Time tracking blog

We have released our new scheduling add-on to everyone. You can now create a schedule for specific times, events or shifts.  Users, Admins or Managers can be enabled to receive reminders (via text, email or twitter)  about clocking in/out of a scheduled event.

This add-on has a lot of great features that you should try out! Check out our wiki for a detailed guide on how to use the scheduling add-on and/or you can watch it in action through this video link.

Now you can set your Timesheets to automatically round to the nearest increment of your choice upon clock in and/or clock out. All of it is customizable, so it still leaves you in control. Many of you have requested this feature because it just keeps things simple – the middle name of TSheets so to speak.  Dealing in even numbers is always better than dealing with fractions.

Read more about installing and using this add-on by following this link. Or you can check out the video below.

Does your business operate with mobile crews? If so, this new feature is sure to please. You can now clock in other users via a text message (if you are an admin or manager of those people).

All you have to do is send your text message as usual, but add @username for each user that you want to perform the clock-in/out for. Let’s view a few examples. If you’re new to text messaging with TSheets, be sure to check out our wiki page on Time Entry Using Text Messages.

• You want to clock in user1, user2, and user3 to the ‘construction’ job code – easy:
  • t in construction @user1 @user2 @user3

• You want to switch user2 and user3 to the ‘cleaning’ job code:
  • t in cleaning @user2 @user3

• You want to add a note to all three users’ timesheets (make sure you don’t put the usernames after the ‘notes’ keyword, else we’ll just include them as part of the note and only put it on your own timesheet):
  • t @user1 @user2 @user3 notes Everyone worked hard today

• You want to clock user1, user2, and user3 out:
  • t out @user1 @user2 @user3

• What if you want to include yourself in the list of people you’re clocking in or out? Just use @me to indicate yourself:
  • t in construction @user1 @user2 @user3 @me

This is a really powerful feature and we believe you’ll agree that it is a real time saver. Have a crack at it and let us know what you think!

For the past couple of months we’ve been hard at work on many different projects, one of the highlights is our new scheduling add-on. This add-on allows you to schedule users for an event and enable them (and/or managers and admins) to receive reminders to clock in/out for the scheduled event.

Please note: This add-on is still in beta and is still under development. Please be patient and submit all bugs/feedback to support@tsheets.com.

Sit back and watch the video below for a quick overview or if you want more detail, visit our in-depth article posted on our wiki.

Ready to get started with scheduling on your TSheets account?  Give us a ring at 888-836-2720 or send us an email at support@tsheets.com and ask for the ‘Scheduling Add-On’.

We’ve just made a change to our Timesheet Report.  All of the line-by-line details of each employee’s time are now hidden when you first run a report, leaving you with nothing but their total breakdown of time.  This will make it much easier for you to quickly review the totals for your employees.  However, the details are still there and easily accessible – you can view the details on one employee at a time, or you can show all details for all employees with a single click near the top of the report.

Give it a try – let us know what you think!

2009-12-10
FYI – We’ve made it so that your last-chosen state will be remembered when you re-visit or re-run a report. So if you like the details to be shown, just show them once and they’ll stay that way until you decide to hide them again, and vice versa.

Thanks for all of the great feedback so far!!

Jared

This feature has been requested many times and I’m pleased to announce that employees now have the ability to maintain their own profiles (with an admin’s permission of course).

Want to watch a video instead? Skip ahead to video.

As an Employee

From an employee’s perspective using the employee profile editor is dead simple.  If this feature is enabled for your account, you’ll see a menu item labeled ‘My Profile’.  Once clicked, this launches the profile editor (see below).

Simply make your changes and click Save.  Your profile has now been updated.

As an aside, with this feature enabled, you’ll also have the ability to reset your password from the login page (previously this was reserved for admins only).

As an Admin

As an admin, you’ll need to elect to allow your employees to manage their profile or not. This can be done through the ‘My Account => Advanced => User Options’ area (see below).

From this panel you’ll be able to allow employees to maintain and edit their profiles (or not) and even restrict them to only editing certain areas of their profile (username, email, password, time zone). Simply check the boxes next to the items you wish to allow and click ‘Save’.
Note that employees currently logged in will not see these changes until they logout and then back in.

If you get stuck please reference our wiki article about allowing employees to edit their profiles.

See It In Action

Watch the video below to see the Employee Profile feature in action.

Our Manual Time Card (aka the Weekly Time Card)  is the tool used by many for manually entering their time.  We’ve made a few enhancements to it recently that you may have already noticed!

For those of you that are impatient and would rather just watch a video, click here.

First of all, what’s in a name?

Apparently a lot!  We found that a lot of new customers were confused when we started talking about the ‘Weekly Time Card’ – they didn’t understand what it was for.  However, as soon as we would refer to it as the ‘Manual Time Card’, it was usually ’nuff said and they got it right away.  So we decided to make it easy – we’ve officially renamed the ‘Weekly Time Card’ to the ‘Manual Time Card’.  You’ll see a new menu entry for the Manual Time Card now.  We’re still leaving the menu entry for the Weekly Time Card there for a little while, to let you get used to the name change, but don’t expect to see it there for more than a few weeks!

Picking a week

Let’s say you want to go a few months back to review the time you put in over the summer months – it used to be that you had to click back one week at a time until you hit the right spot.  Well, no more!  Now you can choose a week via a pop-up calendar instead of having to scan from week to week.  To open the calendar, simply click on the weekly date range at the top of the window.  You’ll see a popup calendar, where you can select any day in the week you’re targeting, and you’ll be taken there instantly.

Notes for a cell

One of the handiest features of the Manual Time Card is the ease with which you can enter notes that get tied to a particular cell’s hours.  This allows you to easily keep track of your daily activities and associate them with which client / project / task you were working on.  However, sometimes it was a little annoying when you went back to look at your notes, because there was no quick way to identify which cells had notes and which did not.  Enter the handy-dandy notes indicator!  This is not a new idea, we borrowed from the popular spreadsheet applications out there to display a triangle in the upper right-hand corner of those cells which contain notes.

Copy Last Week’s Jobs

This was one of our most requested features for the Manual Time Card.  More often than not, users are using the same job codes over and over from week to week.  You may now click on the ‘Copy Last Week’s Jobs’ button in the top left corner to quickly populate your job codes from the previous week to the current week  (I can hear you cheering through the Inter-tubes!).  Let us know what you think!

PTO Bank Totals

Lest I forget, you may also notice the blue colored total next to the ‘Vacation’ job code in the shot above.  If you have PTO Accruals enabled, and the user has the permission to enter PTO time, they’ll be able to see their remaining PTO balance next to the relevant job code.  Pretty cool, eh?

See It In Action

Watch the video below to see the Manual Time Card in action.

If you have any more questions about the Manual Time Card, please see our User Guide Page about it.

Hot on the heals of our new PTO code management tool updates, we’re pleased to announce and roll out our PTO Accruals Add-on!

We’ve had several clients using this feature for the past couple of months and have finally deemed it ready for release. You’ll notice this option on your account if you have a Business or Platinum account.

What is it?

The PTO Accruals Add-on allows you to use your TSheets account to track and accrue paid time off hours for yourself and your employees.  Currently we only offer yearly accruals, but have plans for monthly and pay period type accruals in the near future (if you’d like this sooner, let us know).

We’ve built it to allow you to set company defaults as well as personalized PTO settings and balances for individual employees.

How do I use it?

The easiest way to explain how to use PTO Accruals is by showing you.  Sit back and enjoy the short video below.

We hope you find this new feature helpful. Please let us know if you need help during setup or have any questions along the way.

If you’re one our our legacy customers, please contact us to learn how easy (and affordable) it is to upgrade to our new Business or Platinum accounts.

We’ve just recently updated our Paid Time Off (PTO) Code Management tool to be easier to use and include the much needed global assign option.

Along with this update, we’ve also gone ahead and refined the assign job/pto code tool (used in both the new PTO Code Management tool and Job Code Management tool).

You can now group by group name and sort by first/last name.

We’ve got a lot of new features coming in the next couple of months, so check back often or subscribe to this blog to receive automatic updates.

The future of time tracking has arrived! Receive alerts and be informed when overtime has almost been reached. That’s right! Now you can stop overtime before it wreaks havoc on your payroll!

The Basics

There are a few notes that you should know about the overtime alerts before you dive right in:

1. Everybody is allowed one weekly and one daily alert. If you create any new alerts that interfere with older ones, the new ones will override the old.
2. The authority chain goes as follows: Employee > Group > Company.
3. The alerts will “assume” that the first day of the week is on Sunday if you don’t have your Week Starts On day set.
4. When you type in the number of hours the number will be rounded to the nearest whole number (ex. 37.5 = 38; 37.1 = 37).

How It Works

Everyone knows how frightening overtime is – and it can stack up quickly! Whether it’s skipping a lunch here, staying late enough to finish up a phone call another day – everyone is susceptible to the dangers of overtime. So the TSheets developers came up with a plan to warn people when they are approaching overtime. Not only can you warn the employee, however, you can send alerts to their manager or to the administrator.

Basically, what happens is our system is programmed to run a check every 15 minutes, and alert anyone that meets the requirements of being clocked in past their set limits. Chances are you will not be alerted at 5:00 on the dot that your employee has reached 8 hours, instead you will be alerted sometime between 5:00 and 5:15 that your employee is X number of minutes over 8 hours. (Don’t worry, the number will be accurately displayed. For example, an email sent at 5:05 will say that employee X has been on the clock for 8 hours and 5 minutes).

The best part? TSheets doesn’t calculate the time by the set hourly time – it will alert you to the time specific to your employee! So if an employee came in 30 minutes late TSheets will take into account their number of clocked hours, not the typical 9 to 5 work day – so nobody gets sent home early!

Lets Get Started

The Overtime Alerts are set up as an add-on. This means that they are optional for your account; but free to use if you wish to take advantage of it (for Business accounts and up, if you have a legacy account contact us for your upgrade options). It also means that you will have to install the add-on before you will be able to use it, below is how to obtain the alerts and get them rolling.

Installing the Add-On

1. Log on to your account as an administrator.
2. Click on the “My Account” link on the left hand side of your main menu.
3. Navigate to the “Add-Ons” tab.
4. Scroll through the possible add-ons until you find the one labeled “Overtime Alerts”.
5. As soon as you click on the “Install” button a new box will pop up – this is the preferences box.
6. Here you will set up the alerts to match what you want.
7. Save your changes.

To make things easier on everyone we have the ability to set up our sample alerts automatically. Before you set up any alerts at all you will be presented with a blue box (shown above) that will allow you to click a button and have our two most popular alerts set up for you. One of these alerts will inform you when an employee has reached 8 hours in one day and is still on the clock, the other alert will let you know when an employee has reached 38 hours in a week.

Setting Up Your Alerts

1. Open the preferences box for your Alert Add-on.
2. Click the “Add Alert Rule” button.
3. You will be presented with a box to fill out parameters for this alert.
4. Choose who this alert is for: “All Employees”; “One or more Groups”; “One or more Employees”.
5. Fill out the “Who” box – as you type you will be presented with suggestions; click on the appropriate one. (Only applicable if you did not choose “All Employees”).
6. If you are choosing to make this rule for more than one person click the “Add Another” button below the “who” box.
7. Type in the number of hours you want to be alerted at.
8. Select if that is the number of hours per “day”; “week”; or “never”.
9. Select who you would like the alerts to go to and how you would like to have them received.
10. Click the save button.
11. Repeat this process for as many rules as you need, once you are done click the “Done” button in the bottom right hand corner.
12. Rest easy! Your overtime hours will be closely monitored.

Questions or comments? Please post them below.