Tracking attendance is one of the most important organizational tasks of any company. With the developments in technology, new ways to do this more automatically, easily and accurately have been invented. From low-tech manual timesheets to biometric fingerprint scanners and facial recognition - different companies opt for different methods of tracking attendance.

However, two methods are head and shoulders above their competition when it comes to attendance, both in terms of accuracy and convenience, and in terms of how commonly they're used throughout the business world. Those two are keycards and software for employee monitoring.

Obviously, these two are very different. While keycards are typically used at the entrance of the office building where they record employees' clock-ins and outs by looking at when they arrived and left work, employee monitoring system tracks attendance based on computer activity - turning on your computer counts as a clock-in, and the last activity counts as a clock-out.

But which one of these two is better? We'll try to answer this by looking at a couple of qualities that you might expect your preferred attendance tracking method to have.

Convenience

Nowadays, anything that you have to make an effort to use isn't good enough. People, and especially managers and business owners, have come to expect that every tool is maximally convenient, easy to use and as automatic as possible. So let's see how our attendance tracking methods stand on this criterion.

Both keycards and employee monitoring are pretty automatic and therefore practical to use. As mentioned in the introduction, they take different metrics into account, but the convenience is there either way. The bottom line is - you don't have to do anything to get the attendance data regularly delivered to you.

One advantage that employee monitoring system has over keycards is the convenience of the setup process. You don't have any additional devices when it comes to the tracking software, so all you have to do is install the program on the corporate computers and you're all set.

Accuracy

When it comes to estimating the accuracy of the attendance data that these two methods provide, it really mostly depends on how you define clock-ins and clock-outs.

If you only care about when your employees enter your office building, then keycards are a good enough option. But this might not be the best reflection of when your employees actually start working. Consider the time they take to make their first coffee, maybe have breakfast, catch up with their colleagues, and so on and so forth. This time window can be half an hour long, but you're still counting that as productive office time.

Employee monitoring app aims to eliminate this discrepancy by clocking employees in when they start using their computers. This is much more realistic than keycards. Plus, you can track their breaks this way as well, even those short ones when they don't leave their office.

Buddy Punching Prevention

Buddy punching is a pretty common time theft strategy among employees that costs companies a lot of money. It's basically when an employee asks their colleague to punch in on their behalf if they're going to be late.

Cheating the keycard system in this way is as easy as giving your keycard to someone. It's a bit more tricky if you can't enter the building without your keycard, but it's not impossible to work around.

On the other hand, computer monitoring software works by tracking employees' activity. This means that buddy punching is out of the question, unless employees can (and would!) work on two computers at the same time. In other words, when you see a registered clock-in on a computer, you can rest assured that it was indeed valid.

Conclusion

Both keycards and employee monitoring are great options for tracking attendance. There are certainly good reasons why they beat timesheets and biometric methods - the first one is too inconvenient and at times unreliable, while the second one is too expensive to maintain and somewhat controversial in terms of employee privacy.

So, should you use keycards or PC tracking software? Well, it depends - if you're looking for a relatively accurate solution but that could also be used as an office key, then go for the first one, and if you want a system that will map out employees' activities and be totally time-theft-proof, then the second one is probably better. At the end, there's really no rule that prevents you from using them both.