"Manually keeping track of actual on-the-job hours," protested Al Maes, plant manager of Northeast Concrete, "was a real chore...the smallest calculation error could result in short changing employee salaries and profitability."

Northeast employs 15 full time employees working two shifts. People are in and out at irregular intervals. The firm had outgrown its manual time and attendance procedures.

The challenge was finding an automatic system to collect this information, perform the calculations, work with a payroll system and grow with the company. The solution was Time Guardian. Tracking is automatic. Each employee is issued a coded badge unique to them. Simply swipe the card to "punch" in or out. The system collects, calculates and prepares data, integrating it into your payroll service.

Seven standard reports are available. Most important for Northeast are time card, hours worked and exceptions reports. (Exceptions are "flags" providing managers with important feedback as to how and when an employee is punching or not punching. An "LI", for example, identifies a "late in," and displays on the report.

The time card report provides a complete, detailed account of Northeast's employee punch times, totals and exceptions for the specified period of time. The hours worked report includes employee name, employee number, badge number, and a compact total of hours/dollars for day and pay period. Adjustment descriptons are added as required. The exception report includes the employee name, employee number and badge number, providing a list of the exceptions generated on selected settings.

As Northeast grows the system will keep pace up to 100 employees.