Employee Time Clocks Track Employee Time On The Job
With the Industrial Revolution came the idea of tracking employee time on the job and supervising the length of their breaks. Undoubtedly, this was done manually until the invention of the time clock by Willard Bundy, a jeweler, and his brother Harlow who later organized the Bundy Manufacturing Company and began mass producing the clocks. Several mergers and name changes later resulted in the IBM Corporation. In the early 20th century, IBM's time Equipment Division was sold to the Simplex Time Recorder Company. These first time clocks were mechanical timepieces that used a heavy paper card inserted into a time slot. When the card touched the contact at the back of the slot, the machine printed the time and date on the card. The company then had a printed record for each employee's hours and was able to calculate the wages.
Mechanical clocks began giving way to computer based systems in the 1990s. The first clocks of this type used employee identity codes and magnetic plastic cards. With this system, the employee enters the required information by punching in and punching out, lunch breaks, reasons for taking off early, and whatever other information the employer requires. Even in today's fast paced world with flexi-time and working at home, employers feel the need to keep track of employee's hours wherever they are. Advances in technology, the Internet, the PC, cellular phones, and Palms have led to the increased use of online systems for time track and attendance. Depending on the system acquired by an organization, the employee may use any one of these devices to punch in and out. Labor costs can be controlled more accurately with security devices that eliminate buddy punching, clocking in early, or riding the clock. Modern employee time clock systems use biometrics-fingerprints, palm prints or retina scans-to ensure that the employee does his or her own punching in or out. These same security systems reduce the possibilities that employees enter areas where they do not have security clearance. Not only do the employee time clocks of today guarantee better security, they are able to reduce labor costs by eliminating the need for paper punch cards, the creation of such cards, the manual calculation of pay, and the problem of storing the used cards. Online systems are able to calculate differential pay rates, shift rates, vacations time, and benefits depending on the system used. They are also invaluable in places where employees are tipped since they can enforce tracking and declaration of tips for the tipped employees. However, the employee time clock systems do not actually elaborate the payroll for the organization. The raw data can be imported or exported to a third-party software program for the payroll and other accounting reports. |