Big news! We have completed and are in the process of rolling out the new and improved Photo Verification Report Generator. It is located within the Flag Wall of your account under the Verification tab.
This new on demand tool lets you dig into a certain employees clock in and out records for a certain pay period. You can see the following information;
Verification – A match denoted by a ✔ or mismatch denoted by an X
Confidence Rating – This is a scale of 0 to 100% of how confident we are that this photo is a match to the employees profile photo.
Date and Time of the clocking
Type – The type of clocking event – (ie. a clock in or clock out)
Application used to make the clocking event. (ie. iOS, Android, etc)
Location – GPS location of the clocking if provided by the device is shown via a Google maps link.
Confidence
The confidence rating is used to determine if the photo is a match or not.
Tips
The profile photo and clocking images need to show both eyes and chin to make the best match.
If either photo is two small to analyze the report will display an appropriate error message.
Are you struggling to decide what device is best for your timekeeping? Not to fear, we have created this matrix below to help you decide what option is best for you.
We have updated the attendance export report so that it is easier to manipulate the data it contains. Kieran, our head of client success shot a video to show you how powerful the data is when manipulate using pivot tables.
We have released an updated version of the #MyClock app to the iOS and Android app stores. The #MyClock app gives employees the power to clock in and out with or without GPS and Photos.
The attendance export functionality is still the same within your PayrollHero account, but watch for an update coming shortly that upgrades the report and makes it more useful.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware that we are a time, attendance, and payroll solution that meets your company’s needs. That’s true.
But let’s move away from that for a while and let’s look deeper into what PayrollHero truly is.
You see, PayrollHero is a cool app that lets you clock in to work with a selfie, and generate payroll with just a few clicks. That’s one of our biggest selling points, and one of the biggest reasons why our clients love us.
But that’s not why our product is genuinely enjoyed by some of the best companies in the Philippines and Singapore.
The real reason why our product is valuable to your business is because we save you time.
Time Management Redefined
Beyond the #selfie clock ins, facial recognition, leave management feature, and many more, what PayrollHero wants more than anything is to give you back the time you lose from outdated time, attendance, and payroll methods.
One of our clients, The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Philippines, shared their experience on how PayrollHero makes their payroll processes faster and more efficient.
Here’s a snippet from CBTL’s CEO Walden Chu:
“We wanted a payroll solution that was cloud based and built for the Philippine business environment, PayrollHero was exactly what we were looking for and took our payroll processing time for 700 employees from 16 days to 5 minutes” – Walden Chu, CEO, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Philippines
That’s 144 working hours (or more, due to OT) brought down to just 5 minutes. I don’t know about you, but that’s A LOT of time saved.
And that’s not all… The time that our ridiculously efficient product saves results into a world of other benefits for businesses.
Time Saved Results to Happier Employees
Because time, attendance, and payroll becomes easier to do, employees who act as primary stewards of these processes are taken a huge load off of their shoulders.
It’s not a secret that HR staff, payroll administrators, and accounting / finance employees are the ones that are most affected by the hassles of traditional payroll processes.
With PayrollHero, these employees can relax and focus on other important aspects of their work such as recruiting and employee engagement (for HR), and internal audit / accounting for those in Finance.
The system was not made to replace these employees, but rather, to help them become more efficient and less stressed with the rigours of traditional payroll. A more streamlined, easy, and hassle-free payroll solution can make these employees less stressed and happier at work.
Happy Employees are Good for Business
It has long been proven that happy employees are the best brand ambassadors you can ever have.
The happier your employees are, the more energized and motivated they are to work; and those little things eventually add up. Your customers will notice how happy and engaged your employees are, and this in return, causes them to love your brand even more.
Word of mouth referral goes a long way in growing your business. So the happier your employees are, the more customers you will attract. It’s a domino effect that you can take advantage of.
Beyond Business
Of course, making employees happy isn’t just done to boost your profits. As an employer, it’s important to always put a premium to your employees’ happiness.
With PayrollHero’s selfie clock in, we are able to help your employees start the work day with a smile.
Not only do employees start the work day with a smile, they also clock out happily as they get ready to come home to their loved ones.
The overall mood of employees skyrocket, and because of this, their personal lives improve as well.
Right Person. Right Place. Right Time.
Not only does PayrollHero save you time; we also save you money.
Biometrics and time cards for time and attendance can be tricky. For one, it can easily be gamed by dishonest employees. There’s the case of buddy punching and ghost employees that is pretty much prevalent in the Philippines.
Take a look at how much money you can lose just because of buddy punching:
Even if you only have 1 buddy punching employee (which is very unlikely), you’ll be losing P4,000 a year! Now, in most cases, for companies with a very unreliable time and attendance process, buddy punching is more common.
If you had 500 employees, and 10 of them are regular buddy punchers, you could lose as much as P40,000 a year.
With PayrollHero, you are LITERALLY free from buddy punchers because our system makes sure that the right person clocks in at the right place, at the right time.
If you’ve made it this far down, then I can only assume that you are considering PayrollHero for your business. Whether you are running a restaurant in the Philippines, or a retail store in Singapore; or even any business in Asia, there’s just so much PayrollHero can offer for you.
Handling time, attendance, and payroll for your business will never be the same once you go for PayrollHero.
It’s time to make a positive change for your business. Let us help you save money, and most importantly, save precious time for you and your employees.
If this is something that you’re interested in, we’d love to chat with you. You can contact us at sales@payrollhero.com or visit any of our websites: Philippines, Singapore, Global, to learn more.
Psst! Are you still using punch cards, time clocks, or any other form of manual scheduling to track employee attendance and schedule? If you are, we have bad news.
Sit down for a minute and consider the following statistics:
A full 95 percent of employees steal from their employers through time theft. More than 30 percent of these employees perform time theft by writing in earlier arrivals or later departures, or having a co-worker clock them in or out, – 2013 survey, Kessler International
Buddy punching accounts for 2.2 percent of gross payroll losses – Nucleus Research
Businesses lose an average of 4.5 hours per week per employee in time theft – that’s more than half the amount you pay for a regular employee in a day. – American Payroll Association
Each year it costs companies an average of $65 per employee to collect, calculate and enter payroll data. Unauthorized overtime adds yet another $292 per employee, and mistakes in time calculation and employee fraud combined cost an additional $430 per employee. Therefore, manual timekeeping methods cost companies an average of $787 per employee annually. – G&A Partners
The aforementioned figures are worth pondering, right?
Now let’s dig further into the dark, ghastly world of manual scheduling and attendance.
Behold the TERRIBLE TRIO!
The Deceitful Paper-Based Time Sheet
Paper-based scheduling and attendance can be as simple as jotting down everyone’s name in one column and putting in the number of hours they’ve done in a week on another column. Often, login and logout times are jotted down too. It sounds uncomplicated but here’s why this method is outdated:
Reconciling time sheets, accounting for vacation leaves and overtime, and adjusting schedules takes a lot of time! What if the staff doubles in number for the next six months? The horror!
There’s a lot of room for error, whether intentional or not. Garbled handwriting, anyone?
Since it’s taking you forever to go over the time sheets, pay is most likely going to be delayed. Delayed pay means unhappy employees which, of course, leads to a decline in productivity.
It’s not shareable. Sure, you can have neat photocopies of the time sheets but at the end of the month, most of them are lost or mangled into pieces.
The Abominable Manual Time Clock
Many businesses still stick to the manual time clock because of its low cost. In comparison to time scheduling software, it’s obviously less expensive. But really, how certain are you that the time clock is saving your business money?
It could take a few seconds for an employee to punch in and out, yet much time is required to record and compile the raw data. In short, you need to hire an extra pair of hands to do all these things. The funds that you supposedly save goes into the daily wage of the employee who collects and processes the data.
Next, you could be paying for work that isn’t done in the first place! Enter buddy punching. It’s not common for one of your employees to text a co-worker to kindly clock in for him because he may be running late for work. Or worse, someone from production got a nasty hangover last night, can’t get to work, yet one of the team members clocked in for the absentee today because they’re BFFs.
And there’s the costs of time cards. It may look insignificant at first but the monthly costs could quickly add up, particularly if you’re adding more employees.
Lastly, like it’s deceitful sister – the paper-based time sheet, the manual time clock is a vast magnetic field for errors.
The Sinister Spreadsheet
What’s so sinister about the humble Excel spreadsheet?
Let’s talk about dueling spreadsheets. While there’s no princess to be saved nor kingdoms to be claimed, dueling spreadsheets can be a waste of time, money, and effort in the long run. This occurs when multiple versions of the same spreadsheet do not reconcile with each other.
This Smart Data Collective post explains dueling spreadsheets well:
It happens because the data in a desktop spreadsheet is not bound to a single source that everyone is working from. It may be a single source, but the data may be collected at different times. There may be changes to formulas or additions or deletions that take place, and not everyone is on the same version. This is what happens when spreadsheets are used in repetitive, collaborative enterprise processes.
Research by Ventana on the dueling spreadsheets scenario revealed that 43 percent of their respondents reported that it happens frequently or all of the time, and one-third (31%) find it happening for the most important process that utilizes spreadsheets.
Despite these findings, organizations continue to embrace spreadsheets because “they seem to believe that, like the weather, you can complain about these issues but you can’t do much to change the situation.”
Put an End to the Terrible Trio of Manual Scheduling and Attendance!
Now that we’ve revealed the evil ways of the terrible trio, the PayrollHero team would love to help you prevent the above mentioned pitfalls!
Our ridiculously client-focused approach guarantee that we’ll be with you as you battle your way out of the dark, ghastly world of manual scheduling and attendance. Isn’t it about time that you seek an automated time and attendance system that provides real value for what you’re paying for?
Get in touch with us today and we’ll help your business transition quickly to a seamless time and attendance management system!
Today marks two weeks of my internship at PayrollHero. To celebrate my two-week-erversary, I went out to do a little survey. The aim was to understand what systems businesses have set up to manage scheduling, measure attendance and calculate payrolls.
The Costa Coffee crew.
I surveyed 10 cafés in the Central Business District in Singapore to find out how they schedule workers in their outlets. Some of the outlets I visited were Cedele, Starbucks, Joe & Dough and Costa Coffee. They all had similar systems set up to schedule workers, with a few interesting anomalies:
With the exception of one cafe, everyone uses the punch card system or a regular excel sheet for workers to clock in and clock out. The exception in question has software set up to monitor attendance.
Scheduling is done on a weekly basis. The worst case scenario is when a worker notifies the admin that he or she can’t show up just a few hours before the shift begins.
Usually, the outlet manager calls another outlet to find a substitute. In the case of one cafe, Whatsapp groups are used to coordinate and find substitutes. Most outlet managers believe that the best way to reach someone is to call them. Texting or emailing is not a common communication channel.
The HR admin in every outlet takes around 2 to 3 days to calculate payrolls.
With that simple survey, it was evident that cafés in Singapore use conventional ways to schedule shifts. While workers rarely drop shifts, outlet managers need to be on standby to call nearby outlets for substitutes immediately.
Using Data Analytics to Improve Productivity
When the weather is bad, or there is an MRT breakdown, the situation is worse because all outlets in the same region are affected equally. While an outlet manager is calling multiple outlets for substitutes, customers are walking in and waiting for service before walking out, disappointed and unhappy. That directly affects the bottom line. Managers should be able to access an online database and use data analytics to see which outlet is on top of things in real time in order to call that outlet directly and ask for a substitute.
The top priority for every outlet manager is to make sure the day runs smoothly. It becomes much harder when the manager is not equipped with the right data to plan ahead of time. In a country like Singapore that has high internet penetration rates and high cell phone penetration rates, installing an application that stores this data in the cloud is easy and inevitable. If managers had access to this data, it would also be a way to motivate workers to be regular in order to move higher up in the rankings among outlets.
Calculating Payrolls
The systems put in place for measuring hours worked per employee in order to calculate payrolls should also be revamped. It should not take a manager 2 or 3 days to calculate payrolls when she has a million other things to look after. What’s more, the hassle of buddy punching, human errors and shifts in multiple locations add to complications for the manager. More errors equal higher costs. Higher costs equal lower profits. The bottom line is affected by inefficiencies that can be wiped out by a one-time change in the basic infrastructure.
Finally, the idea behind having an app that does all of the above is predicated on increasing productivity: be it that of your rank and file workers or your manager. Higher productivity leads to a better workplace environment and happier people, which further leads to higher productivity. That is a virtuous cycle, if ever I saw one. In effect: optimizing work productivity with happiness.
As part of getting to know PayrollHero and our clients we decided that it was time for me get out of the office and do some “hallway testing” with Singapore retailers. At PayrollHero the team is constantly talking about “getting out of the office”, “hallway testing” and “being ridiculously client focused”. Today, it was my turn.
Getting to know our customer segment in Singapore is important as we continue to get our product out there. We want to know what these retail businesses do for time, attendance, scheduling and payroll. And we really want to get to the bottom of the pains store managers have with their current system.
I set out to speak to outlet or store managers of F&B businesses around the Ocean Financial Center @ Raffles Place.
A lot of Pain!
Indeed! My conversations revealed that out of 6 outlet managers I spoke with today, all of them mentioned dissatisfaction with their current time clock systems for time and attendance.
Here’s why:
The Biometric System (Thumbprint Scanners)
Using this system to clock in and out at the workplace seem to be the most common with majority (4 of 6) of the outlet managers I spoke with today. They revealed that they have been using the biometric systems for employees clocking in and out at work, and are not happy about it. A manager at a salad outlet says that it is an ‘imperfect system’ because the system itself is inaccurate. This comment is also shared with a manager of a bakery chain; who complained that the system sometimes don’t read the thumbprint accurately and records the time down for the wrong employee.Frustrating? Yes! The same outlet manager adds on saying that at times system reads as ‘absent’ as the employee clocks in.
The Punch Card Machine
The major problem one manager at a sushi outlet has with the attendance system is that the punch machine always broken down. In the days it takes for the machine to get fixed, he has to make time to manually clocking in and out his workers on an excel spreadsheet.Security is another concern with punch card machines. The time sheets are collected, then sent to the HR department for payroll processing via post or using a delivery person. What happens if the mail goes missing? All the data on the time sheets is not backed up on a system.
Point-of-Sale (POS) System
This POS system gives employees a 4-digit code to use over the register to clock in and out of work. So what’s the issue? Well, for an outlet manager of a smoothie chain store here at Raffles Place, she is unhappy that she has to do double work – where she will manually keys in the clock in and out data of each employee again on a different system at the end of each week for payroll.She hopes she has a system that connects the time and attendance with payroll to save time!
The Take- Away
This test has revealed to me that plenty of time can be saved if redundancies and “double-work” for the purpose of verification are eliminated. Managers are delighted to work more productively if they had a system that could shorten the process for time and attendance at the outlet and worry less about payroll.
We have made some changes to the attendance review page so that it shows exactly what is happening with a certain employees attendance. Has it been resolved? Were they absent? What time did they clock in and out? Now it all shows up neatly in a single screen for you to review. (see above)
Also, we added that same level of detail to the employee side. Now employees can log into their personal PayrollHero accounts and see what happened with their clock in and out, if infractions have been resolved, holidays, etc. (see below)
If you have any questions feel free to contact us by responding to this post in the comments or emailing support at payrollhero.com.
PayrollHero’s resolve attendance functionality is a robust tool that lets your managers make decisions on infractions coming from employee time and attendance. PayrollHero not only tracks employee time and attendance data, but serves up powered analytics so that the employee and management can see the results. Plus, the resolve attendance tool tracks what infractions are being adjusted to and who is doing the adjusting. It is a fantastic way to have your finger on the pulse of your teams time and attendance.
We added 3 more thresholds to make managing attendance even easier.
1. Unscheduled Work:
We have added the ability to auto resolve unscheduled work. With this setting you can decide if you would like auto approve certain amount of time for your employees shift, or consider certain amount of time as part of the schedule.
For example:
Hiro has a 9am to 5pm shift. He clocks out at 5.45pm.
–If Submit as is is configured for 60 minutes, 45 minutes will be added to Hiro’s shift without you having to resolve this attendance.
–If Revert to Schedule is configured for 60 minutes, Hiro’s clock out will revert back to 5pm without you having to resolve this attendance.
If Hiro has the same 9am to 5pm shift and he clocks out at 6.15pm, and either of this settings is configured for 60 minutes you will have to resolve his attendance.
This threshold gives you the ability to auto resolve under time work. With this, you can auto submit as is or revert to schedule certain amount of time when an employee does not complete the shift.
For example:
Hiro has a 9am to 5pm shift. He clocks out at 4.55pm.
–If Submit as is is configured for 15 minutes, 5 minutes will be subtracted from Hiro’s shift without you having to resolve this attendance.
–If Revert to Schedule is configured for 15 minutes, Hiro’s clock out will revert back to 5pm without you having to resolve this attendance.
If Hiro has the same 9am to 5pm shift and he clocks out at 4.30pm, and either of this settings is configured for 15 minutes you will have to resolve this attendance.
This threshold is particularly useful for employees that forgot if they did or not clock in already and clock in again to make sure before the system gets to update, and for settings where the internet connection is a bit unstable and employees clock in or out multiple times because their status not being updated.
With this threshold you can configure the amount of time between 2 or more clockings to be considered the same.
So for example Hiro clocks in at 9.00am and a bit unsure if he had clocked in or not correctly because internet was down that morning at his office, he goes back and clocks in again at 9.03am.
If this threshold is configured for 5 minutes:
–Use the earliest clock in as their clock in time: Hiro’s 9.03am clock in is ignored and no duplicate clock in will need to be resolved as the 9.00am is submitted automatically.
–Use the latest clock in as their clock in time: Hiro’s 9.00am clock in is ignored and no duplicate clock in will need to be resolved as the 9.03am clocking is submitted automatically.
With this setting we are confident that most if not all duplicate clocking resolutions will be gone!
You can find more details about setting up the resolution for Multiple Clockings on our Multipliers Knowledge Base.
ted on increasing productivity: be it that of your rank and file workers or your manager. Higher productivity leads to a better workplace environment and happier people, which further leads to higher productivity. That is a virtuous cycle, if ever I saw one. In effect: optimizing work productivity with happiness.
Getting Ridiculously Client Focused!
