Time cards are becoming a thing of the past for employees of UC Davis Health System as it makes the switch to an automated time and attendance system.
Under the new system, known as the Kronos Time and Attendance System, hourly employees are responsible for making daily entries of their shift start and end times, with most employees using the phone to make their entries. These employees use either blue (medical center) or green (School of Medicine) time cards.
Biweekly-paid (pink or gold timecards) and monthly-paid (white or yellow timecards) employees meanwhile, will, once per pay period, enter the exceptions to their regular schedule via the Web.
Departments will be responsible for designating a timekeeper who will review and edit time entries via the Web, normally on a daily basis.
The conversion began in June, and some 400 employees in Plant Operations and Maintenance, Human Resources, the Financial Services Administration, the Pharmacy Department and Accounts Payable/Payroll are on the new system. Several other departments are using both paper timecards and Kronos in preparation for a permanent switch.
A total of about 1,500 employees will be on Kronos by the end of November or early December. And eventually all health system employees, except School of Medicine faculty and some other academic titles, will use the system.
The switch is expected to reduce costs in the areas of paper expenses, mail and courier delivery, time spent on “key-punch” operations, efforts in researching past payroll information for corrections, and reviewing and approving time recorded.
Employees will be able to more easily obtain up-to-date information about their leave balances. The switch also will provide managers with better data about their employees — like overtime usage and leaves.
“We will have greater consistency in the application of pay rules, fewer corrections arising from the current practice of projected time, and elimination of human errors from the manual calculation of time,” said Claire Pomeroy, executive associate dean for the School of Medicine.
Also, employees will no longer miss paychecks due to lost timecards.
Departments will be notified about their conversion to Kronos about two months before their rollout date. Training sessions will be conducted prior to rollout.