Access Control and Payroll Systems
Access Control and Payroll Systems
May 30Some access control or security providers will tell you that your current access control system can also look after your time and attendance needs. This advice is not generally not an intentional act of deception, it simply indicates that there is a lack of understanding of the complexity of time and attendance particularly within the access control industry.
While it is true that your access control system probably records every employee access event, time and attendance is a lot more involved than this. If you intend to record time and attendance with a view to calculating your employee payroll rather than just tracking whether employees are attending the office, then the raw information provided by your access control system is not that useful. The access control logs will be full of entry and exits from doors which have very little to do with the employee’s site attendance. Access control logs will include many access events which are not only irrelevant but actually detrimental to your time and attendance calculations. Sometimes, but not often you can drill down in the access control reporting system to very specific access points such as the front door and very specific times such as start and finish times for your staff but this is stretching the limits of the application and it fall short of your time and attendance requirements.
The raw events that are of interest to time and attendance are the start work and stop work events . For example: Employee #1 arrived at work and clocked in at 8:47:54, stopped for lunch and clocked out 12:01:32, clocked back in at 12:29:20 and at the end of the day clocked out at 17:30:35. Time and attendance software will take these raw clocking times and decide, based on the configured business or award rules how to treat each clocking event. Some of these decisions would include rounding the clocking time to the start of the employees shift, allowing a grace period of a few minutes if an employee is late, deducting time to the next 15 minute interval if an employee is late, rounding the lunch clocking events to 30 minutes, calculating overtime and after a predetermined time but balancing normal time from overtime on a daily or weekly basis, accumulating bank time and reporting on missing clocking events and possible leave inclusions.
This is complex stuff and requires a very specialized software program and, often a specialized data collection terminal or time clock. It is not surprising that access control software struggles with even the most basic of these functions.
If you are looking to increase your payroll automation and you already have access control be vary wary of any advice indicating that you can employ existing access control terminals. Access control terminals rarely give any user feedback such as a clockings log or in fact any confirmation of who has just presented their ID card. Additionally, they are unlikely to be able to communicate directly with time and attendance software without significant development work.
It is not difficult to source a an excellent time and attendance system at a reasonable cost . Don’t be tempted to try and extract useful information from an access control system which was not designed for time and attendance. Many users have gone down this track only to find that the functionality required is simply not present.