What is Enterprise Time Tracking? (Part One)

Tracking employee time and work is critical for payroll, billing, time off management and attendance. Each process requires the capture of time and work data. These are accomplished adequately by manual or automated systems often operating in their own "silos." While it might be possible to have them in one system, do the benefits of this outweigh the costs?



Five Benefits of Enterprise Time Tracking:



1.Visibility: to understand an employee's work time you need the full picture of their schedule including time off requested, time off scheduled, and holidays.



2.More Accurate Data for Payroll and Billing: paying employee (and not overstated) overtime or double time requires accurate hours tracking, including start and finish times. You might also need many methods of data capture such as web timesheets, time clocks, smart phone timesheets, Interactive Voice Response phone time cards, crew timesheets. A significant hidden cost of manual systems, and the built-in time lags required to run payroll and billing, are an increased number of adjustments and corrections payrolls and invoices after they have been processed.



3.More Accurate Data for Time Capture: new employees, inactivated or terminated employees, supervisory assignments, new projects, inactivated activities are the bane of manual systems. Communicating these changes manually through phone, fax, email or snail mail ensures that managers and employees are in the dark longer than they should be about what to work on, when someone is out of the office or who reports to who.



4.Sarbanes Oxley Compliance and Limiting Liability: time off management is the obvious area to benefit not just for SOX compliance but to ensure that employee time off balances are not overstated and leave taken is accurately recorded. When it's time for the employee to move on you will be writing them a much smaller check for unused leave. You will also be a lot less likely to have to appear before a labor board for denying an employee accrued leave or overtime earned.



5.Everything in Sync: having your HR system, payroll and project, attendance, and time off tracking not in sync means a lot of errors. It also means a lot of inaccurate data, corrections and in the worst case flat out errors in pay, bills, time off balances and attendance late performance enforcement.



6.Everything on Time: automated systems can remind employees and managers to complete the most important tasks of time and work tracking automatically. If they are late, automated systems can escalate approvals until they are completed.



7.User Acceptance: if you have a mix of five separate manual and automated system that employees need to use you can be sure they will be less likely to use them. When you consolidate systems, workflows simplify, employees and managers can get everything done in one place, and those not in compliance stand out like a crumpled paper timesheet.



Is it possible?



My next article will explore how enterprise time tracking is possible.



Jason Trend

Pacific Timesheet

http://www.pacifictimesheet.com