What are Time & Attendance systems?

Time & Attendance systems (known as T&A) are the systems that used by companies and HR teams to track and monitor when employees start and stop work and record any absences in order to reflect the relevant adjustments in the employees’ payroll.

More complex Time & Attendance systems will include additional features such as Rostering and Visitor Registration.

Why are they important?

Companies that have Time & Attendance systems can monitor their employees’ working hours as well as any late arrivals or early departures. Employers are also able to see the amount of time taken on breaks as well as levels of absenteeism.

Employees also often like to have a system recording what they are really working as this provides complete transparency for their bosses and the HR department and creates a fairer working environment.

One key element of Time & Attendance is its integration with roll call and providing a Muster report. In the event of a fire alarm evacuation, the Time & Attendance system is able to provide a print out of all the employees on site, enabling an up to date count ensuring everyone is out of the building.

Traditional Manual Systems…and Excel

Traditional manual systems involved paper cards which have times stamped on them using a time stamping machine. Due to the design of these paper time cards, HR were still required to input the times in which employees worked and as a result, errors could be made with the misinterpretation or wrong input of data.

While times have moved on and technology is ever present in the workplace, the manual input of employees’ times still occurs, only now with everyone’s friend Microsoft excel. Although Excel can rule out errors of mis-calculated time worked for payroll. It does not rule out the potential of inputting incorrect information.

Automated systems that can capture and collect such data which is then fed straight into payroll with an interface are able to remove the possibility of these errors occurring.

Automated systems

As technology has developed, so have the ways in which organisations can capture and collect their employees’ working hours.

Modern Time & Attendance systems require employees to touch or swipe in order to identify themselves and record their working hours as they enter or leave the work area.

While swipe cards are still common in many businesses and offer multiple uses, options for bio-metric (hand reader, fingerprint, vein reader or facial recognition) and touch screen devices have continued to enter the market, providing different options to best suit the organisation’s needs.

HFX

At HFX Time & Attendance is what we do and what we specialise in, the reason why we have become market leaders.

Founded over 50 years ago and with over 1,500 customers, HFX has a proven history of developing innovative time management solutions. The latest generation of Saas Cloud solutions are highly customisable and can be configured to meet exact requirements, can support unlimited numbers of work patterns and provide seamless integration with all major HR and payroll systems.

Our solution comprises Time & Attendance, Rostering, Flexitime, Workforce Optimisation, Budgeting & Costing, Job & Task Booking, Access control and Visitors’ Registration and fits organisations of all sizes and sectors including manufacturing, public sector, services industry, leisure, construction, retail, contract cleaning, recruitment, logistics and hospitality.

HFX Devices

We provided a range of devices from Card, RFID or Fob readers through to finger print readers and hand recognition or even mobile apps and QR codes, in order to provide our customers with the best option for them and their needs.