Automated Time and Attendance System

Author: Yosef Lima, Automated-Machines.Com

Automated Time and Attendance (TA) System is an efficient way for a company to record, evaluate and manage attendance activity of their employees.

Comparing to manual time-sheet or time-punch-clock, automatic system has some advantages:

• more accurate and  faster time tracking/recording, data processing and report generation
• reduce human error
• reduce man-hour cost of HR department
• more accessibility employee-activity data
• flexible reports can be generated fast and easy
• ready data for other system such as payroll software
• open possibility to realize advanced features such as online employee tracking, managing remote/distributed workers, etc

The key differences between manual and automatic system are in  how to enter attendance data, and who to process and generate reports. Manual TA-system use time sheet or time punch clock for data recording. The calculation and report generation should do by human. In other hand, automated TA-system use electronic reader to read and store attendance data, and use the power of computer and software to do the calculation and generating reports.

In automated TA system, employee enter their identity (ID),  time and attendance machine read the ID and store to it’s memory along with other information such as date, time, pressed button, swipe direction, etc. Host computer then read this attendance data using downloader function of Time Attendance Software,  then store it to transaction database. This attendance transaction data will be used to generate various reports. The data can also be used by external system, such as payroll and accounting software.

Note: In this article, the terms ‘automated time and attendance system’ , ‘time and attendance system’,  ‘time-attendance system’ and ‘TA-system’  have same meaning.

Automatic time and attendance sub-systems

The following picture show basic components of time-attendance system.

Description:

• Employee ID
  Employee ID typically stored in magnetic stripe, barcode, microchip or RFID transponder. The most common medium now is PVC card. Other way is to use human biometric uniqueness as employee ID. For example: finger print, finger vein, finger and palm geometry,  eye iris, voice, body gesture, etc.
• Time and attendance machine
  Time and attendance machine components:
  • Microcontroller, as the brain of the machine
  • Reader module to read employee ID. For example: barcode reader, magnetic card reader, RFID reader, smartcard reader, finger print reader, finger vein reader, handkey reader, voice recognition device, etc.
  • Memory device to store attendance transaction before move to host computer.
  • User interface, for example: LCD, LEDs, keypad, buzzer, etc.
  • Communication interface to provide the communication link between time attendance machine  and host computer. For example: RS-232, RS-485, RS-422, Ethernet, WiFi, etc.
• Time and attendance software.
  This program read attendance data from machine and store into database. The database will be used for generating useful reports and also for input-data of other applications such as payroll and accounting systems.

Important aspects of Automated Time and Attendance System:

• Capacity
• Power management
• Data Transfer
• Networking
• Software features and performance

Home: Index of Time Attendance System

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