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15 Employee Time Tracking Tips to Boost Productivity in Your Business

Employee time tracking is all about simplifying and streamlining the recording and reporting of hours worked so that the process doesn’t act as a speed bump to your team’s productivity.

In this article, we discuss tips that can transform your employee time tracking into a well-oiled machine so that everything further down the process chain is easier and more accurate.

Key takeaways

Training your team how to use time tracking tools ensures everyone stays on the same page and reduces common mistakes.
Transitioning from tracking time on paper to automated software makes it easier for your business to follow all labor laws and saves hours of manual work each week.
Documenting your employee time tracking rules in a company handbook gives team members a clear guide for clocking in and out without needing to ask a manager.
Connecting your time tracking data to payroll and sales tools helps you see exactly how much you spend on labor in real time.
Reviewing timesheets and asking for employee feedback helps catch errors early and keeps the system running smoothly for everyone.

What is employee time tracking?
Is employee time tracking different for restaurants?
Tips for better employee time tracking

What is employee time tracking?

Man using his watch for employee time tracking

Employee time tracking is the practice of recording and collating information about when each member of your team works and doesn’t work.

For businesses that pay their employees by the hour (be it part-time or full-time), time tracking is the foundation for calculating paychecks and the benefits they receive.

Team members clock in when they arrive at the workplace and clock out when they leave for the day. Some businesses also require that their employees clock in and out during breaks so that management can get a more accurate picture of actual time spent on the job.

For businesses that pay their employees a salary, employee time tracking is often used as a means to observe and control project costs.

Team members record the amount of time they work on a specific project throughout the day, and that data is then incorporated into calculating the true cost of the job (and estimating expenses for future jobs).

At its most basic, the theory of employee time tracking is fairly simple and straightforward. But, when your business takes into account the total number of employees, tax laws, payroll, and any number of other factors, it becomes a full-time job in itself.

That’s why it’s essential to do everything you can to make your tracking system as efficient and effective as possible.

Is employee time tracking different for restaurants?

The process of employee time tracking in a restaurant can be a bit more complex than the process in an office setting where everyone works the same shift each day, but the basic ideas are the same.

Regardless of the type of restaurant you run — or the size of the operation or the number of locations — one of the best things you can do to make things easier is to implement time tracking software into your team’s workflow.

And, with the right solution in place, you’ll be able to do much more than just monitor work hours.

Advanced tracking software like Sling allows you and your team to:

When considering which app to use in your business, keep in mind that the ideal solution is a single suite of tools with the flexibility to do everything mentioned above.

Avoid wasting time trying to assemble many separate apps that may or may not work well together.

Then, once you’ve got your time tracking software in place, try the tips in the next section to make the entire system run better from start to finish.

Tips for better employee time tracking

1) Show your team how time tracking helps them

If you drop a new employee time tracking system on your team without explaining it, your team members might feel like you’re forcing them to do something they don’t want to do or making something they’re already used to more complicated than it needs to be.

To prevent these bad feelings, take the time to show your team how time tracking helps them, and explain how accurate timecards ensure their paychecks are correct every single time.

When they see that the new system prevents mistakes that can have a big impact on their pay, they’ll be more willing to support the change.

2) Build a solid onboarding process

Whether you’re hiring a new server or switching to a digital app, you’ll absolutely need a plan so that everyone receives the same information and training. That’s where an onboarding process comes in.

Create a training program so your employees can practice clocking in, requesting time off, checking their schedules, and all the other important tasks that go into employee time tracking.

When everyone (new hires and long-timers alike) has the same knowledge and training, you’ll have fewer headaches and problems to solve down the road.

3) Put your process in writing

Some businesses just rely on one-on-one training to teach their employees how to clock in and clock out. The problem with that is if there’s a question or problem, employees have to ask someone else for help.

Not that there’s anything wrong with asking for help, but doing so can cause delays and create other problems. All of that can be avoided by putting your employee time tracking process in writing.

The best place to record the rules and procedures is in your employee handbook. This section should cover everything from how to handle a missed punch to how many minutes early they are allowed to clock in.

4) Maintain compliance at all times

Law books to help with employee time tracking laws and regulations

Compliance isn’t just a buzzword that you can use and then forget. It’s a requirement. Make sure your employee time tracking system follows all local, state, and federal laws. This includes rules about overtime, minimum wage, and how long you need to keep time card records.

It’s also important to remember that laws change, sometimes without notice. To stay on top of things, consult with a lawyer or accountant who’s familiar with your industry at least once a year.

Doing so protects your business and ensures that your employees are treated fairly.

5) Automate the employee time tracking system

In the 21st century, automated workforce management software is the new standard for employee time tracking and compliance. These apps allow you to see exactly how much a shift will cost before it even starts.

Plus, you can set wages by position, stay on budget, avoid expensive overtime, view labor as a percentage of sales, create payroll reports, and so much more. Often, with just a few clicks.

In many ways, it does more than just save time. It gives you the information you need to make smarter business decisions.

For more information on the best way to automate your employee time tracking process, check out these articles from the Sling blog:

6) Prevent time theft

Time theft is when an employee accepts wages for work they didn’t do. The theft can be deliberate, accidental, or just negligent.

Regardless of how the theft occurred, the loss of both time and money can have a negative impact on the way your business operates.

Instead of accepting the loss of business resources due to time theft, prevent it from happening in the first place with these tips:

Define time theft so that everyone is clear on what it is and isn’t
Put the rules for clocking in and out in your employee handbook
Incorporate biometrics to remove the temptation for ghosting
Discourage long breaks

If time theft does occur, issue a verbal warning. If it occurs again, consider a written warning in their file, docking their pay, suspension, or even termination.

Whatever discipline you choose, make sure everyone is aware of the punishment beforehand, and do your best to follow through with each employee who breaks the rules.

7) Keep it simple

However you choose to structure your business’s employee time tracking system, keep the process as simple as possible.

For the team members who use it daily, the entire clock-in/clock-out operation from start to finish should only take a few seconds.

Whether it’s punching a paper sheet, swiping an ID card, typing a PIN, or having their fingerprint scanned, anything more than 10 or 15 seconds is too long to be productive.

8) Collect the right information

Keeping things as simple as possible also involves collecting just the right amount of information to be useful, but not too much that your data becomes cluttered and hard to analyze.

Hourly employees should clock in at the beginning of their shift and clock out at the end of their shift. For some businesses, that may be all the information they need.

Other variables you may need to track include:

In some cases, your businesses may even need to track time spent on specific projects or tasks.

Doing so adds another layer of complexity to the time tracking process, but if it’s what your business needs to run smoothly, then so be it.

9) Integrate time tracking with other business tools

For most businesses, tracking employee work hours is just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of other processes depend on those numbers, including performance standards, payroll, overtime, labor law compliance, and more.

You can save time and money by integrating time tracking with other tools in your business so that the data automatically flows from one system to another.

For example, the Sling suite of tools integrates seamlessly with Toast and allows you to compare Toast POS sales data to Sling labor costs and export employee timesheets directly to Toast Payroll (just to name a few).

Such integrations make it easier than ever to use data gathered in one part of your business and apply it to another part of the business without having to manually re-enter a long list of numbers and risk making mistakes along the way.

10) Ask for feedback

Your employees are on the frontline of the time-tracking process every day, so they know what things are working and what things aren’t. Asking for their feedback and implementing their suggestions when possible can go a long way toward making the system better.

An easy way to start is to set up a digital or paper-based “suggestion box” dedicated solely to the employee time tracking process.

Encourage your team to submit their thoughts about:

What they like about the process
What they don’t like about the process
Positive experiences
Negative experiences
New ideas
Anything else about time tracking that they’d like you to know

Then, schedule a meeting and go over the suggestions with your team to get even more feedback.

You may not be able to implement it all, but there may be one or two nuggets that everyone agrees would make the system better.

11) Use 24-hour time and rounding

While using 24-hour time and rounding won’t affect the way your team clocks in and out, it will make things easier for you and your accounting team down the line.

24-hour time

If you manually calculate total hours worked each day, 24-hour time can streamline the process so much that you may be able to quickly do the math in your head.

Here’s why: 24-hour time doesn’t “restart” every twelve hours like the standard format. That means that the morning hours stay the same as you’re used to (1 through 12), but one in the afternoon becomes 1300, two in the afternoon becomes 1400, and so on.

So, if an employee clocks in at 0700 and clocks out at 1700, you can simply subtract the smaller number from the larger number (1700 – 0700 = 10 hours). You can’t do that with the standard format (which would be 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 a.m.).

Rounding

Rounding laws allow businesses to round clock-in/clock-out times up or down to the nearest 10- or 15-minute mark.

Most businesses choose the 15-minute option (because it’s slightly easier), but there’s nothing wrong with the 10-minute option either.

In the 15-minute rounding option, employee work time from one to seven minutes is rounded down, while time from eight to 14 minutes is rounded up.

So, if Rick clocks in at 0758 (24-hour time) and clocks out at 1707, you would round the start time up to 0800 and the stop time down to 1700 for a total of nine hours (1700 – 0800 = 9.0) worked that day.

12) Analyze your data

Once you’ve got your employee time tracking system dialed in, analyze the data to gain insight into the way your business operates and to make smarter decisions about how you use resources.

The reporting feature that comes standard in some of the more advanced workforce management apps (such as Sling) can help you:

Find labor costs for each shift
Manage margins per shift
Decide on an ideal labor budget for each shift
Identify areas where you may be overspending
Avoid expensive overtime
View historical and projected sales revenue
Check labor percentage against sales
Control labor costs against anticipated revenue

Taking the time to analyze your employees’ work hour data can give you more control over the larger aspects of your business that affect your bottom line, including labor costs, payroll, savings, and cash flow.

13) Avoid micromanaging

Employee time tracking taken to the extreme can start to feel like micromanaging.

If you try to account for every last minute of an employee’s day, they may start to feel like you don’t trust them. That can affect their morale and productivity for the worse.

For hourly workers, encourage accurate start and stop times, but give a bit of leeway in-between for breaks, colleague interaction, and other social situations that contribute to employee happiness.

14) Review timecards before cutting checks

Before you send your employees’ timecards off to be processed for payroll, review the numbers to make sure they don’t deviate from your business’s standards for acceptable time tracking.

Reviewing the numbers on each timesheet can help:

Ensure accuracy
Minimize errors
Catch small problems before they become big problems
Prevent these problems from affecting payroll
Avoid unauthorized overtime
Eliminate intentional and unintentional time theft

If you have to contend with a lot of timecards, consider delegating the review to trusted managers so the task isn’t so overwhelming.

15) Save data for future reference

According to the Fair Labor Standards Act, businesses must keep employee time tracking data for a minimum of two years.

This applies to any records that affect wage computations, including:

Time cards
Wage rate tables
Work schedules
Time schedules
Benefits information
Deductions

Businesses must also keep any payroll records that result from the time tracking data — typically for more than two years.

Visit the Department of Labor’s website for more details.

The key to easy and accurate employee time tracking

easy and accurate employee time tracking with sling

The key to easy and accurate time tracking is choosing the right software for the job. Look no further than Sling.

The Sling app was built to streamline a large portion of your scheduling, time tracking, and attendance reporting work.

With Sling, you can build your employees’ schedules within minutes instead of hours and manage time off, availability, and shift-trade requests without collecting, sorting, and collating a huge stack of paper.

Add to that the onboard A.I. that will help you schedule overtime and avoid exceeding your labor budget, and you’ve got a powerful ally in keeping expenses under control.

Sling will even help you reduce absenteeism and late arrivals and keep track of overlapping shifts and double-booking.

Sling also offers a unique feature that turns any phone, tablet, or computer into a time clock. It allows your employees to clock in and out of their shifts without clogging up a central terminal. Sling even notifies you when an employee is running late or forgets to clock in.

And that’s just the beginning of what Sling has to offer to help you better manage your employees.

No matter the size of your business, Sling helps you organize your employees’ work schedules in less time so you can move on to other, more vital, tasks.

The benefits that make Sling a leader in the industry don’t stop with time and attendance tracking features. Sling also addresses the difficulty of labor costs. These expenses are one of the largest capital outlays any business has to absorb.

And since you can’t manage what you don’t measure, Sling’s labor cost feature helps you optimize your spending while you schedule. That means there’s less back and forth trying to reconcile your employees’ work schedules with your labor budget.

You can even use Sling to assign tasks to groups or specific employees, set due dates, and then follow their progress through to completion.

For more free resources to help you manage your business better, organize and schedule your team, and track and calculate labor costs, visit GetSling.com today.

This content is for informational purposes and is not intended as legal, tax, HR, or any other professional advice. Please contact an attorney or other professional for specific advice.

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Frequently asked questions

What should I do if an employee forgets to clock out?

If an employee forgets to clock out, a manager should go into the digital timesheet and manually enter the correct time. That said, it’s essential that you do so in a professional and legal way.

Ask the employee for written proof (e.g., a piece of paper, email, or text) confirming exactly what time they finished their work. Keep the proof in the employee’s file to show that you’re abiding by all labor laws and aren’t just changing hours to save the company money.

Can employees see their own hours before payday?

Absolutely! Giving your team members access to their time tracking report before payday is a great way to build trust and transparency within your business.

With the right employee time tracking program in place, team members can see everything from a running total of their hours and any breaks they’ve taken to overtime earned and the rate(s) at which they’ll be paid.

Such transparency prevents payday surprises where an employee expected a larger check than they received. It also allows them to do some of the work for you. If they spot a mistake (like forgetting to clock out for lunch), they can report it to a manager before the pay period closes.

Does time tracking software work without an internet connection?

Many employee time tracking apps feature an offline mode specifically for this issue. If their device’s Wi-Fi goes down or loses cell service, the app saves the clock-in data directly to the internal memory.

As soon as the device finds a stable connection, it automatically syncs the time tracking information to the online storage. This ensures that a lack of internet never results in a lost shift, fewer hours, or a smaller paycheck for your employees.

How can I take advantage of GPS tracking for remote employees?

GPS tracking uses the location sensors built into mobile devices and makes it possible for the time tracking software to record exactly where a team member is when they clock in or out (down to specific coordinates).

The GPS signal can also be paired with geofencing technology, giving you the power to set up boundaries around your office, work location, or job site. If an employee tries to clock in while they’re outside those boundaries, the system won’t allow it, and you’ll receive a notification.

Similarly, if an employee leaves the work location without clocking out, the system will automatically do it for them.

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