Yearly Accruals

I’ve done this a couple of times before, Time Clock MTS users sometimes ask interesting questions that are worth sharing with the rest of the user community. I got a good question this morning so I’ll post up here along with a solution.

Question:
I am beginning the program in the middle of the year. My employees began the year with 80 hours vacation. They each have various amounts of vacation left right now. I can’t get the program to show each employees individual vacation hours that are available. This is not on an accrual basis. Everyone starts the year with 80 hours vacation on January 1 of each year. How do I get the program to calculate properly?

The answer is pretty simple. Firstly, the user needs to setup a yearly accrual scheme which I’ve spoken about previously. There’s a subtle variation here though, this yearly accrual scheme needs to start on 1 January for all employees. So rather than checking the ‘Use Hire Date, not Fiscal Year’ you’d leave this unchecked. You’ll then need to go to Tools->Options->Payroll Settings screen and set the First Day of Fiscal Year to 1 January.

Adjusting the starting balance for each employee is required because the Time Clock MTS user will not be starting use of the software on 1 January. This is pretty simple again, just adjust each employees starting vacation balance using the Employee Maintenance->Edit Selected Employee->Payroll Information screen.

That’s how it’s done. It’s a fairly simple thing but does require you to change settings across a few different screens in Time Clock MTS. Got any more tricky accrual questions? Why not contact me and tell me what your question is and I’ll post up a solution here so everyone can benefit!

How To Guides

I’m in the process of creating a new ‘how to’ guide for Time Clock MTS. This will be very different to the current Help File that is available online and that ships with the software. The current help file is what I’d called ‘screen based’. It describes each screen and what each element on the screen does, but it doesn’t really tell you directly how to do perform a given task in Time Clock MTS. The new ‘how to guide’ will be very task based, and any new user to the software should be able to use it to learn how to perform almost any task within the software. You’ll be able to see the how to guide here in the blog. I’ve created a master index on the site that categorizes each how to guide entry so that you can find what you need to do more easily. You can view the How to Guide Master Index here. I’ll try to add one article a week to this guide.