In a physician’s practice, time is measured in patient visits, charting, and after-hours calls, not in timecards. That’s why many practice owners think of timekeeping as an HR chore that happens in the background. But in reality, accurate time tracking is one of the most important systems that keeps your practice compliant, efficient, and financially sound.
Why Timekeeping Matters in Physician Practices
California’s wage and hour rules apply to every employee, whether you have one staff member or fifty. That means medical assistants, billers, and front-desk staff (almost always non-exempt) must have every shift, break, and bit of overtime tracked correctly.
In physician practices, that’s easier said than done. Staff often float between providers, shifts change day to day, and after-hours charting or patient calls still count as paid time. And with small teams, the office manager who’s juggling payroll, scheduling, and HR is rarely able to catch every detail.
The result? Small slip-ups can ripple into big problems:
- Compliance risk: If your MA earns $25/hour and skips lunch three times a week, you owe an extra hour of pay for each missed break. That adds up to more than $3,900 a year for just one employee, and the cost multiplies quickly across a team. See why compliance matters in 3 Reasons Managing Staff in a California Medical Practice Is Challenging.
- Payroll accuracy: Shifting schedules and after-hours work make it easy to underpay or overpay. Even a 15-minute underpayment per shift for a biller making $28/hour equals over $1,700 a year — before penalties or claims. Learn more in The True Cost of Not Outsourcing Your Practice Admin.
- Team trust: A staff member answering after-hours messages for 10 minutes a day adds up to more than 40 unpaid hours a year — the equivalent of a full week’s work. Beyond back pay, it erodes morale and accelerates turnover. See also Low-Cost Ways to Boost Healthcare Staff Retention.
When compliance depends on handwritten logs or memory, you’re leaving your practice exposed. Timekeeping isn’t just paperwork — it’s the system that keeps your business side steady so you can focus on the clinical side.
Building Better Habits
Good timekeeping doesn’t need to be complex. The goal is to make accuracy automatic:
- Require staff to clock in and out for shifts and breaks.
- Train your team on why honest time reporting matters (no pressure to “work off the clock”).
- Audit time records regularly so small errors don’t become big claims.
- Use payroll and HR tools that integrate directly with timekeeping so you can stop reconciling by hand.
For a deeper self-check, try our Practice HR Quiz to see if your timekeeping and payroll processes could expose your practice to risk.
More Than Just Payroll
When timekeeping works, it frees physicians to focus on practicing medicine, not playing detective with timecards. It gives staff peace of mind, strengthens compliance, and builds a foundation where the business side of your practice supports the clinical side.
At MedWay, we help physician practices put these systems in place so timekeeping stops being an afterthought and starts being the quiet cornerstone of a healthy, thriving practice.
Here’s the reality: you may think HR support and payroll automation are expensive, but at just $89 per employee per month, avoiding even a single penalty for missed breaks or unpaid overtime could save you more than the entire cost of a year of MedWay’s HR & Payroll solutions.