How to Pick the Best Attendance Management System for Your Organization
Opting for a state-of-art attendance management system has become critical for an organisation’s success. It helps them track employee attendance, which has a direct impact on productivity and company bottom lines. It also allows companies to stay in sync with labor laws. Every country has its own, unique labor laws governing working hours, salaries and leaves. When you track these manually, there is a possibility of errors sneaking in, that could lead to difficulties during month-end auditing.
In order to choose the right attendance management system, it’s important to understand what features you want from your system. Let’s look at all the important features that should be a part of an efficient attendance management system. (Read our blog “Types of Attendance Tracking Systems” to get a better understanding of the types of attendance tracking systems you can use.)
Features
Important features you must look out for in an Attendance Management System
These features are important for any on-premise or cloud-based attendance management system. There could be more based on your needs, but any system must have basic attributes that you should look out for when choosing a system that fits your company.
Entry and Exit
The most essential part of any attendance management system is the ability to record the entry and exit time of an employee, and breaks taken in between work. A system can use either fingerprint-based biometric or magnetic ID cards for this purpose. Both are safe, secure, and reduce the risk of fraud.
Leave Management
Another important characteristic of an attendance management system is to manage leaves seamlessly. And the system must ensure that forgetting to show an ID card or failing to use the biometric tool while entering the office is not counted as leave. Instead, in such cases, employees should be issued auto alerts by the system, asking them to inform their manager or HR about their oversight and a correction should take place in the backend. If an employee fails to report to work, the system should also be able to alert the employee to apply either for leave or special off-times like half-day or a client visit. Leave application should also be a feature on offer.
Inbuilt Payroll Integration
When attendance management is integrated with payroll, the system will ensure that salaries are compensated keeping in mind the work hours put in by an employee, all paid and unpaid leave taken as well as overtime benefits.
Daily Reporting
One of the key responsibilities of the HR or payroll department is to keep track of employee attendance. The attendance management tool that a company opts for must be able to help them generate automated reports on the number of hours an employee has worked on a given day, overtime, leaves and missed days.
While the above four factors form the most important features of any attendance management tool, there are additional offerings that a company can look out for, like a biometric attendance tracker, inbuilt calendar and punch-in alerts. Although not mandatory must-haves, these tools will go a long way in easing the HR team’s workload and bringing transparency into attendance management.
Biometric Attendance Tracker
Driven by AI and Machine Learning, the world has moved towards biometric attendance in a big way. It’s especially useful if you have a large employee base and when everyone comes into office at the same time. A biometric attendance tracker helps eliminate fraud at all levels. This system is also effective for onsite application, where employees work on locations outside of the office. What companies need to keep in mind is that biometric tools are cost heavy.
Missed Clock-in/Clock-out Alerts
The most essential part of any attendance management system is the ability to record the entry and exit time of an employee, and breaks taken in between work. A system can use either fingerprint-based biometric or magnetic ID cards for this purpose. Both are safe, secure, and reduce the risk of fraud.
Inbuilt Calendar
An attendance management system should have an inbuilt calendar tool that can be synced with a third party or other popular calendars to help employees book meeting rooms or inform them about meeting schedules. Calendaring systems have become an essential requirement today, as many employees work remotely. It also helps track their attendance and availability.
Employee Strength
If you have fewer than 20 to 25 employees, you can get by with an attendance log register. But this tool doesn’t work with companies that employ a large workforce. Such organizations can only rely on a well integrated attendance management system, which can track the attendance of employees across various geographies and time zones. Choose an attendance management solution that can be scaled up or scaled down based on your requirement.
Easy Integration
Any new technology- both software and hardware- should be easy to integrate with the existing technology that your business uses. Attendance management technology can be seamlessly integrated with existing systems as it doesn’t need much in terms of software and gears and can be installed with minimal wiring and servers. However, you should be careful to choose a system that can blend with the existing or legacy technologies used in your office or organization. Most attendance management systems are configured to merge with existing technology and all they require are a few configurations.
Budget Consideration
Like any other technology, attendance management systems come in a range of prices. This gives you an option to pick what fits your budget. There are several tools available as well, but they may lack all the features that the system offers. Some even allow you to choose features on an a-la-carte basis to suit your business needs. There are various discounted offers too. Some systems offer their services for as little as Rs. 49 per employee per month and some can charge as much Rs. 4999 per employee. There are hundreds of companies offering attendance management products and you should check out a range of options before you shortlist a product.
Cloud and AI-Enabled
Most attendance management solutions are cloud and AI-enabled today. Cloud-based systems come with some inherent advantages. They can be accessed from anywhere, using any device – laptop or smartphone. AI-enabled features, like generating attendance reports or offering a one-stop access point for all attendance-related information helps boost employee productivity and engagement. Today some solutions offer AI-based face recognition as well, doing away with the fingerprint-based biometric system. This saves time, as employees don’t have to queue to scan their fingers. Contactless face recognition also helps in reducing the risk of infection.
Apart from this list, additional features that companies can look out for in an attendance management system are mobile or app support and an employee self-support tool. These become critical if your employees work remotely. It will help them stay connected, make their experience with the system seamless and ensure that their working day is accounted for.
All these features can be found incorporated in the Kredily HRMS solution. And that’s not all, the additional features include a video conferring platform called ‘Greet’, as well as connecting and collaborating with other employees through its collaboration platform, ‘Reach.’ Kredily’s HRMS solution is cloud-based and has an employee self-service option as well.
New-age attendance management systems have completely changed the way companies track attendance and manage their employees. It assures employees that they can rely on a transparent, foolproof and error-free system to manage their attendance, leaves and compensation. Month-end pay calculations also become fast-tracked and smooth, directly impacting an organisation’s reputation and building trust and loyalty among employees. (Read our blog “10 Benefits of Using an Attendance Management System” to know why it’s important to have an attendance management system in your company.