Time tracking blog

We love all of the great feedback we receive from our customers!  It helps make TSheets a more relevant tool for how you conduct business. 

Based on some recent feedback received, we made some minor adjustments to the summary area of our reports.  You’ll now see a line that indicates the ‘Straight time’ that an employee worked.  This is just a combination of the Regular hours and PTO hours that an employee worked.  The breakout of Regular and PTO hours is still available right underneath (see the image below).  Being able to easily distinguish between ’straight’ time and overtime made sense, so we’ve adjusted it for everyone.  This change is reflected on the HTML report, the PDF report, and the regular .csv report.

We also tweaked the pie charts so that they show the jobcode with the biggest percentage first on down to the smallest percentage last.  The layout of the time breakouts is also improved in the details for each employee.

Hope you like the changes! let us know if you have any questions.

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.

Does your organization process payroll on a semi-monthly basis?  Do you also have to calculate overtime?  Then you’re going to love this new feature.

Now within your TSheets account preferences you may specify what day you want your week to start on, and what you want your payroll period to be.  For example, you could specify that you have a semi-monthly payroll period – the first period ending on the 14th and the second payroll period ending at month-end.  And you can specify that your week starts on Monday.  How these settings affect reports is best illustrated by some pictures.

As you can see, overtime must be calculated based on the total hours for a given work week, and should be independent of what your payroll period start and end dates are.  Most companies process their payroll on a bi-weekly basis specifically so that they can avoid this kind of confusing calculation.  But if you have semi-monthly pay periods – or you want the ability to put in an arbitrary set of reporting dates, set the ‘Week Starts On’ appropriately for your account and TSheets will make sure that overtime calculations are handled appropriately.

You access these new settings by going to My Account -> Advanced, and then clicking on the Report Options tab