Time tracking blog

Some of you may have noticed that we have multiple time cards to choose from, our standard and our new time card.  The new time card does a much better job at handling multi-level tasks and displays your most recently used tasks at the top for easier access.

If you’re an admin of the account, you have the option to select which time card you want your account (and therefore users) to use.  This can be done by following the link at the very bottom of the time card.

The new time card has a couple of new features to point out: Navigating multi-level tasks and most recently used tasks.

Navigating multi-level tasks is very simple.  If there is a folder icon next to the task, this means it is a parent task and has sub-tasks.  Clicking this will take you into the selected task and will display the sub-tasks.   To navigate back up to a parent task, follow the links in the task navigation area (at the top of the task list).

If there is a play (or stop) button next to the task name, this task is available to log and track time against.

Recently used tasks will automatically show up at the top of the list (with the active task being at the very top in green) regardless of which level they belong in (so, sub-tasks could appear and will be separated with slashes indicating levels).  These recent tasks will be highlighted with a star icon located to the right of the task name (see diagram below).

Hope you enjoy the new time card and if you have feedback please post it below.

Here’s a cool tip for all our Mac users out there: Run TSheets as a desktop app.  This allows for easier and quicker time tracking access.

Here’s how it’s done:

1. Download and install Fluid
2. Launch Fluid and create a site specific browser with the settings pictured below (you’ll want to point this to your TSheets account URL, or you can use https://app.tsheets.com/ip/)
   
3. If you’ve done everything right, you’ll get a success message.  Click ‘Launch Now’
4. From here you have two options. 1) run as a desktop app from the dock or 2) run as an app from your toolbar.  If you choose option 1, you’re finished.  For option 2, keep reading…
5. From the toolbar of the app you just launched, select the main app menu item and choose ‘Convert to MenuExtra SSB’
6. Click ‘OK’ to continue
7. You’ll now see the app shows up in your toolbar (along the top, close to your clock)

Hopefully you’ll find this as useful as I do (I use it more often than our main web application).

Let us know what you think.

From day one, we’ve always made it easy for our customers to track their time via extremely simple clock-in and clock-out functionality.  This is great for customers who want to track their time down to the second.  However, we’ve had great call from our customers for an easy way to enter their time manually.  This request often comes from those with salaried employees or consultants who have a block of time they need to track against a client.  We’ve heard your call and are responding with our latest feature, the ‘Weekly Time card’.

The Weekly Time card is an easy to use time ledger that allows you to easily and quickly populate your timesheet with multiple job/project codes and enter time in a spreadsheet-like format against those codes.  Daily and Weekly totals are calculated dynamically as you enter your data and are highlighted in a different color when they exceed configurable thresholds.  All data entered is stored on our redundant, backed-up infrastructure, of course – so you don’t have to worry about losing a thing.

It’s very easy to navigate around the timecard view – you can use your arrow keys to navigate to any cell on the sheet.  When you get to the bottom of your list, new rows are added dynamically as needed.  Whatever row and cell you are currently editing will be highlighted in a different color, so it’s easy to confirm which date/code you’re editing.

You have a Notes field which will show the notes you’ve entered for whichever cell you have highlighted in the grid.  You can edit the notes for any cell in the grid.

You can enable time tracking via the Weekly Time card for all employees, or individually for select employees only.

The Weekly Time card is one more way that TSheets customers can enter/view their time.  The list is really growing, here are some other ways that you can track time with TSheets:
> TSheets Touch
> Mobile Web App
> TGadget
> Mac Widget
> Jott Integration
> Web Interface

Josh Stephens from Coax Jax is one of the first customers that we’ve heard from who is using Jott Integration to keep track of employees’ time. Listen to this interview as he speaks about how TSheets and Jott have saved his company time and money by taking him from paper timesheets to voice activated time tracking.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 6 or above) is required to play this audio clip. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

“TSheets’ Jott Integration has saved me alone (not counting my employees) over 10 hours of administrative work every month!”

Josh Stephens (Coax Jax)

Here’s a bit from the Coax Jax website:

At Coax Jax, we are specialists at designing and implementing custom home theater systems, as well as custom lighting, motorized window treatments, and so much more. We will give you not only incredible home theater performance but also ease of use, so that you won’t feel lost. For the music and movie enthusiast, we will turn your home into a sight and sound paradise.

Today I spoke with a gentleman by the name of Rob who was experiencing a very common pain point in his business. He, like many CEO’s, is very rarely in the office during the day due to the simple nature of his position. This in itself is not an issue. The issue is that his employee time tracking is based upon the honor system. Ouch. Whenever Rob is not in the office all of his employees turn into saints that never show up late and can clock out just in time to make a perfect 40 hour work week. Sound familiar?

I’m sure most all of us have been here at one point in our lives or another and just like Rob, we too have felt the pain of the “honor system.” Just think how many shekels have literally flown right out the window due to employees who fudge 15 minutes here or there.

15 minutes on clock in and clock out is an extra 30 minutes that you’re doling out to this employee every day. That’s 2.5 extra hours a week, 130 hours a year. At $6 per hour that’s almost $780 a year that you’ve lost to just one artful dodger of the timesheet. Can you imagine if you had a whole office fudging just a little here and there? And let’s face it, we’re not even sure that employees of the Vatican don’t push a number around once in a while.

Fear not Brutus of the Boardroom, there IS a solution to this. It’s called automated time tracking and it’s just one of the many beautiful things that TSheets.com can do for you! For just 10 bucks a month Rob could be saving his company thousands of dollars a year.

The past couple of weeks have been very busy for the TSheets development crew.  From updates to Paid Time Off, to redesigning the blog, we’ve been busy rolling out new and improved features, with the TGadget being the latest.

What is the TGadget?

The TGadget is a slimmer, faster flavor of the original TSheets that you’ve grown to love.  It takes up less precious desktop real estate and provides a very quick and streamlined workflow, enabling you to track your time quickly and efficiently.  PLUS, it also functions as a Google Gadget and can be added to your iGoogle homepage.

How do I use it?

There are a couple of different ways to get started using the TGadget:

• From your main login screen (https://your_url.tsheets.com), you’ll see a box and screen shot that talks about the TGadget and how to use it.
• If you’re using an IPhone, you’ll be automatically redirected to the TGadget.  We’ve optimized it to work perfectly with the IPhone.
• You can follow this link to add the TGadget to your iGoogle homepage.

What’s next for the TGadget?

We’ll continue to refine and polish the TGadget, but most importantly this feature provides an ideal stepping stone for a desktop version of TSheets — making all of TSheets’ great features available to you without ever having to open a web browser window.

So take it for a spin, and let us know what you think.

Paid Time Off (PTO) support has been available to employees for a while now.  But now, managers can enter PTO for their employees easily.  They can also make modifications to PTO that the employees have entered themselves.

How does it work?
Open up the PTO Editor normally.  Then, to edit another employee’s PTO, begin typing the name of the employee in the input field at the bottom left of the screen.  You’ll see a dynamically loading list of matching employee names to choose from.  Select one, and then click on ‘Switch User’.  Now you’re editing PTO for that user, as indicated in the top left of the window.

You can easily assign PTO codes to an employee by clicking on the employee’s name (in the top left of the PTO Editor) to bring up the Employee Editor.  From there you can create/modify/assign PTO codes to the employee.

We’ve also fixed a bug in the Report Generator which caused PTO to be included in overtime calculations.  It will no longer do that, and you’re still able to see a tally of PTO broken out by PTO code as you would expect.

Feedback.
We’d love to hear your feedback about what works and what doesn’t work and what we can do to make it better!

As a Realtor, one of the most difficult aspects of your job is proving your worth.  Even once you’ve successfully completed the purchase or sell transaction there’s often questions of what you did for your client to earn your fee (aside from the obvious of getting the results they expected).

Since the real estate industry is mostly comprised of contractors (very few Realtors are employees), it’s not a requirement to track time spent working on tasks (as opposed to employees who have to clock-in and/or fill out timesheets). Without this time tracking task, it’s very difficult to provide your clients with a report showing them the time (and money) spent on getting their property sold or finding them a new one to purchase. This is often an overlooked task and if performed correctly would aid in justifying your fees.

To place emphasis on the importance of time tracking (from a client’s perspective) let’s imagine that your furnace quits working and you have a service man over for repairs.  He fixes your problem and hands you a bill for $500, but he doesn’t itemize how he spent his time.  Wouldn’t you question what he did for $500?  What if all he did was perform as simple a task as flipping a switch? You probably would be reluctant to pay without knowing what type of work was performed.  Right?  Now, imagine he handed you a detailed invoice outlining exactly what he did and how much time he spent on each task. You’d probably feel a little better about paying for the service at this point.  This same need is present in real estate transactions. Clients want to know how and where you spent your time, and more importantly, what you did to prove your worth.

By tracking your time using a timesheet or time clock system, you can effectively provide your clients with detailed information about how and what you spent your time on. This gives you ammo when the “What did you do for me to sell my home?” question arrises and in turn, helps you prove your worth.  And with over 1.3 million Realtors to compete against, any extra edge you can get is huge.

Track your time.  You’ll be more productive, provide better service and have happier (and more) clients.

No, it wasn’t an April Fools joke – today we released our newest tool to make managing your employee timesheets easier than ever.  We’re calling it the “Time Slider”.  The idea was simple; to create a tool that would allow administrators to visually navigate and manage their timesheets.  A lot of thought went into this tool, and hopefully you’ll find it useful and easy to use.

What can it do? The Time Slider can be used to resize existing timesheets by dragging the left or right side of any timesheet.  It can be used to create new timesheets by clicking and dragging in an area that doesn’t already have a timesheet.  It can be used to delete existing timesheets by clicking on a timesheet and then clicking the delete icon in the popup window.

Where’s the old timesheet list?  You can still access the old timesheet list (which won’t be going away) by clicking the big “List View” button in the top-left corner of the Time Slider.

Several businesses with locations in separate timezones have expressed their issues with managing timesheets in separate timezones, so with the Time Slider we decided to try a different approach.  The Time Slider displays all timesheets in your own timezone by default.  If you’re editing timesheets in another timezone that’s fine, but you need to be aware that you’re viewing those timesheets in your timezone by default.  To simplify this you can “Slide” your view to another timezone by clicking “View Options” and then selecting the timezone you’d like to display and manage timesheets in.

Feedback. Your feedback is what keeps us on our toes.   Time Slider is “beta” which means we still have a list of improvements we’ve got planned for it, but we were just too excited about it to keep it from you any longer!  I’d love to hear your feedback about what works and doesn’t work and what we can do to make it better.  Reply here in the blog (I watch it) or email me personally, brandon@tsheets.com.

Boise, Idaho – April 1, 2008 – Today, TSheets.com (www.tsheets.com) announced the launch of a new standard for web-based timekeeping called “Timeclock 2.0″. This standard was developed to create a benchmark for emulating the simple clock-in/out functionality of traditional time clocks, while still providing a web-based application. “We created this standard because most of the time keeping software is just too expensive and not practical for small business owners”, says Matt Rissell, CEO of TSheets. The standard focuses on the most critical point of time tracking, clocking in and clocking out. “If you can’t make it easy to clock in and out, business owners will just revert to paper timesheets”, says Rissell. Other elements of the standard include mobile clocking in/out, managing multiple locations, and payroll reporting.

Founded in 2006, TSheets is part of a growing web segment called “Software-as-a-Service” (SaaS) that uses a subscription-based business model to spread the costs of software over thousands of users, making it affordable for small business owners to use modern technology. Examples include Google’s Gmail, Salesforce.com, Yugma.com and dozens of other web-based business tools. Part of the popularity of SaaS applications is that they typically have a low monthly fee based on the number of users, with support and upgrades often included in the subscription fee. “Timeclock 2.0 is really made possible by the SaaS business model” says Rissell.

A typical small business owner still uses paper time sheets or analog punch clocks for managing employee time. Most PC based time keeping applications are bundled with expensive HR or payroll packages. Other web-based software is available, but cater primarily to single-users such as freelancers or contractors. TSheets’ customers are small business owners with 5 to 20 employees. “Our focus is the small business owner and his or her employees” says Rissell. Thus, the focus on emulating an environment that a small business owner is most used to. The key to making it easier to use for small business owners was simplicity. “We are constantly reminding ourselves who our core audience is” says Rissell.

Rissell has plenty of first-hand experience with the issues of time-keeping. As the owner of a chain of printing supply stores, Rissell experienced first-hand the frustrations of dealing with time sheets, payroll preparation, and consolidating multiple locations. “I just thought this was part of running a business”, says Rissell. What bothered him the most was the actual process of tracking time. “I knew that the numbers weren’t accurate, and it was driving me crazy” says Rissell. Most of this was not dishonest employees, but just the inherent nature of using paper time tracking methods. After not being able to find an application that would work for his business, Rissell contracted with a top developer named Brandon Zehm to build a web-based application. After using the application for a month, the results were obvious. “We figured we saved about $2000 in the first month” says Rissell. Not long after, Rissell sold his business and partnered with Zehm to start TSheets. “After my last company having the headache of over 30 employees and four locations, I was passionate about my next business being web based” said Rissell.

Since then, they have focused on keeping that original simplicity while still adding robustness and functionality. In addition to the announcement of the Timeclock 2.0 initiative, TSheets also announced the release of several new features of their web-based time tracking software, including the release of a free single-user version. One of the most unique new features is a time sheet editor that uses Rich Internet technology to allow managers to edit time sheets through a graphical interface called a “Time Slider”. Additional enhancements in this version include Paid Time Off (PTO) tracking, Quickbooks integration, and additional reporting functionality.

To learn more, visit TSheet’s media page at http://media.tsheets.com

About TSheets

TSheets (www.tsheets.com) is a web-based time and attendance program that allows you and your employees to clock in and out from a computer or cell phone. Currently, TSheets’ customers have several thousand employees using TSheets throughout the world and is multiplying daily. Founded in 2006, TSheets is based in Meridian, ID and currently has a staff of nine. For more information, please contact Justin Foster at Tricycle Consulting –justin@thetricycle.com or 208-841-3497.