supervisors to allocate tasks to their team members and calculate the time they spend on their assigned tasks. This type of time clock software can even help in calculating the billable hours of the employees working from remote locations and work from home professionals.

ii) Scheduling Shifts

Businesses like hotels, restaurants, salons, etc., depending on shift jobs use a time clock app that allows scheduling shifts. It will enable supervisors and managers to allocate, and change shift timings of the team members. It is also used to ensure that all the employees work within their shift timings.

III) Location Tracking

Time tracking software with location-tracking features is useful for businesses having employees working on field jobs like marketing executives, servicemen, etc. The time clock software, including GPS functionality, can track the employees' physical location to ensure they are on duty. 

B. Deployment

i) On-Premise

On-premise time clock software is hosted internally on your company's server. This type of software provides complete control over the data and freedom of working without an internet connection. The option can suit your organization only if you have the required infrastructure and an IT team to manage the implementation, upgrades, and training processes.

ii) Cloud-Based

The cloud-based time clock software is hosted on the software vendor's server and can be accessed using a web/mobile device and internet connection. The software vendors manage the hosting, maintenance, and upgrades. If the internet connection fails, you may not be able to access the software.

C. Price

i) Paid

Based on your budget, internal resources, and requirements you can choose one from the below options -

• Buy monthly/yearly subscription for readymade time clock software available
• Hire in-house software developers or freelancers and pay them the decided remuneration or salary to build a customized time clock software as per your needs
• Handover the entire project to a professional software development company and pay them the quoted price for building a time clock software, including features required.

ii) Freemium

Many paid time clock solutions are available with a free trial for a specific period. If you are not sure about how a particular software would merge with your specific business requirements, you can try freemium options before making a purchase decision.

iii) Free

There are many free time clock solutions available in the market that you can use for your business organization without any investment. These free time clock apps may come with many limitations in the features. So, if you are looking for advanced time clock software but with minimum investment, free online time clock software can be the appropriate option. The open source time clock software can include costs relating to developers' fees, deployment, and training.

Managing attendance and employee time can be a hassle without the use of time clock software. Many companies have already adopted the automated system for tracking and recording the employees' time because of some prominent reasons given below -

Ensures Accuracy

Recording time and attendance of the employees manually on registers or excel spreadsheets can lead to inaccurate time tracking. Using time clock software; the employees can maintain accuracy as the data collected by the electronic biometrics is collected and recorded on a real-time basis. Moreover, the employees, supervisors, and top management executives can access the attendance information at their fingertips.

Eliminates Time-Theft Issues

Humans can lie, but machines cannot. An employee can register wrong clock-in information in an excel sheet, but the time clock software retrieving the punching information from a biometric device cannot be wrong. The time clock software eliminates time-theft issues and enables business organizations to pay accurately to their employees.

Enhances Employee Satisfaction

As the time clock can calculate the accurate working hours of the employees, it becomes easier for HR departments to process payroll quickly. Moreover, the employees can have a real-time view of the data relating to their attendance and hours worked. In case of any issue, they can rectify it on their own or get it done by their supervisor/manager. This obviously would empower the employees and enhance their satisfaction level.

Increases Productivity

Manually calculating payroll is more tedious and time-consuming than automated payroll processing. The task of payroll processing that can be completed within 20 minutes can take hours if you calculate the employees' attendance manually. Moreover, the time clock software can help the top management in analyzing the performance of the employees based on the time they took to complete a project and punctuality maintained. This encourages the level of accountability among the employees, motivates them to work with sincerity, and behaves in a disciplinary manner resulting in maximum productivity.  

Allows Flexible Work Arrangements

In the current business environment, it is quite common for the employees to work from home, or for employers to hire freelancers working from a remote location. In such cases, the employees don't punch in or punch out of a particular physical location. The time clock software, having a variety of clocking options, helps in calculating the number of hours worked by the employees working from home or a remote location.  

Makes Shift and Task Allocation Easy

Using time clock software, it becomes easy to assign tasks to the employees and monitor whether those tasks get completed within a time frame or not. The companies that work based on shifts also can automate the process of assigning and swapping shifts. Moreover, the time clock software also allows the determination of the workload on each employee, project budget, and resources required in each process running within a business organization.

By using integrated timekeeping and payroll systems, the companies have been reported to overachieve their revenue targets by 7%. Besides that, using a time clock software is highly essential for small businesses in different ways as mentioned below -

Employees Get Paid For What They Owe

Small businesses work on a low budget and cannot afford to pay more to the employees than they owe to the company. As the time clocks software eliminates time-theft and buddy punching issues, it helps companies in paying their employees only for the hours they have worked. 

Accurate Payroll Processing

Time clock software helps in automating the task of payroll processing. This helps small businesses to program the attendance & leave policies in specific parameters, automatically handling required calculations, and making the entire workflow seamless and accurate.

Ensuring Business Growth

A time clock software can record the time spent by each employee on different tasks and their performance. The top management monitors this data. It makes employees accountable for the projects assigned to them and strives to deliver maximum productivity. The small businesses yielding high levels of productivity are guaranteed to grow and generate revenue more than their expectations.

A series of business strategies used to improve employee performance and efficiency is known as Workforce optimization. Workforce optimization (WFO) benefits the employees and employers in terms of achieving common goals resulting in the company's growth. Let us just check out how an employee time clock software can help in effectively implementing workforce optimization techniques within a business organization.

Recording Attendance 

As the employee time clock application automates the process of recording attendance of the employees in the organization, it becomes easy to access the insights about performance, effectiveness, and productivity individually. It helps in determining which processes are working and which ones require improvisation.

Assigning Tasks

Assigning tasks in a manner that helps achieve maximum productivity is the most significant technique of workforce optimization. The time clock software provides visibility over the employees working on different tasks and helps the supervisors and managers to assign appropriate tasks depending on the availability and skills of the employees.

Managing Shifts

Many organizations work based on the shift system. The employees' shifts should be managed in a manner that maximizes productivity and balances work and life at the same time. The time clock solution indicates a clear picture of the employees' shifts. It helps supervisors and managers to change and assign shifts in such a manner that benefits the company and employees.

Improved Communication

The time clock software centralizes the information about the attendance, shifts, and tasks assigned. This brings in clear communication between the top management, supervisors, and employees, leaving no misunderstanding between all of them. Transparency in the entire system; ultimately enables you to implement better workforce optimization techniques resulting in increased productivity and growth of the business.

Not all time clock solutions are created equally. Below mentioned are some essential features you need to look for while selecting one for your organization -

Automated Clock In and Clock Out

This feature seems to be evident in any time clock system. But, many time clock solutions require employees to enter time in and out manually. The employee time clock app you select should sync with the biometric or RFID system being used in your organization. That way, you get the numbers right to avoid human errors and fraud against the employees.

Ability to Edit Attendance Inputs

The employees sometimes forget to clock in or clock out of the system. In that case, the system marks the employee as absent for that day. The time clock software should allow the employee to enter the missing attendance details after the approval of the respective supervisor/manager. It should also allow HR managers to edit the attendance information as it would save the employees and managers the time to fix the errors. This would also make employees more accountable for the information they record in the time clock system.

Real-Time Attendance Monitoring

The time clock tool you select should allow the users to monitor the employees' attendance on a real-time basis. This would help you to check the performance and punctuality of each employee in the organization. Also, it allows you to view the details about the staff members present within a premise or working on a particular project easily.

Location-Based Punching

It allows the employees to clock in using a Wi-Fi connection from a certain IP address only. That means the employees can clock in or clock out from office premises only. For many organizations, this feature is quite important as it avoids early clocking in issues and maintains compliance within the organization.

GPS Tracking

Allowing the employees to clock in using their mobile devices with GPS tracking is one of the most important features required by the organizations that delegate repairs and service jobs to their employees. The employees are doing field jobs clock-in using their mobile devices as soon as they start a job and clock out while ending a job. This helps companies track their employees' locations, ensuring they are completing the jobs within a specific time, and providing efficient services to their clients.

Payroll Processing

Many time clock solutions include payroll features that allow you to quickly calculate the remuneration, salary, or wages of the employees accurately based on their attendance details. Processing the payroll of the employees is a highly-time consuming and monotonous job. Moreover, If the organization's payroll process is automated, it helps make sure that employees are paid accurately within a required time frame.

Reporting

The time clock app you select should help you generate comprehensive reports that provide complete information about the attendance of your employees, including their leave balances, late coming instances, overtime, lunch and tea breaks, etc. These reports should be customizable to suit your business requirements and offer multiple exporting options.

Using the latest technology in time and attendance software is important as that may impact the productivity and overall processes within the business organization. For that reason, it becomes necessary to consider the below-mentioned current trends in time clock application.

Wi-Fi Enabled Time Clocks

The Wi-Fi-enabled time clocks include new hardware technology that can support the time and attendance recordkeeping of more than 500 employees. It uses biometric technology that can ensure accuracy in time-punch and facilitates image capture for enhanced efficiency.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has been quite popular for a long time now. The cloud-based time clock tool allows employees to punch in and punch out from any device or platform. It also allows supervisors and managers to access the real-time figures relating to the employees' attendance and performance. With work from home being highly in trend these days, the use of a cloud-based time clock tool has become obvious.

Facial Recognition

Time clock software facilitating facial recognition is an emerging trend these days. In a situation like the spreading of a pandemic like COVID-19,  facial recognition has become important for touchless attendance recording and management. This would help the business organization to ensure the safety of the workforce as it doesn't require touching fingers to the biometric, which can be the primary reason for spreading the virus.    

Artificial Intelligence

According to a study, innovations like AI technology are predicted to increase employee productivity by 40% in 2035. AI-enabled time clock solutions can fully automate the time tracking and performance measurement activities within a business organization. It allows location-based tracking of the employees and gaining advanced insights into the performance of the employees. It also helps HR professionals to solve the queries of the employees using a chatbot, saving both time and effort both.

Fever Detection

For the health and safety concern of the employees, businesses prefer to adopt the time clock system with fever detection capabilities. It delivers the notification to the administrators and HR managers as soon as an employee having elevated temperature enters the premises. In a situation like the spread of COVID-19, the implementation of a time clock system with fever detection capabilities can prove to be quite beneficial for business organizations.

For every business organization tracking and monitoring the attendance of the employees is quite essential to maintain consistent productivity to ensure maximum revenue generation. Below are some factors that you need to consider while selecting an online time clock software.

User-Friendly

The time clock tool you select should have a user-friendly interface allowing you and your employees to learn it easily and quickly. It should help you in organizing and managing your employees without much effort. Moreover, it should be easy to install and access, encouraging your employees to use their maximum features effectively.

Payroll Integration

It may happen that you have selected an employee time clock app that doesn't include in-built payroll processing features. And you are using a separate system for calculating payroll for your employees. In that case, the time clock solution you select should easily integrate with your payroll software, ensuring that your employees are being paid flawlessly.

Scalability

The growth of your business is inevitable. With the growth of your business, the number of employees working would also increase. The time-clock software you are considering for your business should have the ability to grow. If it is restricted to managing the employees that are working at present with your company, then it is of no benefit to you.

Efficiency

If the online time clock software crashes when multiple users work simultaneously or provides a slow performance, it may reduce productivity and create chaos within your organization. Before purchasing software, you need to ensure that it is efficient enough to improve the speed and accuracy of the attendance and payroll processes in your organization. Sometimes you may get attracted to a cheap time clock application, but if it turns out to be inefficient, you need to pay a heavy price in terms of loss of productivity.

Easy Installation

If you have selected a cloud-based time clock software, then the installation is not an issue. But, in the case of on-premise software, you need to check that it is easy to install. Also, you need to ensure that the infrastructure requirements are minimum and match your organization's budget and capabilities.  

Price

This is the most important factor that every business owner considers before investing in any software. When it comes to the time clock system, the price may increase as you add on the features. But paying for the features you are never going to use would not be the wise decision. Thus, you need to select a time clock tool that is efficient, ensures high productivity, and is within your budget.

Business Size & Type

The time clock software that works for a local salon cannot work for a professional and multinational company. The selection of online time clock software depends on the size and type of your business organization. The requirement of the features in a time clock software may vary for a business working with 5 employees on an hourly basis than a business, including more than 1000 salaried employees. 

Mobility

Many companies work with employees located in remote locations. In such cases, mobility in time clock application becomes an essential requirement. The time clock service should be accessible from anywhere using any device, providing the ability for remote workers to clock in and clock out using any device and platform. Moreover, it also helps the supervisors and managers to access the attendance information on the go or track the location of the employees.

Switching from manual to automated time clock apps may seem to be confusing and overwhelming at first. You would reap the benefits, once your time clock system streamlines and automates the process of attendance tracking and recording within your business organization. Here are some steps that would help you in making this transition smooth.

Preparing for the Change

You need to put your decision-making team together and notify them about the areas requiring improvement in your time and attendance tracking system. Discussing how a time clock app can help in improvising the enhancing the productivity and accountability of each employee can help in convincing the decision-makers in adopting the new automated time clock system.

Research & Planning

While transitioning to a new time clock solution, it becomes important to know whether your infrastructure capabilities match the requirements of the system you are adopting. All the time clock systems vary in terms of deployment, integrations, hardware options, and capabilities. You need to research and plan comprehensively to help you eliminate potential issues that you may face due to adopting a system that doesn't fit your business requirements and objectives.

Return on Investment Analysis

A time clock software would require a considerable amount of investment. How would you justify this investment in front of higher authorities and decision-makers? You need to show them the records about the loss the company has made due to time-theft, low productivity, and mismanagement within the organization. Proving that the deployment of time clock services would help generate higher ROI can easily convince the decision-makers to shift from manual to automated time clock systems.

Selecting Vendor

Investing in a time clock system is just not enough. You need to ensure that the time clock solution vendor provides the required training to your staff and makes them aware of the features in-depth. Moreover, there should be no uncertainty when it comes to accessing support from the vendor's side. The transition to the automated system can become difficult and time-consuming for you and your staff members if the quality of support and training is not good enough.

The cost of employee time clock software can vary depending on its features and functionality. There are many online time clock software solutions available in the market at monthly, yearly, and one-time charges. For example EasyTimeClock costs only $0.25/month and Punch:io costs $1000/month. If you prefer paying yearly, then you can go for PurelyTracking, costing $3/year, or TimeClockWindow costing $59.95/year. Also, there are time clock solutions available like CKZ Time Clock at $49.95 and Power Clock at $200 one-time charges.

You can also go for time clocks software systems like Mitrefinch or Virtual TimeClock offering customized prices depending on the features you require.

If your budget doesn’t permit investing in a time clock system right now, you can choose a free and open source time clock software that you can even customize as per your business requirements. 

For detailed information, you can go through the complete list of time clock software here.

At GoodFirms, we believe that a well-featured time clock tool helps all organizations to improvise their standards and take their business to the next level. Based on that philosophy, we make sure that the companies have access to the in-depth information about the software they are looking for and end up selecting the best one that can enable them to achieve their goals. Besides that, the below reasons can justify your decision of referring to GoodFirms' list of time clock software -

• Reputed companies and software vendors trust GoodFirms for deploying 100% safe and secure processes.
• GoodFirms follow a customer-centric approach towards curating only the best software applying the latest technologies and trends.
• The list of time clock apps by GoodFirms not only contains in-depth details about the features, functionality, price, and deployment but also includes authentic reviews helping you to make the right choice.

Achieving an enhanced level of productivity is a never-ending goal for an organization, whether big or small. A time clock tool can help in enhancing the experience for employees, leading to more efficiency. As there have been many workplace changes and policies over the period, the employees now demand more flexibility and control over managing their attendance.  

To build a healthy working environment in an organization, it has become necessary to implement a system that helps employees in following schedules that can help maintain their work-life balance and eliminate issues like time theft, and buddy punching at the same time. 

We hope that this buyers' guide to time clock software has helped you select the right system suited to your business requirements. Please share your valuable feedback with us.