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The Top 10 Best-Kept Secrets of Time and Attendance Systems

Want to get in on a few secrets? 

Most people know the basic premise of time and attendance software systems: electronically capturing employee time, clocking in and out, reporting on employee time.

But we wanted to go further and find those “hidden nuggets” — little-known features that can bring a lot of value to school districts! So we pulled some statistics from our time and attendance management tools (formerly VeriTime) in Frontline Absence & Time, to see how districts are using the tools available.

The following is our list of the Top 10 little-known features that offer the biggest opportunity for increasing accuracy and efficiency in your time-keeping.

1. Integration With Payroll

Many districts, even those using an electronic time and attendance system, are still wasting effort on manual processes, especially re-entering employee time into their payroll system.

The good news is that many time and attendance systems offer the ability to integrate with your payroll system. For example, the Report Writer tool in Frontline Absence & Time allows you to export your attendance data in a format you can easily import into payroll. Most companies offer a variety of custom options, as well, that help you automate even more of the process.

Also underused, the Payroll Review report and other payroll checkpoints help you verify your data and reduce mistakes in payroll.

2. Digital Authorization  

Most districts with time and attendance systems are using a basic approval process to reduce paper and improve accountability. But many are not using additional digital options that would maximize these benefits.

Some systems allow districts to require digital supervisory approval and signature — meaning supervisors must electronically approve or even sign electronic timesheets before they can move to the payroll departments. A robust, K-12 focused system will also offer many options to control visibility and set multiple levels of approval.

Some systems also provide the option to require digital confirmation or signatures from employees. This feature improves accountability from employees as they are reporting their time.

3. One-Click Kiosk  

Without this feature, employees who work multiple jobs would have to go through a several-step process every time they clock in and out for various jobs throughout the day.

With a “one-click kiosk mode,” time and attendance systems allow employees to clock in once at the start of the day and once at the end — and the system automatically fills in the day’s events based on the employee’s expected schedule. This feature is an especially big benefit for employees who consistently work two or more positions per day that are charged to different account codes.

One-Click Kiosk

4. Rounding Rules  

Using paper methods to accurately capture and pay for time actually worked is extremely difficult — and one of the reasons why many districts turn to an electronic time and attendance system.

However, even with a time and attendance system, district could be overpaying employees by not using proper rounding rules. Our data found that most districts have a rule to round time to the nearest 15 minutes, but this can result in districts paying for time that was not actually worked. For example, an employee may clock in before he or she is supposed to, have some coffee, and then begin work — and get overpaid as a result.

By using more specific rules, districts can accurately pay only for time actually worked. You can use rounding rules to do things like:

— Set different rounding rules for clocking in early or late
— Set different rounding rules for shift start or shift end
— Round time to the employee’s scheduled time  

5. Comp Time & Leave Balances

Tracking comp time and leave balances is another very important (but sometimes overlooked) feature of time and attendance systems for K-12.

Whenever an employee accrues comp time, districts need to track that time and if it is accrued or paid as overtime. Districts also need to track absences taken against comp time and the remaining balance.

All of this can be managed electronically with a good time and attendance system. In addition, a system that integrates with your absence management system provides additional value by matching employee absences in one system to comp time balances in the other.

6. Affordable Care Act Reporting

By now, you’ve probably heard that the Affordable Care Act will require most districts to track and report on employee hours. Any employees working an average of 30 or more hours a week (or 130+ hours a month) could be eligible for benefits.

Thankfully, some time and attendance systems now offer special reports built specifically for this need in K-12. For example, the report below from Frontline Absence & Time allows districts to view employees’ average hours worked over any period of time (you can choose your own 3-12 month look-back period). It will even merge (for the report) employees who are working multiple jobs, in order to view their cumulative hours across the district.

You can toggle between both the 30 hour/week limit and the 130/month limit, and the report will show you employees who are under, over or near the threshold. Additionally, you can search for a date range in the future and review if employees’ scheduled hours will push them over the threshold.

Affordable Care Act Reporting

7. Wage Options  

It’s not easy to keep track of everyone’s specific pay rates. But a good time and attendance system, built for district needs, will allow you to keep all these “ducks in a row.”

A wage options feature will allow you to assign an employee or a group of employees to a specific pay rate based on job type, pay range and seniority step. This rate could be hourly, monthly or a fixed stipend.

8. Kiosk IP Blocking

Did you know that some time and attendance systems allow you to actually block users from clocking in from the wrong location?

This lesser-known feature identifies the employee’s IP address (the location of their Internet connection) and can actually prevent employees from clocking in from home, for example, when they are supposed to be reporting to another location.

9. Clock Exceptions

Do you know when your employees are clocking in early, late or not at all?

Our data shows more districts could be using the Clock Exceptions report to view anything outside the norm of the scheduled hours, whether it’s early/late clock-ins or a missed time punch. Plus, you can sort and filter by date range, location, job type and more.

Clock Exceptions

10. Email Notifications  

It’s hard to remember all the tasks you need to address regarding time and attendance. What some administrators don’t know is that many time and attendance systems can send both administrators and employees helpful email notifications and reminders.

For example, administrators may want to be notified when timesheets are submitted, when they are not submitted, or when they need to be approved. Employees may want to be notified when their timesheets are past due, have been approved or have been rejected.

Is There a Substitute Teacher Shortage Crisis?

Across the country, districts nationwide have noticed an issue this school year in recent school years: a substitute teacher shortage.

Theories circulate about why fill rates and sub shortages are a bigger issue in recent years:

  • Districts limiting substitute hours for because of the Affordable Care Act
  • An improving economy and more competitive job market
  • Increased teacher absenteeism
  • Effects of the pandemic on applications to schools

But what’s the real reason? 

We dug into data from Frontline Absence & Time and other sources. While we found that there is indeed a substitute teacher shortage, we looked into what’s really causing it — and what’s not — to find real answers and solutions for school districts.

What’s Not Causing the Substitute Teacher Shortage

1. Districts Limiting Substitute Hours because of the Affordable Care Act

Many districts are concerned about the Affordable Care Act — and the potential that substitute teachers, who’ve never previously qualified for benefits, could become eligible under the new law. Out of concern for the financial impact this could have, some districts have already taken the precaution to limit the number of hours substitutes can work. The most common is limiting substitutes to no more than 30 hours per week.

Not long after, the media, districts and teachers alike began to wonder if fill rates for teacher absences would take a hit from this precaution. Surprisingly, the data from Frontline Absence & Time shows that, on average, districts limiting substitute hours per week have identical fill rates to those not limiting hours.

Most likely, districts generally in reality have very few substitutes who routinely work more than 30 hours a week. Of course, the full impact of the law has yet to be seen and the number above is based on an average. Districts should monitor their own data carefully and make informed decisions about whether or not to limit hours for substitutes.

2. There Are Too Many “Inactive” Substitutes

Another theory is that districts with a higher percentage of inactive substitutes in their sub pool experience lower fill rates. It turns out that, at least for districts using a web-based sub-calling system, this is not a major factor.

Our data shows that even districts with a large percentage of inactive subs (those working less than 1 time per month) have similar fill rates to those with a lower percentage of inactive subs. Most likely, this result is because the vast majority of absences are filled by proactive substitutes accepting jobs online or the district assigning a specific sub.

Also, Importantly, this result may be vastly different in a district manually calling substitutes, where the sub-caller is wasting time every time he or she contacts a substitute who doesn’t want to work.

Either way, best practices do still recommend taking the time at least annually to remove substitutes from the list who no longer intend to work. The effect on fill rates varies for each district, and a cleaner pool of active subs will allow you to accurately report on your sub to teacher ratio and other fill rate-related data.

What Is Contributing to a Substitute Teacher Shortage 

1. Economic Improvement and a Lower Unemployment Rate

While a lower unemployment rate is good news for the nation, this improvement has had some impact on the number of substitutes available for school districts. As the economy improves, more potential substitutes — including new college graduates — are taking full-time teaching jobs or working in other fields.

Our data, as well as data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, show that as the unemployment rate is steadily decreases, the substitute-to-teacher ratio also decreases.

Since 2011, the unemployment rate has gone down from 8.4% to the current 7.2%. Consequently, the sub-to-teacher ratio has decreased from 1 sub for every 3.22 teachers in 2011 to 1 sub for every 5.98 teachers so far this school year.

The substitute to teacher ratio has a direct impact on fill rates. Data shows that the average fill rates stay at 90% when districts have a 1:3 ratio, but fill rates slip to an 89% average when the sub to teacher ratio approaches 1:6.

2. Increased Teacher Absenteeism

While also not a new issue, districts should not overlook the effect of increased teacher absenteeism on the shortage of substitute teachers. Teacher absenteeism rates have definitely increased — often due to increased professional development at the district. If you’re looking ahead to next year’s professional development (PD) programming, consider planning it with teachers’ time out of the classroom in mind. Additionally, with the pandemic changing perceptions around staying home when feeling under-the-weather, teachers may be calling out at higher than pre-pandemic rates. In some cases, absenteeism is also up due to teachers using up days that they will otherwise lose.

What Your District Can Do About Substitute Teacher Shortage

1. Understand Your District’s Data

The #1 thing districts should do is collect and analyze their own data to drive decisions. Districts can be looking at information like:

  • Substitute pool: What is your districts ratio of total substitute to teachers?
  • Fill rates: What are your best and worst fill rates when you consider school location and skills required?
  • Teacher absenteeism: What are your highest absentee days per week? What role is PD playing?

Austin ISD is a perfect example — they used the real-time dashboard and reporting tool in Frontline Absence & Time to determine that they needed to double the size of their substitute pool. The online tools and resulting changes they made allowed them to hit 100% fill rates.

2. Improve the Substitute Hiring Process

For some districts, recruiting and hiring substitutes requires a huge amount of time and effort. One big potential for improvement is to integrate your absence and substitute management system with payroll.

Before they integrated their systems, the personnel at Garland ISD were spending three days every six weeks hand-keying information for new substitutes into payroll and their substitute management system. The Substitute Office Manager said substitutes often had to wait a week or more before they could start working as the office entered all their information.

Now that they integrated their systems, substitutes can begin work immediately after orientation — and the office saved hours of manual entry.

3. Make Substitute Teaching More Attractive

Many districts are increasing substitute pay to attract more substitutes and compete for the best substitutes. Some districts are increasing pay only for harder-to-fill positions, like special education. If this is not an option, oOther districts are offering incentives, such as free or discounted tickets to school events or even discounts in partnership with local businesses.

Keep communication with substitutes frequent and positive. You can use tools like the Letter Writer in Frontline Absence & Time to communicate more frequently with all of your substitutes, whether it’s providing reminders and tips or asking for feedback.

4. Manage District-Wide Absenteeism

Last but not least, see what measure you can take to reduce the time teachers are out of the classroom, especially for professional development.

Careful management of the district calendar — and coordination with building-level administration — can help avoid excessive absenteeism. Holland Public Schools in Michigan, for example, started moving their teacher training to specific in-service days and after-school sessions to minimize teacher absences.

“It’s about looking at the calendar and time differently,” the superintendent said. “I would much rather have our teachers in front of them than a guest teacher.”

Try these approaches to curb the substitute teacher shortage in your district, and see how Frontline Absence & Time can help.

Time and Attendance Quiz: What Is Your District Spending?

School’s back in full swing — and we’ve got a quick quiz for you!

Time and Attendance Quiz:

#1: What percent of your district budget is made up of labor costs? 
#2: What’s the average percent of errors made in payroll? 
#3: How much did the Department of Labor collect in FLSA backwages in 2023? 
#4: How much do districts spend on paper timesheets?

Answers:

#1: Labor costs make up 70-85% of the average school district’s budget
#2: The average organization overpays their employees by 1.2%
#3: The DOL collected $156 million in back wages in 2023 due to FLSA violations
#4: Multiply your number of employees x number of pay periods x $0.03

Now that you know the answers, think about your school district. Are you overpaying employees due to payroll errors? Are you in compliance with FLSA? Are you wasting time, paper and money tracking, approving and calculating time?

With labor costs making up the majority of your district budget, knowing the answers to these  questions — and ways to increase your savings — is crucial!

Here are a few of the ways districts are using automated time and attendance systems to cut labor costs!

Reduce Expensive Payroll Errors

To err is human, right? And according to the American Payroll Association, those errors in payroll translate into $120,000 worth of overpayment for every $10 million in wages. That adds up!

The good news? Electronic time-tracking systems eliminate much of the manual entry where mistakes can happen. From collecting and approving employee time, to calculating and processing payroll rules, electronic systems can eliminate up to 95% of payroll errors.

Owen Hurt, the Personnel Director at Sealy Independent School District, realized their previous time clock system, which was not Internet-based, allowed for significant human error.

“That was one of the biggest reasons for us to look for an Internet-based clocking in and out system,” Owen said. 

He said they were concerned about the impact of these errors if they were to be audited by the Department of Labor, so they moved to an online system that makes it easier to share data with payroll and their absence tracking system.

Eliminate Unnecessary Overtime Costs

One of the toughest challenges in managing your labor force is preventing unnecessary overtime. Without the ability to view schedules and track hours in real-time, districts often find out after the fact that employees went into overtime.

Jeremy Thompson, Superintendent at Era Independent School District, said tracking overtime was especially challenging because of the large number of employees serving in multiple positions across the district. They now use a time and attendance system that allows managers to check electronic timesheets throughout the week and monitor potential overtime situations.

“We now have that data in real time and can make those decisions during the week instead of finding out after the fact that they worked 42 or 43 hours last week,” Jeremy said. “It’s not always possible to eliminate the overtime, but we at least can make that decision now ahead of time, instead of after the fact.”

Improve Compliance With Labor Laws

As any district that’s been audited can tell you, keeping in compliance with state and federal labor laws is nothing to take lightly. However, tracking all the unique and complex laws associated with K-12 can be a real challenge, especially without a tracking system and automated calculation of payroll rules.

In the past decade, 178 school systems from 36 states were audited for FLSA compliance. Of those school systems, 56% were found to be out of compliance, amassing 1,619 overall violations totaling $1.3 million in back wages and penalties.

School districts are making sure they’re not caught off-guard by using a K-12 system that can track and apply specific rules based on your bargaining units, school district rules and state and federal regulations. Many systems can also help districts attach funding codes to employee time in order to track it against federal funds, such as Title I.

Save Hours of Personnel Time

Time is money, right? And a lot of time sure is spent on labor management at the school district. Patti Polensky, Human Resources Director at Odyssey Academy in Texas, used to manually process the district’s paper timesheets.

“At the end of the month or the pay period, I would have to go find the teachers who forgot to complete their timesheets, so it took a lot of running around on my part,” Patti said. “Once I got the timesheets, I had to look at 70 pieces of paper, scanning each one, so you’re talking a half a day just flipping pages one at a time, making sure that I got the data right. And then I had to physically type that information, one employee at a time, into a spreadsheet and then send that spreadsheet to our payroll department, and they had to manually input it into our payroll system. It was crazy!”

That does sound crazy! That’s why Odyssey Academy moved to an electronic system, where employees now clock in right at their desks, supervisors approve the time with just a few clicks and send the data off to payroll.

Eliminate Unnecessary Paperwork

If you’re trying to be more “green” at your district — and save time and money — take a look at your time-tracking process! Once you factor in all those timesheets for each employee each pay period, the amount of paperwork is astounding. Plus, you have to process and store the paperwork, probably in a big filing cabinet, which doesn’t make for easy tracking or reporting of the data.

Karen Mowbray, the Business Officer at Odyssey Academy, said tracking time and attendance manually was very paper-intensive.

“Sometimes the timesheets just ended up non-existent, so you had to have the employee recreate them or find them,” Karen said. “Now it’s all compiled into the computer, which makes it much easier for us.”

These are just a few of the ways districts are taking control of their labor budget and finding ways to improve efficiency and save time, even in the midst of budget cuts.

Explore how Frontline Time & Attendance can support compliance

5 Things Your Teachers Want You To Know

Can you believe it’s almost back to school time? As administrators work feverishly to get ready for another year, teachers are also gearing up for school — and in a recent survey, gave us some insight into challenges they expect in the 2013-2014 school year.

Do you know what challenges your teachers are facing — and how you can help? We asked nearly 500 teachers what they find most challenging about lesson planning and material preparation for the classroom, and here’s what we found out.

Not Enough Time

Not surprising, 55% of respondents said they struggle with time to prepare lessons and materials for their classrooms.

Overwhelmingly, teachers said they do not have enough time during the day to prepare for lessons and often work in the evening and on weekends to get ready.

Stumbling blocks to lesson planning during the day included:
• Meetings
• Paperwork
• Grading
• Parent Communication
• Data Assessment
• Student Behavioral Issues
• Interruptions

As one teacher put it, “With more demands from state and district assessments and increased testing (hence grading), there never seems to be enough time to focus on planning and preparation.”

Specifically, teachers said they would like more time for differentiating lessons for different learning levels, collaborating with their team, researching and finding relevant materials.

Questions to Think About:
  • Are any teachers getting “burnt out” with lack of adequate planning time?
  • Do our teachers have uninterrupted planning periods during the school day?
  • Are unnecessary meetings pulling our teachers from their lesson planning?
  • Are we giving teachers flexibility to develop plans that meet the needs of students?

Varied Student Needs

Districts are increasingly focusing on meeting the needs of students at many different levels, and accordingly, 33% of teachers mentioned addressing varied student needs as one of their greatest challenges.

This area is challenging due to the extra preparation time required and also the lack of resources addressing each learning level.

Here’s how one teacher explained it: “I teach classes that are learning the same material, but are at different ability levels and filled with students with various learning styles. Trying to create lessons that meet the standards while meeting each student where they are can be difficult, but doable!”

Questions to Think About:
  • Are our teachers trained to address students at various learning levels?
  • Do our teachers have resources to help them differentiate lessons?
  • Do our classroom sizes allow teachers to effectively instruct all students?

Lack of Resources

A third of respondents also cited lack of resources as one of the most challenging aspects of preparing lessons.

One teacher explained she has trouble “finding materials that help my students understand the concept being taught,” adding that her students are usually learning below grade level.

The most common frustrations revealed that relevant materials were unavailable, too hard to find or too expensive. Many teachers said they also struggle to find resources that are aligned to district and state standards.

Questions to Think About:
  • Are we providing our teachers with adequate teaching materials?
  • Are our current resources aligned to mandated standards? 
  • Can we curate or recommend resources to aid our teachers in lesson preparation? 

Aligning With Standards

Out of the teachers surveyed, 21% struggle to address the many requirements of the Common Core, as well as district and state standards.

Problems included:

  • Feeling the need to “teach to the test”
  • Textbooks, assessments and curriculum don’t align
  • Losing time on too many assessments
  • Lack of flexibility in lesson planning

One frustrated teacher explained it this way: “Lesson planning in my district is not functional for the teacher. Rather, it is designed for principals to “keep tabs” on what teachers are doing in the classroom. It is more time consuming than it should be to write a district lesson than if I were to write one that would really help me as the classroom teacher.”

Questions to Think About:
  • Are our textbooks and assessments consistent with our curriculum framework?
  • Do we help teachers see the value in assessments and support them in this process?
  • Do our principals support teachers in creating relevant plans that align to standards?

Technology

Technology: we love it and we hate it. Most of the time, teachers love it — but 17% said they struggle with technology in their classrooms. 

For some, technology is still too unavailable or unreliable.

“Some rooms have great technology set ups and some don’t,” one teacher said. “It makes it difficult to teach the same lesson to all my students fairly.”

Others don’t feel properly trained on new technologies.

“I feel overwhelmed by the inundation of technology and my ability to implement it effectively,” one teacher admitted.

Questions to Think About:
  • How can we prioritize updated technology for our classrooms?
  • Are our teachers adequately trained on new technologies?
  • How can we encourage teachers to use technology for lesson creation?
What other challenges do teachers face – and how is your district addressing them?