Sorry, forgot about this post!
Purple - I do forthnightly wages for approx. 200 people, and monthly for 150, and at the moment its all done on manual timesheets, which, at the best of times takes me almost a day and a half to gather up and decipher and leaves me a day to calculate and produce the wages. This is made harder when there is a bank holiday in the payroll week as it means I dont have that first day to be hunter/gatherer!
Rainyday - There is a very good bonus system in operation here whereby they get paid on what they produce, but if Mr X slips off home early and its not recorded, he will still get the same bonus and wage as Mr Y who has stayed doing his job for his full shift.
Another benefit of such a clock card system is that it would hopefully be able to produce valuable reports. We have to carefully monitor the amount of time our guys spend at work over a given period of time and if we exceed then we're breaking the law. I'm not satisfied that the manual timesheets are sufficient to collect this info.