Have you ever taken a deep dive into your payroll process? There are many moving parts when it comes to ensuring hourly workers get paid for the hours they have actually worked. This is a process known as attendance matching.
What is Attendance Matching?
The process involves reviewing the schedule, reviewing time collection data, matching time scheduled to time worked, and feeding that data into your payroll system. Typically, this is a pretty manual process, with the same person/people completing every step. As you can imagine, if a company has a large workforce this can be a strenuous, time-consuming process that is very prone to errors. And unfortunately, those errors impact your bottom line.
How important is Attendance Matching?
Until now, you’ve likely considered attendance matching just another job that needs to be done to keep operations running. Well, what if we told you that attendance matching is actually an opportunity to save both time and money? With advancements in technology, it’s another area of your business that can and should be automated. First, let’s review the process of attendance matching in detail.
Time Collection
The first element of attendance matching is time collection. As you may know from our previous blogs, there are many ways to collect time data from your workforce. What many managers fail to realize is the importance of choosing a method of time collection that is not susceptible to time theft, such as buddy punching. Basically, the more accurate your time collection is, the more accurate your attendance matching will be, and the more accurate your payroll will be.
Reviewing the Schedule
Next, it is important to review the time worked by employees and compare that to the schedule. This is important to help schedulers better understand whether the schedule was accurate, or if employees worked considerably more or less than what they were scheduled for. This data should be tracked and used to improve the process around schedule creation. This also provides schedulers with an opportunity to track absences, late arrivals or early departures, and break times, all of which can often go unmissed.
Compiling the Data
Next, before you can pay your employees, you have to compile the attendance data to provide everything that is needed for payroll to be processed. This includes hours worked, overtime, vacation pay, unpaid time off, and possibly things like time in-lieu. Gathering this data for one employee alone can be time-consuming, but consider a company with 100+ employees, and you can see how easy it is for errors to occur.
Transfer Data to Payroll Provider
The final step in attendance matching is passing the data you have compiled over to your payroll provider/system. This is another opportunity for errors to occur. According to the American Payroll Association, payroll errors can cost you up to 8% of your total payroll. Payroll is already a huge expense to any company, so ensuring that your payroll is error-free is important. However, these errors often get missed due to the large volume of data to be managed. If only there was a way to prevent those errors?
Automation
Automation is the best way to improve your attendance matching process. Not only will it reduce the time and effort, but it will improve the accuracy of the data. With improved accuracy, less money is lost due to payroll errors, improving your bottom line. The best part is, that with the right software, every single step above can be automated to make your life easier.
How does it work?
With software like Celayix, automating these processes is very easy. You can even automate your scheduling process, using a feature like Autofill. Autofill can fill any open shifts on your schedule in a matter of minutes. Employees can check-in/out of a shift using the Celayix mobile app, eliminating the need for time clocks at all. The system will automatically match the check-in to the shift on the schedule.
Video: Celayix Time & Attendance Features:
For example, if an employee clocks in late, the system will automatch that clock-in to the shift, and update the shift to note that the start time was different. An alert will also be automatically sent to the supervisor to alert them to the late employee. With Celayix, these automatches take place for everything attendance related including check-ins, break starts, break ends, and check-outs. Schedulers can review all automatches that have been carried out on shifts, and make any edits where they feel is necessary. This means that managers get the best of both worlds, from accurate time collection to automated attendance matching.
Integrated Payroll Processes
With automated attendance matching, the steps of having to review the schedule and compile your data are completely eliminated. Using your time and collection software, you can create reports and filter data in a matter of minutes. The system should also automatically look after other important data including vacation pay, overtime, etc. so that you don’t have to. This means that even less time is spent handling this side of the payroll process.
Next, you have to handle getting the new automatched data over into your payroll provider. Again, there are ways to automate and improve this process with Celayix. Most payroll systems can be integrated with Celayix, meaning that data can be transferred instantly. Not only does this speed the process up, but it further reduces the likelihood of errors in payroll. Most employers don’t know that 24% of employees will look for new work after the very first payroll error, and only 44% of those employees would reconsider looking for work after an error is fixed. Accurate payroll is vital for both your bottom line and retaining your workforce.
As you can see, there are multiple benefits to automating your attendance matching process. When it comes to workforce management, ensuring that time and effort are being spent in the right business areas is vital. Why waste more time on processes that can be automated and improved with the right software? If you’d like to hear more about Celayix’s attendance matching features, reach out to a solution advisor today.
