One of the more time consuming areas of employee time and attendance tracking is allowing for and recording the events that are outside of the regular process of employees clocking in and out. These sorts of events include employees forgetting to clock in, forgetting to clock out, forgetting to log their breaks, or an administrator recording sick and vacation times. Computerized time clock software like Time Clock MTS cannot escape the need to deal with these sorts of situations any more than manual timeclocks or paper based timesheets can. Where Time Clock MTS excels is that it provides a streamlined process to enter these exceptions and recalculates your payroll in just seconds. While non computerized systems need tedious manual re-calculation which is not only in-efficient but is also prone to error and mis-calculation.
I thought it was worthwhile examining some of the time clock exceptions that would require you to use Time Clock MTS to correct your employees timesheets.
The Edit Times Screen
Missed or Late Time Clock Punches
The most common sort of event that requires an employee’s timesheet to be corrected is the missing punch. This will usually be forgetting to clock in at the start of a work day or forgetting to clock out at the end of a work day. The first step to correcting a missing punch is to actually determine if there are missing punches. This is made very simple through the use of the Missing Punches Report. Alternatively if you’ve got employee comments enabled then employees can leave a note when they clock in late or clock out late. For some other methods of detecting if employees have missed a punch you should take a look at our detecting when an employee forgets to clock in or out blog entry.
There’s a number of ways that Time Clock MTS allows you to handle missing or late punches and all of them involve the Edit Times screen. This screen allows administrators to correct existing employee time card data, insert new punches, and remove existing ones. Adjusting the time for a late clock in or out couldn’t be any simpler. Just double click the time that needs to be edited on the Edit Times screen and change the event time and date to the correct values.
Missed Breaks and Meal Times
Forgetting to clock out and back in when breaks and meal times are taken is a lot more common that anyone realizes and probably the most common timesheet correction after late punches. Because of this Time Clock MTS has made it especially simple for the administrator to clock an employee out for a break and back in using the Edit Times screen. We’ve taken the time to write about this process in some detail in our blog entry about inserting a missing employee punch.
Recording Sick and Vacation Time
Obviously employees cannot use a time clock system to record their own sick and vacation time so Time Clock MTS delivers a streamlined method for administrators to enter several days sick or vacation time for an employee in one simple step. As you’d expecting this happens on the Edit Times screen. Here you can add a single day of sick or vacation time or more efficiently you could add up to 7 days worth of times by making use of the bulk time entry screen. You should be aware that before you can enter sick or vacation time that employee must be set up to record sick time or set up to record vacation time.
Recording Times for Off-Site Staff
There’s no getting around the fact that sometimes staff just are not on site to be able to use your time clock software to record their time and attendance information. In these cases we usually recommend making use of one of our free timesheet templates to manually record the employee’s work times. These times can then be added quickly and easily from the Edit Times screen, again making use of the bulk time entry screen. Alternatively you could convert to our online time clock system www.timeclockmts-online.com. This system allows your employees to punch in and out from any web-browser on any device connected to the internet.
Conclusions
If you’re looking at purchasing a time clock system then you must ensure there is a simple and robust method of correcting your employees timesheets. For reasons of both business efficiency and payroll accuracy correcting employee timesheets is vital to ensure you can deal with forgotten employee punches, late punches, sick and vacation time, and for entering timesheet data for off-site employees.
