Electronic Time Card

Electronic time cards are a great step forward in automation and accuracy, doing away with the clunky old clocks and punch cards. Having a digital timesheet for tracking employee attendance and hours worked instead of paper and a mechanical time clock can simplify the labor intensive task of recording employee hours and can cut out a lot of mistakes and inaccuracies. In a large office, it's possible to have each employee sign in for work on the computer at their desks.

This attendance system and electronic time sheet gives department managers a lot of flexibility and help in closely tracking all of the work activities, and the human resources and payroll departments can automate their number crunching quicker and with far fewer human errors. One of the major developers of electonic time sheet software, Kronos, has a system that takes out the inefficiency of the old, centralized time clocks, and allows departments and whole companies to accurately track and automate time and attendance in the workplace. These systems can account for complex attendance policies and hourly billing rules to take the headache out of calculating timesheets.

Here are 10 tips for making the best use of electronic timesheets in your department:

1. Using electronic timesheet systems, the opportunities for calculation errors and damage to paper records can be eliminated.
2. In a hectic production environment an employee can more easily and accurately track their work from their computer workstations.
3. An electronic, web-based or telephone electronic timesheet system is much more simple, intuitive and reliable than mechanical devices.
4. A computerized timesheet system can easily handle a complex set of rules for work hours, such as in law offices.
5. Many companies have made significant savings in the labor intensive payroll account process, have increased productivity, and have made a high return on investment by switching to electronic timesheet software.
6. Managers can accurately track resources in real time to quickly make adjustments in their departments.
7. Managers can follow trends over time to fine tune employee labor policies.
8. Powerful business software suites can integrate electronic, calendaring and database features.
9. New electronic devices, such as Blackberry PDAs and cell phones can allow more versatility in tracking hours and attendance.
10. Electronic timesheet software can record much more detail about the time and resources used in completing work.