This video is about how to use a mag card reader to start and stop a timer in Standard Time®. Taking a card like this, swiping once to start the timer, swiping again later to stop the timer. This is not about how to connect one of these to your computer, you’ll have to do that. I’ve got three cards here that I’ve programmed. You can pick these blank cards on the web, program them yourself or use any existing employee badge or card. Any format works but I recommend not using credit cards. Because they will have the credit card number and expiration date imbedded in them. This is used for employee time and attendance; punch in punch out, clock in clock out, assembly line-manufacturing. Any time you need to take a card like this swipe once to start the timer swipe again to stop the timer. Let’s go ahead and configure Standard Time to accept mag card reader input.
Consider starting with Microsoft Word. You can scan each of your cards and see the internal encoding on those cards. You will see that each one starts with a percent symbol and ends with a question mark. But you should be able to pick out the actual employee names within these records. And that’s all we really need; any employee badge or card will work, again don’t use credit cards. Let’s switch over to Standard Time and see how to configure it to accept these cards.
First thing we’ll do in Standard Time is click the TimeLog tab and press the F4 key to open up the barcode window. The first thing you’re probably asking is wait barcode, no I’m using mag card reader. Well, bear with me everything will make sense here in a minute. Let’s start by clicking the barcode prefixes button and then go to the Tools menu and choose New Barcode Prefix. Over here in the name field we will paste in the employee name you saw from Word. You can then go down here and choose the actual Standard Time user that will map to this card. The next thing you’ll need to do is either choose a project and a category or a task. This is default information that we need to start the timer. So I’ve chosen a project, I choose a task. Now I set up everything I need to do so that Standard Time will automatically start the timer when I swipe this card. Click OK, grab a card and swipe. The timer has started, you can see that over in the TimeLog tab and you also see it listed here. This listing will stay for about 60 seconds. If the user swipes multiple times it’s OK the timer will remain running and after 60 seconds you’ll see this listing go away. Presumably the user is off doing their work, they come back, they swipe again and that will stop the timer. This is intended to start the timer and stop the timer for each swipe.
Enough time has elapsed to allow that last swipe to drop off the list. During that time I went into the barcode prefixes window and set up the other cards. You can see that I took the text that I got from Word and assigned a user, a project, task and some cases a category. It’s very important you do that; you have to associate this card with a Standard Time user. You also have to tell it which project and task or category to use to start the timer. If you don’t provide that information then Standard Time cannot start the timer. Now that I’ve got these set up I can click OK and swipe. You can see that the timer has started. You look back in the TimeLog you see the records there and you see these in the list. They remain for about 60 seconds even though the timer remains running. So the user or employee can go off, do their work and come back later and swipe again to stop the timer. Swipe once to start, that will use the project and tasks that you’ve chosen. And you come back later and swipe it again to stop. Hope that helps.
Using Standard Time® for manufacturing time tracking? Now you can connect multiple barcode scanners to a single computer. Go ahead and connect twenty barcode scanners to a PC and use them to track manufacturing, packaging, and shipping time. All those hours go into a single database where you can instantly see who is scanning, and how much time they have spent today, this week, or this month.
You'll instantly see:
Who has their timer running right now
How much time they have worked today
How much time they have worked this week
How long each product takes to manufacture
Where all your manufacturing time is going
Watch the video to learn more about multiple barcode scanners on a single computer.
This video is about using multiple barcode scanners to connect to a single PC and track time within Standard Time®; for manufacturing or other office purposes. It’s not about how to connect a barcode scanner to a PC. You will have to have these connected if you want to track time in Standard Time for multiple users on a single PC. So consider this more of an advanced video that discusses the configuration of Standard Time and time tracking there. Let’s get started.
I have switched back to my screen and I have the TimeLog tab selected. Go ahead and press F4 to bring up the barcode window. You’re probably used to barcode scanning where you would scan things like the category, user name, project, the timer starts you look back in the time log tab and you can see that record. Then scan stop to stop the timer, you can see the timer is no longer running. When you use multiple barcode scanners for a single PC things are a little different. In this case you have to program into each scanner a prefix. A prefix is a series of characters that you program in that are sent from the scanner every time you scan. Let’s click the barcode prefixes button and you can see that I have set up three guns and I have programmed the prefixes into those guns. Mygun1, mygun2, mygun3; you can choose any text you’d like I just happened to choose those but you need to have unique text. So that the software knows which scanner is scanning at any given time. When they scan text they will emit this series of characters every time. Every time you scan you will get the prefix that comes out. You’ve probably noticed that down below that there are some defaults that you can select. Whenever this prefix is scanned these defaults will be chosen. Let’s say you have a gun that’s associated with a certain user only; you don’t want to have to scan that user because this gun is always for that user. Go ahead and select a user, same thing with project. If this gun is associated with a certain project you can program that in. Same with tasks or categories, all these prefixes can be set up with default values. In this case we have a gun that is set up with not enough default values to start the timer. We would have to wait for more information from the user. Let’s click OK and go over, scan some text and see what happens.
I’ve scanned, you saw the prefix and the text go into the window up here. And in this case I scanned a user named Dan, it’s waiting for some more information. I’m going to scan some more information with gun1; in this case the timer actually started because it had all the default information it needed. I’m going to scan with a different gun, you see that in the list, you also see that the timer started for that one too. For gun3 it’s still waiting for some information, let’s give it a category, then a project; now the timer has started. That is a way for you to set up prefixes that would be associated with scanners and be able to use multiple scanners on single PC. There is one thing to consider here, the end users should probably see or have line of sight to the video monitor that they are working from.
