Friday, May 28, 2021

Update to GPS Based Tasks

Hello everyone!

After hearing the valuable feedback our customers have provided us, we have decided to make an update to one of our most interesting features called GPS Based Tasks, which enables employees to have an updated tasks list depending on a radius around their current location.

With this update, the setup has been moved from the application to the Administrator Portal, making it even easier to configure the radius for the whole company at once! For this, just go to the Administration tab and access "Preferences". Then, look for the option called "Job Show Radius":


In this field, you will be able to configure the size of the radius in miles, so that any tasks that have addresses or coordinates are shown on the employees' devices depending on their current location.

Note that you can tick the option for "Hide on Missing Coord" in case you want to hide any tasks that don't have addresses or coordinates.

Then, all that your mobile staff would need to do is hit Menu/Connect before selecting a Task to update their current Task List. Here is an example with the full Tasks List, having this setting disabled:


Then, we go ahead and set the radius to 0.5 miles:


After doing Menu/Connect on Timecard GPS, we see that the list of tasks has been updated to reflect only those which are closest, which of course are fewer than before:


Let's say we now want to make the radius a bit larger, so we go back to Preferences and set it to 1.2 miles:


Then we go back to the application and hit Menu/Connect one more time, and as we can see, more tasks will appear based on the bigger area:


Let us know if you have any questions or comments down below!



--Econz Team


Friday, May 14, 2021

Requesting for Reasons for Lunch Not Taken

Hello everyone! Today's post will go over a very useful feature that companies can use to document whenever employees are not able to take a Meal Period after a specific amount of time. With this, they will be asked by the application to type their own reason and this will be emailed to the contact configured for the Manager assigned to that task. Please make sure to go over our previous related posts to learn about how to configure the Worker Monitoring Rules for Premium Pay, as these are a pre-requisite to enable this new functionality, as well as more details on the different user types.

With that being said, let's go over the new stuff! First, make sure that you have setup a task with the corresponding Manager who would oversee any activity and timesheets related to that task. In this example, we have our user "BerlinOps" configured in the Task Owner/Manager field:


You also need to make sure that this user has an email configured in the Email field. You can do this by finding that profile within the "Manage Users" section in the Administration tab:


Then, simply go back to the existing rule, for that, go to the Administration tab and select "Rules, Action and Fences" within the "Advanced" section. On the next screen, find "Worker Monitoring", which will take you to all the rules you have created in your account.

In our example, we have the following "1st Meal Period" rule, which we'll be editing:


Then, tick the checkbox for "Provide Reason":


Doing that, will prompt the users to type their own reason for not taking a lunch, or taking it late after the total minutes that the rule is for:


After the user enters that reason, then the Manager will get an email notification with the reason the  user typed:


That's it! As you can see, it's very easy to setup and a really powerful tool to keep control of everything that is happening out in the field.

If you needed any help setting this up, let us know in the comments section or contact our Customer Support team and we'll gladly assist you.


--Econz Team


Wednesday, May 5, 2021

Enhancements to Lunch Delayed Report

Hello everyone, we have a quick one today, but even our short posts are brimmed with exciting news!

In a previous post we had talked about our Lunch Delayed Report and how it gives the amount of time that has passed between the moment the users have clocked in and the moment they take their first Meal Period. Now you can also show all of the shifts that had enough clocked hours to take lunches, but for some reason these were taken late or not taken at all. The best of it is that you have full control of how many hours the report should use for its search criteria.

It has been designed so that it will show a row for each instance where an employee didn't take a lunch within a specified period of time of clocking in for the day or not taking a lunch at all, as we just mentioned.

This is useful not only to keep track of employees that are not taking lunches, but also in case there was some sort of mistake or that the user actually took it but forgot to punch it, then a Manager will be able to edit the timesheet to manually insert a lunch in the correct time, hence removing that particular instance from the report.

You can also select which type of break you wish to focus on, as well as the elapsed time that will be taken into consideration to consider the time frames when the breaks should have been taken.

Here is an example of what it would look like if we were focusing on a week for all of our employees and wish to monitor any instances where any break wasn't taken during a 5 hour (300 minute) period:

(Click on the image to enlarge)

That's all for today, stay tuned for more updates!


--Econz Team