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:

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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

Filtering the Forms Report

In this blog post, we want to tell you about a great feature we have recently added to our excellent Forms Report. We will now have the ability to filter by a specific form, similar to how the Custom Field Report works. This feature is very useful because it allows you to focus on a specific report, which for some companies is a big time saver being that they can handle multiple reports at the same time and for many employees.

Let's have a look! First, let's find the Forms Report in the Reports tab, underneath the "Task/Job Costing Reports" section:

Here is an example of a company that handles a big number of different forms, which we can check by opening the "Form" dropdown menu:

Of course, if we generated the report without filtering it, we would get a large amount of results, many of which we may not even need to review at the moment:

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So, to make our lives easier, we are going to filter by the one form we need at this moment, "Property Damage Report". Doing this will give us a much more streamlined set of results, so we can dive into them instead of finding them one by one among a bigger list.

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Once that is done, just click the "Download" button and you will be able to see your Form generated as a PDF file!

That's all for now, stay tuned for more exciting news...

--Econz Team

ADP Cost Code Custom Mapping

Continuing with the work we are doing to improve our integration with ADP, today we are going to talk about Cost Code Custom Mapping.

We have already established that you, as a customer, need to have loaded your task list into ADP and that Econz Timecard will be able to easily load those jobs into teams for employees to use. Once employees have punched into those jobs, our system will be able to transfer them back into ADP as Tasks and Subtasks for payroll purposes.

Companies can have a big amount of different tasks each with their own cost code, so it can be difficult for employees out in the field to memorize all of them, so what we normally recommend is to use a format similar to "[Cost Code]-[Job Description]" for either the task and/or the subtask, this way, you can import and export the job codes, while still allowing employees to easily find the activity they will be working on using the Job Description.

Our system can give you the option to choose exactly what it is that you need to export to ADP, be it the full task or subtask as it is in Timecard, or maybe just the cost code for either the task, subtask, or both.

This can be easily configured by logging in as an Administrator user, then going to the Administration tab and selecting "Integrate with ADP", which is found under the Integration section:

Then, under "Time and Payroll Settings", find the option named "Use Prefixed task/subtask?" where you will be able to open the dropdown menu to pick one of the available options:

• Task only Prefixed
• Subtask only Prefixed
• Both Prefixed
• None

Of course, what you choose will directly determine what is going to be transferred over to ADP, so make sure to pick the right setting and click the "Submit" button to save the changes.

Let's look at an example to understand what this setting does. Here we have a few tasks worked by an employee during a one week period, let's focus on the full task and subtask format. We have:

• Task: 100.002908-Calvary Baptist 2458 St Francis
• SubTask: SML0-Safety Meet Landscape

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For the task, the cost code is 100.002908 and the job description, Calvary Baptist 2458 St Francis; for the subtask, the cost code would be SML0, and the description is Safety Meet Landscape. Notice how in our system they are separated by a dash character.

Going back to the list of options, here are the results we would get for each of them, showing each option and what would be transferred to ADP next to it:

• Task only Prefixed: 100.002908.SML0-Safety Meet Landscape
• Subtask only Prefixed: 100.002908-Calvary Baptist 2458 St Francis.SML0
• Both Prefixed: 100.002908.SML0
• None: 100.002908-Calvary Baptist 2458 St Francis.SML0-Safety Meet Landscape

Hope this is easy to understand, our Support team will be more than glad to help you with any questions you might have!

Until next time...

--Econz Team

ADP Temp Cost Code Transfer

Hello everyone, today we want to continue talking about our collaboration with ADP. Now Econz customers have the ability to load tasks and subtasks directly from the ADP WFN system into our Timecard system.

The first step is to make sure to load all of the tasks and subtasks that you will be using with Timecard GPS. The system will use the following format of "Task.Subtask". This means that the task and subtask will be separated by a dot character. If you don't have subtasks, just the task description alone is enough, and if you have multiple subtasks that need to be nested within a task, make sure to use the same task, but adding a new entry with the different subtask following the dot.

For example, in this case, we have 4 instances of the task "PROJECT-6625" and after the dot, we have 4 different subtasks that go along this same project (for example "1001-ROOFING", "1002-MEETING", etc.):

Then, going back to the Econz side, our Support team would configure the integration so that the system recognizes the "Task.Subtask" format and translates the temporary cost codes with that format as tasks and subtasks.

Once that is done, the next step is very simple, we just go to the Administration tab and select "Maintain Task/Customer List" within the Basic section:

Then, we click and select the team or teams where we want to load the tasks to and pick the option "Load ADP departments/costcodes as tasks/subtasks to selected team" from the dropdown menu, as follows:

We will be taken to a confirmation screen where we can select whether we want to Append tasks to the existing list, or Replace that list with these new ones. We can also make sure that we are loading the correct set of jobs and click the "Confirm" button once we are ready:

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After a few seconds, the tasks and subtasks will be loaded to the corresponding teams and will be ready to be clocked into from Timecard GPS:

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Keeping a synchronized list of tasks between the two systems and the mobile application is just as simple as that!

Let us know in case you have any questions or are interested in learning more.

--Econz Team

Weather Widgets for PDF Forms

Hello again! Continuing with the wonderful previous post, we have an additional feature that can be incorporated into the useful PDF forms.

As a quick overview, remember that with Timecard GPS you are able to capture additional fields other than tasks and subtasks, which we call Custom Fields and Forms. You have the option to select from a number of different types of fields that are to be added to these forms, which in turn, can be used to capture information that is later found on a number of reports, as well as the aforementioned Job Confirmation PDFs and well, PDF forms in general!

Added to these, we recently included the capability to embed a convenient and pleasing weather widget within the PDF form, which if this is a feature you are interested in, our Support Team will be able to add to your PDF form output.

Here is an example of a real PDF form showing what it would look like:

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Let us know if this is something you would like to include in your forms and we'll take care of it for you!

Until next time...

--Econz Team

Sending PDF Job Confirmation to Customers

Hello everyone! We have a very interesting new feature today... Have you ever needed to automatically send a customer a receipt, notification or confirmation that a job has been completed for them? With our system, you will now be able to without any hassle, so let's check it out!

First, we need to go to the Administration tab and select "Manage Web Only Custom Fields", found within the Advanced section:

Then, make sure you are working within the "Task Custom Fields" section and add a new field called "Customer Email", then click the "Save" button. The name is important so that the system recognizes it's the field that will be used to send the automatic email.

Once the field has been created it will be added to the list like this:

The next step is to make sure you have created the form that is going to be sent to your customer. We would create a form based on your needs using all the details that you need to capture for the PDF file. For this, we go back to the Administration tab and click the "Manage Custom Fields/Forms" option:

Then, we create the form as needed and once it's done, we need to make sure that the Email Customer option is checked. Don't add anything in the "Alert Email Address" section, since that email that you put in will receive a confirmation every time that the job is completed, which would make sense if it's for internal use, of course, but you definitely don't want a customer getting emails for jobs that are for a different customer.

Adding an email address is job specific, which makes more sense as you will be having your staff working on multiple jobs on different customer locations and this way your clients will be getting individual confirmations for specific jobs that have been finished. So, having said that, where would we add the customer email addresses? By going to the "Maintain Task/Customer List" section in the Administration tab:

In this step, you need to find the individual jobs and click on each ID to edit its details. Here we are editing a random task, note how close to the bottom we have our "Customer Email" field. That's where we would enter our client's email addresses (you can enter multiple addresses separating them by commas if you wish):

So, after the form has been filled out while on a specific job and then the task itself has been completed, the customer will receive the email automatically containing the PDF form, which can be saved to their computers and viewed as desired:

We hope you like this feature, we will be adding some interesting things to it on our next post, so stay tuned!

--Econz Team

iSolved HCM Time Entry Grid Data Transfer

Hello everyone! We had started discussing our iSolved integration a few posts ago, today, we have more updates to share with you. Our integration has been slightly updated to make it even easier for you to use, so let's check it out!

First, make sure to log into our Web Portal as a Payroll Admin, go to the Administration tab and select "Approve Timesheets" from the Basic section:

On the next screen, use the appropriate filters to focus on the users and time period you wish to approve timesheets for. Click the Filter button to generate the information:

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In this example, we want to submit the timesheet for Lydia A Davidson, so we click on "Not Available" on the left side. Of course, if the employee had submitted the timesheet, then this would be the timesheet ID:

On the next screen, click the "Submit for Employee" button to enable the approval of this specific timesheet:

Here is where you can review, edit and approve the timesheet as desired, once you are ready, click the "Save" button on the bottom left side of the screen:

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Then you will get a pop up message prompting to to approve the timesheet changes, click on "Save changes" to continue:

You will be taken back to the "Approve Timesheets" screen. You can continue approving other timesheets if needed, but once you are done with that part of the process, you can go back to the Administration tab and select "Submit Timesheets for iSolved Payroll Batch". This is a meaningful quality of life change, as now you don't need to submit timesheets one at a time, but you can use this tool to send all of them at once.

On this screen, select the Payroll Group and Period according to your needs. In this example, we are using "Biweekly" and doing it from "Jan 12, 2022 - Jan 29, 2022". Click the "Filter" button to view the results for the timesheets you wish to submit to iSolved. You can review and make sure everything looks good before sending them, if that is the case, enter a Batch Number and click on "Save":

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Finally, after the process is done on the Econz side, you can log in to your iSolved account and search for the Time Entry Grid section. Here is where you can view the information that we just sent with the batch option, you will see all timecards and total hours so you can review, make any edits and complete the payroll process using the data captured with Timecard GPS:

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

--Econz Team

Covid Answers Report

As we have discussed before, COVID-19 has come to turn everything on its head, and all of us as businesses have had to adapt to continue as normally as possible. Econz Wireless has been looking for ways to incorporate this to our application to make your life easier at the same time we strive to keep you and your staff members safe by providing a way to fill out Employee Self Assessment Forms.

Today, we want to show you the new "Covid Answers Report" which will complement the data captured related to the COVID-19 form and will tell you if the employee has had any symptoms or not without the need to check anywhere else. For that reason, when creating this form, make sure to phrase the questions so that answering "Yes" will mean that the employee has experienced a COVID-19 symptom or been in possible contact with it.

Here is a sample of the Form  so you get a better idea of what it could look like and create your own:

Field Name	On Device	Field Type
Are you experiencing symptoms of COVID-19 (fever, cough, difficulty breathing)?	Required	Yes/No
Have you had contact with anyone who has symptoms of COVID-19, or tested positive for COVID-19?	Required	Yes/No
Have you or someone you have had contact with travelled or returned to [your country] from any destination within the past 14 days?	Required	Yes/No
Has any person in your household, or with whom you have close contact, been required to self-isolate due to possible COVID-19 exposure?	Required	Yes/No
Are you experiencing (sore throat, trouble swallowing, runny nose / stuffy nose or nasal congestion)?	Required	Yes/No
Are you experiencing (decrease or loss of smell or taste, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, not feeling well, extreme tiredness, sore muscles)?	Required	Yes/No
Are you on any medication that may impair your operation of a vehicle or equipment?	Required	Yes/No

After an employee fills out the form, then the report can be generated to view the simplified answers. Check out this example for an employee's week:

That's all for now, stay tuned for more news and exciting updated!

--Econz Team

RUN Powered by ADP® Integration

Continuing with the series of posts related to integrations, we come today to talk about RUN Powered by ADP®. This post will start by going over the preliminary steps prior to approving timesheets in the Timecard web portal and sending them to RUN Powered by ADP®.

First, we go to the Administration tab and select “Map ADP paycodes to Timecard Tasks”. Then we select the appropriate Company and make sure that the rest of the values are configured properly to match the codes in RUN Powered by ADP® as shown in the example below. Notice how each of the possible code options have a brief explanation as to what they are meant for. With this completed, we are ready to start approving timesheets!

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Let’s continue with the Timesheet Approval process, which means that each of the listed employees in the Approve Timesheets section has already acknowledged, reviewed and signed their own timesheets. We need to make sure to log in as a proper user type with access to this functionality. So we go to the Administration tab and select "Approve Timesheets":

On the next screen, we use the filters to focus on a specific date range, team and/or user and click the "Filter" button:

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And then we click on the ID of the timesheet we wish to review.

The next screen will show us more details of the individual timesheet so we can check them and make any adjustments if necessary.

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Once ready, we click the "Save" button:

Then we will get a confirmation screen, make sure to click on "Save Changes" to complete the timesheet approval:

After the timesheets have been approved, the final step is to send them as a batch to ADP RUN; for this, we go to the Administration tab and select “Submit Timesheets for ADP Payroll Batch”.

Next, we have to select the appropriate Payroll Group and Period, then click on Filter:

The system will proceed with loading all of the timesheets that have been approved for the period and send them to RUN Powered by ADP®:

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Following that step, we scroll to the bottom of the screen and enter the PayData Batch Code in the Batch Number, then click on Save.

Make sure to allow just a few seconds for the system to review the data and send it to RUN Powered by ADP®; once the process is done, we will get a confirmation message that the batch was successfully created. Otherwise, you could get an error depending on if something may be missing in the setup. Here is how it would look like when successfully completed:

RUN Powered by ADP® will finally show the timesheets as follows:

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That is all for now, make sure to ask us in the comments section below or our Customer Support team in case you wish to learn more!

Until next time...

--Econz Team