Keeping track of who’s working when shouldn’t be one of the hardest parts of your day. Yet, attendance tracking can be a massive headache for many businesses with hourly workers. And if you’re managing multiple locations, that complexity multiplies.
Whether you’re running a busy restaurant, managing retail staff across locations, or coordinating healthcare shifts, getting employee attendance right impacts everything — from your bottom line to team morale.
That’s why we’re here to share the time and attendance best practices that can help you reshape a necessary task from a burden into a business advantage, creating a happier, more efficient workplace.
Why effective employee attendance tracking matters
Before diving into time card best practices, it’s worth understanding why proper attendance tracking is essential:
Payroll accuracy: Employees get paid correctly for time worked.
Compliance: Accurate tracking supports adherence to meal breaks, overtime, and other labour laws.
Productivity insights: Data reveals attendance patterns that affect operations.
Fairness: All team members benefit from transparency and accountability.
Forecasting: Data-derived insights help predict future staffing needs and seasonal trends.
Most importantly, accurate time tracking builds rapport with your team by assuring employees that their time is correctly recorded and everyone is following the same guidelines.
8 time and attendance best practices
Precise attendance tracking helps you allocate your most valuable resource — your people — exactly where and when they’re needed most. These practices can change your entire approach to workforce planning.
1. Embrace mobile time tracking solutions
Paper timesheets and punch cards are relics of the past. Today’s workforce needs convenient, mobile-friendly solutions that make it easy to clock employee time.
Mobile time tracking apps allow your employees to clock in and out from their phones, with no physical time clocks needed. Digital attendance solutions have a host of benefits for shift-based businesses:
Real-time visibility into who’s working
Location-stamped time punches
Simplified approval processes
Digital audit trails for compliance
This is especially valuable if you have employees who work off-site or if you operate multiple locations.
2. Integrate your time and attendance system
Your employee attendance tracking system shouldn’t exist in isolation. Integration with other business systems creates a cohesive flow of information and reduces administrative work. Consider integrating your time tracking system with:
Payroll to automatically transfer hours worked to payroll processing
HR software to connect attendance data with employee records
Scheduling platforms to make sure scheduled shifts match with actual hours worked
Your tracking solution should offer integrations with popular platforms to create a connected system that saves time and reduces errors.
Learn how Deputy’s robust integrations can streamline your management processes.
3. Implement authentication technologies
One of the biggest challenges in managing attendance in the workplace is reliability. Buddy punching, where one employee clocks in for another, costs businesses millions of dollars every year.
Modern time clock systems have several authentication methods to ensure accuracy:
Biometric verification via fingerprints or facial recognition
Geofencing so employees can only clock in when physically at work
GPS tracking that captures location data with each punch
Pin codes or passwords for basic authentication
Time and attendance innovations like these aren’t just about preventing fraud. They simplify the process for every employee, even the most diligent on your team.
These simplifications translate to measurable improvements. When University Veterinary Hospital introduced scheduling software, they saved 15 hours a week on building employee schedules — with an impressive 50% reduction in tracking mistakes. See how Deputy made a difference.
4. Automate reports and analytics
Manual data entry and analysis can waste valuable management time. Automating attendance reports helps you focus on addressing issues, not compiling data. Your tracking system should provide:
Real-time dashboards to show information like who’s working and who’s late
Attendance pattern reports to identify chronic issues
Compliance reports that flag potential violations
Labour cost analysis to connect attendance with budgeting
Automated insights like these enable proactive management — which facilitates better decision-making in nearly every area.
5. Establish clear attendance policies
Even the best tracking systems fall short without clear policies. Your attendance policy should be comprehensive, fair, and consistently enforced. Such policies usually include:
Clock-in/out procedures
Grace periods for tardiness
Break requirements for meals and rest
Absence reporting procedures
Disciplinary actions for addressing issues
Clear communication is arguably your operation’s most important time and attendance best practice. Communicate your policies early and often, both during onboarding and through regular team meetings and updates.
6. Conduct regular compliance audits
Staying compliant with labour laws requires constant vigilance. You can identify and correct potential issues before they become costly problems with one vital process: regular time tracking data audits.
A routine can help you stay on top of compliance:
Weekly: Review for missed meal breaks or unauthorised overtime.
Monthly: Analyse patterns to identify chronic tardiness or absenteeism.
Quarterly: Review your attendance policies to keep them up to date with changing laws.
Compliance can get even more complicated if you operate multiple locations, as rules may vary by state or municipality. Multi-location tracking systems can be invaluable for maintaining consistency and accommodating local laws.
7. Leverage attendance data for better scheduling
By analysing patterns in attendance data, you can create more effective schedules that benefit both the business and your employees.
Consider using attendance data to:
Identify coverage needs during peak times
Reduce unnecessary overtime and better distribute hours
Match employee preferences with proven attendance trends
Forecast staffing needs with historical data
Addressing the most common challenges of shift scheduling becomes much easier when you have a wealth of data from employee attendance tracking to inform your decisions.
And the best version of data-based scheduling is smart scheduling: AI-supported scheduling suggestions derived directly from when your busiest shifts are, who your most efficient employees are, and other metrics that don’t always stand out in a sea of numbers.
8. Empower employees with self-service options
Everyone benefits when employees take ownership of their time and attendance. Self-service features give employees greater control over their work lives while simultaneously reducing manager workload. This includes:
Self-service time-off requests
Shift swap capabilities
24/7 access to current and future schedules
Time card review before submission
Staff appreciate the ability to trade shifts right from their phones, while you maintain final approval with just a single click. Deputy’s shift-swapping feature was designed with this simplicity in mind — fewer frantic calls about coverage and more time to focus on other tasks.
Implement time and attendance best practices the easy way
By adopting these best practices for employee time and attendance, you do more than just track hours. You build a workplace where transparency and efficiency go hand in hand. With the right tools in place, you can take back the hours you currently spend managing attendance and use them to build a stronger, more resilient workplace.
Don’t spend another week struggling with outdated time and attendance systems. Turn attendance tracking into a competitive advantage with Deputy’s powerful workforce management software. Discover why thousands of businesses trust Deputy to handle their most important capital of all — their time.
