Pros and Cons of Attendance Machines at Work

Nowadays, it has become easy to track when employees start and end their work. This is possible because of the different types of attendance machines available in the market.

An attendance machine gives businesses everything they need to manage all aspects of their employee’s work time. Therefore, it is vital to keep track of not only when your employees come and go but for how many hours they work, their time-off requests, leaves, etc.

Today different types of HR and payroll software solutions come well-equipped with attendance management capabilities. Accurate timekeeping especially when it comes to employees, is something very important to keep track of. Comprehensive attendance software is a great way to solve this problem.

Managing your employee’s time is important, and so investing in one of the best attendance machines is critical, especially for small-scale businesses. Knowing what is available in the market is the first step in understanding what your business needs.

Let’s look at the different types of attendance machines and see which one will be the best option for your organization:

1. Card Punch Time Clocks

Punch clocks have been used by businesses for years. Today, however, they are considered old school when compared to various other automated and robust attendance machines. Card punch time clock is an original hardware solution that came into existence in the late 1800s. Using this method, employees can easily fill-out physical cards and store them in a filing system. One flaw that continues to remain in these systems is that they are exposed to “buddy punching” just like the old punch clock.

Pros:

• Allows an employee to easily time-in and time-out

• Simple to implement and administer

Cons:

• It is an inefficient attendance machine and considered to be an outdated solution when compared to modern ways of recording attendance

• It cannot prevent fraudulent activities, such as buddy-punching and time-theft

2. Biometric Attendance Machine

A biometric attendance machine can be defined as one that uses different physiological traits, such as fingerprints and iris, to identify an employee.  A biometric system automates the process of clocking in and clocking out. This type of attendance machine is usually installed at the entrance of a building or on different floors. Today, due to the pandemic, the Government of India has prohibited the use of biometric attendance machines that use touch-based features, such as fingerprints.

Pros:

• There are no passwords needed

• A biometric machine is easy to install and operate

• Speed is an advantage as it can be quickly used to mark attendance

• They help in preventing buddy-punching

Cons:

• Various environmental factors can impact clocking

• It demands that even mobile employees should interact with the physical hardware

3. Touchless Attendance Machine

A touchless attendance machine refers to an attendance system that doesn’t require employees to use their fingerprints or any touch-based characteristic for marking attendance. A great example of a touchless attendance machine is KENT CamAttendance. It is based on facial recognition and uses AI-based computer vision technology to capture and recognize the face of an employee. It is managed with the help of an end-to-end encrypted cloud application that helps in storing employees’ records and photos. A cloud-based touchless attendance machine like KENT CamAttendance offers benefits like consistency, cost optimization, and ease of access across different devices and platforms. The KENT CamAttendance takes less than a second to detect a face. The device can even work in offline mode and syncs data to the cloud once internet connectivity resumes. It enables you to centrally manage all your time and attendance needs.

Pros:

• It offers greater precision and helps in the complete elimination of errors

• It helps in reducing the amount of work needed for attendance management

• It allows you to easily manage attendance data for multiple locations or multiple devices in the same location

• It offers seamless integration with an existing HRMS software

• It gives easy access to more transparent performance tracking

These 3 are the most commonly used attendance machines at the workplace. Gone are the days when organizations used to track the attendance of their employees with traditional punch cards.

Now that we have listed down the pros and cons of different types of attendance machines, it will be a lot easier for you to decide in favour of one.