Capturing Employee Time for Payroll

One of the challenges that many organizations face is accurately capturing employee time for payroll. It can be particularly difficult when workers are spread across multiple locations, or job sites. While it is streamlining the data capture process and maintaining the accuracy of the data are critical, it is also important to find a solution which minimizes the burden on the employees responsible for collecting and entering the data. 

Technology offers a variety of good solutions to address this issue. 

Spreadsheet Time Sheets can be a simple but effective way to gather employee time. Whether you use individual employee time sheets, or have a time keeper enter a whole crew’s time into a single sheet, a spreadsheet can easily capture, organize, and submit the data to the payroll system. Anyone with basic computer skills can enter the data and it is very easy to review and edit the data for accuracy before it is processed. Using INTERAC InterLink import/export utilities, data from a spreadsheet is easily imported directly into payroll for processing, eliminating the errors and time spent with manually keying the data in. 

PC and Mobile Applications have become a popular option in recent years. For situations where employees spend most of their time away from the office, these options may be more effective. INTERAC includes several PC based remote time entry options. 

  • Payroll Data Entry is an excellent option for remote offices or client installations where they need the ability to process payroll and print checks. Because it is a subset of the actual payroll application, it creates the transaction files for processing, eliminating the import step.
  • Job Tracker is designed with the construction job site in mind, allowing the time keeper to submit time for their entire crew from an easy and efficient PC based job cost and equipment cost enabled time entry system.


Time Clocks & Point of Sale Systems are widely used in many businesses. Traditionally time clocks were physical devices which were used to punch in and out. Today’s time clock may be nothing more than a software application on a PC. Many POS systems include the time clock function, allowing employees to punch in and out right from a POS terminal. Virtually any current time clock or POS system will output the data in either CSV, or spreadsheet format, making it easy to import into your payroll system. More advanced systems often have the ability to interface directly with the payroll software, sharing the employee lists and other key setup information. This can be a real time saver, only having to maintain one master employee database.

Whatever your situation, there are a variety of ways to streamline your payroll data capture process with INTERAC. 

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