Time, Work and Asset Tracking

• When they come and go.
• Hours they work.
• Projects they work on.
• Time off they take.
• How much time off they accrue.
• Travel and entertainment expenses,they incur.
• Equipment and materials they use.
• Logs of what they did or what went wrong.

This information determines what goes on an employee's paycheck, how much time off they have left on their pay stub, what you bill your customers, and the costing of activities recorded in your accounting system. 

What is Enterprise Time and Work Tracking?
Time tracking for payroll: work hours overtime other compensated time or payments time off taken approvals	Time Off and Absence Management: time off balances and accruals time off policies and rules time off requests time off approvals time off scheduling holiday schedules
Absence Management: Absence points rules: work schedule and leave schedule violations Absence points tracking Absence points progressive disciplinary warnings Advanced rounding rules	Time and Attendance Tracking: clockings: start and finish times time and attendance approvals early and late check in/out tracking attendance schedules attendance performance tracking
Project/Job Time and Work Tracking: work breakdown structure project time worked project time approvals project estimated hours project estimated hours to complete project costs project billings project profitability	Equipment Tracking: equipment tracking by class and asset equipment hours equipment usage equipment approvals: hours, mileage, etc. equipment costs equipment billings equipment profitability
Materials Tracking: materials tracking by class and type materials approvals units of measure material usage materials costs materials billings materials profitability	Supervisor Logs and Forms: daily logs accident tracking incident tracking morning huddle daily work plan safety check

So really, enterprise time and work tracking is very important for your business.
How Is Your Time and Work Tracking Going?
Is your business data stuck in silos?
You might be using manual paper-based or Excel-based “systems,” or software operating in their own “silos.” Silos is a term used by strategy consultants. The term originally comes from where you store grain or nuclear missiles. Either way, it's not good to have systems in "silos." Why they are this way, walled off from one another, stuck in separate filing cabinets,  spreadsheets or databases, is a matter of your company’s history. Tracking systems usually grow up in different functions and parts of the business developed over time independently of one another to get the job done that’s in front of them. These tracking systems have had little or no awareness of each other. Early in their development it might never have occurred to them that they should communicate or “integrate” with each other.
 
Now, it might seem silly to personify paper files and systems as if they could ever have intelligence, or have the wherewithal to collaborate with other paper files and systems. However, once you automate these systems, this integration becomes possible, and getting a holistic view of all parts of your business at any time should become easy to do.
 
Visibility Into Time and Work Performance
To understand an employee's work time you need the full picture of their schedule including time off requested, time off scheduled, and holidays. To understand their productivity you need to know what they work on, when and for how long. To understand the efficiency of how assets are used you need to know be able to track their use, costs, billings and where appropriate, their profitability.
More Accurate Data for Payroll and Billing
Paying employee (and not overstated) overtime or double time requires accurate hours tracking, including start and finish times. You might also need different methods of data capture such as web timesheets, time clocks, smart phone timesheets, Interactive Voice Response phone time cards, crew timesheets and others. A significant hidden cost of manual systems, and the built-in time lags required to run payroll and billing, are an increased number of adjustments and corrections payrolls and invoices after they have been processed.
More Accurate Data for Time Capture
New employees, inactivated or terminated employees, supervisory assignments, new projects, inactivated activities are the bane of manual systems. Communicating these changes manually through phone, fax, email or snail mail ensures that managers and employees are in the dark longer than they should be about what to work on, when someone is out of the office or who reports to who.
Regulatory Compliance and Limiting Liability
Time off management is the obvious area to benefit not just for SOX compliance but to ensure that employee time off balances are not overstated and leave taken is accurately recorded. When it's time for the employee to move on you will be writing them a much smaller check for unused leave. You will also be a lot less likely to have to appear before a labor board for denying an employee accrued leave or overtime earned. Overtime and other labor rules require strict tracking of attendance and hours. It also requires detailed auditing of entries to ensure that an employee's attendance and hours have not been unnecessarily modified or adjusted without good reason. Accurate and complete time and work data are the best defense against any employee labor rule claims. 
Synchroning Everything Together
Having your HR system, payroll and project, attendance, and time off tracking not in sync means a lot of errors. It also means a lot of inaccurate data, corrections and in the worst case flat out errors in pay, bills, time off balances and attendance late performance enforcement.
Everything on Time
Automated systems can remind employees and managers to complete the most important tasks of time and work tracking automatically. If they are late, automated systems can escalate approvals until they are completed.
User Acceptance and Use of Data
If you have a mix of five separate manual and automated systems that employees need to use, you can be sure they will be less likely to use them. When you consolidate systems, workflows simplify, employees and managers can get everything done in one place, and those not in compliance stand out like a crumpled paper timesheet.
You can turn what used to be paper-based or Excel-based data into so-called “business intelligence,” that is, data that can be analyzed or summarized across functions and units to see the bigger picture of your business. 
In short, “Enterprise Time, Work and Asset Tracking Software” more specifically can be defined as tracking the time, work and assets it takes to get things done, the costs you expend to do this, and the money you make from these business activities. In the world of human resources, capital equipment and material resources, how the business is running is best understood if you know the complete picture of how employees spend their time, use equipment, assets, materials and other internal resources.

Pacific Timesheet is a developer of enterprise time, work and asset tracking software, integrated into one system for you to track and manage your business.