Attendance Management Software

What is Attendance Management Software?

Attendance management software tracks and optimizes the working hours of employees while keeping a record of wages and salaries paid. Think of it as a more genial ‘Mouth of Sauron’ keeping a close eye on how much time employees spend on the job. With top attendance management software, you can automate the payroll process, comply with government regulations, and ensure employees receive correct recompense for overtime.

Popular Biometric attendance management software has found a home in schools, colleges and other educational institutes as well. With this system, you can keep an eye on the comings and goings of students, teachers and other school staff. It also has the nifty feature of sending an alert to parents when their child is missing from a class.

Time and Attendance management system also helps minimize errors in bookkeeping, design graphical representations, while integrating financial analytics, business intelligence analytics and HRMS software. You can also capture attendance directly from the employee self-service portal (ESS). To prevent the misuse of ESS, you can program it so that attendance would be marked only from a specific login IP address designated to each employee.

Who Needs Attendance Management software?

If you’re running any kind of business, you must have employees & staff. And for tracking their working hours as well as the time they enter & leave the office, you require an employee attendance management system. It doesn’t matter whether you run a clothing store, fast-food outlet, schools, hotels, or an MNC; you need an application to track the comings and goings of your employees. The basic purpose of any time and attendance software is an accurate calculation of the number of hours employees have worked.

Why you Need Attendance Management System Software?

The best attendance software in India is essential for businesses. There’re no ifs or buts about it. Whether you run multiple shifts during the day or have third-party payroll employees, you need to be able to calculate the exact wages you owe to your staff. The same goes for overtime too. You can even document the time employees have spent at their work station. Also, you can check their punctuality levels by viewing whether they tend to show up late or have a habit of leaving a little earlier than the stipulated working hours. By using the best attendance management software, you can also see the number of leaves taken by employees and plan your schedule accordingly to ensure that work doesn’t get affected.

Modules in the Best Time and Attendance Management Software

The best attendance management system software comes equipped with several modules that help HR managers complete their daily work routine efficiently. Let’s find out more about them:

1. Job Costing Management System: Through the job costing module, you can allot employee working hours to a project, a customer or an activity. By integrating job costing management into your employee attendance management system, you can easily calculate cost prices, send invoices to customers and implement a cost accounting system.
2. Hr Time and Attendance System: Get the most out of your workers through human resource planning by drawing up optimised work schedules. This module enables your HR to consider account workloads, employee skills, planned absences, as well as regulatory, personal and collective constraints. So, you won’t be in for any surprises (unscheduled leaves, sick leaves, vacation leaves, etc.) and will be able to meet your deadlines in time.
3. HR Time Tracking System: Generate customizable reports (w.r.t absenteeism rate, change in absenteeism by gender/age/department, level of seriousness for employee accidents and accident frequency rate) to help your HR department.
4. Attendance and Leave Management System: Apart from monitoring employee presence, attendance management systems help manage leaves as well. Employee leaves can be due to sickness, paid time off, personal emergency or planned vacation, what matters is that the manager can check which employee is at work or not, in a jiffy! He can also view if an employee is due to any overtime pay or not.
5. Payroll Attendance and Integration: This module is available in most of the trusted attendance software. Your payroll should be integrated into a seamless fashion with your attendance management system so that no errors occur while processing employee payroll. This solution provides accurate attendance data so that the salary and benefits due to the employee can be calculated without a hitch.

Features of Biometric Attendance System:

1. Remote Attendance System – If your company offers employees the facility of working from home, then this feature is a dream come true for you. You can track employee attendance with a remote clocking feature that brings accountability without being restrictive. This is a win-win for the company management as employees can simply clock-in without being physically present in the office or the education establishment.
2. Assign Shifts – Markets are flooded with advanced attendance system software through which HR managers can effortlessly assign shifts to employees. It can be done easily even if the employees are working in different departments making shift management a confusion-free endeavor.
3. Simple Attendance Registration – You can track attendance registration of all employees in your company to maintain workflow. The majority of Attendance Software India is backed by a simple attendance registration interface. You can also ensure accuracy and transparency in registering employee attendance is maintained at all costs through an easily manageable application.
4. Overtime Management System – The best attendance management software keeps an accurate record of employee and their accounting details over time. You also receive insights with respect to the distribution of tasks among employees. Through this solution, you’re able to comply with overtime laws of the land.
5. Best Time and Attendance Management System – Through attendance management software solutions, users have the option of self-registering their attendance by logging in the application. The solution along with other institute management tools maintains a complete log of employee attendance for every individual employee. It also helps people in administration tasks maintain records for reporting and future use.
6. Elimination of Missed Punches – By moving with the times you can completely eradicate human errors and manipulation. How? Punch clocks could be easily hoodwinked by an employee who returned from his lunch and forgot to punch in. Or that employee’s friend could punch-in for him (buddy punching) leading to inaccuracy in work timings. The manager will have to verify the correct punch-in/punch-out time of the employee. Modern attendance management system sends alerts to the manager informing them of a missed punch solving the problem before it turns into an issue.
7. Flexible Employee Attendance Scheduling: Certain businesses offer their employees the flexibility to start and end their office working hours at different times. For these firms, attendance management software helps create custom schedules for rosters. You’ll receive alerts and notifications pertaining to overtime, poor attendance, etc.
8. Fingerprint Scanner Attendance System:  A fingerprint scanner can detect placed fingers and performs equally strong even if you have wet and dry fingers. It comes with an amazing feature that lets you scan finger prints providing you optimum security and safety.
9. Biometric Attendance Machine - This Biometric attendance machine is a real-time attendance machine that lets you monitor your employees in and out timings. It can also detect the face, palm, retina, fingerprints and more. It is a highly qualified attendance monitoring system.

Advantages of Attendance Management System

The best attendance software offers multiple benefits to simplify employee attendance tracking. Here's a few of them:

1. Early Detection of Potential Attendance Issues: One of the primary reasons for tracking employee attendance is to identify and discover any issues like absenteeism, eliminate time clock abuse, and augment employee productivity, which may need addressing. The best attendance software helps ensure that employees do not end up abusing their scheduled time off, arrival, leaving or break times. This is handy when monitoring planned and unplanned absences, and while enforcing attendance policies. One may think, why even bother because on the surface it may seem like a few minutes, however, it all adds up.
2. Create a happy working environment with prompt time-off requests: By prompt handling of time-off requests, you can keep your workforce happy and motivated. This also has the effect of keeping your employees focused at work as they may find it a tad bit difficult to concentrate on work if they’re waiting for you to approve their vacation/time off request. Through attendance tracking and Document Management Software, it’s easier to review and approve planned absences. Employees can go on with their work without the uncertainty of unapproved leave hanging over their heads.
3. Make better hiring and scheduling decisions with real-time analysis of productivity: Real-time availability of attendance data helps in pointing out where improvements can be made to augment productivity. By collecting data, you can gain a realistic view of productivity levels to be able to make better hiring and scheduling decisions. Sifting through attendance data analysis can help reveal trends for payroll savings. By aligning these practices with business goals and objectives, you can stay on target and course correct if necessary, having considered the imbalances in hours worked.
4. Lower absenteeism with better employee attendance tracking: Excessive absenteeism can have a hugely adverse impact on a company. Through good management and control of absenteeism, you can limit its effect on the overall cost borne by the business. You can achieve this by recording employee absences through an attendance system software along with the Leave Management Software to resolve any discrepancies which may crop up. This helps in addressing unusual spikes in absenteeism quickly and painlessly. If you don’t, be prepared to tackle inaccurate or incomplete records. This has the negative impact of making it difficult to keep track of when, and how often, employees miss work.
5. Attendance tracking ensures employees get paid in full and on time: By tracking employee attendance, you can ensure that employees get paid on time and in full. Since you have access to their exact working hours, it leaves no room for any employee to be over or underpaid. Employers can also calculate overtime and pay accordingly. In addition, you can find out the work hours of different departments. This helps in identifying the employees/departments who are putting in consistent over time. By tracking these patterns, you can improve your decision-making process with respect to redistribution of workloads.
6. Remove the bottleneck of one person entering data for the entire staff: Are you encumbered by one designated person entering time for an entire company? The time to fret is over. By employing an attendance management solution, you can track employee attendance and improve the flow and accuracy of data. Apart from keeping track of their daily working hours, employees can also view how much time off they have accrued or used.
7. Scheduling vacations become a piece of cake with attendance tracking software: No matter how loyal, blessed with good health and motivated your employees are, they would want some vacation time for themselves. By having a centralized place for vacation schedules, you can simplify the process of ensuring employees get vacation days on their preferred dates. Deploying an attendance management system has the added benefit of giving managers an advanced notice, so they can prepare for planned absences. Plus, managers can track attendance to monitor the amount of vacation time each employee takes.
8. Data Visualization: Top of the line attendance management systems not only record the details of time and attendance but also present the data through the help of visualization tools. With the assistance of these tools, you can easily review an employee’s attendance and leave records along with any overtime they’d have worked over the past month, quarter or year. This helps the employer make a fair and accurate assessment of employees, enabling him/her to offer rewards or promotions based on performance.
9. Compliance: The best attendance software monitors employee breaks and uses that data for reporting and compliance purposes. It also sends automatic notifications if employees are abusing break privileges, recording their break patterns to match with the legislative norms of the country.
10. Mobile Functionality: The modern workforce is more likely to be scattered either working from the office, home or the field. Firms having offices in different locales also need to keep track of employee attendance. Having a mobile version of attendance system software helps to remotely track employees and clock in their working hours. These mobile applications also support GSP tracking along with location monitoring enhancing worker safety.

Free Attendance Management Software Buyer's Guide

If you’re looking to buy attendance management software, there are certain criteria which you may need to evaluate first before taking the leap. Let’s find out what you need to keep in mind before finalizing the list of attendance management software:

1. Need is the Only Truth of Life: The first step on your journey to buying attendance management software is assessment of your need. Whether you really need it or not. Do you want a core attendance management portal that takes care of your major attendance management tasks like job costing, leave management, time and attendance? Do you need an attendance management software to seamlessly integrate with your payroll software? Or you require attendance software packages that fulfil your niche requirements such as human resource planning and remote tracking of employees?
   After you’ve performed the internal assessment, you’ve to choose the best attendance management software according to your defined needs from a list of available attendance management software.
2. To Budget or Not to Budget: The beauty of attendance software in India which are currently available is that you have several options to choose from. Options which are available at different price models. If you’re a heavy hitter, you can go for an on-premise attendance software information. If you’re working on a limited budget, you can take a monthly/yearly subscription. You also have the option of ‘pay per use’ where you pay as per the amount of bandwidth you utilise.
3. Demos – Do I Need Them or Not?: Check if the attendance management software in India offer free demos or trial version. This is especially useful if you don’t want to make a significant investment without having a look at the software first. Find out if the attendance software system fits the bill and offers the features/modules you’re looking for. After going through the demo, evaluate if you’re comfortable and willing to take the jump.
4. Don’t Forget About User Experience! (UX/UI): UI plays an important role when it comes to choosing the best attendance management software vendors. The design aesthetic of the system, how pleasing it is on the eye, its user-friendliness can swing the buyer’s decision. An exhaustive attendance software system overflowing with modules, will not overwhelm the user if it’s backed by a clean interface.

List of Best Biometric Time and Attendance Management System Companies In India

1. HR Mantra attendance software
2. Keka time and attendance software 
3. PeopleApex
4. ADP
5. TimeMate
6. OfficeTimer
7. SpectraVision
8. Zoho People
9. DICL Software
10. Marg attendance software

Time and Attendance Management Software FAQs

Q. Do I need to purchase new IT infrastructure to use attendance management software?

A. No, you don’t have to. You simply need a computer device whether it may be a tablet, mobile, laptop or a desktop, with a good internet connectivity and you’re good to go.

Q. I run a small company having just 25 employees. Do I still need to buy attendance software solutions?

A. If you are having trouble in administration, employee attendance tracking, checking employee overtime, and so on, the best attendance management software has the answer for you. Basically, it’ll make your life that bit easier. No more maintaining paper records/registers and leafing through the pages to check employee attendance for processing employee payroll.

Q. Which is better? On-premise software or cloud attendance tracking software?

A. On-premise is best suited for companies having their own IT team and dedicated infrastructure for IT applications. On the other hand, cloud-based attendance management software is ideal for firms who do not have a dedicated IT resource team. So, you save bucks right there! Plus, on-premise attendance management software requires considerable investment vis-à-vis license purchase, annual maintenance cost, etc. Top HR system solutions offer the freedom to pay on a monthly/yearly basis.

Q. Do I need to pay annual maintenance fees?

A. Annual maintenance fees is applicable only for on-premise software licences purchased by the company. If you’re paying subscription fee price for cloud attendance management software, you do not have to pay any annual subscription fees.

Q. Attendance management software have multiple modules. But I don’t need all of them. Can modules be purchased separately?

A. Yes, you can purchase modules as per your company requirements. If your primary need is to process employee salaries, choose payroll management module. Keep track of employee punch ins/outs with time and attendance management module. Keep a tab on employee leaves/vacation days/sick leaves with the leave management module. Basically, you can pick and choose which module you want and build from there or buy the full attendance software complete with all the razzle-dazzle