How UK Time Clock Systems Helped Transform Payroll for My Small Business

If you have ever tried to run a business, you would know that is not a walk in the park. This becomes especially difficult if you are running a small business, like me, with limited capital and resources. In my enthusiasm to get more done – and to save costs – I took more tasks upon myself than I could manage. The end result was that I was spending more time on running my business and had less and less time to focus on growing my business. To make matters worse, most of my organisational processes and operations were done manually which resulted in them taking up more of my time than I could spare.

Take my payroll for instance, I had no automated system to manage or track my employees’ hours. We simply used pen and paper timesheets and my workforce entered their times manually, by themselves, when they started or ended their shifts. As you can imagined, there was quite a lot of rounding off of hours going on. While I was up to my neck in running day-to-day affairs of my business, I have no way of detecting or preventing such practices. In retrospect, I guess that if I had implemented an automated solution, such as the UK time clock systems, a bit earlier I would have had saved much more than I was trying to save by doing everything by myself.

My problems were not just limited to inefficient recording of employee hours but were much more complicated. I had a little over 30 people working for me but they were divided between 3 different locations. It was humanly impossible for me to be there to have employee clock in and out or watch over how efficiently they were spending their time. The problems would just pile up at each pay cycle – which incidentally was every week - when I had to physically go to each location and collect all the timesheets so that I could prepare employee wages.

Next was the hurdle of preparing employee wages. With 30+ employees who had varying pay scales and benefit, it used to take too much time to apply the appropriate pay rate to individual employees and calculate their wages, overtime, taxes and other deductions. There used to be occasions when I would make some mistakes and the entire process had to be repeated. There were also instances when employees were overpaid or shortchanged. In the case of overpayment, there was hardly a case when employees would come forward and report the issue but if, god forbid, any employee received less than was owed to him, there was a lot of hue and cry.

As a result, my business started to decline as I was too busy handling payroll related chores to find time for chasing after new business or convert my leads into sales. This was the time I realized that if I wanted to stay competitive and achieve business growth on a sustainable basis, I would have to not only delegate some of the responsibilities I had taken upon myself but would also need to implement automated business management systems.

To achieve that, I embarked upon the quest to find an HR solution that could not only automate the process of recording employee time and attendance but also help with payroll. There were literally hundreds of systems out there and it was really difficult for me being a layman to decide on a suitable one so I turned to the medium that could help me the most, the internet.

I searched for different relevant phrases and made a list of companies that showed up against most of them. Next, I visited their websites, read product descriptions and features and the pricing until I finally settled on a provider. uAttend was offering time and attendance management systems that didn’t need to be downloaded or installed and it also did not require any IT support. I just needed to plug the system in and start managing the HR in an efficient manner.

The system is cloud based, meaning that I have absolutely universal access and can view employee time and attendance details from anywhere in the world. The systems run on biometrics and employees have to clock in with their fingerprints eliminating any chances of time theft or buddy clocking. The time and attendance data is recorded and stored in real-time. On top of all that, I get to prepare my payroll within a few minutes by simply exporting a report prepared by the new system into the payroll software, without any errors. Now, I have significantly reduced my operating costs and am enjoying steady business growth since I have time to devote to my core business activities.

If you are a small business owner like me and would like to get rid of the problems associated with manual time and attendance, please visit uAttend.co.uk to get more information on time attendance UK and other systems offered by them.