Posted on

Quick Questions: Time Tracking for Mac

Yes, Standard Time® does run on Apple products. That includes the desktop-Mac, iPhone and iPad. The screens look just like the PC screens.

The video below shows Standard Time on a Safari web browser. You can track time and expenses, plus PTO and vacation accruals. Every timesheet and time tracking feature you might see on Windows or Linux is available on the Mac. And it runs as nice as any browser.

Just so you know, this is not a native Mac time tracking app. But it does work nicely on Safari browser on the Mac. The actual app is running on a Windows IIS Web server, and is being served up to any clients that wish to log in. Those clients could be Windows systems or Mac or Linux or any other. Windows is just the server, but any client can log in.

Standard Time does not have a native Mac app. But it does have a native iOS app that runs natively on iPhone and iPad. That version is available in the Apple Store. It’s not as functional as the version you see in the video below. The native iOS time tracking app is intended for short bursts of use while away from the office, like at client sites or at home. It syncs with the Web Edition you see here using web services over your data plan or Wi-Fi. All your time and expense records end up on the Windows Server database where they are available for reporting and decision-making.

Check out the Safari browser running Standard Time below.

Posted on

Quick Questions: Viewing Employee Time

Here are some simple steps to view your employee’s timesheets.

Managers need the ability to check employee time so they can verify that hours are correctly logged to projects and tasks. Of course, employees can’t look in on other people’s time, but administrators can if they have permissions to do so.

Simply follow these steps to check your employee timesheets.

Posted on

Quick Questions: Timesheet Pay Periods

Your timesheet can be closely tied to your payroll pay periods. One way is to configure it to show all the days of the current pay period instead of just one week.

video below

Most timesheets show only seven days. But sometimes employees wish to see the full pay period so they can make sure all the working days are filled in. Nobody wants a short paycheck just because their timesheet isn’t filled in. It’s nice to see a weekly view from Monday to Friday, but sometimes even more helpful to see the full pay period.

Here’s what you see:

  1. Every day of the pay period
  2. The total scheduled hours for the pay period
  3. The total hours entered for the pay period
  4. The starting and ending dates
  5. The ability to submit your timesheet for the full pay period, rather than just one week

Posted on

Quick Questions: Submitting Timesheets

If you’re in a consulting firm, you know that billable hours are your livelihood. Losing hours is not an option. Lose too many, and you’ll be consulting somewhere else. Every consultant must be utilized to the max, and every hour must be accounted for.

Time is money.                                                     scroll down for a video…

In that light, the management overhead of submitting and approving timesheets is a small price to pay for accurate billing. Think of it as another set of eyes on your most valuable asset — consultants, and their billable hours.

Managers can view a list of employees who have submitted their timesheets. Emails go out to those who have forgotten. Another email goes to managers, and lists employees who forgot. Now managers can check each timesheet and approve it.

What are they looking for? Correct time under clients, projects, tasks, and time periods.

Posted on

Quick Questions: Task Warnings

What? Employees are camping out on fun tasks, and ditching the losers?

What does that even mean? (scroll down for a video to explain)

It means people sometimes like to stay where they’re at. They like familiarity. Easy work. Tasks where they can switch on the autopilot and Facebook all day.  Okay, fine… Not everybody is a shiftless lay-about. We take our jobs seriously. And our careers. But still… sometimes it’s nice to just keep working the same tasks until they are just “perfect.”

Task warnings shut that stuff off.

They pop up when tasks are supposed to be nearly complete. And they stop time logging when no more time is allowed. That nudges employees to move on and finish projects up. Heck, you can’t afford not to these days.

Posted on

Whiteboard: DCAA Compliance

The government is a huge bureaucracy that has many rules. When you have a government project they require rules for tracking your time. Any easy way for tracking your time is with Standard Time® which has DCAA compliance built in.

Employees on your team will have to follow these rules, plus others:

  1. Employees should enter hours on the day they occur, so they are more accurate and nothing is forgotten.
  2. One employee cannot enter hours for another. No ghost posting.
  3. If you make a change to previous entries, you should enter a note explaining the change.
  4. Each employee must have a username (and password) so their postings are associated with this name. That means you can’t use a spreadsheet because change to spreadsheet are anonymous.
  5. Employees must submit timesheets so there is an electronic signature associated with this action.
  6. Managers must approve [submitted] hours for employees.

Posted on

Quick Questions: Graphical Timesheet

Timesheets can display a huge amount of textual information. And that can drive some of you nuts. So here’s an alternative.

A graphical timesheet.

The graphical timesheet displays time log records in block form, sort of like your Outlook calendar. Each block represents a single time log or time off request. Start and stop times are plotted on a weekly calendar so you can easily see which day and hour they fell on.

Drag and dropping time logs simply changes the start and stop times, or the duration, depending on the drag operation.

Posted on

Quick Questions: Time Off Requests

Every employee, business owner, independent contractor, consultant or small business owner takes time off from their job. The following video will show how Standard Time® handles vacation requests.

New hours are accrued periodically, and hours are subtracted from that bank as time off requests are approved. Manager receive an email notification when time off is requested. And employees get another email when the request is approved or rejected.

Posted on

Quick Questions: Resource Allocation

Find the employees that are free in your company to work on your project. The color coded chart makes life easier for the project manager.

Sure, you know approximately which projects and tasks everybody is working on, but wouldn’t it be nice to see a bar graph showing it?  You can research employees who might be available for your project.  Look for short bars, that indicate a shortage of work.

Posted on

Quick Questions: Creating Project Tasks

Follow these simple steps to create a project task that is displayed in the timesheet.  Scroll down for a video.

Why track time with project tasks?  Because you will be tracking much more information that just a project. It takes the same amount of time to enter hours for a task as it does a project.  But a project task contains other information that you can use to better understand the execution of your project.

For instance, project tasks are associated with categories.  Each category describes the type of work you performed.  You can run reports or comparisons on categories.

Project tasks also contain other fields that differ from task to task.  So choosing the appropriate task means you are also choosing those other data point.  Again, use them in reports to learn more about where your time is spent.

Other useful association may exist, such as payroll information, estimates verses actuals, and link dependencies based on task completion, and warnings when tasks are nearly finished.