THE expanding access-control market, estimated to be worth around €10 billion by 2020, is growing at 10 per cent year on year. Access control technically includes the old faithful mechanical lock and key.
However, when IT departments talk about access control today, we are really talking about sophisticated electronic turnstiles, gates, wireless locks and other barriers.
Often keys are lost, stolen and copied, leaving buildings and premises vulnerable, and often leads to replacing expensive locks. Alternatively, when an electronic security card is lost or stolen, access rights for that card can be withdrawn immediately, that renders the card totally useless.
If the card is used before the alert is raised, and security is breached, a host of information, regarding access point, behavioural activity and possible location, if the culprit is still on the premises, is accurately recorded.
Biometric technology is able to recognise a person by the unique features of their face, fingerprint, DNA or iris eye pattern etc and then decide on a secure and convenient method of identity, for authentication purposes. In the last number of years, we have all seen the continual biometric technology developments in the fields of banking, retail and mobile phone sectors.
Managing your staff access and attendance is interdependent on the overall productivity of companies and organisations. The old manual processes of calculating attendance, is time consuming repetitive work that can often lead to inaccurate results, resulting in unhappy staff.
On that basis, it’s no wonder that progressive organisation and businesses have adopted automated time-attendance systems, from the likes Lisburn-based market leader North Time and Data (NTD), to streamline employee attendance.
However, at the time of salary processing, just the attendance information is not enough. Payroll integration makes time-and-attendance and payroll systems process information under one identity by linking the payroll software with attendance data gained from the time-and-attendance access terminals.
Time-and-attendance systems gather employee data in real time and payroll integration automatically sends this data to the payroll software. This automated process eliminates manual intervention, which has proven to be more efficient, resulting in more accurate payroll processing.
Payroll processing of employees, working remotely and from multiple locations, can sometimes prove to be a herculean task. With an automated, centralised, time-and-attendance system, companies can ensure information regarding attendance data, and when synchronised with software like Sage Payroll, accurate wages and salaries can be processed.
A growing trend is to see more and more time-and-attendance employee self-service portals, for staff to monitor and manage all their time-and-attendance and leave options. They allow employees to view their shifts and/or schedules, attendance, leave details and leave applications and often much more.
On the management side, using a time-and-attendance integrated payroll solution can generate accurate reports on work hours, absences and their patterns, overtime and breaks etc.
Paying your employees on time and accurately is of the utmost importance and can greatly affect how employees perform at the workplace. Payroll management with accurate attendance data, is an imperative function of any HR or payroll department now.
:: Trevor Bingham (editorial@itfuel.com) is business relationship manager at ItFuel in Craigavon. Follow them on Twitter @itfuel.
