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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?"
If you can afford a commercial solution, TimeClockPlus is excellent.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
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.
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
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.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
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.
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.
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.
Make sure that the Vacation/Sick Time thing works and can be corrected if there's a problem. At one company I worked out, it was broken. I got sick for a while that my boss forced me to use sick time even though I wanted to use vacation time as I knew I was out of sick time. When they got it working again, I was in the hole for a whole year on sick time. I was repeatedly warned that I could be fired for this situation. My boss wouldn't admit he made a mistake, HR said there wasn't anything to do about and I made vague threats of resolving this in a court of law. When I later quit, I was surprised they didn't charged me for the sick time that I owe them. Go figure.
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.
SourceForge has this project that looks pretty promising. It has several others too, just search for "time and attendance".
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.
--Tim
When I first saw the title I thought sarcastically "Why don't you take Excel which is an accounting spreadsheet application and wildly contort it to your needs, like everyone else does.
Then I read the rest of the summary and.. well..
Enjoy your migration. I feel your pain. Whoever made that bed should have to lie in it. Ya right.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
I am putting together a time tracking system that is free for basic use and comes with a one month trial for the group use features. It's available here:
http://stufftodo.dedasys.com/
It's very simple and straightforward - what it has going for it is that all you have to do is tell it what you're working on via drag and drop, and it keeps track of how long you've been active on the project. Of course, this makes it most suitable for people who are at their computers most of the day, but I guess you can't be everything to everyone.
It is still beta-ish, so pricing is open to negotiation and feature requests are welcome.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
You work for a top 30 Uni that doesn't have an ERP system? I suppose I'm not too suprised at that, but that's really the best solution since if done properly it will tie everything together, not just time entry and tracking.
WorkBrain on Vista would most likely be as fun as having a DOJ and IRS audit at the same time
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Has anyone else heard of or tried Kronos http://www.kronos.com/ ?? Holiday Retirement Corporation uses it for its entire work force. I only use it at a facility level. We have Human Resources and and IT department who handles it on the technical end. From the level I am allowed to use it it handles with punch cards in/out times. It allowes multi-user log ins to manually add in split shifts, sick hours, and vacation time. I have heard a future version handles scheduleing and incorporates it into the time cards to automatically adjust for minimum 2hr rules. Sorry I don't know the technical details or cost.
. . . don't build it on Oracle Forms.
Just trust me - don't do it.
What?
For the last ten years, I've been developing Taskjitsu, an open source professional services automation system that tracks time sheets and tasks. It is freely available, GPL-licensed, and commercially supported by PKR Internet.
Taskjitsu is at its core a Java web application, layered on top of Tomcat and PostgreSQL. It runs on Windows, Linux, and any other system that can run Java 1.4. We have RPMs available that work with Red Hat Application Server 1.0 and other JPackage 1.6-derived systems.
We use Microsoft CRM with some modifications. You track cases / tasks / projects / etc and resolve with time. If you don't truly need clock-in / clock-out time, it should work great. And with the reports it generates you should be able to track total time - if it doesn't match your set hours, then your employees may be uhm reading slashdot or something :-D
Disclaimer: I am generally a Linux proponent, but Microsoft CRM truly is a good product.
The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody. -Ralph Waldo Emerson