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“Our employees are our biggest assets.” Most organizations have used this phrase in countless employee meetings and documents. Yet how many organizations truly leverage this asset – their employees – to the fullest?

To maximize the productivity of employees while maintaining control of labor expenses, organizations must have an accurate understanding of their workforce – where resources are allocated, how productive those resources are, whether absenteeism is too high, how much overtime is worked, and so forth.

Time and attendance software is a crucial element in managing the workforce. This paper will discuss in more detail specifically why a Time and Attendance solution may be crucial for the ongoing success of your organization.

In addition, this paper will move beyond why to invest in a Time and Attendance solution and discuss what factors to consider when evaluating the Time and Attendance solutions available to your organization. The Top 5 Reasons to Buy a Time and Attendance Solution

The reasons to move from a manual, labor-intensive Time and Attendance process to an automated solution are numerous. The five reasons below summarize the most important benefits to be gained from investing in an automated Time and Attendance solution. In the final analysis, they all come back to the same fundamental value – more efficient time and labor reporting will make your organization more productive and profitable.

1. Save on Labor Expenses

Labor is one of the largest expenses – if not the single largest expense – at most companies and public entities. Clearly it is also one of the most controllable. Organizations that attempt to manage labor expenses without all of the relevant data, however, can quickly find that their decisions may negatively impact productivity without delivering upon the promised cost savings. A Time and Attendance system can help ensure that your labor decisions are the right ones. Among the ways that you can save money with such a system include:

à Ensure that you have the right headcount to handle volume in a particular department or location – not too many employees, not too few – accounting for the fact that volume may be different one month to the next, one day to the next, or even one hour to the next à Monitor excessive overtime or leave à Analyze the cost of labor in certain positions, ensuring that you are paying market wages and applying pay grades consistently across the organization à Align labor allocation with strategic goals and initiatives as opposed to activities that are not producing an adequate return à Ensure billable hours are billed to clients correctly, not to your company à Reduce time wasted by every member of your workforce by automating the process, allowing your resources to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time being productive

2. Improve Business Productivity and Performance

Although saving money on labor expenses is clearly a reason to purchase a Time and Attendance solution, doing so without regard for productivity and organizational performance is a recipe for disaster. Understanding your workforce can lead to an equally sizeable benefit in improved productivity. Does having one fewer customer service representative negatively affect your customer’s waiting time on the phone and therefore customer satisfaction? Can a junior, less expensive associate process transactions as quickly as a more senior, more expensive resource? Does one location manage the same revenue as another location, with 20% fewer headcount? Why do you have more resources on Project A than Project B, when Project A is significantly less important to the executive team than project B? And of course, what would be the impact of reducing the administrative hassle of timekeeping for every employee and turning those extra hours into productive time?

All of these questions – and countless others – can be answered by looking at your workforce data (in some cases combined with other company data). Labor may be your highest expense, but it is also your company’s biggest asset! Ensuring that you have allocated your scarce resources behind your organization’s strategic goals is an intangible benefit that could outweigh more tangible cost savings exponentially.

The management benefit of a Time and Attendance system is multiplied when the system can be integrated into your other business systems. Integrating with other workforce information, financial information, customer information, and sales and marketing information can allow an organization to get an even more robust picture of its business and provide insight that leads to greater efficiency and productivity.

3. Improve Payroll Efficiency and Reduce Errors

Although there is significant cost savings to be gained by managing your labor more efficiently, there is a more immediate and direct cost savings in payroll. Replacing this often labor-intensive process with automated Time and Attendance reporting can make a drastic difference. A savings of 40 hours per pay period, for instance, may amount to as much as 2,000 hours of savings over the course of the year – a significant time and cost savings. For larger organizations, the savings may be substantially more than this conservative estimate.

In addition to the benefit gained by virtue of automating the Time and Attendance process, there is a significant time and cost savings in error reduction. How much of your payroll department’s time is spent on resolving errors that were caused by manual processes? In many instances, an inordinate amount of time is spent resolving a handful of errors…errors that would be eliminated in an automated environment.

4. Increase Employee Satisfaction

No employee, whether the most junior member of the mail room or the Chief Executive, likes to spend time on administrative activities. Time and attendance entry is a chore in a manual environment, and one that often gets put off until the last minute…and even then, some employees don’t take the time to ensure that their time is entered into the correct buckets. Automating the process – and providing access to the time system from multiple input devices – reduces the time spent on time reporting and makes it much simpler to input time correctly.

Although time entry is a concept that we can all relate to, there are more important ways in which an automated Time and Attendance system will significantly increase the satisfaction of your internal customers (your employees). Most notably, providing managers at every level of the organization with timely reporting and analysis of their workforce allows them to do their job more efficiently and effectively. In a manual environment, creating reports with the level of detail that is needed for effective management may take days, weeks, or even months. If someone requests a small change to a report, it may go back into the queue and add further to the time before the manager gets the information that he or she needs. With automated Time and Attendance solutions, reports and analysis are available within minutes, not days or weeks. Ad hoc reports can often be created by the manager in a self-service environment, allowing him or her to get the information exactly as desired – without burdening (or waiting on!) the IT or management reporting group.

When people can do their job more effectively – without waiting on the information they need – they will be happier and more productive.

5. Ensure Compliance

Compliance and regulation in the workplace increases regularly…it may seem as though compliance requirements multiply almost daily! Each of these compliance regulations – including the Family Medical Leave Act, Sarbanes Oxley, and the Fair Labor Standards Act – requires timely, accurate labor reporting. Time and attendance solutions significantly ease the burden of complying with the myriad of regulations by providing accurate, timely, and auditable Time and Attendance reporting.

The significance of better compliance with regulations does not end with better reporting, however…there is a significant financial benefit as well. Avoiding the potential fines and excess wages paid as a result of these acts can save an organization thousands of dollars, if not more. In addition, the effort and hours required to respond to a potential compliance issue amounts to a further waste of time and money.

The Top 5 Factors to Consider When Purchasing a Time and Attendance Solution

Clearly there are numerous compelling reasons to invest in a Time and Attendance solution. The solution you choose, however, will have a significant impact on the extent to which you recognize the benefits that have been discussed thus far.

à If you pay too much for a Time and Attendance solution, the cost savings you expect will be offset by the price of the solution à If you choose a solution that is difficult to use or that lacks important capabilities, you will not recognize the value that you desire à If you select a solution that is not configurable to your needs – or that does not integrate into your systems – your investment will not provide the return you expect

The primary considerations for purchasing a Time and Attendance solution – and maximizing the value from that purchase – are discussed below.

1. Value

If you overpay for a Time and Attendance solution, the financial benefit that you will receive goes down dollar for dollar! In considering a solution, focus on the best combination of capabilities for the price. Does the system do all of the basic tasks that you need? Is it easy to use? Can it be configured easily to your specific organization, and integrated with your existing systems? Does the vendor from which you are purchasing offer a variet