What are the advantages of tracking attendance online?

Gone are the days when organizations solely relied on paper-based processes and spreadsheets to mark attendance. With many companies following remote and hybrid working styles, manual HR processes are no longer sustainable. Cloud-based attendance management systems have become the go-to tool for many organizations, considering the multitude of benefits these systems offer. If you are new to cloud-based attendance tracking systems or still not sure if they'll be worth the investment, here are five advantages of tracking attendance online:

1. Ensures accurate data

Because the entire process is automated, tracking attendance online ensures that you have accurate data. All your employees have to do is open their web or mobile app, check in when they start their day, and check out when they end their day. All of the data will be stored automatically in the system. Since the process involves no manual intervention, the data will remain error-free. Some online attendance trackers help you set geo and IP restrictions too. This means you can make it so that your employees can only mark their attendance when they are within the geographical area that you've defined, and only when they are using the proper IP address. Some systems also come with facial recognition technology to prevent proxy entries.

2. Easily integrates with other systems

Attendance management is interconnected with several other functions. By taking your attendance process online, you can integrate it with other systems. For instance, if you have a biometric system in place already, you can integrate it with your online attendance tracker to capture and store the data. Similarly, since attendance data is crucial for payroll processing, you can automatically push attendance data to your payroll management system by integrating them. If employees don't mark their attendance for a specific day, it can be converted into an absence and pushed to your online leave tracker automatically.

3. Saves a lot of time

If you have more than 10 employees in your organization, tracking attendance manually can take a toll on your HR team's productivity. Collecting employee attendance data through paper timesheets and inputting it manually can make the whole process more tedious. By switching to online attendance trackers, you'll not only streamline and automate the entire attendance process but also save tons of paper. Online attendance trackers centralize all the attendance data in a single place so that anyone with the proper permissions can access the data from anywhere. You and your employees don't have to write emails back and forth in case they fail to mark their attendance or mark it incorrectly. They can simply raise an attendance regularization request, and update the entries upon approval.

4. Improves employee productivity

Having a centralized attendance system can go a long way toward improving employee productivity. With online attendance trackers, managers can get a clear idea of who from their team is in and who's out at a glance. This allows them to better allocate work. These systems also come with a variety of intuitive reports that help you understand the attendance patterns at your organization. This way, you can identify issues like buddy punching, as well as unscheduled absenteeism and missed entries, before they start affecting your organization. When you have a proper process in place to track attendance, employees will become more accountable and productive.

5. Provides the highest level of security

Since attendance data is one of the key aspects required to ensure compliance with labor laws, cloud-based attendance trackers offer the highest level of security. You can make use of features like two-factor authentication and password protection to ensure that only your employees have access to the system. You can also define permissions based on roles so only specific people have access to the attendance data. Additionally, you access the attendance data at all times, provided you have an internet-powered device.

Tracking attendance online

Since attendance management is an everyday process, having a cloud-based attendance tracker can truly make it a breeze. We hope this blog post gave you a clear idea of the different advantages of tracking attendance online.

Zoho People, our cloud-based HRMS, comes with a comprehensive attendance tracker that helps track employee working hours, gain clarity over attendance trends, offer inputs for payroll, and a lot more. Learn more about Zoho People's online attendance tracker. 

Also Read:5 tips on how to manage employee attendance