{"id":2068,"date":"2020-03-27T05:00:50","date_gmt":"2020-03-27T05:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/empmonitor.in\/blog\/?p=2068"},"modified":"2025-03-21T11:58:38","modified_gmt":"2025-03-21T06:28:38","slug":"methods-to-track-employee-hours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/methods-to-track-employee-hours\/","title":{"rendered":"4 Methods For How To Keep Track Of Employee Hours"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When it comes to running a successful business, <\/span><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><a style=\"color: #008080;\" href=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.in\/blog\/employee-tracking-software-features\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em><b>employee tracking <\/b><\/em><\/a><\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">of time is one of the crucial aspects that cannot be ignored. There are many reasons for tracking the employee hours be it for:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Calculation of payroll\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Labor regulation compliance<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Calculating total man-hours spent on a project<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Handling HR related work<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Many companies have adopted different ways to track their employees hours and they all seem to fit them as they get used to with it.<\/span><\/p>\n<h4 style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><b>Why To Track Employee\u2019s Hours?<\/b><\/span><\/h4>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.empmonitor.com\/pricing\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-8135 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/calculate-over-time.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1600\" height=\"900\" srcset=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/calculate-over-time.png 1600w, https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/calculate-over-time-300x169.png 300w, https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/calculate-over-time-1024x576.png 1024w, https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/calculate-over-time-768x432.png 768w, https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/calculate-over-time-1536x864.png 1536w, https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/calculate-over-time-1080x608.png 1080w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There might be different kinds of agreements you hold with your employees be it in the form of regular employees or external consultants. The regular employees\u2019 time tracking is important to track the progress of an ongoing project based on which a manager can calculate how much more time would be needed to finish it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If the project is lagging based on the lesser number of hours being given by the employees at work then the manager may add more resources to the project or take other necessary steps to ensure that employees should spend more hours.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Whereas for an external consultant, apart from <span style=\"color: #008080;\"><a style=\"color: #008080;\" href=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.in\/blog\/best-productivity-monitoring-software-in-2020\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em><strong>tracking the project\u2019s progress<\/strong><\/em><\/a> <\/span>it is also necessary to calculate the amount of salary they are going to be paid based on the number of hours they spend at work. And since external consultants are more expensive resources, the hours spent by them in a project helps managers calculate the total budgeting too of the projects based on which they assign-reassign more or less resources to their projects.<\/span><\/p>\n<h4 style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><b>Regular time vs overtime<\/b><\/span><\/h4>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.empmonitor.com\/pricing\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-6685 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Overtime.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" srcset=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Overtime.png 1024w, https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Overtime-300x169.png 300w, https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Overtime-768x432.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It is a federal law in many countries for the employees to log a maximum of 40 hours in a week. Hence, the hours they are spending at work must have to be tracked very accurately so that if they are doing overtime then they must be compensated monetarily for that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Whenever the employees claim to be paid extra for the overtime then employers must have a robust employee time tracking mechanism in place so that employees&#8217; claims can be cross-checked. Based on this mechanism, they can easily know how much overtime has been spent by the employees and thus how much extra amount is being owed by the company to them.<\/span><\/p>\n<h4 style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><b>Tools for tracking employees\u2019 hours<\/b><\/span><b><\/b><\/h4>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In order to know <\/span><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><a style=\"color: #008080;\" href=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.in\/blog\/measuring-employees-productivity\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em><b>how to keep track of employee hours<\/b><\/em><\/a><\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"color: #008080;\">,<\/span> there are traditional as well as more advanced methods commonly being followed by the companies around the world. They have been using different methods for tracking employees\u2019 hours based on their needs and conveniences. Few of the most followed methods can be listed below:<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><b>Timesheet templates<\/b><\/span><\/h4>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.empmonitor.com\/pricing\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-5827 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/image6.jpg\" alt=\"timesheets\" width=\"1592\" height=\"666\" srcset=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/image6.jpg 1592w, https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/image6-300x126.jpg 300w, https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/image6-768x321.jpg 768w, https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/image6-1024x428.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/image6-1080x452.jpg 1080w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1592px) 100vw, 1592px\" \/><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Employees can enter their hours in a weekly timesheet specially designed to log their in and out times manually. There can be rows for everyday with columns logging their start time, end time, lunch time, vacations\/leaves as well as <a href=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/mandatory-overtime\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em><strong>mandatory overtime<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Employees can log their hours religiously in this sheet and hand it over to their employers at the end of every week. Then employers can convert those data into monthly records and use them for various purposes as I mentioned above.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Free online timesheets can be downloaded from the web which are easily available. A sample timesheet can look like this:<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><b>Employees Time Tracking Software in Excel<\/b><\/span><\/h4>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.empmonitor.com\/pricing\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-3240 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Timesheet.png\" alt=\"Timesheet\" width=\"750\" height=\"465\" srcset=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Timesheet.png 750w, https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Timesheet-300x186.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Another method which also falls under manually tracking employees hours is by entering the data in an excel sheet. An common excel sheet can be kept in a local server which everyone can access through their computers connected to a LAN network.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Formulas can be inserted in the total hours column which will calculate the total logged in hours based on in and out time entered by the employees. All the weekly timesheets can be stored at one place in a server and can be viewed by the managers for their respective teams.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This method of logging in time would be more accurate when it comes to calculating the total hours because of using the embedded formulae on excel sheets as compared to manually calculating them in the previous method mentioned above.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A typical and simple excel sheet time tracker would look like this:<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><b>Timesheet calculator<\/b><\/span><\/h4>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There are many timesheet calculators freely available on the web. These simple to use calculators come with embedded features specially designed to give you the total logged hours of your employees.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">All you need to do is to just install them on every employee&#8217;s computers as well as your own and they will give you specific data for everyone on your installed version. There is no need to calculate the total time logged in as it will be done based on the data entered by the employees.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">However, just the fact that they are also dependent on manually entering the data by the employees, it is still liable to mistakes and is not completely fool-proof.<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><b>Automated employee time tracking software<\/b><\/span><\/h4>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.empmonitor.com\/pricing\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-8484 size-full aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/task-tracking-software-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"750\" height=\"465\" srcset=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/task-tracking-software-1.png 750w, https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/task-tracking-software-1-300x186.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The last option is the one-stop solution for all the issues related to <span style=\"color: #008080;\"><a style=\"color: #008080;\" href=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/advantages-employee-time-tracking-software\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em><strong>time tracking<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/span>. While there are many time tracking software available on the web, there is no software as simple, easy and comprehensive as<span style=\"color: #008080;\"> <strong>EmpMonitor<\/strong> <\/span>designed to do this job with utmost accuracy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.empmonitor.com\/pricing\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-7159 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Check-How-My-Boss-Uses-Online-Employee-Time-Tracking-Tool-While-I-Work-4-1.png\" alt=\"My-Boss-Uses-Online-Employee-Time-Tracking-Tool-While-I-Work\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" srcset=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Check-How-My-Boss-Uses-Online-Employee-Time-Tracking-Tool-While-I-Work-4-1.png 1024w, https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Check-How-My-Boss-Uses-Online-Employee-Time-Tracking-Tool-While-I-Work-4-1-300x169.png 300w, https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Check-How-My-Boss-Uses-Online-Employee-Time-Tracking-Tool-While-I-Work-4-1-768x432.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The biggest benefit of using EmpMonitor is that it is a fully automated software designed to track total time logged in by your employees based on actual hours they spend on their computer.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Let\u2019s look into few of its basic features:<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><strong>Automatic calculation of login hours:<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The software would let you know the exact logged in hours based on fully automated features where there\u2019s no need for the employees to enter login and log-out hours manually. It automatically detects the employees activity on their computers and keeps calculating the total login hours based on that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At the end of each time interval it will show you the total time your employee was online in the form of numbers as well as impressive charts and graphs.<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><strong>Specially designed for distributed network:<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Unlike the previous methods mentioned in this blog, it is specially designed to track hours of employees who are working remotely as well. All you need to do is install this software in your employees\u2019 pc and it will be running in the background calculating all the necessary data for you to have a look upon at a later point of time.<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><strong>Group your employees:<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You can assign your employees to different groups based on their locations or departments and it will show you the productive hours for the whole group as well. So, through <span style=\"color: #008080;\"><strong>EmpMonitor<\/strong><\/span> you can literally leverage the time tracking mechanism to another level where you can know the total man hours being logged in right from employees to the whole departments or different locations where your team is situated.<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><strong>Time spent on each app:<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You can not only know how much time is being spend by your employees on their\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Computer but EmpMonitor can dig in much further than that. It can accurately calculate how much time is being spent on each app which will give you a more realistic picture of employees\u2019 productivity.<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><strong>Cloud based working:<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You don\u2019t have to depend on the local network to track your employees any more like the options I mentioned above. Since EmpMonitor is cloud based, you can track your employees\u2019 productivity from anywhere which means in the cases even when they are working from home.<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><strong>Stealth mode:<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you don\u2019t want your employees to know about this software running in their pc then you can also run it on stealth mode. It will be running in the background and your employees would not have a slightest hint of it. It doesn\u2019t appear on the running program list as well as they cannot even stop it from running on their pc.<\/span><\/p>\n<h4 style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><b>Conclusion<\/b><\/span><\/h4>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Adding time through excel sheet, timesheet or timesheet calculator might be the cheapest options available but they can only help you attain your objective up to a certain extent. They require a lot of paperwork, manual work, storage related concerns to be dealt with and even with those you can not completely rely on the data you are getting from those.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Instead, using an <\/span><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #008080;\" href=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/employee-tracking-software-features\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>employee tracking<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"color: #008080;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #008080;\" href=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.in\/blog\/employee-tracking-software-features\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em> software<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/span> like EmpMonitor gives you a special boost on this activity and because everything is automated, you can completely rely on the data that are being presented to you. Many employers are preferring to shift to automated tools for most of their tasks and EmpMonitor has gained enough fame in its niche specially for the purpose about which this blog has been written.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So don\u2019t wait to join the bandwagon for automating your time tracking system in your organization and get a free trial of EmpMonitor today to get acquainted with many more features of it by yourself.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.empmonitor.com\/pricing\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-2446 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/Empmonitor-01-1.png\" alt=\"employee-tracking \" width=\"2917\" height=\"1667\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When it comes to running a successful business, employee tracking of time is one of the crucial aspects that cannot be ignored. There are many reasons for tracking the employee hours be it for: Calculation of payroll\u00a0 Labor regulation compliance Calculating total man-hours spent on a project Handling HR related work Many companies have adopted [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":2069,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[161],"tags":[34,35,331,332,333],"class_list":["post-2068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-productivity","tag-employee-tracking","tag-employee-tracking-software","tag-employees-hours-tracking","tag-how-to-keep-track-of-employee-hours","tag-time-tracking","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2068"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16327,"href":"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2068\/revisions\/16327"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empmonitor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}