The employee then selects an option to indicate that he or she is starting work, ending work, going on break or other options. The timekeeping terminals transmit these timekeeping events to the timekeeping server. At the end of each pay period, the business's payroll system gets the number of hours each employee worked from the timekeeping system and prepares paychecks. The exact details of what an employee sees will depend on an employee profile that a terminal receives from the timekeeping server. The employee profile will include the employee's name, the language in which to display prompts for the employee and what special options apply to the employee.
Most businesses assign their employees a fixed location in the business place to do their work.
Employees with a fixed work location will normally use the timekeeping terminal nearest to their work location. To avoid long lines in front of timekeeping terminals, it is recommended that the terminals be positioned so that fewer than 70 employees with fixed work locations will use the same timekeeping terminal. A substantial portion of the cost of the timekeeping system will be the cost of the terminals. To keep their cost down, the timekeeping terminals will have a minimal amount of memory. However, to keep response time down, we will want the terminals to cache employees profiles so that most of the time they will be able to respond immediately when presented with an employee's ID card.