Time a attendance systems affects strategically to a company , payroll is calculated with its results , and employer and employees must trust in the installed system.
Hardware and Software are the components of a Time Attendance system, it is quite advisable to buy both from the same supplier as it can be catastrophic to have two different providers for each.

So as not to make a bad choice you have to focus in the following issues:

Price – Price must be affordable and according to the size of your company, clearly with the same time clock and the same time attendance package a company with 300 employees obtains ten times more benefits than a company with 20 employees so it is clearly a fair to expect that you will pay just a portion of the maximum price and the amount will adjusted to your annual investment's figures.

Friendly Use – Installation is normally straightforward and it is normally done by the provider but the daily use of the package should be also friendly.
After installing the Software configuration is needed, Time attendance configuration can be not so straightforward, time attendance systems are not normalized and each company must be able to include in it its particular and probably exclusive issues. It is quiet desirable if the software supplier helps you after hearing your explanations about what you want to obtain and how you must also be aware that the time attendance software must quite open and versatile to fulfill your future needs even if those future requirements are still unknown.

Open systems – Time attendance Software has two main outputs, fuels direct information for employee's tracking on delays, absenteeism and also statistics the second main output is to payroll software , the software package you acquire must be able to export the needed information to feed the payroll software and avoid manual interaction.
Other compatibilities needed are obvious but must be pointed out , our computer hardware and operating systems must be compatible with the time attendance software and hardware , also the company’s network infrastructure, and even Internet connection and properties.

Size of the company – Time and attendance software programs are normally licensed for a certain number of employees. You should definitely take note of this when buying. Some cheap programs have a closed number of users. Time attendance software must be able to be upgraded so when your company grows you just buy the upgrade and you have not to buy another system.

Reliability - this is a MUST- When biometric time clocks are needed you must consider certain parameters of the reader like : how long it takes to the time clock to identify one finger between 2.000 , a good machine must do it in one second or less . Even if you only have 20 employees the terminal must be capable of identifying the employee between a huge amount of finger patterns, this is important because it is closely related to the reliability of the terminal.

If the terminal is prepared for 2.000, it will behave with zero errors when you use it with only 100 employees, if more than one time clock is needed you must check the facilities for downloading and uploading the patterns from to terminal to the others, are available so the enrollment of the employees are done only once in one time clock.

Stand alone Biometric - It is highly advisable to choice an stand alone unit , there exist fingerprint readers which are connected to a PC and the PC has the identifying algorithm , those readers are very cheap but normally has problems when changing operating systems version or when other software is installed in the PC.

Customer Support – This is a quite known issue but in this case is specially significant , choose the time and attendance software with a company that offers a good support and service.