How Biometric Time Clock Can Help Your Business

Biometric time and attendance systems allow employees to clock in and clock out of work using their unique biometric trait such as fingerprint. These systems provides numerous benefits to employers such as monitoring mobile employees, real-time data on which employees are working and who are not, which employees showed up late and who are nearing overtime. Therefore, the increased need for accountability and transparency, flexibility and a mobile work force has led to the rise of biometric time and attendance systems in companies across the world. Biometric fingerprint systems are increasingly becoming a popular way to monitor employee time and attendance in most institutions and offices.

The widespread acceptance can be attributed to the fact that biometric systems eliminate the common issues associated with manual attendance tracking such as lost cards, employee time theft etc. Biometric systems are much more reliable and accurate as compared to passwords or magnetic cards. It uses employee’s biometric traits such as fingerprints to clock in and clock out of the attendance system during the day and prevents any fraudulent activities. As fingerprints are part of the employee’s being this technology adds enhanced security to the attendance tracking software and prevents employees from buddy punching fellow employees.

The implementation of a fingerprint time and attendance system can benefit a business in numerous ways such as elimination of employee time theft and increased security and accuracy. We will discuss some of the advantages below.

One of the biggest benefits of biometric attendance system is that it prevents employees from punching in their co-workers when they are not present at the workplace. This is however not the case with other forms of attendance tracking such as passwords or smart cards as employees can share these among each other and punch in for their late or absent co-workers. This results in employee time theft and costs businesses tens or thousands of dollars every year. The implementation of biometric attendance machines eliminates the issue of buddy punching as fingerprints can neither be duplicated nor transferred among co-workers and requires that the employees be physically present to clock in and clock out of work.

Fingerprint identification is the most accurate way to identify any employee due to the fact that biometric credentials are unique to every individual and also that they are extremely difficult to forge or duplicate. It aids businesses to accurately track employee time and attendance and eliminates time theft issues due to early and late arrivals or departures, unauthorized overtime etc.

In addition to increasing the accuracy of payroll calculations, biometric attendance systems also help to decrease the burden on payroll department. Biometric systems eliminate the need of manual reconciliation of employee attendance records. It decreases staffing overhead and saves valuable employee time. It accurately records employee arrival and exit times from the company premises and provides payroll with reliable labour data. This means employees can be paid accordingly to the hours worked and over-payments can be reduced resulting in huge cost savings for the business. Thus business operations can be managed efficiently leading to an overall increase in productivity.

There are some instances where employees might have to work overtime to take care of an unusual business situation. However, putting in all the extra hours of work for long periods of time can eventually wear down even the most sincere and enthusiastic workers. Moreover, it can create dissatisfaction among employees if they are unsure of their hard work getting recognized. The proper implementation of biometric clocks in such a situation will alert employers of any excessive overtime situations and enable them to accordingly balance the workload. The result will be a more fair balance of workload and employees will not feel overworked. They will also be confident that their overtime is being noticed.

Fingerprint identification can be easily and quickly integrated into existing time and attendance systems. Due to the intuitive design, fingerprint systems have a low learning curve and employees can start using it with minimal user training. Further, it provides accurate results with a simple fingerprint swipe and minimum user invasiveness.

As compared to traditional time and attendance tracking methods, biometric systems are considered to be an extremely convenient security solution. There are no passwords to be remembered and no badges or ID cards to be used. It reduces the delays caused due to employees forgetting their access badge and allows the employees to quickly log into work.

Another lesser known advantage of a biometric workforce management system is that it creates concrete audit trails. With these systems, employees can be held accountable for their actions and thus biometric systems encourage employees to act ethically. Since employees can be identified accurately with fingerprint systems, they can be held responsible for frequent, unscheduled or extended breaks, late attendance, absenteeism etc. Therefore employees tend to become more responsible and misuse of time is reduced which leads to a significant increase in employee productivity.

In the face of stiff competition and steadily rising operating costs, it becomes increasingly difficult for small size businesses to achieve return on investment and reach their full potential. Therefore, businesses are constantly looking for solutions that can help to reduce their overall expenses. With conventional attendance tracking mechanisms, repetitive consumable costs are incurred. Over a period of time, smart cards and key fobs may need to be replaced due to loss or wear and tear. In contrast, a biometric attendance system relies only on an employee’s biometric credential such as fingerprints for verification and to clock-in the employee at work. There are no replacement costs for cards or fobs and the employee can never forget his fingers at home.

Thus we see that a fingerprint attendance system eliminates the inaccuracies and loopholes of manual time and attendance systems thereby helping businesses to achieve faster return on their investment. It provides working hours data electronically to payroll and human resources which saves the time and effort required to manually calculate the work and overtime hours. It also reduces various administrative expenses by decreasing staffing overhead, saving the costs incurred in replacing lost or stolen ID cards and eliminating the need to reset forgotten passwords.