Challenges
For recruitment agencies
Employees typically complete a paper timesheet containing the relevant start times, finish times and total hours worked for the week. Monitoring this time is crucial to make sure employees are recording their hours accurately for payroll, client billing and employee productivity monitoring. Once complete, the client will approve the recruitment timesheet and submit it to the agency for processing.
In many cases, the recruitment timesheets are faxed, scanned, or eMailed to a central location. To pay the worker, the recruitment agency must manually transcribe the data into their payroll system. The process is labour intensive, time-consuming, and often lacks accuracy.
For employee timesheet management
Employee timesheets can be used to record timekeeping, highlight absenteeism, track bonus time, productivity and much more in a corporate environment.
Every week, the organisation may need to track data from hundreds or thousands of employees with information arriving from different locations. Due to the potential impact on staff remuneration, the data must be collected quickly and accurately. However, the timesheets are often scanned and manually keyed at a central location or abroad. This presents several challenges:
- Inaccurate or miscalculated hours worked entered into payroll systems leading to higher costs or disgruntled staff
- Late or lost time sheets leading to workers being asked to recall hours worked after the event and delayed payments
- Administrative burden associated with chasing manual timesheets, manual data entry, and correcting errors – adding hours to an employee’s week
- Limited visibility and quality control if data entry is outsourced to an overseas company
Solution
The solution to these challenges lies in a TeleForm-based timesheet automation system.
The intelligent data capture software automatically captures and indexes data and images from paper timesheets and extracts the information, using handprint (ICR), machine print (OCR) and checkbox (OMR), ready for export to a database.
Some of the benefits of timesheet automation include:
Easy timesheet creation
Create new timesheets and configure legacy forms with a drag-and-drop designer.
Add clear and simple field types and embed rules/logic to timesheets for accurate data capture.
Capture accurate data
With automated timesheets, every line item is sanity checked for time-based math errors and overlapping time periods with daily and weekly totals cross-checked.
This process is guaranteed for every line item on every timesheet; a validation that is impossible with manual data capture.
Better management information
Capture both productive and unproductive time (e.g., downtime, waiting time) from staff timesheets and confidently set contract rates for future projects
Improve operational efficiency
The time tracking software automates timesheet capture directly into payroll systems offering quicker time to completion from timesheet submission to payroll.
Meanwhile, businesses can easily monitor employee performance and the number of hours worked to eliminate additional payroll costs and deliver a healthier bottom line.
Eliminate paper storage
Digitising records eliminates manual filing, saves money, and releases valuable floor space.
Once digitalised, paper timesheets can be searched and retrieved for on-screen viewing within seconds.
Automatic archival
Once the content is verified, it can be exported into payroll software or eStore for archiving and retrieval.
Alternatively, it can be exported to different formats including Excel, CSV, Sage, SQL, or SPSS.
Secure deployment
The timesheet software is installed on-premise, with no need to send confidential information to off-site scanning bureaus or processors, so it is much easier to comply with data protection laws.
