HRMS Attendance: The Self-Service Revolution

HRMS Attendance systems are similar to payroll systems: they’ve been at the forefront of technological advancement in HR and are operationally critical to many organizations. The data found in these systems can be integral to supporting business operation and to effective staffing and planning. However, these systems have an additional layer of complexity as they often involve external hardware to track timekeeping activities…or do they?

The Old Days

Many of us remember the old days of punch card. This progressed to smarter technology such as magnetic and barcode cards, to the more secure biometric collection devices that require a fingerprint or facial recognition to trigger the start of a shift. All of these devices function behind the scenes in an HRMS; they are a collection point capturing a date and time in order to track employee work hours, which in turn contributes data to payroll within the HRMS.

In some companies, HRMS attendance software has taken a giant technological leap forward and is deployed within devices carried into the workplace by employees themselves such as iPhones, iPads, Android devices and other smartphones and tablets. Forward thinking HRMS vendors have built device based applications that allow for the capture of clocking in and out data as well as other functionality that accurately sub-divides an employee’s day, such as the ability to attach a project or account code to certain work hours, thus facilitating the billing or charging of employee time to certain projects and code.

Additionally, new HRMS functionality allows for the entry and approval of vacation time off via mobile devices. Today’s technology is far removed from the days when a manager had to sign a vacation approval request (having first manually reviewed staff coverage levels of course), before sending the piece of paper down to the payroll department for processing. Now, an employee with access to a cloud or web HRMS platform can often enter the request online and it will alert the manager who may be on the go and on a different time zone or continent! Further, the HRMS can have rules applied to limit or disallow requests that break pre-defined rules or processes, as well as automatic notifications that alert employees of the need to take holidays prior to deadlines. Such applications, when established with effective rules and routing soon cause us to wonder - how did we ever cope before?