What is Attendance Management? What are the features, advantages and disadvantages

• Functions
• Type of Attendance Management System
• Issues for Attendance Management Work
• Advantages and Disadvantages
• Cautions when selecting an Attendance Management System

The following functions are a part of attendance management.

This function records the time of arrival and departure in order to tally the working hours for each employee. There are a wide range of time stamping methodologies with various attendance management systems, such as touch panels and IC card systems. Time stamping from your own PC or smartphone is also available.

Shift tables can be created based employment type, such as fulltime or part-time employees. Versatility and flexibility in shift management increases work productivity and allows for a variety of employment types in the workplace for employees who work in different shifts.

The workflow function allows managers (supervisors) to approve employee requests for paid leave, half-holidays, overtime, or modifications to clocked time, and streamlines the application/approval work process.

The tabulation/Analysis function aggregates each employee's working hours, break times, paid vacation status, and so forth, starting from an employee's time of arrival to departure. The analysis function allows for various analysis types that are useful for labor management, such as comparisons of working hours by department, or checking for the distribution of employees who have worked long hours (overtime).

The alert function notifies employees, and/or the HR department, when there is a missed clocking or omission, or a vacation request. Additionally, necessary or required alerts can be issued by setting the standard working hours in advance (an additional precaution for monitoring or controlling overtime hours).

The information sharing function allows for linking data from other systems, such as personnel management and payroll calculation systems, with the data of the attendance management system. Depending on the type of attendance management system, the linkage and information sharing methods may differ.

Basically, there are two main types of attendance management systems in usage: 1) on premise (installed) or, 2) cloud-based.

On premise attendance management systems require a company to prepare its own server and install an attendance management system software. All maintenance, security and knowhow must be managed by the company.

Initial setup and operating costs tend to be high, but a greater degree of customization and flexibility may be achieved in order to meet the company's specific requirements covering all aspects of hardware, functionality and security measures and protections.

A cloud-based attendance management system entrusts to a provider the handling of all hardware, software and operation and maintenance of the attendance managements system so it can be used as a service.

Cloud-based attendance management systems keep the initial and running costs lower when compared to the on premise attendance management systems.

The ability to customize tends to be low, so it is necessary to select an attendance management system that matches your company's attendance regulations and security policies.

Attendance management is an important function for preventing long working hours and promoting or encouraging employees to take paid holidays. Many companies face the following issues:

HR and accounting departments must perform tabulation work after the payroll closing date. This tabulation is based on the daily clock-in and clock-out times recorded by employees. If you have not introduced an attendance management system, you will need to manually calculate, or enter the data into Excel in order to total the results.

These manually performed methods are not only time consuming, but could be error prone. And, these errors could also increase significantly when you have to calculate flextime work or shorter work hours.

Aggregating employee data is used as the basis for employee payroll calculations, so the aggregate results must be accurate. However, problems or issues may occur due to manipulation of the data by an employee, supervisor or colleague during the time stamping, that could result in the HR management and/or accounting not being able to detect the incorrect data input or fraud.

An example would be a timecard clocking system used by a company. Under these systems, it is easy for a co-worker to clock in another employee, or modify working hours when employees go home.

A revision to the Japanese Labor Standards Act has extended the retention period for attendance records from three (3) to five (5) years. However, to assist in the transitional period, the three (3) years period will be used for the time being. The documents that must be saved include timecards, attendance records and attendance management sheets.

If attendance is being managed manually, records will need to be safely and securely stored, thereby significantly increasing storage requirements and complicated filing procedures.

Forgetting to stamp timecards as well as delays in applications and approval can occur when an employee has applied for paid leave. When an employee submits a paper document, it has to be circulated to the approver for approval and stamping. This increases the difficulty in identifying where the document is at any given time during the process. It also increases the risk of losing the document. HR and accounting would like to ensure that approval is received by the due date, but lack of real-time information makes it difficult for operations to run smoothly. It also makes it difficult to respond to inquiries from applicants.

When laws related to attendance management are revised, as defined in the Japanese Labor Standards Act, HR and accounting must quickly understand the legal revisions and make changes to their work related rules. However, since this is not the only work performed by busy HR and accounting staff, they often do not have the time to spare for dealing with the legal revisions. On the other hand, the risk of being in violation of the legal revision does not allow for mistakes, so the burden on HR and accounting increases significantly.

By introducing an attendance management system, you can prevent fraudulent time stamping and/or data falsification and accurately grasp the working hours for all employees.

Timecard stamping is a method prone to fraud. Stamping can be done by a person other than the employee, or for stamping on time and working overtime. It also makes it easier for a manager and HR or accounting staff to falsify overtime hours by decreasing the real overtime amounts. Timecards are difficult to keep as objective records.

In the case of an attendance management system, each employee must login with a different account and clocks in. This significantly lessens the possibility of impersonation. Also, since the record remains as objective data that can be checked by multiple personnel in charge, it is less likely to be tampered with than timecards.

Attendance management automatically calculates the correct working hours (from clocking in and out of work), thereby reducing input errors, misunderstandings, and calculation errors that may occur in manual tabulation work. Also, since the calculation speed is fast, you'll be able to get a grasp of what's happening in real time.

Many attendance management systems are handled by the system provider, so even if the person in charge of HR and accounting does not have a detailed understanding of the revision to the law, they can still be in compliance to the revision of the law simply by using the system. This frees users from worrying about penalties for non-compliance.

Due to the impact of the Corona pandemic, many companies introduced remote work. Also, many companies have multiple locations such as branch offices and sales offices in addition to the head office. Under such circumstances, employees working offsite (from where HR and accounting staff are located), attendance management cannot be performed with conventional timecards.

When employees use the attendance management system, they can access the system from their home, a satellite office, a branch offices, and more, in order to stamp their start and finish times, making it easier to manage attendance for employees who are away from the office.

If a company introduces an attendance management system that can link data with a payroll calculation system, payroll can be automatically calculated according to an employees' work type. As a result, errors in salary calculations and cheating are less likely to occur, and the relationship of trust between the company and employees can grow.

Attendance management accurately calculates working hours, overtime hours, late-night and holiday premiums and so forth, so fraud such as non-payment of overtime is less likely to occur.

In addition, by using an attendance management system that maintains compliance with the latest legal revisions, you can concentrate on other aspects of HR. According to the work-style reform-related laws that came into effect in April 2019, the upper limit of overtime hours has been set at 45 hours a month and 360 hours a year in principle. Responding to such changes on your own can be time consuming and difficult.

By using attendance management, you can strengthen your compliance and improve your company's image as a company that follows the laws and maintains its participation with its employees.

The introduction of an attendance management system has a monetary cost for implementation.

There are attendance management systems that are free and can be used indefinitely, but in most cases, they are limited in the number of users and functions, making them impractical unless you are a small business.

In addition, although attendance management is important, it is a cost center that does not generate profits like sales support tools, so for some companies, it may be difficult to get approval to secure a budget.

By introducing an attendance management system, you will need to persuade the management by predicting what problems in attendance management can be solved and how much cost can be reduced.

Due to the influence of work style reforms, various work styles, such as flextime, remote work, and shorter working hours have taken root in Japan in recent years. These create and even greater need for attendance management.

For example, many companies need to introduce an attendance management system that allows employees to clock in from their own desk, from their smartphones at home, and properly calculate break times for shift workers and short-time workers.

When strict laws and regulations related to attendance management, such as the Japanese Labor Standards Act, are revised, it is necessary to use an attendance management system that complies with these latest revisions, and thereby reduces errors and improve work efficiency for attendance management.

For instance, work-style reform laws have been enforced in stages (to give companies time to come into compliance) since April 2019. Employees are obliged to take at least five (5) days of annual leave. A good attendance management system assists companies in monitoring their employee leave and assists companies in enforcing compliance with these legal revisions to prevent violation of this law by alerting employees who have not taken their five days of annual leave, even when the end of the term is approaching.

In Japan, declining birthrates and an aging population has caused a decrease in the population resulting in predicted, labor shortages that will continue to progress into the future. As such, many companies are accepting foreign workers to make up for this labor shortage.

In order for foreign workers to be able to use an attendance management system effectively, it's important to select an attendance management system that supports foreign languages; especially when considering the fact that many foreign workers cannot read or write Japanese.

Attendance management systems record data (attendance days, working hours, overtime hours, etc.) This data is not only important for attendance management, but is also used in payroll calculations and human resources management.

Using a payroll calculation system, human resources database, in addition to attendance management will improve work efficiency, allowing you to use data already created, rather than re-creating data for each functional database.

In anticipation of introducing new systems in the future, it's important to select an attendance management system that has many other systems that can be integrated with it.

Over the past few years, there has been a steady trend towards choosing a cloud-based attendance management system over an on premise type, but there may be cases where you would hesitate selecting a cloud-based implementations due to concerns of customizability and compliance with company security policies.

However, there are some attendance management systems, such as "CViElite Attendance" provided by CVi, which are highly customizable and have a high level of security even though it is cloud-based.

It's important to select a system that fits your company's needs, and has comprehensive coverage of what you want, including ease of operation and maintenance after setup, and cost effectiveness.

In addition, high operability and measures against omissions of stamping are also important selection points.

Attendance management system assist in solving problems regarding time stamping and low work efficiency, which were posed by conventional analog attendance management methods using timecards and Excel.

When choosing an attendance management system, it is important that the system supports various work styles, complies with the latest revisions to the law, and can handle foreign languages. Once that's done you can then introduce the systems that best fits your company.