Put Attendance Management System on Auto Pilot

Attendance Management System is digital solution to register an employee’s presence or absence according to their in and out timings. An employee’s presence is directly connected to the work hours spend on a specific project or assignment. It shows his/her motivation and decency towards the work.

Every organization devises an attendance policy that fits according to their needs. This policy defines the works hours and shift times an employee is requested to follow. It can include fixed, flexible, and rotational shifts.

Attendance Capturing at the workplace is important as it states the working hours spent by an employee at the office. These working hours help in the actual payroll process at month-end. A good and punctual attitude in work may give you a ladder to a better position. Along with this it also increases productivity and morale. Consistent absenteeism also leads to workplace issues and turns down the morale of the dedicated employees who wants a day off due to exhaustion.

Regular attendance capturing ensures that employees are being noticed and help make them regular towards their work.

Till now, certain methods are deployed for capturing attendance from paper-based to entirely cloud-based methods. But when you want your business to upgrade with time, a cloud-based attendance processing system stands out as a boon.

Paper-Based Attendance Muster
Attendance muster is generally a paper-based method where every employee needs to sign at the entrance and exit from the office. This type of muster is updated every month and stored. But this method is very prone to errors, proxy attendance, and attendance thefts. At every month-end manager needs to calculate total hours spent at work, overtime, and payroll. For a large number of employees, this process is thus time-consuming and very prone to human errors.

Excel-Based Sheets
After the limitations of attendance muster, excel sheets for attendance calculation came. It was quite better from the previous one where formulated sheets are used to enter attendance data. Due to human intervention, this method is prone to error, and one needs to double-check every data to confirm it to calculate work hours and finalize salary.

Biometric Integrated Machines and Swipe Cards
Biometric machines capture employee’s attendance through their fingerprints. This method eliminates proxy attendance but requires a lot of money and time to install a biometric device, maintain it, integrate it to a centralized server, and a multiple numbers of devices for every office.

All the limitations of the above methods come to an end when you use an attendance management system that provides time efficiency without any attendance theft and human mistakes.

Cloud-based attendance management system
Why not invest money in a system that can streamlines your end to end attendance process and it is an effective error-free method? The cloud-based attendance management system is an efficient time saving and even cost-saving option for you. Rather than spending your valuable time in compiling, collecting, and generating attendance data with help of cloud based system you can use your time to plan and organize strategical operations that align with your business needs.

There are a variety of characteristics offered by the cloud-based Attendance method. With these functions, you can guarantee a more straightforward and faster attendance capturing without wasting time in old-fashioned ways. Here is a list of those characteristics.

Employee Self Service portal
ESS is a very exceptional feature for the HR attendance system. With their Employee Self Service portal login, employees can access the attendance details, verify for missed punch, and apply online for regularization and leave management.

Online Punch
The platform allows employees to punch online through their login every time they enter and leave the office. This feature is accessible to every department and controllable from the main centralized server.

Attendance Regularization
If somehow the employee forgets to punch, the attendance regularization feature helps to apply for the same. This feature shows monthly time in and time out along with holidays, leaves, and missed punch. Employees can apply for regularization with reason through the same option.

Device Integration
Suppose you are using any biometric device or card scanner to register attendance. In that case, it can be integrated with the digital solution to regulate and store attendance data to the centralized cloud server directly. As data is directly stored in the system, time consumption for calculation and errors can be eliminated, giving you a smooth payroll transaction.

Attendance-Payroll Integration
If your payroll is integrated into your mobility solution, there is no need to perform calculations for work hours, overtime compensation, and leave management. Payroll will directly fetch attendance information and processes an error-free and streamlined payment.

Approval System
You can directly manage your approval system through attendance policy configuration. The authorized person can directly handle requests and applications through the ESS portal. It brings efficient management of applications without wasting much time in approving. On the generation of any application, the system notifies the approving manager. Employees can check the status of applications from mail and system notification.

Reporting
Attendance management solution generates an inbuilt report according to your needs. These reports may include in/out punches, monthly attendance summary, working hours’ detail, so you don’t need to calculate, overtime and compensation reports, and many others to save you time for essential productive work.

Attendance administration carries a lot of functions right from a punch in/out to payroll integration that needs to be accomplished.

Setting up Policy
The attendance policy is configured based on your working hours, time in, time out, overtime availability, early going, late coming calculations, and application approval management. Based on your department, a flexible policy is made that encircles all aspects to calculate work hours. This policy may differ from employee to employee.

Using conventional methods, it becomes necessary to print a whole new policy even if a small change is made. While using software-based, as a part of embracing an online software it is easy to input a little change. Also, designing a roster policy is quite easy without creating excel sheets.

Registering Employee
Once you’ve configured the policy, it is required to assign a particular policy to a specific employee and inform them about the updates.

Capturing Attendance
For an organization using paper-based methods, employees need to sign the attendance muster for every time in and time out. With biometric, attendance is captured using fingerprint punch. In comparison, digital attendance monitoring facilitates employees to punch online using their login.

Leave Management
Employees’ time-offs are also considered to calculate attendance. The leave module in HR includes the process of assigning leaves, controlling leave applications, and approving them. While configuring rules of taking leaves, the administration needs to provide a fixed amount of leaves, how to let employees avail those, and who needs to approve these leaves.

Conventional methods of processing leave application consume a considerable amount of time from asking for leave to get it signed by the authorized manager on paper. But a platform minimizes your time here, and processes leave management on a single touch.

Month-end Calculation
Here comes the most challenging part of calculating the total hours for payroll. This calculation includes total hours an employee has worked, leaves taken, and overtime calculation. This area is most prone to mistakes for a human count. The manager needs to double-check every detail to confirm the rightfulness of payroll. Thus we can assume how much time consuming this can be.

Reporting
After calculating attendance, department wise monthly reports indicating the time in, time out, worked hours, overtime hours, missed attendance, and the corresponding salary is finalized.

Let us now dig a little deeper and find out the functionalities of the cloud-based attendance solution.

There are many attendance solutions with outstanding functionalities but choosing a perfect one that fits your business needs is another challenge. Here are some of the characteristics that your digital solution must ensure

Automatic Environment
Digital attendance management must guarantee flexible and automatic processing right from attendance capturing to payroll calculation. Once configuring the policy, the system must function accordingly.

Scalability
Some of the solutions comes inbuilt with the HR human resource solution. However, you can buy modules according to your need on a subscription basis. Your platform provider must ensure a flexible subscription without any drawbacks.

Centralized
A centralized platform can control the data of different departments right through one server. The head manager can manage all the ongoing processes and make regulatory changes throughout the office.

Mobile Support
Modern solution comes with an attendance app facility that enables attendance regularization and approval at your hands. Like ESS login, you can access it and enjoy the same features with the same efficacy as the platform. Employees can apply for attendance regularization on the go and notice the application approval. Even managers with their login can update the application through mobile with a single touch.

Attendance using Face Recognition
When an employee is punching online during work from home, it might not be necessary that the right person is punching. To know if the same person is punching, face recognition, or say selfie punch is introduced. Simultaneously, along with punch, the employee’s selfie is also captured for precise authentication.

Employee Tracking
Consider your employee is on a client meeting out of state, and you need to know his/her location to keep track of the visits. Geo tracking attendance enables employee tracking for each location visit via GPS points. It can be used for eliminating location and time thefts.

Geo-Fencing
Giving online punch access to employees may result in marking attendance from outside office. But with the Geo-Fencing facility, you can mark a fence around your office to authenticate attendance. Employees can be allowed to punch in/out within this boundary only, eliminating location theft.