The great-grandparents of modern biometric time clocks, punch clocks were once the gold standard in time and attendance management. These revolutionary devices allowed businesses to track employee movements and gain greater control over the payroll. Some, like the model in the image above, were rather magnificent. Of course, these old clocks came with many frustrating issues.
From buddy punching and time theft to the tediousness of manual payroll, these problems drove business owners up the wall, but thankfully, they also drove innovation. Nowadays, we have access to cutting-edge time and attendance technology capable of boosting payroll accuracy, improving security, and helping business owners gain far more operational efficiency.
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits to be gained from upgrading to a biometric time clock.
The perfect balance of ease and high security
Ideally, access to your premises should be smooth, quick, and easy for your team and any visitors to your premises. However, ease of access often comes at the cost of security. Conversely, high security often comes at the cost of ease and speed. Nowhere is this more evident than in the lengthy procedures we must go through every time we need to take a flight.
While airport security isn’t likely to be speeding up anytime soon, most business owners can create a smooth, fast, and efficient access system for employees and visitors alike. This can be achieved quite easily, in fact, with biometric technology.
Fingerprint time clocks and biometric access systems allow authorised personnel to clock in with ease – no keys, cards, or passwords required. With no keys, cards, or passwords, there’s nothing for employees to forget or lose, and crucially, fewer security issues for employers to worry about.
This is only one aspect of the boost in security a biometric access system can give to your business. Biometrics are, by their very nature, biologically unique and unchangeable. This makes them one of the most secure credentials you could ask for, especially when combined with multi-factor authentication.
It is important to note here that some low-quality fingerprint scanners do not read enough data points to create a truly unique profile. This can lead to false positives in which a person with a similar pattern of ridges and furrows may register as someone else. So long as you install a high-quality system from a globally recognised brand like FingerTec, you’ll experience no false reads. FingerTec uses multispectral technology to gain accurate and detailed scans, even through dirt, moisture, and surgical gloves.
Indeed, a sophisticated biometric access system can take you beyond the process of clocking in and out. By adding fingerprint access systems to certain areas of your premises, you can control employee and visitor movements with ease, ensuring only authorised personnel have access to valuable assets and sensitive data.
Improved accountability leads to higher morale
To a certain extent, we can all sympathise with the motives behind buddy punching. In most cases, employees aren’t viewing it as stealing time. Rather, they see it as helping a friend who’s running late or having a hard time. The problem is, this behaviour can have major flow-on effects for the business and for coworkers.
While it’s difficult to track employee time theft, businesses operating without a biometric time clock system are at a far greater risk. With hundreds of millions of dollars lost each year to inaccurate time and attendance reporting, there’s a lot on the line. These monetary losses are generally front of mind for employers. However, you may not have considered the impact time theft can have on other employees in your team.
If you put yourself in the position of a conscientious team member who always shows up on time and records their attendance accurately, you can imagine how frustrating it would be to see others getting away with taking long breaks, arriving late, and ducking out early. Issues like this can eat away at morale over time and create rifts within your team.
The beauty of a fingerprint time clock is that it doesn’t require you to micromanage your team in order to improve attendance and accurate reporting. Installing the device creates an instant sense of accountability as there’s no way to rig the system. That accountability puts everyone on an even footing, paving the way for better team dynamics.
Biometric time clocks help you eliminate human error
Your biometric timeclock can connect directly to your payroll system, transmitting the data from the terminal automatically and cutting out the scope for human error. You’ll no longer have to worry about manual entry or spreadsheet management, and you’ll have an instant snapshot of employee activity whenever you wish to access it. By eliminating this error-prone manual work, you’ll also free up your HR department to focus on higher-level tasks that could further drive efficiency.
Biometric time clocks and payroll automation
By automating the time-tracking process and sending the data directly to your payroll system, you’re creating the perfect foundation from which to fully automate your accounts payable. You’ve automated part of the process, why not automate the rest? As mentioned in the point above, this will give your HR department even more scope to focus on bigger things. It will also cut out yet another avenue for human error.
Scalability to support your business journey
With a fingerprint time clock, you’ll never again have to print new keycards when you bring in new employees. Nor will you have to worry about security issues when employees leave your business. Profiles can be added and deleted in minutes, so as your business grows and evolves, your access control system will grow smoothly along with it.
If you’re looking for a way to decrease time theft, improve efficiency in your HR department, and boost the security of your business, the simple addition of a biometric time clock can help you with all this and more. The key thing to keep in mind is that the quality and security of your system and its data storage are the most critical aspects of this upgrade.
Biometric data is perhaps the most sensitive data you can hold as it cannot be changed if compromised. So, it’s crucial to keep these factors front of mind when selecting your new technology. If you have any questions on this front, Nexus Biometric can help. Contact us today, and one of our friendly technicians will be happy to give you the guidance you need.
