Are you one of those employees who spend a few hours at work chatting with friends or posting your opinions on social networking sites? Well, watch out because clocking in systems are never far away from spoiling your party. Online chat, social networking sites and online stores have turned out to be employers worst nightmare; not least because many of them are paying their workers and consultants for hours spent on non-work related activities. This can be costly, especially for small and medium sized organisations; and then came the clocking in systems. These were designed to turn tables against sloppy employees.

With clocking in systems, employees can keep track of the time put in for an organisation, especially for online tasks. And for even those employees that do not use a PC in their day-to-day activities, clocking in systems can be useful in collecting data. Clocking in systems largely navigate around ethical issues associated with the more audacious computer monitoring software. The latter go the whole hog of tracking what the employee does online and which sites he/she visits. The difference is that with clocking in systems, the employee is constantly mindful of his/her obligations to the organisation. The computer monitoring software, on the other hand relies more on the employee’s fear that someone is watching.

What are the benefits of clocking in systems?

Accurate time keeping by employees is the most obvious benefit for using clocking in systems, increasing efficiency for the business. By default, this also helps reduce the workload for the organisations’ HR department, who now having much less on their plate, are in a position to come up with better employee management systems.

Moreover, the HR managers can easily get verifiable employee data using clocking in systems, as well as extra tools for schedule management for every employee on the payroll. This data can be used to scheduling purposes for the staff for breaks, holidays and even overtime allowable. With clocking in systems, it is possible to pinpoint any employee lateness and/or absenteeism with ease.

There is almost an overwhelming urge for employees to overstate the hours that they have put in especially when using a manual time tracking system. This is known as time theft. Clocking in systems can dramatically reduce time theft, as workers do not have all the time to think about the hours they have worked. Excel time sheets give the worker the opportunity to reflect upon the time factor, perhaps taking into consideration personal financial needs.

Not all time theft is deliberate, like when workers round off the number of hours worked or prolong a break to last longer than originally scheduled. But when one considers the implications of paying for "free" 15 minutes extra per day throughout the year, the importance of clocking in systems becomes even more apparent.

Clocking in systems- Is it Necessary to Break the Bank?

There are options available in the market for clocking in systems for nearly all kinds of businesses, from organisations with just a few employees to those with thousands of employees. The cost is usually guided by the size of the employees involved. The higher the number of employees, the higher the costs of clocking in system. For instance, for companies with around 1-50 employees, clocking in systems packages will only set back such a company around £500. With all the benefits of clocking in systems like we have seen, the benefits would seem to outweigh the costs.