Thursday, February 9, 2012

How a Time Clock Can Improve Payroll Accuracy

If your company uses a time clock system to record hours worked, you probably already know how prone the system is to error. Because the time clock does just one thing, the data collected from the system is liable to be entered incorrectly, mislabeled, entered twice, listed for the wrong employee, or any number of other mistakes. You get the idea. For their own purposes, time clocks do a great job, but they are very limited in their function. As a result, the mentioned mistakes, along with countless others, are waiting to befall to the manager who does not use time clock software.

Time clock software immediately eliminates the typical errors that crop up with all measurement systems. For one thing, software will automatically include paid time off, which a time clock will not do. By using an automated system that includes time clock software, you can easily apply the paid time off hours to any worker’s paycheck. Not only will your employees be happy to get accurate checks, you will be free to perform other managerial tasks that often are postponed due to “payroll time.”

Rounding errors are the bugaboo of payroll, and have been for over a hundred years. In the old days, this category of mistake was the most common paycheck error, and accounted for many managerial hours spent trying to correct the problem. Whether you are skilled or not with mathematics, rounding takes time, and time clocks cannot do it. Software does the chore automatically and accurately.

One of the other common errors in the world of time clock payroll accounting has to do with duplicate entries. If you manually enter data of any kind, you know all too well how this occurs. The reason is human fatigue and inattention. The numerical version of a typographical error, duplicate entry causes a cascade of errors in payroll reports. Because payroll software instantly eliminates this error, you can say goodbye to the nightmares of finding and correcting mysterious duplicate entry errors.

The time clock is a wonderful invention, and has allowed small and large businesses to measure something that used to be utterly time consuming and frustrating. By centralizing the chore of recording and stamping total hours on an individual card for every employee, the time clock truly revolutionized the industrial revolution. Today’s time clock software is just as important as that long-ago invention, providing yet another leap ahead in the world of business technology.

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