Time Attendance Software

Author: Yosef Lima, Automated-Machines.Com

Time and attendance software is the most important part of a time and attendance system. Reliability, performance and features an automated attendance system is mostly depends on it’s software. An expensive rich featured machine without a good software is simply a waste. 

There are two ways to realize time-attendance software in your company. Make it or buy it. Some company have their own programmers or able to pay programmers to build their own time-attendance software to fulfill their specific needs. On other way, most other companies prefer to buy ready-to-use time-attendance software package from professional developers. Major reason is because building and maintaining software costs time and money. 

Time and attendance system supplier or system integrator,  usually sell the system in package: machine and time-attendance software. Some suppliers also include payroll software in their package. Following picture shows the relationship.

Time and attendance machine manufacturer usually provides software-driver in their package. The time-attendance developer use this driver to communicate to machine. Data output of TA-software can be used as input data to payroll software.

Principle of time-attendance software

Basic function of time-attendance software is:

• collecting data from machines
• data processing as required
• generating reports

Besides of that basic functions, there are some supporting function, for example:

• entry data master:
  • employee data,
  • schedule,
  • time table,
  • company rule,
  • etc
• maintenance:
  • archiving,
  • backup
  • etc

Following picture shows basic principle of time and attendance software.

Before the system running, some table should already be prepared (master-tables):

• [Employee] contain employee data: Name, ID, Dept, Title, Schedule, etc,
• [Schedule] and [Time-Table] contain information of employee’s schedule.
• Company [Rules] contain attendance regulation. For example: tolerance of lateness
• Other table, such as department, holiday, grade,  group, etc

Note: The tables mentioned here, their function and relationship are just example to describe the basic time-attendance software system.

Attendance data from machines is collected and stored in attendance-database.  The stored attendance-data and  master-tables are processed to create required reports and output-data for external system such as payroll or accounting system.

Time will increase database size. Huge active database can arise unwanted effect to processing performance. To avoid that, some time-attendance software have archiving and recapitulation mechanism.

Disk-drive and PC can be damaged anytime. Good time-attendance systems have reliable, fast, and easy backup and recovery  mechanism.

Home: Index of Time Attendance System

You may republish this article on your own websites, with one condition: keep the live links to automated-machines.com. We need that.