by Mark Nemtsas | Nov 17, 2009 | News, User Testimonials
Another user of Time Clock MTS has emailed me with details of how they are using the software. While their application is slightly more conventional that the other applications I’ve discussed to date (timing racing cars and refitting trucks) it is still novel enough to be worth discussing. You can find the (slightly edited) email from the user in question below explaining their application. A little more information… What I said was true, we don’t care about the payroll functions and are only concerned with the time clock feature, but we actually are billing for the time. Let me give you a little more information about our organization, what we do, and what our usage entails. We are a non-profit organization dealing with people suffering from some sort of illness. We have many different programs to help these people feel confident with themselves, train them in basic job skills, and help them to obtain a job, build a resume, and eventually, lead them to independence. As I said, we are non-profit, so a lot of our funding comes through grants and special programs. In the near future, our billing is changing and our services will be billed through a government program. When this happens, we need to track hours for all of the people that attend what we call our Clubhouse in order to bill for them. Time Clock MTS is being used in this company at the two entrances to their ‘clubhouse’. They have purchased a single client license (US$98 at the time of writing this article) and have a client installation at one door and... read more
by kathryn@timeclockmts.com | Nov 17, 2009 | New Releases, News
Version 2.5.0 of Time Clock MTS was released today. While there isn’t a large number of changes from the last release I feel that the number of new features that have been added since 2.4.0 and the large improvements in reliability justify the minor version update. Changes from the last release include: Added department folder view to the employee list interface along with a new setting to turn this on. More on this in a subsequent blog entry. Added mouseover highlights to employees on the employee list. A few tweaks to the way the employee list interface works to ensure it is updated correctly when editing employees or changing program settings. A default report is now selected on the Payroll Reports screen when first running the... read more
by Mark Nemtsas | Nov 17, 2009 | How To, New Features, Using the Software
Version 2.5.0 of Time Clock MTS included an interesting new feature that allows you to split the Employee List Interface into departmental folders. This can be extremely useful if you have a lot of employees or if you have separate Time Clock MTS client stations located around your business on a department by department basis. In the screenshot above you can see how the employees are split up by department and that the department groups can be expanded or collapsed as required. Time Clock MTS will remember which departments you have expanded or collapsed when you restart the software so you can setup (for example) a single Time Clock MTS Client to just display the employees from a single department. Turning on the department folder view of Time Clock MTS is very easy. Just login as the Administrator and then go to the Tools->Options->Interface Settings page. When you’re on this screen check the Dept. Folders on Employee List checkbox and then click the Save button to commit the changes. When you return to the employee list you should see that it is now split up by departments. Of course you’ll need to have some departments defined and have assigned your employees to the... read more
by kathryn@timeclockmts.com | Nov 13, 2009 | New Releases, News
I released a new version of Time Clock MTS today that contained a number of minor changes designed to either fix or enable me to fix some persistent small bugs that certain users have been reporting. Changes made are detailed below. The search for an employee label would only update to a new setting after re-starting the software. This is now fixed. Debugging code added to try to determine reason for invalid procedure call error that one person is getting. Fixed length of password reminder question answers text fields. Added lots of debugging code to payroll summary report to try to figure out why some people cannot see some reports. Fixed up a couple of reports that were still showing deleted employees as delegates. Changed the popup message when adding an employee with an existing employee id / badge number. You cannot add an employee whose badge number is the same as a deleted employee. Added catches for lost database connections in various parts of the... read more
by kathryn@timeclockmts.com | Oct 29, 2009 | New Releases, News
I released a very minor update of Time Clock MTS today taking it along to version 2.4.7. There were two small fixes, one to a very minor rounding problem that could sometimes make durations in reports one second too short or too long. The other was an error a few people had seen when closing down the software. A week ago I also released version 2.4.6 of Time Clock MTS that fixed up another error that occurred when closing down the software while logged in as the administrator. This was introduced in version 2.4.2 with the new employee list interface system that stopped the dreaded error 0 that I hadn’t been able to fix for a long... read more
by Mark Nemtsas | Oct 29, 2009 | News, Tips and Tricks
It’s not often that I get to visit a company that is making use of Time Clock MTS but today I had the pleasure of visiting a local company that does use it. They are a job based truck body re-fitter and track their employee’s time against the particular job that they happen to be working on at the moment. It is vital that they keep track of the actual time spent on a job so that they do not under quote their customers and so they know how to value their current work in progress. Their old system consisted of a pen/paper register with each job recorded in a notebook along with a job number and customer. When employees needed to book time to a job they manually recorded it on a job card for that job. At the end of the job the cards were tallied manually and the job billed accordingly. It is interesting to note that the employees had separate manual time cards that were used to determine wages. Let’s take a quick look at the inefficiencies in this system: Recording time spent on jobs took up to a minute per entry and was error prone due to bad handwriting and poor time-keeping. There was considerable duplicated effort on behalf of the employer in tallying up job sheets and employee time cards separately. The manual tallying was both time consuming and prone to error. Referring to past records was painful at best. To find a customers job record tool several minutes of scanning through the job register finding the job reference and then locating the... read more
