Automate Payroll and Get Your Saturdays Back!

Employee time tracking isn’t something you can mess around with. Proper time tracking ensures employees will be paid accurately and on time. How you process payroll directly impacts the lives of the employees on your roster.

Over half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and that number has only gone up since the start of the pandemic. Chances are, a good percentage of your employees will have already spent their paycheck by the time you hand it to them.

As a payroll manager, you know they’re relying on you to get the numbers right so they can put food on the table and a roof over their heads. Automating payroll can help you master the art of accurate employee time tracking without clocking a single minute of Saturday overtime.

Manual processes are holding your team back

Considering payroll accuracy is universally recognized as critical to the success of any organization, the number of businesses still relying on manual payroll processes is surprising.

Manual payroll processes are extremely time-consuming. Ensuring accurate time tracking manually requires an extensive amount of extra work and time (and time is money).

This process is vulnerable to human error at multiple touchpoints. Employees must clock their hours correctly. If they round their hours, payroll managers have to ensure the rounding is accurate. If they don’t round, counting up hours and calculating pay gets even trickier. The manager has to approve time as well, and if you’re using physical time cards, it only increases the risk that they can get lost or destroyed. When discrepancies occur, payroll managers have to fall back on time-consuming processes to correct and verify payroll.

As if that process doesn’t sound like enough of a headache, just wait until you go beyond the basics and bring complex calculations like shift differentials, overtime, holiday pay and varying pay rates into the equation. When pay rates differ from one employee to the next, payroll managers are stuck in a constant reel of shifting context. It’s almost impossible to get into a rhythm and crank out accurate payroll calculations in a timely manner. That’s where a choice has to be made– sacrifice accuracy or lose your Saturday to a never-ending list of tedious calculations. If those two options aren’t cutting it for your organization, it’s time to find a digital time-tracker solution.

Employee time-tracking solution in action

Cloud-based solutions act as a centralized source of truth for payroll data. All relevant stakeholders can access and review time cards submitted and amounts paid from anywhere, which simplifies reconciliation and eliminates the risk of lost time cards. And payroll integrations allow you to connect employee time tracking information directly to your payroll software, making the process of running payroll seamless.

The Toledo Public School’s (TPS) transportation services department is a great example of how digital payroll solutions can transform the employee time tracking and payroll process for payroll managers. They turned to TCP Software to design a solution after recognizing that managing a manual payroll system for over 260 employees was too much for one person to handle.

Prior to the switch, Payroll Coordinator Angie Pack executed payroll entirely by hand. She worked 15+ hour days including weekends just so that employees could be paid accurately and on time. She had to physically count up time-card hours for each 10-day period, track down employees to fix discrepancies and collect signatures, transfer this data to a separate document, then upload it to their human resources management software at the end of each pay period.

By 2018, she and Transportation Coordinator, Cindy Fox, were exhausted by duplicative work, payment errors and labor-intensive data entry. As Cindy puts it, “I walked in one day and saw stacks of paper on Angie’s desk. I learned they were our employees’ timecards and then quickly realized Angie was having to do payroll by hand because we didn’t have a better solution!”

After implementing TCP’s TimeClock Plus software, the TPS transportation services department improved payroll accuracy by 90% while spending 85% less time on payroll activities.

Adopting TCP’s solution meant they were no longer relying on physical time cards or manual workflows. Employees were held more accountable in the payroll process, reducing the need for reconciliations. Additionally, they were able to automate complex rate collections based on unique transportation rules and regulations. Best of all, Angie was finally able to take some well-deserved time off. Prior to implementing TCP’s solution, she’d accrued over 300 hours of unused comp time. When the case study was written, that number was already down to 40 hours.

It’s your turn

Going digital with your employee time tracking saves time, money and stress, allowing your team to achieve accurate payroll in a fraction of the time. That means you can get your Saturdays back and have time to analyze workforce data to cut down on overtime, now that you’ve tamed your own.

Ready to transform the way you do payroll? Learn how TCP can streamline your time and attendance tracking.