The UK�s workplace environment has undergone radical change in recent years. The �9 to 5� culture of most companies has long gone, flexible work patterns �flexitime� are now a feature of many companies and more and more people are choosing to work remotely or from home as they seek an improved work-life balance With a lot of companies supporting family life this has shown an improvement in workers motivation and quality to work �a happy employee is a good employee�.
Add to this increased employment legislation with the European working time directive employers have had to provide information of employee hours. This is where an employer will turn to Time and Attendance systems. There are two separate parts in this sector, Time and Attendance and payroll they are commonly linked but one can work without the other depending on the size of your organization. The Time and Attendance system predominately logs start time, breaks, overtime, and end time, employee rules are setup, shift patterns are created and the gathering of all the information regarding hours worked. It is the job of the Time and Attendance system to collate these times using the rules and present an hours worked for each employee. A payroll system has the job of taking the data from the Time and Attendance and calculating the pay for each employee. In the payroll system each employee will have a �pay rate, overtime rates double time etc. Payroll systems can even send the information to banks to deposit wages into employee�s accounts. With these two parts a fully automated clocking system can be set-up this will result in reduced overheads more accurate information and a lot less manual data entry from everyday work life.
With the more people working �flex-time� hours clocking systems have become more sophisticated and require more security features.
That�s why a modern, efficient time and attendance system has become such an important management tool. In any manufacturing environment it can now be relied upon to deliver accurate, real-time business critical information, however complex a company�s shift patterns are.
Sophisticated payroll systems are not only for collecting data to calculate wages they are more than often used to identify repeat lateness or illness. This can provide management with efficiency reports and how to improve productivity in the workplace. As well as doing the obvious tasks the spin off application from clocking systems can have there advantages in the modern workplace such as fire report list�s (who�s in the building today) providing holiday planning making sure key personnel are not of at the same time.
In today�s business if you employee more than 5 people then a clocking system can save you time and ultimately money. The requirement for a full Clocking System Time and Attendance and Payroll is not necessary if you only employee a few people most Time and Attendance systems allow the exportation of the data into various formats so it is possible to import into a spreadsheet and do calculations and produce reports within a simple spreadsheet. So for very little cost rewards can be seen after just a few months.


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Andy McSaint has been a author for many technical manuals and case studies for Capture Services with over 20 years in the Shop Floor Data Capture Industry Clocking Machine