RFID vs GPS based employee attendance tracking

Ever wondered what else you could use to get the employee’s attendance other than the biometrics system you use at your office?

Let me tell you why biometrics is not very useful as employee attendance system other than to ensure the user himself was present at the location or providing access to a secure area.

You may think isn’t it the whole purpose of having attendance? No, it isn’t.

Attendance is about ensuring that the person is present to perform their assigned duty. Unless you have some stick to chair kind of job like in the case of call centers or IT team present at the office or the people who are in the clerical position getting the attendance through biometric systems like finger-print or retina scan is useless.

Why? Say if your field engineer is supposed to visit a client’s place at 10:00 AM near to his home or opposite to your office’s location. What currently you are doing is to ask him to visit the office first to mark the attendance and then go to the client’s place and keeping in mind the traffic in all major cities you may have wasted his one or two precious hours to get his attendance marked.

Now, the other methods to get the attendance from the employees and still automate the system is to use RFID based system.

RFID or Radio-Frequency Identification is used to read the information available in a chip attached to an object e.g., company issued ID cards.

The problem with the RFID system is similar to the biometric system. The employee has to be present at the location to mark his attendance, and it can be manipulated by the employees very easily.

One can pass his ID card to his colleague to mark the attendance, especially when the organization is big and not everyone is recognizable by face.

The other solution involves a Mobile phone. It is the most common gadget carried on the earth. Nowadays every smartphone carries a GPS chip, which gives precise location up to 20 meters.

With applications like TeamSpoor, one can easily enable their employees to mark their attendance from anywhere in the world with geo-location.

For example, the same person, which was once asked to visit the office to mark his attendance now can mark his attendance from his home and leave for the client’s location directly. This flexibility in attendance will not only saves his time but also make his time more productive.

Some of the benefits of having a GPS based attendance are:

  1. Mark attendance from anywhere in the world. Even from the Sea or remotest area in alps.
  2. No extra electronic equipment or expenditure required.
  3. It makes the staff more productive and gives them more flexibility.
  4. Geo-fences also ensures that a person doesn’t leave or enter a specified area unless their working hours are over. It is beneficial in case of stores where an employee needs to be present for some specific hours.
  5. Integration with existing HRMS is easy as the system is already on the cloud.

With advance, time-sheet software like TeamSpoor, capturing the attendance is straightforward and reliable even if there is no network available on the phone to upload the attendance data to a cloud server.

If your company is looking to implement a cloud-based attendance management system or considering an RFID based system for the same, then please feel free to discuss with us before moving ahead.

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