How Schools and Colleges Benefit From Automated Time & Attendance Tracking
When we went to school, our teachers kept track of our attendance on a daily basis, just as their own work hours were tracked by school administrators. Class times, breaks, gym, and sports activities were set at predetermined times, and our academic lives revolved around those schedules. As we graduated from college and moved on to workplaces as new employees, our hours and attendance continued to be tracked. The payroll department would compute our salaries, as well as any overtime due and time off, to comply with increasingly complex workforce regulations.
At many educational institutions, time and attendance tracking continues to remain a manual process, using paper and spreadsheet-based timesheets. Inevitably, errors creep in, often taking hours or even days to pinpoint and rectify. Payroll managers have their work cut out for them as they try to accurately compute salaries due. Over time, management finds it hard to get up to date information on time off requests and balances. Compliance is an inadvertent casualty of manual time and attendance tracking, increasing risk even as Department of Labor inspectors step up enforcement of wage and hour laws.
In recent years, many leading educational institutions have chosen to adopt automated time and attendance tracking. Leading solutions are offered as SaaS (Software as a Service), using strategically located Cloud infrastructure to securely host customer data. Users can easily access their application through various client devices such as web browsers and smartphones, for example. Organizations are thus relieved of the burden of having to maintain on-premise hardware and software, as well as the cost of skilled IT personnel to handle the system.
Cloud-based time and attendance tracking helps educational institutes:
- Track time worked by faculty, staff, student workers, volunteers, and part time employees
- Track time at the department level for visibility into chargebacks
- Streamline their payroll process
- Ensure compliance with labor laws
- Stop time theft
- Understand workforce availability
- Optimize scheduling of resources and staffing of projects
- Gain visibility into time off liability
The multiple advantages provided by automated time and attendance tracking solutions make them a natural choice for schools and colleges looking to upgrade from obsolete manual tracking systems. Cloud-based solutions can easily scale up with the growth of any educational institution, and have proven return on investment to boot.
Co-authors: Sharon Lee & Pratheek MI
