Time and attendance systems are a valuable tool for businesses of all sizes, as they help to streamline the process of tracking employee hours and attendance. They offer a variety of benefits, including cost savings and improved efficiency.
Electronic leave trackers are another useful tool, helping to streamline the processing of employee leave applications, leave approval and the storing of leave records. This helps line managers to improve productivity and reduce the amount of time and resources spent on administrative tasks.
With both these systems in place, employees are more likely to take responsibility for their own work hours and attendance. This helps to reduce absenteeism and tardiness, which can be costly for businesses. In addition, time and attendance and leave tracking systems help to ensure that employees are paid accurately for time worked and leave is recorded accurately, which goes a long way to improving employee satisfaction and retention.
However, a common problem that all businesses seem to have, including ours, is a simple automated checking process that compares time worked or attendance to the leave record in payroll.
In the case of our company, I had a strong suspicion that several employees were not at work but had forgotten to submit a leave record. Line managers approve leave records when they get them, but typically do not check attendance back to the leave records because of several practical reasons.
For one, it is an extremely time-consuming exercise to check these records manually, and as a result, it often does not take place. Payroll administrators have a multitude of important tasks to complete, and spending large amounts of time on highly repetitive tasks in not an effective use of their time or the company’s resources.
Our employees are paid monthly and receive the same salary whether they are at work or are on leave. So, it is not a huge problem for the employee, but it is a big cost for the company if we don’t manage leave properly.
The extent of potential losses can be significant, and moved us to use business intelligence tools to develop an automated process that does a quick check on the imported time and attendance data and the data from leave records in payroll, in order to highlight any exceptions or disparities. This allows us to either fix the attendance system or ask the employee to update their leave record.
We have been running this check for a few months now and it really is a simple process. As I suspected, even in our own business that employs only 60 staff members, we have at least five discrepancies a month. With the latest data showing that an average salary in South Africa is currently R 23,982 per month (or R 1,106.73 a day), we can assume that even small businesses may be losing at least R 72,000 a year by not doing this simple check. Some of our larger clients have shown much bigger losses.
I have been encouraged to see that our discrepancies are becoming less every month and believe that these checks are clearly improving employee accountability as well.
We are excited to now be able to offer this analysis to our clients, which can be run using time and attendance data and leave records from any system.
We would love to discuss your needs with you and put together a free quotation. Please contact us at [email protected] to set up a time.