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The global workforce is being increasingly dominated by a few countries. In many of these countries, companies find it difficult to keep track of their employees’ time and attendance. This leads to major losses in productivity and profitability for the company as well as an increase in lawsuits from frustrated workers who are owed unpaid wages or overtime pay. With blockchain technology on the rise, how can employers be sure they’re paying out appropriately?
The “how to track employee time and attendance” is a process that many companies use. The process can be done manually or through software.
Learning how to measure employee time might help you avoid overpaying and underpaying fines. A timesheet template, a time clock, and other tools may be used to keep track of employee attendance. Whatever method you choose, make sure you have an up-to-date list of personnel, document start and stop timings, and follow all relevant labor rules.
Consider utilizing When I Work if you’re presently tracking your workers’ work hours using pen and paper and want to upgrade while still saving money. Employees may use the app on their phones to clock in and out, or use a time clock if you like. The program is free for up to 75 workers, and it interfaces with a variety of payroll providers. You can join up in minutes.
When I’m At Work
1. Make a list of all of your current employees.
You’ll always need to build and maintain an accurate list of current workers, regardless of any process intricacies with how you manage employee time worked (on paper, in a spreadsheet, or within time and attendance software). If you fire an employee tomorrow, don’t wait until the end of the month to remove them off your payroll. You can give them a paycheck by mistake if you’ve automated their payroll time tracking in any manner or neglect to delete them later, which can happen when things become hectic.
Sort by Employee ID.
Maintaining a list of current workers is a good beginning step toward monitoring time spent, but organization is crucial. The most common way used by many employers is to do so by name. It is, however, safer to issue each employee an employee ID.
If you have an employee with a popular name, such as Mike Smith, there’s a strong possibility you’ll recruit someone with the same name; this might result in employees mistakenly exchanging work hours, which can be a pain. Also, if you rehire an ex-employee that you failed to remove at a later date, you’re more likely to create multiple entries for the same person.
It’s simple to assign an employee ID. You may begin anywhere between 1 and 1,000, however 1 makes more sense, such as 001. Just make sure you don’t skip any numbers once you’ve assigned the first one. Don’t re-use an employee’s ID after they’ve been fired. If you ever have a payroll audit, having numerous workers with the same employee ID number, including current and former employees, might make things more difficult.
You’ll need to include this number everywhere you save employee information. Create an Employee ID column if you’re using a spreadsheet. If you use time tracking software, it may automatically allocate it to you. If you must input manually, double-check that the ID you enter corresponds to the proper employee.
Admins may assign employee IDs to each employee using time tracking software like When I Work; workers do not have the ability to change this number.
Each employee should be classified as either exempt or non-exempt.
A label indicating whether they are exempt or nonexempt workers should also be included in your personnel list. Exempt employees are usually salaried, though not always, and are not paid overtime. Because the work hours for which they are compensated are frequently consistent week after week, determining how to monitor employee time for this group is easier. Nonexempt employees are frequently paid on an hourly basis, and their working hours are more likely to fluctuate based on your company’s demands.
If you include an employee’s nonexempt vs. exempt status on your employee list, you’ll be able to easily check it if you have any questions. It’s also good practice that will make future audits go more smoothly. Auditors check for this to verify you’re not breaching any laws by failing to log employee time for nonexempt employees who are required to be compensated for overtime hours worked beyond 40 per week.
2. Keep track of employee work hours on a daily basis.
Some businesses don’t have clear guidelines regarding how often employees’ work hours should be documented; they believe they’re OK as long as they have a total by the payroll date, which is occasionally weekly or bimonthly. However, if you’re not using software or a free online time card calculator, we recommend that you or your staff keep track of these hours on a daily basis.
When you allow yourself time to sleep, it’s easy to forget what happened throughout the workday. Employees may easily inflate their hours without you realizing it or having a mechanism to check them if their work time deviates from the timetable on a frequent basis. If you don’t keep daily time records, you’re putting your company at danger. Daily overtime requirements exist in several places, such as California. Employees are entitled to double-time compensation if they work more than 12 hours in a daily, regardless of weekly work hours.
Record Start & End Times
Make careful to track the time your employees start and end working in order to accurately record their work hours. You have the option of recording the exact time or rounding it to the closest quarter hour as required by federal labor standards. For example, a beginning time of 10:07 may be legally recorded as 10:00, while a time of 10:08 can only be rounded up to 10:15. If you choose to round, keep in mind that rounding down when you should be rounding up might result in overtime pay violations.
Lunch & Rest Breaks
Unless you employ kids, you must account for them if you provide lunch and rest periods to your employees, which is voluntary under federal law. Because lunch or meal breaks are often unpaid, you may ignore this time when keeping track of employee time. Make sure to record it for transparency, indicating that 12:30 p.m. to 1 p.m. is adequate for a lunch break.
A lunch break is not the same as a rest break. Rest periods are frequently shorter, ranging from five to twenty minutes compared to 30 minutes to an hour for lunch breaks, and should be compensated. Before establishing any relevant rules, check your state’s regulations since some jurisdictions require you to provide rest breaks after workers work a set number of hours, such as 10 minutes for each four-hour work period.
When you use a time tracking program like When I Work, you can export your workers’ time data to a spreadsheet and evaluate items like lunch and meal breaks.
Shifts that are split
Tracking time for employees who work Shifts that are split is similar to tracking time for employees who work consecutive hours. A split shift is when an employee’s daily schedule is split into two or more separate parts of the day.
They may work four hours in the morning (9 a.m. to 1 p.m.) and four hours in the evening, for example (5 p.m. to 9 p.m.). The four-hour break in between the two shifts is not considered rest or lunch time since it is an eight-hour workweek. You don’t have to pay them or even keep track of them. Include the start and finish timings for each shift, as well as any lunch breaks that occur during those periods.
3. Add up the number of hours you worked each day.
You’ll need to add your workers’ work hours before each pay period so you know how much they should be paid. This is something that a decent employee time monitoring program will take care of for you. If you must manually enter the time, bear in mind that all minutes must be converted for payroll reasons. For example, 10 minutes should be shown as.17 of an hour. This indicates that from 8:04 a.m. to 4:15 p.m., you worked for a total of 8.18 hours, or eight hours and eleven minutes.
Paid and unpaid vacations
If an employee takes PTO, unpaid time off, or sick leave, you should keep track of it day by day. We recommend maintaining a thorough record of when an employee requested time off. Use a time off request form that includes the date, reason, and whether the time off is paid or unpaid, among other details.
If you have any questions about the dates later, be sure to note your consent on the time off request form.
You should track paid vacation and sick leave hours and mark them correctly so that you know to include them with the employee’s paid work time for the week. Check your state’s paid sick leave legislation for further information. It’s also a good idea to keep track of unpaid leave so you can keep track of an employee’s attendance patterns. Make sure it’s marked as unpaid so you don’t pay for it by mistake.
Special Circumstances That Make Adding Daily Hours Difficult
Calculating the total work hours should be straightforward if you or your staff keep track of their time in an orderly manner. However, some circumstances might make things a bit more difficult. If your workers’ work structure differs from the typical method, such as if they work from home, you may need to consider additional elements, such as their real working hours vs. the regular timetable you establish for them.
Employees who work from home
Employees who work from home are more likely to deal with distractions in their work environment, especially if they’re operating at home. Everyone’s circumstances are different, but this can range from tending to their children’s random needs throughout the day to communicating with the delivery guy. Recording work time of 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. may not be entirely accurate. Some employees may work later to make up for distractions during the day, and some may just fall short on their expected work hours each week.
If your workers are nonexempt, it’s critical that they express their work hours as precisely as possible; otherwise, you’ll have to pay overtime if they work more than 40 hours per week. Consider having them keep a spreadsheet of their job duties. They can keep track of how much time they spent on each thing from beginning to end. You should urge them to use a stopwatch or a timer app to get the most exact results.
Employees on Business Trips
Many service professionals have direct contact with customers. They may even go to their clients’ locations in certain situations (think bookkeepers, consultants, and so on). Travel time must be counted as work time under federal laws. All you have to do if your employee travels during their usual workday is make sure the time isn’t deducted from their overall work hours. If the journey occurs late in the day, extending their typical working hours, make sure they log it and inform you.
Just a reminder that travel time from their home base to the business and back does not count. You should evaluate the travel time from the work site to the home office vs. the travel time from the job site to their house if an employee goes straight home after leaving a job site. If the time they spend commuting home is longer than the time they would have spent if they had returned to work, you will only be charged for the extra time.
Let’s pretend Jenny’s commute from work to home takes her 45 minutes. She concluded her day at a client’s office, though, and instead of returning to the office, she went home. It took an hour to drive from the client’s workplace to her house. You just have to pay for 45 minutes, not 60.
Employees Who Are Paid on a Project-By-Project Basis
When you need to manage employee time per project, you’ll need a quick approach to keep track of how much time they’ve put in. It won’t assist if you don’t know how to distribute the eight hours they worked today. If your team is manually recording time, you should urge them to utilize a stopwatch, however an online time tracking program with time tracking built-in would be preferable. They may reset it if they transition to a new project.
4. Compile a list of weekly work hours.
You may summarize your workers’ work time for each day of the pay period after you’ve totaled it. Some workers may work a conventional 40-hour week, while others may work just 25. You must examine relevant federal and state overtime requirements if any workers work more than 40 hours per week; employees who work overtime are entitled to a higher pay rate for the extra hours worked.
Total number of hours worked on a regular basis
When separating normal work hours from extra hours, the term “regular” is often used. As a general rule, any hours fewer than 40 hours are considered ordinary hours. This is, of course, based on federal legislation. Check your state’s regulations since normal hours may be classified differently depending on the total number of hours worked in a day vs a week.
Total number of hours worked in overtime
Overtime hours are defined as any hours worked in excess of 40 in a seven-day workweek, according to federal laws. If one of your workers works 45 hours a week, five of those hours should be classified as overtime, while the other 40 hours should be classified as regular hours. This is especially significant for nonexempt and hourly workers. Any overtime hours must be paid at the time and a half overtime rate. Depending on your state, this rate might go up to twice the standard pay rate and cover hours spent outside of the eight-hour workday.
Most time tracking software, such as When I Work, enables you to establish overtime alerts, which will tell you when workers are approaching their weekly overtime hours.
Confirmation of Total Hours Worked by Employee
It goes without saying that keeping track of employee time and attendance is a delicate task. It is linked to the remuneration of workers. As a result, it is a potential conflict hotspot. Include a section in your time tracking system that enables your employees to validate the time you are authorizing to prevent any concerns with the amount of hours you add to their paychecks.
An employee signature will suffice if you’re utilizing a timesheet or spreadsheet. If you use time tracking software, it will almost certainly have a self-service HR site with an integrated computerized clearance procedure, so you won’t have to do anything additional. Of course, if you modify any of the work hours they enter in the system, make sure they have a chance to evaluate it. It’s also a good idea to have a record of their agreement to the adjustment.
Employee Time and Attendance Tracking Best Practices
You may make monitoring employee time simpler by following certain best practices. These include anything from automating as much of the procedure as possible to staying up to speed on all relevant labor rules.
- Before paying workers, make sure they sign off on all time and attendance paperwork.
- To guarantee you have the most precise time data and to automate the process, use a time tracking tool—even free time clocks or software will suffice.
- Rather of keeping track of work hours on paper, use a spreadsheet.
- Examine the federal and state rules that regulate employee time that must be paid and time that may be unpaid.
- Any occurrences that impact employee work time that are out of the ordinary should be documented.
- Keep track of your working hours on a daily basis.
- Organize employee time sheets with relevant information such as employee IDs, names, and project IDs.
When it comes to monitoring employee time, accuracy should be your first priority. The next step is to develop an efficient method that saves you time and typically goes hand in hand with accuracy.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on Employee Time Tracking
When determining how to measure employee time, you may have the following questions. Because it might be perplexing, we’ve addressed the most common questions we’ve heard from companies.
Is it necessary for me to keep track of time worked by paid employees?
It is debatable. Although the majority of paid workers are exempt, some are nonexempt. If your paid workers are nonexempt, you should keep track of their working hours. Nonexempt workers are protected by federal law, despite the fact that they are routinely compensated for the same amount of hours each pay period. They are unable to work overtime (more than 40 hours in a workweek) without receiving additional compensation.
If someone forgets to punch in or out, what documentation do I need?
It’s a good idea to have someone sign a paper verifying the time that should be acknowledged if they neglect to clock in or out. Keep a copy of this in their personnel file in case the employee or an auditor has any queries.
What if I mistakenly identify an individual as salaried when they should have been classified as hourly?
You won’t face any legal consequences if you misclassify an employee as salaried vs. hourly, as long as you paid them the proper amount and deducted the necessary taxes. When you blend exempt and nonexempt categorization categories, it creates a problem.
Because many firms categorize salaried staff as exempt and hourly employees as nonexempt, combining these payment kinds might imply that you also mixed these categories. This is the point at which it becomes a legal issue. Because nonexempt workers must be paid overtime, misclassifying them in this way might result in unpaid taxes and labor law infractions, as well as costs and penalties.
Conclusion
It’s a huge choice to figure out how you’ll manage staff attendance and time worked, but it’s vital. The time tracking procedure will be same regardless of whatever tools you use or if you utilize pen and paper (there are better free choices out there). You’ll need a system for keeping track of employee labor hours and adding them up each day. This is essential even if you utilize a tool, however it will most likely be done automatically and in the background.
Consider When I Work if you’re looking for a simple method to go from a manual time tracking system to one that’s more automated but still free. You may use it for free if your company has 75 workers. Employees may clock in and out using their mobile devices, and you also have the option of installing a time clock.
When I’m At Work
“Best way to track employee hours” is a question that many people have asked. The “best way to track employee hours” will be discussed in this blog.
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