Attendance Management Software: 5 Best Tools + Benefits
Attendance management is so much more than just controlling employees’ presence at their workplaces. It includes a wide range of activities, from absenteeism prevention to time off scheduling and workload management.
The main challenge here is that only a small fraction of staff absences can be planned in advance. But a bigger part of schedule changes is actually last-minute. These can be tardiness due to traffic or any unexpected events, calling in sick, early departures from work, and other cases that just cannot be planned in advance.
That’s the reason why attendance management must be performed in real time. And, as a real-time process, it consumes lots of effort. However, many businesses still prefer to run it with Excel spreadsheets and similar tools and consider special automated systems redundant and hardly affordable. 💰
Let’s see why such a view is rather detrimental to your business and check out some of the best attendance management systems available on the market today.
What’s Wrong with Traditional Attendance Management Process?
1. Manual processes are prone to error 💣
The experience of many businesses and teams shows that attendance management is especially demanding when performed manually. In this case, it implies duplicated work and double-checking of data stored in different parts of the document, while requiring quick action and high attention to detail.
2. Manual attendance tracking and calculations are time-consuming ⌛
A particularly exhausting part of keeping records in spreadsheets and similar tools is manually checking every data entry and keeping the document updated. Think of logging tardiness notes received via a messenger into a spreadsheet — every day! The inability to run an attendance log in multiuser mode adds pain to the management process.
3. Without automation, the overall management costs increase 📈
Eventually, manual attendance logging systems significantly increase the cost of maintaining actual information in attendance logs and managing employees’ absences. They not only slow down work but also leave room for errors, damaging work efficiency. Automated attendance management brings many benefits to managers and teams.
5 Excellent Attendance Management Programs for Your Team
Adopting a special software tool for attendance management turns out to be a reasonable solution for a team of any size. Automation brings efficiency and a hassle-free management process. So, here we present some of the best solutions for online attendance management that any team can benefit from today:
1. actiPLANS
Key features:
- Leave management
- Work scheduling
- Automated time off accrual
- Insightful reports
- Notifications
- Mobile app
- Time tracking and iCal integrations
actiPLANS is a simple and flexible work scheduling solution with a multitude of thought-through features for leave management. It can be applied to process leave requests, analyze the use of time in your team, and plan out different custom types of work on a user-friendly visual timeline.
How does it work?
actiPLANS lets you schedule your own types of work. These can be employee shifts, project activities, corporate events, staff locations or virtually anything else you want!
After adding bespoke work types to the system, you may allocate them across the team using the visual timeline. Along with a complete list of employees, this timeline includes the info on their scheduled time off, making it easy to build your work plans around staff absences and increase schedule accuracy this way.
Your team members can also use actiPLANS as a self-scheduling tool. Each of them will have full access to their personal time off balance data. They may take it into account when planning vacations and then submit leave requests in a matter of seconds via the Leave Scheduling interface. 🚢🌴🥥
actiPLANS provides a plethora of amazing benefits for managers as well. For instance, automated time off approval makes the entire leave management process much faster and more efficient. Plus, thanks to informative reports, you can analyze the absence and attendance trends within your team and enhance decision-making.
Sign up for a free actiPLANS trial today and bring your attendance management to another level.
2. ClockIt
Key features:
- Time clock functionality
- Geolocations and geofencing
- Software integrations
- Shift scheduling
- Vacation management
- Mobile app
As a high-quality time clock software, ClockIt helps to monitor when your staff members come to work and leave it. Thanks to geolocation and geofencing features, employees’ attendance data may be submitted to the system automatically. And along with that, ClockIt includes all the necessary absence management features that allow for effortless vacation scheduling and tracking.
How does it work?
With ClockIt, your employees may punch in and out of work in multiple convenient ways: from the web, via a mobile app, using Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Chat. Besides, ClockIt offers a biometric time clock kiosk with fingerprint punch in and facial recognition features. Installing such a kiosk in the workplace is a sure method for eradicating the problem of buddy punching with utmost effectiveness. 💯
In addition to all that, ClockIt allows you to track time spent on different projects and tasks, schedule employee shifts, and manage staff absences. And by running straightforward ClockIt reports, you can analyze all this vital employee attendance data with sufficient depth.
3. All Hours
Key features:
- Time clock
- Location tracking
- Absence management
- Payroll
- Data analytics
- Mobile app
All Hours is a multifunctional attendance management software. You can implement it to schedule staff absences, process payroll, analyze employees’ attendance and track when they start and end their workdays.
How does it work?
All Hours includes a web-based version and a mobile app. And besides a manual time clock functionality, the latter comprises such handy features as geofencing and location tracking. With their help, it’s possible to capture the exact time your employees come to work and monitor how much time they spend working overall. This fosters better control over team performance and helps to ensure everything is fair and square when it comes to hourly pay calculations. 💲
Besides, the app contains a simple leave management functionality that allows employees to submit urgent time-off requests in a convenient way and makes it easy for managers to approve them.
The web version of All Hours incorporates a visual team calendar that is perfect for planning longer-term vacations for future dates. Plus, the system automatically notifies managers about new incoming leave requests and lets them analyze staff absence data via insightful reports.
4. Keka
Key features:
- Absence management
- Time tracking
- GPS tracking
- Mobile app
- Shift scheduling
- Useful integrations
Keka is a robust attendance management program that is suitable for anyone who wants to track employees’ working hours, schedule shifts and control staff absences all in one place. The solution is largely based on automation, which boosts process efficiency and simplifies team management a great deal.
How does it work?
Keka lets employees clock in and out via a web-based platform or a mobile. It also incorporates a GPS tracking feature that captures when employees show up at work automatically. Yet no matter which method you decide to use for logging your team’s attendance data, Keka will process and present it to you in the form of stats and visuals — you can check them to see how many hours a day each staff member remains productive, how frequently they are late for work, etc. 🐌
Keka’s time clock features work in perfect sync with its shift scheduling functionality that allows for flexible and comfortable work planning. For instance, you may create any preferable shift scheduling pattern and set up an automated shift rotation in the system. It will make the scheduling process less time-consuming and gives you a chance to focus on more important tasks instead.
5. sumHR
- Time clock functionality
- Time off management
- Overtime tracking
- Shift planning
- Integration with biometric devices
sumHR helps to manage employee attendance and absences in line with your unique organizational policies. It is a flexible solution with built-in automation and a multitude of handy integrations that foster a more streamlined management process.
How does it work?
sumHR can be set up using over 50 versatile absence and attendance management rules. Such a high level of configuration flexibility lets you fine-tune the system in line with your internal policies just perfectly and make sure the team complies with them without a hitch.
sumHR provides users with an extensive choice of time clock and hour tracking methods: from a browser solution and a mobile app to fingerprint punch in and facial recognition. 👨🦰
By capturing when employees come to work and leave it, the program helps managers to monitor employee punctuality, control overtime, and see how well everyone fulfills their contractual obligations. In other words, sumHR is excellent for identifying and addressing any attendance problems and high absenteeism in your team.
Main Benefits of Web-Based Attendance Management Software
1. Lots of saved time 🕒
The ability to configure complicated processes and rules (for example, for leave balance accrual) and apply individual rules to team members eliminates the need to calculate any values manually. What’s more, employees’ self-service saves time spent on communicating with managers regarding absence requests. It also means less paperwork — and more time for actual work tasks.
2. Increased accuracy ✅
A system specifically designed for handling absence requests, logging attendance, and absences, and calculating related figures eliminates human errors. This ensures more accurate payroll processing and reduces the effort spent on it.
3. Better decision-making 🧠
The system keeps all data on employees’ attendance and provides the ability to structure it logically and visually in reports and charts. This speeds up and simplifies the decision-making process regarding any aspect of attendance management: approving or rejecting leave requests, handling absenteeism or presenteeism issues, etc. The data, summarized and grouped in reports, also reveals important trends and allows to take the necessary action as soon as possible.
4. Easy visual work planning process 📅
With an attendance management software system, team and project managers stay aware of who’s in the office on each specific day. This allows them to plan workloads for future periods and distribute work accordingly.
5. Quicker leave request management process ⚡
Special procedures preset in the system for requesting leave and making a decision regarding its approval or rejection means less time spent on leave request processing and related communication. If your tool provides the ability to leave comments on requests, approvals, and rejections, it completely eliminates the email back-and-forth from the leave management process.
6. Clear and transparent absence history 📊
All data related to absences is stored in the system, so any employee can see their balances with the full list of changes made to them. This increases transparency and eliminates the risk of misunderstandings and workplace conflicts they might cause. Attendance logs can also provide justifications for managers’ decisions and actions regarding their employees’ performance.
7. Notifications on colleagues’ schedule changes 🔔
Some special software systems include tools that allow employees to inform their coworkers and managers about last-minute changes in their schedules. This is particularly convenient with mobile apps that provide a quick and easy way to let everyone on the team know you’re running late or leaving early.
Summary
Attendance management software is a time-saver for both managers and employees. In other words, it is a truly helpful solution for any business and any team. ✨
It automates routine processes, eliminates the risk of errors, provides a log of historical data, and allows to use absence data for analysis and decision-making. Basically, this kind of software increases the efficiency of attendance management, reduces the costs of work, and frees up some time for more important tasks.
