A Time card is a necessary part of doing business when you employ hourly workers. But there are some companies out there that still use paper time cards. That’s a shame because digital options could save these users time and money. When employee time cards or time sheets are filled out manually, scheduling and tasks get forgotten and misrepresented—so the information, especially as it adds up over time, is not accurate, and this means extra cost for an employer
There are several reasons to ditch paper time cards for good – here are just a few.
Digital Time Cards Eliminate Buddy Punching
Time theft is a real issue for construction companies that use paper time cards. Unfortunately, not every employee you hire will be 100% honest or have your best interests at heart. Two-thirds of all US businesses fall victim to employee theft.
“Buddy Punching,” where an employee has another employee clock them in or out when they’re not at work, can lead to hours of false work records every month, costing you in payroll.
Hour inflation is a problem faced by employers with a remote workforce of 20 workers or 200—and those minutes and hours add up to a significant and unnecessary monetary loss.
A digital time card solution, like ExakTime, eliminates buddy punching with photo biometrics and GPS tracking with geofencing.
- Photo Biometrics: When workers clock in and out from the field with their unique four-digit PIN, our convenient FaceFront Biometrics feature snaps a photo with their front-facing camera, which your bookkeeper can use to verify the accuracy of every punch.
- GPS Tracking with Geofencing: ExakTime Mobile allows you to collect each employee’s location upon clock-in with GPS, so you know they were at the job site when they clocked in and out. A geofence flags whether an employee is on site as they clock in or out, or may allow employees to clock in only in designated areas. For example, a construction employee might not be allowed to clock in until they physically step onto the job site, whose GPS coordinates and radius are determined by their employer.
Digital Time Cards Eliminate Manual Errors
Not every type of time theft is intentional. Some time theft is based on human error. The accuracy of paper time cards relies heavily on good penmanship. When an employee hands you a time card that is so sloppy that a nine looks like a zero, you’re most likely going to have an error in your data entry.
But sloppy penmanship isn’t the only reason for manual errors; bookkeepers also make mistakes on occasion when entering data by hand. And those errors could potentially open your business up to a compliance lawsuit if your employees aren’t paid the overtime they worked, according to the Fair Labor Standards Act.
With ExakTime, you won’t have to decode handwritten time sheets anymore. Employees’ start and stop times are recorded digitally in the GPS time clock app, so there’s no opportunity for misremembering or incorrect recording. Everything is there in your system so that you or your payroll personnel can easily prepare for payroll. Collect online employee sign-offs on time cards and sync the data directly to your accounting program.
Digital Time Cards Save Time
Any bookkeeper will tell you, payroll processing with a pen and paper is a time-consuming headache. First, you need to decipher the data – no easy task with sloppy, handwritten time records. Then that data needs to be manually entered into your payroll processing software.
According to research by EY, just under 30% of HR processes, like entering time cards, could be automated This frees up valuable time for other, more strategic, work.
Automated time tracking solutions, like ExakTime, make payroll processing more efficient and accurate. Records collected by either the mobile app or ExakTime’s rugged time clocks are automatically pushed to software in your office, eliminating the need for time-consuming trips to multiple job sites to collect time records.
Your payroll processor can simply sync the numbers and in seconds you can create payroll reports. And, with AccountLinx, the data can be synced directly with your payroll program.
If any employee’s time punches are missing, that can be seen during the week—so there won’t be a last-minute scramble to ensure delinquent time sheets are in by the payroll deadline.
Relying on paper time cards to track employees’ hours is far more trouble than they’re worth. A paper time card leaves you open to employee theft and mistakes, and processing them is needlessly time-consuming. Using an automated time tracking system will also eliminate the inaccuracies of illegible and messy handwritten time cards save thousands of dollars every year on materials and save the time it would normally take to process payroll.
Wondering if you could save by switching to a digital time tacking? Use our Payroll Savings Calculator to find out just how much a digital time and attendance solution like ExakTime could save your business.
