Slashdot Mirror
Low-Budget Network-Based Time Tracking Software?
0verkill asks: "I have been charged with the task of finding time tracking software to replace our current manual punch card method of tracking our employees time spent on the job. I would appreciate any feeedback/suggestions from anyone who has experience implementing and/or maintaing this software. Here are the criteria that I'm working with currently: I have a spending range of up to $400-$500; the software should support clocking in/out from more than one network attached workstation; basic report generation -- nothing too fancy but something that covers all the basics; and finally something that is resistant to time tampering (maybe software that could obtain an official time from our servers)."
Why not subscontract the development work, and then release the source as GPL. I'm sure there'd be at least a few people that would add patches etc to it!
No this is not a troll. If you have Windows then try TimeClock Plus. I was about to take some time and write a time tracker system when my boss just purchased this. I was pissed because I thought the project would be fun. It turns out that this software works really well for us and has saved my _lots_ of time. We only have version 3 but it will run in a client server mode and will get time from the server.
Google and Freshmeat searches can tell you what exists *if* people describe their software with descriptive terms. The search *won't* tell you if its any good.
Ask Slashdot is a chance to ask a relatively informed population for their advice and experience related to a topic. I think that's exactly what Ask Slashdot is for. Sure, they could ask in other forums like a newsgroup but people go with what they know.
I'll start with the obvious - did you search Google or Freshmeat for Time Reporting solutions?
You don't say how many users you are supporting, but if it's less than ten I have an answer for you. Journyx has a timesheet program that is free for less than ten users. It is commercial software that runs on Windows NT, Windows 2000, AIX, Solaris, Linux and FreeBSD. Annual maintenance (giving you priority tech support)runs $435, within your limit. Pricing beyond 10 users is above your price limit, starting at $1375 for the next 10 users.
They also offer a hosted version of their app, with the following pricing: a minimum purchase bundle of 25 users, a monthly cost of $7 per user, and an initial setup fee of the higher of $250 or $10 per user. I can't tell from your problem description if this will fit your needs or not, as, for example, if you had 25 users this would have an inital cost of $250 and then an ongoing monthly expense of $175, costing $2350 for the first year. There are also online partners running 5- or 10-user hosted sites free, if you have this few users and don't want to run the application in-house.
This is a web-based solution - users would log in to the web page and clock in or out themselves. Reporting capabilities are built-in. The fact that the app is web-based permits you to secure the host and fulfills your requirement that time reporting be secured from end-user tampering.
The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life
Christ, for 500 bucks, I'll write you one. Really. Contact me if you're interested.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
www.ibutton.com
:)
Use perl to read from serial/write to network, some more perl to set up a daemon. Everyone gets a button (with guaranteed unique serial number), and blue dots get installed on networked nodes. The buttons are pretty cheap, and the readers are also pretty cheap. You could get 100 people and 100 workstations all running this stuff with hardware costs well below your budget, and have some cashleft over to write the daemons (which would be really simple). You could use the rest of the budget to pay me to write the stuff for you - I'm pretty cheap.
First I apologize if my question didn't belong on slashdot in the firstplace this was my first post. I was not trying to get anyone to do my research for me I was just hoping to learn from the experiences of others both good and bad. /. community that is) we share similar intrests and many of us work with technology for a living. I hope that my question will be intrepreted as a compliment to the fact that I consider this to be one of the most meaninful, worthwhile, and knoledgable sources of information on the net. For those of you who posted your suggestions, Thanks a bunch! If anyone else has anything to add to this topic, now that I have provided more deatails about the requirements, your input would be appreciated.
I have played with apporx 8 demos of diffrent software and learned quite a bit. However, I consider the experience of people who have wrestled with this problem before to be far more valuable than my limited experience. I would consider programming the app myself but my boss is looking to implement a solution around the beginning of march. Second, I dont have much programming experience, at least not enough to fees comfortable writing it myself. I assumed that the time I spent working on it at work would 1: Cause me to neglect my primary responsibilites. 2: turn out to cost almost half as much if you consider the time that I would have to spend coding it given my general lack of experience. I appreciate the fact that writing it myself would probably prove to be the most meaninful solution. However I really didnt consider that to be a feasible option in this situation. In a lot of ways this is one of my first IT projects that involves not only the implementation of the software but the requirements gathering.
I would have provided more details on the requirements if I had known them myself. I met with the full-time employee (I'm a lowly student worker btw) today who is my management liason with this project.
This is what I can provide as an update if anyone is still interested. There will be about 30 employees (also student-workers) using the system. The program must be able to round to the nearest 15 minute interval. The program should be able to print out a version of the report that would be suitable for an employee's signature. The program must be able to either keep its on time, or prevent the user from casually changing the time on the system clock. The program must support a way to print reports sorted by the department the student works for. The program does not need to differentiate between sick/vacation/jury duty etc... Employees need a way to enter a manual time punch (with a supervisor required to enter a password for approval) The interface that the employees will be working with must be intuitve, with a mimimal learning curve.
I realize that I could have sought answers to these questions elsewhere but I wanted the opinions of the readers and posters of slashdot because I respect your opinion more so than I do most other groups out there. I feel that for the most part we have a lot in common, (the
My employer (http://www.nemein.com) sells a web-based solution that's fairly sophisticated. The big thing is that it combines project tracking features and has some nice reporting, as well as a pleasent user interface for inputing hours against different projects
We've installed it at a few clients during development in order to get feedback. We've just gone into a 'feature freeze' so that we can package it up as a 'version 1.0', complete with documentation. I don't know what the price will be for the package, but you might as well include us in your list of candidates. Contact us using the URL I gave you, or I can try to answer questions here.
(Note: the timetracker on the web-site is an early version. The new version is significantly different.)
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow