Balmori Software Inc.

[ Article ]

Are you evaluating computerized timekeeping devices (aka computerized bundy clocks or biometric devices)? Avoid later disappointment and feelings of betrayal by keeping a simple framework firmly in mind.

Just as with any investment in business equipment or production machinery, the bottom line is, you're seeking productivity increases.

Ensure that you actually get the productivity improvements you seek by knowing your basic parameters.

A useful first step is to get your definitions down cold.

A TIMEKEEPING device is a piece of hardware (with software). Its basic function is to capture accurately your employees' time of arrival and time of departure from your workplace.

It is aptly described as a "computerized bundy clock," because it performs the same function as that charming appliance from an earlier generation. To record the time-ins and time-outs of employees, the timekeeping device is necessarily equipped with rudimentary software that can capture and store these time-in/time-out data.

A timekeeping application - now that's a very different beast. First of all, it's purely a piece of software, not hardware. It may reside in the data capture device; but it more usually resides in a computer.

A timekeeping application is a much more sophisticated piece of software than the software you find in a time data capture device, going way beyond merely recording your times of arrival and departure. The timekeeping app does a lot more data crunching than the time capture device.

How does it do its work? From the data capture device, the timekeeping app absorbs raw data showing workers' arrival and exit times.

Then to this raw data, the timekeeping app applies the company's rules about time. Official work times, lateness, grace periods, overtime, and such.

The timekeeping app's main output is processed time data - a neat listing of regular hours worked, overtime hours worked, late hours, and undertime - for each employee.

1. Time-In/Out data capture device (hardware + software) 2. Time-keeping application (software) 2. Payroll application (software) Fig.1. Never, never assume that a data capture device (box 1) will always come with a timekeeping application (box 2) (it may or may not), which in turn is not, not, not the same thing as a payroll application (box 3).

Imagine doing all this by hand for twenty, eighty, two hundred employees; not a lot of fun. But a well-designed timekeeping app frees the payroll officer from having to compute these figures by hand. Without the timekeeping app, there's no choice but to do this task the hard way.

Numerous rules, policies and algorithms (your rules, your policies, your algorithms) determine the processed time info output of a timekeeping app.

It's management that sets these rules, in a direct manifestation of your company’s policies about time, indeed, its cultural attitudes about time.

As dramatized in the sidebar ("Elvis has entered the building!"), different companies will have different ways of treating the same work day, each one of them perfectly justifiable.

That’s management’s prerogative (or the labor union’s hard-won conditions). When implemented by a human clerk, these rules seem simple, straightforward, even self-evident.

But when translated into a computer program, their full complexity emerges. That’s because computers require everything to be expressed explicitly and precisely.

Computers, unlike most humans, are famously intolerant of ambiguity. And computer programs have a tendency to expose inconsistent rules and procedures... by crashing.

Part of the challenge of computerizing timekeeping is frequently the need to first “repair” rules conflicts that had been coexisting undetected in the previous (non-computerized) regime.

And that is why it’s one thing to create a time-in-time-out data capture software module (easy); it’s quite another to create a true timekeeping application (much more difficult).

The point was made earlier that different companies can and do assume different attitudes, and therefore formulate different policies, to various time questions in a workplace (typical issues are illustrated in the sidebar).

Face it, different companies will have different rules; because there’s no standard way to handle time issues. What this means is that a timekeeping application always has to be specially tailored to each company’s attitudes, rules, and culture about time issues.

This is why a timekeeping application is a very complicated thing, and a very different animal from either a time data capture module or a payroll application. Don’t confuse one with the others, or think they are all one and the same thing.

A time data capture module, because it merely records raw time-ins and time-outs, can’t tell regular hours from overtime hours, or absences from disciplinary suspensions. Or holidays from regular workdays. That’s the job of the timekeeping application.

Now let's contemplate a third animal: the payroll application itself. Everyone knows that a payroll application is a piece of software that computes your employees’ pay in peso terms.

But it’s useful to remind ourselves that in computing our pay, a payroll application has to handle many, many more parameters and variables than just time.

Aside from time-impacted pay issues like overtime, night differential, and time-based pay, a payroll application needs to simultaneously handle pay issues that have nothing to do with time: contributions to various government funds (SSS, HDMF, PHIC); contributions to in-company provident funds; a whole slew of income taxation issues and mandatory BIR reporting; and issues having to do with employee benefits in monetary form, such as company loans.

And that’s how a payroll application differs from a timekeeper application. And that's why a payroll system is a different and separate animal from a timekeeping application.

Therefore, if you are about to invest in a time data capture device, clarify first if it comes with a timekeeping application or not. If it doesn’t, then all you get is a machine that produces the same raw time data as a bundy clock, only perhaps with biometric identity validation capabilities or optical scanning features to prevent employee fraud.

If you do decide to commission a timekeeping application, make sure that your company’s rules, policies, and algorithms regarding time questions are crystal-clear to the software developer you hire. And yes, now that you know the difference, make sure your programmer really delivers a true timekeeping application, not just a time data capture module.

Now is the point where you say: OK, I now have at hand both a timekeeping data capture device and a timekeeping application. Can I possibly avoid the tedium of re-keying?

Can you arrange it such that the timekeeping app exports its output seamlessly, automatically into the payroll app while I practice my salsa moves or read Lady Chatterley's Lover?

Answer: If what you have is a true timekeeping application as meticulously described in this article, then the answer is yes, it is possible to express its output in text format so that the payroll app can automatically "suck in" that data.

This has an obvious benefit: you escape manual re-encoding (re-keying) of processed time data from the timekeeping app into the payroll app.

If, however, what you have is only a biometric data capture device, then know that it will only record time-ins and time-outs.

If all you have are a timekeeping data capture device and a payroll app, you can now see that you still lack the middle box (the orange box) in our diagram in Fig. 1.

Without that middle box, you'd have to convert the raw time-in/out data into processed time data yourself. Manually. (Spreadsheeting is still manual handling, as anyone who's ever tried it knows).

Fore more info on this topic, read the related article Biometric data capture devices: where they're helpful, where they're not.

-rsr/rcd


Title:   Three different animals: learn how to tell them apart (and save wear and tear on your career)
              Data capture devices vs. timekeeper applications vs. payroll applications



Share on

                                                                

<<< Back to top >>>