History

Time clock, made by National Time Recorder Co. Ltd. of Blackfriars, London at Wookey Hole Caves museum

A Bundy Clock used by Birmingham City Transport to ensure that bus drivers did not depart from outlying termini before the due time; now preserved at Walsall Arboretum

contactless magnetic time clock card

Electronic time clock

An early and influential time clock, sometimes described as the first, was invented on November 20, 1888, by Willard Le Grand Bundy,^[2] a jeweler in Auburn, New York. His patent of 1890^[3] speaks of mechanical time recorders for workers in terms that suggest that earlier recorders already existed, but Bundy's had various improvements; for example, each worker had his own key. A year later his brother, Harlow Bundy, organized the Bundy Manufacturing Company,^[4][5] and began mass-producing time clocks. In 1900, the time recording business of Bundy Manufacturing, along with two other time equipment businesses, was consolidated into the International Time Recording Company (ITR).^[6][7][8][9] In 1911, ITR, Bundy Mfg., and two other companies were merged, forming Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR), which would later change its name to IBM.^[10] In 1958, IBM's Time Equipment Division was sold to the Simplex Time Recorder Company. However in the United Kingdom ITR (A subsidiary of IBM United Kingdom Ltd.) was the subject of a management buy-out in 1963 and reverted to International Time Recorders. In 1982, International Time Recorders was acquired by Blick Industries of Swindon, England, who were themselves later absorbed by Stanley Security Systems.
The first punched-card system to be linked to a Z80 microprocessor was developed by Kronos Incorporated in the late 1970s and introduced as a product in 1979.^[11]
In the late twentieth century, time clocks started to move away from the mechanical machines to computer based, electronic time and attendance systems. The employee either swipes a magnetic stripe card, scans a barcode, brings an RFID (radio-frequency identification) tag into proximity with a reader, enters an employee number or uses a biometric reader to identify the employee to the system. These systems are much more advanced than the mechanical time clock, various reports can be generated, including European working time directive, and a Bradford factor report. Employees can also request holidays, enter in absenteeism requests and view their worked hours. User interfaces can be personalized and offer robust self-service capabilities.
More recently, time clocks have started to adopt technology commonly seen in phones and tablets - called 'Smartclocks'. The state of the art smartclocks come with multi-touch screens, full color displays, real time monitoring for problems, wireless networking and over the air updates. Some of the smartclocks use front facing cameras to capture employee clock-ins to deter "buddy clocking", a problem usually requiring expensive biometric clocks. With the increasing popularity of cloud based software, some of the newer time clocks are

Types

A basic time clock will just stamp the date and time on a time card, similar to a parking validation machine. These will usually be activated by a button that a worker must press to stamp their card, or stamp upon full insertion. Some machines use punch hole cards instead of stamping, which can facilitate automated processing on machinery not capable of optical character recognition. There are also variations based on manufacture and machine used, and whether the user wants to record weekly or monthly recordings. The time cards usually have the workdays, "time in", and "time out" areas marked on them so that employees can "punch in" or "punch out" in the correct place. The employee may be responsible for lining up the correct area of the card to be punched or stamped. Some time clocks feature a bell or signal relay to alert employees as to a certain time or break.^{[citation needed]}
Fraudulent operation of time clocks can include overstamping, where one time is stamped over another, and buddy stamping, where a friend clocks in another member of staff.
Self-calculating machines are similar to basic time clocks. Nevertheless, at the end of each period the total time recorded is added up allowing for quicker processing by human resources or payroll. These machines sometimes have other functions such as automatic stamping, dual-colour printing, and automated column shift.^{[citation needed]}
Software based time and attendance systems are similar to paper-based systems, but they rely on computers and check-in terminals. They are backed up with software that can be integrated with the human resources department and in some cases payroll software. These types of systems are becoming more popular but due to high initial costs they are usually only adopted by large business of over 30 employees. Despite this they can save a business a lot of money every year by cutting down errors and reducing administration time.[cita