Time tracking blog

Many companies across the globe are asking themselves, “Isn’t there a better way to track my employee’s time without using a time sheet?” With the pitfalls that a time sheet lends itself so easily to, it’s no wonder business owners are looking for alternatives.

Pitfalls and Time Sheets

If you’ve ever used a paper time sheet you quickly understand the pain of the pitfalls associated with it. But just in case you forgot, here are some brief reminders.

• A time sheet allows your employees to lie about their hours. In most traditional systems employees have the opportunity to add the hours that they have worked at the end of a day, week or entire pay period. Because of this employees can enter false hours or (more commonly) they can simply forget the hours they worked, causing them to estimate their daily hours.  Even the honest ones tend to estimate in their favor rather than yours.
• A time sheet provides an inaccurate clock in/out time. Because employees are filing out their time sheets manually they can very easily make up the 15 minutes they were late for work. They can also leave work a few minutes early to beat the traffic without any consequence. These minor “fudges” of 5 or 15 minutes here and there are usually the most painful part of time sheets. We call it Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts.
• Time sheets are a huge waste of time. Bookkeepers usually spend hours trying to contact everyone and collect everyone’s time sheet. Usually once everyone’s time sheet is collected the bookkeeper spends a few more hours decoding hieroglyphic handwriting and correcting basic math errors. Then after they finally figure out exactly how many hours each employee has worked, the next step is manually entering them into some sort of payroll software. All told, this process can easily take an individual an entire day.

A Solution to the Time Sheet

So if everyone knows that a time sheet is such a pain in the neck, why are so many business owners still fighting with them? The truth is that usually a business owner just doesn’t know any better way. Some don’t even know that they are losing money, because they have no way of accurately finding out.

The challenge is finding a way to track your employees’ time that will benefit your business rather than a method that will add to the stresses, frustrations, and money pits that already surround you.  TSheets makes clocking in and out via any computer or Internet connected device easy and simple, so that your employees will be tracking their time as it happens, rather than trying to track it on their own and enter it later. TSheets offers a free personal version of their timesheet software, while business owners can use it for as little as $9.95 a month.