Traditional Attendance Register VS Attendance App

Introduction

Managing payroll is a tedious task. The huge expenditure of any business, the ‘Salary and Wages,’ depends on many factors like work quality, overtime, target achievements, and the most important factor is ‘attendance.’ Is the employee present at the workplace at the stated time? Hence, it becomes of utmost importance to keep a track record of the attendance so that it becomes easy to manage the month-end salary and incentive computations for each of them.

Attendance records can be maintained in various ways. Major factors to be considered while determining the appropriate technique are as below:

• Time Required
• Costs involved
• Size and nature of business
• Human resources involved
• Affordable technology
• Permissible levels of errors or misstatements in attendance computations

Traditional Attendance Register

Traditional Attendance Register was a technique wherein businesses maintained a ‘Hajri book’ to keep a record of the date and time of attendance by the employees. ‘Hajri’ in English means ‘Attendance,’ ‘presence.’

This was literal pen and paperwork where a proper format is printed, which is required to be filled in by the concerned people and particulars and signature to mark their attendance for the day or event. A general format contained the following details to be mentioned.

1. Name of the staff
2. Date 
3. Time of entry
4. Time of exit
5. Signature
6. Employee or Worker ID

At the end of the month, this data was summarized to calculate the number of hours or days the person devoted to the company and accordingly compute the salary or wages payable to him.

This methodology of attendance-keeping was not a full-fledged and universal one. It contained a few drawbacks.

• Involved huge paper-work.
• Data were subject to manipulation.
• Difficulty in summarizing the content during month-end.
• Lack of accuracy
• Time-consuming activity

Nevertheless, such a method could be well-off for the small businesses which do not have many people to work. But for big companies with huge businesses and huge workforce, such registers are not at all feasible. In such cases, traditional attendance methods do not serve the purpose. 

Attendance App

With the growth in technology and android application systems, a surge is seen in the use of applications to fulfill business needs. A payroll system forms a major department to handle such applications. Good applications like the Dukaan App contain versatile options and well-programmed features to perform a proper attendance record and report generation using the app. It enables to save the names of the staff along with their other information like the ID, staff, department, shifts, address, contact details, etc., everything in one place. Readily available calendars help the proper selection of dates and enable its edition if necessary. The most important factor here is the control system. Access security can be ensured by allowing access to just the concerned person with proper authentication methods. 

Attendance marked through such systems can save on time and curb down the technology costs involved to maintain a proper attendance machine or other systems.

Features of an Attendance App can be listed as below:

• Record attendance at a click
• Synchronization of data across multiple devices as needed
• Easy addition, deletion, edition of staff data
• Quick retrieval of data in a systematic format to draw reports
• Record shifts and overtime
• Export of attendance sheet and reports possible for a set range of period
• Remarks can be added to employees keeping track of important points to be noted.
• Enable salary computation with inbuilt mathematical calculation features
• Custom widgets available to store data even without having to open the app.

To infer

It depends on business needs and size to decide upon which type of attendance system is needed. Using the traditional ‘Hajri book’ system for attendance for a big-sized firm is a baseless idea. And similarly, it’s not cost-effective to use a custom-developed app for a very small business which may involve huge costs. So, a cost-benefit analysis is done before taking any decision.