Enhanced Spokeware Dashboard

We are pleased to announce the latest Spokeware development release. There is now a company dashboard page, allowing easy access to the various employee punch options available. Additionally, this release brings the option of giving employees the ability to log in and view past and current timesheets. To access this page, simply continue using the URL currently used for employee punches. You will now see links at the top of the page, the purpose of each described below.

Punch: "Punch" gives employees the option to punch in and punch out using two different punch buttons. This is the primary punch option used, preventing employees from trying to punch in when they are not punched out, and vice versa.

eXtended Punch: eXtended Punch gives employees the ability to punch in to a selected "Department" and/or "Job." This gives employees who work in multiple Departments, Jobs, etc. the ability to allocate their time to the area it is being worked.

Track Hours: This feature gives employees who have been granted access the ability to enter number of hours worked for a certain date. Only employees who have been given access will be able to successfully enter hours using Track Hours. The number of days available for the employee to select is configurable based upon your needs. If you would like any group of employees to be able to enter hours (as opposed to punching in and out in real time) for the current date, the past week, etc., please contact your support representative to have this feature set up.

Legacy Punch: The original punch option, this gives employees a single button for punching in and punching out.

Dashboard Login: The latest feature for enhanced employee use, the Dashboard Login gives employees the ability to log in and view their past and current timesheets, granting further access to those with proper security the ability to edit and save their own timesheets.

Using their payroll system's user name and password to log in, employees can navigate to TLM > My Timesheets to view timesheets. In addition to the status of the timesheet and whether or not it has processed through to payroll, the employees have a summary of hours per timesheet as well as the ability to open up individual timesheets to see hours by day. Employees who have been given proper security will also have the ability to edit and save their own timesheet. Please contact your support representative if you would like this option set up for any employees.

Viewing your recent punch activity

Every now and then we get a request from an employee to view their recent punches. Typically a manager can provide the employee with a view of their timesheet or print a timesheet for them.

This works for the most part but in order to provide our clients with even easier self service access option we are introducing the Recent Activity punch on all of our time clocks (except for ones that use magnetic swipe cards or proximity cards for punch in/out).

 

When providing your employee number and your PIN you now have a new option to click the Recent Activity button.

If you are authenticated properly your 10 most recent punches, including any open punches, will be displayed right below the button. For your security the list is cleared after 60 seconds unless you clear it out manually before that using the close button at the bottom of the list.

The lay out of the time clock has also been changed slightly to give even a better visual on smaller screen devices such as net books and tablets. There is less space now above the employee number field and less space to the left of the form so the time clock displays better on smaller form factors without compromising usability.

Those changes and various behind the scenes improvements will be released over the upcoming Labor Day weekend.

Happy Labor Day.

Reporting Enhancements

 

We are happy to announce that the most recent enhancements to Spokeware functionality have been in the realm of Reporting. With the latest release, additional reporting features have been added to increase the information available to you and the ease with which it is accessed.

There is a new Time Sheet Report available under TLM –> Reports.

This report can be run for any date range of your choosing and will show you a breakdown of hours worked by Job for each day within the period entered.

Additionally, the report can be run “Detail by Employee” and hours will be broken out by employee for each day within the period entered.

There is also a new left hand side navigation link under TLM called “Employees.” Under this link you are able to individually pull up the employees you have access to and:

1. Send messages to be displayed upon the employee’s next punch

2. Add missing timesheets for the employee

3. View the employee’s 10 most recent Open, Approved and/or Imported timesheets. For those that have been approved or imported into payroll, the timesheet will be Read-Only. For any Open timesheets you will be able to edit and approve just as if it were accessed through TLM –> Time Sheets

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact your friendly support representative.

Gracias

I am excited to announce the latest Spokeware functionality. Spokeware is starting to roll out multi-lingual prompts with Spanish as the initial language to support in addition to the English prompts.

The prompts will be displayed alongside the English prompts for ease of usage.

 

Offline Support

Spokeware is a Web 2.0 application, meaning that it runs as a web application and connects directly to our servers for real time punching in/out. This is important as our managers would like to view time sheets, budgets and other dashboard information in real-time as employees punch in/out and use the system.

Real-time connectivity offers numerous advantages but can pose a challenge if the network connection is lost intermittently. With the latest release of Spokeware we added offline support. If the network connectivity is lost employees will still be able to punch in/out using Spokeware. Once connectivity resumes the punches will be synchronized with the server and will appear in timesheets, budgets and dashboards.

 

RESTful Integration

For our partners interested in integrating their hardware devices, such as Point of Sale devices, or specialty software with Spokeware we now offer a RESTful API for easy integration.

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. We use APIs that adhere to industry standards such as those used by Amazon and Google. Using our open API any client can develop their own methods of punch in/out to Spokeware and build any user interface on top of that. Integrating with our open APIs requires merely few lines of standard REST calls.

 

If you have any questions on how to use the new functionality please contact your friendly support specialist.

Access Restrictions and Scalability

 

There are several exiting changes in the upcoming release of Spokeware.

Spokeware always had access restrictions on the individual device level. If you want to employee access controls you can restrict access to only authorized devices and only an Admin can authorize a device in the field.

This feature always allowed for fast deployment of devices and being able to replace devices in a pinch in the case of a hardware failure.

In the upcoming release of Spokeware we add another layer of access restrictions based on IP addresses. Now, a client can decide to limit access by authorizing individual devices, or to limit access based on IP address or to enforce both types of restrictions.

This allows clients the most flexibility in configuring access to Spokeware. Configuring IP address restrictions is done by our staff so contact your support representative if you want to deploy this feature.

Separately our technical team has been working hard on integrating the Spokeware platform with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. AWS was the forerunner in the cloud computing arena, years before other companies even realized what cloud computing is. Today, the AWS platform offers the most scalable, robust, mature and reliable cloud computing platform out there.

By integrating with the AWS platform Spokeware servers can now have the option to dynamically scale up and down as load changes. Allowing us to continue to offer a robust and responsive customer experience by automatically deploying more servers when needed.

Another integration point is the ability to use AWS’s cloud based Databases for storing some of our data. The AWS cloud database is replicated and distributed which means that it is resilient to hardware failures, something all systems are susceptible to. In a traditional system a hardware failure would dictate rebuilding the hardware and restoring data from backups. With the AWS cloud database the data is replicated in real-time so recovery happens in real-time without any noticeable effects to the end user.

The robust security architecture employed by AWS makes it extremely secure adding another advantage to their offering.

We started with offloading a very small amount of our data to the AWS cloud. Our objective is to leverage the AWS platform where it makes most sense while utilizing our current data centers to the fullest where it makes the most sense.

“I am really impressed with Spokeware’s balancing act of leveraging the robust AWS platform for items that benefit from distributed, replicated architecture while maintaining the core of their offerings on their existing proven platform” – CEO of Coffee Computing Corp.

The aforementioned updates will be rolled out over the next week as we perform a staged roll out across our servers.

Adding Timesheets

 

In Spokeware timesheets are automatically created when an employee punches in. This eliminates the extra steps of managing timesheets separately and having to remember to maintain them and makes it extra convenient for the manager to view/edit and process employees’ punches or whole timesheets.

However this ease of use has generated a need and a request. The need stems from people being new hired into the system and not having been trained on punching in/out. By the time they punch in to the system for the first time their prior week’s timesheet is closed.

The request came from all the people that are falling in love with Spokeware and would like to use it to manage timesheets for salaried employees or have the employees submit their own timesheets based on an honor system. Since there are no punches, the system does not generate a timesheet and there is no way for the salaried employee to enter their time.

To solve the need and fulfill the request the software now allows the Manager to add timesheets on the fly whilst managing open timesheets as illustrated in the screenshot below:

You simply pick the employee that you want to add the timesheet for, enter the starting date of the week you want to add the timesheet for and click the Add Time Sheet button.

The timesheet will be created and can be edited just like any other timesheet in the system. The manager can fill in the hours for the salaried employees or have the employees complete and submit the hours themselves.

For new hires that have missed punching in for the week the manager can enter their hours manually into the timesheet.

The latest release of Spokeware also includes couple of other enhancements. In that same screenshot you will notice a Filter By Location drop down. If you are a manager managing multiple locations you used to view timesheets for all employees in all locations all at once. This can be overwhelming for managers that manage hundreds of employees.

With this release you filter the timesheets by location so that you can process them one location at a time.

The last change deals with incorrect settings. If the employee was not setup correctly with a punch earning code Spokeware registered the punch without an earning code.

This is not a typical usage scenario but is an indication of a missing setup. None the less the manager could not open the timesheet to fix the error if the timesheets had punches with no earning codes.

This latest release of the software uses the system’s default hourly earning if no default earning code was defined for the employee. In the vast majority of the cases that’s the proper earning code to use. In the few cases where that is not the case the manager would be able to edit the timesheet and override the earning code.

The new features are available immediately in the system. As always, if you have any questions please contact your friendly account representative.

Time Away From Work in Timesheets

In the most recent release of Spokeware we added a new functionality that would help reduce double data entry and eliminate errors.

Previously, if somebody requested Personal Time Off through the HR system it needed to be manually added to payroll in order to get paid. This resulted in couple of undesirable results. First, the double data entry, a manager had to approve the PTO (or any other Time Away from Work) request and then the manager had to remember to pay that amount on the next payroll. Secondly, there was no way to track that time on the Employee’s time sheet.

With the most recent release of Spokeware a new feature has been added whereas Time Away requests, such as PTO, will automatically be added to the appropriate Timesheet once the request is approved by the manager. Once the request is in the Timesheet it will flow to payroll along with the rest of the Timesheet entries once the Timesheet is imported into the payroll system.

The new functionality eliminates the need to enter the data in multiple places. It also leaves a permanent record of the PTO on the employee’s timesheet for tracking and auditing purposes.

Anniversary and Birthday Months

 

We are often asked the question, how do we get a list of employees who have their anniversary or birthday in any given month.

The Active Employee List report now includes the Anniversary and Birthday months as separate columns in the output.

Since every column is sortable and searchable this means that you can now easily sort by Anniversary month or Birthday month and locate all the employees that happen to have a birthday or an anniversary in a given month.

eXtended Punch In/Out

 

In addition to the classic Punch In/Out functionality of SpokeWare managers can configure their time clock for extending punching.

To do that you navigate to the XPunch version of the URL. For example:

http://stratex.spokeware.com/xpunch/wir

notice the “xpunch” in the URL in place of the classic “punch”.

Instead of the familiar punch In/Out buttons you will notice a single Start Button.

Once the user enters the Employee Number and their PIN and clicks the Start Button they will be taken to a second screen depending on whether they are already punched into the system or not.

Assuming this is their punch in, they will prompted to select the department/job they are punching into and have only the options to punch in or to cancel out.

The default is the employee’s home department/job and they can change the selections to punch into a different department/job.

On the other hand if the user is already punched into the system then they will get a different screen after clicking the Start button. The screen will look something like this:

Since the user is already punched in there will be no options for selecting the department/job and the only options are to punch out, or the familiar break buttons.

In addition tipped employees can enter Cash Tips on the screen as they punch out. If there are no tips or if the employee is not a tipped employee they can leave the default value of 0 in there and not bother with that field.

However tipped employees that would like to declare their cash tips can enter right on this screen instead of communicating it to their manager. The cash tips will flow to the time sheets where the manager can audit/approve them and eventually will make their ways to the payroll when it is processed. This reduces the chance for errors and allows the employees to take responsibility for reporting their cash tips.

As explained earlier the manager’s can setup their time clock to use extended punching simply by replacing punch with xpunch in the URL. The Manager can choose to exclusively use one of the two different modes or have both the classic version and the extended version available as two separate tabs or two separate windows and directing employees to use the appropriate one.

Alternatively if the location has more than one time clock each of them can be configured with one mode and/or both modes using multiple tabs or multiple windows.

If you need any help setting up which version of the time clock to use please contact your friendly support person.

In addition to the time clock changes described above there are couple of changes to the manager’s side of the application.

Under TLM –> Reports there is a new report under the “Time Sheet Reports” section.

The new report allows the manager to view time sheets that were already imported into a payroll. The report goes back 45 days which is enough for the 3 most recent bi-weekly or semi-monthly payrolls.

If a time sheet is not imported yet then it will be available under the Open and Approved Time Sheets report as always.

We have received feedback from one of our users that they would like to be able to save printed paper when printing those reports. As such the reports now print each employee’s time sheets on a single page if the time sheets fit instead of each time sheet on a separate page. As always if you have feedback or questions please contact us at support@oaesoftware.com

On a small side note our blog can now be found at http://blog.spokeware.com in addition to http://spokeware.blogspot.com

SpokeWare Release

 

We are releasing a new update to SpokeWare today. As always there are a bunch of behind the scenes bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations. Some of the big ticket highlights of this release are:

• Announcements on the Time Clock

The Time Clock now displays eStratex Announcements on the Time Clock. If you have any questions on how to setup the announcements in eStratex please contact your friendly support staff.

• Timesheet Editor Revamped

The Timesheet editor was re-worked based on end-user feedback.

Below is how the Timesheet editor looks today

Here is how it will look after today’s release:

The layout of the top part was changed slightly and the font size was reduced to allow better use of the space on the screen. Note: you can always enlarge/reduce the font size by using the Ctrl and +/- key combinations on your keyboard.

Much more importantly the Timesheet editor now allows you to edit the punch in/out time instead of the total hours. It displays the time in, out and the unpaid break (e.g. lunch) time taken during the shift. You can override any of those values and update the Timesheet and changes will be reflected immediately.

You are now able to delete any Timesheet entry, not just zero entries.

Open punches are now displayed in the Timesheet editor. The entry’s date will be colored in red. The missing punch’s time will be displayed as ?? for both the hours and the minutes. You can either Delete the entry altogether or update the missing punch’s time.

A bug was fixed related to entering paid PTO hours on the Timesheet. Under certain conditions adding the PTO would’ve caused an Overtime entry to be added to the Timesheet even though PTO is not Overtime eligible. This has been fixed and adding the PTO through the Timesheet does not affect Overtime under any conditions.

• Budget Module Real-Time Data

The budget module now uses real-time punch data from the Time Clock. As soon as a punch is complete or added through the Timesheet editor the impact of that punch on the budget will be reflected in the budget module.

The data will continue to update in real-time as work is carried out.

A minor bug in this module has been fixed where saving the rooms sold was not updating the calculations correctly and this is now fixed.

 

Upcoming changes

The changes above are complete and will be released this weekend. For the upcoming release we have three main items on our development list.

1. Split the punch in and punch out buttons on the Time Clock. This will allow people to punch out even if they forgot to punch. The open punch would show up on the Timesheet editor and the manager would override the punch.
2. Allow employees to enter cash tips earned as they clock out.
3. Add couple more requested reports.

 

As always if you have any questions please contact your friendly support person.

Coping with Internet Explorer

 

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer gives web developers many headaches due to all kinds of little oddities in its behavior. One those oddities is when Internet Explorer decides that it needs to keep copies of web pages to display to the user instead of getting them from the application you are using.

This is all good and dandy when you are viewing a web page that does not change often, like cnn.com for example. But when you are editing a timesheet and making changes you do not want to see the old timesheet because Internet Explorer decided to be “helpful”. You would want to view the changes immediately as you make them.

In this scenario we have couple of options. The best option is not use Internet Explorer at all and instead use one of the modern alternatives, such as Google Chrome (can be downloaded here) or Firefox (can be downloaded here).

If for some reason you are unable to use a modern browser and need to use Internet Explorer then you will need to tell Internet Explorer to always give you the latest version of the website you are viewing and not its own saved copy.

To do this, you need to go to the Tools menu. Find the “Internet Options” option, typically the last item under the Tools Menu.

Once the Internet Options dialog is open look for Browsing History which is available on the General tab in IE8.

Click the Settings button to open up another dialog. Under the heading Temporary Internet Files choose the option for: “Every time I visit the webpage”.

Click OK on the dialog windows, close your Internet Explorer and restart it and you should start seeing better results.

The following screen shot shows the settings windows in IE 8. If you are using an older version of Internet Explorer then you will need to upgrade or download one of the other browsers mentioned above.

 

After you do the steps above and restart Internet Explorer there is one more step to do once you actually go back and login into SpokeWare. When editing a Timesheet (any Timesheet) for the first time after making those changes you will need to click the Ctrl and F5 keys together to force Internet Explorer to refresh its stored copies of the webpages.

A New Release of SpokeWare is Available

 

We are excited to announce a new release of SpokeWare available as of March 27th, 2011.

Highlights of the changes are listed below.

Time Sheet Edit Screen

• Improved OT Processing:

• When manually adding a punch to a timesheet that causes the worked hours to go over 40 hours for the week OT calculations are now automatically performed and OT hours are added to the timesheet.

• Improved Punch Hour Display

• The hours display when entering punch information was realigned for easier use and the hours are now displayed using the AM/PM designation.

• Ability to Add Per Unit Amounts

• Clients that track per unit amounts, for example number of rooms cleaned, can now enter those amounts into the timesheet. Simply change the selected earning in the Earning drop down to an earning that handles units (such as number of rooms) and the entry form will hide the punch information grid and display the amount entry field. Enter the number of units and click Add Entry and your units will be saved into the timesheet and will be imported into your payroll when you import the timesheet.

• Ability to Add Dollar Amounts

• Similarly clients that track dollar amounts for earnings such as cash tips can enter those amounts in the timesheet. Simply chose an eligible earning from the Earning drop down and the Amount field will be available to enter the amount. That data will be added to the timesheet and later imported into the payroll eliminating the need for double entry.

• Job Drop Downs Default to Employees Position

The location drop down in the Job description now defaults to the employee’s location. Similarly for the Department and Job drop downs. This enable’s Managers to quickly add entries to a timesheet while reducing the chances for errors.

• Earning Drop Down Defaults to Regular Hourly Earning

Similarly the Earning drop down now defaults to the Employee’s default hourly earning. This helps in eliminating mistakes and speeds up data entry process.

• Managers can now view multiple locations

A manager that has access to more than one location can now assign the timesheet earnings to a different location. If you have access to more than one location they will all be available in the drop down. If you need access please contact your friendly support representative and we will assign you access after verifying the request.

• Timesheets now allow for updating earning codes in place

 

Due to popular demand Managers can now change a timesheet entry’s Job (location, department, job) and/or Earning code simply by overriding those values from the appropriate drop down and clicking the Update button.

Tip: if you find that the screen is too wide for your display you can reduce the font size in your browser. On most modern browser this can be achieved simply by pressing and holding the Ctrl and – (minus) keys together.

 

 

Reporting Changes

• Managers can Re-Open Approved Timesheets

The Open and Approved Timesheets report is a very handy report that can be accessed by navigating to TLM –> Reports –> Open and Approved Timesheets

This report lists all available timesheets that are either open or approved but have not been imported into payrolls as of yet.

The report has the unique feature in that it allows a manager to view timesheets on the screen in a compact fashion yet when it is printed it prints each timesheet on a separate page along with place holders for employee and manager signatures. This allows for employees to verify the hours before the manager submits the timesheet to payroll.

Every now and then a manager would inadvertently approve a timesheet and would need it re-opened. As of this release, this report now adds the ability for the manager to Open Approved timesheets right from the report. It also allows the manager to approve Open timesheets right from the report.

This allows the managers to undo Approvals without having to contact support and at the time time provides a single location where a manager can go over timesheets with employees and approve en mass.

To approve a timesheet click on the Open Status and you will be prompted to confirm before it is approved. To open a timesheet click on the Approved status and you will be prompted to confirm before it is re-opened.

 

If you have any questions or feedback you can always contact us at Support@OAESoftware.com