Tracking clock-in and clock-out time, rotational shifts, compensatory offs, and overtime of employees is highly challenging when you use spreadsheets or any other manual means to record and manage employees’ attendance at your workplace.
You can improve your HR department’s productivity by implementing biometric attendance software.
To get a detailed overview of biometric attendance management software, you must understand a few major things about the software:
What is Biometric Attendance Software?
Biometric attendance software is programmed to store, manage and administer the data fetched from a biometric device installed in your organisation. A biometric device is used to track employees’ attendance by recording their unique identification traits, like fingerprints, voice, and now AADHAR.
Types of Biometric System
On the various pattern of following recognition, types of a biometric system are categorised:
- Fingerprint
- Facial
- Iris
- Vein Pattern
- Voice
- Aadhar Card
- RFID ID Card
How does Biometric Attendance Software Work?
You must be well aware of the biometric device installed on your office premises. Once your employees’ unique identification trait is recorded, mapped and compared with their existing details in a device, they are allowed to enter the premises.
But what about the data recorded in the system? How will you manage it for payroll processing or any other process? How do you administer your attendance system with that recorded data?
That’s where the biometric attendance software comes into play.
Once you configure your biometric device with the software, you need not worry about fetching data manually and maintaining multiple spreadsheets for tracking leaves or processing employee salary. With a biometric attendance system in place, you can easily calculate paydays, configure your leave policies, manage multiple work hours, in short, streamline your attendance and leave management processes effortlessly.
Did You Know?
According to statista, the market for biometric technologies will steadily grow over the next few years to reach $55.42 billion by 2027.
In this VUCA world, one cannot ignore the importance of a biometric attendance management system. It is engineered to assist human resources and improve their efficiency. To empower your organisation and turn it into a better workplace, let’s explain the “WHY” biometric attendance system:
1. Record Real-Time Attendance
Time theft is one of the reasons behind decreasing productivity of the whole organization. Many employees might be involved in spending less time at the desk and more in the cafeteria. However, with biometric attendance software, you can be aware of the whereabouts of your workforce in real-time and calculate the total working hours of each employee accordingly
2. Minimise False Entries
Buddy punching or proxy attendance by colleagues and managers can cost heavily and indirectly promote a favouritism work culture. However, biometric attendance system can eliminate chances of false entries and offer actual statistics of a person’s working hours (as biometric details are specific to employees)
Did You Know?
According to a Workplus Report (2019), time theft can cost employers an average of $11 billion per year.
3. Highly Accurate
Biometrics is all about using unique identification traits to record attendance. So, ultimately there are the least chances of mis – calculating present-absent days, payroll with relevant deductions, shift rotations, overtime, compensatory offs and other related data
4. Boost Transparency
Whether it is a time attendance system with face recognition or voice identification, it boosts workplace transparency. This software eliminates every chance of manipulation. Further, it offers multiple dashboards to identify loopholes in the attendance system, thereby promoting transparency in processes
5. Easy-to-Manage
Unlike switching between multiple spreadsheets to map working days, credit policy, new joiners’ time attendance system and more, you can easily manage your attendance policy just by implementing biometric attendance software and customising workflows as per your needs
6. Effectively Saves Time
Time stamping and reconciling records against employee details is time-consuming and leaves no employee time for strategy-making. However, biometric attendance software sync all the information automates data in real-time, and offer downloadable templates to manage attendance, effectively saving time
7. Reduce Payroll Errors
Verifying and collating payroll from the biometric device is indeed a difficult and laborious process. However, with biometric attendance tracking software in place, automatic data syncing with payroll systems or effective payroll software like ERP, SAP can eliminate the payday blues of HRs and assist in statutory compliances
8. Improve Return on Investment
As software saves your company from time theft, buddy punching, recalculation and re-processing of payroll, it somewhat seems obvious how it drastically impacts your ROI and can become a valuable resource for your HRs
9. Automatically Generate Biometric Attendance Reports
Once you set up your biometrics attendance software, you need not worry about generating reports. Your software will automagically generate reports to give you a detailed view of daily attendance, and monthly working hours and moreover, analytics to redefine attendance policies
Biometric Attendance Reports
Biometric software auto-generates biometric attendance reports to offer the hawk eye view of attendance to CXOs, HRs and managers. Some of the major reports are:
- Attendance trend of late coming and early going
- Extra working hours for comp offs and overtim
- Leave reports including ledger, summary, audit
- Monthly attendance for monthly working hours, payroll processing, etc.
You can either view these reports in your software or can easily download them.
10. Enhance Employee Experience
Biometric attendance software helps improve attendance management, provides an unbiased review process, and helps with error-free payroll processing and strategy making, creating happier workplaces.
Features To Look In The Biometric Attendance Software
Now you must have understood the importance of biometric attendance management software in your organisation. There are a few major features you should consider if you’re thinking about exploring and investing in software:
1. Data Security
As biometric software stores employees’ confidential data, ensure it follows security standards and guidelines. Also, you must ensure that your employees have a secure environment and that your data is not sold to any other businesses.
Note: Always read the terms agreement and clarify every doubt related to security with vendor
2. Quick Adaptability
User-friendly interface, intuitive navigation and easy-to-understand biometric attendance management must be deployed at the workplace. It ensures that people dedicated to utilizing the software won’t feel difficulty and fully utilise it.
Note:Always have a demo session or free trial to get hands-on with the software before purchasing the pricing plan
3. Software Integration
Data stored in the biometric attendance management software must be synced up with other software for payroll processing, performance management, expense tracking and other related HR tasks. Make sure the software you choose is compatible with other software and allows automatic data flow for other purposes
Note:In the demo period itself, integrate and test software you further want to integrate with biometric attendance software
4. Customer Support
Biometric attendance management software might be easy to install and use, but there could be some difficulty with it in certain cases. Make sure the product provider will be available to help you with any challenges you face, so you can save your team’s time and energy.
Note: Before installing the software, know about the customer support like who will be the concerned support persons, what would be the mode of communication, availability, waiting for time and mo
What is the Future Scope of Biometric Attendance Software?
“By 2022, Gartner, Inc. predicts that 70 per cent of organizations using biometric authentication for workforce access will implement it via smartphone apps, regardless of the endpoint device being used.”
Various studies have found that biometric attendance machines may be bypassed by other attendance recording methods, such as mobile apps. If we closely look, biometric software can be vandalised, consume a lot of time for identification, are placed in a static location and have limited features.
Additionally, the biometric fingerprint device cannot solve the problems related to the hybrid model or organisations that had allowed for permanent work from home after the pandemic repercussions. It is difficult to manage on-site workers with biometric systems in place if companies are involved in field jobs.
If the pandemic or other unforeseen challenges occur again in the future, it would not be possible to manage attendance with the biometric system in place.
You may want to consider adding features like geotagging and geofencing to your biometric attendance software. These features can help you track on-field employees and manage multiple shifts more easily. Additionally, a mobile app can make it easier to mark attendance.
Wrapping Up
The fact cannot be ignored that biometric attendance management software can be utilised effectively in multiple industries whether in hospitals or in commercial stores or in any other workplace. Additionally, the standard pricing of biometric software also encourages every enterprise to implement it in their system.
Thus, if you are currently using the biometric device to record attendance, then we recommend syncing it up with the biometric attendance software for better management. If you want an efficient system, start learning about HCM software with an attendance module.
Read this to know why HROne can be a great choice.