Keeping track of employee time and attendance can be a complicated and time consuming process. The complexity and time consumption of this task increases exponentially as a company grows in size. Monitoring the everyday schedule for a company can be a considerable task in itself. Add to that, late arrivals, absenteeism, sick days, sick leave, holidays, overtime and a whole host of other unforeseeable occurrences and you can see how easily management of time and attendance can turn into a nightmare.

Those are only the considerations that have to be taken in with an ordinary work schedule. When companies operate on shift work or flexi time schedules organising employee time and attendance can become almost impossible, requiring a large department in its own right just to keep it operating. These are the primary reasons pretty much every medium and large company uses an automated time and attendance system.

The reasons are simple. Time and attendance software cuts costs, increases efficiency and provides a whole host of other benefits. Preventing absenteeism not only saves money and improves efficiency it can also reduce stress on the rest of the workforce. Absenteeism increases the workload that has to be carried by the other staff. Staff can also become resentful of being at work while others are absent.

Time and attendance software typically allows a company's human resources department to outline the parameters of their company work schedule detecting, usually through some type of card scanning system, and recording when employees arrive and leave. Of course some systems have more functionality than others but by and large they all have this basic function.

The question then arises. What should a company expect their time and attendance software to do for them? Is it enough to just scan and record their employees arrival and departure times or is there a potential to integrate a far greater range of functionality into the system? If a company is going to the effort of implementing this system, integrating it into their work force and their infrastructure it would surely be more efficient if it could form the basis of broader time and cost saving measures.

Many time and attendance software systems predict future scheduling conflicts and alert the user well in advance. An extension of this functionality is that some systems now allow their users to run 'what if' scenarios. The user can input the parameters of various situations that may occur, such as a large number of employees becoming ill at once or what the effects of rearranging the schedule in a particular way might be. The time and attendance software can then tell them what the consequences of those situations might be.

A good time and attendance system will also incorporate a function for recording the presence of employees that work from remote offices or who work on the road. By integrating biometric scanners with the system, connected to a usb port, companies can ensure that employees are working for their wages even if they are not under immediate supervision.