Compensation Data Facts - What's What in Compensation

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History of compensation... Time clocks came into use in the late 19th century when industrialization turned time into an increment of payment. Businesses and factories relied on watchmen to ensure workers documented their time correctly and were looking for solutions more efficient than human timekeepers.

The earliest time recorder was the employee time clock. Invented in 1888 by Willard Bundy as a method to track attendance, the mechanical time clock, which recorded when employees punched in and punched out, tracked the hours employees worked and helped calculate pay. Bundy Manufacturing Company led the commercial sales of mechanical time clocks and their merger with a number of other time equipment companies in 1911 formed the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation. In 1924 the company changed its name to International Business Machines (IBM).

Today, manufacturing plants still use a time clock punch system similar to Bundy's invention.