In last week’s blog post, we looked at who needs to be considered when determining if your Time & Attendance solution is meeting all of your company’s needs. This week we will look at all of the different functionality available in Time & Attendance software to help you narrow down which components you need to include to put together the right solution for your people.
Part 2 - What Time & Attendance Functionality Does Your Company Need?
Beyond knowing what all of your stakeholders need, your company policies and processes will also have a big impact on your Time & Attendance needs.
There are 6 basic functions that you will want to consider when examining your requirements for Time & Attendance:
1. Time Capture
The ability to track time for any employee type with highly configurable and intuitive timesheets.
2. Time Approval
The ability to create flexible approval workflows that adapt to your business processes to ensure accuracy and compliance.
3. Rules Management
The ability to automatically calculate grace periods, overtime, statutory holidays, shift premiums and break rules with configurable calculation rules that provide you with control to change them as your business changes.
4. Absence Management
The ability to automate your time off management with self-service time off request capabilities and advanced accrual rules and calculations.
5. Labour Tracking
The ability to cost time easily against hours worked.
6. Reporting
The ability to provide insights with reports that can be customized with filters and groupings to get the exact data you need.
After reading those six considerations Time & Attendance doesn’t seem too complex right? But as I mentioned in last week’s post on Time & Attendance stakeholders, Time & Attendance is like a chameleon-- it’s beyond the basics where the real complexity starts and where you want to know if your solution is a good fit.
Here are just a few of the key elements to inspire you to start making a list of your unique requirements to take into account when you are assessing existing or new solutions.
Time & Attendance Software Requirements
| Consideration | Options |
|---|---|
| Do you need time collection devices? | What time capture device will be best for your people?
|
| What are your scheduling needs? | How do you schedule shifts?
|
| Do you have any 24/7 operational considerations? | Will the solution need to handle?
|
| Do you have remote location considerations? | Do you need to consider multiple locations?
|
| What elements of data do you need to capture? | What information will you want to capture for reporting?
|
Time & Attendance is one of the most complex elements of managing your people and getting it right entails clear communications between your vendor and your stakeholders. It involves great training and an implementation process that takes your company needs into account.
Always keep in mind your final goal – to ensure your Time & Attendance solution helps everyone in the organization easily track their time in one simplified solution.
Having the right Time & Attendance solution provides huge reduction on time entry data errors and enables us to see trends in the data much quicker, and employees can stay on top of their time. Overall it’s provided us with better communication across the organization and visibility into what everyone is doing.
Adam Czarnecki, Greatwest Kenworth, @adamczarnecki
Time & Attendance Requirements Checklists
If you read my blog posts regularly (if you don't, subscribe here) you'll know I really like checklists.
So here are two checklists that I hope you will find helpful.
- Assess the Time & Attendance needs of each one of your employee groups.
- Determine the Time & Attendance functionality you really need for your organization.
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