Time tracking software

An attendance tracking software can keep track of all your employee hours, both overtime and regular working hours. It can do this all digitally, where employees are required to submit their hours either for tracking purposes or for approval from managers.

An attendance tracking system is the method a business uses to track hours worked and the presence of employees within the company. A system can be facilitated by an attendance tracking software, but they are often not one and the same.

In fact, many businesses use Excel to track attendance. This is not only more time-consuming than using attendance tracking software, as you need to enter data manually, but is also prone to errors. It also comes with many other drawbacks, including:

• Spreadsheets can be changed at any time by anyone with access, meaning all of your important data is susceptible to potential manipulation.

• Excel does not fulfil the legal requirements for attendance tracking stipulated in privacy regulations.

• An Excel spreadsheet can easily be deleted or overwritten if there are different versions of the file in circulation. You can therefore lose all data due to a technical problem.

Whether or not tracking working hours makes sense does not depend on the size of the business, but there are three reasons why you may need attendance tracking software:

• Employees are primarily paid based on the hours they work.

• Your company has different working hour models. For example, shift work, part-time or flexitime models with compensation for overtime.

• Your company is subject to statutory regulations, such as the minimum wage law, which stipulates attendance tracking

Beyond the legal obligations, tracking the exact number of hours worked using attendance tracking software serves as the basis for salary calculations. You can also avoid conflicts and misunderstandings between employers and employees.

Management and HR can get a reliable view of their employees’ working hours, while each employee can be sure that they are being paid fairly and will not have to work any unpaid overtime.

For attendance tracking to fulfil its purpose, it needs to be accurate, reliable, and transparent. Only an attendance tracking software can offer that.

With Personio, you and your employees can record your working hours online. After employees enter their hours, managers can confirm the entries if required. They can apply their company’s working hour regulations and adjust the attendance tracking software accordingly.

At a minimum, a system like this saves the HR department a great deal of time, since a majority of the work can be automated with attendance tracking software and you no longer need to deal with incorrect or incomplete timesheets.

The switch to attendance tracking software affects both the HR department and the rest of your employees. It is important to reassure your employees that attendance tracking software is not used to monitor them personally. Personio strictly adheres to data protection laws.

Your works council has a right of co-determination in tracking attendance, but it can neither prevent nor demand the introduction of a specific attendance tracking software. As a rule, it will have nothing against an attendance tracker that conforms with the law. Involve your works council in the process of introducing the software to make it easier for your employees to adopt it.

Before you switch to a new attendance tracking software throughout your entire company, you have the ability to test it on a select group. That will help you learn whether everything works, what you need to improve and how your employees can be trained. Once the test has gone smoothly, you are ready to successfully introduce attendance tracking software.

Should you already have an attendance tracking software, you can link it to Personio using an interface (API). All entries that your employees previously used to make with punch cards or a work hours app in the system can now be managed in Personio.

What if your employees don’t work in the office, for example, in their home office or on the road? That’s not a problem because with a digital time clock, employees have access to the attendance tracking software from anywhere and can enter their time online.

You can easily use an attendance tracking software like Personio as the basis for complex time tracking, as well as updating weekly hours worked, vacations and public holidays. In the working hours account, Personio shows the current overtime worked at all times.

If you use attendance tracking software, all of the information converges into one central place and can be processed directly. That way, the working hours account is automatically linked with payroll, vacation administration and digital personnel files.

You can manually or automatically generate error-free salary calculations. The data you need for payroll can be sent directly from the aggregated data whenever you like. Salaries for time worked are automatically adjusted accordingly, for example, if your employees work on an hourly basis or receive financial compensation for overtime.

Personio also features an overtime calculator, which automatically transfers overtime to the salary calculation (if that’s how you set it up). The average and maximum permitted working times are monitored and if the limit is exceeded, both manager and employee are alerted.

Manually calculating vacation time can be very laborious and lead to errors, particularly in larger companies where there is a fair amount of employee turnover or there are both full-time and part-time employees.

Automated vacation calculations ensure efficiency and legal compliance. Personio calculates entitlements for every working hour schedule and shows remaining vacation days at all times. Public holidays, which differ in every state, are also taken into consideration.

With Personio, employees can enter their working hours online and access their target versus actual hours at any time. To do that, employees log themselves into attendance tracking software from any computer – and enter their start and end times, as well as any breaks.

Line managers or HR managers can confirm the times entered with a simple click. You can specify individual approval processes for each department, team, or individual employee.

Entering data takes just a few seconds. Managers and HR employees can confirm the times entered with one click. If you use third-party systems for attendance tracking, for example, terminals for time cards, you can easily import their data into Personio.

Personio’s reporting and export functions within the attendance tracking software show you at a glance how many employees worked how many hours at any given time. You can generate an overview of attendances and absences, sick days, weekly working hours and vacation days at month- or year-end.

Depending on which numbers are of interest to you, Personio can create a spreadsheet or graphic analysis that you can also export or use for your reporting.