Posted on Fri, Aug 26, 2011
Welcome to the latest edition of MobileTime, a blog about the issues affecting mobile time tracking and industry in general. Our goal for this blog is to provide useful, helpful information presented in a concise format to our customers and all others who might benefit. Today's article is the last in a series of posts that deals with internal controls embedded in mobile time tracking systems.
Have you ever wondered what internal control features make for a safe, secure mobile time tracking application? One that you can depend on to give you an accurately recorded, properly disbursed payroll. In this issue we will focus on the role of signatures, approvals and audit trails in assuring valid payroll data.
How do you keep from having disputes with employees regarding who worked what hours, and how do you handle a situation where an employee does dispute his hours worked? Without any supporting evidence, it comes down to one person’s testimony against another’s, a very untenable situation at best. This is exactly why many companies require their employees to attest, in writing, to the number of hours worked. This can be accomplished regardless of whether the time tracking method used is paper-based or digital. This signing usually is prefaced by some sort of accompanying text that may read something like “
I certify that the hours shown here are correct and that all work has been performed with no injuries." With the pre-requisite signatures in place, confusion and disagreement can be easily avoided!
In addition to employee signatures, many companies require time record approvals by management personnel, often at multiple levels. Most often, a foremen out in the field will approve his crew’s time records since he is most familiar with how long they worked, what jobs they worked on, and what tasks they performed along with other peripheral information. The foreman’s records may then be reviewed and approved by a project manager or superintendent who has overall responsibility for the associated jobs or projects, and lastly, final approval may be done by the payroll or accounting manager to assure that all business and payroll rules have been properly applied.
What happens when someone changes the hours worked for an employee in your time tracking software? Will you know what was changed, who made the change, and when the change was made? Without this information, the adequacy of the accountability of your system really comes into question. Changes can be made at any time to your records and no one will have a clue as to the source of those changes, much less what changes were made. That is why it is crucial that your time tracking software contain features that provide a clear audit trail capable of establishing the facts pertaining to any changes made.
Employee signatures, multi-level approvals, and audit trails can not only strengthen the internal controls associated with a mobile time tracking application, they can prevent potential disputes regarding the hours worked by employees of the company. Does your time tracking system incorporate these very important controls?
Posted on Fri, Aug 19, 2011
Welcome to the latest edition of MobileTime, a blog about the issues affecting mobile time tracking and the construction industry in general. Our goal for this blog is to provide useful, helpful information presented in a concise format to our customers and all others who might benefit. Today's article is the second in a series of posts that will deal with internal controls embedded in mobile time tracking systems.
Have you ever wondered what internal control features make for a safe, secure mobile time tracking application? One that you can depend on to give you an accurately recorded, properly disbursed payroll. In this issue we will focus on limiting access and assigning responsibilities to assure accurate payroll data.
The first line of defense for a mobile time tracking application should always be the use of encrypted passwords to access the system. This will help prevent unauthorized persons from logging in and using the system. In selecting passwords it is a generally accepted rule of thumb that the easier a password is for the user to remember, the easier it will be for a potential hacker to crack. However, complex passwords are much harder to remember, and oftentimes result in the user having to write down or electronically record this information which in and of itself reduces the security of a system. Probably the best advice for selecting a password is to not base it on words or names that have personal significance like your birthdate, or the names of your spouse or children. Here is an excellent link on
choosing a secure password.
Once encrypted passwords have been established, the next step should be to assign user responsibilities. This can be done in a couple of ways. In some systems, user responsibilities are assigned by the administrator of a system. As an example, the administrator may allow the user to create transactions but not to edit or approve them. Editing and approving transactions may be limited to management personnel. Other systems may automatically assign responsibilities through license types. In these types of systems, the license type will dictate the individual responsibility. For example, the license type may restrict the user to entering and reporting on only his time.
When considering a mobile time tracking system, you should not consider any system that does not incorporate these two very important security measures.
Posted on Fri, Aug 12, 2011
Welcome to the latest edition of MobileTime, a blog about the issues affecting mobile time tracking and the construction industry in general. Our goal for this blog is to provide useful, helpful information presented in a concise format to our customers and all others who might benefit. Today's article is the first in a series of posts that will deal with internal controls embedded in mobile time tracking systems.
Have you ever wondered what internal control features make for a safe, secure mobile time tracking application? One that you can depend on to give you an accurately recorded, properly disbursed payroll. In this issue we will focus on the role of data integrity in assuring accurate payroll data.
A properly designed mobile time tracking system begins with using correct information. It pulls this information directly from the payroll/accounting system to insure the validity of the data used including employees, jobs, cost codes, pay codes, etc. One can assume with at least a certain degree of confidence that this data has already been reviewed and approved by the appropriate accounting managers. Compare this to a system where the data has to be manually input into the time tracking system. The possibility of human error increases dramatically when manual processes are introduced. This is one of the main shortcomings that electronic time tracking applications were created to address in the first place.
Once the newly created records have been reviewed, edited, and/or approved, they are exported back to payroll/accounting. It is at this point where a second integrity check occurs. These records will be validated before being accepted by the importing application. Any invalid data will be rejected and the time tracking application administrator will have to research the cause. Unless someone has manually entered new data, or there has been some kind of update or deletion in the payroll/accounting system since the data in question was initially imported, invalid data should be the exception and not the rule.
A good mobile time tracking system makes it very easy to use the correct data to generate accurate payrolls. Do you have such a system?
Posted on Fri, Aug 05, 2011
Welcome to the latest edition of MobileTime, a blog about the issues affecting mobile time tracking and the construction industry in general. Our goal for this blog is to provide useful, helpful information presented in a concise format to our customers and all others who might benefit. Today's article discusses the issue of Buddy Punching in mobile time tracking.
Buddy punching is the term referring to when an employee clocks in another employee (the “buddy”) who is either running late, leaving early, or not showing up altogether. Buddy punching is relatively commonplace, and according to Nucleus Research, “three out of four companies experience loss from buddy punching”.
The cost of missed labor hours can be very high. For example, if you have 15 employees getting paid for 10 minutes of unworked time per day, the total time for a month, assuming an average of 21 working days per month, will be approximately 3,125 minutes, or 52 hours. If your average pay rate is 20.00 per hour, then you are paying an extra $1,040 each month for labor not worked. Adding the cost of payroll taxes and benefits will increase the cost even more.
What can be done to combat buddy punching? There are several available options.
- Use a supervisor – have employees report directly to their supervisor at the beginning of each shift. It may be necessary to do this on a regular basis for a while to get the employees used to the procedure, and then later, continue it on a random basis.
- Use a video camera – Simply setup a camera pointing to the time clock and let the employees know that all clock ins and outs will be recorded. Obviously, camera security may be a concern.
- Smartphones with fingerprint scanners – up until now, smartphones have mostly been limited to those with fingerprint readers for unlocking the phone. However, it appears that true biometric technology is entering the smartphone world. According to a July 21, 2011 article posted on www.govtech.com, “A new device is nearing the mass production stage that combines iris, facial and fingerprint recognition scanning into a smartphone, giving nearly instantaneous identification results to an [law enforcement] officer using it in the field”. Obviously, the cost of this type of device will not be cheap as the units are estimated to sale at $3,000 each.
- Laptops with USB connected fingerprint scanners – these are a very low-cost but effective, not to mention portable, way to do fingerprint scanning. The scanners are small, but very accurate, and can start at a cost of under $200 for the physical scanner and any associated software.
- Biometric time clocks – heavy duty time clocks are ideal for high volume use and are able to withstand harsh environments, although they are not portable. Instead, they mount to a wall or tabletop. These devices are generally relatively expensive depending on the quality and sophistication of the unit.
All of the above solutions will provide labor savings but the last three will also reduce the time spent on calculating payroll and submitting it to Accounting. If you think that you are paying for work not performed due to buddy punching, you should investigate these options. Based on our example above, it could definitely be worth your time and trouble.