The Time and Attendance (TAA) module tracks your employees' time, collecting data to help you manage clock-ins, work activities, time cards, absences, overtime, reports, and payroll integration.

Note: The help pages provided in this Knowledge Base will be focused on Synovia TAA — that is, the TAA software you access through the Synovia platform (https://login.synovia.com); for help with legacy TAA, you can go to Legacy Time and Attendance Help. Be aware, however, that the legacy articles are not necessarily up-to-date (and won't be updated in the future).
 
For more information about TAA, see An Introduction to Time and Attendance. For details about how Synovia TAA compares to legacy TAA, go to Legacy TAA Versus Synovia TAA.

This article describes the various features of the TAA software module, which you access through three Synovia menus — TAA Core, TAA Time Cards, and TAA System Administration — by clicking , , and , respectively, on the accordion menu.

Note: What you can access in Time and Attendance depends on your user privileges (as with all Synovia screens). If you need to perform a task on a screen you can't view or change, contact your organization's Synovia administrator.

These are the options on the TAA Core menu:

Note: If you're looking for a Reports option, you won't find one in the TAA menus. The TAA reports are included with the rest of the Synovia reports (in Core >> Reports); see What TAA Reports Are Available? for more information.

• Time and Attendance Legacy: To launch our previous version of the TAA software, what we're now calling legacy TAA (https://taa.synovia.com).
   
• Work Monitor: To check the current work status of employees in one or more departments, displaying who is clocked in and out, and, if schedules are assigned, who is late to work. 
   
• Absences: To check and enter absences.
   
• Attendance Events: To track and enter attendance events, which are part of a points-based system you can use to measure employee performance, based on attendance and policy compliance. You can associate attendance events with absences (such as "Absent Without Calling In"), tardiness, leaving work early, and other infractions.
   
• Export Time: To export an employee time data file for your payroll company.
   
• Import Employees: To see the setup for your import of employee records (employee IDs, names, departments, and so on) from your payroll system, perform an import on demand, and map the import data to TAA data.
   
• Import Notifications: To see the status of the import of employee records from your payroll system, including which imports contain errors, new employees, and changed fields.
   
• Employees: To see your employee records, individually selected from a drop-down list.
   
• Punch ID Assignment History: To view the current and past punch IDs assigned to your employees.
   
• Employee Assignments: If you are using the Sartox payroll system, to view the jobs available for each employee by job code and assignment number. These assignments are set and updated via the employee import. This screen is also available for the Generic import, if your organization needs unique job codes/assignment numbers for another reason.

These are the options on the TAA Time Cards menu:

• Time Cards: To view and edit your employees' time cards.
   
• Group Shifts: To add shifts for a group of employees (if you have editing privileges) — for example, in situations such as training sessions.
   
• Shift Exceptions: To find and handle shift exceptions, which are errors your employees made while logging in or out. These must be fixed before you can export your time records for a payroll system.
   
• Shift Analyzer: To manually implement specialized business rules that were previously created via the Shift Analyzer tab of TAA System Administration >> TAA System Settings. This type of rule is one you want to apply only under certain circumstances, not something that will be a part of every shift — for example, if an employee drives a special route, such as a field trip, they might get 15 minutes of pretrip time added to their time card.
   
• View Schedules: To create, view, and edit an employee's schedule.
   
• Assign Schedules: To assign a schedule to an individual employee or a group of employees.
   
• Master Schedule Templates: To create, view, and edit master schedule templates, which are planned shifts (including days, hours, job types, and, optionally, assigned vehicles) you can assign to your employees.
   
• Absence Requests: To approve or deny employees' requests for time off (if you are a supervisor in charge of handling absence requests).

And these are the options on the TAA System Administration menu, which is primarily for tasks your TAA system administrator will need to complete:

• TAA System Settings: To customize TAA to your organization's needs, including rounding rules and calculations, what day your work week begins with, what your regular work hours are, your attendance policy, and Shift Analyzer rules.
   
• Employee Type Management: To add and edit employee types, assign employees to them, specify which job types are valid for the employee types, and determine which employee types have access to the TAA Portal and appear on the MDTs (mobile data terminals).
   
• Departments: To organize your employees into different departments.
   
• Job Types: To specify the job types your organization will use, such as Regular Route or Field Trip, their job codes, and the employee types they are valid for.
   
• Pay Rates: Not often used, but to specify pay rates for each job type.
   
• Attendance Event Types: To create attendance events (such as Unexcused Absence) and assign their point values.
   
• Absence Types: To create and edit the absence types that can be entered in TAA.
   
• Holidays: To add holidays to your work calendar, assign them to employee types, and determine whether they're paid.
   
• Portal/MDT Settings: To customize your TAA Portal and MDT settings, including whether employees can make absence requests through the portal and from which IP addresses they can access it.
   
• Employee Fields: To manage what fields are included in your employee records.