Overcome the Paper Timesheet Saga with Automated Time and Attendance

When we have the opportunity to share what we do here at nettimesolutions with our friends, family and business acquaintances, it’s beautiful to see the light in their eyes when they understand the impact an automated time and attendance system can have on an organization — we love what we do, and we love showing other people how we can make their business lives happier.

In order to improve workforce productivity and ensure that managers and employees have access to the information they need to make better workforce decisions, we know that organizations are turning to automated time and attendance. By automating their time and attendance, organizations are increasing their efficiency and effectiveness, improving their compliance and ultimately realizing their strategic business results. The trouble is, there are still many organizations that are caught in the saga of paper payroll.

A Department Director’s Paper Timesheet Saga

We recently sat down with the director of a client services department, Janice, who had six direct reports in her department, with each of those six employees having between two and six direct reports of their own. In total, the client services department was comprised of 22 individuals — a mixture of exempt, salaried employees and non-exempt, hourly employees. With half of the team working out of corporate headquarters, and the other half working out of the company’s satellite office, the team regularly faced some communication challenges, and payroll day was no exception.

Here’s a snapshot of payroll day for Janice’s client services department:

  • All employees fill out the paper timesheet appropriate for their type of employment (salaried or hourly) and submit to their respective managers.
  • Because, let’s face it, people get distracted and forget to submit their timesheets, the managers have to chase down those timesheets. Or, even worse, Janice herself is the one looking for her managers to get them to chase down their employees’ timesheets.
  • Managers must check their employees’ timesheets for errors (including calculating all time assignments), sign each timesheet, and submit to the department director (Janice). With half of the team at the satellite office, their timesheets are sometimes scanned and emailed to Janice, but usually faxed. When the fax machine goes down (which seems to be a regular occurrence on payroll day), the process is delayed further.
  • As department director, Janice is responsible for double-checking her managers’ work, which required again calculating all time assignments for mistakes such as mathematical errors or misclassifications. If something isn’t correct, it goes back to the manager to fix with the employee.
  • Until each error is resolved, Janice can’t submit her department’s payroll paperwork to the payroll department, and the payroll department cannot process the company’s payroll without submissions from each department director.
  • Once Janice is able to submit her department’s payroll and get back to working on the job she was truly hired to do, the payroll manager has been known to call her to say, “David indicated he took 16 hours of PTO last week, but according to my records he only had four hours of PTO remaining, so now he’ll be docked 12 hours without pay.”
  • Janice then has to explain to David that he took more PTO than he had in his bank (information that Janice did not have access to when she originally approved his time off request the month prior), and he will be seeing that reflected in his paycheck.
  • David experiences an emotional response to this blunder, causing his own disengagement that begins affecting his co-workers surrounding him. For all intents and purposes, the day is lost.

Did you feel your temperature rise as you were reading about Janice’s bi-weekly payroll experience? Perhaps her story is similar to your own. With a trusted time and attendance provider like nettime solutions, you’ll spend less time struggling with your paper payroll, so you and your team can now focus on the strategic initiatives and mission-critical responsibilities of your business.

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