5 Employee Time Tracking Features You Need for Payroll During Holidays

Managing payroll during holidays can be a challenge. 

Employees expect payroll and holiday pay to come through as efficiently as it always does. You need to make sure you’re properly tracking vacation days, overtime, last-minute schedule changes and everything else the holidays can bring. 

But you can only do that if your employee time tracking solution has the right features.  

5 features you need to process payroll during holidays

1. Simple, responsive scheduling

Schedule changes are inevitable during the holidays. The right employee time off tracker will help you manage them seamlessly. 

With Time Tracker, employees can view their schedule from any device, see who’s available if they need to request a shift change, and get instant notifications when changes are made. 

As a manager, Time Tracker streamlines the holiday scheduling process. You can:

• Create and save templates for Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s, etc. 
• Color code different job types to make assignments easy
• Use drag-and-drop editing to modify shifts quickly
• Access and update the schedule right from your phone

2. Easy time-off requests and approval

It seems obvious that an employee time off tracker would allow employees to submit their time-off requests to managers directly, but that isn’t the case. 

Look for a solution like Time Tracker to make leave requests foolproof:

• Set up time-off codes to differentiate between sick days, vacation, etc.
• Block any days or dates that aren’t eligible for payroll holiday pay
• Approve or deny every request in a few easy clicks
• View all approved time-off requests while making the next schedule

3. Overtime management and alerts

Overtime is always a concern when it comes to employee time tracking, and things get more complex as schedules shift around the holidays. Some people work less while others want to pick up overtime, so you need an employee time off tracker that will help you stay up to date on where each employee stands. 

With Time Tracker, you can:

• View each employee’s total shift hours while building new schedules 
• See each team’s daily, weekly and monthly hours as they come in
• Set up rules so you get an alert when an employee goes into overtime
• Use historical data to make sure you don’t over-schedule an employee who often ends up working overtime

4. Instant expense tracking

One weak spot in most employee time tracking systems is expenses. These systems are capable of tracking time, but they aren’t much help when it comes to giving employees a way to track expenses on their own, which can be crucial during the holidays when people aren’t onsite as often. 

Time Tracker can help you manage costs by:

• Giving you the ability to preload and customize expense categories and add expenses in batches to save time
• Allowing employees to upload receipt images from their mobile devices and add them directly to invoices (if you choose to give them that ability) 
• Generating expense reports that will help you monitor reimbursements in seconds

5. Payroll integrations

Running an efficient, streamlined payroll during holidays isn’t easy. Not only are you keeping track of more remote workers than ever before, but you’re also working around modified schedules, days off and unexpected sick days that always pop up during the holidays. 

With an employee time tracking system like Time Tracker:

• Employees can clock in and out and take breaks with time cards
• Managers can set employee time to round up or down so hours worked are documented as accurately as possible
• Once time is approved, the system can integrate with your payroll and accounting software so you can process payroll and holiday pay faster

Since Time Tracker already integrates with payroll systems like ADP and Gusto, it can save you 30+ hours in administration every month—and it may save you even more in tricky processing windows like running payroll during holidays. 

Ready to make processing payroll during holidays a cinch?

A free 14-day trial of Time Tracker is a great place to start.