Low-Budget Network-Based Time Tracking Software? 24
0verkill asks: "I have been charged with the task of finding time tracking software to replace our current manual punch card method of tracking our employees time spent on the job. I would appreciate any feeedback/suggestions from anyone who has experience implementing and/or maintaing this software. Here are the criteria that I'm working with currently: I have a spending range of up to $400-$500; the software should support clocking in/out from more than one network attached workstation; basic report generation -- nothing too fancy but something that covers all the basics; and finally something that is resistant to time tampering (maybe software that could obtain an official time from our servers)."
Roll your own... (Score:1)
Re:Roll your own... (Score:2)
Whatever happened to searching? (Score:1)
I am growing weary of no one doing ANY research on topics and just asking slashdot.
Question is What's Good? not What is there? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ask Slashdot is a chance to ask a relatively informed population for their advice and experience related to a topic. I think that's exactly what Ask Slashdot is for. Sure, they could ask in other forums like a newsgroup but people go with what they know.
Re:Question is What's Good? not What is there? (Score:1)
"nothing too fancy but something that covers all the basics" doesn't explain much.
There is very little information given. As a result, this question is essentially asking us to do the searching for him. Details are important when assessing a system. This post lacks these.
In the end, this person is better off checking out freshmeat, finding 3-5 that he finds look best and trying them.
I do agree the review aspects are definately what slashdot is about.
Re:Question is What's Good? not What is there? (Score:2)
A question asked here may very well be covered by countless faqs and Google searches, but could really lead to interesting discussions about related things. For example, a really simple question such as "How do I get X to work on my FooBar video card" is answered in so many different places that it's almost impossible *not* to stumble across the right info, but here it could lead to some really interesting discussions about features, unknown bugs, cool hacks and other things involving the card.
I think this is what Ask Slashdot should try to be about, in addition to providing pointers to the right answers to a question.
Sub-Contract the Development for it (Score:2, Insightful)
Timeclock Plus (Score:5, Informative)
More scope than you might think (Score:1)
If it's just a punch clock, do it yourself. but keep in mind your still going to have to take care of things like security, now you've got to have a list of every employee and keep it current. Depending on the systems that your HR and Accounting departments use this may not be a huge problem, but it's something to consider. Take care not to underestimate this project.
Good luck,
Dan
Journyx, or search Freshmeat or Google (Score:3, Informative)
You don't say how many users you are supporting, but if it's less than ten I have an answer for you. Journyx [journyx.com] has a timesheet [journyx.com] program that is free for less than ten users. It is commercial software that runs on Windows NT, Windows 2000, AIX, Solaris, Linux and FreeBSD. Annual maintenance (giving you priority tech support)runs $435, within your limit. Pricing beyond 10 users is above your price limit, starting at $1375 for the next 10 users.
They also offer a hosted version of their app, with the following pricing: a minimum purchase bundle of 25 users, a monthly cost of $7 per user, and an initial setup fee of the higher of $250 or $10 per user. I can't tell from your problem description if this will fit your needs or not, as, for example, if you had 25 users this would have an inital cost of $250 and then an ongoing monthly expense of $175, costing $2350 for the first year. There are also online partners running 5- or 10-user hosted sites free, if you have this few users and don't want to run the application in-house.
This is a web-based solution - users would log in to the web page and clock in or out themselves. Reporting capabilities are built-in. The fact that the app is web-based permits you to secure the host and fulfills your requirement that time reporting be secured from end-user tampering.
Re:Journyx, or search Freshmeat or Google (Score:2, Informative)
although i already posted about the product we swtiched to (on another post), i'll mention it here for a price comparison...
we switched to Track-IT [dovico.com]which (From their web site) appears to cost $227 for the suite, and another $227 for "Punchclock per 50 employees"....
so, there's another option.... http://www.dovico.com/
phpGroupWare (Score:1)
Since I haven't tried it I can't really comment further, maybe someone else here can?
I agree with a previous poster, that you should start by taking a look at what software your HR department is using. The list of employees needs to stay in sync with their database and they need to extract values from the timetracking software you choose.
time tracking.... (Score:1)
however, if you want to go with a out of the box solution my company uses tracking software from these guys [dovico.com]...they specialize in time & project tracking solutions, so they might have something that can help you out....
If only... (Score:1, Offtopic)
You can almost get by with the vitality ratings and such, but even those can be misleading.
So many of the SourceForge projects are stillborn or abandonware that a single "is this project still alive" post to the forums will push the vitality up to 38%.
I don't know why the comments system on Freshmeat is so inactive... perhaps it's the site membership requirement? Perhaps it's the lack of a "# Comments" notice on the main page? At least you know when you see a FM announcement that something is happening with a project, but the user-real-life-experience stories are invaluable; that's why this kind of Ask Slashdot question is so popular.
Sorry for being more than a little off topic, but I really do think the community's missing out in this area.... There's an FM/AskSD disconnect here, and I just wanted to brainstorm on it for a second.
ibutton (Score:4, Interesting)
Use perl to read from serial/write to network, some more perl to set up a daemon. Everyone gets a button (with guaranteed unique serial number), and blue dots get installed on networked nodes. The buttons are pretty cheap, and the readers are also pretty cheap. You could get 100 people and 100 workstations all running this stuff with hardware costs well below your budget, and have some cashleft over to write the daemons (which would be really simple). You could use the rest of the budget to pay me to write the stuff for you - I'm pretty cheap.
Sorry about the lack of details (Score:2, Informative)
I have played with apporx 8 demos of diffrent software and learned quite a bit. However, I consider the experience of people who have wrestled with this problem before to be far more valuable than my limited experience. I would consider programming the app myself but my boss is looking to implement a solution around the beginning of march. Second, I dont have much programming experience, at least not enough to fees comfortable writing it myself. I assumed that the time I spent working on it at work would 1: Cause me to neglect my primary responsibilites. 2: turn out to cost almost half as much if you consider the time that I would have to spend coding it given my general lack of experience. I appreciate the fact that writing it myself would probably prove to be the most meaninful solution. However I really didnt consider that to be a feasible option in this situation. In a lot of ways this is one of my first IT projects that involves not only the implementation of the software but the requirements gathering.
I would have provided more details on the requirements if I had known them myself. I met with the full-time employee (I'm a lowly student worker btw) today who is my management liason with this project.
This is what I can provide as an update if anyone is still interested. There will be about 30 employees (also student-workers) using the system. The program must be able to round to the nearest 15 minute interval. The program should be able to print out a version of the report that would be suitable for an employee's signature. The program must be able to either keep its on time, or prevent the user from casually changing the time on the system clock. The program must support a way to print reports sorted by the department the student works for. The program does not need to differentiate between sick/vacation/jury duty etc... Employees need a way to enter a manual time punch (with a supervisor required to enter a password for approval) The interface that the employees will be working with must be intuitve, with a mimimal learning curve.
I realize that I could have sought answers to these questions elsewhere but I wanted the opinions of the readers and posters of slashdot because I respect your opinion more so than I do most other groups out there. I feel that for the most part we have a lot in common, (the
PHPaga (Score:1, Interesting)
Look at phpaga.sf.net.
Just wrote one (shameless commercial plug :-) (Score:2)
My employer (http://www.nemein.com) sells a web-based solution that's fairly sophisticated. The big thing is that it combines project tracking features and has some nice reporting, as well as a pleasent user interface for inputing hours against different projects
We've installed it at a few clients during development in order to get feedback. We've just gone into a 'feature freeze' so that we can package it up as a 'version 1.0', complete with documentation. I don't know what the price will be for the package, but you might as well include us in your list of candidates. Contact us using the URL I gave you, or I can try to answer questions here.
(Note: the timetracker on the web-site is an early version. The new version is significantly different.)