We 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 .