Pros and Cons of Time and Attendance Software

If you are working in a firm then you must be aware of the time and attendance software that every company has installed. The first activity that you do upon entering your office gates is punching your attendance. You are asked to log in with your card, give your fingerprints, or whatever the procedure demands from you. This is the time and attendance software. Some companies are still doing it the old school way while others have gone on to use the latest methods of biometric time and attendance software.

So, just as every other company on the block is adapting to the new style of noting the time and attendance of a company, there are certain pros and cons for the same. As biometrics help you to give the right kind of accuracy, let us start with the pros first.

Benefits of biometric time and attendance

• The time at which you step in your office premises, that exact hour, minute and second is registered in the company system giving it the accurate data for its record.
• There is very little scope of any kind of human error and this makes the biometric time and attendance all the more reliable.
• The company will benefit from the accurate time and avoid any breach of information and everything is secured.
• The biometric time and attendance will help in preventing buddy punching as everyone will have their own face or fingerprint as their access card. So, no one will be able to check in on behalf of their colleagues.
• The company’s administration load will be lowered and moreover they will save a lot of time which otherwise would have gone in manually handling all this information.

The Disadvantages

• The cost is the main disadvantage of the biometric time and attendance software. A lot goes in installing this software and this is the reason why only the big firms and companies have the biometric software installed.
• Although, the load on the managers will decrease, there has to be one employer with the biometric device the whole day to ensure that the biometric system is working properly.
• The reliability of the biometrics like the fingerprints is not reliable in the case of excessive chemicals. This may also happen when the environment makes the biology unreliable.
• The facial features of a person changes over the course of time with age. This makes the facial recognition software very unreliable, if it is not updated regularly. It at least takes more than a year for the facial features to change, so a re-scan of the face needs to be done every year to ensure that there is no loss of individuality.
• Another problem with the biometrics is the change in the facial features of a person due to the health. Yes, if a person has diabetes or any other physical ailment, there is a significant change in the eye color. This change can be detected as a false positive by the time and attendance software.

So, just like any other technology, the time and attendance software has a fair number of pros and cons, too. But, this technology is being touted as the next big thing when it comes to securing national and international level information.

Time and Attendance software is scalable and can be easily implanted in modules. It includes HR functions such as absence management, access control modules, and fire evacuation that offer an integrated solution for workforce management. Thus, we can use it to its full potential now, and hope it improves with time in the coming days as the software overcomes every kind of shortcomings it generally faces.