Cut Time on Employee Hours Management in Three Simple Steps

If you ever feel there are not enough hours in a day, you are not alone. British research shows that many small business leaders would like an extra four hours in their working day just to complete their admin. Managing time and attendance sits at the heart of this. Scheduling, keeping track of worked hours, timesheets, holiday approvals and corrections all eat into the week for both business owners and HR staff. In this article, we show how to cut back on that time and regain your focus.

Administration is one of the main culprits behind lost hours in almost every organisation. Research among SMEs by German state-owned investment bank KfW shows that seven per cent of their working time goes into administrative processes, with an average of 32 hours per month going purely into compliance with legal requirements.

How admin steals focus from your business

The impact of this goes beyond inconvenience. Every correction to a timesheet or holiday balance takes time away from customers, sales and staff support. For HR, repeated mistakes mean more questions from employees, more emails and a higher risk of disputes about pay or hours worked. Over time, this does not only increase costs, it also damages trust in how working time is handled.

In many SMEs, keeping track of time and attendance is nobody’s main job. Owners juggle growth, cash flow and customers. HR handles recruitment, payroll and day to day staff queries. Time tracking ends up scattered across spreadsheets, paper and messages, which becomes fragile as the team grows. How to improve this situation?

Three clear steps to cut time and attendance admin

• Simplify - Create one clear way to record time. Decide how people clock in, record breaks and request absences. Write it down in plain language and share it with everyone. A simple and consistent process is better than a clever one that nobody follows.

• Focus – Keep control high, but effort low. Decide which records often require the most corrections and which ones have the largest consequence if incorrect. For some companies, this could mean a focus on overtime or irregular weekend shifts. For others, it could be the absence requests. These are the records you should check most, instead of just scanning every entry. This saves valuable time. Set up a regular weekly moment for managers to approve hours before they reach HR or payroll.

• Standardise – Make sure information is always complete. This may sound obvious, but in many businesses there is are often informal ‘procedures’ for things like shift changes and absence requests. For example, a note or even a verbal message to a line manager. Do not allow this and always refer to standard templates for these actions. Also, set a firm cut off point before payroll. This leaves room for a short periodic check for missing information or unusual patterns, so issues are fixed early rather than in a rush at month end.

Turning time data into better decisions

Once time and attendance records are reliable, they become a useful management tool. Owners can see where overtime is rising and where staffing needs to change. HR can spot patterns in absence, understand pressure points and support managers with facts instead of guesswork.

The idea is simple. Get a clear and fair way for people to record their time, keep clean records and check the parts that matter most. Do that and you will save hours each month and give employees more confidence in how their time is managed.

Find Out More

TimeMoto Cloud helps businesses of all sizes cut time and attendance admin by putting clocking, schedules, and absence management into one simple system, with employees handling much of the input themselves. This reduces manual corrections, keeps records clear for compliance and frees up hours each month. Try TimeMoto Cloud 30 days for free at www.timemoto.com/free-trial.