Today’s businesses all strive for success in highly competitive marketplaces — keeping one eye on the competition, the other on their operating expenses. For most companies, payroll is still the largest operational expense. In fact, according to Forrester Research, most organizations devote 40-60% of their budgets to wages, benefits, and other labor-related expenses.



Payroll processes and data have traditionally been highly prone to inaccuracies. Making payroll mistakes can have a significant impact on the bottom line. The mistakes can cause a major dent in cash flow, court cases with disgruntled employees, or even an investigation by government authorities.

Why is payroll data so prone to error?

As the American Payroll Association reported, it takes an experienced payroll manager seven minutes to total the hours on a paper time card. It is also estimated that one out of every eight time cards is incorrectly totaled. The processes that impact employee pay have historically had little automation and few controls. Inaccurate capture of employee hours, manual application of complex pay rules, and multiple data entry steps render payroll generation an error-prone process in many organizations.

Time and attendance systems are used by businesses both large and small to efficiently keep track of employees’ time. By manually tallying time cards with paper and pen, a business risks being cheated out of thousands of dollars in lost time and money if they don’t keep accurate records of employee time and attendance.

Imagine if your company lost 15 minutes per day per employee over a 250-day annual work year. If you have just five employees who get paid $7.00/hour, you would be losing $2,250 per annual work year. That number goes up considerably as your workforce grows. If you have 100 employees who get paid $22/hour, your business would lose $138,750 a year!

Time is Money…Your Company’s Money

Organizations require an approach that enables expenses related to payroll to be generated in accordance with secured, documented operating procedures. Accurate employee pay starts at the “point of punch" – the moment when an employee clocks into work. Feeding precise time and attendance data into the workforce management process is the critical first step along the path of labor-cost certainty. An integrated solution allows automatic validation of data at the point of entry, helping to ensure that dependent systems and processes access correct data.

Automated time and attendance systems reduce repetitive tasks found in manual time recorders that require time card collection, calculations, and corrections performed by payroll personnel. With the latest automated time and attendance technology, businesses can manage their workforce efficiently and increase productivity with the swipe of a card or fingerprint. It’s like adding another employee at no extra charge. As companies grow, the systems grow to accommodate new hires.

A time and attendance system will help satisfy your auditors need to have accuracy and authorization in your processes. With a time and attendance system, the process of calculating pay, such as overtime, is automated. This removes the subjectivity and potential for error from the process that is present in a manual system. All time and attendance systems also have some type of manager review and approval mechanism. This ensures that employee time is properly authorized before checks are processed.

There’s no better time than now to take a closer look at your payroll process. Manual mistakes or outdated equipment could be costing your business thousands of dollars each year.