15 Features every Attendance Software should have!

Every Attendance Software should have at least the following features:

1. Fully Automated Communication: An Attendance Software should be able to communicate regularly with Time Attendance or Access Control Devices with absolutely no manual intervention. The devices could be located at different geographical locations; even then the communication should be fully automated.

1. All data in one interface: Attendance, leave, overtime data and shift plans should be displayed in one single interface to better understand the data for each employee. Employees may be allocated to different shifts and hence it's important to calculate work duration from clock in/out data with reference to shift plans.

1. Shift Planner: Shift Planner enables you to allocate employees to different shifts each day. Work duration of an employee is calculated based on Clock in/out times and shift assigned to the employee for the day. Employees can also be allocated to different day offs.

1. Attendance Rules Definition: Every company has their own attendance rules. The clock in/out data should be processed based on these rules. It should be possible to define the attendance rules in the attendance software so that the software can process attendance data without any manual intervention.

1. Interpreted Attendance Data: An employee may clock in/out many times during the day. But, the software should interpret and organize the data in such a way to make it meaningful to users. For eg: An employee clocking in after 30 minutes of the shift start time should be marked as 'Late-In' for 30 minutes.

1. Real-time Attendance: Time Attendance Devices accumulate data as employees clock in and out. The attendance software should communicate in real-time with the devices to collect the attendance data from the devices.

1. Data from difference sources: Attendance data may come from Time Attendance or Access Control devices, HR users may import attendance from text or excel files, Employees may clock in using the Employee Self Service, or data could be imported from another database.

1. User-defined Attendance Types: It should be possible for users to categorize attendance according to their own requirements. For eg: User may define attendance types like 'Training', 'Work from Home', 'Client Visit', and so on.

1. Close integration with Payroll: The attendance summary should be closely integrated with payroll so that no manual intervention is required to process payroll with attendance.

1. Employee request to correct attendance: It should be possible for employees to apply for attendance corrections. Once the correction is approved by the manager, it gets integrated to the attendance system.

1. Notifications: Employees and managers should be notified of important events in the system. For eg: Notify the user when a time attendance device stops communicating for over 4 hours. Notify the employee and manager when an employee reports late to work.

1. Enables Decision Making: Enables top management to make quick decisions based on KPIs. Provides the Top management with an overview of the attendance and also allows drill down to details to understand better.

1. Employee Approvals: Employees should be able to request changes to attendance, and it should also be possible for managers to approve or reject it. For eg: Employee can request for a Work from Home or Client Visit. On approval from the manager, this becomes part of the attendance.

1. Multi-Company: More than one company may operate from the same premises. In such a scenario, it should be possible to organize employees in to multiple companies and the companies may share the same time attendance devices for employees to clock.

15. Multi-Location: Multi-location attendance software brings data from different geographical locations in to one centralized office to process it at one location. Users may access the software from the centralized location or the remote locations.