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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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.
The changes above are complete and will be released this weekend. For the upcoming release we have three main items on our development list.
As always if you have any questions please contact your friendly support person.
