Time tracking blog

This is for all of you QuickBooks users out there!  Up until now, you’ve only had two choices for mapping TSheets’ job codes to the QuickBooks Customer/Job/Service Items.  These two choices were limited in how they dealt with hierarchical Item lists in QuickBooks.  Well, no longer!  We’ve added a third choice for mapping that will allow you to map your tiered TSheets job codes to a tiered Item list in QuickBooks.

For new customers installing the QuickBooks Integration Add-on, the new choice will be the default, unless you choose otherwise.  For existing customers that want to switch to the new method – you can do so by opening your Customer Settings, clicking on Add-Ons, and then clicking on the Preferences button for your QuickBooks Add-on.  Underneath the mapping tab, you’ll see a new choice represented by this graphic:

If you have any questions about setup or configuration, please give us a call, we’d love to help!  A good place to start for first time setup is here: http://wiki.tsheets.com/wiki/Quickbooks_Integration

You may have noticed that our job code management tool feels a little bit snappier lately.  We’ve recently put in some enhancements that will allow it to scale much better for those of you who have a lot (and we mean a LOT) of job codes.  Enjoy!

We’re making some simple text changes to some items in our main menu that you should be aware of.

We’ve decided to change ‘My Account’ to ‘Company Settings’.  We think this makes more sense since we’ve recently added the ‘My Profile’ menu item.

Another important menu item change to note is the changing of ‘Weekly Timecard’ to ‘Manual Timecard’.  We’ve had quite a few customers ask about manual time entry and realized that it made more sense to label this tool to better reflect it’s use.

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.

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

Wondering what your co-workers are working on? We’ve just released some updates to the Who’s Working list that make it possible for you to see. Previously, we displayed the employee’s shift total. Now from the main TSheets web interface you can see what job/project someone is clocked in under, how long they’ve been clocked in for that job/project, and you can also see the total number of hours clocked for the entire day.

If someone is clocked in under a long job/project name, you’ll only see a portion of it in the Who’s Working list. However, you can see the full job/project name by hovering your mouse over the job/project and the full name will appear as a popup.

For employees who are currently off the clock, you’ll still be able to see the total number of hours they’ve clocked for the day.

Now you’ll know when the Sales team is talking up your latest gadgets and gizmos and the Development team is squashing those elusive software bugs :)

The Who’s Working List is displayed to admins by default, but you can allow any/all employees to view it by granting the ‘See “Who’s Working”‘ permission via the employee editor. You can further customize it to hide hours worked from employees via your My Account window -> Advanced tab. This will allow them to see who is working and on what job/project, but there will be no information displayed concerning how long they’ve been working for that day or shift.

Enjoy!

Today we have the pleasure of announcing another highly anticipated feature – Multi-level Job/Project codes!  TSheets users with the new business or freelancer accounts finally have the option of breaking away from a flat list of job codes, and can now track time against clients, projects, and tasks.

How does it work? Essentially multi-level job-codes work just the way they did before, except now there’s a parent / child relationship that can be created.  Use this structure to your advantage by breaking jobs/projects into levels.  Client -> Project -> Task is probably the most common way to break tasks out, but we’ve left it open ended so it will work for your unique needs.  Get started by clicking “Manage Employees” (yes, we know this is counter-intuitive) and then “Manage Jobs/Projects” at the bottom of the window.

We’ve added two new ways to make assigning job codes to employees easier.  Truly global job codes. For a long time we’ve had the ability to assign newly created job codes to “all current employees”.  We’ve now replaced that with an “Assign to everyone” check-box that makes that job-code globally assigned to everyone.  When job-codes are assigned to everyone they show up with a light-blue background color.  It’s important to realize that a job-code assigned to everyone with this option cannot be unassigned from anyone- it’s global.  Which leads us to the second improvement.

A new job-code assignment tool has been added.  To access it, create a job-code, then edit it again by clicking on the job-code’s name, and then click the new “Assign” button.  A new interface appears with a list of employees, allowing you to assign (or unassign) the job-code in bulk.  The screen-shot on the right shows it in action.

Moving forward. At some point we’re planning on adding a layer specifically for those of you tracking time for customer billing purposes.  We’re not sure what that will look like just yet, but it’s on our minds and might be ready in the 2-3 month range.  If you have suggestions be sure to post them, we take customer feedback very seriously.

More time tracker screen-shots:

Adding a new job-code:

Editing a job-code:

Moving a job-code:

Assigning job-codes to an employee: