Employee Time Clock is a software which is used to track employee working hours based on a project or the total time they have spent in a location.
It creates a digital timesheet of the clock-in and clock-out hours of an employee during a working day.
What is the purpose of time clock app?
Time Clock apps are used for payroll purpose and as well for the compliances of labour law. Many governments mandate that you should pay your employees for overtime over & above the rate of normal working hours.
To correctly calculate the actual working hours of an employee generally companies implements biometrics-based (fingerprint or retina scan) clock in and clock out system. Some also use a traditional manual system where employee signs and put the time on a register.
All off the above methods are outdated and cumbersome to manage.
With a hardware-based solution, it is a costly affair with all the AMC (annual maintenance contract) and downtimes in case of a malfunction or even the complete data loss.
Same is the case with the manual process of getting attendance. If a register gets lost or spoiled, you may lose all the data. Also, one needs to digitally compile all the data again to get some useful reports out of non-digital data.
Time clock apps are installed on the employee’s mobile phone and update the data on the cloud server on a real-time basis.
They are maintenance-free and doesn’t have issues like data loss or malfunction.
Time Clock apps also enable the employees to be remote as the app store the location of punch-in and punch-out times as well.
Features Of Employee Time Clock App?
A Time Clock software provides many benefits like;
- Accurate Clock In and Clock Out reporting.
- Shift scheduling.
- Geo-location with the time.
- Location tracking during working hours.
- Complete payroll reporting like overtime, leaves and performance.
Accurate Clock-In & Clock-Out Reporting
One of the most agonizing things while managing an on-field workforce or remote employees is to get their attendance.
Either you will have to ask them to report at the office to mark their Clock-In and Out timing or you will have to let go of the compliance and trust their words.
Trusting their words is not wrong but it is not always very productive and scientific approach for the problem. You will never get an accurate data of their productivity and scope of improvement on your process.
With an attendance app, which can accurately track the Clock-In and Clock-Out timing with a precision of location through GPS, you can get the right data at your fingertips.
You can calculate their working hours, leaves and most importantly the overtime for the compliance and employee motivations purpose.
Solutions like TeamSpoor can get you an accurate attendance from the field through employee’s mobile and GPS location for the authenticity. These reports can be downloaded and used in any analytics software.
Shift Scheduling
Another benefit of using a mobile application for timesheet reporting is Shift Scheduling.
Not all the employees work 10 to 6, they may be working eight hours a day, but the timing could not be the same for all.
For example, in a factory, there could be engineers those who work in multiple shifts of eight hours or the security guards who could work 6 AM to 2 PM one day and on another day, they could be working 10 PM to 6 PM.
Similarly, if you have delivery or pickup teams on the field then there are high chances that they could be working in multiple shifts to provide 24×7 services.
A good timesheet application not only provides in the clock in and out timings but also help in building and assigning shifts to the teams and ensure the compliance.
Mobile apps like TeamSpoor also helps the managers to ensure everybody is following the shifts by sending rea-time updates on their mobile.
Geo-Location with Time
Getting the time for clock-in or clock-out is all good but when you really want to ensure compliance i.e., the remote team is working or on-field teams are in the market doing their work as supposed then you will also need geo-location with the timing.
Mobile apps like TeamSpoor get the geo-location (GPS coordinates) with the address of the location where the user has marked his attendance.
This helps when you want your users to mark their attendance only from a particular location, say from your office or at a customer’s premises.
The real-life use case of this feature is when you have a field force, which works at a customer’s location e.g., security guards, showroom employees etc.,
Even though they can mark their clock-in or clock-out time from a remote location, they need to be at the exact same location to get it worked.
Location Tracking During Working Hours
Another big feature an employee time clock should have is creating route-maps of the field employees to ensure that the company field force is not wasting their time on unrelated and unproductive tasks.
Privacy issues come first when it comes to tracking of employees, however, tracking an employee’s location during the working hours is not a breach of privacy and the app should ensure that any kind of tracking should not be done after working hours or when they users’ clock-out from the system.
The other big advantage of location tracking is location awareness.
Managers know all the time where their team members are, and they can deploy the resources depending upon the demand instead of guesswork.
Complete Payroll Reporting
What good a Time Clock software is if it cannot provide payroll reporting and without a good Time Clock software you cannot generate accurate payrolls without heavy-duty work of compiling the data.
Employee Time Clock applications help you to generate payroll specific reports, which includes but not limited to:
- Attendance & Overtime (timesheet)
- Leaves
- Conveyance
- Expense management
A good employee time clock application can help your business directly and indirectly in many ways.
To get started with a Time Clock application for your business click here.
