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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)."
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.
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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.