Timecard v10 New Form Feature: Hold for Later

Hello everyone! Continuing with all of the excellent new features that our new version  Timecard v10 has, we are proud to show you today a very interesting quality of life improvement we have recently added to the Forms: hold for later forms!

As that name implies, the idea here is that you will be able to start a form while on a task and get back to it later, so the app will hold it for you, as the default behavior is to send the form to the server as soon as the task is changed.

In order to enable it, just go to the Settings on the main screen of the application and set the "All-day forms" option to ON:

Now, we are on a Task called "Meditek" so we want to open the Forms section and start filling out some data related to "Accommodation Expenses":

 

Of course, at this moment we could be on a business lunch and we need to travel back to our hotel after we are done. So we can tap "Done" on the top right and continue with our day, which in this case means switching to the "Travel" task:

Notice that when we access the same form while being on the "Travel" task, it will be completely blank:

So, now we have come back to our hotel room and we are ready to complete the form with the remaining information, so all we need to do is switch back to the "Meditek" task and when going to the forms section, you will notice that the app had saved all the data you entered for that specific task:

That's perfect! All that's left is to add the remaining information, take any needed pictures and tap "Done" when ready:

Once you clock out, the completed form will be sent to the server so that the Managers can access it via the Web Portal.

This is a wonderful time saving feature which will allow you to save and complete forms during your shift, and we really hope you like it! Let us know if you have any questions or comments below.

--Econz Team 

Timecard v10 Updates to Team Clock-in Display

Hello everyone! Today we are back with a great quality of feature that has been added to our Timecard v10 application. Our application will now make it easier for Team Leaders to visualize and have access to the profiles of the staff members that have been clocked in using the Team Clock-in feature. The application will now bring to the top of the list whoever is currently active; this way, you won't have to scroll over a long list of employees, which is particularly useful for those companies who have teams with a large group of members.

So, let's check it out! We are showing this with the perspective of a foreman, of course; we need to be clocked in first to be able to clock other team members in. Within the Main Screen, we open the Menu on the top right and select "Manage Team":

This is what the employee list looks like before clocking anyone in.

From here on, we can look for the employee that we need to punch in and tap his/her name:

Let's pick one of the last names on the list, we'll see how it will be brought to the top instantly!

And clocking in another name in the middle, the app will bring it to the top and sort it alphabetically to make it easier to find and manage:

That's all we have for today, this was a short but sweet one and we hope you take full advantage of this great improvement implemented to make your life much easier.

Until next time!

--Econz Team

The Weekly Employee Time Card With Answers Report

Going hand in hand with the Custom Premium Pay Questions, today we are going to show you an excellent report you can use to your advantage: The Weekly Employee Time Card With Answers Report.

This report bears some similarities to the Employee Time Card By Week Report, so this means you will be able to generate a PDF with your custom logo and have a beautiful, printable version of the end of day questions your employees have answered, along with their signatures.

The report can be found by going to the Reports tab and selecting "Weekly Employee Time Card With Answers Report", which can be found in the Customer Reports section:

Then, filter the report according to the date, users and teams that you need and finally click the "Generate PDF Report". Here is a sample of what the report look like:

Click on the image to enlarge

We are very proud to bring this excellent report to you and hope you can get the best out of it and make your company more productive, at the same time that you are keeping track of your employee's time, attendance and correct breaks and meal periods.

Until next time!

--Econz Team

The Forms Exclusion Filter

Hello everyone! This post is for all of you who already make use of our powerful Forms features (and of course, all of you who don't will be very interested in learning what Timecard v10 can do...). As you are probably aware already, Timecard can use Form Filters so that you only see them on certain jobs. This is incredibly useful since you can tie these forms to specific projects or activities that may need to have a very specific form that only applies to those tasks.

But there is another scenario that is the exact opposite of this situation... What if you have a large list of tasks that share a common form, but you don't need/want this form to show for one specific task (e.g. like "Travel Time", "Meeting", "Internal Training")? For that case, we have created the Exclusion Filter!

Let's see how to set it up: First we would go to the Administration tab and select "Manage Custom Fields/Forms":

Then we can choose the form that we want to add a task filter to (to prevent it showing on a specific set of tasks). For that, we scroll down until we find the "Exclusion" section:

Inside the text box is where we'll type the tasks that we want to have excluded from displaying the form in question. In this example, we are going to add the ones mentioned above:

Now, when we go back to Timecard v10, we should be able to clock in on any task other than the ones listed in the exclusion filter and see the "Property Damage Report" form:

But when we punch in to one of the three excluded tasks, the unneeded form will no longer be listed:

That's all for now! Let us know if you have any questions or comments below.

 

--Econz Team

Timecard v10: Auto Team Management

Hello everyone! Continuing our series for Timecard v10, in which we will go in detail about many new features our application has; we have something very interesting today, and that is Auto Team Management.

This is related to how the application manages team clock-in. With this feature, you will be able to decide how the app handles the punches of the team members without a phone. Let's see how it works and how you can set it up!

First, while clocked in as a Supervisor, tap the Menu icon on the top right of the screen:

Then, select the first option "Manage Team", which is the place you would normally go to manually clock team members in and out and handle their breaks:

Following that, tap the gear icon on the top right to access the team handling specific settings:

Once you do that, you will notice the following options:

Each of this settings will have a drop down menu so you can pick whether you want the application to Prompt you to take an action at the event you select, set it to Auto to take the action automatically for you, or set it to Off, so you won't be prompted but you will need remember to do each step manually. 

Those three actions take effect into the following settings:

• Manage Team on Clock-In: this step will prompt the supervisor to clock his/her team members in at the same time, or do it automatically. The default is Off, which means that each user will need to be clocked in manually.
• Manage Team on Clock-Out: by default the app is set to prompt the foreman to clock team members out, if this is set to Auto, then everyone will be clocked in at the same time that the supervisor clocks out, and setting it to Off will require the supervisor to always clock people out manually. This means that if the team leader clocks out without clocking the team members out first, they will remain clocked in.
• Manage Team on Change Task: this, of course, will change the way that tasks are handled, setting it to Prompt will ask the foreman if the team members should also be switched to the same task that person is changing to, and this will happen every time the task is changed. Using auto will skip the prompt and change everyone at the same time. Off will require each person's task to be changed manually.
• Manage Team on Break Start: same as above, but this happens when the team leader starts a meal or rest break, the default option is set to off, so each person would need to be sent to break manually.
• Manage Team on Break End: this works just like on Break Start, but of course, on Break End.

For this example, we will set it as follows:

So, when we are clocking in as a supervisor, if we have some team members we want to clock in, we have to do it manually for each person, so let's do that:

Now, when it's time to start a task, or take a meal break, we have it set to Auto, which means that when we take a break...

...then everyone who was clocked in, will be taken to break automatically:

Same thing will happen when ending said meal period.

Finally, we set the Clock-Out event to Prompt, which means that when we clock ourselves out, the application will ask us if we would like to clock our punched in team members, too:

And that's it! You can play around with the different options to see what fits your company the best, or ask us any questions so we can guide you and recommend the best of these useful combinations for your needs.

Until next time!

--Econz Team

Application Announcement: Timecard v10!

Hello everyone!

We have wonderful news we would like to share with you. As always, we are looking to improve our products looking for ways to give you, our valued customers, the best workforce management application in the market. So, we would like to present you with the Timecard v10 application:

With its new redesigned interface, you will be able to do everything that Timecard already does, plus a list of new features which include the following and more to come:

• Calendar Features
• Additional PDF form capabilities
• PDF confirmation of forms sent back to employees
• New Form Filters
• New Settings for Managing Teams

We will be providing more in depth articles for these new features so you learn more what they are all about and can incorporate them into your organization.

If you are interested in learning more, leave us a comment down below!

--Econz Team

The Enhanced Sage 300 Report

Hello everyone!

Following our previous post about Statutory Work Days, we have an update that incorporates this new feature in a report. We call it the "Enhanced Sage 300 Report", as it's based on the original Sage 300 Report.

Whenever an employee works on a Statutory Holiday, this report will add an extra line of hours to match the hours set up for each one of the profiles, stated in the PROJECT column.

In the case that there were holidays, the system will add an additional line showing the holiday hours and include "HOL" in the PROJECT column. Note that this is used specifically for the times when there is a statutory holiday that the employee did not work, but still needs to be paid for.

Finally, when there is overtime, the pay rate to will be adjusted to 1 1/2 the pay rate value, to make things easier for the staff in charge of payroll. An additional line will be created to make the overtime easier to visualize along with its new fixed pay rate.

Here is a sample of what the report would look like on a regular week:

Click on image to enlarge

On this example we see that April 11th and 12th have the usual 8 hours with its pay rate of 26.50, but when we come to the 13th and 14th, an additional line has been added to signify the overtime with its updated pay rate of 39.75. Also, we have a paid Holiday on the 15th, which at the same time is a Statutory Holiday that this employee worked on, as noted in the "PROJECT" column by "HOL" and "STAT" respectively.

Additionally, if you have configured Auto Break Deduction, the report will deduct the specified amount of time of the last task on the day. For example, we have user "Bowen Thompson" who needs to have 30 minutes deducted from the total hours. If we first check the Timecard Task Detail Report, we can see that the last task he worked on the 27th there were 2 hours registered. Also, the next day shows a total of 13 hours worked in one individual job:

Click on image to enlarge

If we generate the Enhanced Sage 300 Report, we will see that 30 minutes have been deducted from that last task of the day on both cases, providing the desired timesheet calculation as follows:

Let us know if you have any questions or comments down below, and until next time!

--Econz Team

Setting up Canada Specific Overtime Rules

Hello everyone! Today we have a very interesting post about a new feature that has been added to our system. This feature has been put in place for our Canadian customers who need to set an overtime rule that takes care of adding up the overtime hours at the end of the month for every instance that an employee worked over 40 hours in a given week. This way, instead of paying overtime weekly or bi-weekly, it is going to be paid at the 4th week of the month.

To set this up, you need to create a user type that will be used solely for employees who this rule applies to. For the sake of this example, we created one called "Fourweek0T40", but make sure to name it as something that makes sense to your own organization:

Then, go to the Manage Overtime Rules in the Administration tab and follow the necessary steps to create the rules.

After selecting the user type you wish to manage, which should be the one that was recently created for this specific purpose, then we click the "Manage" button:

Set the date when the rule will be applied for; keep in mind that the correct overtime rules will not be enforced on any entries before this date. Here is an example of how this can be setup, taken from the Overtime section on the screen you are taken to:

Click on the image to enlarge

Note that we have set it to "Any time over 160 hours, reconciled over a period of 4 weeks." This shows how the system will recognize that the employee has worked any overtime going over 40 hours in a week, within a 4 week period.

Then, we set the start of the first of these periods, like "01 May 2022" in this example, and finally, the last piece of the puzzle is setting "Workers are guaranteed 40 hours per week, with any extra regular hours reconciled at the end of the configured period". This prompts the system to calculate those extra hours that may have been accumulated at the end of the specified 4 week period.

After this, it's just a matter of following the usual process of approving the timesheets and sending the Payroll Data Batch, the additional overtime hours will only be shown on the timesheet for the last week of the monthly period. Each weekly period will show the total worked hours in contrast to the maximum of 40 reported hours.

Also, after sending the weekly hours with the integration, there is an additional new step that needs to be taken to reconcile those overtime hours. Using the "FourWeeklyReconciliation" filter and combining it with the desired user type and payroll period, we will be able to see the users that have outstanding overtime:

Click on the image to enlarge

Note the total Regular ("R") hours on the first row, followed by the 18 Overtime ("O") hours on the next row.

That's it for the moment, next week we will show you additional details related to this post, so stay tuned for more!

--Econz Team

The Expanded Timecard Task Event and Location Report

Hello everyone,

Today we want to talk about one of our most recently incorporated reports, the Expanded Timecard Task Event and Location Report. This one is sort of a combination of the Timecard Event Report and the Timecard Task Event and Location Report.

When you generate it, you will notice the inclusion of four new columns:

• Start Event ID
• Start Break Event ID
• End Break Event ID
• End Event ID

These columns will provide you with the information of the ID associated to each of the events gathered from the device by the employees, which can be used to create an upgraded costing analysis for your field jobs that can be used with the integration software of your preference.

Compared to the Timecard Event Report, which created a new row for each event, this one summarizes all events related to a specific entry, so whenever you start, end a task and/or take a break in between, the event IDs for each will be shown on their corresponding column and row:

Click on image to enlarge

As with most of the reports, you can generate it online or export it into a CSV file using the date range, user and team filters of our choice.

We hope you get the best out of this report, let us know if you have any questions or comments down below!

--Econz Team

Enhanced Auto Timesheet

Hello everyone, today we have an awesome update related to creating auto timesheets; we have added new functionality to make this feature much more robust. You will now be able to create timesheets with multiple tasks during the same day, make them recurrent, and even skip weekends if needed!

To enable this functionality, first we need to go to Administration tab:

Then, you can start adding timesheets, just go to the Field Workers tab, find the employee you wish to generate timesheets for and click the "Update Roster" button:

Then, you can select the start of the week, click on "Get Roster", then click the "Edit" button on the day you wish to add your changes:

You will find multiple options on the top section:

• Auto Timesheet: enable this so that the system generates the timesheet automatically as the hours of the day pass by, simulating the generated entries as if they were added by the employee.
• Recur Daily: use this if the employee will work on the same set of tasks on a daily basis.
• Include Weekend: leave this unchecked if the employee won't work during the weekends so there are no punches generated on Saturdays and Sundays.
• No End Date: click this option so that the tasks are created indefinitely.
• End By: if the specific set of jobs you are entering are supposed to end at some specific date, then you can use this so the system stops at that day.

The next section is where you will create the actual punches, it's as easy as selecting the start and end times, then the task and subtask, if available, and clicking the "Save" button. If you need to add multiple tasks, use the "Add Change" button to add new rows until you have added everything  you need, then Click "Save" at the bottom.

Alternatively, use the red X button to remove a row. Once the changes have been saved, you can go back and view the whole timesheet preview:

Click on image to enlarge

Make notice of the fact that we chose to exclude weekends on this employee's timesheets, so Sundays and Saturdays are blank. You can also do any necessary edits after creating the auto timesheet, just click the edit button and follow the same process we just described.

That's all for now, make sure to use this wonderful time saving feature to your advantage and let us know if you have any questions or need any help setting it up.

Until next time...

--Econz Team

Update to Timesheets: Statutory Work Days

Hello everyone, today we are following up with a past post where we talked about customizing company holidays. Our system has now been updated to be able to provide additional details so that companies have even more complete timesheet information in case an employee had to work during a Holiday. Originally this was shown once the timesheet had been approved, but in order to make your lives even easier, we thought making this available even before that step, so Managers will be able to visualize every worked holiday right at the moment when they are starting to review the timesheets!

To illustrate the example, let's go back to the settings where we had defined our Holidays, we can see that on April 15 we have Good Friday set as one of the possible paid holidays:

This means that if an employee worked during that day, after that person has submitted their signed timesheet and the Manager in charge is approving them, then we will now be able to see the Earning/Pay Code signifying that it corresponds to STW for "Statutory Work", like the highlighted line in following example:

There we can see that Ann Marie worked on the same day that we have "Good Friday" as one of our Holidays, so instead of the Pay Code being set as a regular day "REG", it is now showing as "STW", which stands for Statutory Work. This way, the Payroll Department can easily keep track of these days that are special cases and pay their staff accordingly.

That's it for this one, let us know if you have any questions or comments below!

--Econz Team

Third Level of Approval for General Managers

Hello everyone, hope you are doing great!

Today we will talk about something that we recently implemented that can be very useful for every one of our customers, especially the ones that require another level of approval when integrating into other Payroll and Accounting software packages. This comes back to the topic of the General Manager Approval, a feature designed so that in case someone needs to oversee that timesheet approval process, can do so after both the employees and their managers have reviewed, signed and approved their timesheets.

There are two new settings that will be found by going to the Preferences within the Administration tab:

Click on image to enlarge

Enable the "Payroll Requires General Manager Approval" option if you need to enforce the third level of approval in the timesheets before these are sent to Payroll. The default behavior when this is left unchecked is that this is only optional and no General Manager approval is required, so make sure to enable this if your organization must have another approval level prior to pushing the timesheets to an external payroll system.

Next, check the "Enable General Manager Edit Manager/Worker approval" option. With this, a General Manager user will have the capability to edit approved and accepted timesheet entries regardless of the input from the employee or the manager who would be the second level of the chain. What this means is that a General Manager will be able to approve timesheets at any point, contrary to the default behavior where they could only interact with the timesheets after both the employee and the supervisor had already approved said timesheets.

There are many cases where this can be useful, for example, the employee could have lost the device with the application and is no longer able to sign the timesheet, or that staff member's supervisor is on PTO and the General Manager is the one that would need to provide backup with the approval process. Another example would be a case when the employee needed to have a special exemption approved or some sort of extraordinary circumstances that required that person to work for more hours than usual.

That's all for now, this simple change will definitely make many jobs easier so we hope you can take full advantage of it. Leave us a comment or question down below in case you have any questions!

--Econz Team

Office Admins Working with Leave Applications

Today we have a quick but very important announcement for you: upon high demand, we have added the Manage Leave Applications functionality to Office Administrator users. You may recall that this was originally only available for Full Administrator users to review, approve or reject Leave Applications generated by employees from the Timecard GPS application.

In the past we also talked about how Administrators are able to add vacation time for employees that do not use the application but their payroll is managed through our system. We also made an update post when the Timecard GPS app added the ability to request for Vacation, Holiday and Sick leave.

Well, now Office Admins will be able to take part in the approval process! To access this functionality, just log in and go to the Staff section in the Administration tab and select "Manage Leave Applications":

From here, you will be able to utilize all of the Leave Admin features, including adding PTO, Family and even Maternity Leave!

That's all for now, leave us a comment below in case you have any questions!

--Econz Team

Customizing Company Holidays

Hello everyone! Today we have a brand new feature that will complement the configuration of User Type Holiday hours. With that, you were able to visualize the total hours that an employee would be getting on a specific working Holiday, so that Payroll Administrators can then approve these hours in case they should be counted towards the Timesheet.

By default, our system will use a predetermined set of Holidays according to the country that your account is setup with, but now you will be able to select exactly which of those Holidays should apply to your company setup.

Getting this done is pretty straightforward; first go to the Administration tab and select "Configure Timesheet Settings", which is found under the Staff section:

Then scroll down until you find the "Holiday Pay" section, make sure that "Output holiday pay" is enabled, as per the previous guide, then click on "Define Holiday Days".

Select the years that the Holidays should be pulled for (by default the current year will be already selected and pre-loaded), then click the "Get Holidays" button:

Find the days that you don't need and click on the red X to delete them.

Then scroll to the bottom and click "Save Holidays" to apply the changes:

You can also click on the plus sign if  you wish to insert your own customized Holidays, just enter the Holiday name, the calendar date and the observed date, then click the "Save Holidays" button:

When you go back to this screen, the new Holiday will be added to the system:

One more important thing to add is that you need to make sure to tick the checkbox on each of the Holidays that you wish to apply to the company's timesheets. This step is required in order to be able to view these days in your staff's timesheet when working on approving them. Once you are happy with the changes, click "Save Holidays":

That's it for today's post, we hope you can get the best out of this new feature. Stay tuned for more exciting news!

--Econz Team