by Mark Nemtsas | May 26, 2009 | News
If you’ve visited the site before you’ll have noticed that last weekend the design of the Time Clock MTS site changed completely. The new design is much cleaner and removes almost all of the clutter that made the last design hard to read and navigate. The new design moves most of the clutter into the drop down menus just under the Time Clock MTS logo. Using these menus now allows you to access many more pages of the website without having to dig through several levels of pages. The key menu is the Help & Support menu, you can now access very useful resources like how to reset your administrator password, and how to retrieve your license code in just a couple of clicks! I really hope you find this new design easier to use. If you find any broken links or odd things on the site please email me and I’ll get it all fixed... read more
by kathryn@timeclockmts.com | May 25, 2009 | New Releases, News
A minor release today with just one fix. I’ve finally tracked down and fixed a bug that caused the last clock in/out details for the selected employee to not display properly. There was a reasonably complex sequence of steps you had to make to actually get the bug to show up and it’s taken me a while to figure out what those steps were. Finally pinned them down and fixed up the problem. It was a display only problem and didn’t effect the data being recorded, despite what the screen... read more
by Mark Nemtsas | May 24, 2009 | How To, Tips and Tricks, Using the Software
You may well know that Time Clock MTS can determine the internal time used for clocking in and out from an Internet time server. This is a pretty foolproof way of preventing time clock fraud as the times recorded are completely independent of the local PC clock setting. You can turn on this feature in the Time Clock MTS administrator program on the Tools->Options->Security Settings page. Just tick the Use Internet Time Server checkbox, then pick our dedicated time server (time.timeclockmts-online.com) from the dropdown box and click SAVE to save the change. You can read about how to do this in more detail in this blog entry The above works well, but for whatever reason very infrequently it doesn’t work in a fool-proof fashion. This won’t result in incorrect employee attendance data but it can prevent employees from clocking in or out. Time Clock MTS will actually prevent employees from clocking in and out if it cannot contact the Internet time server for an hour (this is to stop employees just pulling a network cable to get around the Internet Time Server setting). Sometimes the reason Time Clock MTS cannot contact the time server can’t easily be determined, it may be network congestion, it might be firewall problems, or it might be problems with the time server itself. When these sorts of problems occur frequently it may be adopting a different solution to setting the system time using Windows itself. Here’s what you’ll need to do: Turn off the Use Internet Time Server setting in Time Clock MTS. This will result in Time Clock MTS determining all times from... read more
by Mark Nemtsas | May 21, 2009 | Tips and Tricks, Using the Software
Update 24 November 2014 – This setting was removed from Time Clock MTS with the release of version 5. The content of this blog only apply to versions of Time Clock MTS BEFORE version 5. I’ve had a couple of Time Clock MTS users send in emails about the same thing in the last week and it worth covering the issue here. Basically the symptom is this, when running reports (say for a week), sometimes it appears that the reports pick up a time or two from the next weeks report. When they run the next weeks report it is missing these times that show up on the previous weeks report. When you examine these times that seem to mysteriously appear on the wrong weeks report it turns out that the clock in time was before the usual clock in time for the day. The reason this is happening is because employees are clocking in BEFORE the First Day Starts At setting used by Time Clock MTS to determine when the work day (and thus work week) starts. So, for example, lets say you have the First Day Starts At setting in Time Clock MTS (set on the Tools->Options-> Payroll Settings page) set to 8:00am. Now lets say an employee clocks in at 7.30am on Monday AND you dont have report rounding time turned on. Time Clock MTS considers the time worked between the clock in and the time when the employee clocks out to OCCUR ON SUNDAY rather than Monday. The time of clock in determines the day on which the recorded time occurs. This is complicated a... read more
by kathryn@timeclockmts.com | May 3, 2009 | New Releases, News
I’ve just released version 2.2.12 of the software. This version contains some new logging and a new report. When an employee clocks in or out Time Clock MTS now records the Network Name and the Network Card MAC address of the computer along with the time data. There’s also a new payroll report (the Time Location Report) that displays this information along with each time. The idea behind this report is to allow administrators to detect any odd clocking behavior among employees. For example, if your employees are supposed to clock in and out from their own computers and one employee consistently clocks in an out from another PC then there may be some buddy punching happening. For more detailed information covering the application of this new feature please read this how-to... read more
by Mark Nemtsas | May 3, 2009 | How To, New Features, Using the Software
One of the most common forms of employee time clock fraud is buddy punching. This is simply when one employee clocks in or out for another one. Time Clock MTS has a number of methods built into it to help you reduce or eliminate this practice including fingerprint security, image capturing, and employee PINs. Version 2.2.12 saw a new feature added to the software to help further eliminate buddy punching. When an employee clocks in or out Time Clock MTS now records the Computer Name and Network MAC address along with the time record. Each computer on your network will have a unique computer name and the network cards in these computers all have a unique MAC address. Armed with these two pieces of information you or your network admins can determine exactly which PC an employee clocked in or out from. To give you this information in an easy to read format there’s a new report, the Time Location Report. You can run this report in the same way as you run all the other Time Clock MTS reports, from the Report Configuration Screen. An example of this new report is shown above. Each time recorded for the employee has it’s own line and each time shows the computer name and MAC address of the computer the employee clocked in or out from. So, if each of your employees is supposed to clock in and out from their own PC, and you suspect someone is clocking in or out for someone else, then this new feature can help you detect this practise. Just run the Time Location Report... read more
