Attendance Recording for Small Business - Food Retailers

Attendance Recording for Small Business - Food Retailers

Small business in the food retailing industry share some standard operating practices. Finding an employee attendance system which works well in this industry can be challenging but not if you know the right things to consider.

Here are some typical characteristics of small retailers. 

• Typically, these businesses will employ between ten and fifty staff.
• Employees can work quite varied shifts.
• Employees are often paid overtime and penalty rates.
• They often employ casual employees.
• IT infrastructure on-site is often very basic 
• The payroll is usually calculated by an offsite bookkeeper or perhaps the partner of the proprietor.
• Employees are very interdependent, so it is usually very evident when a team member is late.
• In the case of larger employers, the rostering of staff for budgeting is required. 
• There can be issues with fingerprint time clocks because employees work with water and occasionally cut their fingers.
• MYOB, Quickbooks and Xero are the most common payroll product used. 

Some of the above points are more significant than others, so to find the best solution, you should first identify where your current system is letting you down and what the potential costs are.

The Food Industry's 3 Most Common Attendance Challenges

1. The time it takes to process payroll each week
2. Payroll calculation mistakes causing overpayments
3. Storing and retrieving paper timesheet records

 Interestingly, employee time theft doesn't make the top 3 challenges, but if this is a problem in your business, then it needs to prioritise as a system requirement.

Time & Attendance Systems Most Used in the Retail Food Industry

So, what solution would cover the main challenges? Since reducing the time to produce payroll each week and making it more accurate are the top two priorities, you will need to make sure that the time clock can deliver these results. 

Entry-level time clock systems may not be able to deliver this depending on specific pay rules that you may apply. To understand this better, you can read our article entitled "The most important thing you need to know about time clock systems."  

Having said that it might well be that your payroll rules are quite simple. In this case, the most common system used by the retail food industry is a Facial Recognition Stand Alone Time Clock. Provided it is a quality, advanced product, it will drastically speed up the collection and processing of employee attendance records. It will automatically calculate employee payroll hours and store all records electronically. 

That's the essential priorities covered, but what about the rest?

Fortunately, some products deal with many of the other requirements.

Standalone facial recognition time and attendance systems, for example, do not rely on software to access the time clock records. All the attendance reports can simply be downloaded using an internet browser from any device pr location. This means that your bookkeeper can do the payroll from their office or home.

Another feature that may be important is exporting to payroll. While this can be an advantage in eliminating data entry and possible errors it is often an issue for entry level time clocks as they are often restricted in the number of payroll categories they handle and payroll products they support. 

The process of data entry for say, 30 staff can take as little as 10 minutes so in my view the ability to export to payroll can be an overated feature. 

In summary, the ideal time clock for the typical small business in the retail food inductry will be a stand alone facial recognition time clock with export to the more popular payroll software products. If you company employs more than 30 employees and has more complex pay rules and a less common payroll system then you shoud pobaly consider the addition of a more sophisticated attendnace product.

Time & Attendance Consultant