For many companies, the concept of employee theft conjures up images of workers stealing from cash registers, pocketing office supplies or helping themselves to products. As an increasing number of businesses upgrade from filing cabinets and Rolodexes to cloud storage and computerized databases of customer information, firms are also realizing that they need to protect their digital assets and other information, as Entrepreneur magazine explains.

Closed-circuit video and Internet Protocol cameras can be instrumental in helping companies crack down on product thefts and register pilfering, while cloud-based security services and data encryption allow business owners to safeguard electronic information, the news source reports. The cloud can also be beneficial when it comes to securing firms against a type of employee theft that may not immediately come to mind when thinking of ways that workers steal from their employers, but is still extremely costly—time theft.

"Coming in late, leaving early and taking extended breaks shave time off the workday—and also steal from the payroll budget," notes business writer John Patrick Pullen, writing for Entrepreneur.

As well as being rampant across HR time tracking (i.e. companies tracking their employees' hours in order to ensure accurate reimbursement for work done), this type of theft also occurs with time tracking for billing purposes. It could be argued that overbilling clients is even worse than overstating hours in order to commit payroll fraud, as it directly involves customers.

Mitigate overbilling with internet timesheet technology
Sometimes, overbilling is deliberate on the part of a professional—to meet billable hour quotas, for instance—but in other instances, it is accidental. Sub-par online timesheet management or manual time tracking is often to blame in cases of unintentional overbilling. Businesses can crack down on these types of inaccuracies by integrating online time tracking solutions such as Sage Timeslips. In-house time and billing departments can work with the desktop incarnation of the Sage Timeslips software, while professionals can leverage Sage Timeslips eCenter to carry out detailed, precise time tracking and reporting without having to be in the office. Sage Timeslips eCenter can be used with iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android-based mobile devices, negating the need for professionals to track and enter their time using desktop or laptop computers. 

Read the rest of the Entrepreneur article here.