The primary purpose of using the employee time sheet template is to gain workplace accountability. By using timesheets, employers get an opportunity to track the hours for which an employee worked, the breaks taken, and the overtime hours.
Timesheets also allow an employer to achieve other subsidiary goals. These include task scheduling and creating and managing payroll reports, thereby improving the workflow management of the company.
If you have proper knowledge about the applications of timesheets in your business, you can efficiently utilize its advantages.
Why are Automated Timesheets Better than Paper-based Time Sheets?
While both automated and manual or paper-based timesheets are used to achieve the same goals and improve the productivity of a company, you get certain benefits from using computerized timesheets over manual ones.
- No chances of errors: The use of the right software solutions for timesheet management of employees helps achieve greater precision. The data entered is validated.
- Increased transparency in tracking performance: While in paper-based timesheets, there are high chances of data manipulation, automated timesheets help avoid such instances. Besides automating workforce management, there is transparency in the data concerning employee performance.
- Easy access and sharing of data: Automated timesheets can be accessed through any device and can be easily shared.
- No chances of losing data: Paper timesheets are challenging to carry, and if those are lost by any chance, it is impossible to retrieve the data. On the contrary, automated timesheets enable you to store data on a cloud-based platform. This enhances the security of the data, preventing it from getting lost.
- Time-efficient: It cannot be denied that automated timesheets lessen a great deal of your burden of filling up the timesheets manually. This saves your time.
- Integrated system: Automated timesheets enable you to integrate HR management policies and processes with the software modules associated with payroll reports.
Automated Timesheet Templates: The Must-Have Features
The automated templates can vary according to the software solutions you are choosing. However, five features must be present in your automated timesheet template. These include:
Uncomplicated Information
Whether you use weekly, daily, or monthly timesheets, your template should be capable of providing you various filters so that you can get the desired information with ease.
For instance, if you wish to visualize the working hours of the employees under a specific project or process, you should be able to filter the data on your timesheet accordingly.
Compatibility
Your company may have different projects and different operating systems. As such, you need to ensure that the automated timesheet software you choose fits well into all your operating systems. You should be able to convert your timesheet to Excel, PDF, or Google Docs with ease.
Flexibility
Besides that, your timesheet should be flexible enough to enable employees to log in from any device such as mobiles, laptops, tablets, or web portals. Furthermore, you should consider if you can export or integrate your timesheets to other applications as per your need.
Real-time Status Updates
As your employee clocks in and out, you and the managers of their project or process should be able to get real-time status updates. The timesheet template should also have the feature of enabling employees to request approvals or denials of their time-off.
Access to Cloud
The software solution that you choose should be cloud-based. In other words, the data on your timesheets should get stored in the cloud so that if you lose the Excel or PDF file, you can retrieve the timesheets from the cloud.
Hence, automated timesheet templates can act as boons to your business. For overcoming the tedious and stressful process of managing paper-based timesheets, you must take a logical step and implement automated timesheets at the workplace.