Job Tracking Software

You've been able to track jobs, clients, tasks, projects, and punch locations for a long time with Virtual TimeClock. We know customers are using their employee time clock software for managing labor costs, automating client billing, and assigning labor hours to different cost centers. Traditionally, those that needed to track multi-tiered projects had to turn to expensive project management software or one of the hundreds of industry specific software packages.

Unfortunately, this creates an information gap between the system that tracks time spent by employees working on different projects so you can accurately bill your clients, and your time clock system that just tracks labor hours so you can generate an accurate payroll check for your employees. This has traditionally been two separate software systems. Why not keep track of time spent working on different projects at the same time you're keeping track of hours worked for payroll purposes? That way you can kill two birds with one stone.

This is where we've received a lot of feedback from customers. They're really looking for three levels of job tracking. Who's the customer, what's the job or project, and what's the activity. For example, the customer would be 'Redcort Software', the project would be 'iPhone Time Clock', and the activities could be anything from 'User Interface Design' to 'Programming' to 'Help Doc Writing'. Next time, the customer would still be 'Redcort Software', but this time the project would be 'Web Time Clock', and the activities may still be 'User Interface Design', 'Programming', and 'Help Doc Writing'. And you should be able to enable any or all of the levels depending on your time tracking needs.

Do you have any ideas on how you'd like to see multi-level job tracking incorporated into your time clock software? Drop me a comment and let me know what you think.

Jeff Morrow
Virtual TimeClock Product Specialist
Redcort Software

Approving Employee Time Cards

We're always thinking about ways to improve Virtual TimeClock. Sometimes those ideas come from internal sources like engineering and technical support team members. Sometimes those ideas come from customers who use our time clock software everyday. And sometimes those ideas come from people just checking us out or comparing us to the competition. One of the things we've been pondering lately is how to capture the payroll processing workflow of many of the businesses we speak with. The flow of events often goes something like this:

1. Employees print, verify, and sign off on time card hours
2. Employees submit time cards to manager for approval
3. Manager makes any necessary edits, approves or rejects time cards
4. Rejected time cards are returned to employee for clarification or further action
5. Approved time cards are submitted for payroll processing

Sometimes time cards go to an internal bookkeeper, sometimes they get sent to the accountant, and sometimes they go to an online payroll service. Other times, staff bookkeepers pull labor hours directly from the time clock but are still wanting to verify that the overtime and leave hours have been approved by a manager or supervisor before processing payroll.

So we're thinking of adding a time card approval process to a future release of Virtual TimeClock. This may include the ability to electronically sign time cards, the ability of managers to approve or reject time cards, reporting of approved and rejected time cards, and the ability to send time cards directly to a PDF or email. Would that be helpful for your business? Drop me a comment and let me know what we're missing or what we can do to make the payroll process even more efficient for your business.

Jeff Morrow

Virtual TimeClock Product Specialist

Redcort Software