7 best employee attendance management systems of 2024

You have more important things to do than micromanage your team or ensure they clock in on schedule for every shift. Whether you manage a hybrid team or remote employees, you need an easy way to track timesheets and monitor work activity.

How can you automate these processes without adding to your workload or compromising employee performance? You need automated attendance tracking software that integrates with the payroll and project management apps you already use.

Let’s look at the best employee attendance management systems to find the ideal solution for your team. With the right platform, you can spend less time monitoring employees and more time leveling up your team.

5 features you need from an employee attendance management tool

Not all tools in this category are created equal. The best attendance tracking software offers:

1. Automation: When saving time and working efficiently are your top priorities, automated attendance management is essential. Choose an app that automates time tracking, employee engagement, and workflow improvements.

2. Accuracy and reliability: Why waste time triple-checking timesheets or manually entering employee activity? Look for a tool that provides accurate time tracking and lets you make manual edits when necessary.

3. Cross-device tracking: Does your team use a mix of desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones to do their jobs? Seek out a platform that seamlessly monitors time and attendance across these devices so you can rely less on manual input.

4. App integrations: Want to spend less time entering timesheets and transferring project data? Prioritize a platform that works with your project management and payroll software so you can batch-process payments and manage projects efficiently.

5. Actionable insights: Raw data is helpful, but actionable analytics can make a more significant difference for you and your team. Choose a platform offering useful recommendations for improving workflows and retaining your best talent.

The top 7 attendance management tools for employees

Now that you know what features to seek, let’s look at some of the best time and attendance solutions. First, we’ll look at our own employee attendance solution, Time Doctor.

1. Time Doctor

Time Doctor is a time and attendance management system designed to help busy managers build a more productive and balanced workforce.

Over 250,000 users trust Time Doctor to automate attendance tracking, employee scheduling, and payroll processing—ultimately creating a streamlined system that’s better for employees, managers, and organizations.

Features

This attendance and time tracking software includes all the features necessary to save time and increase productivity.

Work schedules

With Time Doctor’s scheduling tool, you can easily set up one-time or recurring shifts for your team. Since you can assign required employee hours for each shift, you can ensure you have enough coverage throughout the day.

By default, the scheduling dashboard displays shifts for your entire team. However, you can filter it by specific users or groups to confirm coverage and avoid overtime.

Time Doctor supports CSV uploads, so you can input spreadsheets to schedule shifts in bulk. You can also add individual shifts to the scheduling dashboard as needed.

Automated attendance tracking

Once you schedule shifts with Time Doctor, the system can handle employee time tracking automatically. In other words, there’s no need for manual clock-ins or clock-outs.

Time Doctor automatically begins tracking time when employees log in to their devices for work. You can see who started on time and who put in the required employee work hours successfully.

If necessary, you and your team can edit attendance tracking data. You can manually input the hours worked and specify tasks for each shift to collect more in-depth data.

Employee timesheets

Does your team waste a ton of time creating timesheets manually? With Time Doctor, employees can turn attendance data into time cards automatically.

You can then review time cards manually or set them to approve automatically, which can take administrative timekeeping tasks off your to-do list.

This time clock software can even export timesheets to absence management systems and streamline human resources tasks.

Real-time monitoring

Don’t want to wait to find out your team is exceeding expectations or falling short of key performance indicators (KPIs)? With Time Doctor’s real-time monitoring, you can stay on top of both big wins and potential performance issues.

The system’s screencast tool automatically records employees’ screens at preset intervals. Since it also tallies keystrokes and mouse movements per minute, Time Doctor can give you insight into what your team is working on and how efficiently they’re progressing.

Note that Time Doctor doesn’t log keystrokes, and it allows employees to blur sensitive information included in screenshots. In other words, it protects employee privacy and allows them some control over how they’re monitored.

Attendance reports

With Time Doctor’s attendance reports, you can get an overview of your team’s performance and keep an eye on trends. The dashboard automatically adds “present,” “late,” and “absent” labels to each shift so you can quickly assess attendance.

Want to handle activity issues before they escalate? With Time Doctor’s activity report, you can spot the team members who spend too much time idle or waste time using unproductive websites and apps.

You can also use productivity reports to help your team work even more efficiently. This report automatically calculates productive vs. unproductive hours for each employee so you can see who’s contributing the most to any project.

Performance alerts

Need to catch performance issues before they become costly? Time Doctor dashboards show you which teams and employees are tracking the most or least hours and spending the most or least time on productive websites and apps.

You can work with underperforming teams and employees to resolve productivity problems as soon as you notice an issue rather than waiting for monthly or quarterly reports.

In some cases, you won’t have to step in at all. Time Doctor automatically alerts employees if they’ve been idle for a preset amount of time, prompting them to continue working.

Payroll capabilities

Once you’ve set up employee attendance tracking in Time Doctor, you can directly convert the data into billable hours. Then you can manually review your team’s time cards or set up an automated approval process.

Time Doctor integrates with platforms like Gusto, PayPal, and Wise, letting you process payroll in just a few seconds. All you have to do is choose pay periods and currencies for your team and set payments to process in bulk.

If you pass on project costs to clients, Time Doctor can simplify your workflow. The software allows client billing integrations like FreshBooks and QuickBooks, so you can get invoices paid faster.

Pricing

Time Doctor offers a 14-day free trial. Paid plans for this cloud-based platform start at $7/user per month.

Customer ratings

Capterra: 4.5/5 (480+ reviews)
G2: 4.4/5 (320+ reviews)