Reasons Small Businesses Should Automate Their Time Tracking

You may have launched your small business for any number of reasons: a passion you wanted to pursue, or the freedom that comes with being your own boss. Chances are a love for payroll management wasn’t what inspired you to open up shop, yet there are countless tasks small business owners must juggle to succeed, time tracking included.

This is where automated time tracking systems like TimeTrakGO come in. Automated time trackers are easy-to-use systems with features ranging from simple accountability to real-time reporting, and they remove the need to track time by hand. Here are three reasons to automate your time tracking.

1. Enjoy a More Efficient Process

An automated time tracking system lets small businesses spend less time on mundane payroll processes. Manually collecting and calculating employee time eats away at valuable labor hours. Automated time tracking reduces that tedious work and gives you a central database for your time and attendance information.

Automated time tracking systems can also be accessed from a computer or smartphone, so employees can track their own time while you focus on other things. Approvals move faster too: instead of staff interrupting your day to get a time card signed off, the process runs in the background while still producing a timely, accurate paycheck.

2. Save Money by Eliminating Errors

You and your staff are only human. If you’re manually reporting employee time and attendance information, you’ll likely make a mistake at some point, and even with the best intentions, it’s hard to stay accurate when you’re transferring numbers from paper time cards into a spreadsheet. Those mistakes can be costly: you could overpay staff by miscalculating hours, or lose time fixing errors after the fact.

Automating time tracking improves time card accuracy and protects your bottom line. Removing manual data transfer, and automatically applying exceptions like tardies and absences, means more accurate records with fewer steps to get there.

3. Increase Productivity While Decreasing Costly Overtime

Automated employee time tracking gives you a clear picture of hours worked, paid time off, and unplanned overtime. If overtime is a recurring struggle in your business, the timekeeping method may be part of the problem. Traditional paper time cards or handwritten timesheets are usually only turned in once per pay period, and by then it’s too late to act on an employee running excessive overtime.

Automated time tracking systems that combine hours already worked with future scheduled hours can flag likely overtime before it happens, giving you a chance to adjust the schedule instead of finding out about the cost on payday.