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.

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

The reporting feature is probably the most used and most important feature found in TSheets.  Reports with raw data are good, but reports with graphs are even better.  I’m pleased to announce that our reports now have graphs!

Accessing the newly enhanced reports is as simple as running a timesheet report from within your TSheets account.

We’ve got many more ideas about adding more and different types of graphs to the reports page, but we wanted to ask you, our customers, for ideas about what you would find most useful.  So, here’s your chance to help change the face of our reports.  Post your ideas in the comments area below.

These are relatively simple new items, but nonetheless, they are new & we wanted you to know about them!

Timesheet List Updates
When viewing the timesheet list, you can now sort the list in chronological or reverse chronological order by clicking on the “Time In” tab. We’ve also added the ability to sort the timesheet list by Time Out, Total Hours, First Name, Last Name, Job Code, and Location. Just click the approperiate tab and you’re on your way. The user search has been improved too. You can now search employee’s timesheets by either first name, last name or email in addition to user name.

To get this new update, click on “Manage Timesheets”, then click “List View” in the upper left hand corner. If you need to refresh your browser, you’ll see a baby blue notification pop up directing you to do so in order to enable the new feature.

Updated Report
Once again, our customers are helping shape the wow factor & usability of TSheets – keep the requests coming in!
The new PDF reports are easier to read for Internet Explorer users and the job codes are no longer abbreviated, you will now see the full job code name.

New People
It is very exciting to be hiring people when there are local companies shutting their doors and  down sizing all over the place.  Please welcome our newest additions to the team!

Bill Logsdon: Bill is a local boy with general manager experience in the cable TV industry that loves to connect with customers and thrives on creating relationships.  He has an impeccable sales record that led him to one of the top positions in the Northwest.  Bill is a dedicated father of two: Alyvia & Jaksen and loves to shoot hoops when ever the chance arises.

Rick York: Rick is a fresh faced graduate of Northwest Nazarene University with a degree in Business Administration.  His unmistakable swagger with customers makes him likable and successful at solving problems at the same time.  Rick is a sports nut to the core & loves to throw the ball around even in our parking lot on a snowy day.

Jen Harris: Jen landed at TSheets in November of 2008, geared up to make a difference in a company with a social media plan.  With three years of educating, training & doing social media for local SMB’s, Jen understands the power of the internet when combined with evangelical customers and a great product.  Jen has three kids: Five year old Ella & two year old twins Henry & Clara.

Thanks to our friends over at onlineaccounting.com, we received a huge education on ways to improve our QuickBooks export format.  In other words, we just got schooled by the women who wrote the book on using QuickBooks properly.  If you use QuickBooks for processing payroll or want to easily create invoices from your time tracking data, you are going to love this!

Our QuickBooks integration has been rewritten as an Add-on, and can now be found in the Add-ons section of your Freelancer, Business, or Platinum TSheets account.  To get started, open the My Account window from the main TSheets interface, and click on the Add-ons tab.  Scroll down and locate the QuickBooks Add-on, and click on Install.  Upon doing this, another window will open up where you’ll be presented with an array of configuration options.

Some of the items you’ll get a chance to configure as part of the Add-on are:

• Company Create Time – This is a unique code related to your installation of QuickBooks, and is required in order to import time into it.
• Payroll Items – TSheets now allows you to enter your QuickBooks Payroll Items into TSheets, and map a default one to each of your employees!  This is going to make processing payroll much more like a checkup as opposed to a root canal.
• Customer / Job / Task Mapping – Yes, you can have your TSheets time mapped directly to your Customers, Jobs, and Tasks in QuickBooks.  It’s just a matter of naming your job/project codes so they match your QuickBooks entries.
• Billable Job Codes – That’s right, you can now mark a job/project code as billable or not.  If you export time that was tracked against a billable job code, it will set the billable flag so that it can be an invoice item once it’s imported into QuickBooks.
• Define Payroll Schedule – You can define your payroll schedule (weekly, biweekly, twice a month, monthly) so that you don’t have to do manual calculations when pulling reports.  Just select the pay period with the correct period end date and you’re ready to go.

Here are a few images so you can get a feel for how easy this is.  Check it out yourself via a free trial account, we think you’ll be pleased!

Company Create Time

Payroll Items

Billable Job Codes

Payroll Schedule

Many of you have requested an export to .pdf feature. You spoke, we listened. An export to .pdf feature is now included in your TSheets reporting options. The main benefit is portability and ease of use. By exporting to a .pdf, you can now easily attach this timesheet to an email, file it in your personal files, compile weekly timesheets in one easy to read document, etc. By compiling a number of timesheets in one PDF, it’s now easy to create a (non) paper audit trail.

As a self employed professional, it will now be much easier to run a report, export to .pdf and send off to a client in an easy to read familiar format, explaining hours worked on project XYZ, an over/under estimate of project ABC, etc.

We’re also updating the already existing .csv export option. The current .csv report does not export as pure raw data, but rather includes a number of calculations already done for you. Many of you expressed interest in a ‘raw’ format that could easily be imported into a number of data integration systems such as payroll and/or HR databases.

Again, you spoke, we listened. Since you now have the option to export raw data, you and your IT department are free to do whatever you so choose with this data. Whether it be a pre-existing database you’re using, or building a custom database, TSheets can now provide you with raw time data.

Overtime calculation is a piece of timekeeping that usually differs from state to state, and may even differ from company to company within the same state.  While TSheets does not process payroll for companies, we do offer the ability for a customer to configure overtime tallies based on configurable weekly and/or daily overtime thresholds.  We have introduced a new option in the overtime calculation area of the Advanced Settings of the My Account box that should make it easier to make the TSheets tallies of overtime match how our customers process overtime.

The new option is only available if you have first enabled daily overtime calculation.  You can then use ‘Count All Hours Towards Weekly Overtime’ on the Overtime tab to choose whether or not to include daily overtime hours in the calculation for weekly overtime.  By default, this will be unchecked, meaning that once an hour is counted as an overtime hour under some form of overtime, it will not be counted as an hour worked for the purpose of another form of overtime. For example, when an employee works ten hours in one day, the two daily overtime hours will not also be counted as hours worked for the purpose of weekly overtime.

If, however, your policy is to count all hours worked for the purpose of weekly overtime, regardless of whether daily overtime existed, then you would check the box.  This would result in an employee working ten hours in 1 day, and the two daily overtime hours also being counted as hours worked for the purpose of weekly overtime.

Below is an illustration of calculating overtime with the ‘Count All Hours Towards Weekly Overtime’ box unchecked:

And here is an illustration of calculating overtime with the ‘Count All Hours Towards Weekly Overtime’ box checked:

Keep in mind that TSheets provides overtime calculations for convenience and reference only, and due to its complexity, the customer is ultimately responsible for the accuracy of their payroll.

As part of TSheets‘ mantra, we’re all about helping you get control of your time and attendance in a simple and affordable manner. This means bringing down to the minute accuracy to your time tracking, eliminating the amount of time it takes to gather information and run reports and allowing you to get a real time view of what is going on within your company.

How do we do this? We help you eliminate paper timesheets and all of the time and money that you loose using them. No more employees fudging hours based upon estimated times. No more hours spent on collecting, correcting, compiling or calculating times to run a single report. Overall, with an online timesheet we’re helping you streamline your time and attendance system, while bringing you more accuracy at SIGNIFICANTLY lower costs.

As you know TSheets is dead set on making your time and attendance tracking easy and affordable. One of the largest expenses you pay out, and you may not even realize it, is in generating reports.

If you think of all the time that you or your bookkeeper spends on trying to collect, correct, compile and calculate just one pay period’s report you may be surprised at how much time is actually being spent. Time is money (as you know), so you actually may be paying out big bucks just to gain an understanding of how much you need to pay an employee.

It’s for this very reason that TSheets gives you the ability to run reports quickly based upon any date range you select. You can view reports instantly for yesterday, last week or even last month. You can look at individual employee hours, time spent on certain jobs or even how much time was spent by a given department all at the click of a mouse. This is just one of the ways we try to get you back into control of your time and attendance.