Handheld and Digital Time Tracker: Big Differences, Great Opportunities

Managing employees’ work time and attendance has always been a big challenge, particularly for companies involving mobile workers and hourly paid staff. In fact, companies from every industry report that employees often arrive in office late, leave early, and prolong their lunch breaks. A few minutes may seem like an insignificant problem, but different studies have shown it can have a great impact on business performance and efficiency.

Accurate time tracking is mostly important for small businesses where even a little error can account for a significant part of the overall budget.

Traditional Time Tracking Tools

Traditional time cards and punch clocks have long been used as an effective way to keep track of the hours worked. But as employees become increasingly mobile and sometimes work away from the office, time becomes harder to manage and traditional time punching becomes less and less sensible.

These traditional timekeeping solutions have numerous disadvantages, including inefficiency, high risk of error, time ineffectiveness and so on.

For the most of businesses, manual, paper-based time tracking requires too much effort and brings too little. The situation becomes even more complicated when there is more than one work area or project to track.

There is another drawback associated with traditional time tracking approach. Many businesses report employees who are absent or tardy taking advantage of simple time punching systems and having their co-workers "punch" for them. This situation results in exponential losses, especially for international companies with many employees.

How an automatic time tracker works

A modern time tracker solves the mentioned problems by providing the alternative to traditional time cards.

The automatic time tracker has many advantages, allowing companies to effectively manage their work time spend on a every single project. Some of the greatest advantages include fast and simple time tracking process, productivity monitoring, lower maintenance costs, as well as reduced ineffectiveness and time losses. Other benefits associated with modern automatic monitoring are: much better accuracy in terms of payroll and billable hours, reduced or even eliminated "buddy punching", as well as fast and accurate payroll and billing processes.

And the last, but not the least: using the electronic time tracker is also environmental and can facilitate a company’s overall CSR policy, which has become an inseparable part of most contemporary companies.

There are time trackers designed to fit the needs and budget of virtually every type of business, offering different features, best of which allow keeping track of employee vacations, days off and sick leave. A time tracker is a complete work time management solution. It is particularly beneficial for international corporations with a large number of employees.

In conclusion, as companies' work gets progressively more dynamic every day, time trackers help them record the work of employees much more efficiently than the traditional paper time cards. By automating time and attendance tracking, digital work time data makes all processes much faster, easier, and accurate, leading to increased productivity, decreased time waste and higher efficiency.