For those of you reading this who happen to be the owners of managers of larger companies, what follows probably isn’t going to be news to you. However, there are a lot of smaller businesses out there as well as startups small and mid-sized alike whose senior personnel are as yet unaware of one very important  legal requirement relating to employee time and attendance. All employers in Australia are required to maintain records of employee attendance for those workers who earn under $55,000 base salary annually (even if overtime pay puts these employees over this amount of earnings for the year).

Now, if your firm is using a Bundy-style time clock or another time card based attendance tracking system, this can be more than a little hassle. It means either keeping all of those time cards around or manually entering all of this data into a ledger or spreadsheet. Neither is the most appealing prospect – especially if you have a lot of employees, saving every time card can take up a great deal of storage space in much less time than you might think. Of course, keeping track of all of this employee time and attendance information by entering it manually can take up a great deal of time.

Technology Makes Payroll Easy

Fortunately, there are less time consuming (and space consuming) methods of complying with this legal provision. Better still, the technology which makes this possible also provide a great many other benefits for your company’s attendance procedures as well as your bottom line. There are a lot of strong arguments to be made in favor of upgrading from your old time clock in favor of an electronic model which can be integrated with your company’s network and software systems – and of course, they make for a very easy way to meet the requirements imposed by the Workplace Relations Regulations of 2006. They’ve been in force for some time now, but again, there are a lot of business owners and managers out there who are either unaware of this legal requirement and even more who are in search of a better way to bring their company into compliance.

Since a biometric time clock can send employee time and attendance information directly to your computer systems via your corporate network, the attendance information which you’re required to maintain can be stored electronically and instantly. This alone saves you quite a bit of time (and it does the same for your company’s payroll processing, another source of savings).  It’s not just a way to meet the mandates of the Workplace Relations Regulations, but an accurate, convenient and thoroughly modern way of tracking attendance which saves your company time and money while keeping you fully compliant with applicable regulations.