The TimeControl website follows an educational and information sharing philosophy.  That’s not an accident.  To talk about how and why we follow that model, we have to look back at HMS Software’s history of publishing our information on the World Wide Web.  HMS’s creation predates the Web which came along a good 6 years after our founding.  HMS Software’s original website is one of the oldest websites in the world, dating back to the early 1990s.  For those who keep track of such things, the HMS site was in the first 7,000 or so sites added (manually) to the old Yahoo website directory during its first year.  To put that in context, that’s before Google and at its peak, Yahoo was adding thousands of directory listings per day.

The Yahoo directory was shut down some 10 years ago from this writing.

All websites were educational or information sharing sites at the time.  And the HMS website along with the TimeControl website which followed closely behind, were no different.

With the web extending and the types of sites taking advantage of the capabilities of web development tools, a new type of philosophy became the go-to for people like ourselves in the software publishing industry: The Landing Page.

In this model, users were directed to a starting page where, in order to move forward, they would have to give up some identifying information such as a name, an email address, or a company name.  Some such sites were more intrusive than others where they would check to see if you were using a generic email account such as gmail.com or hotmail.com or outlook.com and would insist that if you wanted to get to the “good stuff”, you use a corporate email.

Here at HMS, we’ve never been comfortable with that whole concept.  I remember visiting a website of a vendor once and, before I had even entered my name, email or phone number, my phone rang right beside me on my desk.  “Hello?” I answered.  “Hi!” said a bright cheery salesperson.  “I see you’re browsing our website and I wanted to see how I could help!”  That was so unnerving that I told the cheery fellow to please never call me again and hung up.  Thinking on it later, I could see the technology the company used to get my name, and contact information from just visiting the site but the experience was so intrusive, that it felt creepy and stalkerish.  I never visited that vendor again but I also made a pledge that HMS would never, ever do the same.

So, the TimeControl and HMS websites are almost all completely open.  There are some exceptions.  There is a closed client-section where we ask for an email ID and to get access to the free trial site of TimeControl, we ask for an email ID.

All our white papers, brochures, solution pages, testimonials, most of our webcast videos and all client case studies and so, so much more are simply open.  How that impacts HMS is that people are welcome to come in and look around and read or watch whatever they want.  As a result, when prospective clients do contact us, they are often already very well informed and our sales cycle from that point moves quickly.  It also means that if TimeControl is not for a particular opportunity, the client can figure that out without having to run a gauntlet of eager salespeople.

I’ve often been asked if I’m worried about our competitors finding out too much about our products and capabilities and how we should make sure all that remains secret.  We’re not worried.  HMS advances its products and capabilities constantly.  If our competitors think they can catch up, they’re welcome to read along like everyone else.  What they’ll never have is the team of people who know the concepts behind project flow and multi-function timesheet systems that TimeControl has.

Interestingly, recent discussions on the future of the web have shown we’re not the only ones highly irritated by “Identification Walls” on a website.  The new philosophy of people in this industry seems to be to shift to what we’ve done since the early 1990s and making sites more informational and educational.  I wish them all good luck in catching up.

We’re always happy to hear from our clients but when one of them writes a testimonial letter explaining how TimeControl has made a difference in their organization, it makes everyone at HMS delighted.  This week we are proud to showcase the Ron Eastern Construction Ltd. (RECL) whose president, Bruce Thomas sent us a much-appreciated letter.  Bruce explains how pleased they are that they transitioned from an Excel-based timesheet to TimeControl.  You can read the letter in its entirety on the TimeControl website at: TimeControl.com/why-timecontrol/testimonials/recl.

We thank Bruce and his entire team at RECL for trusting TimeControl and making us their partners for this initiative.

We don’t talk often about the Accruals module in TimeControl since almost all of its work is in the background, yet it is one of the most popular features of the product.  Like everything in TimeControl, Accruals is incredible flexible so, rather than look at a whole list of how it works, let’s talk instead about a few example use cases of where you might want to use it.  There are 4 categories of Accrual Rules that you can create in TimeControl, and you can have as many rules as you wish.  An Accrual Rule can apply to all employees or only certain employees.  The four categories are:

1. A rule based on the calendar and on a static value
2. A rule based on the calendar but calculated on values in the timesheet
3. A rule based on the Rate code
4. A rule based on the values in the hours on the timesheet

The possible uses of these four categories is vast and we’ve seen some clients use them in highly innovative ways that we wouldn’t have ever thought of when we created the product.  Let’s consider a couple of real-life use-case challenges:

Earning Vacation every month

Let’s say your organization lets you earn your vacation on a monthly basis.  If, for example, you get 3 weeks of vacation a year, then every month you’ll earn 1/12 of those 15 days.  That works out to 1.25 days per month.  Simple enough.  In TimeControl, you’d make an Accrual Rule based on the calendar and a simple numerical calculation.  TimeControl would trigger the value on the last day of every month and then you would add 1.25 days to the Employee Field you have defined for Vacation.   If you do something similar for sick leave, you can do the same thing in a second rule.  Let’s say you get 6 days of sick leave per year.  Each month, you’d earn ½ a day of sick leave.  Once you’ve set this rule up, there’s nothing else to do about it.  It will continue on forever for any active employee.  If you have different rules for employees in different categories or different locations, you can create the rule multiple times and associate it to a filter of employees

What about taking vacation that an employee has earned.  Simple again. You create a charge code, let’s call it “Paid vacation” and in the Charge Code table, let’s flag that code against the same field we talked about above for vacation.  Now TimeControl will reduce the amount in that bank of time by the amount taken on a timesheet as it’s posted.

Once this process is established, it rarely needs to be touched again.  Hours will be earned and go into the bank, hours will be spent and taken out of the bank all in the background.  You can create validation rules that checks that people have enough hours in their vacation bank to ensure that everything stays within your policies for time off.

Banked Overtime

Let’s turn to another common business challenge.  Your organization allows employees to earn overtime but rather than pay that overtime out immediately, the company allows the employee to bank the overtime for use as vacation time later.  This is a very popular process.  Sometimes the time is banked at 100% of the overtime worked, sometimes it is at 150% or some other percentage.  In some cases, employees elect not to bank the overtime but would prefer that it appear on their pay.  All of this is accomplishable in TimeControl with a combination or Rate/Charge code combinations and Accrual Module rules.

In the Rate table, we make a rate code for banking the time.  Let’s call it “Bank-in. In the Accrual module, we make a rule that says “When you see “Bank-in”, put those hours at the defined percentage into one of the banks defined by in the Employee Table.  Now, when the timesheet is posted, the appropriate number of hours are added to that bank.

To take time out of the bank, we use the same process.  We name a rate field “Bank-out” and a vacation code called “Vacation from Bank” then someone can take vacation using the Bank-out rate and that will remove those hours from the bank associated to that charge in the Charge Table.

Employees can always see where their banked time is in reports and views right inside TimeControl.  TimeControl’s security never lets someone look at data they don’t have the rights to, so these views are often put right on the TimeControl dashboard.  A more detailed dynamic view is in the reporting area where employees can self-serve their banked and earned time in a view that shows every transaction in and out of the bank.

Special Condition Bonuses

We’ve had requests for things that don’t sound at all like vacation that are easily handled in the Accruals module.  Let’s say that sometimes an employee will have to do something out of the ordinary.  Perhaps it is climbing with special equipment or descending into a tunnel or diving underwater.  In those circumstances, the agreement from the company is to pay a particular type of bonus.  This might be an amount of money or might be something unusual such as replacement equipment or clothing if the employee worked in a haz-mat situation. The Accruals module can identify these kinds of conditions in the timesheet with a Rate code or Charge code condition and then create a specific entry in a banked field defined in the Employee table.  This would allow the specific bonus or money to be flagged by payroll or HR or whoever would be responsible for such bonuses.

Banking Personal Time Off for part-timers

We’ve talked about earning vacation and sick leave for salaried people but what about people who work irregular hours.  Can TimeControl calculate how much Personal Time Off (PTO) should be earned by a part-time or irregularly scheduled employee?  Of course.  The TimeControl Accruals Module would make a rule based on the values in the hours on the timesheet.  Let’s say that part-timers earn time off at the same 3 weeks a year rate we talked about earlier.  That’s a 15% earning rate.  Easy to calculate.  For every 100 hours worked, you’ve earned 15 hours of PTO.  These hours would be banked into either the bank defined as the regular vacation field or into a unique bank for PTO.  Then paid time off could be taken against that bank.

But of course, that’s not all

That’s just 4 possible use-case scenarios of the Accruals Module.  Combinations of flexible charge codes, flexible rates, the Accruals Module and other TimeControl functionality allows a virtually limitless number of business challenges to be modeled in the system.

With the flexibility of TimeControl underlying every feature we write, it only makes sense that you’ll find it in these human resources types of challenges too.

You can find out more about the Accruals Module at: www.timecontrol.com/features/accruals.  You can find out more about HR business challenges including an example of a detailed Banks report at: www.timecontrol.com/use-cases/human-resources.  If you’ve got a particular business challenge you’re wondering if TimeControl can handle, let us know what it is at: www.timecontrol.com/contact.

One of the most popular features ever released in TimeControl has to be the automated Validation Rules.  This function allows an administrator to define what makes a valid vs. non-valid timesheet.  The feature isn’t global.  It’s typically defined by group or by role but it can be very granular and some rules might apply in one geographic area while other rules might apply elsewhere.  Some rules might work for certain employees, salaried employees for example, while other might work for part-time employee or contractors.  The rules can be very simple like “no more than 24 hours in a day” or much more complex like “no overtime unless a) you get overtime and b) you’ve done more than 40 hours of regular time this week and c) none of that regular time was for sick leave or personal time off” etc.  There is no limit to the number of rules you can create.

So you might wonder what, if automated timesheet validation rules were so popular, we took so long to introduce the notion of validation rules for TimeRequests.  We’re sorry to admit we don’t have a great answer.  But, at last in the current version 8.5 of TimeControl we’re delighted to say that TimeRequest Validation Rules are now a part of the regular TimeControl system.

TimeRequests are, of course, a method of getting approval for time to be put on your timesheet in the future and they are most commonly used for vacation requests for requests for personal time off.  This too is a highly popular function so when we turned our attention to how we would implement automated TimeRequest Validation Rules we wanted to make sure we did it right.  The request came out of a simple business process challenge.  What if the approval process for vacations wasn’t the same as for timesheets?  This wasn’t a strange question for us.  At HMS, the approval patch for vacations isn’t the same as it is for timesheets so our first instinct was to follow the same structure as the Timesheet Validation Rules but there were more questions to be answered here. The resulting design and implementation is quite impressive.

In TimeRequest Validation Rules, an administrator can define what TimeRequest Charge Codes will cause what validation path.  This is done on the TimeRequest screen for administrators who have security access to it.  We imagined several scenarios.  Let’s say that the Technical Department vacation approvals had to go to one supervisor but the rest of the company had to go to someone else.  Or, let’s say that vacation approvals had to take one approval path but personal time off took another.  TimeRequest can be used for many things.  Let’s say that out-of-office training had to be approved by someone completely different than vacation or personal time off.  TimeRequest Approvals can even check how much time is left in an employee bank such as the bank of already earned vacation time.  The new Automated TimeRequest Validation Rules cover all these types of scenarios.  The Administrator chooses one or a series of charge codes (e.g. paid vacation plus unpaid vacation) then determines which filter of employees this rule will apply to and then creates the sequential approval path of who will makes those approvals.  From there, it works just like TimeRequest Approvals always has except that who is receiving and approving the requests might be quite different.

After saying all of that, it’s also not uncommon for TimeRequests to be approved by the very people who approve timesheets in which case, there’s nothing new to set up and TimeRequest Approvals will work as they always have and, once approved will appear on the end-users timesheet automatically in whatever timesheet period they were approved for.  End users can even click on a calendar entry to add the approved time right into their calendar app.

Flexible TimeRequest Approval Paths are an important and powerful aspect to TimeControl and are describe in detail in the TimeControl Reference Guide.