Make Sure Daylight Saving Time Doesn’t Accidentally Deduct an Hour From Your Employees’ Time Cards

Daylight Saving Time officially ends at 2:00 AM on Sunday, November 6! While you already know to set your clocks back an hour, you don’t have to do a single thing to your self-adjusting FingerCheck biometric time clocks.

However, when the clocks roll back, if you have nighttime employees who are clocked in overnight, they will lose an hour due to the automatic turning back of the time. To correct this issue, we created a workaround in the software that adds an hour when DST ends.

Now for the fun stuff. As your go-to time clock authority, we’re obligated to give you a bit of background on Daylight Saving Time. Here are some facts you might not have known:

Who originated Daylight Saving Time?

Despite popular belief, Benjamin Franklin did not originate Daylight Savings Time. The actual man deserving of the credit is an Englishman by the name of William Willet, who at the start of the 20th century, proposed the idea that the United Kingdom spring forward the clocks by 80 minutes between April and October.

During an early-morning horseback ride in 1905, he was enjoying the abundance of sunshine and was struck with the thought that more people could enjoy the sunlight if there was a mass seasonally-timed change of the clocks. His proposal was summarized in a pamphlet titled “The Waste of Daylight,” released in 1907.

Which country first instituted Daylight Saving Time?

Interestingly enough, Germany was the first country to implement daylight savings time during World War I to conserve electricity in 1916. Weeks later, the U.K. followed suit, introducing “summertime” as the marker of change. Here in the U.S., daylight saving was practiced at random for decades in some states and cities, starting and ending daylight saving whenever.

“Passengers on a 35-mile bus ride from Steubenville, Ohio, to Moundsville, West Virginia, passed through seven-time changes,” reports Timeanddate.com. Finally, in 1966 the “Uniform Time Act” was introduced, standardizing daylight saving time from the final Sunday in April to the final Sunday in October. Recently in 2007, Congress adjusted Daylight Saving Time to end on the first Sunday of November and begin the second Sunday in March.

A more colorful narrative of the events leading to the global phenomenon we now know as “Daylight Saving Time” couldn’t possibly be imagined!