In the manufacturing process of high imaging performance lenses, the errors of the surface figure and the material homogeneity make it hard to realize extremely-small aberration lenses. Lots of compensation strategy must be applied and the lens elements clocking is an essential one. A clocking algorithm that can figure out the right angle of lens is proposed and the validity of the algorithm is proved by an experiment, it also shows that clocking is a potential strategy of wavefront compensation. A principle that can be used to judging the compensability of a lens and selecting optical material is proposed. At the end of the paper, a method of modeling multi-field optical system for clocking compensation is proposed, and the analysis result of optical design software proves that it′s useful. Clocking is an effective and economic compensation method in high performance lens manufacturing process, and it is meaningful for image performance improving.