Electronic Time Sheets have always been a popular form of Time and Attendance Software. These products are increasingly hosted online and available as a SAAS (Software as a Service) product.
From a user’s perspective, the process of filling out an electronic time sheet generally involves opening either a local or hosted application and entering specific start and finish times for the work day and, in some cases, details of the specific task or cost centres to which those times related. This process adds the advantage of allocating employee labour costs to specific departments or cost centres or client jobs. The suitability of these products in your business application may become clearer after reading the Time and Attendance Consultant’s Guides.
Electronic time sheets are most commonly used in applications where the employees are in more trusted roles and are probably salaried employees who are not paid strictly according to the hours they work. Usually, the main requirement of time tracking for these employees is the costing of their time to specific projects for time and billing purposes.
The more sophisticated applications are designed to handle more complex environments where integration into third party applications such as Microsoft Projects is required. Often a feature of these advanced electronic time sheet applications is materials and expense billing and either direct client billing or integration into other invoicing and accounting software.
The suitability for your company will be dependent on a number of factors including whether you have any hourly paid employees in your business, how closely you need to monitor the attendance times of your staff and the importance you place on integration into you current management information systems.
Electronic time sheets are rapidly replacing manual systems and there is one aspect in particular in which they are far superior to the manual version; because the data is in an electronic format it can be exported into management software and used for producing more complex information such as payroll calculation, and time and billing information. In addition the system is less open to employee time theft as the clock on and off process can be linked to a time server ...manual systems rely on an honour system which is subject to abuse.
There are some quite advanced products on the market and a sample of what is available can be seen in the video on the right. While some of these products are quite advanced they may not necessarily have the functionality you application requires so it is worth investigation a number of alternative products.
Electronic time sheet products are increasingly available as Software as a Service applications (SAAS) and it is accurate to say that if the current platform is only offered in the form of software installed on your own server then this is fast becoming an obsolete alternative. This is essentially because the SAAS model is absolutely perfectly suited to online time sheet applications so this calls into question the product mobility and forward thinking of the software provider who is still using the installed software model.
