If you’re thinking about looking into employee time clock software, it’s very important that you know how it works so that you can see how it fits with your company. In most cases, employees are not going to find it hard to use, but special training may be required when setting it up. Remember, tracking the hours that are worked is very important, and you don’t want to make mistakes that could make employees miss out on the paychecks that they are expecting. Teaching them to avoid mistakes as well can make the whole process go smoothly.
First of all, you should know that there are a few ways that the software can be set up. Some employers prefer to put the program on just one computer, and then all employees who need to sign in or out have to go to that computer terminal. This does make it easy to monitor what the employees are doing, but it can be an inconvenience if someone is supposed to use that terminal and they keep getting interrupted by people who want to sign in or sign out. An alternative is to set the program up on each computer, and then employees can just log in from their own terminals.
To do this, you have to give each employee a username and a password. It is definitely easiest to let the employees pick their own passwords so that they can remember them. The usernames can be anything that you like: full names, initials, employee numbers, or some combination thereof. You don’t really have to worry about security with this, since no one would have a reason to log in as anyone else, but having separate names and passwords ensures that employees do not accidentally log in or out for the wrong person.
After they log in, the employees just have to click the button that says that they are at work. The software keeps track of the time, right down to the second, on its own. If you work on a basis of rounding – to the nearest quarter hour, for instance – you can either set the system up to round on its own or you can do this manually. Employees then have to click the button again when they leave, and records are compiled of the total times that they worked. These records are then saved so that they can be referenced later.