Using Clocking Systems for Flexitime

A time and attendance system can help you with flexitime… well, a good one can anyway!

Do you have flexitime in your workplace? Chances are, you’re keeping track of everyone’s hours via an excel sheet or something similar, and having to record all the balances of hours manually. Maybe you’ve thought about getting a time and attendance system before, but couldn’t work out how it was going to work with such flexible working hours. Well, in this blog we’re going to blow our own trumpet a little, because the Capture^it time and attendance system is great with flexitime and might be just what you’re looking for.

For each employee on flexitime, Capture^it holds the following information

• The employees core hours
• The employees flexi-start times
• The employees flexi-end times
• All Flexi-leave taken
• Flexi-leave planned but not yet taken
• The contracted hours the employee must work

During the core hours, Capture^it expects the employee to be at work. If the employee clocks in after the start of their core hours, or clocks out before the end of their core hours the software will flag these events for an administrator’s attention; marking the employee as either “Late” or “Finished Early” (or even both!). Employees will also have an ‘earliest start time’ and a ‘latest finish time’. Arriving outside these times will not count towards the hours worked by the employee on that day, although you might decide to later ‘credit’ these under exceptional circumstances. It is very important in any system that the employee is able to view their current position in respect of their current debit or credit hours so that can plan in making sure they work sufficient hours in the agreed period.

If you’re using the Capture^it PC Clocking software then employees can view the amount of hours they either owe or have accrued. PC-Based Clocking is perfect for office environments which tend to be the most common place to find flexitime, so the two work together very well. It also makes requests for flexi-leave much easier, with employees able to check how many hours they’ve accrued before requesting the time off. If the employee does not have PC access then they will still be able to view their current flextime position at time of clock-out on the clocking terminal.

Speaking of flexi-leave, this is recorded separately to the standard annual leave days. For obvious reasons, this means the employee doesn’t lose their entitled annual leave days, but it also keeps the recording of holidays more organised. Should you ever want to know how many days annual leave an employee has had not including any flexi-leave, then because Capture^it records these as two separate entities, you have that information available.

Flexitime & Regular Shifts

You’re not constrained to just flexitime if you have flexitime workers. Capture^it is able to keep any number of different work profiles for different employees or groups of employees. So it might be that you have workshop staff who work a standard working week; 8:30 am – 4:30 pm, Mon – Fri. Then you’ve got full-time office staff who are on flexitime, and you’ve even got a couple of part-time staff (that may, or may not be on flexitime!). You can set up those work patterns for each group of employees, including flexitime rules for the office staff, whilst the workshop staff are expected in at the standard hours, and so on. You might even have one particular employee who has special rules all to herself, in which case you can set that employee up separate to everyone else. The Capture^it system is – excuse the pun – flexible! Ha!