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.

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.

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).

Re:Domain Logon

[LordEd]

Time logged in does not necessary equal time worked. People have meetings, reboot computers, work on paper, etc. What happens if somebody forgets to log off?

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.

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.