For decades, keeping track of time and attendance in the workplace was both a guessing game and a matter of trust. As companies grew more complex and added to their workforce, recording employees’ time in the office and their overtime became more complicated, cumbersome and unruly. Business owners and HR managers often estimated hours worked and frequently resorted to relying on employee honesty in order to account for hours logged on the job.

Integrating the time clock into the workplace was a major step forward – but a flawed one. Employees could clock in, then leave the workplace without notice and return later, robbing companies of valuable labor. Or, they could recruit a coworker to clock in or out for them – a term called “buddy punching”. It was a problem that cost employers a considerable amount of money.

Today, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires that all employees must be paid overtime when they work beyond a certain number of hours per week. The rule applies to companies with salaried workers as well as hourly employees. Companies that fail to adhere to these rules can be hit by heavy fines and severe penalties. How can your company accurately keep track of worker hours and adhere to these complicated regulations? (And, how can you do this in a contact-less manner?)

Fortunately, Accu Data’s Time and Attendance Software is the answer, allowing managers to monitor and submit employees’ hours easily and accurately. Take a look at these five important ways that time and attendance software can benefit your company:

  1. It Tracks All Time

Time and attendance software captures and records hours that all employees work, whether they be on-site or away from the office. It’s a foolproof system of tracking working hours that takes the guesswork out of accounting for employees’ time on the job, including overtime.

  1. It’s Error-Free

The software program verifies pay to the penny and to the hour, avoiding the manual logging and costly mistakes of the past. It truly is the error-free answer to monitoring time and attendance.

  1. Visibility

In years past, getting the big picture in time and payroll management meant flipping through logs and spreadsheets. With today’s latest time and attendance software, managers and HR personnel can get the whole picture, thanks to dashboards that display real-time representations of employee work activities, enabling them to spot trends, plan for the future, and better prepare work schedules with greater precision and accuracy.

  1. It Controls Costs

Failure to keep close track of employee time and attendance can be costly in many ways. For instance, when employees reach their overtime threshold and exceed it, that can hit your bottom line hard. Time and attendance software has built-in notifications to alert you when an employee is about to reach his or her maximum number of allowable overtime hours. This vital aspect can save your company thousands of dollars annually in unnecessary overtime expenses.

  1. It Has a Contactless Option

With everything happening in today’s world, it’s more important than ever to maintain a safe environment for your employees. With this in mind, there are contactless time and attendance options readily available. For instance, proximity card readers and badge scanners are not only technologically efficient, but they are completely safe. Employees don’t have to handle anything, punch buttons or slide a card through the reader as long as they are nearby the equipment to have their card or badge scanned.

Contact an Accu Data representative today to learn how integrating time and attendance software can make a world of difference to your annual payroll costs — while staying compliant with government regulations. We can show you how our smart, cloud-based software can increase profitability and significantly reduce errors, while helping you plan for your future HR and payroll needs.