One of the biggest hurdles supervisor’s and bosses have to jump over is recording the number of hours their employees worked. Over the years, various methods involve an employee time clock.
Still today, you can find offices and businesses that use traditional punch-in employee time clock.
Why?
It’s what they used as an employee and then became so comfortable and familiar with it that they decided to use it when they became managers.
For these more long-established offices, using a traditional punch-in employee time clock is simple. It easily keeps track of employees’ hours at the end of the work week or pay period and they rarely have to manually fix the time cards.
As the years went on, businesses have started to automate this process using solutions. These systems are more developed than traditional punch-in time clocks and prove that they will soon no longer be used. These systems have increased the capacity of a traditional punch-in employee time clock beyond keeping track of employee hours.
Yes, the traditional punch-in employee time clock does serve as a worthwhile ancestor to automated time tracking solutions. However, it’s time for businesses to move towards more current and efficient methods to log their employees’ hours.
The traditional punch-in employee time clock has certain faults that keep businesses from running as efficiently and productively as possible.
In this article, I’ll run through the reasons why traditional punch-in employee time clocks are done. Many of the reasons are the faults that keep businesses from running smoothly.
Employees Can Steal Time from the Company
Not all employees are honest about their time cards when they use a traditional punch-in employee clock. This system allows for friends at work to punch in and punch out for each other.
It allows an employee who is running late for work to ask his friend to punch-in for him- even though he’s not present. There’s no way to prove his dishonesty and he will receive his paycheck according to his time card.
This scenario has led to companies losing profits and overtime payouts to employees who might not have worked the hours logged on the time cards.
Mistakes are made on a Traditional Punch-In Employee Time Clock
At the end of the pay period when payroll needs to be produced, employees on payroll staff can make mistakes.
This is common since they are adding up all the hours tediously by hand and then putting it into the payroll database system. After logging all the hours, the employees can receive their paychecks.
Employees make mistakes if they’re tired of doing the task for so long and if the actual employee made a punch-in or punch-out error.
All of these mistakes add up to erroneous paycheck amounts and unhappy employees, especially if they are not paid enough. On the other side, if they’ve been paid more than they were supposed to receive, they have to give the extra amount back to the company.
A Traditional Punch-In Employee Time Clock Wastes Time
Honestly, the punch-in employee time clock wastes the company’s time. If an employee has to wait in line to punch-in or punch-out it takes away from the time he could be working.
In some offices, the employee time clock is not placed near the actual workspace so time is taken away from the workday to “travel” to and from it.
The human resources employees, who gather the employee’s time cards, need a large amount of time to do the whole task with little error. This task is usually done after hours so it won’t conflict with regular duties of the human resources department. This means these employees work overtime which is another expense for the company.
Using Time Cards is a Repeated Cost
In order for a company to use a traditional punch-in employee time clock, it needs to always have time cards on hand. This is a repeated cost to the company and becomes an even bigger expense for larger companies.
Companies that want to become more environmentally friendly, one way to do so and cut costs is to stop using a time card system.
If employee time clock malfunctions under the traditional system, the employees will have to keep track of their hours using their own pen and paper. This makes it even more difficult to keep track of the time and honesty of the hours.
A Traditional Employee Time Clock Could Cause Monetary Loss
The traditional system of recording employee’s hours not only takes a long time but also a very ineffective way of going about it. Remember, it costs money to produce the payroll, pay the employees who work overtime to record and log the hours in the database, and to purchase the time cards.
Is it now clear why you should at least consider switching from your manual clock to an automated time tracking solution? It brings benefits to the company since it provides valuable information to make the company more efficient.