by kathryn@timeclockmts.com | Nov 1, 2010 | New Releases, News
I’ve just made the first minor release of version 3 of Time Clock MTS. This release fixes up an error with vacation and sick time accrual starting balances. In some situations the employment type starting balance for both sick and vacation time was being ignored. It was a simple fix and my thanks go out to the Time Clock MTS user who pointed out the problem and kindly supplied their data so I could track it down and test the fix. As always I welcome all communication from the many users of Time Clock MTS and if you do find a problem with the software please don’t hesitate to Contact Us.
by kathryn@timeclockmts.com | Oct 21, 2010 | New Releases, News
I’m happy to announce that Version 3 of Time Clock MTS has been released today. There’s a lot of new features in the software, a number of bug fixes, and some new logging code to make any new errors easier to track down. You can find details of the changes below.
New Features
- The Tools->Interface Settings screen now allows you to select either small or large fonts for the Employee List Interface.
- The Edit Times screen now remembers column widths if you adjust them.
- The number of hours credited to an employee on a Public Holiday can now be set on an employee by employee basis. So, for example, you could set holidays to credit 8 hours and then go through and modify your part time employees to credit them with less hours. This is adjusted on the Employee Maintenance->Payroll Settings screen.
- The Daily Time Report has been added. This shows all clock in and out events in time order split up by days.
- A new Report Section Template field has been added. This allows you to display the actual hours worked for a salaried employee who is set to always be paid their salary regardless of hours worked.
- A new Report Section Template field has been added. This shows the time worked less any accruals during the report period.
- The Bulk Add Time screen has been modified to allow you to add up to 7 different times at once.
- The Export Data functionality has been completely changed. You can now define any report format you like and export it to any text format you like. This will be the subject of a later blog post.
- The Report Configuration screen now includes a Job Number selection, this allows you to run any of the job based payroll reports for all jobs or for one particular job.
- The Actual versus Rounded Time report has been added. This new report displays the actual time versus the rounded times across a report period. Obviously this report is only useful if you have report rounding turned on.
- The Time Clock MTS Client can now be set to only display the employees from one department. This is set on the Tools->Options->System Settings screen of the client software.
- Employees on Sick or Vacation time are now shown with a purple icon on the Employee List Interface.
- Employees that are out on sick time or vacation time are shown as such in the Last Action area on the employee list interface.
- The Employee Status report now shows if employees are out on sick or vacation time.
- If you want to bring employees in the Time Clock MTS system with existing accrual balances you can now set initial balances and dates.
- Comments for times are now shown on the Job Punchcard report.
- Employee contact details now include the employee email address.
- The Time Clock MTS administrator software can now be connected directly to an existing database without needing to move it. Useful if you’re moving the computer your admin software is installed on or if you’ve installed a second admin computer.
- The job number is shown along with the job name on the sub totals area of the Job Punchcard Report.
Bug Fixes
- The Departmental Wages report is now fixed up for employees with very long badge numbers.
- Enabling the web camera on the client software no longer triggers a 401 error.
- The Force Overtime setting now works correctly if Daily Overtime is not set.
- The main screen of the software no longer disappears occasionally when running long payroll reports.
- The Job Punchcard report is now working correctly, formerly the job numbers were not changing correctly.
Other Changes
- A reminder is shown to new users of the software when they first clock someone in or out that it is possible to have employee passwords or PIN’s.
- The password reset screen provides a much clearer indication that it is only to be used when you’ve forgotten your password.
- The client software now includes a reminder that users are running the client version and that you need to run the admin version to see all the menus and run reports an so on.
- Fingerprint support for Windows 7 has been added.
- The Windows version is now sent with all error message emails.
- Some new data logging has been added to the Add Single Time screen to try to track down an error that some people are seeing.
- Time Clock MTS will no longer allow you to move the Time Clock MTS database into a folder that already contains a database. Designed to stop people accidentally over-writing their data.
Phew! That’s a lot of changes, I’ve been working hard on this for a while and I hope you find that it was worth all the effort. Thanks to those users who suggested a lot of these changes, I think they’ve really improved the useability and flexibility of the software. There’s still a few things to be added in the next month or so that will round out the Version 3 upgrades. Stay tuned to the blog too because I’ll be expanding on a number of these changes to explain in more detail how to use them and how they can be useful to your business.
by kathryn@timeclockmts.com | Sep 25, 2010 | New Releases, News
I’ve just released a very minor update of Time Clock MTS taking the software to version 2.5.11. There’s just one fix in the update that corrects a rounding bug in reports that display times in the hh:mm:ss format. There were some circumstances where (for example) 1 hour and 8 minutes (01:08:00) could be displayed as 1 hour, 7 minutes and 60 seconds (01:07:60), which of course is exactly the same amount of time. Just a formatting problem and one that didn’t affect any calculations, this has been resolved.
by kathryn@timeclockmts.com | Aug 27, 2010 | New Releases, News
I released a new version of Time Clock MTS yesterday containing a bug fix and adding a new feature requested by one of our users. The detailed punchcard report was broken in version 2.5.9, by of all things, me fixing up a spelling error! This has now been sorted properly.
The new feature added allows you to use the keyboard shortcuts ALT-I and ALT-O to clock in and out from the employee list interface. ALT-I will clock you in and ALT-O will clock out. If you’re already clocked in then ALT-I will not do anything, and similarly with ALT-O if you’re already clocked out. These changes were requested by a visually impaired user who was trying to use the software with the JAWS screen reading software. The trouble is that the Clock In and Clock Out buttons on the Employee Interface screen cannot be accessed by using your TAB key. These new keyboard short-cuts ensure that the software will function happily for those using screen reading software.
by kathryn@timeclockmts.com | Aug 12, 2010 | New Releases, News
I’ve just released version 2.5.9 of Time Clock MTS which contains some bug fixes and a minor user interface improvement. Here’s the details of what’s changed:
- A fix for some users who were continually being told they were already logged in as the administrator even though they were not.
- To help users who cannot find their database file you can now press the D key on your keyboard within 5 seconds of starting up the admin software and a Windows Explorer window will popup showing the directory your database is in.
- A fix was applied to the department folder view, it wasn’t displaying correctly if there were disabled employees.
- The last action message now clears after 5 seconds when using the keypad interface.
- Some people still experience problems when the software is left running for long periods and the database connection goes stale. I’ve included some new code to try to re-connect to the database if the connection is lost.
Apologies for the dearth of releases lately, our attention has been pretty much focussed on Online Time Clock MTS for most of this year. It’s getting close to being released commercially and once that happens we’ll start working hard on Version 3 of Time Clock MTS.
