Thinking of making the switch to an online attendance system for your business? There are actually quite a number of advantages to doing this. For example, it can qualify you for several of the incentives the Singapore government is offering businesses to go digital. One of the criteria for the Digital Resilience Bonus is the use of a digital HR solution, after all. But besides that, there are many other reasons to switch to an online attendance system. Below, we’ll cover 5 of the most significant ones.

1. Organisational Savings

The best way to appreciate this is through contrast: there are many ways often-unreliable and time-intensive manual attendance systems cost your company money. For instance, they make it easier for employees to indulge in tardiness, which costs your organisation time as well as efficiency. They also make it possible for employees to abuse their time reporting, which can lead to you overpaying people who are actually underworking. Moreover, manual attendance tracking can take up a serious amount of a manager’s time—time that could be better spent on other things. As such, an online attendance system that provides both accuracy and efficiency (through automation) can save your business a fair bit of money. Ones with features like biometric systems may even spare you the cost of things like misplaced ID cards. Moreover, those that work on multiple devices and cloud technology also give you the ability to skip traditional system setup processes. For instance, Adaptive Pay’s online attendance system works on both computers and mobile devices. As such, you won’t have to pay for things like dedicated scanners (for employee “clock-in”), for example. And as it operates on cloud technology, you won’t even have to pay for a costly and technically complex in-house server setup. This can help you keep total expenses low for your switch to an online attendance system.

2. Automated Attendance Tracking

Computerised tracking of attendance lowers the possibility of errors in employee time tracking. This can benefit your company in several ways. For one thing, it helps you figure out whether or not people actually need to be paid for overtime. It also avoids errors in payroll—but we’ll talk more about this later, as it’s important enough to be considered a discrete benefit by itself. The best online attendance systems even include options for GPS tracking. That comes in handy if your employees are supposed to work on-site and you want to be sure they’re only clocking in at the office instead of at home. Some solutions even offer biometric options like fingerprint clocking-in! Adaptive Pay included this in its software, for example, to prevent workers punching in for their friends.

3. Automated and Accurate Payroll Calculation

A good online attendance system can integrate with your payroll module for ease of payroll calculation. That’s why employees can avoid errors in their pay cheques with such attendance systems, as mentioned earlier. When errors in payroll happen, they often take a long time to correct because so many records have to be consulted for validation of corrections. And the validation typically has to occur manually. Automated employee time-tracking reduces the chances of such mistakes happening. As mentioned in the previous benefit, it can record employee times down to the minute… and thus send accurate data to payroll for calculation of monthly salaries.

4. Enhanced Organisational Insight

This benefit is related to the fact that these programmes allow automated attendance tracking. In the same vein, most of them also generate automatic reports—not just for individual employees but for the entire workforce. These reports are useful when management is strategising how to improve company performance and efficiency. The reports give a snapshot of the organisation’s labour performance on current company policies. Those insights can lead to improvements in HR, management, leave policies, and more. For example, they can help managers determine if further manpower is needed for certain tasks and whether or not HR budgets are sufficient.

5. Improved Employee Trust in Management

This doesn’t just come about as a result of payroll errors being avoided. It happens too as employees realise that your attendance system can make identifying hardworking or lazy workers easier. They’ll see that this can give you a better idea of which employees deserve promotions, wage increases, and the like… as well as which employees may need to be replaced. That gives them more reason to believe that if they do their jobs well and serve the actual hours they’re supposed to, you’ll recognise that. This may help increase trust in management, as issues sometimes arise over perceptions of inequality in employee treatment or time tracking.

Bonus: How to Get More Benefits from an Online Attendance System

As mentioned earlier, the benefits we listed above aren’t all you can expect to get out of a good online attendance system. In fact, they’re just the tip of the iceberg! But as with most other things, you can only enjoy most of these benefits if you use your online attendance system properly. Moreover, you also need to pick the right one, as such systems certainly aren’t made equal. If you’re not sure how to select an online attendance system that suits your needs, let us help. We can talk to you and evaluate your business to determine your online attendance system needs.