Timecard GPS: Fresh New Look!

Hello everyone!

We have been around helping our customers make their payroll processes easier and efficient, while maintaining the highest standard in the industry. It has taken a lot of hard work from our teams and more importantly, all the support and loyalty from our customers, and we are looking forward to more years of successful partnerships to come. That is why today we have very exciting news we want to share with you, our Timecard GPS application is getting a new look and feel!

Check out the NEW and improved home page now including scheduling:

When accessing the menu, you will notice some new features that we are also bringing to the table, such as the Schedule Manager and the Timesheet Dashboard:

Keep an eye out for an upcoming post which will cover all you need to know about the Schedule Manager, which will provide employers with many powerful features and allow them to share meaningful job details to their employees to ensure the best possible service:

Finally, here is a screen shot of the new Team Clock-In section, many of you are already familiar with, but now with a fresh new look:

If you are interested in learning about all the new and upcoming features, or would just like to have a refresher on the application, make sure to reach us at 866-403-3475 or send us an email at customersupport@econz.com to arrange a time for an online webinar.

That's all for now, until next time!

--Econz

The Location Discrepancy Report

Hello everyone!

Today we will be talking about a report that recently got a very interesting update: the Location Discrepancy Report. With this report, you will be able to monitor your employees' movements by making use of the power of Smart Fences, which we have covered on several previous occasions. Every time an employee triggers an alert, Timecard will compare the distance that was setup in the Smart Fence itself, with the actual location that was reported by the staff members from the device.

This way, you will be able to tell how far or close they were to the expected address. Note that this report will generate entries only if the pinged location is further than 100 meters, or around 300 feet, and you will also get a "Discrepancy Distance" column showing the actual distance between the two points:

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Also, as a wonderful bonus, you can click the reported location and it will open a new tab showing the map with the expected location (marked as "E"), the reported location (shown with an "R"), and a line showing the distance between the two points:

As with most reports, you can generate and view it online, create a CSV file and also filter it by a specific date range, teams and users.

We know you will take full advantage of this useful report, but if you want to learn more about it, leave us a comment below!

--Econz Team

Maintain Task/Customer List For Workers: Manpower Edition

Hello everyone, today we are back with a new feature! Always thinking of better ways to make your life easier and help you be faster and more efficient at work, we have engineered a feature that will allow you to load tasks to individual users that haven't been added to a specific team. This is very useful because originally, if you wanted to assign specific projects to only one person, you had to create a team just for that one employee, load tasks for that person, and repeat the same process for every other staff member that needed it. While that still is pretty easy to do with our system, we enabled an even quicker method of taking care of that.

Let's see how to set it up! First, we go to the Administration tab and select "Preferences", from the "Basic" section.

Next, scroll to the bottom and tick the new "Has Field Worker Tasks" option, then click the Save button on the bottom left of the screen.

Once you go back to the main Administration section, you will notice a new entry called "Maintain Task/Customer List For Workers":

You will notice a familiar face, this section is pretty similar to the original "Maintain Task/Customer List", but instead of having a list of teams on the left column, we now have a list of Field Workers. From here, you will be able to load tasks for an employee, ideally one that is not assigned to a team, but keep in mind that if you do upload tasks for someone that belongs to a team, then these new tasks list will override the previous selection of jobs.

The beauty of this new functionality is that you don't even need to click on the names, you can use a CSV file and load the tasks and subtasks, just like you would do on multiple teams, but this time, it's on multiple employees. Open the dropdown menu and select "Load tasks/subtasks for specified employees using the Manpower CSV format".

This time, following the format from the example, we would use column A to put the employees' Device IDs, column B would have the Tasks and C, the SubTasks. same as uploading tasks to multiple teams, if you have a task with several subtasks, make sure to list all of the subtasks on column C, and to use the same task that these should go to on column B.

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The rest of the columns are optional, you can use them to set a job start and end time, address, and even smart fences if you wish so! Finally, find and select your file to upload it, append or replace the list to the existing tasks and save it. Now all of your employees can have their own individual set of tasks and subtasks!

That's all for now, stay tuned for some interesting announcements to come...!

--Econz Team

Adding Travel and Slipseat Codes for the Timesheet Approval Process

 Hello everyone! Today we would like to keep building upon the topic of pay codes that go hand in hand with our ADP integration. This time, we want to show you how to add Travel and Slipsear codes so they can be used for the timesheet approval process. As you are probably aware, using different specific codes for timesheets will enable you to create more accurate timesheets and abide by the different regulations depending on your location.

To set this up, we would start by going to the "Approve Timesheets" section within the Administration tab.

On the next step, we need to select the option to submit the timesheet for the employee, please note that this option is only available if the timesheet hasn't been submitted from the application on the device).

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Once the timesheet has been submitted, make sure to select the correct code on the "Pay Code Entries" section, which means SSP for "Slipseat Pay", and TRP for "Travel Pay". Then, you need to select whether it's an amount of dollars or a value of hours. Check out the following examples for both types of values:

SSP code with amount of USD

TRP code with amount of USD

TRP code with amount of Hours

Then, you can approve the timesheet and click the "Save" button to complete it.

You can tick the checkbox and approve all tasks in the timesheet at once.

Then click the "Save" button

That's all for this time, stay tuned for more exciting updates!

--Econz Team

New User Type: the Junior Office Admin

Hello everyone! Today we want to tell you about a new user type we have introduced to the list of different access types we provide to Web Portal Users. "Why so many?", you might ask? Well, flexibility is the name of the game. We are always thinking of ways to improve our system and provide as much flexibility to companies as possible, which means bringing different types of administrator rights depending on multiple needs.

Sometimes you may want to have someone just manage timesheets and nothing else. Other times, you want just that but limit the visibility to certain teams or users. We even have an option to assign specific projects to Managers so they can approve timesheets for the projects they oversee, regardless of the team the user belongs to. With these examples, you can see the value of having different access options for different scenarios. It's the same as in an operating system like Linux, where you can manage permissions and ownership for users, groups, and all others to resources such as directories and files; by providing levels of access, you are enforcing a tighter security to your valuable company information.

With that being said, the protagonist to today's tale is the "Junior Office Admin". As the title implies, these are a variant of the Office Admin user type, which, as you might remember, is able to approve timesheets for everyone, even being able to filter exactly whose timesheets they will approve. The main difference, and what makes it "junior" in this scenario, is that this user will not be able to remove users from the system; something that usually requires more rank or responsibility to perform.

Setting it up is very easy! We start by going to the Administration tab and selecting "Manage Users", within the Staff section:

Then, click the "Add New" button on the top left of the screen:

On the next section, you can fill out the information for that person's profile, here is an example:

After you are done and have entered a secure password, click the "Add New" button on the bottom left of the screen:

After that, the profile will have been created and it's ready for use:

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

--Econz Team

Exporting ADP Batch as a CSV File

Following with the topic of the exciting ADP Integration, today we want to show you how you can now keep a backup of your batch payroll by exporting it to a CSV file. Of course, make sure to check our previous post for a more in depth article related to this topic).

Our starting point will be right after the employees have approved their timesheets from the Timecard GPS app and then the Managers would also approve them via the Web Portal. As soon as the batch has been successfully created, we can go to the Administration portal, and then access the "Submit Timesheets for ADP Payroll Batch" section within the "Basic" section:

Once inside, we will select our appropriate Payroll Group, which will vary from one organization to another, then the Period of the timesheet that you would like to export and click the "Filter" button:

Doing that will display the desired results, in this example we are showing the timesheets that were sent for a single employee from our Timecard GPS system into ADP. After this, we would click the Download button:

That will start the download of the file to your computer, this process will vary depending on the browser and browser settings you are using, but in most cases you will either select where to download the file, or it will default to the Downloads folder.

Once we open the file, we can view the generated data in CSV format, which will be very useful to create a backup of all the batch transfers that you are doing (e.g. maybe you want them for offline access or in a printable format).

That's it for today, stay tuned for upcoming updates on more exciting features our team has been working on to make your life easier...!

--Econz Team

Email Alerts for Leave Requests

Coming back to a previous topic where we discussed Leave Requests, today we are bringing you details of more functionality which will make handling the PTO process more robust. As we all know, these are very busy times, and sometimes we need some help from the systems we use to keep track of what's going on, so in the case of the Human Resources team, handling PTO requests promptly is critical.

For this reason, Timecard GPS has a feature that will allow Leave Admins to receive emails as soon as a request has been sent from a device. It's very easy to set up, but as a requisite, make sure to follow the steps on this post to assign a Leave Admin to an employee prior to completing this next step.

With that out of the way, go to the Administration tab and select "Manage Users" within the "Staff" section:

Then, find the name of the Admin user and update the profile with the contact details, specifically the email portion. Also, very important, make sure to tick the "Notify Via Email" box:

Once that is done, the employee can request PTO with the application, which will trigger an email alert to the Manager in charge of reviewing that staff member's request:

Then the person in charge can go to the Administration portal and manage the Leave Request:

(Click on the image to enlarge)

That's all for now, we hope you like this feature as much as we do! Let us know if you have any questions or comments below.

--Econz Team

Allocating all time to clock in day for overnight shifts

Hello everyone, we have a very interesting topic today. This is intended for those companies whose employees work during the night, so it's expected that their shifts overlap two separate days.

By using this new feature, our system will provide you with overtime and extra time calculations based on the whole shift that was clocked in, regardless of if the employees started one day and finished on the next one.

The idea here is that in order to provide accurate timesheet information, if an employee worked overtime, for example, then that time would be allocated to the one day shift (taking the hours from the moment the system registered a clock in, until the clock out). This is, as opposed to cutting the days from 12:00 AM until clock out, and then the clock in the next evening until the following 12:00 AM.

This is very important, because on overnight staff there can be moments where there is OT right in the payroll cutoff time, so applying this setting can be the difference of when an employee would get the correct amount of paid hours.

Also, one more thing to consider is that hourly employees might need to attend during different scheduled times, so it's crucial that the correct amount of hours is allocated to the right shift, instead of placing hours incorrectly by following the Calendar days. 

To set this up, start from the Administration tab and go to "Manage Overtime Rules" in the Payroll section:

Then, select the User Type you wish to manage the OT rules for and click on "Manage":

In this example, we are adding a new rule, so we need to tick the checkbox for the option "Allocate all time to clock in day":

That's all you need! From the start date that the rule is created for and onwards, time will be automatically calculated for overnight employees, including overtime and extra time.

Hope you like this enhancement, let us know if you have any questions or comments below.

Until next time...!

--Econz Team

New Feature: Moving Tasks Between Teams

Sometimes, you just need to move tasks from one team to another. Maybe the company underwent some staff changes and a new team will take some tasks that another was working on and will no longer need. Perhaps, a person in charge of managing tasks might have uploaded them to the wrong team and you just need a quick fix. If any of those scenarios sound familiar, this is the feature for you!

We have added new functionality that will enable you to move tasks from one team to another. Originally, you would to need copy the tasks to the new team, and then delete the original tasks. In some cases, you may have hundreds of specific tasks that need to be moved, so it can take a lot of time to get rid of them, so we thought of a good way to make your life easier, as we always do.

For this, you would go to the "Maintain Task/Customer List" section in the Administration tab:

Then, let's say we have a few selected tasks from our "Region B" team, that need to be added to our "Region C" team. What we do, is just tick the tasks that we want to move as a first step:

Then, while having selected the tasks and seeing them checked on the screen, we select the team we want to move them to, in this case, "Region C":

Next, we open the dropdown menu and select the appropriate option:

Note that, we are able to do the same but moving subtasks from a task to another, within the same team. So, after selecting to move the selected tasks, we can verify the original team where the jobs where moved from and see that they are no longer there:

And finally, we confirm in our "Region C" team, that the new tasks have been populated:

That's all for this time, stay tuned for more exciting news!

--Econz Team

Bereavement Code for Timesheets

Hello everyone, today we are picking up on a subject that we had previously talked about, so now we are adding something new to it, the addition of Bereavement Codes for timesheets.

This feature is intended to be used for the cases where an employee has had the unfortunate passing away of a family member and the company provides bereavement leave for their staff. Since this is a feature that works together with a software integration, some additional setup is required; you can visit our previous post linked above to learn more about it.

Now, let's go over the steps on how to use it; first, we would find an employees timesheet that needs approval, we can do this by logging in with the appropriate user type and going to the Administration tab, then selecting "Approve Timesheets":

Then, find the timesheet that needs to be approved, and right below the detail for the hours, you will find the "Pay Code Entries" section. Use the "Select paycode" dropdown menu to choose the right code for this specific case. In our example we are using "BRV" for Bereavement. Also, it's out company policy that an employee can use up to three work days for this leave, so we are going to input 24 hours, which means 8 hours per day:

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Once we are done entering the code and the amount of hours, we can click the "Add" button to proceed:

Just like on previous entries that use this type of integration, this codes will be added to the payroll system that Econz connects with.

Let us know if you have any questions or comments, that's it for now, we will be back very soon with more news!

--Econz Team

New Multi Timesheet Approval Functionality

Hello everyone! We are very pleased to show you a brand new feature we have just deployed called "Multi Timesheet Approval". It's an enhanced method to review and approve timesheets for your staff, where you will be able to easily visualize and approve multiple timesheets in one go.

To find this feature, we would go to the Administration tab, then within the "Basic" section you will find "Multi Timesheet Approval":

Once inside, you can view all the timesheets for the entire company at once, or use the filters to focus on a specific team or user:

We will filter the screen to visualize just one team for this example, so we pick it from the dropdown menu and click the "Filter" button. You will be able to use the left and right arrows on top of the screen to go back and forward the different timesheet periods. So, here is our current team view:

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Notice the different colors depending on the status of the timesheet. We have "Unsubmitted" in red, next stage is "Worker Pending" in green, and finally "Management Approved" or "GM Approved" depending on the settings of your account.

When you click on the status of any users, you will be able to perform a number of different operations:

First up is "Show Details"; clicking this will give you a quick view of the user's timesheet:

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Then, we have "Show Full Details", which as indicated, will open a new tab. This is the equivalent of going to the Administration tab, then selecting "Approve Timesheets" and filtering by the date and user... You can start seeing how much time you will save by using this!

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The next option is "Edit". This is one of our favorite new features since it will pop up a new style of editing screen right from the same timesheet approval section.

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Finally, we have the "Submit Timesheet" button. What this does is that it moves the approval process forward going by the steps described above, that is from Unsubmitted to Worker Pending:

And using the "Submit Timesheet" option from this status, will take you to the final stage, showing the timesheet as approved. Note that you can also use the "Approve" button on the right to perform the same function:

That's all for this time, we will be back with more awesome news for you!

--Econz Team