Traditional manual timesheets are a recipe for disaster

According to a 2013 market research report, traditional timesheets are disliked and very inaccurate.

423 people with responsibility for employee tracking were surveyed.

50% of these said that in their company or department, users disliked entering timesheet info more than they disliked expense reporting or time off reporting. All you have to do is to search Twitter for #timesheet and you will see that this is still the prevailing opinion in 2018! People consider filling in a manual timesheet to be a waste of time, and often they forget to do it.

96% of responses said that their employees made mistakes in reporting their own working time. More than 51% of the responses said that over half of their employees make mistakes, and 15% say all their employees make mistakes.

This is not overly surprising, as there are so many errors which could be made with a self-reporting manual timesheet! A quick, non-exhaustive list:

• People could forget the exact details of the shifts and enter generalised, technically incorrect times.
• They could fill them in with the wrong colour pen, if the timesheets are paper and usually scanned or read by a computer.
• They could enter information for one day or time into the wrong slot.
• Their handwriting could be difficult to read.

All of these are accidents and don’t even touch on the potential deliberate misinformation which can occur. Most of the survey respondents (66%) thought that most of the mistakes were accidental, and only a very unfortunate 4% believed the mistakes were deliberate.

Tensor Attendance Management – The Perfect Way to Prevent Timesheet Errors

With our accurate, real-time clocking in and out system, your employee will never have to fill in another hated timesheet again. All they need to do is use their smart-card or biometric (fingerprint or hand geometry) at the sturdy readers and their entrance and exits will be automatically recorded and transferred to the central database for you to examine at your leisure.

This will drastically reduce hour recording errors. If they do happen, for example if an employee forgets to clock in, then you can see it on the database and amend it or discuss it with the employee as necessary. With the data at your fingertips seconds after input, problems can be immediately spotted. This is far more effective than needing to wait until the stressful end of the month payroll period to discover errors.

If your employees work in many different places (for example salespeople, carers or construction workers) and you can’t use a static attendance reader, then we have a solution for that too. Our Self Service Module can be accessed from a browser or a mobile phone, and employees can use it to clock in and out (as well as a list of other features including requesting holidays). If they use the mobile app, you can even use GPS to get confirmation that they are located where you expect them to be.

To update your time and attendance management from terrible timesheets to reliable card readers, please contact us or book a demo for further information.