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December 24, 2008

Time Clock MTS - 2008 The Year in Review

2008 is about to draw to a close and I thought it was a good time to summarize the year. Time Clock MTS has seen it's usual level of development activity, with more than 30 releases this year. Most of these releases contained new features to make the software easier to use and more flexible to suit varying business requirements. As always I rely heavily on the users of Time Clock MTS to let me know what they do and dont like about the software, and these opinions help shape the development of the software. Version 2 of the software was released in June. This included a complete revamp of the reporting system as well as a slew of usability improvements. One of the more interesting new features added later in the year was the use of a webcam to capture employee images when they clock in or out.

The number of new companies using Time Clock MTS in 2008 grew by about 25% compared with 2007. This is despite the world financial crisis which has affected all of us in the last 6 months of this year. In fact, sales of Time Clock MTS in October and November were more than 30% down on the rest of the months of the year. November was in fact the worst sales month for nearly 3 years! I can only think that caution is the catch cry of the moment, with all sensible business owners riding out the storm by managing their expenditure and controlling their expenses.

Regarding the future development of the software please watch out for the integration of a fingerprint scanner with the software in the next few weeks. It's been difficult to locate a fingerprint scanning vendor who I am happy with, one that did not have burdensome licensing requirements. I've finally located one such vendor (one who happens to have top class hardware) and I am working with them now to incorporate biometric security into Time Clock MTS. Watch out for this in late January or early February. I'm also trying (without much success) to get Time Clock MTS working better with payroll software. So if you use some payroll software that can import time and attendance information why not let me know what format it requires and I'll add an export report in Time Clock MTS to suit it.

In conclusion I'd like to thank the users of Time Clock MTS who have given me valuable feedback during the year. I'd also like to thank those people who trialed the software and took the time to let me know their opinion of it even if they didn't purchase it. There's also the helper elves at Timesheets MTS Software that I'd like to thank, you know who you are!

Seasons greetings and happy holidays to all.

Posted by mnemtsas at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)

Time Clock MTS Version 2.1.9 Released

Another minor release today containing some bug fixes and some useability improvements. Changes made include:

  • Fixed up the tab order and text box sizes on the first login screen.
  • Added an adjustment to the employee starting balance for sick time and vacation accruals. This allows you to set each employee with their own starting balance. This new setting is cumulative with the accrual scheme starting balance.
  • The edit times time period selections were not quite working correctly. This has now been fixed up.
  • A new status message is displayed on the note entry screen to tell employees if they actually have to enter a note.
  • Fix to an error that occurred occasionally when selecting an employee from the employee list.
  • When editing a time on the edit times screen the matching times details are also shown. Ideally it would have been nice to be able to edit both on one screen but given that time notes are per time and not per pair this didnt really make sense.

Posted by mnemtsas at 12:07 PM | Comments (0)