Software for Managing Timesheets? 45
Posted
by
Cliff
from the clock-in-and-clock-out dept.
from the clock-in-and-clock-out dept.
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?"
TimeClockPlus (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Then they replaced it with some version of an Oracle time-keeping product. Web based, and almost unusable. You had to know projects and tasks, but you cou
Domain Logon (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm almost sure Windows tracks this. Does SAMBA track it when acting as a DC?
In any event, figure out how that works and just have a script e-mail a report at the end of the week.
Re:Domain Logon (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
We require people to lock their workstations if they get up. If they are gone for more than 5 minutes, we require them to logoff.
And you are right about the time. If I come in and spend 20 minutes talking to my boss before I sit down, I wouldn't get paid for that time under my system.
Re: (Score:2)
Better to automate it! If you cannot put a password-lock screensaver on by default, then get smartcards for the staff that must be present in a reader/usb port for the PC to unlock (which they do automatically). We looked into these for security reasons for a customer, and some are rubbish - they lock thescr
Lucid Information Technologies (Score:4, Interesting)
Employee Scheduler (Score:5, Interesting)
It was written for managing student employees in a library -- and its not half bad.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/empscheduler/ [sourceforge.net]
I ended up hacking the hell out of it, adding ajax calls so that it was a little more user friendly, and had ended up with a clock in / clock out solution (using student id cards and a card reader). Tried to contact a few folks listed on the site, but it looks like a dead project (and my source is gone...don't ask...wasn't that hard to do though). If there was a community around it, I would have kept using the software and contributed...but there wasn't.
Its good software, but it needs some work. If you are a php coder, you might want to think about trying it out and seeing if you can hack the functionality you need.
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
Where are your patches to the mainline source tree? Did you contribute all of your "hacks" or fixes back upstream?
"If you pour water in the harbor, all boats rise at once"
I'm sure many dozens of people could benefit from your changes. They might even re-energize the project.
Re:Employee Scheduler (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried a few times to contact the folks that were responsible for the software to contribute to the source.
No response back. I had actually thought of setting up a fork'd project, but I was too busy with a few other projects to have everyone asking me questions. I wanted to donate to the original project and be done with it. I had cleaned up a LOT of HTML, converted it all to CSS (for instance, the web view and the print view used separate files that needed to be hacked twice to change anything...I used a print style sheet and threw away almost half the code), and de-spaghetti coded the PHP. Beyond that, it was mostly hacks to get things working for me (i.e., lots of crap with the prototype js library)
But all in all, I've had too much attitude thrown at me when I work open source apps. I prefer to get in and get out ASAP. I don't want my name associated because of it. I generally contribute anonymously when I do have to interact -- but most of the time, I prefer to just comment the hell out of code so that it is obvious to the newbie what I'm doing -- and honestly, this is why most of the BIG code I've given out has been put into the public domain because I don't want to get into arguments as to people's religion on code.
Either way, the point is moot now. By the time I had my head above water enough to do anything (running a university office and a music industry consultancy saps the energy outta ya), I found that the development server I had this on was wiped. Backups are probably on some DVDr, but who knows at this point. The code could be re-done in a day or two either way (and probably a lot cleaner now that I've gotten a lot more proficient at CSS and JS -- the PHP stuff was dead simple).
Re: (Score:2)
I just find the interface to TC to be slow, clunky and not worth using. The old system ran nicely using Java in any browser. It was still poo, but bearable if you only ever booked to one or 2 projects. It's hard to find projects/codes t
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.
Vacation/Sick Time Thingie... (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:1)
The biggest problem I have with it is the requirement to add the tasks your working on to the sheet before you can put time against them. The interface for doing that is too slow and annoying.
Re: (Score:1)
Your suggestion has been entered in our product backlog. In the future, you may enter suggestions at: http://www.replicon.com/supportservices/suggestion s.asp [replicon.com]
Every suggestion is logged and reviewed by the Product Management team at Replicon. We appreciate your feedback. Your comments and suggestions help us provide products and services that serve you best.
Thanks,
Jessica Lee
Product Manager
Replicon Inc.
Excel lent (Score:2)
Then I read the rest of the summary and.. well..
Enjoy your migration. I feel your pain. Whoever made that bed should have to lie in it. Ya right.
Mark Shuttleworth has a project for this problem (Score:4, Informative)
timesheetphp (Score:3, Informative)
"Stuff To Do" (Score:2)
http://stufftodo.dedasys.com/ [dedasys.com]
It's very simple and straightforward - what it has going for it is that all you have to do is tell it what you're working on via drag and drop, and it keeps track of how long you've been active on the project. Of course, this makes it most suitable for people who are at their computers most of the day, but I guess you can't be
ERP (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I too work for a 'top 30' (actually, I believe mine is a 'Big 4') -- and while there are certainly tools that can manage the extremely tedious details, these are generally not in the hands of rank and file employees, and really don't suit departmental needs for managing and scheduling groups of peoples.
When you talk larger universities, you are talking hundreds of offices, probably multiple campuses, and many thousands of employees. I believe my u
Timesheets always the problem (Score:1, Redundant)
WorkBrain Not good Danger do not use (Score:1)
WorkBrain on Vista would most likely be as fun as having a DOJ and IRS audit at the same time
Try Kronos (Score:1)
Whatever You Do (Score:1)
. . . don't build it on Oracle Forms.
Just trust me - don't do it.
Re: (Score:1)
You might try Taskjitsu (Score:1)
For the last ten years, I've been developing Taskjitsu [taskjitsu.com], an open source professional services automation system that tracks time sheets and tasks. It is freely available, GPL-licensed, and commercially supported by PKR Internet [pkrinternet.com].
Taskjitsu is at its core a Java web application, layered on top of Tomcat [apache.org] and PostgreSQL [postgresql.org]. It runs on Windows, Linux, and any other system that can run Java 1.4. We have RPMs available [pkrinternet.com] that work with Red Hat Application Server 1.0 [redhat.com] and other JPackage 1.6 [jpackage.org]-derived systems.
For our company needs... (Score:1)
Disclaimer: I am generally a Linux proponent, but Microsoft CRM truly is a good product.