Unlike many timesheet systems, TimeControl maintains distinct tables for Users, Employees and Resources. This is deliberate and allows for highly defined interaction with Project Management and corporate Finance systems. Some timesheet systems are created with the premise that all users are also employees, and all employees are also identified as a resource. This is common in a small IT business but project management definitions are often more complex and this led us to define these three tables separately from the very beginning of TimeControl.
Users
End users are those who have been given a login to access TimeControl directly. The definition of these records includes the name and authentication information and the User Profile for them to get into TimeControl and get access to the security definition defined for them. A User is one who can create records and own data such as a timesheet during the approval process. In the User record, you can optionally define if this user is associated to a particular employee but this is optional because we always identified a role for users who would not, themselves, enter timesheets but would be responsible for timesheet data, enter timesheets on behalf of others or do administrative or approval work.
Employees
Employees are those for whom timesheets are created. An employee might have an associated User record but that is not necessarily the case. Because these tables are all separate, a non-user employee might be defined so a timesheet could be created but entered and managed on behalf of the employee by another user. This happens in TimeControl Industrial all the time with Crew Timesheets but it can happen in any TimeControl. Whenever a timesheet line is created, it is associate to an employee record. Also, the user entering the data is identified in the line’s timestamp and the log.
Resources
Resources are the record to which project assignments are associated. While a resource could also be the name of an employee, it is common for project resource management to define a role or skill instead of a name. So a “developer” or “senior developer” or “documentation specialist” or “QA specialist” might be the more common resource levelled assignment in the project management system and the employee who would do the work might be assigned to that actual task much closer to it happening. In TimeControl, you can associate an Employee record to a Resource Code. So many different employees might have the Resource Code: “developer”. When TimeControl sends data back from the timesheet data to the project management system, it rolls up all the hours of each employee to the associated resource definition. So, the project management system might never see the name of the employee, only the hours from “developers”.
We’ve also gone further. What if someone is a developer but today is doing work that is assigned to a “QA specialist”. TimeControl has the ability to expose the resource code at the timesheet line level so someone who is doing work that is different from their normal resource definition can identify that properly in the timesheet. These fields are invisible by default but can easily be exposed in the appropriate User Profile.
In TimeControl Industrial, the same logic applies to non-labor resources. An assignment might be made for “Excavator” in the project management system. This will be the resource definition that is imported from the project system. But “excavators” don’t do anything. A particular machine number might so the work might be accomplished by CAT330#29. This resource would then do the work in a material timesheet which would then roll up to “Excavator” when pushed back to the project management system.
Flexibility
At the end user level, these multiple levels of definition aren’t typically visible. A person logs into TimeControl, enters the time for the work they did last week and move on to their weekend. But, the background, these intimately linked tables allows for countless definitions of data that can then conform to the use cases needed by project management, job costing, payroll, billing and more. While the flexibility may be hidden from the end-user, it is always there in the background for the TimeControl Administrators to use.
This is a project that HMS has been working on since last November and on October 14th after 11 months of waiting, it is finally coming to fruition.
When TimeControl first got started in 1994, we responded to the most common demands for project-oriented timesheets. The first couple of versions of TimeControl had only weekly timesheets.
We’re delighted to see TimeControl featured in an article by XRaised this month. The article is available for access via LinkedIn on the XRaised blog.
We are delighted to find TimeControl at the top of these internet Best in their Class lists:
With the imminent decommissioning of Microsoft Project Online, we have been approached by numerous companies asking if we are able to save their Project Online timesheet and associated project and task data. It is perhaps to be expected as HMS is a company which has had a link to Project Online since its creation and has had links to every version of Microsoft Project since 1985.
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