How to convince your boss to choose time off and attendance management software?

Calamari
9 min readJun 15, 2021

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Choosing the right attendance tracking and leave management software isn’t easy. Even if from the HR specialist’s point of view the solution is great, they have to find the right argument to convince the CEO to invest in it.

That’s why we collected a list of arguments to choose Calamari Leave and Calamari Clock In that will convince every company owner that it’s the right choice and a good investment in the future and efficiency of their organization.

What is time tracking and absence management software?

Leave, attendance and time tracking software is an HR management tool that facilitates the work of human resources specialists especially in the field of preparing periodic worked time reports, detecting employees’ lateness, overwork, other incompatibilities, and day-off limits.

It allows to request and accept leave requests, register worked hours, create attendance lists, and quickly generate archival timesheets. Thanks to storing all the data in a well-protected cloud, all employees’ information is available from any place at any time only for authorized people like administrators and managers.

It’s also the solution that all the company can benefit from. It can make employees’ work life a lot easier. Thanks to the constant access to the vacation tracker and calendar make planning the projects, meetings, and other important events much quicker and more efficient thanks to the given information.

Attendance list allows employees to always know who’s in the office and who has a day off, so they can properly plan their work in time to become more productive and don’t waste time waiting.

Starting and finishing the workday in Calamari can be done using various methods:

They minimize the risk of losing attendance lists, making a mistake during signing on the list, or a situation when someone forgot to do so. The feature that notifies employees that it’s the time to clock in/out is another help in making sure that employees register their time according to how much they work.

In the European Union, documenting and tracking the working time of employees is obligatory for all the companies based in member states since 2019, so finding flexible and efficient software to help the HR team with this obligation is a very important decision.

The pros of absence management tool

Calamari consists of 2 modules: attendance and time tracking (Calamari Clock In) and absence management system (Calamari Leave). Thinking of choosing the tool, it is possible to subscribe to one of two modules or both of them.

Choosing the right tools is pretty easy and is not forcing companies to pay for features they won’t be using.

But why is it worth choosing Calamari Leave for the company’s absence management?

Decreasing the costs of creating the time tracking documentation

Preparing the periodic reports of worked time and day-offs is a very time-consuming duty for the HR team. It takes much time that could be used for other tasks that can’t be automated. By letting Calamari create the reports, you not only save time but also minimize the risk of human mistakes in filling the forms and calculating employees’ working time.

Using leave management tool allows to:

  • save time and effort needed to manually check all the worked time-related documents about every employee, especially when using paper documentation;
  • reduce the time of waiting for the information about planned absences of employees from other departments that are needed to plan the projects;
  • minimize the risk of mistakes — like incorrect calculations in reports and the time lost due to inefficient planning work in time.

The cost of mistakes due to inefficient absence management is higher than any leave management tool that exists! More information about the topic you can find in our article: 5 risks of an ineffective leave management process.

Increasing employees productivity

Increasing the efficiency of an HR department is not the only pros of absence management tools. Calamari Leave can also increase the productivity of the whole company due to many reasons, for example:

  • automatization — it eliminates the problem of errors in documentation and asynchronous information flow. It minimizes mistakes connected to project planning without the full information about employees’ availability. Thanks to the vacation tracker calendar that every employee can access, it’s easy to plan work in the most efficient way;
  • ease of use — using mobile technology allows to track the vacation calendar, request and accept days-off even after work hours on at the last moment without a need of going to the office. It can be done via mobile device or web app at any time;
  • availability of time-off limits and easy requesting procedure — makes all the employees know about their leave days to use via the Calamari. They don’t have to waste time on asking the HR specialists and they can plan their entitled leave the best way, so they can take a good rest at least twice a year. The easy requesting system encourages people to take leave days and prevents employees from overworking.

Information availability

When deciding about accepting an employee’s leave day, the manager usually has limited access to the information about the planned vacation of other people from different teams. It may cause the situation when, even if making the best possible decision, the key employee to finishing the project can be unavailable. This kind of delay may result in loss of income for the company.

Thanks to the vacation calendar of the whole organization, managers have more information so they can make even better decisions and eliminate the potential income lost. The employees themselves can also decide when to get the leave based on the calendar, to know when there’s no chance of getting a day off. Thanks to this, both — employee and manager — save time on considering potential acceptance of the request.

Legal compliance

According to the EU directive NR 2003/88/EC created in 2019, all the entrepreneurs operating in the territory of the member states are obligated to collect and keep the records of the working time and leave days of their employees. Therefore, regardless of the chosen tool, employers must collect such data.

Thanks to the Calamari absence management software it’s easy to speed up the process of collecting work time connected data and minimize the possibility of mistakes. All the risks related to employees’ personal data storage are transferred to the software provider. Data are safe thanks to being stored in a well-protected cloud. Even in case of a breach, the law consequences are transwered to Calamari.

Increasing employees satisfaction level

Getting rest from work is an important benefit for the employee. The employer’s job is to make sure that people follow it. Thanks to leave management tools it is possible to create easy rules of requesting and accepting vacation requests. Making it possible to request with a few clicks makes employees more willing to take the opportunity to take a rest.

For the entrepreneurs, it’s also an additional benefit. In case of any kind of ambiguities, problems, or suspicions about the employee following the rules, it’s easy to check the fact. It’s also security for employees that they can prove their working time and take leave if necessary.

With access to the leave calendar of the organizations, it’s also easier to plan the upcoming projects and events such as team-building trips or employee training.

Improving communication quality and work organization

Giving them access to the vacation calendar to all the employed people is a great way to optimize the work. As mentioned before — by planning with having all the possible information about the availability to key employees — but also in eliminating the situation when people can’t finish their smaller tasks because of the absence of their coworkers.

Thanks to the planning based on complete leave calendar data people can stop losing their time waiting and even plan their daily duties the best way not to lose time.

Good information flow — caused by vacation calendar, employees requesting a system, and Slack statuses automatic updating — makes it easier to eliminate the situation when people are waiting on the meeting for someone who’s not absent.

Great time management is a simple way to save money, reduce costs, and even increase income.

More information about the pros of absence management software online you can find in our article: 13 benefits of a leave management system,

The pros of attendance and time tracking tool

Both absence management and time tracking tools have a lot of benefits for more than just the HR department. That’s why it’s worth looking closer to the other ways that HR management tools can help the whole organization to gain the most of it.

Attendance list in real-time

Thanks to Calamari Clock In it is possible to automatically register the working hours but clocking in/out using various methods. The software also allows checking in which coworkers are currently working, are on a break, working remotely, or aren’t working on a given day at all.

It gives managers a possibility to let their employees spend a break in peace and inform them about something when they get the notification they got back from break.

This kind of attendance list is also useful in case of a fire alarm or any other life-threatening event. It makes it very easy to find out which employees were in the building and to check if every one of them went out safely. In times of the Covid-19 pandemic, the daily attendance list makes it quicker to find people that had contact with a sick person and are in the risk group.

Flexible and easy time tracking methods

Calamari gives a possibility to use a variety of time registering methods thanks to which it is pretty easy to find the best solution for a given organization.

Except for clocking in and out using the web app, it is possible to use Calamari’s mobile app or register beginning and the end of work by Slack’s app with integration with Calamari.

The possibility of registering time by QR codes — with making a picture of an employee that begins their shift — is a great solution for big enterprises to make sure that everyone follows the rules. It also eliminates the chance of someone unauthorized to go inside the office using a lost employee’s ID card.

There’s also another way — by using iBeacons. They track someone’s signal for the whole day and at the end of it, the beacon counts the worked time and registers data in the system.

Calamari is oriented on its clients’ needs and shares its API documentation. In case of special requirements from the client’s site, it is possible to integrate Calamari with the company’s software with little effort and help from the support team.

Preventing delays and abuses

Employees’ lateness, taking too long breaks, or leaving the office too early is a small problem with potentially big consequences. The time and attendance tracking tool resolves those problems.

Calamari allows managers to set on the notifications when their subordinates come to work late or get out too early. It’s an easy way to detect people with a punctuality problem and help them in changing their behavior. Giving employees the signal that those kinds of actions won’t be tolerated, will quickly get great results.

It is also possible to fight lateness by rewarding the most punctual employees. Calamari can be used then to be a system that gives employees their rewards — like extra hours of free time…

To find out more about using Calamari as a rewarding and motivating tool, check the article: Leave management and time tracking software in rewarding and motivating employees.

Time tracking over particular projects

Not every department needs a project management software like Jira or Basecamp, most of them can just use Trello or a timesheet. Thanks to Calamari those departments can easily track the time spent on working on given projects without the need of purchasing extra tools.

If the manager adds the projects to Calamari and signs employees to them, when they start their shifts, they can choose which project they’re going to work on. When finishing one task, they can easily change the project to another one. This way managers know how much time which duty takes and employees can check how long they work on which tasks to better plan their duties in the workday to increase their efficiency.

More pros on registering worked hours can be found in the article: 5 reasons why you need a mobile clock in clock out app.

Facilitating cooperation with remote employees

Since the beginning of COVID lockdown, remote work has become even more popular. Both employers and employees had to get used to the new reality where working remotely was a must and it turned out it works well. That is why people want to work from home more often.

Because of that, Calamari is a great answer for the CEO’s need of finding a way to register the working time of remote employees. Using time tracking tools and thanks to the integration with the popular office tools like Slack, MS Teams, G-Suite, or Jira, Calamari allows quick information flow about the absences and availability of the employees, so the distance is no longer a factor preventing people from work remotely.

Summary

Attendance and absence management software is a tool that helps the HR department in reporting employees’ worked time and in managing absences. But it also has various benefits for all the employees. Calamari can help in saving money, time, planning projects, and preventing lateness and overwork.

Knowing all the benefits from HR management tools like Calamari, it’s worth trying how it works for two weeks free to check its all features.

And what arguments convinced you to try Calamari? Let us know!

Originally published at https://calamari.io on June 15, 2021.

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Calamari

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