attendance

Time and Attendance Tracking Overview

TimeForge is an easy to use workforce management solution for your business, and includes many powerful features designed to improve your business. These include:

Go home early and stop fussing with payroll and time card mistakes with easy time tracking (electronic time sheets and time cards) and staff monitoring.
No more worrying about break laws and meal management with easy one-click break sheets and meal management.
Get done with payroll with a single click with our one-click payroll exports to popular provides like SurePayroll, CompuPay, QuickBooks, and more.
Rest easy with automatic reminders when staff are late, show up early, late, or start approaching overtime.
And much more…

Here is a brief overview of some of the features of TimeForge Attendance …

Get the Flash Player to see this movie.

TimeForge Attendance is a powerful replacement for your traditional time clock, or the limited punch in / out included with many Point of Sale systems. Use TimeForge Attendance by itself, or combine with TimeForge Scheduling for a powerful workforce management solution.

TimeForge can also integrate with many Point of Sale systems, stopping employees from clocking in early, or leaving too late.

Use TimeForge Attendance to make your life easy! TimeForge easily manages time cards, staff attendance, and payroll exporting.

Time and Attendance Made Easy

Over the last few months, we have been improving all three of our hospitality and retail labor management products, including TimeForge Attendance.

TimeForge Attendance is a powerful time and attendance software system that for employee time cards and managing payroll. Using TimeForge Attendance, staff members can clock in and out, managers can review employee time cards, and then management can approve time punches for third party payroll processing.

TimeForge Attendance can perform many other time management duties, including:

Tip tracking and mileage reporting
Record staff notes about each shift worked
Stop buddy punching with biometric fingerprint scanners
Interface attendance and time punches with your favorite Point of Sale system
Track time off, sick time, and PTO time for quick processing
Allow staff to check their time cards using the TimeForge employee portal

If you are using a standard time clock, or are having staff write their arrival, departure, and lunch breaks on a piece of paper, switching to TimeForge Attendance will save you hours of headaches each and every week!

Some of the recent improvements to TimeForge Attendance include:

Automatically switch positions if an employee is already clocked in. Staff members are occasionally responsible for working back-to-back shifts with different departments or positions. For example, an employee might be scheduled from 10:00am – 2:00pm as a Cashier, but from 2:00pm – 6:00pm as a Delivery Driver. To ensure that they remember to clock out as a Cashier, and in as a Delivery Driver, at 2:00pm, TimeForge can automatically do this for your staff members. This feature can be configured on a per-location or per-department basis.

Automatically Switch the Clocked-In Position for an Employee

Clock out staff members at a specific time each day. To ensure that staff members are all clocked out by a certain time, you can set a department-level or location-level clock out time. For example, if your business closes at 11:00pm, and no one should be at work beyond 11:30pm, you can set TimeForge to automatically clock out all staff members at 11:30pm. This feature can be configured on a per-location or per-department basis.

Automatically Clock Out Employees Out At A Specific Time

Automatically clock employees in based on their posted schedule. Sometimes staff members forget to clock in, even though they are scheduled to work and arrived on time. TimeForge can automatically clock staff members in based on the posted schedule, if they have not yet clocked in. For example, if an employee is scheduled to work at 8:30am, TimeForge can automatically clock them into the system at 8:30am. This feature can be configured on a per-location or per-department basis.

Automatically Clock In Employees Based on the Schedule

Receive an email message during the day showing which staff members are clocked in. If you’d like to know which employees are clocked in at your business during an important part of the day – before a dinner rush, just before closing, or after the first morning shift – you can! Update your alerts and set the time you’d like to receive notification of who is clocked in.

Receive a Daily Email of Clocked-In Staff

Automatically clock employees out based on their posted schedule. Sometimes staff members forget to clock out at the end of the day. TimeForge can automatically clock staff members out based on the posted schedule, if they have not yet clocked out. For example, if an employee is scheduled to leave work at 8:30pm, TimeForge can automatically clock them out of the system at 8:30pm. This feature can be configured on a per-location or per-department basis.

Automatically Clock Out Employees Based on the Schedule

Use a time and attendance system to make your life easy and improve profitability! TimeForge can quickly and easily manage staff timecards, employee attendance, and export payroll for accurate processing. Sign up for a trial today to use TimeForge Attendance.

TimeForge Attendance Improvements

Many of TimeForge’s November and December updates included improvements to scheduling, enhanced multi-unit capabilities, additional Point of Sale capabilities, and new training videos.

We have also been hard at work on many improvements to TimeForge Attendance. TimeForge Attendance is a labor management software tool that focuses on employee time cards and managing payroll expenses. Employees can clock in and out using the system, managers can review staff timecards, and then managers can approve the employee time punches for third party payroll processing.

If you are using a standard time clock, or are having staff write their arrival, departure, and lunch breaks on a piece of paper, switching to TimeForge Attendance will save you hours of headaches each and every week!

Some of the most recent improvements to TimeForge Attendance include:

Several new TimeForge Attendance tutorials are online and available for your review! Don’t get lost or confused about how to edit time cards, modifying clock in parameters, or setting up IP addresses for restricting employee time punches. Review the TimeForge Attendance manual (videos are coming soon), and read about all of these profit saving topics.

Quickly identify employee time punches and problematic time cards using the TimeForge Most Different notifications. As you process and approve / export payroll, TimeForge automatically identifies different (or strange) time punches, and ranks each shift based on how different the shift is from the other staff member time punches. Managers and payroll supervisors can use the “Most Different” field to quickly identify potential problems before cutting checks for staff members.

Show the last person to edit or change time card data. All time card changes are recorded and can be viewed in the TimeForge Daily Log by qualified managers. However, you can now easily review which manager (or supervisor) most recently modified any specific time card entry. Reduce fraud and and identify compliance issues immediately.

View the last manager to edit a time entry

Identify hours worked on the Clocked-In Employees page. You now have the choice to manage labor by scheduled or actual labor costs, or by the scheduled or actual labor hours while you are reviewing who is clocked in, or which staff members were previously clocked in during the business day.

Review Worked Hours and Total Costs

Manage attendance and timecards by departments. When you have a large number of staff members, managing your labor can be complicated. You can now browse and edit staff time sheets based on the department that you are interested in reviewing.

Edit Attendance by Department

Look for more information about recent improvements to TimeForge Attendance very soon. We continue to improve the software so that you can manage your workforce effectively, and go home early!

You should be using a time and attendance system to make your life easy! TimeForge can quickly and easily manage time cards, employee attendance, and export payroll for processing. Sign up for a trial today to use TimeForge Attendance to track employee time.

TimeForge Updates for December

It’s been a while since we’ve written on the blog about TimeForge improvements, but we have been hard at work adding features, improving functionality, and otherwise making TimeForge a better tool for your staff and your business.

Some of these improvements include training videos, which can be found on TimeForge’s Manual – the videos cover many aspects of TimeForge, including attendance and time cards, scheduling, employee management, and much more.

In addition to the expanded manual, many other improvements are included in our latest TimeForge release. The most recent update, which happened about a week ago, includes more than 100 new features, improvements, and changes – and every one of our customers is already running the latest and greatest version of TimeForge.

Some of these new features include:

Faster page loading on all TimeForge pages. If you are on a DSL or Cable connection in the United States, most of the TimeForge web site should load in less than a second! Get done, get out, and go home faster!

The Schedule Detail View is improved, and faster. Our Schedule Detail continues to expand in functionality, and you can now schedule by station or section, or swap the scheduled employees with a single click.

Schedule Detail View

Create a default location for each employee. Managing staff members who can work at multiple stores (or locations) can be extremely difficult. TimeForge makes staff management easy, enabling your management team to get done quickly and get back to business. You can set up a default (or home) location for staff members, which will ensure that the AutoScheduler schedules the employee at their default location first, where possible.

Default Staff Member Location

Create a default department for each employee. Managing staff members who can work in more than one department can be complicated. You can set up a default (or home) department for staff members, which will ensure that the AutoScheduler schedules the employee into their default department first, where possible.

Default Department for a Staff Member

Automatically approve requests when employees are “available to work” or “want to work”. Instead of spending your time managing requests for employees who want to work, these requests can be automatically approved without needing manager intervention. For example, an employee who normally cannot work on Wednesday because of their class schedule can request to work online and will not need manager approval to request to work on Wednesday (normally, she will need approval to actually pick up a shift).

Automatically Approve Work Requests

Check back soon, as we’ll be discussing some of the other TimeForge features that have been recently added!

You should be using a labor management system to make your life easier! TimeForge can quickly and easily build your staff schedules, manage attendance, reduce labor costs, and streamline employee management. Sign up for a trial today!

TimeForge Improvements

We’re always improving and extending TimeForge to improve your business and to ensure that you can quickly and easily build schedules, manage time and attendance, and communicate necessary information to staff members.

So, if it’s been a while since you last reviewed TimeForge, make sure to come take a look at everything we’re doing to improve your day!

11 New Reports

TimeForge users now have access to eleven new labor management reports, including reports about shift swapping, attendance vs. schedules for employees, and much more! Read more here.

Enforce the Schedule

TimeForge can now enforce the start time, end time, employee, and position that is scheduled to work, if you would like to enforce the scheduled labor. Read more here.

Message Multiple Locations

TimeForge can now send messages across locations, allowing you to target managers, or staff members at different stores / units. Send messages to individual staff members, everyone at certain locations, or identify specific positions to receive messages. Read more here.

New TimeForge Partners!

We are proud to introduce two new TimeForge partners, who are bringing TimeForge to their clients and respective markets. Mercer Sales & Service serves customers in New York and Pennsylvania, and High Plains Cash Register serves customers in West Texas. Read more here.

Give Shifts Up

Staff members can give up a shift to any qualified employee, or the employee picking up the shift swap can specified by the staff member giving up the shift. Communication among staff members has never been easier! Read more here.

Daily View Improvements

We are always improving our scheduling system to make scheduling easy for staff members and managers. While building a work schedule in the Daily View, you can now see how many hours and shifts each staff member is scheduled to work (this has always been available in the Schedule Detail View). Instantly know what everyone on the schedule is doing! Read more here.

You should be using a labor management product to make your life easier! TimeForge can quickly and easily build your employee schedule, manage time and attendance, reduce labor costs, and streamline labor management. Sign up for a trial today!

New Labor Management Reports

TimeForge now includes eleven (11) new reports – which are available in the TimeForge user accounts. Reports are necessary to run your business, and TimeForge now has more than 60 reports available for TimeForge Max customers.

These new reports include the ability to review employee certifications (such as food safety or alcohol certifications, CPR, uniform sizes, or other types), compare attendance (actual work) to scheduled time, identify staff members who were not scheduled or did not work, review time off requests, and compare shift swaps by employee or position. Enough information to run your business!

Certification Reports

Certification Test Date Report: View each employee’s certifications based on when certifications were taken, and easily locate which certifications need to be renewed.
Certification Expiration Date Report: View certifications by employee and located expiring certifications, and those that need to be renewed.
Employee Certification Report: On a list of all active employees, view the certifications that each employee has in their account.

Attendance vs. Schedule Reports

Attendance vs. Schedule: Three new actual vs. schedule reports are available to TimeForge Max customers. Check actual vs. schedule data by employee, or by date. Compare individual shifts worked and scheduled, or view the labor data at a higher level by reviewing by position data for your store (or multiple stores).

Worked or Scheduled Reports

Who Did Not Work: Identify which employees did not come to work during a time range.
Who Is Not Scheduled: Identify which staff members were not scheduled during a time range.
Not Scheduled, with Attendance: Locate employees who clocked in, but were not originally scheduled to work.
Was Scheduled, no Attendance: Locate staff members who were scheduled to work, but didn’t actually clock in.

Attendance vs. Schedule by Employee Reports

Attendance vs. Schedule by Employee: Two reports are available to review employee schedules and attendance. One report is a detail level report, showing each and every shift, with variance between hours scheduled and hours worked. The other report is a summary by employee, also showing time worked, work scheduled, and the variance.

Shift Swapping Reports

Shift Swapping by Employee: Which staff members are swapping shifts the most? Identify which employees pick up, or give up, the most shifts.
Shift Swapping by Position: Which positions are swapping shifts the most? Identify which positions have the largest ratios of giving and picking up shifts.

Sick, Vacation, and PTO Reports

Employee Time Sheets, with Requests: Review time off requests that occur one time, while viewing the individual time sheets for staff members.
Paid Time Off Report: A PTO report that displays sick time, vacation time, and other PTO requests.

We are always adding new reports to allow you to quickly and easily manage labor issues.

You should be using a labor management product to make your life easier! TimeForge can quickly and easily build your employee schedule, manage time and attendance, reduce labor costs, and streamline labor management. Sign up for a trial today!

Enforce Scheduled Positions and Clock In Times

TimeForge can directly control labor costs – and improve the bottom line – at your restaurant, retail store, hotel, or other business by stopping employees from riding the clock. TimeForge can disable early clock in’s by staff members, and can also stop late clock out’s.

To enforce the employee schedule, you must be using both TimeForge Attendance and TimeForge Scheduling together. Inside of the TimeForge Attendance Options, you will find two options:

Do you want to allow employees to clock in at any time, with any allowed position, regardless of their schedule?
Do you want to allow employees to clock out at any time, regardless of their schedule?

The first option controls staff member clock-in’s, and if set to “Yes”, employees can clock in at any time. The second option control staff member clock-out’s, and if set to “Yes”, employees can clock in at any time. To stop employee’s from riding the clock, change both of these settings to “No”, and then set an appropriate grace period.

Employees who are clocking in must clock in during their grace period, and if they are too early for their shift, a manager needs to let them in. The same is true of clocking out!

TimeForge also requires that employees clock-in using the scheduled position, in addition to the time clock enforcement.

You can enforce the labor schedule using the standard time clock within TimeForge, or any other supported timeclock functionality, such as the TimeForge Online Time Clock, Dinerware Point of Sale, TimeClock Mode within TimeForge Attendance, and others. In fact, you can also use our biometric fingerprint scanner with schedule enforcement!

Use this TimeForge enhancement to control labor costs by removing the ability for employees to ride the clock!

Are you using a labor management product to make your life easier? TimeForge can quickly and easily build your employee schedule, manage time and attendance, reduce labor costs, and streamline employee management. Sign up for a trial today!

Grocery Stores

Grocery management sometimes feels like juggling cats – there is a lot to do, only a few hours to do the necessary tasks, and a simple task, such as getting staff and vendors to cooperate, is tedious by itself. Labor management is only one aspect of your day, but it’s an important – and time consuming – one. Over-staff and you could lose a lot of money. Under-staff and your customers will go to another grocer.

TimeForge can cut the time spent doing routine but tedious tasks like building a grocery employee schedule or monitoring attendance at your grocery from hours to minutes. And TimeForge gives you the tools you need to painlessly do the less routine, but vitally important, tasks like fine-tuning your work force and monitoring and forecasting labor costs.

If you spend hours just creating an employee schedule, you’re not alone. It’s not easy. You have to take a huge number of factors into consideration – your employees’ specific availability, skill levels, accrued PTO, time off and shift swap requests, and the busy (and not so busy) times in that particular store.

Once the staff schedule is complete, you have to communicate the schedule to all your employees, redo it in the event of an unexpected illness or time-off requests – and find on-call employees to fill in for absent staff members. All affected staff members need to be reminded of the schedule changes, again. Small mistakes can result in missed shifts, unhappy employees (and increased turnover), or even labor fines.

With TimeForge you can …

Build efficient employee schedules for one or more locations, in just a few minutes for each store.
Export payroll to many popular payroll providers – such as ADP, SurePayroll, Paychex, Quickbooks, and others – with a single click.
Notify employees of schedules or schedule changes by text message or email – eliminating employee confusion and missed shifts and reducing turnover.
Record staff member availability, employee time-off requests, and other key information.
Stop early clock ins and late clock outs or buddy punching to provide immediate labor cost controls.
Remotely check on employees that are clocked in – using the web, Facebook, or a cell phone.
Provide remote 24/7 access for employees to view work schedules, review timecards, request time off, change work availability, swap shifts with other staff members, and receive daily schedule alerts via email or text messages.
And much more …

Your time is money. But in both flush and tight economic periods, grocery managers need to do more than manage day-to-day activities quickly and efficiently. In addition to saving manager and staff hours on scheduling and attendance monitoring, with TimeForge you can cut costs by:

Scheduling employees with the strongest skills during your busiest times.
Receive notifications of potential labor shortages automatically.
Monitoring your labor costs – in real time.
Take advantage of nearly 3 dozen different reports to keep an eye on labor costs and scheduling trends.
Using your existing staff more efficiently in order to avoid layoffs or unnecessary hiring.
Trying out various “what-if” scenarios to visualize staffing or schedule changes—without losing your original schedule.

In fact, TimeForge can help you increase grocery store profits by 3-5%

TimeForge is a complete labor management solution for the restaurant and hospitality industry, providing one-click seamless access to employee scheduling, time and attendance, and payroll reports. Use the whole TimeForge product suite, or only the parts that your business requires.

Bike Retailers

Bicycle retailers trying to stay ahead in this tumultuous economy have a tough road to navigate. Consumers are skittish, sales are down, and costs are skyrocketing. The line between surviving and thriving is thin, but savvy bicycle retailers know that the path to success lies in keeping costs low and streamlining their processes so they have time to strategize through tough times.

Luckily, TimeForge can accomplish both of those things. How much time do you spend creating a schedule? If you said “hours” you’re not alone. If you are a bicycle retailer, you’ve had to build employee schedules that take a huge number of factors into consideration – your employees’ availability, expertise, accrued PTO, time off or shift swap requests, and the busy (and not so busy) times in your shop.

Then you have to communicate the schedule to your employees, redo the schedule in the event of an unexpected illness or time-off request (and find someone to fill in for the absent employee), and then communicate the updates to all the employees.

It’s complex, it’s time consuming and it’s tedious. But it’s very important. Over-staff and you lose money. Under-staff and you lose customers.

Babysitting the time clock to ensure your employees aren’t riding the clock or punching each other in isn’t much fun either, but successful managers know that attendance monitoring can go a long way toward cutting and forecasting labor costs.

TimeForge can cut the time spent building an employee schedule and monitoring attendance from hours to minutes.

And in both prosperous and challenging economic times, the ability to manage schedules at one or many locations, schedule those with stronger skills in the high volume time slots, and monitor and forecast your labor costs makes TimeForge not just a time-saver but a budget-booster. In fact, TimeForge can increase store profits by 3-5%.

Add in the ability to integrate simply with Point of Sale and payroll systems, to notify employees of upcoming schedules and schedule changes by email or text message (and the resultant drop in late or absent employees), and the ability to focus your energies on the urgent duties facing a retail manager on any given day (rather than mind-numbing scheduling minutia), you’ll find that the time saved first week alone pays for the investment. Your business will profit with TimeForge!

Some of TimeForge’s Benefits for Bike Retailers Include…

Create complicated employee schedules – in minutes, not hours.
Inform employees of schedules, schedule change, meetings or training by text message or email – eliminating employee confusion and missed shifts.
Review daily sales information, important things that happened during the day, approve shift swaps, review employee requests for time off, and monitor employees on the clock either on site or remotely, through the TimeForge website, via a Smartphone (such as a Blackberry or iPhone), or through Facebook.
Stop employees from clocking in before the shift starts or after the shift ends, and stop employees from punching friends in early.
Export payroll to many popular payroll providers – such as SurePayroll, ADP, Quickbooks, CompuPay, and Paychex with a single click.
Monitor and forecast sales in order to accurately predict employee work schedules and labor costs.
Increase same-store profits by 3-5%.
And much more…

Best of all, TimeForge is easy-to-use – you’ll save hours immediately, without weeks of training and complicated set-up processes. If you are still not convinced, read what some TimeForge users say here. Or sign up for a free 10-day trial today to discover for yourself much time and money you can save every week.

Labor Management for Childrens Retailers

This is one of the most difficult retail environments in recent memory for children’s product retailers. Still, history has shown that retailers who survive – and thrive – through recessions are those who take the downturn as an opportunity to make changes; to streamline and refine operations. Because seemingly small changes have big impact.

Babysitting the time clock to ensure your employees aren’t riding the clock or punching each other in isn’t much fun either, but successful managers know that attendance monitoring can go a long way towards cutting and forecasting labor costs.

Over-scheduling could drain away your profits. Under-scheduling could drain away your customers. Skillful retail employee scheduling and attendance monitoring isn’t easy. It can be tedious and time consuming. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be.

Read more about TimeForge labor management and children’s retailers here.

TimeForge labor management and employee scheduling software is used by owners and operators of children retail stores, retailers, food-service, and other service-oriented businesses around the world. TimeForge will increase profitability, reduce turnover, and improve retention at your business!

Quick Contact

3417 73rd Street
Suite G
Lubbock, TX 79423

Phone: 1 866 684 7191
Fax: 1 866 684 7191
E-Mail: info@timeforge.com

About TimeForge

TimeForge builds the best labor management tools available for the food-service, retail, restaurant, and hospitality industries. This includes employee scheduling, attendance management, and other labor management tools.

Labor Management. NOW Simple.

Entries Tagged as 'attendance'

Products

Industries

Twitter: timeforge

Time and Attendance Tracking Overview

Related articles or pages

Time and Attendance Made Easy

Related articles or pages

TimeForge Attendance Improvements

Related articles or pages

TimeForge Updates for December

Related articles or pages

TimeForge Improvements

11 New Reports

Enforce the Schedule

Message Multiple Locations

New TimeForge Partners!

Give Shifts Up

Daily View Improvements

Related articles or pages

New Labor Management Reports

Related articles or pages

Enforce Scheduled Positions and Clock In Times

Related articles or pages

Grocery Stores

With TimeForge you can …

Related articles or pages

Bike Retailers

Some of TimeForge’s Benefits for Bike Retailers Include…

Related articles or pages

Labor Management for Childrens Retailers

Related articles or pages

What some of our clients have to say ...

Quick Contact

About TimeForge