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Up to 20% of all employees in the United States are regularly late for work, costing organizations like yours billions of dollars a year.

The solution? Timesheets, which monitor employee hours, tardiness, performance, and absenteeism. These documents also collect valuable data for payroll, accounting, billing, and project management. So they're critical for human resource teams everywhere.

But there's a problem or two.

Paper timesheets require too much time and effort, while outdated timekeeping systems don't provide HR teams with the employee insights they need. That's why more organizations are using ETL to move timesheet data from one location to another so they can run it through the latest business intelligence (BI) tools. The result? Powerful real-time analytics about employee performance, workplace productivity, payroll, labor costs, and absentee management. 

With ETL, organizations never lose track of time. 

In this guide, learn about the benefits of ETL for timesheets and how Integrate.io can help make it all happen.

The Problem with Timesheet Tracking

Organizations should track timesheet information to calculate payroll, facilitate accounting processes, manage absenteeism, and measure employee performance. However, many companies are behind the times. HR teams rely on legacy systems for time tracking that provides few if any, insights into the amount of time an employee works during a specific period. This is a problem for companies in every niche.

As an example, take employee lateness, which costs U.S. businesses more than $3 billion in lost productivity every year. If HR teams don't monitor tardiness properly, they can't determine lost money and resources or increase workplace performance.  

That's why teams need the latest digital technologies for timesheet tracking. These tools generate insights into the hours worked by all employees in that organization. As a result, users can correctly compensate employees, discipline those who turn up to work late, manage staff absences, enhance billing processes, reduce labor costs, and improve accountability.

Read more: Top 7 ETL Tools for 2021

What Is ETL for Timesheets?

Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) is a process that moves timesheet data from its original location (for example, a database) to a new location so teams like yours can analyze that data. This analysis might involve:

  • Generating insights into employee performance, timekeeping, tardiness, and absenteeism.
  • Monitoring recorded work hours across various departments.
  • Learning more about the time spent on specific projects and tasks. 

You can use all this information to improve performance, productivity, payroll processing, accounting, billing, labor costs, and project management in your organization.

Many databases can't provide you with the above insights, so that's why you need to move data from one location to another. ETL is the process that does that for you.

Read more: What Is ETL?

How Does It Work?

ETL for timesheets is a relatively simple process if you use the right tool.

Extract: A good ETL tool extracts timesheet data from a data store not optimized for analytics. That data store might be an old database or legacy system that doesn't provide any useful information about hours worked, payroll, billing, tardiness, absenteeism, etc.

Transform: The ETL tool transforms the data from the data store into the correct format for analytics. It might do this by cleansing the data, restructuring it, removing inconsistencies, or improving data quality.

Load: The ETL tool then loads the transformed data into a data warehouse or data lake. Now you can use your timesheet data for analytics!

The right ETL tool automates much of the above process, so there's little human intervention. It creates data pipelines that move timesheet data from its original location to a final destination like a warehouse. Pre-built connectors mean building these pipelines requires little or no code, so you don't need extensive programming knowledge.

Read more: ETL vs. ELT: 5 Critical Differences

How Integrate.io Can Help with ETL for Timesheets

Integrate.io streamlines the entire ETL process for human resources teams, even if they lack data engineering experience. This no-code/low-code data management solution extracts timesheet data from its original source, cleans it up, transforms it into the correct format for analytics, and then loads it into a data warehouse or lake. Now you can generate real-time insights about timekeeping, payroll, billing, absenteeism, and employee performance for better business intelligence. And there's no complicated code.

Integrate.io takes the stress out of timesheeting with its point-and-click user interface and simple data pipeline builder that integrates data from its source to a new destination without the complex coding typically required to facilitate this process. Other Integrate.io features include world-class customer service, pre-built connectors for data migration, simple workflow creation, and a REST API that won't let you down.

Move with the times when you invest in Integrate.io to execute ETL for timesheets.

Integrate.io is your all-in-one data management solution for moving timesheet information to a data warehouse for deep analytics. Now's the right time to create no-code/low-code data pipelines for better business management. Learn how Integrate.io optimizes ETL for timesheets with a customized 7-day demo.