Timecard GPS: Premium Pay Configuration

The new Premium Pay Configuration will enable companies to keep track of their employees' meals. There are different things this feature will allow your company to do:

1. You can assign meal time for specific periods of times.
2. You can also setup a default time for this meal time, which will be used to determine if employees had to finish their breaks before time due to work requirements.
3. By setting up these rules, the system will provide a number of automatic alerts, such as break reminders or if the taken break has been too long.

To enable this, go to the Administration tab and click on "Manage Premium Pay Configuration". These are the options that you will see. Make sure to click on "Enable Premium Pay" to activate it:

The following list explains what each of the configurable fields means:

• First Meal Entitlement Duration: minimum shift duration that entitles an employee to a first break.
• Second Meal Entitlement Duration: minimum shift duration that entitles an employee to a second break.
• First Meal Within Duration: maximum time where the first break must be taken.
• Second Meal Within Duration: maximum time where the second break must be taken.
• First Reminder After Duration: time after shift start when the worker will be reminded to take the first meal break.
• Second Reminder After Duration: time after shift start when the worker will be reminded to take the second meal break.
• Reminder Frequency: how often the system will remind an employee to take a break if it hasn't been done after the specified time.
• Duration of the Meal Break: how much time the employee is expected to take as a meal break.

In this example account, we have configured a 30 minute meal break. Employees will be entitled to take a first break if they work at least 4 hours and a second one if they work 8 hours at a minimum. If the staff hasn't taken the break once the maximum worked time is reached, a notification will be shown every 15 minutes.

The following are examples of events that employees will visualize in the application related to Premium Pay.

- The user is approaching the 4th worked hour and hasn't taken the meal break yet, so the system reminds him to take it:

- Once the employee has passed the 4 hour mark, they will get the following reminder:

- If the meal was taken after the first or second period (according to the order the breaks are setup), the user will be prompted to confirm that it was either at their election or due to work requirements. Completing this step will require a signature.

- If the Meal was finished before the duration set (in this example, 30 minutes), the field worker will be prompted to confirm it was at their own election and if it was because of work requirements. A signature is also needed to proceed. This step will be the same for both the first and second meals:

- At the end of the day when the employee clocks out, a series of questions will be shown as follows:

Please keep in mind that the questions will be shown depending on the answers the employees provide, the above images with Yes/No buttons illustrate all the possible questions your staff will get.

The Premium Pay will only be recorded once in one of the following scenarios, which will be the first one that happens. This is using the same example of a first period of 4 hours and second period of 8 hours setup with a meal time of 30 minutes, so feel free to substitute these values with what your organisation uses:

1. If the first meal was taken after the 4 hour period due to work requirements.
2. If the second meal was taken after the 8 hour period due to work requirements.
3. If the meal had to be finished in less than 30 minutes also due to work requirements.

If you wished to review the information generated with this functionality such as the answers to the questions and the signatures, you can use the "Premium Pay Raw Data Report", found of course, in the Reports section.

Let us know if you have any questions or comments, or contact us for more information.

--Econz Team

Timecard GPS: New Administrator Settings (August 23, 2017 Update)

We have made a couple of changes to provide Managers and Administrators more control over what functionality they want to enable for their staff, specifically:

• Timesheet Signoff
• Task Search on Device
• Tracking During Breaks
• Clock-in Photo
• Editing Events through the mobile app

To enable or disable these features, please go to the Administration tab and select "Preferences" on the Basic section.

Scroll to the bottom of the settings and you will find the following options:

Make sure to enable or disable these features according to your company's needs and only if you need them!

Here is a brief description of each feature (click on the links to read the full article):

• Timesheet Signoff: give employees the ability to sign and approve their hours and have a Manager approve or decline, edit and resubmit these timesheets for re-approval.
• Task Search on Device: enable a search functionality within the Tasks List, so employees can punch in to tasks that have been uploaded to teams they don't belong to.
• Track During Breaks: when it's active, the app will continue to track the GPS location of the staff. If disabled, they won't be tracked during breaks.
• Clock In Photo: if checked, employees must take a picture to be able to clock in for the day.
• Event Edit on Phone: allow field workers to edit their punches.

If you need help understanding these features or you would like us to enable them for you, or if you just have some questions, please feel free to contact our support team here.

-- Econz Team

Timecard GPS Supervisor App

The Timecard Supervisor Application is the newest addition to our Econz lineup. This version will enable field employees to have features that were previously only available to web users, such as viewing company users' timesheet and GPS location activity.

To be able to use these features, a special type of user needs to be created. On the web portal, go to the Field Workers tab and click on Add New on the top left of the screen.

Make sure to follow these settings below. The Device ID is the user's phone number and the Name is of course, the employee's name. Device Type must be "TimeCard" and User Type has to be "Field Worker Administrator". Use the time zone according to your location and and set the password to something secure of your choosing.

Let's check out the new functionality the Timecard Supervisor app has! It can pretty much do everything the Full Version of Timecard GPS does, you will be greeted with the familiar home screen:

Here is where the good stuff begins. Swipe from the right border of the screen to the left and you will see the map. If you do the same while in the map view, you will be able to see the Employee List. This is the equivalent of the Home Lists screen on the web portal.

You will have three filters that can aid you to view a specific individual's last activity and location. The first one is the Status filter, which you can use to filter users according to their current clock in status.

Then, you will see the Time filter, useful to focus on a specific date or one of the other options shown below:

Finally, the user filter can be used to focus on just one person at a time. You can even type the name of the employee you are looking for and tap on Filter, if you want to do a search instead of looking for names in the list.

Below is what it will look like when you do a search with a name. You can tap on the Send button to send messages to employees through the application.

Entering a name in the User filter, will of course allow you to focus on that person's last location, for example, here  is Juanita's last location:

We hope you can get the best out of the newly added functionality of the Timecard Supervisor app. If you had any questions, feel free to contact our support team or leave us a comment in the comments section.

--Econz Team

Timecard GPS: Editing User Events

This blog post will cover one of our newest and most important features: Inserting Events from the Web Portal.

This is a powerful tool for companies that need to edit and add punches in case someone in the staff forgot to clock in to a task or a break.

To access this feature, go to the Administration tab and click on "Edit User Events" in the "Basic" section.

Once inside you can use the Team, User and Date filters to find what you need to edit.

In this example, we already have a user that needs some edits done. We are going to cover the four available options:

1. Changing a task
2. Adding a Clock-in and out
3. Inserting a task
4. Inserting a break

1. To edit a task, click in the following icon:

The next step is easy, just select the Task...

...and Subtask (if applicable)...

 and then pick your reason for the change before clicking on "Save Changes":

After this, you will see the change reflected immediately:

2. The next thing you can do is insert a Clock in/out event. Keep in mind this has to be done in a time frame where there are no punches.

Click on the button shown above (the one with the small watch) and you will be taken to the following screen:

Here you can select a task and a subtask, just like you did in the previous section:

Also, you need to select the Start and End times along with the reason for the change:

Once you are ready, Save it, then the new punches will be added to the system:

3. Let's say this employee worked on something else during this day, so you need to insert a task in between. The Insert Task Start/End button is your best friend here:

After clicking this button, the next screen will look very familiar, that's because it's the same process that we just did:

Select the appropriate Task, Subtask with its Start and End Times and the reason for the change, and finally click on "Add". Your inserted Task will be added:

4. Of course, we can't forget about breaks or lunches, we need to add a break in between, so the button with the Pause icon is the one that you are looking for:

This one is also very similar to the previous steps we did, the difference is that instead of a Task, you need to select a Break Type (this will vary depending on your setup).

We have chosen a 15 Minute Break and entered the time accordingly. Click on Add and the break will be added to the timesheet:

Finally, let's take a look at how the punches will look like on one of the reports:

As you can see, everything looks perfect!

Let us know if you have any questions.

--Econz Team