Let’s paint the picture of what really happens with time sheets. It’s 8:05 am, your employee Dan just got to work and are settling in at their desk. Fast forward to Thursday evening when that same employee hands in his time card. He wrote down 8:00 am and 5:00 pm on the time card even though they were there at 8:05 am.

The looming question that every employer has to ask when using manual time cards is, how much is this really costing your business? You may think that. Manual time sheets are the way to go, and the only real cost is the cost of the paper for the time sheets. Let’s look at this further….
Employees: Time Theft
There is a common problem in many industries where employees have an hourly wage. Let’s give your employees the benefit of the doubt, that they are not doing this intentionally. The problem is human nature, not the intention. If your employees don’t clock in with a time clock, the time card really is out of sight and out of mind. Then they are asked to remember when they arrived and left every day of the week at one time. Now, of course, they won’t put themselves down as intentionally late. So a little fudging takes place. Five minutes here and five minutes there. The key takeaway here is whether it is intentional or by accident; your employees cost you. Tremendous amounts of money!
Humans: Humans Make Mistakes
Once those time sheets are handed in, somewhere, someone has to add those time sheets up. It may be you or an employee of yours in the human resources department. The point is, it is easy to make mistakes. According to the American Payroll Association, those errors are estimated at roughly 8%. The takeaway is those mistakes can add up quickly and get very costly.
What Can You Do?
This is the next question you have to ask yourself. What can you do to stop timecard waste? There are many mobile applications on the market today that allow people to sign in to their account and clock in and out at the beginning and end of each day. By utilizing a service like this, you can see when they clocked in and because the service uses GPS to track where they log in, you can determine if they are actually on the job.
For business owners, this will help you to have a piece of mind knowing that each employee was actually on the job and clocked in. Remember 5 minutes here, and there will add up quickly over several employees and over the year.
So how can we help? At Check Write Payroll, we can take care of all of your payroll solutions. Contact us a Check-Write to see how we can save your time and money in taking care of your payroll needs.