The time card calculator plays a huge role in computing the total work hours of employees and recording their start and end time. In fact, employers can use the weekly data report generated from the time card calculator to process their payrolls. Read this blog below to learn about the time card calculator and its significance in detail.

What Is Time Card Calculator?

A time card calculator is a tool that calculates the exact working hours of employees during a specific period considering their clock in / clock out and overall breaks time. In other words, you can input the start and end times of employees’ working hours for each day to calculate their total productive working hours for a stipulated period. It also gives insight into overtime hours an employee worked. 

An online time card calculator is primarily used to calculate the exact compensation for employees based on their number of working hours in a week or month. 

To use the time card calculator, you need to input the start time, break time, and end time for each day for a particular time period(week/month), along with the hourly pay rate. Some of the time card calculators also allow multiple aggregate breaks per day and auto-deduct breaks from total worked hours. Then, the timecard calculator generates the total working hours of employees and the corresponding compensation for that specific period. Besides, the time card calculator also generates printable reports that show the detail of time and wage calculations. 

In addition, if you integrate an automatic time tracker with an online time card calculator, then it can automatically calculate exact employees’ productive working hours, eliminating any chances of timesheet fraud or over/underpaying.

So, whether you want to find the exact working hours of employees, ascertain the overworking hours, or calculate their wages for a certain period on an hourly basis, the time card calculator fits the bill. 

Further, the time card calculators mostly comply with local labor laws. Hence, the wages are calculated according to the applicable local compliance rules.

Reasons You Need a Time Card Calculator

• Saves Admin Time

One of the taxing tasks for admin or HR dept. is to collect the accurate working hours of employees and process them for payroll. It takes a good deal of time to process the time data and then calculate the wage for every employee after deducting break hours, holidays, etc. The time card calculator does the math for you by taking employees’ work hours and hourly pay rates and using it to calculate payroll while considering all factors like overtime, breaks, and holidays.

This way, the time card calculator frees up the admin’s time that can be engaged in different productive activities. Besides, a time card calculator in integration with automatic timesheets weeds out the chances of any human errors, and timecard tempering, as it automatically collects the time data of employees and calculates the remuneration.

• Eliminate the Chances of Errors

When you have to calculate the accurate employee hours for payroll processing while considering all the factors like overtime, breaks, and holidays, then chances are there you will end up making accounting errors or miscalculations like misplacing the decimal. Wrong compensation calculations may result in employee disputes, incorrect paychecks, and even lawsuits. Therefore, the timecard calculator works as a one-size-fits-all solution, as it saves you from landing in hot water by ensuring that employees get paid appropriately to which they are entitled. 

• Accurate Billing for Clients

Submitting the bill to the client calls for an accurate estimate of the working hours you spent on that project. The Timecard calculator helps decipher how many hours were spent on different tasks of the project. The calculated bill generated from the time card calculator reflects the actual hours spent on the project without relying on any guesswork. You just have to enter the start and end times each day for the consecutive project time period, and the time card calculator will provide the exact invoice for the client. 

• Calculates Overtime Work of Employees

Employers might need to know the overtime hours of the employees. They can find it using the time card calculator. You can set the condition for overtime, like above 8 hours per day, or more than 40 hours per week, along with the overtime pay rate for payroll. The calculator will automatically calculate the overtime worked hours as well as the overall gross pay. Also, since everyone is using the same calculator, it eliminates ambiguity, and therefore employee disputes like whether someone worked more or fewer hours than others.

• Ensures Projects Are Profitable

In any organization, business leaders need to ensure that the project they are working on is profitable. The time card calculator enables them to track their time and cost for each project and further break it down per task basis. With the help of this data, business owners can make prudent decisions like which projects are more profitable and which ones can be dropped to improve the organization’s overall competency and balance sheet.

• Helpful in Improving Efficiency

Recording and calculating the time spent on different tasks of the project using a timecard calculator can help employees improve their efficiency. Time card enables you to discern the tasks of the projects that are taking too much time. Then, you can find an alternative solution for them to improve productivity and efficiency. For example, if an employee usually works for 40 hours per week but is logging in for 60 hours over the past few weeks, the manager can assess if there is any bottleneck and understand why this fragment of the project is taking more time than other ones. 

• Minimizes the Risk of Compliance

Different countries have unique labor laws requiring the wage to be calculated according to their local compliance rules. Most time card calculators comply with the local laws and therefore calculate the wage, overtime pay, etc, while clinging to these laws. Therefore, the time card calculator reduces the risk of compliance as well as liability with federal labor laws.

• Discourage Time Theft

When you deploy an automated time and attendance system in integration with a time card calculator, you can prevent time theft in your organization and save a tremendous amount of money that could have been wasted due to false timesheet payrolling.

How to Use Time Card Calculator

There are many time card calculators available online which can be used to calculate exact employee time and also the wages according to the time worked. You can enter the clock-in and clock-out times for each working day along with the break time. You can set the wage rate per hour and the time period for which you want to calculate the wage. This way, the time card calculator will calculate the grand total working hours and gross pay for that stipulated period. 

You can also calculate the overtime hours by setting the overtime conditions and calculating the pay by selecting the corresponding overtime pay rate. This way, you can calculate the wage and working hours of every employee of the organization and create and print individual reports of these calculations.

The post Top 8 Reasons You Need a Time Card Calculator appeared first on ReadWrite.

The rise of technology-based business models is disrupting market dynamics, intensifying competition, and transforming the landscape of the professional services industry. Professional services firms must incorporate technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to enhance agility and streamline workflows.

Adopting technology can help businesses effectively manage resources — accurately bid on projects, and upgrade their processes to stay relevant and become future-ready.

The recent Global AI Adoption Index 2022 survey revealed that 35% of companies reported using AI in their business, and an additional 42% reported that they were exploring AI technologies.

Professional services organizations that implement AI can easily analyze real-time data across multiple functionalities to identify market gaps, forecast project estimates, automate back-end processes and thereby gain a competitive advantage.

This article will help professional services organizations understand how AI can boost their competitiveness and help them tackle industry challenges.

Key Challenges Faced by Professional Services Organizations and Where AI Can Help

Professional services organizations face various unique challenges, like managing increasingly complex projects. And identifying and addressing revenue leakage. Also, many professional services organizations use siloed legacy systems.  These disconnected systems result in fragmented information, incomplete status reports, overbilling customers, inefficient use of resources, and uncertainty about project costs and profitability.

AI-powered professional services automation (PSA) solutions can help organizations gain real-time visibility and insights into critical metrics like work-in-progress, backlog data, utilization, and margins, without any manual intervention. AI-based PSA platforms also enable effective resource utilization across locations and projects by identifying gaps that may cause a resource crunch or project delays.

AI technologies can help professional services organizations:

• Improve employee utilization rates
• Avoid scope creep and revenue leakage
• Retain top talent
• Create more profitable projects and improve margins
• Improve customer satisfaction and retention

What Is AI?

AI is the simulation of human intelligence processes that allows machines to perceive environments, comprehend ideas, learn from experience, solve complex problems, adjust to new input, and augment human capabilities.

Three things differentiate AI from everyday software:

• AI can calculate and learn from data accurately
• AI can perform tasks intelligently without explicit instructions
• AI can reason and act humanely

By combining these abilities, artificial intelligence provides greater accuracy than other types of software and can accomplish tasks that would otherwise require humans.

Impact of AI on the Professional Services Industry

Artificial Intelligence is changing the way the professional services industry interprets insights, optimizes operations, and future-proofs their enterprises. Professional services firms can utilize AI-based technologies to aggregate data, predict customer analytics, and make automated business decisions while reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks.

AI also allows organizations to focus on areas that require critical thinking skills and can help create a value-based system.

Professional services organizations that fail to leverage AI will be hamstrung by manual processes and will likely experience volatility.

How AI Can Help Professional Services Organizations

Artificial Intelligence can drastically increase business efficiency by automating repetitive tasks, accurately projecting budgets, and offering an additional layer of security. Plus, incorporating AI into daily business processes helps professional services firms expedite projects.

Organizations that understand the potential of AI technologies and incorporate them into their business can improve operations in the ways outlined below.

Improve Resource Utilization

Improving resource utilization can directly impact the growth of a professional services company. In the post-pandemic workplace ecosystem, a business’ resources are often spread around the globe — making it difficult for the company to monitor and effectively manage them.

The resulting lack of oversight causes projects to underperform, sometimes with serious consequences, such as revenue loss, quality issues, and client dissatisfaction.

By incorporating AI, professional services organizations can ensure that resources maximize their billable time across projects. AI-powered software such as Polaris PSA can help PSOs easily determine whether their resources are available to take on new projects or if they need to hire more resources to meet demand.

Retain Top Talent

In today’s world, it is increasingly difficult to retain top talent. Lack of career growth opportunities, poor work-life balance, and low compensation are the most common reasons why workers resign. High attrition can lead to massive organizational costs while adversely impacting productivity and revenue. All companies need to focus on retaining talent. Many businesses will need a PSO (professional service organization firm).

AI-powered systems can aid in talent retention in several ways. They can:

• Enhance the employee experience by automating mundane tasks that may lead to burnout or poor performance
• Analyze which employees are most likely to leave and suggest potential resolutions
• Combine flexible scheduling with strategic workforce planning to promote better employee work/life balance
• Recognize when employees are facing difficulties or spending most of their time on one task, so the company can find effective ways to resolve the employee’s concerns

Avoid Scope Creep

Project scope creeps undoubtedly poses one of the greatest challenges for professional services firms. Lack of planning, poorly defined requirements, and inefficient monitoring can lead to project scope creep. This results in cost overruns and timeline delays, as well as a decrease in customer satisfaction, which can derail a project.

To tackle scope creep effectively, it is important to keep track of metrics such as hours worked, project status, and completion date. An effective AI system provides PSOs with an in-depth view of their projects and helps them track those metrics in real-time. This data allows firms to take action and improve forecasting before scope creep becomes a problem.

AI-powered solutions allow professional services firms to create clear project schedules, predict milestones, accurately project deliverables, forecast project efficiencies, and mitigate scope creep risk. All these parameters help improve and optimize the project, benefitting the professional services organization in the long run.

Optimize Efficiency and Margins

Professional services firms often struggle to gain visibility into their day-to-day processes. Spreadsheets, paper trails, manual entries, and other siloed processes can no longer track productivity, revenue, and other critical business metrics accurately. In addition, with increasing project complexity, PSOs often struggle to manage projects, time, resources and costs efficiently. To overcome these issues, professional service firms need actionable data.

With AI-based solutions, PSOs can unite all project data, productivity metrics, and billing information, then analyze this data to find solutions that optimize workflow efficiency and increase margin. Investing in an AI solution that is configurable, scalable, and flexible can help a professional services organization stay on top of its game and improve its overall operations.

Conclusion

Professional services organizations need the right people, projects, processes, and skills to improve their operations and optimize productivity. Implementing AI helps professional services organizations improve resource utilization, retain top resources, optimize productivity and increase overall efficiency while allowing them to stay on the right track.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Karolina Grabowska; Pexels; Thank you!

The post How AI Overcomes the Professional Services Industry’s Challenges appeared first on ReadWrite.

Managing a workforce has never been easy. Unfortunately, it has only become much more complicated in the last couple of years with the rise of hybrid digital work models and the gig economy. Compounding these challenges is the increasing employee turnover as more and more people continue to leave their jobs in search of higher wages, benefits, and flexibility.

To solve these challenges and enable more intelligent management of their workforce, organizations today are looking at artificial intelligence (AI). It is because the benefits that AI can bring to a modern organization are considerable, making it worth the investment. In fact, with recent advances in AI technology, AI is now not only reducing manual effort but also actively engaging the modern workforce.

The Role of AI in Managing Modern Workforce

Over the past couple of years, organizations across the globe have realized the growing digital needs of running a business. Modern workers are no longer content with the status quo. They are increasingly in favor of accelerated digital transformation initiatives that enable them to work remotely and enhance and empower better employee experiences.

The 2022 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey also revealed that 48% of CIOs have already deployed artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) solutions or are planning to do so during the upcoming twelve months.

Artificial intelligence plays a pivotal role in ensuring these outcomes. And one of the critical advantages of incorporating AI into workforce management tools is that it helps automate a wide range of tasks and activities like scheduling, budgeting, compliance, payroll, employee development, and more.

AI also allows organizations to leverage employee data for various purposes, from analytics to reporting to predicting future needs. A fascinating example is using AI to match your current employees’ skills with potential projects in the pipeline.

AI plays a significant role in keeping employees engaged at work, especially when they are working remotely. Organizations can also leverage AI-powered data analytics to create customized hiring and training plans, deliver performance feedback in real time, and support other workforce management processes.

Here are some of how AI is helping organizations overcome modern workforce management challenges.

1. Accurately Determining Resource Requirements

In any organization, managers and leaders rarely have the time to focus on creating accurate employee schedules, leading to several challenges. This results in over and under-allocation of tasks and activities, leading to issues like burnout, wasted work hours, or delays in completing tasks, all of which could have been easily avoided with accurate scheduling.

Overcoming these challenges requires strategic scheduling that considers the labor demands for each task or activity. It is also essential to evaluate the effect of unplanned time off on the schedule. This becomes easier with a workforce management solution that leverages artificial intelligence.

These solutions can accurately analyze existing resource demands while accounting for future requirements to create truly flexible schedules. As a result, managers can create schedules that improve the allocation and utilization of resources, allowing employees to get work done faster while reducing stress.

2. Improving Skill Utilization

Employees usually have a variety of skills. To make the most of their employees’ talent, managers must ensure optimal utilization of their skills. However, traditional resource management methods are often unable to properly leverage the skills and time of employees to get work done.

Here, AI-powered predictive analytics solutions can allow managers to determine the most efficient allocation of resources across tasks and activities based on skill demands and time requirements. When combined with a professional services automation tool, managers can easily avoid situations like miscalculating resource requirements based on hunches and gut decisions.

3. Optimizing Resourcing Costs

For any organization, it is vital to keep costs to a minimum to maximize the profitability of any project. Unfortunately, resources and time are two of the most significant cost components of any project. Therefore, managers must strike a fine balance between having resources available for a project and the timelines needed for completing it. This requires a thorough understanding of contracts, skills, availability, and other factors.

An AI-enabled professional services automation solution makes it easier to match resources with demand while meeting all requisite cost and time criteria. As a result, managers can quickly assign the right resources with the appropriate costs to projects to get the work done on time and within budget. This ensures timely deliveries and enables the organization to save money on time and effort that would have otherwise been wasted.

4. Improving Workforce Productivity

Workforce productivity is a crucial metric for any organization as it is directly linked to project delivery and revenue. As such, organizations must do what is necessary to improve the overall productivity levels of their workforce. Employees with more flexibility in their schedules and are assigned work per their preferences tend to be more productive.

AI-powered workforce management solutions can play a pivotal role in improving productivity. These solutions can prevent sudden schedule changes and account for skills and qualifications when allocating resources to tasks. All of these capabilities positively affect employee morale and productivity levels, benefiting the organization in the long run.

5. Lowering Employee Turnover

Organizations can combine flexible scheduling with strategic workforce planning by using AI-based workforce management solutions. This allows employees to work as efficiently as possible and, that too, as per their preferences. For example, managers can ensure their employees get to work shifts they would like, make sure that each employee gets enough time off, and so on.

Therefore, employees gain the ability to swap shifts or take time off as needed without impacting an e organization’s ability to deliver on its projects. In addition, optimizing work schedules with artificial intelligence offers higher flexibility, allowing employees to be more engaged and satisfied with their jobs. As a result, they are less likely to quit an organization searching for new jobs, leading to lower turnover numbers.

6. Conducting Fair Performance Evaluations

Artificial intelligence can be of immense use in various aspects of workforce management beyond mere employee scheduling. As these solutions are powerful enough to analyze vast amounts of data, they can be pretty helpful in performance evaluations. These solutions provide accurate insights into employee performance, enabling managers to assess their workforce fairly.

As you may be aware, bias is one of the biggest concerns with employee performance assessments, making AI-based solutions the better choice. A key advantage of using AI in performance evaluation is that these solutions can reduce subjectivity and eliminate bias. AI-powered solutions leverage real and complete data to generate insights into performance. In addition, since AI governs the entire process, the review process is completely transparent and objective, leaving no room for personal biases of managers and supervisors.

Fair evaluations are important. Employees want their evaluations to be based purely on their work. When their efforts are objectively reviewed, employee morale improves significantly, leading to higher engagement and satisfaction levels. Managers also benefit from fair evaluations, giving them a clearer picture of employee behavior and motivations.

7. Streamlining Payroll Processing

Payroll is an enormously complicated process. It is not just about ensuring timesheets are filled and submitted on time. Several calculations are involved, and the accuracy of these calculations is of the utmost importance. Any error in payroll calculations can lead to unhappy employees and even put an organization at risk of costly litigation.

With artificial intelligence, organizations can automate payroll calculations and ensure they are completely accurate. These solutions can use time data and pay rates to deliver the correct pay data to the payroll team quickly. Moreover, payroll processing can be done much faster by eliminating manual effort, leading to on-time pay for your employees.

8. Ensuring Payroll Compliance

Payroll compliance is absolutely essential for any organization. Failure to comply with all applicable laws and regulations can result in an organization being held liable for hefty penalties and litigation. At the same time, it creates a poor impression of an organization among its employees and clients, which can hurt its business.

However, payroll laws can be challenging to navigate for an organization that is not prepared. There are laws at both the state and federal level — and it is the responsibility of an organization to determine which of those laws apply to their specific business.

Artificial intelligence can do the heavy lifting on behalf of an organization. AI-powered solutions can easily apply these laws during payroll calculations and ensure the necessary tax rates and other items are taken into account. This makes payroll compliance vastly easier.

9. Streamlining Hiring Processes

The hiring process is one of the most significant areas of workforce management that can be improved by implementing AI-powered solutions. It has been well established that hiring for any position requires considerable effort and time. With AI-based solutions, recruiters can quickly reduce the time and effort required to find suitable candidates.

These solutions are designed to quickly sort through multiple resumes and identify the most suitable candidates based on established criteria such as location, skills, and experience. Advanced AI-powered technologies, such as natural language processing, help increase accuracy. This results in fewer blunders during the hiring process, which is one less worry for the HR team.

As per the IBM Global AI Adoption Index 2022, 35% of surveyed companies stated that they are already leveraging artificial intelligence in their business. Additionally, 42% of companies are currently exploring AI to adopt it within their businesses. The same report mentioned that 30% of global professionals already use AI-based automation tools to save time.

Conclusion

All of these statistics underline the increasing importance of AI-powered tools in modern workforce management. Using AI to drive strategic management of your employees can increase overall efficiency while enabling organizations to stay on the right track.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Kampus Production; Pexels; Thank you!

The post How AI Can Help Overcome Workforce Management Challenges appeared first on ReadWrite.