What is Time and Attendance and why is it interesting?

How often have some of us worked at a job where we have had to swipe in? It is typically an action that requires little thought from the end-users, due to the simplicity of the solution. Yet a typical time and attendance solution can have a lot of moving parts and save a business a lot money. Besides just making sure that employees arrive on time, time and attendance solutions can be used to control door access in a building and can integrate with payroll software such as Quickbooks and Sage to ensure accurate accounting.

When creating a time and attendance solution, businesses frequently want to track meals and breaks, the type of work performed, and the number of items produced. Besides tracking time at the office, time outside the office is also calculated in a good time and attendance solution: Vacation time, compensation time, sick time, and even jury duty can all be recorded.

In the past, attendance was checked manually through time clock mounted on the wall or time sheets. In modern days, time and attendance solutions typically involve a mixture of software development and sophisticated hardware such as fingerprint scanning, eye scanning, or face scanning. The cards that are often seen being carried by employees operate through radio frequency (RF-ID) technology.

What are the practical uses of this for a business? According the American Payroll Association, there is a significant human error factor when performing manual calculations on payroll. Their study showed that overpayment on payroll can range from 1% to 8%. Even if employees are getting paid as little as 15 dollars an hour and have as little as 100 employees, this can account for over 30,000 dollars in lost money annually (conservatively speaking). This is why time and attendance solutions are so important for businesses to upgrade their solutions.