In this tight economy, business owners are taking more and more steps to save money in order to remain profitable. For many businesses, employee down time causes loss of revenue because they are getting paid but they are not actually working. For instance, employees who come in a few minutes late every day get paid for their full shift, but their employers are losing that much time every day in productivity. A few minutes here and a few minutes there add up to a lot of down time after a while.
Even using a standard timeclock isn’t a guarantee that employees will actually be on time. Without an accountable time tracking system in place, it is too easy to do what is known as “buddy punching”. This is when someone gets a co-worker to punch in or out for them so they don’t get in trouble for being late or leaving early. This is actually considered a form of time theft because employees are stealing time from the company, which translates into dollars.
A new system is being integrated into many businesses that puts an end to “buddy punching”. This new system is an automated fingerprint timeclock. Since it leverages biometric technology, there is only one person who can actually mark attendance – the person who the fingerprint belongs to. Using such a system reduces employee tardiness because employees know they can no longer manipulate their time by asking a friend to punch them in or out.
If you’re worried about identity theft and fingerprint security, don’t be. Each and every print that is recorded is encrypted. This means it is converted from the original image and stored as a set of numbers. The print is not an actual print at all. Biometric timeclocks are equipped with time tracking software system that gives each print a mathematical value. It is this value that identifies the employee and is associated with his or her work hours, not the physical print. The numbers don’t represent anything else about an employee and provide no confidential information. The actual print is not reproduced and there is no stored image of the print on file anywhere in the host system.
While this probably isn’t good news for employees, it is great news for employers who want to save money and prevent time theft. By making employees more accountable for their work hours, fingerprint timeclocks help ensure that employees only get paid for the time that they are logged in.
