Everyone’s moving to “The Cloud” — and we’re making it easy to do so.
Cloud-based personal productivity applications have shown CIOs and IT managers that they can achieve lower infrastructure costs, improved flexibility, and the elimination of time-consuming software implementations and upgrades. For these reasons we’ve seen many of our time and attendance customers demanding a quicker move to the Cloud — a demand that we’re willing and able to meet! This year, we’ll be focusing more on bringing cloud-based computing to iEmployee customers enabling them to work faster, be more productive and lower costs.

New channels bring added value and competitive differentiation.
In 2011, we’re even more dedicated to building out our partner ecosystem so that iEmployee customers will have more attractive service and product offerings. Specifically for time and attendance, we’ll be looking at taking a slightly new approach and putting more focus on enhancing the current time and attendance automation technology.

Product innovation all around!
Who doesn’t like new, bright and shiny things? Being a technology company, we get to work on introducing next generation products to our time and attendance customers, which is not only fun but also rewarding. This year, we’ll continue to invest in product innovation to help you meet your business goals with low-cost, easy-to-use workforce optimization software solutions. We’ll be working on enabling easier set-up, integration and management while providing more predictable budgeting and spend options.

There is no federal regulation requiring employers to provide paid time off, but it’s strongly encouraged as a way to attract and keep solid, talented employees. Because there is no regulation, employees can accrue PTO at different rates depending on where they work. Your company’s guidelines should be clear about accrual rates and usage policies.

Generally speaking employees earn more vacation time the longer they remain with a company, moving from perhaps nine vacation days their first year to 16 days their ninth year, says Salary.com. They are likely to have nine or ten federal holidays plus personal and sick days. A PTO bank might start employees at 14 paid days off in the first year, growing to 23 days in their ninth year. These days cover both sick leave and vacation time, giving employees flexibility to use time as they need it.

Now that you have time off, how can you use it? Many companies have policies about requesting paid time off in advance so it can be approved. This system prevents companies from being short-staffed during busy periods or potential abuse of the system. Online PTO software — in lieu of paper requests — can make these requests easy to manage. However, it’s important to be extremely clear about the rules. Can employees use only a few hours at a time or is it by complete days? Since sick time is part of the PTO bank, what are the policies regarding calling in sick? Make it clear that PTO isn’t just vacation time.

No matter the system your company uses, tracking PTO is important for both employees and employers alike. Using PTO software automates processes such as accrual and requests for time off, making it easy for everyone to get the time they need to recharge.

Photo courtesy of flydime

As paid time off (PTO) banks become a more common solution for companies to combine sick leave, vacation time, and personal days into one central storage area, other problems can arise. How do employees accrue time? How can they use it? What (if any) warning do they need to give in advance of taking a day off — or two, or three, or five?

PTO management becomes simple with a PTO tracking software. Automating the system will improve workplace efficiency as well as transparency. Managers can easily see and respond to requests; employees can review their current PTO balance and request time off from anywhere they can access the Internet.

Sound good so far? Besides being simple to use, PTO tracking can save companies money. In fact, a study by AppMail found that the process of requesting, reporting and tracking PTO is often “manual and cumbersome” for most companies.

“Companies also typically allow the employee to initiate and follow up on the process of requesting time off. Using an honor system for reporting time off […] means no checks and balances exist to ensure that that employees don’t, intentionally or unintentionally, neglect to report PTO,” reports the Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal.

PTO tracking software that lets employees enter their PTO into a real-time system creates a more accurate picture of PTO use. Employees no longer have to worry about their request getting lost in the shuffle (sometimes literally); it only takes a few mouse clicks. Employers can track reports and provide management tools to track and address absenteeism. Awareness of who is using what time when saves money in both the short and long term.

Companies that stay with a more traditional division of paid time off into vacation, sick time, and personal days also benefit from PTO software like iEmployee online PTO tracking. Categories are effortlessly defined and maintained so that employees can see their accruals and plan accordingly. Calendar functions help make sure the coverage exists for when an employee requests some PTO; you’ll never have to worry about an entire department requesting the same week off again!

By combining a powerful PTO management software with clear explanations of your PTO system, you’ll avoid potential PTO tracking pitfalls, keeping everyone from employees to managers to HR personnel happy.

Photo courtesy of dilivion

But before we begin, what exactly is benefits administration? “Benefits administration involves the creation and management of employee benefits, as well as providing a means for employees to be trained in understanding how the benefits work, and what types of standards employees must meet in order to qualify for the benefits,” explains Wise Geek. In other words, benefit administrators create the system, explain it and maintain it.

Days off
Keeping track of personal days, vacation days and sick days is often a major part of benefits administration. Does the company have days earmarked for specific purposes or do employees have a general PTO bank? Using a benefits administration software makes tracking what employees have earned and used much more effortless.

Health insurance & wellness programs
Along with the more traditional health insurance coverage, many companies are implementing wellness programs for employees. Among larger employers (those with over 500 employees), 61% offer such programs. “More than ever before, employers are recognizing the value of a healthy workforce and are viewing wellness programs as an investment to help address their business objectives,” says Dr. Ronald Leopold, vice president of MetLife U.S. Business. Even though such programs have a nominal cost, most employees feel like they will “favorably impact” their performance.

Investments & retirement
An employer’s investment or retirement program can include payroll deductions from the employee’s earnings, matching funds, stocks or other investments. Benefit administration works with financial officers to ensure that money is where it should be in a timely manner. With increased worries about the financial future, many employees are looking for access to retirement planning resources, though fewer than 40% of employers offer such services. And helping employees feel more financially secure aids productivity while on the job.

Welfare of employees
While benefits administration has clear responsibilities to employees, it also needs to recognize company needs, particularly in keeping costs low. Using software to automate processes means administrators can better address the needs of improving employees’ health and wealth issues instead of shuffling paper. “By promoting programs that can help employees help themselves, employers can remove some of the financial burden from employees’ shoulders,” explains Dr. Leopold. “Employers, in turn, can reap the benefits of a more productive, loyal workforce.” Clear benefits make employees are more likely to stay with employers, which benefits everyone.

Photo courtesy of Jeff Belmonte

Creating an employee time attendance sheet can be a discouraging task. How can you create something logical, accessible, and protected from user errors? More importantly, any kind of employee attendance tracking should be easy for both employees and management to access what they need to know, whether it’s how many vacation days are used or remaining, when sick time is used, or if someone always seems to be “sick” to create a long weekend.

Viewing employee attendance over a year’s span can help employers efficiently track usage. Yet, when creating a employee time attendance template in Microsoft Office, “[…] you can’t create one worksheet that contains all of the workdays in a year. Even excluding weekends, a typical year has 260 workdays (52 x 5), but Excel has a limit of 256 columns.”

Reading through these instructions for creating an employee attendance template, the sheer number of places for error is staggering. “Unless people in your company work on holidays, go through and enter an “h” for each holiday date through the year. […] When someone takes a day off, enter a “v” for vacation, a “p” for personal day, and an “s” for sick day. The workbook automatically counts the number of days off and records it in the appropriate columns on the quarterly worksheets. It also records the total number of days off on the Year-to-Date Summary worksheet.”

Not only is a worksheet like this complicated to set up, but maintenance is a continual struggle. Who will input all the data? Employees themselves? How will the document be accessed? Having multiple copies of a file can lead to further confusion and errors. And how are partial days calculated? Calculations that require complex formulas depending on entering exact values can quickly become useless with the careless click of a mouse.

With the many employee tracking software solutions available on the market, this paper-based model seems even more inefficient. Everything is already set up – no need to create formulas – and accessibility becomes even easier. Employees can track their attendance, PTO, and request days off; a user-friendly interface makes seeing information like sick days remaining easy for both employees and managers alike.

Saving time, not just in creating a clunky system but having a streamlined employee tracking software will make everyone’s life more effortless. Save Excel for what it’s designed for and instead find the right employee time attendance tool for your business.

Photo courtesy of Maureen Didde

With the many challenges of starting and running a small business, employee time tracking might not be at the forefront of the entrepreneur’s mind. Cutting expenditures by cracking down on purchasing, maybe, or implementing more accountability on expense reports; these seem like logical places to start. Yet according to Startup Smart, solutions that make employee timesheets and an employee time tracking system more efficient are an easy and effective way to cut company costs.

While many companies look first at their expenses as a place to save, they should instead be examining where and how employees spend their time. Broadening this understanding of employee time tracking allows management to understand their business better so they can make more informed decisions about where to cut costs.

As owners move away from directly looking at employee timesheets, they might be losing valuable operation information. For example, when an employee is on the clock, what is actually company-related? What are personal or non-approved activities? Visibility into the amount of time employees spend on tasks helps employers assess efficiency and plan future strategies. But how to quickly and easily assess this information without the clutter of employee punch cards or physical timesheets?

This is where an online employee tracking system comes in. Instant access to information like employee timesheets and expenses means less time lost and more productivity gained for the business as a whole, observes IRIS Exchequer Accounting Software company spokesperson Rupert Ralston.

The start-up environment poses unique challenges. Unlike an established business where patterns of expenses and employee timesheets are apparent and well-established, start-ups are often still creating their rhythm. They have many unanticipated transactions, leading to an unclear picture of the truly necessary operation costs. By understanding what employees are doing “on their time,” employers can instill a work culture that minimizes excessive spending of both time and money.

With a variety of employee time sheet software available, an online employee time tracking solution can be easiest for keeping overhead low and everyone connected. Letting everyone know how their time is valuable reflects the value employers place on perhaps their biggest asset: their employees.

Photo courtesy of mao_lini

Over the last three years, the number of cases of “potential fraud detected and investigated” rose 37%, according to a recent study by the NHS Counter Fraud Service (CFS). Recurring varieties of fraud included unpaid subscriptions and “timesheet fraud,” which involves employees falsifying their employer’s timesheet system to their own benefit, reports the BBC.

Just because the percentage of those detected went up doesn’t mean that the actual number of fraudulent timesheet system manipulations did too. The key part of the sentence is potential. There is an improved awareness of fraud and how to report it, said the spokeswoman for the organization, which works to improve business processes in the UK. This means that the actual occurrences of fraud might actually be the same — or less. It stands to reason that the system of protection is simply getting better, and the higher number of investigations is a result of better oversight work.

So, either the number of people committing fraud increased or the number of cases reported increased, or some combination of the two caused such a large gain. What does that mean for administrators and management? Specifically, since the majority of the problem was in payroll fraud, how can you ensure your timesheet system remains free from fraud?

There’s an easy first step: Payroll automation software with electronic timesheets. There are many more reasons to implement a modern timesheet system than just preventing fraud. Since the NHS CFS puts the cost of fraud at well over $17 million from 2009-2010, that’s no small change.

Online timesheets aren’t just a timesheet on the web. There are a host of benefits from using an electronic timesheet system, such as:

●     Averting scheduling conflicts for staffing

●     Convenient time-off request feature for employees with instant response capabilities from administrators

●     Confirming overtime or scheduling changes instantly from anywhere

●     Allowing administrators the ability to specific data by time, group, project, or person as necessary

●     Electronic timesheets allow remote clock in and clock out

●     Online timesheets can be verified by both employee and administrators for maximum accuracy

The last point is especially germane to NHS CFS study. Whether or not the likelihood of fraud is rising, eliminating a means of committing fraud is a good way to keep losses minimal. A solid payroll system will save administrative costs and overhead, but it can also prevent fraud by opening up communication between management and employees.

Photo courtesy loop_oh

When the modern workforce started arriving at the same time en masse in the morning and leaving at the same time, it was because the tool for keeping tracking of the employee time and attendance was a whistle and a pair of eyes. If the overseers could see the employee after the whistle blew, they were on the job.

Now, decades later, the factory set-up has so pervaded the business consciousness that almost every company has the same working hours. This is all despite the fact that time management has advanced a few centuries! Time and attendance used to be a clock you’d punch into, and the 9-5 schedule of the past is another relic of a time gone by.

HR management and professionals are a veritable trove of data for companies. Because so many organizations require thorough paperwork and records from HR, the best place to truly understand the workforce is by talking to the professionals whose job it is to, well, understand the workforce. Time and attendance of employees is always an area of interest for business, who lose money every time an employee isn’t actively working.

Researchers for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) shared their poll of 511 HR professionals in Washington, DC, this past September. SHRM pollsters found some rather stark numbers indicating the overwhelming majority of employees would prefer a flexible, modern schedule. HR management and professionals offered the following insights:

●     Nearly 90% of those surveyed said flexible work arrangements aid in employee retention. Various business needs and sustainability issues were cited as reasons for not being able to offer such schedules.

●     58% percent of HR management and professionals said flexible scheduling is most often provided with part time employment.

●     59% believed that flexible scheduling — things like telecommuting, part time, compressed schedules — was designed for older employees.

●     Asked about telecommuters, 63% of HR management and professionals surveyed said employee productivity remained the same; 32% said productivity was increased as a result.

●     Focusing again on telecommuters, 42% said absenteeism decreased. Time and attendance, it seems, was better when the employees were away from the office altogether.

Most indicative of a sea change from the typical work day schedule is the response from the HR management and professionals surveyed to the question of telecommuting. It is quite true that many of the options of flexible work scheduling were designed to help limit unnecessary travel. There’s certainly wisdom in putting in place measures to help the less-capable employees work to their full potential. Alongside this, there comes a new generation of technology and people, one allowing the other to bring a change to the typical American work schedule.

Photo courtesy sergis blog (also don’t try that at home)

The first rule of business motion: for every day an employee misses work, there is a resulting cost. Lack of employee attendance shows up in many ways. The regular flow of work is interrupted and reduced; projects and deadlines can be affected, and maybe even cost the company money if the employee attendance is sick leave or otherwise paid time off.

With the year so young, it’s a great time to implement a few ideas to help up employee attendance. Software, incentives, or even some simple office adjustments can make a big difference when all is said and done at the end of the year. The following list is also geared towards positive, rather than negative, changes. Those have considerably more appeal in the long run, for both employers and their employees.

1. INCENTIVIZE

It seems obvious but is often overlooked — employee attendance is higher when employees want to come to work. Now, obviously employees want to earn their paychecks, and to some managers, that is enough incentive. Most of us know better, though. Day and in and day out, “the grind” can be tiresome and motivation can lag. Incentives, even little ones, can make days stand out, can give people a reason to look forward to even Tuesday mornings! They don’t have to be hundreds of dollars in bonds (though if you manage a profitable investment firm it certainly can be), rather more along the lines of a few bonus overtime hours for a month of perfect attendance, or allow an employee with a week of perfect attendance and high productivity to leave an hour or two early on Friday afternoon.

2: CHANGE

There’s always an old way of doing things. In some cases it’s the result of a long process to determine the best way to get things done. In other cases, however, it’s an outdated relic. Better to adapt than be left behind — and attendance management software is the next frontier of managing employee attendance. Software can track employee hours, project hours, manage paid time off, administer payroll and do so with less man hours and with greater accuracy than traditional employee attendance systems.

This also applies to the conditions of the office. Chances are your building is well lit, clean and comfortable; you don’t need any feng shui expert to come in and do it over. If you have a problem with employees taking days off, it may be a result of a manager with an authoritarian style that promotes “sick” days. Managers with poor listening skills, who set unattainable goals, don’t listen, and blame others will cause a few days of employee absenteeism. Or it could be a bad office environment, where the levels of respect and professionalism need to be raised between staff members. Employees who get along with each other and with administrators are less likely to miss work.

3: COMMUNICATE

Installing attendance reporting software will help keep track of attendance, but talking with employees will always be the most effective way to bring about positive change. As a first step, be sure there’s an employee attendance policy on the books and everyone knows the details. Encourage employees with stellar attendance, and find out why those missing too many days are doing so. There might be a valid reason or there might be a problem behind the days off that requires managerial focus. Without communication, it’s impossible to know what to do.

A few simple steps, and 2011 could have a much better bottom line at your company or organization than that of 2010. Employee attendance is a prime candidate to be re-evaluated by companies who need a way to save money and create a happier workforce.

Photo courtesy epSos.de

There is no shortage of red tape in payroll. Sometimes it can seem like the whole process can be more fitted to a law school graduate, a person trained for years to read legalese and jargon so warped by years of constant flagellation that the intent of the words is almost impossible to discern. That’s how the paperwork can feel, at least.

In this new era of online benefits administration, however, HR processes are very different. An article from P&C360 does an excellent job of explaining just why that looks to be the case. This provides us with an opportunity to have a few insights into the old benefits administration failure and how the software can help be a salve.

1. Accuracy and Efficiency: With paperwork, the more employees a company has, the more time is needed just to process paperwork. Benefits administration software allows single information to be inputted a single time and be accessed multiple times. It’s simple, and it clears up nagging human error — legibility. Because HR professionals have such a surplus of responsibilities — tending to the responsibilities of enrollments, invoicing, paperwork — that have nothing to do with profit generating or productivity in general, the last thing they need is more to do! Online benefits can include a website where employee questions can be directed, rather than going to HR.
2. Hidden Costs: Especially interesting is that often employees have no idea of the true costs and employer takes on for each job position. There are contributions for benefits, PTO issues, FICA, Social Security, and many others. Because these are items that were rarely before been seen by employees, including these into benefits administration software in the form of a reporting feature is of great value.
3. Forms, Forms, and Forms: Anyone who’s had a job knows the first day will be spent signing your name over and over again. It’s the same way that HR never seems to have the one document or record you need. Those are petty concerns to employees, to employers there’s a real monetary loss for the process of paperwork and filing and the necessary staff. Benefits administration software allows a reduction of forms (the way filling out a tax return has gotten easier with online tax preparation software), and complete access to any document required. It’s more convenient, faster, and it saves money.
4. Kept Secret and Safe: Last we come to the two issues of security and privacy. Benefits administration, traditionally done with paperwork in filing cabinets, has more than a few weak links in terms of security. It’s even a Hollywood style cliché.  In Batman Returns,  the true villain is revealed when his secretary looks through his office cabinet and finds incriminating evidence. Online benefits administration software prevents both the snooping and the illegal behavior, by allowing secure logins while granting administrators more access to data and reports.

The simple matter is that online benefits administration software is faster, more accurate, more reliable, cheaper, more secure and more private than the old way of doing things.

photo courtesy Teemu Mäntynen