If you’ve yet to indulge in the deeply glamorous experience of hunching over a stack of paper time cards to tally up employees’ hours in a dimly lit back office for what feels like 14 hours, then this article isn’t for you. If this sounds familiar, you may be one of the 38% of US employees whose companies still use physical timekeeping systems, welcome to your intervention. Lift HCM helps businesses save money by streamlining their payroll with digital time and attendance systems. But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here because we’re worried about you.
Every week, employers and their staff spend hours adding up time sheets and manually entering everything into their payroll system to ensure everyone gets paid on time. It’s a stressful situation; one in which getting too hasty with the data entry can have profound and terrible consequences for your company. Let’s review some of the ways paper-based time and attendance could be costing your company.
Physical Timekeeping Ties Up Your Leadership
The simple act of adding up an employee’s hours for a given pay period and recording them in your payroll platform can tie managers up for days. The amount of time it takes to calculate hours from paper punch cards can fluctuate based on the number of employees and the length of your pay periods. After switching to a digital time and attendance system, however, one company with over 150 employees shaved that time down to under a day. Their efficiency increased by about 70 percent. Physical time and attendance systems rob your company’s leadership of their valuable time when the alternative is instantaneous.
Correcting Paper Records Costs You Time
Here’s a fun fact: of the 38% of companies using paper-based timekeeping, 80% reported having to make corrections on timesheets. Yikes, right? Here’s another: they needed to make those corrections on 80% of the timesheets they received. At some point, the question is no longer “why haven’t you digitized your timekeeping system?” and instead becomes “why hasn’t your management team collectively blown a gasket and mutinied?”. This isn’t to suggest that a digital timesheets are infallible, but you’re also not dealing with eraser marks or scratched out text increasing the chance of misreading what’s written with each “correction” you make.
Don’t Let Unnecessary Audits or Inspections Cost you Time and Money
It’s easy to make mistakes when you’re transferring time and attendance data from paper timesheets to a digital payroll platform; whether you misread what’s written or enter the wrong numbers for a given date or shift. This may help explain why the Department of Labor estimates as many as 70% of US businesses violate or do not comply with wage-and-hour regulations largely due to inaccurate or misclassified payroll data. These little oopsie-doodles have cost employers $5.5 billion in penalties. When you switch to a digital system, you remove the risk of having a middleman to interpret the number represented on a timesheet.
(Spoiler Alert!) Time Theft Costs You Money
Sometimes the thing that robs your company of precious time and resources is actual theft. Time theft, anyway. No, it’s not the title of a 1990’s sci fi drama, “time theft” refers to the unauthorized use of company time for personal activities. Remember our expensive coffee run analogy? A study from the Robert Half Group found employees “steal” over four hours per week, on average. Using a digital timekeeping system, employees can “punch in” without the ability to embellish the time logged in their favor.
Ask Your Payroll Manager About Digital Time and Attendance Options
The first step in solving a problem is admitting you have one. Speak up now or continue to suffer the staggering costs of a paper-based time and attendance system. Lift HCM has a fantastic solution and can turn just about any internet-connected device into a timeclock. Schedule a consultation with our seasoned business development managers to learn more about what you stand to gain from making the switch.
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