Developing an Attendance Management System For Employees: Its Cost, Features and Business Model

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With the great influence of technology, working cultures have not remained the same now. The traditional 9 to 5 jobs have been replaced with flexible working hours. And further, in the wake of covid, flexible working cultures have turned into remote working and hybrid office patterns.

In such hustling bustling working scenarios- tracking, storing and managing employee data with manual practices becomes a tedious task for organizations. With the changing work cultures, more and more businesses are inclining toward technologically activated work settings that provide better control of employee discipline and enable you to keep track of their performance.

Moreover, the only concern of implementing digital attendance systems is to get an insight into employee movements, but also to help you ease enforcement. Different nations and departments have their own set of administrative requirements for working hours, wages and vacations. That is where well-planned attendance management systems are taking center stage and help you keep track of the information above.

Wondering how attendance management systems are different from traditional employee management systems? If yes, then before hiring a mobile app development company to customize an AMS solution, you need to understand the concept and take a sneak peek at how it is a better business solution in modern times.

Understanding the Concept of Automated Attendance Systems and How They Are Different From Manual solutions

An automated attendance system is a system that saves and tracks the status of each employee. Being integrated with various modern features and functionalities, it empowers organizations with a simple digital platform that makes it far easier to manage the attendance of the employees, especially in large enterprises. Apart from bringing transparency to employee records, it can also prevent unwanted movements of employees and unauthorized entry.

Each department is defined with its own logins and the majority of those systems work on the basis of face detection and other recognition algorithms that automatically detect an employee when using a webcam or a device camera. By using such an automated attendance management system, you can easily generate weekly, monthly or yearly employee reports. By introducing this system, you will receive significant benefits that were lacking with the manual attendance management System as mentioned below.

How Has Automated Attendance Management System Revolutionized the Traditional Attendance Systems?

There is no doubt in this fact that technology-driven attendance management systems can automate the entire employee records and create a central hub for accessing data. Still here’s how they act differently…

• Enhance Employee Productivity and Saves Money

By implementing an automated attendance system, you can easily cut down unnecessary movements of your employees ultimately resulting in enhanced employee performance. With some monitoring systems in place, employees are forced to complete the task within the given deadline. This in turn will influence your company’s profile positively as well. Also, the company will witness less employee absenteeism and an enhanced payroll process in time.

• Provide Accurate Attendance Records

With manual attendance tracking, providing false data is a common practice that leads to inaccurate data. They might add extra hours of working to the attendance sheet which may charge overtime wages. By hiring an app development company to custom tailor your attendance system, you can bring transparency to the employee attendance data. Moreover, you no longer have to worry about such costly miscalculations or errors.

• Record All Employee Data Automatically

With the integration of an automated attendance management system, you don’t have to overthink the attendance task. Right from punch-in to punch-out, employee performance to absenteeism, it records everything. Collecting and storing employee data can turn into an automated process with an automated attendance system. With this system, you can easily analyze the stored data and determine how many hours they have worked.

• Easy To Integrate

Customizing an attendance system with various integrations as per the need of your organization’s attendance policies is really easier. All you need is to hire a software development company that has skills and experience in creating attendance systems that offer features like Biometric and swipe systems.

• Reduced Admin Load

With collective automated employee data, there is no need of spending hours manually calculating the working hours of the employees. Placing automated attendance systems in the workplace will eliminate the need for manual work on attendance and help you utilize time for managing other operations.

If you are really impressed with these advantages of implementing an automated attendance system and curiously looking for an app development company that can help you build a solution that streamlines the attendance management process and ensure a quality solution. Then here, we are sharing some important tips that help you develop a successful employee time tracking and attendance management app.

How To Create A Successful Employee Time Tracking and Attendance Management App?

Undoubtedly, there are a number of employee time tracking and performance analyzing softwares available in the market. But before turning to those applications or ERP systems, its crucial to remember that not all time and attendance management solutions will have exactly what your business needs.

Whether you are looking to implement a very basic version or want to implement software that automates everything and integrates systems that automates everything, you need to hire an app development company that can customize the application that fits to your business needs. Apart, to ensure that your application work flawlessly and handle the complexity of the work, you’ll need to consider the following features in the context of what your business needs and then build a software that offer these features

Most Essential Features and Functionalities To Consider in Time and Attendance Management System

• Employee Signup: Allow users to sign up the app using the credentials generated by the organizations. By signing up an app with a unique employee ID, it becomes feasible for organizations to track and manage the data of each employee without any error.
• Biometrics: To make your attendance system work flawlessly, it is important to include the feature of biometrics to monitor real punch-in and punch-out activities of the employees. With the implementation of this feature, organizations will have better control over buddy punching and minimize the risk of time-theft.
• Facial-Recognition: Keeping in mind the COVID-19 scenario, integrating the face recognition feature in your employee attendance system has become an important consideration. Today, facial recognition solutions have become a more favorable feature than using fingerprint biometric.
• Payroll Integration Support: It can be one of the best ways to improve the efficiency by integrating your time and attendance systems with a payroll feature. This can be achieved using an attendance system that works with your existing cloud payroll software.
• Cloud-Based Support: With a cloud-based solution, employers and employees can access their systems from anywhere, anytime. Adding a cloud-based support to your employee time and attendance system that eliminates the need for constant updates when there will be an addition to the team.
• Workforce Management: The most potential way to manage your employees is by having a system that can help you keep track of employers and enables you to gather all such information in one place.
• Electronic Timesheets: Automated attendance management systems have successfully replaced the traditional paper spreadsheets and allow you to maintain accurate employee records. To integrate this feature, you can hire a mobile app developer that can make your app work smoothly. Whether it be tracking holidays, overtime, and other complex time sheets circumstances. Electronic timesheets are accessible and make employee attendance reporting far simpler.
• Managing Shift Schedules: Adding scheduling flexibility to your work becomes easier by implementing this feature in your employee time and attendance management system. Using this feature, organizations can have better control over their staff management and allow employers to give their input and make changes on the go.
• Tracking Overtime: Having an overtime tracking feature in your attendance systems will make it easier to comply with the latest guidelines on how much you need to pay to employees. You can easily evaluate the extra working hours of each employee by weekly auto-generating reports.
• Simple and Easy To Use Interface: Make sure your employee time tracking and attendance management system has a simple interface and attractive interface that is easy to get started. Make sure, you don’t have to put long hours in training employees for accessing this module.
• Reporting Functionalities: This is one of the most important functions of a good attendance system that allows you to generate automated reports based on preferred dates. This feature of your employee time tracking system will help you track employee’s schedules and simplify payroll calculations for employers.
• Push Notifications: Let your app send alerts to employees when they fail to clock in for the breaks or missed clocking out in a hurry to exit the office at the end of the workday. Moreover, managers/employees will be notified about these abnormalities via auto-generated warnings and allow organizations to make efficient actions.

Knowing all such basic yet advanced features of developing employee time and attendance management apps, many of you are excited to know how much does it cost you to create an app.

While determining the app development cost is one of the most serious concerns of organizations, before getting deep into understanding the app development cost, it is important to know about the technologies that you can use for development.

What Tech Stacks and App Development Team Required For Creating Employee Time Tracking App?

Employee time tracking apps are not just about tracking employee working hours. In fact there are much more complex tasks that they handle. While the sole reason for implementing these systems is to automate the employee attendance, keep track of their performance, storing data on clouds, managing payroll, offering onboarding tools, performance management, succession planning and more. Though these systems are handling complex tasks, to make it work flawlessly, you need to ensure that you are using the right technologies for the app development.

With the great innovation and advancement in technologies, now organizations have multiple choices of technologies to be integrated in the app development process. But going with the advanced technologies will quickly lift up the budget, but you never want to compromise the performance. By hiring a software development company, you can create a mobile app that works flawlessly. The experts can help you implement unique methodologies and technologies that assist in creating a strong backend and make your app work like a well oiled machine.

• Programming language: Java/Kotlin (Android), Objective C/ Swift(iOS)
• Cron: To handle time-based job scheduler
• AWS RDS: To manage database
• AWS S3: For object storage
• AWS SQS: To handle sequencing service
• AWS Lambda: For running codes without servers
• AWS Step Functions: Build Distributed app using visual workflows.
• Amazon EC2: A perfect web service that provides you a secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.
• Elastic Search: It is an open-source distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of solving the growing number of use cases.
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service: A fully managed, scalable and secure Elasticsearch service.
• DocumentDB: offering Amazon DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility.
• Kibana: Your interface into the Elastic Stack
• REST API: Ensuring seamless state transfer
• PHP Framework: Software and libraries on the PHP programming language.
• IaC: Infrastructure as Code
• Terraform: Open source infrastructure as code software tool

Now the question is how to get started with the development process? Whether you are looking to build an app from scratch or looking forward to migrating it from one platform to another, you need an excellent development team including Business Analyst, project manager, app developer, app tester and UI/UX designer that can handle the complexity of the project and ensure you quality solution.

Now the major question left is how much does it cost to build an employee time and attendance management app for your business.

How Much Will It Cost To Develop An Employee Time Tracking App For Your Business?

Estimating the cost of developing an employee time tracking and management app is a challenging task even for the experienced app developers especially when they are unaware about your business requirements. If you are eyeing up the average cost to build a time tracking app then one thing that you need to keep in mind is the complexity of the app and how much integration you will be required in the ETM system (Employee Time Management).

If you are curiously looking for the app development cost, then you need to keep in mind such important cost affecting factors that can affect the budget and timeline.

Majorly, these factors are including:

• The complexity of the app structure;
• Choice of Operating system to launch an app;
• Features and Functionalities to be included in the app;
• UI/UX design and its structure;
• Quality assurance and app testing;
• Technology requirements and advancements
• App development team and its hourly cost.

These are the few major cost influencing factors to consider while developing an app. If it comes to a conclusion then it will be fair enough to say that the average cost of developing an employee time tracking system will revolve around USD20,000 to USD25,000+ for each platform. But before you make any decision, keep in mind that these cost estimations can go up and down depending upon the complexity of your project requirements. Therefore, we always recommend booking a free consultation to make an informed decision and get the real estimations.

Ending Note

With the increasing flexibility in the work culture, it is becoming highly important to consider implementing automated employee time and attendance management systems in place. The simple purpose of implementing these solutions is to automate the time management system and empower businesses with a well defined platform that enables them to track employee’s performance.

So if you want to be sure that your organization has a similar solution in place, then you can hire a mobile app development company that helps you implement the best systems offering enhanced employee experience and improve business productivity. Since employees are your valuable asset, it is important to have such technology driven systems in place that help you monitor employee time and attendance and enables you to manage payroll.

So if you are an independent firm, looking for the software development company that assists you from design to development to deployment then you can contact us or drop a query below.