City workers clock in with fingerprints

Technology speeds payroll processing at two Laurel departments

Hourly city employees who work for the department of public works or parks and recreation use the new machines. They place their fingers on the machine, which scans their fingerprints and the computer software identifies the employee’s position and wage, Frost said. The first time an hourly employee uses the machine, the computer scans his or her fingerprint, which is stored in the computer.

There were some initial glitches with the system that have now been worked out, Frost said. One such was a connection problem between the machines throughout the city and the main database located in the municipal center. After reconfiguration, the problems no longer exist, Frost said.

The new machines are a huge labor and time saver, city employees said.

‘‘With timecards ... all it does is stamp the time in and the time out, and every time payroll came we had to do manual calculations on each card,” Frost said.

Now, individual departments just have to double-check through a computer if the calculations, which the computer does, are correct.

Completion of the payroll for the Department of Parks and Recreation used to take five days. Now it takes a day and a half, said the department’s office manager, Eileen Lavins.

One of department assistant Wendy Friend’s duties was to physically rewrite and add up timesheets, and manually check for errors. The task was daunting and deadlines were difficult to meet, Lavins said.

‘‘It was just continually busy. There was never a dull moment,” she said. ‘‘We’re still busy, we stay that way. But it’s a good busy [now].”

Summer is the busiest time for the departments, with about 50 additional employees working at the pool and other seasonal facilities, Frost said. That brings the number of hourly city employees to 120, up from 70 during the rest of the year.

The task was also daunting because one employee could hold multiple jobs with different hourly wages, so they would have to punch in and out on separate timecards, Frost said.

The time saved is helping city employees adjust to other new software upgrades, Lavins said.

One such upgrade is last spring’s introduction of new plastic membership cards with a barcode and photo, costing the city $65,000. The cards, swiped for entry into Laurel’s public facilities, replaced paper ones that tore easily and could be used by someone other than the card-carrier, Frost said.

At the community pool, teenagers would often leave the pool and pass their cards off to a friend to use, said Joanne Barr, deputy director for parks and recreation. The new identification cards not only carry photos, but also show when the cardholder last visited. They are used to enter the armory, community center and the pool.

Residents can register for classes and reserve rooms using the same card, Barr said. A resident who does not want to renew his or her membership can keep the card and renew it at any time.

The new computer system links to a geographic database and can tell if a cardholder lives in the city limits or not. This is important because there are different membership rates for residents and non-residents, and city lines can be confusing for some, Frost said.

‘‘People would come in and say they’re resident when they’re not residents,” he said.

The Department of Parks and Recreation is also looking forward to spring 2008, when it is expected that residents would be able register online for classes at the various city facilities.

E-mail Elahe Izadi ateizadi@gazette.net.