The Case For Automating Manual Time Tracking

The benefits might be great, but they are not obvious

In business there's probably not much more important than the time it takes to c
omplete a task. Tracking employee time has a long history. Check the history of
time clocks in Wikipedia, you'll learn that the founding companies of IBM made t
he first mechanical punch time clocks, and later there were more sophisticated d
evices like proximity, badge swipe or biometric time clocks. What it does not te
ll you is the how slow the marketplace has been to adopt new "technology" in tim
e tracking. Why? Because what's tried, true and proven is difficult to replace f
rom the standpoint of 1) cost 2) risk and 3) inertia.
Today, after fifteen years of the Internet revolution, the next wave, "web-based
" technology, is calling your name. But before you begin to evaluate where web-b
ased applications are appropriate or sensible, we need to ask some questions abo
ut how your manual data processing is working (or not) for your organization.
Data collection:
Why are you using manual data collection methods? What are the advantages? Are t
here data loss problems?
Authentication:
Are there data forms or other documents being used and do they require signature
s? In manual systems, signatures legally provide data authentication. But from a
n operational standpoint does a signature truly authenticate data? What are the
risks and costs of unauthenticated data?
Processing:
In your organization, does the processing of time and work data lead to somebody
getting billed, paid, costed, fined, suspended, or terminated? Given that one o
r more of these can result, is business as usual okay?
Reviews and Corrections:
Does this data require reviews and approvals? Does it require rejections or corr
ections? What are the costs to review this information manually? And what happen
s when managers have no bandwidth to do so? What data falls off the table? What
gets missed? What decisions do not get made?
Where Does It Need To Go:
Does the data need to be sent somewhere else on a scheduled basis or to meet a d
eadline? Are there “built-in” corrections and adjustments that are unavoidable b
ecause the process is slow?
As you probably know, there are several areas of pain in manual time tracking.
The Five Pitfalls of Manual Time Tracking
1.Data Collection: “Slow Is Unsteady and Loses The Race”
In the physical world of manual time keeping, data integrity problems come in th
e form of lost, damaged or destroyed time cards or timesheets. There are unavail
able fax machines, busy signals, faulty delivery at the other end, snail mail or
worse. You might think manual data collection is inexpensive, but it has hidden
costs in time and money. Problems in the beginning (time data capture) infect l
ater stages of the process such as....

2.Authentication: “Buddy Punching” Problems and John Hancock

Not having an iron-clad method of authenticating an employee's time is a problem
. In time and attendance tracking, having an employee's friend punch his time ca
rd when he's late or leaving early is a real problem. And at the end of a week o
r time period, employees can sign fraudulent time cards or that of their buddy.
And they have little incentive to do a good job here. The more lax they are punc
hing the clock, the more they and their supervisors have to initial time cards w
ith corrections, and the whole process grinds down to become slower and more cos
tly. What's worse, with more lapses in punching clocks in real time, employee an
d supervisor memories become more severely tested. Fraud is not always the culpr
it. Accuracy starts to suffer. In the United States, physical signatures carry a
lot of weight legally. But beside providing legal cover, they often foster an e
nvironment of white lies and fibbing that gets further endorsed by managers who
have little choice but to go along with the system.
3.Processing: Policy and Rules
Many organizations rationalize that they manually process policies and rules bec
ause they are so variable and complex. Generally, these approaches do not scale
well and do so at great expense. Another problem with manual rules processing is
that it often takes place in payroll departments after supervisor approvals.

4.Approvals/Rejections, Review, Oversight

Manual approval of time cards requires supervisors to monitor employee overtime
or double time in their heads, if at all. Or worse, they might not be able to mo
nitor more complicated rules or calculations at all. With manual time cards, it
is time consuming for supervisors to monitor time and attendance daily, often op
ting for end of week reviews of time cards, initialing corrections for the “miss
ed punch,” the “I forgot to punch” and other incidents that need to be corrected
. Of course, memory failure at the end of the week often conspires to hurt atten
dance accuracy.

5.Sending It Somewhere Else

After all is said and done, time, attendance and task data is collected for vari
ous reasons, all of which are very important. Manual processes require certain “
built-in” inefficiencies to work properly. Most payrolls build in three to four
days of slack because of slow data collection, slow approvals, and double data e
ntry. Some even have employees “guesstimate” their hours for the last two to thr
ee days of a time period creating even more need for corrections.
Conclusion For This Post
At every step of a manual time tracking process there is inefficiency: data loss
or distortions, lack of authentication, arduous administrative processing of ru
les and policies, supervisors having to spend time babysitting time cards more t
han managing, and extra cost and effort to process payroll more slowly.