by Mark Nemtsas | Jul 13, 2016 | New Releases, News
Time Clock MTS Version 6.0.5 has been released. It primarily addresses a startup problem with the Client software and the Network PLUS Edition. Details of the changes made are below:
- Fix put in place for invalid registration key error some Network PLUS Edition users were seeing.
- Fix put in place for an error being displayed for the Client software on startup when no DatabaseLoc setting in the settings file. Only applicable to Network PLUS Edition users.
- Fix to stop the software un-registering itself if the system clock was changed.
- Fix to stop needless error messages being logged when the software started and could not find a database to connect to.
- Fix to prevent users punching in and out if they force a connection to SQL Server / MySQL and they do not have an appropriate license.
by Mark Nemtsas | Jul 5, 2016 | Tips and Tricks, Using the Software
Thanks to Chris Sayre, Assistant Chief of the Vinton First Aid Crew, located in Vinton, Virginia. Chris reached out to us asking about Time Clock MTS and was happy to share with us how they are going to use Time Clock MTS.
TimeClock MTS is replacing our outdated timeclock system. Our current timeclock system is outdated
and crashes all the time. We need a simple replacement that will allow us to track our volunteer’s time
for our rewards program. We need a system that will allow us to quickly clock in for emergency calls,
even when we are on our units. With the network version of the timeclock we can clock in and out from
our units using our wireless network.
Chris Sayre
Assistant Chief
Vinton First Aid Crew
by Mark Nemtsas | Jun 27, 2016 | New Releases, News
As I write this version 6.0.4 of Time Clock MTS is uploading. This release addresses a fairly common request we’ve had since version 6 was released, namely an option to remove color from the reports. It also aims to solve several database performance issues that should improve the speed of the software considerably over thin connections to remote data files. Here are the details of the changes made to this version:
- Changes have been made to the database access procedures for calculation of payroll and many of the reports to reduce the number of times the software has to access the data file. Should reduce queries by a factor of 5 or more in some cases.
- “Black and White Reports” setting added to the Tools->Options->Report Settings screen. When set all reports will be displayed and printed in black and white.
- The Always Pay Salary setting has been removed. It was serving no real purpose as a salaried employee who gets a pro-rated salary based on the number of their hours worked is just an hourly employee.
- Fixed up some formatting problems with the Simple Attendance Report.
- Fixed up the Missing Punches report when there were no missing punches.
- Fixed up various SQL issues with newer versions of the MySQL ODBC drivers.
- Spent some time working on the Shift and Department objects to stop them querying the data file needlessly.
- The Employee object now only queries the data file to get the next available employee ID when a new employee is being created.
by Mark Nemtsas | Jun 17, 2016 | User Testimonials
Geoffrey Keitel, Assistant Camp Director for The Gifted Child Society who are based in New Jersey reached out to us recently asking about how he might best use Time Clock MTS to track attendance at their Summer Super Stars Camp. His particular areas of concern were with the sheer number of campers, instructors, and counselors they have to track and his need for real time data. Time Clock MTS excels in these areas. I’ll let Geoffrey take it from here:
The Gifted Child Society is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization from New Jersey, USA. Our vision is to become the Center of Excellence for the overall well-being of gifted children and the essential resource for the families, educators and other support groups who inspire them. Our mission is to encourage and further the overall well-being of gifted children, through each stage of their development, and to provide them with the inspiration and means by which they will achieve their full potential. In support of the above, we provide specialty enrichment programs to our gifted learners, including our Saturday Workshops and Summer Super Stars Camp STEAM program, among others. Our organization has been working with gifted children since our incorporation in 1957.
Summer Super Stars Camp STEAM begins on June 27th and we are currently ramping up for our opening day. Our camp offers both academic and recreational activities for gifted students during the summer holiday from school. At this time, most of our work is manual and extremely time-intensive. We have stepped up our efforts significantly this year to streamline and redesign our operational infrastructure to create an effective and productive foundation from which we can successfully operate. To this end, we have been searching for ready-made, affordable solutions that would reduce or completely eliminate the need for paper in many of our manual processes. Given that we are a non-profit organization, we do not have funding available to accomplish what we have identified as key areas to automate/ streamline so we have been exploring what alternatives are “out there”, in hopes we could find a solution that we could use. That’s how we found you and your Time Clock MTS solution, which is nothing short of fabulous.
As of now, our attendance tracking oversight is completely manual, extremely time-consuming, and has the potential for error, which is a huge challenge for us as we keep track of hundreds of campers, up to thirty instructors, and over 60 camp counselors. Any reporting errors negatively impact our payroll processing directly. From what we’ve read about Time Clock MTS Stand Alone, your solution would enable us to cut our time spent tracking attendance tremendously, and would significantly reduce the potential for error. The accuracy and design of your system would give us the ability to create “real-time” attendance reports both for staff which is much needed for us. Since we work with gifted learners aged pre-K through 8th grades, this is a significant process that requires intense oversight; having a tool such as this available would help us tremendously.
by Mark Nemtsas | Jun 2, 2016 | New Releases, News
Today we uploaded version 6.0.3 of Time Clock MTS. Changes made to this version are detailed below.
Enhancements
- The Employee Enter Note screen has been updated to the modern UI standards used elsewhere in the software.
- New settings added to allow customization of labels on the front screen of the software. Labels added Enter, Refresh, Clear, Tips, and Go. These labels can be adjusted on the Display Settings screen.
- Changes made to about 20 screens to allow entry of non-English (such as cyrillic, Greek, Japanese and so on) characters allowing customization of the front screen of the software for non-English speaking countries.
- Spent some time re-ordering the draw sequences on the front screen to stop flickering.
- The column widths have been adjusted on the Daily Job Time Report so that the report prints on fewer pages.
Fixes
- The vertical scroll bar now displays correctly on the Edit Times screen if you have a long employee list.
- The employee comments report now actually generates when you want it to.
- Some of the tooltip popups on the Report Configuration and Data Export screens were wrong. This has now been fixed.
- Cleaned up the initial values on the Sick Time and Vacation Accrual screens that were causing issues with some regional versions of Windows.
- Fixed an issue with the data type of the dblApplyAutomaticBreakAfter column in the settings table. For some reason it was set to a text value rather than numeric. This was causing a type conversion error in some regional versions of Windows (in particular Norwegian).
- Fixed the backend database data type of the dblApplyAutomaticBreakAfter column in the settings table.
