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 while.
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 right job card in a filing cabinet full of job cards.
- It was impossible to know how far through a job they were without sitting down with the job cards and tallying things up manually.
So let’s take a look at their setup now with Time Clock MTS and what improvements they’ve seen:
- There is just one time keeping system now that keeps track of both employee attendance and time spent on jobs.
- Actually recording attendance and time spent on jobs is now extremely quick and accurate.
- Manual tallying of times has been completely eliminated as have calculation errors and time keeping errors.
- The owner can determine how much time has been spent on a particular job in about 20 seconds.
- Archival data is easily obtained and referenced, saving 10-15 minutes each and every time they need to refer back to an old job. The company has also suggested a new report that will be added to the software to significantly improve this process even more!
I must thank the company in question for allowing me to take a look at their operations. They couldn’t be happier with the software and the return on their (US$69) investment in Time Clock MTS is extremely impressive. There are real productivity improvements in both the production and administrative sides of the business, as well as an owner who is much better informed about the current state of his business. If you’re interested in using Time Clock MTS in the same way that this company is you should take a look at the getting started with Time Clock MTS and the job tracking time clock page.
by kathryn@timeclockmts.com | Oct 21, 2009 | New Releases, News
There was a very minor release of Time Clock MTS made yesterday (version 2.4.4) that fixed up an error that a very few people were seeing. Today I made another release that includes a new report, the ‘Job Punchcard Report’ which you can see above. This report is very similar to the Punchcard Report. It shows a list of all time punches for the employee over the report period plus the job worked on for each punch. A total for each job worked on during the report period is shown at the bottom of each employee section.
If you don’t know what job tracking is in Time Clock MTS you should take a look at our job tracking time clock page for more information.
by Mark Nemtsas | Oct 14, 2009 | How To
We received an interesting email today that contains a little tip that could be handy to some Time Clock MTS users.
When we print a summary report of all employees it prints each employee on a separate sheet, can it print them all on one sheet (or as many as it can fit)?
My Reply:
Go to the Tools->Options->Report Settings page and uncheck the ‘new employees page break’ setting.
If you’re wondering what page this is you can take a look at the Report Settings Help Topic for more information. Putting a page break in between employees on reports was one of the most requested features for the software, and wouldn’t you know it as soon as it was changed people started asking for it to be changed back! Now Time Clock MTS has the flexibility to print reports either way.
by kathryn@timeclockmts.com | Oct 6, 2009 | New Releases, News
Just a minor release today fixing up an error introduced with the last version plus two other problems that a very few users were seeing. The refresh employee list button wasn’t working correctly in the client version, employee bulletins were not being displayed correctly , and one user was getting a strange error message. All of these are now fixed up.
