timecontrol, TimeControl Industrial, TimeControl upgrade

TimeControl version 8.6 now available

TimeControl, TimeControl 8.6, TimeControl upgrades, Chris Vandersluis, Christopher Vandersluis, Christopher Peter VandersluisWe are delighted to announce that TimeControl 8.6 is now available for our on-premise customers.  There are numerous new and enhanced features which are a part of TimeControl on-premise and TimeControl Industrial on-premise.  These same features will be included in the update to TimeControl Online, TimeControl Industrial Online which will come in the next few weeks.

Here are just some of the great enhancements to TimeControl. now available:

An all-new Line Item Approvals

We have rewritten Line Item Approvals with an updated interface and a wave of new features. Line Item Approvals is part of TimeControl’s unique Matrix Approval Process for Labor Actuals™ which has been a part of TimeControl since its first version. This version of TimeControl extends that process dramatically. After organizational approvals are complete, Line Item Approvals allows multiple paths or processes to approve each cell of each line of the timesheet. Line Item Approvals stands apart from Project Manager Validation and allows others in the organization to approve timesheet data. For example, a project manager might have to approve lines before they are sent back to the project but in a completely different process, a billing manager might have to approve lines before an invoice can be created and a Finance manager might have to approve lines before they are accepted into Capital Costs and Assets of the organization. The approvals are organized around an integration process with a mind to reviewing TimeControl data before it is sent out to be consumed by other corporate systems.

We’ve enhanced Line Item Approvals with additional email and notification capabilities along with an ability to add a second sequential level of approvals for each process. In what should be welcome news to those who have already used this feature, we’ve also given the creation dialogs a complete rewrite to make it simpler for administrators to create their own line item approvals.

Line Item Approvals for Materials / Equipment

As if everything we just described for Line Item Approvals wasn’t enough, in TimeControl Industrial and TimeControl Industrial Online we’ve extended the Line Item Approval concept to approvals for Materials and Equipment. Now material consumption and equipment usage has its own Matrix Approval Process where each line item can be approved both at the Materials entry level and then at the Line Item level.

Use Multiple Tabs at the same time

Over the years, working to support multiple browsers and to help with the performance of data being displayed on the screen, we lost the ability to open multiple tabs of the same TimeControl instance at one time. We have rewritten the memory management for TimeControl’s interface and can now happily report that TimeControl supports multiple tabs into the same instance of TimeControl.

This would allow, for example, an administrator to open the User Table in one tab and the Employee Table in a second tab instead of having to exit one table and flip to another.

Support for Multi-factor authentication in Microsoft Project Online

If you are using Microsoft Project Online or SharePoint for Microsoft 365, you may be recommended to use Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) for security purposes.  TimeControl supports linking with SharePoint for Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Project Online with Multi-factor authentication enabled or disabled for the connecting user.  The instructions to support Multi-factor authentication have multiple steps and can be found in the TimeControl Reference Guide.

TimeRequest is now part of the free TimeControl Mobile App

The free TimeControl Mobile App has a major new enhancement. Now your TimeRequests can be created, released and approved right from your phone or tablet! This allows you to create a request for vacation, personal time-off or any other category that your organization might have configured TimeControl to use TimeRequest for. This is a big enhancement to efficiency. And, did we mention? The App is free to anyone with a TimeControl license. It can be downloaded from the Apple Store or Google Play.

Enhanced Autofill now allows for multiple weeks and more

Autofill is one of the most popular TimeControl features for TimeControl Administrators but up until now, it has only worked on weekly timesheet periods. To be fair, that is by-far the most common timesheet period selected among TimeControl deployments but for those with bi-weekly, bi-monthly or monthly periods, Autofill felt incomplete. That’s not the case any longer. With TimeControl 8.6, Autofill has been enhanced and the Wizard to create new Autofill definitions has been rewritten to allow different types of periods to be selected. The same old power is still there but in a bi-weekly time period, you can fill in 14 days instead of 7 of expected hours for Autofill to take advantage of.

And… there is so much more!

There is so much more to this version, ability to report on the code or the description of a user defined field, hierarchy tables and screens can now flag a hierarchy as inactive, ability to import external tables, Materials Posting now supports posting procedures and more.

For a more complete list of features in TimeControl 8.6, visit www.timecontrol.com/features/latest.

How to upgrade

If you have a current service agreement for TimeControl or TimeControl Industrial you can download the new version on the support/updates page. The free TimeControl Mobile App will be updated on the Apple Store and Google Play automatically regardless of whether you are an on-premise or online customer.  For subscribers to TimeControl Online, TimeControl Industrial Online and TimeControl Project, these systems will be updated automatically in the coming weeks. Subscribers will receive a notification within their system at least one week prior to the upgrade.

For more information on the latest TimeControl features or our upgrade services, please fill in a contact request at email info@hms.ca .

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A goodbye to our friend Ken Edwards

Ken Edwards, Senior Account Executive of HMS Software at the annual HMS staff meeting in January 2025
Ken Edwards, Senior Account Executive of HMS Software at the annual HMS staff meeting in January 2025

It is with deep sadness that I must announce the passing of one of our longest serving staff members.  We were recently informed that Ken Edwards had passed away during a diving trip to the South Pacific.

Ken was a senior account executive at HMS Software.  He has been with the company for 35 years.

It would be impossible in a few words to describe Ken’s incredible impact on our firm.  He joined HMS before we even launched our first TimeControl.  He has been there from the beginning.  In his role in Sales and Marketing, Ken was known to project managers across Canada, the US as well as Europe and Asia Pacific.  He was a founding member of the Toronto chapter of the Microsoft Project User Group (MPUG).  He had easily met over 10,000 project managers during his career.

For those of us at HMS who have been with the company a long time, we remember our kids growing up at the same time and going through the growth of ourselves as parents and the transformation of our children into adults.

Ken was a part of our fabric; a part of our infrastructure; a part of our family.

We send his family our heartfelt condolences.

Thank you Ken for everything you shared with us.

We will all miss you.

A Celebration of Life to honor Ken will be held at Compass Point Bible Church at 1500 Kerns Rd., Burlington, Ontario, Canada on Thursday February 20, 2025 at 2pm with a light reception to follow.
Ken’s service will be livestreamed here.

Here is the announcement of Ken’s passing from his church:
Ken Edwards Family News

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Multiple Profiles presents a challenge

TimeControl Multiple Profiles, Chris Vandersluis, Christopher Vandersluis, Christopher Peter VandersluisSince the very first version of TimeControl, we have believed that no users should have to confront features in the product that aren’t for them. For a timesheet, you might think that’s silly. After all, how many features can there be?
Lots.
But in TimeControl’s User Profiles, Administrators and system designers can decide what elements of TimeControl to display to which users.
So long as some super-Administrator has access to the User Profiles, you can hide many of the features that you might not be interested in deploying at this time. This is a common practice for almost all TimeControl deployments over the last 30 years.
The result is that an end-user who perhaps just does their timesheet and nothing else can have everything else hidden. They won’t see the Tables or the Reports or the Tools or even the documentation unless that has been made available to them. This makes TimeControl incredibly easy to adopt for the end user.
But… This same ease of use can present a challenge over the long term.
On a regular basis an experience TimeControl user emails a request asking if we can help find a tool that would attach itself to TimeControl for some function only to reply that the very feature they are looking for is already in TimeControl.
Some clients have been using TimeControl for over 25 years and like any enterprise system, once it’s in place and doing what was originally intended, there is little effort expended on seeing how the use of the product can be extended or if the organization is using all that the system provides.
Not that we expect every user to read all our documentation but just to make this point, our reference guide has over 600 pages. The user guide, over 100. Our report designer guide is another 400+ pages and our BI Guide another 180+. The TimeControl Project Guide is another 100+ pages.
There are a lot of features that could be used in TimeControl, and no one deploys them all.
So, if you are a TimeControl client, we encourage you to keep an eye on what’s new in each TimeControl version and from time to time ask our staff to do a generic catch up training session as we might do for any new client. You can also look at the many video courses or sessions on the website or just keep up with this blog.
TimeControl may have the answers you’re looking for already in your hands.

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Happy Holidays from your TimeControl Team

Happy Holidays 2024, TimeControl, HMS Software, Chris Vandersluis, Christopher Vandersluis, Christopher Peter VandersluisAs we near the end of a remarkable 2024, we’d like to take a moment to thank all of our clients, our colleagues and friends and wish you all a safe, healthy and happy holiday season.

HMS will have holidays hours over the next week as follows:

Tuesday December 24 HMS offices close at noon
Wednesday, December 25 – Office closed for Christmas
Thursday, December 26 – Office closed for Boxing Day in Canada
Friday, December 27 – Regular hours
Monday, December 30 – Regular hours
Tuesday, December 31 – Office closes at noon
Wednesday, January 1 – Office closed for New Year’s Day
Thursday,  January 2 – Office closed
Friday, January 3 – Office opens with regular hours

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HMS President named top 10 iconic leaders of 2024

Industry Chronicle Magazine, Chris Vandersluis, Christopher Vandersluis, Christopher Peter VandersluisIt’s highly flattering to me to find myself once again being written about.  This is, no doubt, thanks to the 40th anniversary of HMS and my 40 years leading the firm.  Industry Chronicle Magazine has named me One of the Top 10 iconic leaders of 2024.

As flattering as this is, a leader is no one without a team to lead and I have one of the best teams in the software industry.  The TimeControl marketing, sales and development team are remarkable and while not the largest team in the market, they serve clients who are among the largest organizations in the world.  You need only look at some of the case studies and testimonials on the TimeControl website to see some of them.

If you read the article, you’ll see it’s not really about me.  It’s about the 30 year success of TimeControl and the team that built it.

So, this honor is really theirs.  To my team and all the clients, colleagues and family that are a part of our TimeControl world, I say thank you.

Chris Vandersluis
President, HMS Software

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Putting the Key into Key Performance Indicators

TimeControl Homepage Dashboard, Chris Vandersluis, Christopher Vandersluis, Christopher Peter VandersluisOur consultants are often asked to help with creating a dashboard view in TimeControl’s Dashboard module.  (That’s a picture of the TimeControl dashboard in the post, right here.)

Over the years, we’ve tended to ask a few common questions that often has our client pause and then say they’d like to think about their request some more.  The problem isn’t technical.  Nor is it a process problem.  The issue comes from not thinking about what a dashboard is for and how it can be used.  Here are a few basic questions about what you’d like to display:

1. In what way does this indicator reflect some corporate strategy?
Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean that it is meaningful.  Is this indicator something that will move the organization forward if it shows something to you?

2. Is the Key Performance Indicator actionable. 
We will ask something simple for example, “If this indicator is green, what action, if any, will you take?  If the indicator is red, what action, if any, will you take?” and so on.  If the traffic light is red, we stop.   If it’s green, we go.  That is something we understand in traffic.  What is the business equivalent here?

3. Is the KPI measurable?
Do you actually have a measure that shows what the performance indicator is about?  Is it a measure that can be counted on?  How often is it measured?

4. What about timing?
Many people will ask for “real-time” dashboards.  That’s easy to demonstrate but hard to make a difference with.  “What action will you take based on this indicator?” we will ask.  “How often are you prepared to make that decision?  Hourly?  Minute-by-minute?  Daily?  Weekly?  Virtually no one says hourly.

There’s a lot more to creating a dashboard than just making it pretty and picking out awesome icons.  I wrote a much longer article about this over on my EPM Guidance site some 14 years ago but the logic still applies.  The article was an offshoot of a project management presentation I’d done.  You can find it at: https://www.epmguidance.com/2010/04/28/the-keys-to-key-performance-indicators/.

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HMS President Chris Vandersluis named as Influential Business Leader of 2024

Chris Vandersluis, Christopher Vandersluis, Christopher Peter Vandersluis, Business Talk Magazine Influential Business Leader of 2024We’re delighted to announce and congratulate that Chris Vandersluis, President of HMS Software has been named as an Influential Business Leaders of the Year- 2024 in the November 2024 Business Talk Magazine.

The magazine has just been published at https://businesstalkmagazine.com/influential-business-leaders-of-the-year-2024-november/.

To find the article about Mr. Vandersluis, HMS Software and TimeControl, go to page 31 or search for “TimeControl”.

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What makes TimeControl unique?

Stand alone, TimeControl, Chris Vandersluis, Christopher Vandersluis, Christopher Peter VandersluisWe talk about what makes TimeControl unique all the time but we’ve been doing some internal training lately and thought it might make sense to lay out what HMS considers TimeControl’s Unique Selling Propositions.  This is a common concept in sales to identify what makes a product unique or makes it stand out among it’s competitors.  So, here are what we focus on when we describe TimeControl to prospective clients:

TimeControl is a Multi-function timesheet

That’s surprisingly (at least to us) rare.  Most timesheet systems are designed with a primary purpose.  By far the most popular is a Time and Attendance timesheet organized to use with Payroll.  The next most popular perhaps the Time and Billing timesheet that is organized by client to use for invoicing.  Think they’re the same? They’re not.  Somewhere down the list of timesheet types is a Project Management update timesheet to put the Actuals into Budget vs. Actuals.  The focus there is activity based costing to compare against a plan.

TimeControl was designed since its inception to fulfill multiple roles at once and that carries through every design decision we’ve made with the product.  Using the same timesheet data, you can get auditable down-to-the minute attendance for Payroll and multiple rates for billing and updates of not just actuals but also task progress for Project Management and numerous other processes.  That leads nicely into the next aspect of what makes TimeControl unique.

TimeControl is the most flexible timesheet in the industry

As a multi-function timesheet TimeControl must, by extension, support multiple business processes.  That means, TimeControl is going to have to be flexible.  That has been a center point of the product design since 1994.  Some of the many ways we do this include:

User Defined Fields

Every TimeControl Table, the Timesheet Header and Timesheet Details and many other aspects of the product allow an unlimited number of user-defined fields.  These are used to condition data for many possible purposes.  This might be used for reporting, for grouping or filtering data and for grouping or filtering data differently for different purposes.

Changeable menu, fields and reports through User Profiles

TimeControl’s User Profiles allow you to determine who can see what data is available to each user profile.  There are an unlimited number of User Profiles that can be created so some profiles might be geography specific, some user authority specific and some department or role specific.  In each profile you can decide what menu selections are available, what data can be entered, what data can be viewed and this security extends all the way to the field level.

That’s unprecedented.

Free TimeControl Mobile App

It’s not enough to have all that power in our web application or to say that TimeControl is available both for on-premise deployment and as an in-the-cloud subscription service but we also include with every license the ability to use the free TimeControl Mobile App.  The Mobile App is also unusual in that it’s not just for timesheet entry.  You can also use the Mobile App for approvals, timesheet review, materials and equipment entries and even for mobile-specific reports.

TimeControl is the most Integrate-able timesheet in the industry

Unlike some systems where integration is a concept or something external that you pay extra for, TimeControl comes with pre-built integrations for numerous products such as Oracle’s Primavera, Microsoft Project, BrightWork, SharePoint, Contruent and more.  There is also an ability to import and export data either on demand or on pre-planned automated schedules.

For those looking to weave TimeControl into a more extensive corporate process, TimeControl includes a full bi-directional API which allows clients to establish coded integration to virtually any other system.

There is lots more of course, the extensive way we accommodate rates, our multi-lingual interface, the multiple ways to report on TimeControl data, the ability to create libraries of dashboard templates and so on and so on.

 

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How does TimeControl handle multiple languages?

Multi-language, localization, TimeControl, Chris Vandersluis, Christopher Vandersluis, Christopher Peter VandersluisTimeControl is in use in virtually every time-zone in the world. One of the questions we are often asked is how we will support the local display for users in different places who are all part of the same organization and same TimeControl instance.  This term is commonly referred to as localization in the software industry.

TimeControl has several answers for that.

Languages

TimeControl ships with numerous language translations including French, English, Spanish etc. But, that’s often not enough. Even in a single language, many clients ask us if they can modify some of the terms that TimeControl uses. Perhaps the term “Task” is used instead of “Charge” or “Initiative” is the standard term in that organization for “Project. For this reason, TimeControl ships with the Language module included. A client can create numerous modified languages. They can copy from an existing language and then make their own variant. The same module allows a client to literally add a language we have never translated. Usually, only a tiny fraction of TimeControl’s terms have to be translated as this is usually most significant for the individual users who the client has defined to have the least amount of menu items to select from.
The labels on a page, the menu items, even the error messages can be modified.

Since this is a user-profile oriented aspect of TimeControl, this allows one language to be used for one group (in one country for example) and a different language to be used for a different group.
It’s a powerful aspect of TimeControl.

Dates, money and more

Many of the display options for TimeControl are either defined within the application (for example the currency symbol) or are derived from the browser’s “culture”. This makes TimeControl automatically show 30/10/2024 for our Canadian users and 10/30/2024 for our American users. Internal options for display options are either in the System Preferences (where they would appear for all users) or User Profiles (where they would appear only for those users with that User Profile.

Some options (such as select a language) are also changeable within each user’s MyAccount area.

Documentation

Aside from TimeControl-supplied documentation, what about an organization’s own process guide for using TimeControl. You can replace the documentation that is supplied with the product (or hide it) and instead, display your own. This can be used to show different language format guides (we supply both English and French user guides) or just display the how-to guide on the internal process along with where to direct your questions.

It’s always improving

We work on the Languages module and display options within almost every version of TimeControl and we often use this feature ourselves when we are helping an organization deploy the product. The language module is in both the on-premise and on-line versions of TimeControl.

 

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