One hundred reasons to be cautious
March 31, 2009 by Bill MeltzerPosted in: Compensation, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views
A lot of companies are switching to electronic hour-tracking systems instead of using old-fashioned time cards.
A Pennsylvania branch of United Cerebral Palsy did just that, and the caregiver ended up with a big payroll crisis on its hands.
Due to a glitch in the system, more than 100 caregivers employed by the company either had mistakes on their paychecks or didn’t get paid at all until after they brought the issue to Payroll’s attention.
It’s not just employees who were affected. Because the computer system has failed to track caregivers’ work hours, United Cerebral Palsy was unable to bill clients.
Moral of the story: It pays to have a backup method of tracking hours. Going totally paperless isn’t always more efficient in the long run.
April 3rd, 2009 at 9:49 am
Your story doesn’t say, but it seems they missed the most basic concept of running the system in parallel with their old paper system for a trial period to work out all bugs.
April 10th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Thats why you do always do a practice run when processing the old way to see if there are any errors.
April 17th, 2009 at 7:20 am
Supervisory review of time sheets are essential even after system is tried.
Hopefully, supervisors are aware of their staff’s activities/assignments. If not, the problem goes well beyond payroll and billing…
April 17th, 2009 at 8:00 am
That is so right.
I am in the middle of a conversion of the Timekeeping System. I have been running testing for any issues that may come up whilst doing the payroll in the normal fashion. It is very time consuming however once everything is set my job will be that much easier.
We have been testing since the first of March with a go live date of June. Makes you wonder if the conversion was a rush job.
April 17th, 2009 at 8:04 am
“Integrated” Payroll and Time & Attendance systems have safeguards built in that would have never allowed that situation to move beyond a designated time period. Approvals at various levels (as set by the owner/adminisrtrator) have to be in place before forwarding to payroll for processing. If those approvals aren’t received in a timely manner, alerts are sent to designated people for follow up. The same is true once the T&A data is brought into the payroll system. Alerts are sent to payroll indicating a file has been approved. Once that alert is received, a “clock” starts ticking. If no action is taken on that file within the specified time period a follow up alert is sent.
The problem stems from the fact that people purchase non-integrated solutions that reuire “human” manual intervention. This should be unacceptable upon review and purchase of these systems. If already in place, employers should evaluate the potential risk of moving forward with these antiquated, non-functional solutions in contrast to totally updating their existing model. In today’s market, they’ll actually improve their solutions performance, they’ll have use of new and functional add-ons and they’ll save substantial dollars. The real resistance comes from those assigned to operate these systems and their hesitation to learn new systems and procedures.
April 17th, 2009 at 11:36 am
A back up system is always a must, specially when the supervisors don’t seem to have their act together and forget to add hours due to the employees for unexpected call ins and/changes on regular schedules they forget to do electronically; and when electronic system do not accept punching the time cars before and after the scheduled time.