Tag Archives: timecontrol timesheets

timecontrol

Have your TimeControl rules changed?

For many organizations in the past weeks, employees have changed their working conditions.  changesahead_300x223For TimeControl, this may warrant relooking at your timesheet and project progress capture processes.  This is a common occurrence when an organization merges with another or brings on a new department.

For most TimeControl clients, when they implement TimeControl, a process guide is created that covers all the different practices and procedures for events such as onboarding new staff or adding new projects or doing timesheet and project approvals.

In the last few weeks many clients have been shifting staff from working at the office to working at home or working at different hours in order to facilitate social distancing.  This might affect your regular TimeControl processes in a number of ways.

Perhaps your regular office hours are now flexible for anyone working from home.  Perhaps you have new sick leave procedures for your remote workers.  If someone has been tested positive for Covid-19 do you have new timesheet charge types for that person?

There are a number of TimeControl functions that processes that might need checking:

Filters

Filters are used throughout TimeControl to enable features such as restricting what projects are visible to what employees or how a validation rule should work.  If your business has been changed with some people now working from home or taking on new responsibilities, then these filters might need a review.  In particular:

Validation Rule Filters

Validation Rules can changed when working conditions change.  Perhaps you now have more staff working flexible hours or perhaps your current policies on personal time off have altered.  A review of the filters that are the building blocks of Validation Rules can help you adapt.

Employee Table Filters for Projects, Charges, Rates

In the TimeControl Employee Table, there are places to implement filters for each employee.  These filters determine what projects, charge codes and rate codes can be viewed by that employee.  If your situation has changed the way that projects and tasks are being completed, then looking at these filters to see if changes are needed makes sense.

You can find out all about Filters in the TimeControl Reference Guide.

Validation Rules

Have your Validation Rules changed?  You can deactivate a Validation Rule or change it to be a warning only instead of an error if your business conditions are in flux.  This can be done for each rule.

Projects and Charge Codes

Are you still creating projects and charge codes in the same way you done traditionally?  Also, are you creating certain project and charge code entries to identify the specific costs of the change due to Covid-19?  Being able to identify these costs specifically might become important in the near future because of insurance claims or government recompense for such expenses.

Assignments

With people not co-located, you may be rethinking how tasks are assigned. TimeControl’s Assignment function lets you assign or re-assign tasks and create budgets for them.  Perhaps your tasks and assignments should be rethought also in terms of your target completion.  It may take more (or less) time to get certain types of tasks completed.

Dashboards

While most organizations use email effectively to send out news, the Dashboard area of TimeControl is an ideal place to put persistent notices and relevant news in the Announcements area.  Announcements can have as-of and expiry dates and can be fine-tuned to be visible only to certain roles so not all announcements need to be seen by all employees.

TimeControl Mobile App access

Finally, the free TimeControl Mobile App may be more attractive than ever.  If you are using TimeControl Online then you already have everything you need to activate the Mobile App.  The App is enabled in the Administration Area for TimeControl overall then per Profile in the User Profiles area.  Users can download the App for free from Google Play for Android devices and the Apple Store for iOS devices.  If you are using TimeControl OnPremise, then you may have to configure TimeControl to be enabled for the Mobile App.  Contact HMS Support if you have questions about how to do that.

And more…

Aside from actual changes to configuration, what about your approval process and allowances for people who are not in their normal roles.  You may want to investigate delegation through the Alternate User functionality as well as how you are doing your approvals for both the timesheet as a whole and line-item approvals for projects.

What about new processes from HR for onboarding or offboarding?  Are there employees who might be temporarily not doing timesheets?  Are there any new rules from Payroll?

Typically such changes are quick to do in TimeControl but it is important to keep track of what you change because you are likely going to have to change it back sometime soon.

If you need assistance with changing your TimeControl, TimeControl Industrial or TimeControl Online configuration, talk to the HMS Technical staff at info@hms.ca.

 

 

Testimonial

Have you seen the latest letter sent to us from Sinope?

We are always delighted to get input from our clients. This month brings us a lovely letter from Sinope Tech. It’s especially exciting for us as it comes to us from a client in Quebec, Canada in the same province where HMS Headquarters is located. Sinope is a manufacturing company specializing in innovative smart home products.

Cassandra from Accounting at Sinope explains in her letter that their team is using TimeControl for employees to track project and non-project hours and this allows Sinope to use reports from TimeControl for Research and Development Tax Credits.

Cassandra is also highly complimentary about our services:

“TimeControl also offers an exceptional support service! Quick and clear answers are always given to us.”

We’re delighted to be working with Sinope and proud to be a part of their project control environment.

You can read Cassandra’s letter at: TimeControl.com/why-timecontrol/testimonials/sinope.

timecontrol

Meeting your HR and Payroll requirements with TimeControl

Human ResourcesWe tend to talk so much about the project management aspects of TimeControl that we often overlook the much more common part of a business that is interested in timesheets and that’s Human Resources.

Unlike the timesheets that are included with many project management systems, TimeControl is designed to serve both Project Management and Human Resources at the same time.  Aside from project management needs, there are several aspects of the organization that will have a great interest in the timesheet data.  Some of those departments are combined and usually all of them will fall within the Finance group.

Human Resources

This department focuses on employee attendance and participation in HR related tasks such as training.  HR will usually manage statutory holidays, vacation approvals, sick leave and other benefits.  Their interest in timesheet data is usually the exceptions.  When did someone take the day off and was that associated to some bank of benefits to which the employee was entitled?  HR may also manage time employees are expected to take for training, certifications, safety briefings and other compliance time.  Data collected from the timesheet can be key for tracking this type of effort.

Payroll

Well, of course everyone wants to get paid and for some organizations this means collecting timesheets with each hour identified.  Payroll may have to collect timesheet data even if everyone is on a salary.  There are many exceptions for which Payroll must be able to identify whether someone worked overtime, was absent or worked in conditions that would affect their pay (such as while travelling).

Other Finance

There are other Finance areas outside of the interests of which may also have an interest in timesheet data for such things as including Billing, labor costs for R&D tax claims, and labor cost of assets that will appear on the balance sheet for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and more.

What do these departments need?

One thing that is common to all the areas above is the level of data quality and control that they required.  Approvals for payroll will almost certainly be different and more stringent than the approvals for project management.  We often explain that if the budget vs. actual for project management is off by a hundred dollars, no one will get excited.  But, if someone’s paycheck is off by one single cent, they will feel compelled to complain.  The level of attention to the data is different from the HR perspective.

The TimeControl.com site has an area with numerous resources of interest to HR and Payroll departments.  These pages include webcasts, white papers slide shows and more.  Here are a few links that may be of interest:

If you need more help with determining how TimeControl can fulfill your HR and Payroll requirements, you can also contact HMS and we’ll set up a call with one of our implementation specalists.  Just go to TimeControl.com/contact and let us know you want to talk about your HR/Payroll needs.