Main Reasons for Companies to Invest in Attendance Management System

From traditional punched cards to modern access cards and biometric systems, tracking employees' working hours has been an essential process. Employees are expected to track their check-in time when they arrive at work and note their checkout time when they leave. In reality, most employees fill out their time sheets in a hurry just before they leave for work.

In the worst case, this process only happens on the last day of the week/month, just before they hand in their time sheets to the HR department. Manual time recording practices put a strain on employees' productivity and morale. Filling out the working times days or weeks after the actual working day only leads to inaccuracies, manipulation of the time sheets, and so on.

Without a reliable employee attendance management system, companies must deal with compliance issues, payroll errors, and more. Replacing paper-based time sheets with appropriate attendance management software helps companies save time, reduce administrative overhead, maintain accurate attendance records and eliminate process bottlenecks.

What is attendance management?

Attendance management is the process of preventing time theft by employees by recording employees' working hours, registration times, departures, breaks and vacation time. Companies use a variety of methods, from punch cards and spreadsheets to automated attendance management systems and biometric devices to manage employee attendance.

7 Indications that your organization needs an attendance management system

Every organization must keep track of how its employees spend their time, especially when working with customers and providing services at an hourly rate. Attendance management is necessary not only to properly bill customers, but also to reduce the time that human resource managers and tax officials spend on administrative and attendance management activities.

To prevent your online presence management system from breaking down, organizations must look for telltale signs that indicate that your current presence management system is no longer working.

1. There is no transparency in your presence management process.
2. Your presence tracking system causes your employees to resort to manual tracking
3. Employees or other persons can easily change confidential attendance data
4. Your attendance system lacks some critical features such as multi-level approvals, mobile submission and biometric integration.
5. You have no way to prevent compliance risks like buddy punching
6. There is not enough information to make informed business decisions
7. Planning nightmares and staff shortages have become a habit
   

Popular Attendance Management Systems

Some of these popular presence management systems include all of these features and more. These HR tools go beyond just attendance tracking and include additional functionality such as overtime management, vacation management and real-time reporting.

IceHrm

IceHrm solves important HR challenges such as Attendance, Leave and Payroll accounting in a single interface. It collects attendance data in real time from various sources and integrates the attendance management system with the built-in payroll module.

Ideal for: Small to Medium-sized organizations

Price: Three different plans are offered. IceHrm Opensource, IceHrm Cloud and IceHrmPro. Each edition has the attendance management module. You can even use Attendance Management Module with a free plan like IceHrm Opensource, and IceHrm Cloud (Lite).

Sign up for a free trial here.

Kissflow HR cloud

Kissflow HR Cloud is a cloud-based presence tracking system that allows employees to mark their presence on any device at any time. It helps companies to avoid problems like buddy punching, punch-in errors and more. Best of all, companies can integrate it with their biometric system to streamline all HR functions from recruitment to retirement.

Ideal for: All size of organizations
Price: starts from $690 per month

Zoho people

Zoho People offers a range of HR processes including attendance and time recording as a service through its sophisticated self-service portal. Similar to other SaaS platforms, it can be linked to an organisation's current biometric system. Its geofencing function helps to restrict the location of check-in via an IP address.

Ideal for: SMBs and medium-sized enterprises

Prize: Zoho people has 4 plans. However, attendance and shift planning are not part of the low-end plans.

4th Kronos Workforce Management
Kronos Workforce Management can look back on a long history and enjoys the reputation of being a pioneer in the time recording segment with its first patented microprocessor-controlled time switch. Kronos offers almost five products in the field of time recording.

Ideal for: medium to large organisations

Price: Kronos Workforce Central is not available on the website, it is only available on an offer basis.

SumHR

Employees can track, record and submit their daily attendance using the SumHR attendance function. It was developed to record attendance time based on employees' "first in" and "last out". It not only displays shift time and duration, but also allows employees to check their attendance details for up to 90 days.

Ideal for: small organizations and start-ups

Price: SumHR prices start at $0.74 per employee per month

5 Essential features that every attendance management system should have

Not all attendance management systems are created equal. Some have better functionalities than others. If you are looking for a new technological solution, you naturally want to choose the best one. While every organization may have unique needs, here are some essential features that every company needs and on which you should never, ever compromise.

Web-based attendance management system

With web-based employee attendance software that tracks, collects, stores and displays current time sheets, HR managers can get rid of spreadsheets and paper files.

Storing employee time sheets and attendance details in a centralized, cloud-based attendance management system will make this possible:

• Increase accuracy
• Ensure data integrity
• Improving employee productivity
• Reduction of administrative burden
• Reduced administrative costs and
• Increasing the efficiency of HR personnel
  

A web-based attendance management system will eliminate missed shots and incorrect time entries, keep an accurate record of attendance data with little to no supervision. HR staff will no longer have to sift through piles of time sheets to process payrolls or retrieve employee work schedules.

The web-based system displays all related time information in a single interface and saves staff time and effort in manually storing, maintaining and analyzing all attendance records.

Remote working

With cloud-based attendance management software, companies can reassure modern employees who do not want to be tied up in an office cubicle. For thousands of years in the workplace, working from a distance has been a routine part of working life. Therefore, employers can no longer be content with on-site presence tracking devices.

What they need is an omni-channel, always-accessible, cloud-based presence management system that tracks employee attendance and absence times while on the road. Time recording software should go beyond simply monitoring the presence of employees. The perfect solution allows employers to create and maintain rosters, send notifications of overtime, missed beatings, etc.

With a cloud-based time recording application, companies can monitor an employee's working hours even when he or she is working remotely. The collected data could be accessed by managers and HR staff at any time and from any location. Cloud solutions are also flexible, pocket-friendly and free of software upgrades and installation issues.

Leave requests

An ideal attendance management system should have an individual module for tracking the sheets. Monitoring employee absences is just as important as monitoring attendance, working hours and the presence of employees. Whether it's an absence due to illness or planned holidays, absence requests should be easy to view, track and approve/reject at a glance.

Leave management is an important aspect of personnel administration and has a direct impact on the bottom line of a company. Improper holiday management practices and the use of manual holiday tracking tools can lead to under staffing, employee dissatisfaction, lost productivity, project delays and even high staff turnover.

An automated attendance module eliminates spreadsheets and e-mails from vacation management, integrates employee absence details into the company calendar, and streamlines workforce planning.

Policy compliance and reporting

By implementing an automated employee presence management system, companies can easily ensure compliance with policies and regulations. According to employment guidelines, every employee is entitled to vacation, time off and overtime pay. It is the duty of employers to ensure that their employees are given sufficient breaks to reduce stress and strain on their working lives.

If this does not happen, organizations will have to deal with wage theft allegations like these large corporations. To prevent regulatory compliance disasters and keep pace with changing regulations and political standards, organizations must streamline time tracking and time flow through automation. Good solutions for managing time sheets allow employers to easily implement changes in policies/regulations.

Integration and reporting

An efficient software for attendance management can be seamlessly integrated with other HR software such as payroll, accounting, etc. If your attendance manager simply connects to other applications and exchanges data easily, HR staff can stop manual data reconciliation and duplication.

This not only saves time, but also improves data accuracy, prevents payroll errors and ensures data confidentiality. Even with an all-in-one solution like HRMS, SMEs can prevent their data from falling through process gaps if their solutions are integration-friendly. Any change made at one interface is reflected in other applications in real time without human intervention.

Advantages of an ideal Attendance Management System

Whether you are a start-up or a company, the right Attendance Management Software can have a huge impact on how well the time tracking process works in your organization.

Here are eight reasons why your company can benefit from an ideal attendance management system. A presence management system:

1. Can create customized, visually appealing reports
2. Offer insights into trends in employee time off and shift patterns
3. Has an impact on the performance of the organisation
4. Ensures accuracy and consistency in presence processing
5. Significantly improves employee productivity
6. Enforces organizational guidelines and regulations
7. Elimination of time theft risks and manual errors

Choose a robust Attendance Management System

Great attendance management software gives you 100% visibility into your employees' working hours, eliminates missed shots and streamlines attendance tracking. The features included in an attendance management system play a major role in simplifying time and attendance tracking.

However, by using a unified HR software to manage the attendance process, companies can eliminate data redundancy, reduce manual errors and save valuable employee time. IceHrm HR software improves employee productivity and tracks employee working hours while seamlessly integrating with other back-end systems for data exchange.

Best of all, IceHrm allows app administrators to customize the attendance management module to meet the unique business needs of a company. Automated alerts and insightful reports keep managers and employees informed of process bottlenecks.

Tired of shuffling time sheet template bundles and long spreadsheets? See how the IceHrm has made HR management easy!