Software for Managing Timesheets? 45
An anonymous reader asks: "I currently work as a help desk supervisor for the IT department of a Top 30 American university. We have around 40 graduate and undergraduate students manning our support areas at different times of the day and night, and a recent augmentation of our budget has us in the position to hire more. We still do our master schedule with a moderately complex Excel file, our time sheets are submitted online using a webpage, and our workers' clock in and out with a separate webpage which gives us reports that we import into yet another spreadsheet. Needless to say, our current, time-consuming method is rather clunky and has us looking at alternatives. What existing systems are out there that might fill our needs? What systems should we avoid?"
Timesheets (Score:5, Informative)
We spent an extensive amount of time evaluating the timesheet issue, and we came to the conclusion that licensing timesheet applications from third parties is really a waste of time and money. Remove the Excel sheets from the equation, hire a proficient web developer / DBA for a couple of months if you need to, but build your own system. This way, you can customise it exactly to your requirements, and not have to worry about the often massive costs involved in what is really a very simple (concept wise) application.
If you are determined to go down the third party application path, I would strongly advise you to avoid systems from vendors such as SAP. In my experience, they tend to create a whole bunch of (expensive) problems where there should be none, and you end up paying through the nose only to be left with buggy systems, costly consultant fees, and vendor lock-in.
Have you tried this open source solution? (Score:5, Informative)
We've been using it for a while now and it has been working great, one of my friends who works at a major University uses it as well.
Another List of Time Tracking Software (Score:5, Informative)
We use a product from http://www.dovico.com/ [dovico.com] and it works well but it doesn't do scheduling.
Have you tried SourceForge? (Score:1, Informative)
Replicon Web Timesheet (Score:2, Informative)
It works great for us. We've been using it for 7 years now, with 40-ish users. No problems, it's a great product. Entering time is easy, the reports are powerful, and it can integrate with other software. We integrated it very easily with our in-house account-management system.
If you don't want to run the software yourself, I see they have a hosted offering. [replicon.com]
Mark Shuttleworth has a project for this problem (Score:4, Informative)
timesheetphp (Score:3, Informative)