Jim Courtwood
Author of the Time & Attendance Guide Series

One of the most common questions I am asked is why some time and attendance products are so much cheaper than others. Here is a plain and simple comparison of budget time clocks against quality time and attendance systems.

The typical budget-priced time clock system will suffer many of these issues.

  1. Poor support
  2. Inadequate installation instructions

  3. Limited warranty

  4. Inaccurate calculations

  5. Poor fingerprint reading

  6. Data loss

  7. Poor leave management

  8. Incomplete overtime calculations

  9. Limited payroll software export options

  10. Limited payroll categories

  11. Poor rounding rules

  12. No overtime balancing

  13. Reliability Issues

  14. Poor documentation

  15. No automatic backup

  16. Hardware failure

  17. Free but  unsupported software

  18. Poor time zone support

  19. No Daylight Saving Support

The result of these failings is that your budget-priced time clock will be painful to implement, difficult to administer and inaccurate - that is if it doesn't fail entirely at some stage taking your employee data with it!


Quality time and attendance system, by comparison, will practically automate your employee attendance process. The software will be robust and reliable, the calculated payroll hours will be automatic and accurate, and the export to payroll will be seamless.

A quality time & attendance system can streamline the whole employee payroll process saving time and money by eliminating employee time theft, eliminating accidental over payments and dramatically reducing your data entry time. A poor time clock will most likely make things worse and end up costing you money.

Remember that we are dealing with your employee attendance records and they must be retained for seven years. Would you trust that to a budget-priced product?

For more information about time clocks and time and attendance, systems download the free copy of the Time & Attendance Consultant's Guide at the link below.

Jim Courtwood

Time & Attendance Consultant

1300 553 254

FREE Guide to Employee Time Clock Systems

User the  FREEGUIDE code at the checkout