If you own your own business, or you are a manager or director of any moderate sized company, you have probably already discovered a need for time and attendance software. Your employees and the people you report to both want to have accurate, reliable, and timely data on when they worked, how much they worked, and other information pertinent to their pay check. Unfortunately, depending on who you ask, there are a lot of time and attendance software packages out there, and it is hard to make heads or tails of what exactly each one offers, and what the shortcomings and benefits that each software package has. Plus, it is hard to get an idea of what each one may end up costing without talking with a sales rep or vendor of the software you end up looking at. This can make evaluating time and attendance software challenging at best.

One of the best places to start, without involving a vendor yet, would be to look at some of the review websites that are out there for the various different time tracking software packages. The bigger, more popular time tracking packages will have entire websites, magazines, and user groups dedicated to them. These sources of information and reviews can be an invaluable resource for getting real feedback from real people that use the product you are thinking about, or that looks good for your employee tracking needs. But beware, some user groups, or bulletin board type sites are actually sponsored by the company making the software, and they will filter out any negative or derogatory comments, making the information you are reading sometimes seem a little too good to be true. At any website you end up reading for reviews of software, make sure and try to find out who sponsors the website, and look for some negative reviews that balance out the opinion and information available. If you can’t find any, you might want to treat everything you are reading as a little suspect, or best case scenario (which you should probably do anyway for anything on the internet).

When you start getting down to deciding what time and attendance software package to try or buy for you organization, remember that it should be absolutely trustworthy. By trustworthy, I mean your employees, or you managers should have complete, total confidence that it is right and that the numbers it shows can be depended upon to be accurate. What this could mean at first is getting a an evaluation copy or a trial phase of the software, setting it up, and letting perhaps just one department use it to start tracking their time. Then, heavily audit each record for the period, for example a pay period or a month. Have someone not "vested" in the software working audit your old method for calculating employee hours, and the new software, and compare the two different methods. Of course, they should match exactly, especially if when the new time tracking software is implemented, you are going to be calculating pay from it. If employees or management senses that it is not accurate, or that their pay was affected, it could end being a lot of trouble to resolve, and may end up costing you money.

If you own a smaller business, or are responsible for the obtaining time and attendance software for a small division perhaps, you might be surprised to find that there are free versions of employee time tracking software out there. Of course the old standby is Microsoft Excel, but there are actually several other actual true time keeping software packages out there that are completely free. Many of the free ones are what is called "open source". This means that they are developed by a worldwide team of developers dedicated to making that particular software package better and better. Of course, this can have it’s downsides. Sometimes this means that the software is too tailored to a narrow audience, those who give feedback or support the developers of that package. It also usually means that there is no "formal" support model, so if you tech support for the product, you may have email or call the developer directly, and they will get to your problem when it suits them. This can mean substantial cost savings thought, but it doesn’t necessarily mean your employee tracking software will completely free. You may need to purchase hardware, or pay IT staff to implement your "free" software, incurring hidden costs, whereas you may have a vendor doing that work as part of a complete package otherwise.

As always, when you are looking for time and attendance tracking software for your employees or for your company, make sure you shop around. Especially with economy the way it is these days, prices and services can be very competitive, and a software vendor may have great deals on a full implementation package. If you have a really savvy IT department, and want to save on cost, consider some of the open source alternatives for your time tracking software. Hopefully this article helps you evaluate your time and attendance software before you purchase something you don’t like.