Most HR software applications have something known as the time and attendance tracker embedded in them. Clocking the time and attendance of employees in an organisation is a very important tool since it can be effectively used to monitor employee activities with regards to:
- Their entry time and exit time,
- Requests for absences,
- Time-off requests sanctioned,
- Effective working hours put in etc.
Since keeping a track of the time and attendance of employees is a crucial part of workforce management, it is best to use a time tracking software which can either be:
- Standalone: This is generally used to generate reports, record timesheets etc.
- Integrated: This type comes integrated as a part of other software packages installed like the accounting software package, payroll software package, billing systems, resource scheduling etc.
Time and attendance tracking methods
Depending on the requirement of the industry these time and attendance tracking HR software cater to, they can use any of the below given methods to track employee time like:
- Durational wherein duration of the work time is recorded,
- Chronological wherein the start and the ending time of a task is entered,
- Automatic which calculates the amount of time an employee spends on a task with the help of the start and stop buttons and these also come with the provision to retrieve the tasks which have been logged,
- Exception-based which automatically records the standard employee working hours,
- Monitoring which records the times an employee is active or idle,
- Location-based which monitors remotely based on the location of the employees etc.
With numerous tracking methods available, almost every requirement of the industry with regards to employee time and attendance clocking, is catered to. This is what makes this method and consequently the implementation of the payroll software crucial and extremely beneficial for calculating the disbursements of all types of employees that a firm or a company or organisation has on its payrolls.
