What are the Best Solutions for Employee Time Tracking?

Completing timesheets and tracking time annoys many employees. Some wait until the end of a week, month, or pay period and rely on their memory to estimate the times and dates they worked. Not only is this ineffective, but it also has larger ramifications for the company down the road.

Companies are realizing that providing a quick and intuitive way for workers to log their time allows them to better understand their workforce and continually improve its performance.

Depending on how your company is setup, where your employees are and what they’re comfortable with, the right employee time tracking solution for you may look different than your neighbor’s. That’s okay – you have to crawl before you run.

Crawl: Basic employee time tracking solutions

For your new small business of a few employees, the top tier digital solution for employee time tracking is probably overkill. At a minimum, there needs to be a spreadsheet that either gets updated by employees or the payroll administrator.

While this isn’t the most sophisticated option, this information must be captured somewhere in order to remain compliant and this spreadsheet could ultimately get imported into a more robust system when you’re ready.

Other basic options follow the “punch card” methodology. Following the traditional time-clock and time-card relationship, some companies are moving towards scanning employee ID cards to clock them in.

Walk: Sophisticated employee time tracking solutions

The next level in employee time tracking solutions can be summarized as cloud-based applications. The goal of systems like these is to streamline the process of tracking activities and, most importantly, minimize the amount of administrative time needed to keep everything afloat.

Allowing employees to clock in from their computer, phone, or any internet enabled device, workers are no longer required to be in a particular location in order to get credit for working. Research also shows that the more regularly workers log their time, the more accurate they are.

These solutions have advanced reporting features and also keep electronic records of all activities. Combine that with the ability to access the platform from anywhere and, all of a sudden, you can get a real-time holistic view of your workforce whenever you want.

Workful even offers a geofencing clock-in feature which leverages GPS and a specific geographic perimeter to clock-in and clock-out.  This way, employees have to be within a specific area before able to clock-in from mobile devices.

A key difference in this level of solution, is that employee time automatically integrates with your payroll solutions. No more data entry necessary.

Run: Advanced employee time tracking solutions

You may be in a situation where your employee time tracking process needs the full makeover. The more advanced features that time tracking platforms offer will cost more but its impact makes it worthwhile.