From Dust Collector to Punch Clock

Thomas J. Overberg, O.D.

The idea of going paperless can be overwhelming. The time involved, the planning, the attention to details and the initial cost can be more than what most of us want to face up to. However, we’ve found this quick and easy method that improved our productivity and lowered our payroll costs, all by using a computer.

Vickie, my wife, helped me tremendously while I was developing my paperless office. She would set up meetings with different vendors and make phone calls to help find software that would work with our ideas. One day while doing payroll, she came up with a wonderful suggestion.

She became tired of trying to read the hand-written notes staff members would attach every week to their sign-in and sign-out sheets. Notes about vacation and personal days. Notes about needing to leave for a few hours for this and that personal crisis. She was wasting a lot of time adding up their actual work hours. No professional well-run organization should have to bother with these time consuming trivial tasks.

We took an old 486-SX computer that was collecting dust in our basement, then set off on a search of the Internet for electronic time clocks. I did my search on http://www.yahoo.com  for "timeclock." You can do similar searches for free programs on http://www.download.com or  http://www.shareware.com. Most sites will allow you to download a trial version for testing before you purchase. We downloaded quite a few before making our decision. We found ours, loaded it onto that old dust collector, and it went to work documenting when our staff came and went. No more illegible notes on scraps of paper, Post-it notes and napkins.

This program also automatically calculates each employee’s payroll to the minute. It also documents vacation and personal sick days, and the information is easy to retrieve—and, of course, difficult to dispute.

This impacted our bottom line in two ways: significantly and immediately. Some employees arrived punctually every day and left as scheduled. Many, however, constantly showed up late for work and took long lunches. The scrap-paper-and-napkin timesheet method showed that everyone arrived at the office at 8 a.m., took exactly one hour for lunch and left around 5:30 p.m.

My former dust-collector, however, revealed a surprisingly different story. Many actually arrived around 8:08 a.m., took an extra 12 minutes for lunch and left around 5:20 p.m. And, mind you, they were getting paid the same as those who worked the full day—unfair to those employees to say the least!

This may seem trivial at first glance, but we were paying our employees on the 8:08-5:20 shift for an extra 30 minutes a day that they were not working. If you pay $8 an hour, you’ve lost $4 in one day—on one employee. Over a five-day workweek, that’s $20. Multiplied by 50 weeks and you’ve given this person $1,000 over the year to do nothing for your practice. And, this is for only one single employee who can not show up on time. How many of your employees work a shift like this? You could buy yourself—or one of your conscientious employees—a new car with the savings.

We’re only scratching the surface of the equation, too. Factor in your share of payroll taxes, retirement plan benefits and morale, and the problems of tardiness explode.

Our cost for the electronic time clock: about $49. It has made the staffers who do arrive on time and work a full day much happier. They no longer feel like they’re taken advantage of. It has helped some latecomers improved their punctuality. And for those who continue to run late—well, let’s just say I’m not losing a new car over them anymore. They now know what their tardiness costs in each paycheck.

It also helps each staff member realize how his or her personal actions impact the productivity of the entire practice. Morale in our office has improved and everyone understands his or her personal accountability. This was one of my last steps to going paperless. No matter how paperless you want to be, try this small change. You will see more of your employees and fewer scraps of paper.

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