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

TimeClockPlus

[peacefinder]

If you can afford a commercial solution, TimeClockPlus is excellent.

Domain Logon

[Bios_Hakr]

What would really be nice is if you could go to the Domain Controller at the end of the week and find out what users were logged in and for how long.

I'm almost sure Windows tracks this. Does SAMBA track it when acting as a DC?

In any event, figure out how that works and just have a script e-mail a report at the end of the week.

Lucid Information Technologies

[Jeff Molby]

http://www.linfotech.com/ They're about mid-way through the dev of time/project management app. You obviously wouldn't be getting a battle-tested app yet, but they're classy guys and you could probably influence the direction of the project.

Employee Scheduler

[clifyt]

Before we switched to a commercial solution (which was a mistake in retrospect), I had implemented an open source / php app I found over on SourceForge -- Employee Scheduler.

It was written for managing student employees in a library -- and its not half bad.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/empscheduler/

I ended up hacking the hell out of it, adding ajax calls so that it was a little more user friendly, and had ended up with a clock in / clock out solution (using student id cards and a card reader). Tried to contact a few folks listed on the site, but it looks like a dead project (and my source is gone...don't ask...wasn't that hard to do though). If there was a community around it, I would have kept using the software and contributed...but there wasn't.

Its good software, but it needs some work. If you are a php coder, you might want to think about trying it out and seeing if you can hack the functionality you need.

Re:Employee Scheduler

[clifyt]

Ignoring the obvious attitude,

I tried a few times to contact the folks that were responsible for the software to contribute to the source.

No response back. I had actually thought of setting up a fork'd project, but I was too busy with a few other projects to have everyone asking me questions. I wanted to donate to the original project and be done with it. I had cleaned up a LOT of HTML, converted it all to CSS (for instance, the web view and the print view used separate files that needed to be hacked twice to change anything...I used a print style sheet and threw away almost half the code), and de-spaghetti coded the PHP. Beyond that, it was mostly hacks to get things working for me (i.e., lots of crap with the prototype js library)

But all in all, I've had too much attitude thrown at me when I work open source apps. I prefer to get in and get out ASAP. I don't want my name associated because of it. I generally contribute anonymously when I do have to interact -- but most of the time, I prefer to just comment the hell out of code so that it is obvious to the newbie what I'm doing -- and honestly, this is why most of the BIG code I've given out has been put into the public domain because I don't want to get into arguments as to people's religion on code.

Either way, the point is moot now. By the time I had my head above water enough to do anything (running a university office and a music industry consultancy saps the energy outta ya), I found that the development server I had this on was wiped. Backups are probably on some DVDr, but who knows at this point. The code could be re-done in a day or two either way (and probably a lot cleaner now that I've gotten a lot more proficient at CSS and JS -- the PHP stuff was dead simple).