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Payroll Time Clock Software – Choosing The Best

It is not unusual to spend hours collecting and totaling employee time cards each payroll period. Hand written time sheets are usually filled out the day before payroll is due, and time cards from a mechanical or electric time clock are usually full of hand written notes explaining missed or late punches. All of those notes have to be deciphered, interpreted, and corrected before payroll can be processed. This just increases the time and effort required to prepare payroll for input into your payroll software, or sent to your accountant or payroll service. Payroll time clock software makes it easy to go from time clock to paycheck in a few simple steps by automating your payroll process. So whether you choose to outsource your payroll processes or keep them in-house, the best payroll time clock software will help you avoid labor intensive payroll processing by instantly applying your business payroll rules, generating accurate payroll reports, quickly exporting your payroll data, and automatically archiving your payroll records.

The Best Payroll Time Clock Software Instantly Applies Your Business Rules
The best timeclock software will automatically keep track of when the current pay period ends and the next one begins. This allows you to setup your pay frequency one time and your time clock software will keep track of all those dates for you. Pick a time tracking system that allows flexible pay period settings like Weekly, Biweekly, Semi-Monthly, and Monthly. The best timeclock software will even accommodate custom business rules by allowing you to create user defined pay periods. You should be able to set what day of the week defines the start of your workweek in order to accurately calculate weekly overtime. The best timeclock software will even keep track of weekly overtime when the workweek crosses pay periods.

The Best Payroll Time Clock Software Generates Accurate Payroll Reports
The best timeclock software will have built-in reports that apply your business pay rules to instantly total regular hours and overtime. Time card entries that have been added manually or modified should be flagged for easy follow-up and monitoring. Employees should be able to add notes to their time cards explaining a late or missed punch so you can quickly adjust time card entries and reprint reports before sending off the hours. Many time and attendance systems allow you to customize the way your payroll reports look and display employee hours with a built-in report writer. This gives you the flexibility of sending your hours to your accountant or payroll service in both detailed and summary formats.

The Best Payroll Time Clock Software Quickly Exports Payroll Data
If you want to automate your payroll processing even more, then pick a time tracking solution that allows you to export your time card data for easy import into your payroll software or your favorite spreadsheet software for further analysis. Exporting hours for payroll should apply all of the same pay settings as your payroll reports. The best timeclock software allows you to control what fields get exported and the order they get exported in. Employee time clock software gives you the flexibility to process your payroll in the way that makes the most sense for your business.

The Best Payroll Time Clock Software Automatically Archives Payroll Records
The best timeclock software will automatically archive past pay periods. This means hours from historic pay periods should always be instantly available. You should be able to close pay periods with the click of a button to record all hours, overtime, gross wages, and time deductions for the current pay period and advance to the next pay period automatically. When viewing historic payroll reports, your employee time clock software should always use the stored totals from the closed pay period rather than calculating the totals again based on the current settings for each employee. This is important since wages, overtime, and time deduction rules change over time. Since past payroll reports are always instantly available, there is no need to store paper time cards. Employee time clock software will help you save time and space.

Choosing the best payroll timeclock software can take some time, but armed with the right information, it is possible to find the best payroll timeclock software to fit the needs of your business.