If you run a small business, you probably have a hidden expense thats eating your time, and your businesss money: Tracking employee time and productivity.
When businesses are small, traditional practice is to use some sort of manual time keeping system to log employee hours. Each employee fills out a paper time sheet, the payroll administrator goes over the time sheets, cuts the checks, handles the deductions and government paperwork, and deals with requests for time off, overtime and vacation days.
As businesses grow and add employees, this manual system becomes more and more cumbersome. The steps to automation start out small an automated punch clock and pre-printed time cards, and a rapid switch from manual time keeping to using a spreadsheet.
But even this level of automation requires manual re-keying of data, and as the number of employees grows, the more demanding the needs are for your time and attendance and payroll systems. A lot of businesses end up trapped with a legacy system, usually cobbled together out of several different parts, perhaps even with custom programming in the mix.
Payroll accounting is a repetitive and aggravating task...