Using a MAX ER-1500 or a SEIKO Precision QR-375 time recorder, you can calculate work times for up to 50 people on an employee's time card. These electronic time and attendance recorders, or ?time clocks?, create less work for the payroll administrator of small to medium-sized businesses (SMEs), who, unlike in larger organisations, are not dedicated payroll professionals but have many other tasks which must be done including the weekly wage run.

Both time recorders can calculate employee's hours by the use of encoded time cards, the MAX ER-1500 using a system of holes down the left and right-hand edges of the time card, whilst the SEIKO Precision QR-375 uses barcode technology to differentiate between time cards. As the time cards are non-generic, this enables both machines to distinguish an ?in? clocking from an ?out? clocking so that they can never over-stamp, and also enables the elapsed time calculation, the MAX ER-1500 on a daily basis and the SEIKO Precision QR-375 with an additional running total.

Unlike older mechanical and electro-mechanical time recorders, the MAX ER-1500 and SEIKO Precision QR-375 also offer the following advantages ? they both have a built in memory battery backup, so that, in the event of a power supply failure, once power is resumed they will display and print the correct date/time; and, the summer/winter hour change, or ?Daylight Savings Time?, is carried out automatically. There is no need to callout an engineer as was the case years ago, or for anyone to reprogram them.

The European Working Time Directive not only requires businesses to comply with its requirements, but compliance must be documented. For example, records need to be maintained showing that weekly working time and night work limits are adhered to, as well as details of those workers who have opted out. An absence of such records is punishable by law. What better way of documenting weekly hours worked than on a time card, for all, including the employee, to see?

At the time of going to press, in excess of 1,300 MAX ER-1500s and over 500 SEIKO Precision QR-375s have been sold in the UK and Ireland.