Josh, a manager at a local restaurant, is doing his payroll. He has 30 employees working different shifts at different wage rates. They had to do overtime a couple of days because the restaurant was pretty busy. A couple of people missed their shifts and he doesn’t know why. They have a time clock, but it crashed last Wednesday. Lucky they have a logbook for the employees to sign, right?
Josh settles in for a long day of encoding clock ins and outs, and calculating pay. He takes the tips into account. He has to make sure everything is right because wage theft can get them sued. He barely leaves his office to check on the restaurant that day. He goes home well after hours to make sure the employees are paid on time. Sounds familiar?
Many managers in America go through the same tedious process every single pay period. Encoding different information from various sources and calculating the correct pay takes time and money. Spending a good chunk of your administrative resources on doing the payroll can certainly make a dent in your overall profits. So how do you cut the process down and free up your managers’ time to do more important tasks instead?
1. Have a reliable time clock
The biggest hurdle in creating an accurate timesheet is unreliable attendance records. Traditional punch clocks are prone to time theft. Buddy punching, time clock deception, and extended breaks cost companies millions. In 2017, a PollFish survey revealed that the U.S. economy loses approximately $373 million to time theft every year. Investing in a reliable time clock helps insure companies against this. While some companies still use inefficient fingerprint scanners, most forward-thinking ones use electronic time clocks with a photo verification feature.
2. Use a timesheet calculator
A timesheet calculator is the easiest way to manage the hours your staff is working. You only need to enter the hourly rate and start and end time of your employees. This free online timesheet calculator will work out the total amount of hours worked and the wage amount for your staff. You can even factor in the breaks they take during the day. So put your calculator away and let the online timesheet calculator do some of the work for you. Add as many employees as you want and print the results when you’re done.
3. Invest in automation technology
Having a reliable time clock and using a timesheet calculator can only get you so far. While these automate some processes, you still need to do a considerable amount of administrative work. If you have reliable time clock records but they don’t produce a timesheet, you will still need to transfer that data. This can lead to costly mistakes down the line. If you have a timesheet but it can’t be exported to a payroll system, you are going to be stuck in that back office for a long time.
Investing in time and attendance automation technology can address these problems immediately. Tanda users find that saved employee data cuts down the administrative work to a fraction of the time. They publish schedules from the platform to avoid miscommunication. Then, they monitor their staff easily from their desktop, tablet, or mobile phone. Once the pay period is over, they simply export the processed timesheets to an existing payroll partner. They have more time to train their employees or engage their customers as a result.
Don’t let timesheets take up too much time
Timesheets have always taken up the resources of managers across all industries. It’s a tedious but necessary part of running a business. Successful managers know how important it is to balance labor costs against delivering customer promise. Getting it right means expanding the bottom line faster. Transitioning to automation technology doesn’t have to happen all at once. Try it out with a free time clock, scheduling template, or timesheet calculator first and see what difference it can make. Once you know your way around it, you’ll be ready to explore the full range of features that will revolutionize how you do business.
