Tracking your employees’ working hours is essential to make sure that you calculate payroll accurately, comply with labor laws, and manage projects effectively. Nowadays there are many ways that you can get this done, and it’ll help to know the 3 main types of options available.

1.  Manual Tracking

There are several methods of manually tracking employee work hours, including paper timesheets, or mechanical punch cards. Despite being simple and low-cost, these methods are not very accurate and can cause issues because they aren’t private and have no back up.

2.  Digital Timesheets

Digital timesheets are a more modern alternative that can consist of either manually using spreadsheets or using automated apps. While these options don’t have the same issues as manual tracking, they are still fairly limited and can basically only track the time that employees clock-in and clock-out.

3.  Tracking and Monitoring Software

Nowadays most larger organizations use software to track employee work hours. Not only are these mostly automated, but they also provide far greater detail than any of the other options and allow you to gain insights into how your employees spend their time.

In general, tracking and monitoring software can be divided into two main types:

• Time tracking software

For the most part this type of software is designed to track work hours including clock-in, clock-out, breaks, time spent active or idle, and so on. Some may also allow you to categorize the time spent based on tasks, projects, and other factors.

• Employee monitoring software

Unlike time tracking software, employee monitoring software like Controlio provides far more in-depth monitor that will not only track the work hours of your employees but also their activities. The features in Controlio will let you know what apps they use, websites they visit, and how much time are spent on each of them.

Additionally, Controlio can also track emails, file transfers, IM chats, and various other types of activity. If necessary it can capture screen recordings, log keystrokes, block websites, or send alerts. Overall this not only provides you with more insight into your employees work hours, performance and productivity – but also is useful to improve security.

As you can see, each of these types of software is unique – and it will be up to you to determine which is the best fit.

Final Words: How to Choose

Trying to choose the right type of option to track employee work hours can be tricky. At the end of the day though, it should be largely based on your businesses’ size, needs, and budget.

For small businesses with only a handful of employees, manual tracking or digital timesheets may suffice. However for large businesses that have more employees, automated time tracking software is undoubtedly better.

And last but not least, if you feel you want to monitor employees more closely to improve productivity, security, and management – full-fledged employee monitoring software should fit the bill. It may be a bit more difficult to set up, but it will be worth the investment in the long term.