Do Your Salaried Employees Need A Time Clock?

If you've used clock in software for any length of time, I'm sure you've noticed it has many other valuable uses besides making the payroll process more efficient and holding hourly employees accountable for their time worked. These may include such features as built-in messaging, absence management, and tracking time spent on different jobs or projects. These other features are what make clock in software a valuable tool for your salaried workers as well. Here are five reasons for having salaried employees use your time clock system.

Replace your manual in/out board
This is perhaps the most powerful reason to use your computer clock in software for salaried employees. Your clock in software will already be keeping track of when people are in, on break, out to lunch, or gone for the day. If you're keeping track of tasks, jobs, or locations, then you'll also know what people are working on or where they're at. This is all happening as a byproduct of your regular employee time tracking. Here are some of the benefits of having your salaried workers use the in/out board as well:

• Convenience - no more wall boards or magnets to update to see who's in and who's out
• Efficiency - cut down 'on hold' time because phone calls are routed faster when you know where people are at
• Emergency preparedness - run a status report to get an instant list of who may still be in the building
• Worker management - monitor employees in real-time with at-a-glance status
• Inexpensive - there's no need to purchase or maintain separate in/out board software

​This makes your clock in software a great tool for receptionists and call centers to know when and where to route incoming calls or visitors.

Improve office communication
Built-in messaging modules work right alongside the in/out status board and function like simple, self-contained email systems. Both hourly and salaried employees can use messaging to notify managers of an appointment or request a day off. Managers can communicate directly with workers or broadcast notices of meetings or other company information. If you want an easy way to organize your business and improve office communication by using technology you already own, then deploy the messaging module that's already part of your time clock system across all employee computer time clocks.

Track available and remaining vacation hours
Tracking accrued and used leave can be a labor intensive undertaking. If you're already using your employee time clock system to keep track of vacation and sick time for hourly employees, why not do the same thing for your salaried employees? It sure beats using a separate spreadsheet just to keep track of PTO and eliminates the inconvenience of having to look up remaining leave balances whenever an employee wants to take a day off. Your clock in software should allow you to keep track of all kinds of absences, including vacation, holidays, sick time, and personal time off, both paid and unpaid.

Time off is typically accrued in two different ways. An annual award is basically a lump sum that gets deposited into the employee's leave account at the beginning of the benefit year, which means the full balance is immediately available for use. With a calculated award, employees have to actually work hours before any leave hours accrue and are available to be used. This allows you to customize leave awards based on your benefit rules and for different lengths of service. If your salaried employees won't be using the time clock to track their time, then you'll likely only be able to accrue their leave benefits as an annual award.

Accurately bill clients for labor hours
One of the more common reasons that salaried workers use employee clock in software is so their labor hours can be accurately recorded against specific jobs for billing clients and customers. Since your time clock reports should be able to summarize time by activities or department, you can run status reports to make sure you're remaining within project budgets before the project ends. Your total labor hours can now be easily entered into your invoicing or accounting software for accurate and timely billing of your labor. Time card notes can be added to client hours to explain job details or project tracking status. The key to tracking labor hours accurately is to record new activities as they happen, so make sure each of your employees has easy access to a time clock computer for recording their time.

Manage labor costs
Closely related to client billing is managing labor costs. By including employee wage information on reports, time cards can be summarized to provide you with both labor hours and dollar costs for any activity, task, job, or department. This will quickly show you actual labor hours and costs on a per job basis, allowing you to track changes in labor costs from job to job, or the same job for any time period.

I hope you can see that having salaried employees use your clock in software can certainly increase office efficiency, and maybe even save you a little money along the way.