Time Clocks For Workforce Management

In 1888 a jeweler in New York invented the payroll time clock and his brother Harlow Bundy began to manufacture them for sale. He started the Bundy Manufacturing Company. The company joined up with a couple of other companies and became the International Time Recording Company. In 1911 it merged again and became Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation, and later changed its name to International Business Machines, or IBM. Going back to the original machine that started it all; what is a time clock? Basically it is a time device that records the time that employees arrive at work and then leave it again at the end of the day. It is easy to see how this device became popular with employers with staff large in number and who could not always be on hand to check on the staff themselves. Some of these old clocks still exist today as collector’s items and are truly beautiful. Some are designed after the basic grandfather clock, with carvings and elegant lines, with a large, decorative dial at the base of the clock. The basic mechanical time clock machine worked with printed time cards that had little check boxes indicating time in and time out. Each employee was given a card, and fed it into the machine when arriving at work and leaving again. When the card was inserted, with the relevant check box lined up, a lever on the clock was pulled and an inked ribbon caused the time stamp to be printed in the box. Some models used a dial wheel instead of cards, and each employee dialed his own name/number and the time was recorded. This obviously lent itself to misuse by other employees, and the ‘key’ clock was invented. Each employee was provided with his own key so only he could record his coming and going. As the clocks became more sophisticated, an employee time sheet was used. This was fed into the machine and activated a device at the back of the slot that printed out the date and time on the paper. Mechanical punch card time clocks and punch card time clock recorders were exclusively used for decades until the late 1970s, when they were first linked to microprocessors. This started the move away from analogue to electronic systems, although the analogue time clocks have never totally disappeared and are still preferred by some. Punch cards gradually gave way to magnetic strip swipe cards, which are still very much in use today. However they do lend themselves to dishonest practices, as the employee cannot himself be identified by the machine, only his card. Today a variety of different systems are used to monitor the comings and goings of employees. Both analogue and digital time clocks are still used. But probably the most up to date system is the use of biometric time clocks. The same technology that is used for admission to secure areas by biometric recognition, is also used for modern time clocks. This technology scans people and identifies them by various parts of their body or their voices. When this scan of a known person activates the machine, the name of the person is selected and the date and time is recorded. These biometric time clocks include the technology for any one of many types of recognition systems, including voice recognition, finger print recognition, vascular pattern (veins of the hand) recognition and retinal scan recognition. Probably the most popular type of payroll time clock is by simple finger print recognition. These rule out all sorts of frauds, such as ‘buddy punching’ where an employee checks a friend in or out as a favour, when he is not even there.

There is a wide variety of time clocks for all sizes of businesses that have multiple employees. They are an effective tool when trying to improve workforce management.