Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

A recent survey on employee theft found that 24% of workers have committed time theft by claiming they worked more hours than they did, taking longer breaks than are allowed, or asking another employee to clock in or out for them. These employees were adding 4.5 hours that they didn’t work to their timecards each week. Think about that for a moment.

At the federal level, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) does not require employers to provide rest and lunch breaks to their employees. However, it does dictate how employees must be compensated if an employer does choose to offer breaks: In the absence of meal and break laws imposed at the federal level, many U.S. states have created their own state-specific laws. These state laws override FLSA requirements when they’re more favorable to employees, which is unanimously the case.

Are you still tracking employee hours with paper timesheets or spreadsheets? If so, you’re not alone, but you’re leaving money on the table. Small businesses lose thousands of dollars annually to inaccurate time reporting. Research shows that proper time tracking solutions can reduce productivity leaks by up to 80%. Additionally, manual time tracking devours your administrative resources. Every minute spent calculating work hours is time you could invest in growing your business.

With hundreds of time tracking software options available on the market, finding the right one for your small business can be challenging. Many tools offer the exact same features as all of the others, making it difficult to create a shortlist of options to demo or test. To help, we’ve compiled this list of the nine best time tracking software for small businesses. Below, we share what types of small business each app is best for, what unique features each offers, and how they compare on price.

If your business is still using manual punch clocks, paper timesheets, or Excel spreadsheets to track employee time, you might want to consider upgrading to time tracking software. Time tracking software is a modern solution for tracking employees’ hours that significantly improves the process of tracking time. It saves managers and admins tons of time and makes running payroll quicker and easier. It also helps you reduce labor costs and prevent time theft.

Direct deposit is the electronic transfer of a paycheck directly into an employee’s bank account. Instead of issuing a paper check, the employer initiates an Automated Clearing House (ACH) transfer that routes the funds straight to the employee’s bank. Employers choose to pay employees by direct deposit for several reasons. It’s faster, more accurate, and easier to manage than paper checks. It reduces the cost of printing checks. And it also lowers the chances of lost or stolen checks.

Time card apps help employees track their time accurately and easily. They’re more efficient than paper time cards — which are hard to centralize, edit, and keep accurate records on — and can be simpler for small businesses to use than feature-heavy HR tools. If you’re ready to upgrade how you track employee time, we’re here to help.

If you want to use Excel to track PTO for your company, you don’t have to start from scratch. Many businesses have created free templates you can use that make it easy to calculate PTO accruals and see when employees are scheduled for time off. In this post, we’re going to share our five favorite free Excel PTO tracker templates, share the benefits and disadvantages of tracking PTO in Excel, and introduce you to a better option for PTO tracking.

Get a jump start on creating schedules in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Microsoft Word, or Google Docs with these 28 free employee work schedule templates. We’ve provided lots of options for different scheduling types — including monthly, weekly, and daily options — as well as options for scheduling employees by location, project, or position.

In this post, we’re going to walk you through an eight-step process for how to make a schedule for employees in Microsoft Excel. We’ll also share a few free Excel templates you can use to get started and highlight some of the benefits and disadvantages of using Excel for creating employee schedules. Related: You might also like our guides on how to make an employee schedule in Google Sheets and how to create an employee schedule in Google Calendar.