Saturday, March 20, 2010

I used to Hate my Job

I am the payroll clerk for a very large construction company that has over 150 employees. It is my job to figure up their time and print out checks every other week. It takes me at least two days to do this and sometimes three days because most of the time I would have to track down quite a lot of workers and find out what hours they worked for that pay period. Most of them work off site and don’t come into the office to clock in so they have to write down their hours. Finally, after years of pulling my hair out my boss got the telephone time clock system which has saved my sanity.

The system is easy to use; the workers just call the given number to clock in and out and the system records their time. When it’s time to do payroll I just download the information from the time attendance tracking data base and almost all my work is done. I just have to click “totals for the pay period” and just like that everything is added up for me.

Life has been so much better since we started using this method rather than the old style time clock and the writing down time method. Those systems didn’t work for us for many years but now I know things will be a lot smoother come payroll time. It takes me half a day to do payroll now instead of the two and sometimes three days it used to take me.

I feel like a brand new person not having to stress out about doing the payroll anymore. It used to be such a pain and would have me edgy for days. I used to dread going to work on payroll week because I knew what it was going to be like. Now, with the telephone time clock, I actually have time to goof off; but don’t tell my boss.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Always on Time

The company I work for has started a new way for employees to clock in and out every day. It’s called the telephone time clock system and it works really great. Many of us are field agents and spend most of our days in meetings with clients or in training. It’s impossible for most of us to go into the office to actually clock in and then go about our daily appointments. We had been just keeping track of our hours but there is always some sort of disagreement by using this process. The new system has stopped all the disagreements and is much easier to deal with.

Every morning as I head out the door to begin my day I will call the number to clock in with the phone time clock system. When I am off the clock for lunch I simply just call the number again and it clocks me out. Again, when I’m done with lunch and heading to my next appointment, I simply call the number again and I’m clocked back into the system. It’s a very simple process and takes less than a minute to do.

The accountant that does payroll has found it to be so much less stressful than the old system we used. She is able to pull the logs for the time attendance tracking which tells her exactly how many hours each of us have worked for that period. She doesn’t have to do any figuring at all; it has daily totals which takes away the guess work involved. In the past many of us who would forget to actually write down our hours were always making guesses as to how many hours we worked; this way the guess work is out the window. I’ve really found this system to be a big improvement from the old way of clocking in and out.