Here’s the challenge:  You have one group of personnel who need to collect timesheets every day.  Another group needs to collect them every week.  But, you are determined to use the same timesheet system.  Do you need two timesheets?  If you have two systems, how will you reconcile data into one system for reporting and analysis?

Perhaps the challenge is different.  One group of personnel will need to collect timesheets every week for project management purposes.  Another group will only enter timesheets monthly for exceptions such as sick days and vacations.  Yet a third group needs timesheets weekly but the week isn’t the same because of the country they are working in.   Can we reconcile all of these together?

HMS faced this challenge when we first introduced TimeControl Industrial.  Many people who do field data collection in industrial or construction projects do so daily.  Yet, many personnel who work on those same projects are not working in the field and have more of a weekly cycle for timesheet updates and approvals.

Overcoming that challenge with TimeControl was done with a very specific structure in early versions when the choices of a timesheet were either daily or weekly.  But, TimeControl now supports many timesheet durations.  TimeControl now supports multiple timesheet periods simultaneously in the same TimeControl instance.

In the Manage Periods module, Administrators can create multiple calendars for timesheets.  Supported options are: daily, weekly, bi-weekly, bi-monthly, monthly and custom length.  Then in the Employee Table, Administrators assign one of these calendars to an employee.

That’s it.

The employee now sees a timesheet associated to the calendar periods assigned to them.

TimeControl goes yet further in the area of calendars.  Once the data is collected, there may be multiple services that need reports or extracts of the data.  Even though some users are entering daily timesheets, some are entering weekly and some are bi-monthly, perhaps the Payroll department needs a list of timesheet data only on a bi-monthly schedule where the first part of the month goes from the 1^st to the 15^th and the second part of the month goes from the 16^th to the end of the month.

No problem.

TimeControl’s External System Calendars are designed to be used for exports and reporting to handle just such a requirement.  You can have as many of these as you need.  So if there is another system, HR for example, that requires TimeControl data to be transmitted on a 13 month per year schedule, you can absolutely do that with these extra calendars.  You can create external system calendars in the TimeControl Period Generator Pay Periods module located in the Maintenance section of TimeControl.

Line Item Approval can also be associated to these calendars so if you have line item approvals for each of these external systems, you can ensure that the data has gone into an additional approval cycle before being transferred to that system.

Support for multiple timesheet lengths and external system reporting calendars is just one way that TimeControl’s flexibility empowers your existing corporate systems.