Time & Attendance is key input for your Payroll. Human Resource and finance departments in any business organization spend ample time to collect Time & Attendance data and process payroll. Employees are the backbone of a business enterprise. Any irregularity in their salary or leave calculation is most definitely going to generate unrest and dissatisfaction among them and will eventually affect the functioning of the enterprise. Payroll system covers sensitive employee information with respect to their remuneration, timesheets, time & attendance and leave records, and also taxes and deductions, whenever applicable. Timesheets and maintenance of attendance records are central to payroll processing, so it must be calculated with 100 percent accuracy and precision.
Earlier, when the processes were not automated, the business firms had to keep a record of the employees’ confidential information manually. The employees’ in/out timings were recorded in physical documents that were used for salary processing at the end of payment cycle. In addition to the employees’ in and out timing, other time and attendance factors to be taken into account for payroll include shift differentials and overtime calculation. But, before this, the timesheets need to be approved by the reporting managers of the employees, which take up time as well as efforts of the respective department in charge of it. Now, another catch in this scenario is that the employee may be reporting to more than one manager simultaneously. This will make the entire process cumbersome.
The HR department employees are also charged with the responsibility of furnishing the approved timesheets and accurate time and attendance details to the finance department employees on time, thereby avoiding any delays in salary processing. A slightest error in its computation could have an impact on the employees’ compensation.
In the manual payroll processes, the employees in the HR department experienced problems in accurately tracking the start/end timings of the employees with respect to their specific tasks as well as a detailed breakdown of the tasks. Further, the timesheets hold due relevance in recording start/end timings related to the particular tasks and projects they are handling within a business enterprise.
Likewise, the employees’ time and attendance records were also maintained manually, raising the chances of committing errors a little further again. Let’s consider a scenario here. If some of the employees forget to sign in the attendance register or get the flexibility of working from home, there could be a possibility that the corresponding entry wouldn’t have been made in the register, it is assumed that the employees was on leave on that particular date. This might result in leave or salary deduction for the employee and lead to employee dissatisfaction towards the payroll management department. In either case, it is a lose-lose situation for the employee as well as the employer.
Migrating from manual processes of recording time & attendance to maintaining details on electronic spreadsheets also did not solve the problems of the employees working in the human resource department. Though, it offered them some relief as all the calculations could be done in the spreadsheet using formulas and all the information was available at the click of a mouse.
With so much competition in every sphere of business, the enterprises resorted to cloud computing, the emerging trend in Information Technology (IT) to automate the time and attendance tracking of their employees. Cloud-based software offers the firms ample benefits that bring a significant impact on their business such as a reduction in their operational cost and effective time utilization, thereby improving productivity.
Migrating to cloud-based software applications significantly brings down the enterprise’s expenses incurred on IT, which includes installation, configuration and maintenance costs.
Working on cloud applications saves the time and efforts of the HR department employees, who can devote that time to other more important and productive tasks, based on priority.
Cloud lends the HR department employees the flexibility to approve timesheets from any remote computing device with internet access. The Finance department employees can also export data for salary processing to the payroll system from any place they can access internet.
Moreover, Cloud-based time & attendance software gets upgraded automatically without any effort on the part of the subscribing enterprises. These system upgrades come without incurring any additional cost, over and above the subscription fees.
Switching to cloud computing enables the business enterprises to carry out the payroll processing smoothly and efficiently. It ensures calculation of timesheets and attendance with accuracy and precision, making the cumbersome processes simpler. With the manifold benefits of cloud-based time and attendance software discussed above, your business ventures can boost their operational efficiency by a substantial decrease in cost and optimum utilization of time.