Page 68 - Essentials of Payroll: Management and Accounting

Accumulating T ime W orked
But this generally results in the least accurate data of all, for now there
are two people entering information (the employee and the data entry
person), which creates two opportunities to make a mistake. In short,
the best way to avoid charging time to the wrong job is to have an

interactive data entry system.
Another problem is that a vastly inaccurate amount of hours will
sometimes be charged to a job, usually through the incorrect recording of
numbers. For example, an eight-hour shift might be entered incorrectly
as 88 hours.To avoid such obvious mistakes, the timekeeping system can
be altered to automatically reject any hours that clearly exceed normal
boundaries,such as the number of hours in a shift or day.A more sophis-

ticated approach is to have the timekeeping system automatically accu-
mulate the number of hours already charged during the current shift by
an employee, which yields an increasingly small number of hours that
can still be worked through the remainder of the shift; any excess can
either be rejected or require an override by a supervisor (indicating the
presence of overtime being worked).This approach is not possible,how-
ever, if employees record their time on paper, since the information is
entered after the fact, and any correction to an incorrect number will
be a guess by the data entry person and hence may not be accurate.

Another possible problem is that an employee might charge an incor-
rect employee code to a job, resulting in the correct number of hours
being charged to the job but at the labor rate for the employee whose
number was used, rather than the rate of the person actually doing the
work. To avoid this error, the timekeeping system should be set up to
automatically access a list of valid employee numbers to at least ensure
that any employee code entered corresponds to a currently employed

person.Though this is a weak control point, it at least ensures that hours
charged to a job will be multiplied by the hourly labor rate of someone,
rather than by zero. A much stronger control is to require employees to

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