Employees are late for a variety of reasons: from traffic delays and childcare difficulties to mental health issues and lack of sleep.  Here are some strategies to help you address chronic lateness:

• Develop a company policy on lateness to emphasize that punctuality is valued by your company.
• Monitor attendance.  Employees are more likely to come on time when they know that their attendance is monitored.  Time clocks encourage punctuality by keeping track of employee arrival time.  Time and Attendance Software can be utilized to evaluate tardiness patterns and help plan solutions.
• Schedule a meeting with each chronically late employee to discuss his/her reasons for being late.  Brainstorm possible solutions.  An employee might be encouraged to plan to arrive at work 15 minutes early to accommodate any traffic delays.  Scheduling meetings first thing in the morning might provide an additional reason to arrive on time.  The company might consider offering accommodations (e.g. later start time/later finish time) for an employee with childcare responsibilities or sleep difficulties which contribute to morning fatigue.  It is important to develop a plan with specific strategies and goals, monitor its effectiveness (e.g. keep track of employee attendance via a time clock and a Time and Attendance Software) and schedule another meeting to evaluate and/or change the plan as necessary.
• Reward punctuality.  For example, employees that come routinely on time (e.g. on-time attendance for five consecutive days) could be entered into a regularly-held draw for movie passes or a temporary use of a coveted parking spot.
• Set an example: be on time yourself!

Late Employees: Effective Strategies - Time and Attendance Software

Are you still using an old-fashioned Time Clock with paper Time Cards?  How much time and effort do you spend each payroll period?

First, you have to buy Time Cards which cost approximately 5 cents per card.  At the beginning of each accounting period, you have to write the name of each employee on the card that he/she will be using.  At the end of the accounting period, you have to manually calculate total hours worked and manually input those numbers into your payroll system.  Have you wondered about how much time it takes to process each card?  What about the possibility of making an error during the calculation process?

According to The American Payroll Association (APA) study, the overpayment due to human error can range from 1% to 8%. (For further details read our blog: Time and Attendance Software ROI – Human Error).  Furthermore, it takes approximately 4 minutes per employee to calculate each time card and 2 minutes per employee to enter the data into a payroll software. (For further details read our blog: Time and Attendance Software ROI – Cost Calculation).

How much money is your company losing by utilizing old-fashioned Time Clocks with Time Cards?  Click on ROI calculator to estimate the cost of payroll processing in your company.

There is a much more efficient solution.  For as little as $260, you can get a standalone Time Clock.  If you get a Fingerprint Reader, you will not require any cards and hence eliminate that expense.  If you want to continue using a card reader, then you will need to get a proximity, barcode or magnetic stripe card for each employee, but this card can be used indefinitely and even reused when staff changes.

Finally, you will need to combine this time clock with a Time and Attendance software.  We offer a free online Time and Attendance software for companies with 25 employees or less or you can get a more advanced version for as little as $1 per employee per month.  When using our Midex Time Control, you can track your employees’ attendance from anywhere with internet access and at the end of the accounting period, you can export data to your payroll software.

Are you still using Time Clock with Time Cards? - Time and Attendance Software

We have released an update for HandPunch Attendance Manager.  The new version (1.0.3.) of our HandPunch software, the user can add new and modify existing registrations.

 Just like in our previous version, original attendance logs remain in the system despite any new, changed or deleted registrations. The user can always upload original attendance logs.

 In addition, we have added a function allowing users to upload attendance logs directly to our free Midex Time Control Express edition. Now users do not have to save registrations to a CSV file in order to upload them.

 We hope that you find these new features useful for your company.  We always welcome any feedback and suggestions for future software development.

Update for HandPunch Attendance Manager – Version 1.0.3 - Time and Attendance Software

We are proud to announce the release of our new free Time Clock software called Time Clock Attendance Manager. This software allows you to connect to your Fingerprint Reader or Card Reader, download attendance logs (registrations), add, modify or delete registrations and export them to a CSV file or directly to Midex Time Control Express.

Every time you download logs from your Fingerprint Reader or Card Reader using Time Clock Attendance Manager, attendance logs are automatically stored on your computer. These attendance logs can be adjusted and exported to a CSV file, while original registrations remain unchanged. You can later open this file with Excel or import it into any Time and Attendance Software including our free Midex Time Control Express.

You can create a free Midex Time Control Express account and upload your employees’ attendance logs directly to your account without exporting it to a CSV file.  Follow this link to sign up or get more information about Midex Time Control Express.

Download Attendance Logs from your Time Clock - Time and Attendance Software

We are proud to announce the release of our new free HandPunch software called HandPunch Attendance Manager.  This software allows you to connect to your HandPunch, download attendance logs, delete unnecessary registrations and export them to a CSV file.

Every time you download logs from the HandPunch device using HandPunch Attendance Manager, attendance logs are automatically stored on your computer.  These attendance logs can be adjusted and exported to a CSV file, while original registrations remain unchanged.   You can later open this file with Excel or import it into any Time and Attendance Software including our free Midex Time Control Express.  Follow this link to sign up or get more information about Midex Time Control Express.

Download Attendance Logs from your HandPunch - Time and Attendance Software

At Midex Software we had recently launched a free edition of Midex Time Control called Express.  This is a free online Time and Attendance software for companies with 25 employees or less.  Many customers are cautious about free software: they think that there is a catch when something is offered for free. Why are we offering a free edition?  What is the catch?

Reason 1:  This is one of our ways to market our Time and Attendance software.  Some companies spend a lot of money advertising their products on the internet, magazines and other media.  Instead, we offer a free product to attract new customers. 

Reason 2: Many customers require a simple employee tracking solution and just want to download logs from these Time Clocks without any advanced data manipulation.  By offering free Time and Attendance software, we promote our Time Clocks (such as HandPunch, Fingerprint Reader and various Card Readers), which can be used with our software.

Reason 3: After using Midex Time Control Express, many of our customers realize how great this program is and upgrade to one of our paid editions to take advantage of other features that we offer.  You can see a comparison of features between editions at Compare Midex Time Control Editions page.

If you would like to implement a Time and Attendance solution in your organization, you might like to start with our free Midex Time Control Express edition.  Follow this link to sign up:  free Time and Attendance software.

Why do we offer a free Time and Attendance software? - Time and Attendance Software

In the last two articles, we’ve discussed how much money company loses on Payroll due to human error and time it takes to calculate payroll.  You can read these two articles by clicking on the links bellow:

Time and Attendance Software ROI – Human Error
Time and Attendance Software ROI – Cost Calculation

In this article, I want to highlight another cost saving factor of how a Time and Attendance software gives you return on investment.  When employees start or finish a work day, they do not clock in or out at the exact moment when a shift begins or ends. For example, if an employee starts work at 9am, most likely he/she will punch in a bit earlier, maybe at 8:57am.  If the shift ends at 5pm, then that employee might punch out around 5:02pm.  At the end of the day, it is estimated that, on average, employees get paid extra 4 to 12 minutes a day.

How much this could really mean in dollars?  For example, if your company has 100 employees and everyone is getting paid for extra 4 minutes per day, you are paying for 400 extra minutes per day.  If we multiply this by 5 work days, it comes out to 2,000 minutes or 33.3 hours.  If your employees get paid on average $15 per hour, then the total cost of overpayment is $500 per week or $26,000 a year.

Table below outlines how much a company could be losing every year.  Cross reference the number of employees in your company with the number of minutes you think you might be overpaying your employees per day.

Midex Time Control, which is an online Time and Attendance software, eliminates overpayment by rounding registrations. The price of a Midex Time Control solution provides a great return on investment!  To estimate how much return on investment a Time and Attendance software can bring to your company, see our ROI Calculator.

Time and Attendance Software ROI – Money lost due to rounding - Time and Attendance Software

In our previous article, Time and Attendance Software ROI – Human Error, we have discussed how much a company loses due to human error during payroll calculation.  But this is not the only cost involved when it comes to manual employee attendance tracking.

If your employees are registering using old fashion Punch Cards or manually entering their time into a log book, someone has to manually calculate these records and enter them into payroll software.  On average, it takes 4 minutes per employee to calculate a time card and 2 minutes to enter the data into payroll software.  What does it mean in dollars?

Let’s say we have 100 employees.  It takes someone 600 minutes or 10 hours to calculate everyone’s time and enter it into payroll software.  If we are doing payroll bi-weekly, it means that we have 26 payrolls per year.  10 hours times 26 payrolls, comes to 260 hours per year just to calculate payroll.  If employee who calculates payroll gets paid $20/hour, the yearly cost is $5, 200 or $433.33/month.  If you are doing your payroll on a weekly basis, then the cost is doubling to $10,400/year or $866.67/month.

Table below outlines how much a company is losing every payroll based in bi-weekly payroll schedule.  If you do your payroll weekly, simply double each value. Cross reference number of employees in your company with the number of minutes you think it takes to calculate each time card and enter the data into your payroll software.

Midex Time Control, which is an online Time and Attendance software that eliminates the use of time cards and manual calculation of employee time. The price of a Midex Time Control solution provides a great return on investment!  To estimate how much return on investment a Time and Attendance software can bring to your company, see our ROI Calculator.

Time and Attendance Software ROI – Cost Calculation - Time and Attendance Software

The American Payroll Association (APA) conducted a study about typical human error factor when manually calculating payroll.  According to the results published in Paytech (the APA’s monthly magazine), the overpayment due to human error can range from 1% to 8%.

What does it really mean?  Here is an example.  If a company has 100 employees, with an average hourly pay of $15, then the company is paying $1,500 per hour for all 100 employees.  If every employee works 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, then the company’s payroll is $60,000 per week ($1,500/hour x 40 hours) for all employees.

If we factor in as little as 1% human error, the company is losing $600 per week or over $31,000 per year.  Midex Time Control, which is an online Time and Attendance software that eliminates human error by automatically calculating data for the payroll.  The price of a Midex Time Control solution provides a great return on investment!

Table below outlines how much company losing every week.  Simply cross reference number of employees in your company with Human Error factor that you believe is in your company.

To estimate how much return on investment a Time and Attendance software can bring to your company, see our full ROI Calculator.

Time and Attendance Software ROI – Human Error - Time and Attendance Software

With the upcoming daylight saving time (DST), clocks must be adjusted one hour back.  This is typically done on a Sunday at 2 a.m. but this may vary depending on the country.

When daylight saving time arrives, changing time on your Time Clock is relatively simple: check the manual for your device and follow instructions.  You can also find step-by-step instructions for HandPunch, Fingerprint Reader and Card Reader at the end of this post. Alternatively if you have HandPunch, you can use our HandPunch Admin software which will allow you to change the time on your HandPunch remotely.

When you change the time on your Time Clock, you have to make sure that no one is working at that time.  The best time to make time adjustment is after everyone punched out for the day.  For example, you can change time on your time clock on Friday night and when employees return to work on Monday, the Time Clock is going to be ready for use.

Some organization work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  If someone punched in before the time change and will be punching out after the time change on the Time Clock, this employee might lose an hour of work.  In such case, you might have to adjust their time by adding an extra hour through your Time and Attendance Software.

Changing Date and Time in HandPunch
Changing Date and Time in Fingerprint Reader

Daylight saving time – Don’t forget to change time on your Time Clock - Time and Attendance Software