Can a Clocking System Help You Ensure Fair Pay?

A few weeks ago, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy released their new list of rogue employers failing to pay minimum wage.

The list, which consisted of 139 companies, outlined how much the businesses owed their employees and effectively ‘Named and Shamed’ them.

It’s fair to say; this is a PR nightmare for the many businesses on the list. No company wants to get caught effectively stealing from their staff.

Don’t want to end up on the list?

Of course you don’t! No one does. The first thing you do is use the national minimum wage calculator to work out if you are correctly paying your employees, and if not, how much you owe.

If you (or HMRC) discover you’re not paying the correct minimum wage rates, depending on the severity and amount of time this has gone on, you may:

• Have to pay fines (up to 200%) of the underpayment.
• Find your name on the government’s list.

You will have to return back-pay of up to 6 years to any employees or former employees.

So how can a clocking system help me?

It’s the law that HMRC team members can carry out inspections at any time—so you need to spot any mistakes before them and like with any tax issue, you have the responsibility to prove your staff’s work hours and pay.

Not only will a clocking system give you dates and times of employees working hours, but it will also show any overtime, absence or breaks etc.

Overtime might not seem important in this situation, but it’s working over the contracted hours that could make employee pay below minimum wage.

A clocking system will save your employee data in the cloud, meaning 99.999% availability, and no worries of losing or misplacing data.
Remember – HMRC recommends that you keep records for three years.

Employee clocking’s can also be viewed as a report or timesheet, and most clocking systems will allow you to download data by pay period, department, individual or more.

Citadel by Chronologic is a cloud-based subscription clocking system. Citadel allows your employees to clock via terminal, app or web and offers reporting, timesheets, updates and more as standard.

Find out more about our clocking systems here.

Any questions, or if you’d like to request a free online demo to see how clocking in with Citadel could work for you, call 01761 410015, email us or click the chat icon.