Software for Managing Timesheets?

An anonymous reader asks: "I currently work as a help desk supervisor for the IT department of a Top 30 American university. We have around 40 graduate and undergraduate students manning our support areas at different times of the day and night, and a recent augmentation of our budget has us in the position to hire more. We still do our master schedule with a moderately complex Excel file, our time sheets are submitted online using a webpage, and our workers' clock in and out with a separate webpage which gives us reports that we import into yet another spreadsheet. Needless to say, our current, time-consuming method is rather clunky and has us looking at alternatives. What existing systems are out there that might fill our needs? What systems should we avoid?"

Comments

Timesheets

[colonslashslash]

I'm working for a company in the aerospace industry at the moment, and I was originally hired to create a project management system for them. Eventually, timesheets came up as an issue, and we decided to go our own route. We have about 12,000 employees worldwide, but it's easily broken down into about 100 different cost accounts. Without going into too much detail, what I have created is just a web-based frontend to a database table full of cost account codes, and a few tables storing employee ID and hourly/time information.

We spent an extensive amount of time evaluating the timesheet issue, and we came to the conclusion that licensing timesheet applications from third parties is really a waste of time and money. Remove the Excel sheets from the equation, hire a proficient web developer / DBA for a couple of months if you need to, but build your own system. This way, you can customise it exactly to your requirements, and not have to worry about the often massive costs involved in what is really a very simple (concept wise) application.

If you are determined to go down the third party application path, I would strongly advise you to avoid systems from vendors such as SAP. In my experience, they tend to create a whole bunch of (expensive) problems where there should be none, and you end up paying through the nose only to be left with buggy systems, costly consultant fees, and vendor lock-in.

Have you tried this open source solution?

[passion4]

Have you looked at TimeTrex Time and Attendance? Its open source, has web based clock in/out as well as several hardware based methods for greater efficiency, handles scheduling, time sheets and even payroll.

We've been using it for a while now and it has been working great, one of my friends who works at a major University uses it as well.

Another List of Time Tracking Software

[pci]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_time_tr acking_software

We use a product from http://www.dovico.com/ and it works well but it doesn't do scheduling.

Have you tried SourceForge?

[Anonymous Coward]

SourceForge has this project that looks pretty promising. It has several others too, just search for "time and attendance".

Replicon Web Timesheet

[diegoq]

We use Replicon Web Timesheet. It's a web-based solution, the website is usable by Firefox, IE, and Opera. The server runs on the Windows platorm, and uses a Microsoft or Oracle database. Of course, if you're not a Windows shop, this probably isn't the answer for you.

It works great for us. We've been using it for 7 years now, with 40-ish users. No problems, it's a great product. Entering time is easy, the reports are powerful, and it can integrate with other software. We integrated it very easily with our in-house account-management system.

If you don't want to run the software yourself, I see they have a hosted offering.

Mark Shuttleworth has a project for this problem

[Qbertino]

Mark "Mr. Ubuntu Linux" Shuttleworth has a team he sponsors building on a project called 'School Tool'. It's a) built in Zope, which is quite possibly the most advanced (if yet compareatively slower) web application server in existance and probably the most sophisticated enviroment for this sort of thing and b) is a project that is in extremly good shape (having failed once when attempted in Java) and lead by people with solid software developement experience and skills. If SchoolTool doesn't solve your multiple-timesheets problems I'd say your outa luck because AFAICT it's the best software for this sort of thing there is.

timesheetphp

[tonigonenstein]

I am surprised almost no one mentioned free software solutions. We use timesheetphp at work and its pretty good. We naturally had to make a couple modifications but not that much. Check the demo on the web site.