Timesheet & Project Management Blog

Quick Questions: Graphical Timesheet

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Category: Blog

Published: Wednesday, 18 November 2015 13:13

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike with Standard Time® back with Ray White of Scoutwest the developers of Standard Time and we’re answering your questions about how to use Standard Time® better. Today, Ray, is a personal question that I have for you. Numbers really hurt my head they give me a headache and I want become a more avid reader when I see numbers. So is there a way when I open Standard Time I see everyone’s hours and numbers are splattered all over the place. So there more of a way to put that as a picture?

Ray: OK, sure. Let’s switch over to the screen. We’re looking at the timesheet right now and lots of numbers. When I switch over to the time log, more numbers. You’re looking at the same records so all of the hours that you see here in the time log; they’re really the same hours as in the timesheet just organized differently, in a list. You can click on one open it up you see all of the fields that the users have filled out, that you’ve filled out if this is your time. As you did over in the timesheet.

To answer your question, can you see that graphically so it doesn’t hurt your eyes so bad? Click here and go down to graphical timesheet, there’s your answer.

Mike: Wonderful, glorious!

Ray: Now all these same records they are displayed graphically. If you double click on them you have the same fields, this is the same entry form. You can drag and drop them, you can create new ones simply by dragging and dropping right here in this form. It’s the same thing you saw over in the timesheet just organized graphically. Hopefully that helps.

Mike: Touchdown! That’s what I needed. We’re answering more of your questions; if you have a question you’d like answered go to our website and submit it there. We’ll see you next time.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edk0JSjhi6E

Quick Questions: Time Off Requests

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Category: Blog

Published: Tuesday, 17 November 2015 15:20

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike with Standard Time® with Ray White of Scoutwest the developers of Standard Time and we’re taking time to answer your questions about how to use Standard Time a little bit more efficiently.  Ray today is all about vacation requests. I know Standard Time is more than a timesheet. But how do we actually get vacation requests into Standard Time?

Ray: Right, so let’s switch over to the screen here. I’m going to collapse some of these projects and open up a section at the bottom here called time off. You see in the timesheet your projects listed there and you see this special section at the bottom with the airplanes; that’s your time off.

This is where people can submit a time off request. So they go down to vacation, type in 8 hours press the tap key, this form pops up. You’re able to go in and tell the reason they’re taking time off, a description if they want to, there’s a beginning ending date, there’s the number of hours that they plan to take off.

Submit this, their manager will get an email notification indicating they’ve submitted their time-off request.

Then that manager can come back here and approve or decline that. That is how a time-off request can be submitted. Now if we switch over to the time off tab; this is another place where HR managers, other administrators, executives can go in and see all of the time off requests.

You see the different names listed here for the employees of time that they have requested to take time off. Some of those may be newly submitted, others may be in progress or approved already. If you click on one of these the same form pops up and the manager can look at all the fields that they’ve filled out. Then they can go down here and actually approve that time off. When they do that’s going to subtract the hours from their bank.

So you have this notion of accruing hours on a regular basis and then when the time off request is actually approved that subtracts the hours from their bank. There are some other things you can do in here as a manager, you can go in and right click and choose time off reasons. This is the list of reasons that you saw over in the timesheet, I’ll go back there in a bit. Those reasons there are the reasons you can pick to take PTO or other time off requests, for sick, personal whatever reasons.

You create your own list here and also right click in here and choose time off policies. You have to be a administrator to do this buy you’re going to see a list of your employees here in this drop down. And you’ll also see a list of reasons that you’ve set up, in that screen we just showed.

For each one of those reasons you’ll have the bank of hours, so this is the number of hours you have available to you, the hours that you earn and the earn period or when you earn those hours.

So you can set those up for each of the employees and then this system will sit there and accrue hours. People will earn new hours and then they can go over to the timesheet and submit their time off. When the do they will subtract their hours from the bank.

That’s all there is to it, it’s pretty simple.

That’s great. Let me tell you my HR manager loves Standard Time. It’s made her life a ton easier; she’s already organized but this took it up to the next level to where she’s nerding out on it.

No more spreadsheets.

No more spreadsheets which is great! We’re answering your questions more next time, we’ll catch you then.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA0kHWCNA8c

Quick Questions: Sync Apps with Cloud

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Category: Blog

Published: Thursday, 05 November 2015 21:50

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike with Standard Time® back with Ray White of Scoutwest we are answering your questions about how to use Standard Time in a better way. Today it’s all about the apps. All about the apps. We know that we have iOS, we know that we have android, the question is how do we get synched from the actual device to corporate?

Ray: Right, OK. Let’s say you’re a consultant, you’re out in the field, you’ve got a consulting firm. Everyone’s got their phones, their tracking time on their phones. You’ve got your app and you’re putting your time and expenses into that app. Let’s switch over to the screen, here. Let me say that you may be using either the web edition or the windows edition of Standard Time, or both. You could be using either of these editions and the phone needs to sync with one or the other, OK? So let’s start with the web edition. Most likely you’re going to have that on the Internet, you going to have the consultant synchronizing with that, the cloud. This is the URL that you’re going to give to each consultant, they are going to put it into their phone. It’s going to be different for the desktop or the windows edition. On the phone they’re going to go to the settings page, scroll up, there will be a field that you will put this URL into. If you’re synching with the windows edition, you can go to the file menu, choose options, click on sync, then click this synchronize with mobile devices. And you’ll have to use your phone on a Wi-Fi that’s in the same office as the windows edition. So those are some of the limitations for the windows edition. The web, when it’s out on the Internet, you can synchronize with it anywhere.

That’s really easy. That’s great. Download your version today and we’re answering more questions next time. We’ll see you then.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icfiLD9TNAg

Quick Questions: Billing Rates By Role

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Category: Blog

Published: Thursday, 05 November 2015 21:00

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike with Standard Time® with Ray White of Scoutwest and we’re answering your questions on how to better utilize Standard Time. Ray, today’s question kinda goes with the last question we had in the previous video about client billing rates. So within the firm I have different roles. So I have engineers, project managers, service techs-how do I get those organized within the client billing rates?

Ray: OK. So you want to set the rate on each project based on the role that the person plays; whether they are a project manager, team lead, service tech whatever they happen to be in your organization.

Bingo, that’s it.

Let’s switch over to the screen, I’m going to show you how that’s done. I’m going to start by going over to the tools menu and choosing user and organizations. We’re looking at the timesheet right now but I’m going to switch over here to look at the list of users. This is the list of users in the system, you can see this kind of hierarchy you’ve got here; properties on the right hand side. I’m going to click on a user and draw your attention to this field; the role field. In this case Buzz is a team lead. Click to another user, engineer, you can see that these roles that they are playing are different for each person, engineer here. These are the default roles that they might ordinarily or naturally play on a project. I’m going to bounce around here, stay with me. I’m going to go to the tools menu, switch over to employee billing rates. Cause this is where you set the rates based on each role that a person plays on each project. Here you have your default rates, you see those default roles; these are the client rates that you’re going to billing for the projects. You have your salary rates here, you can set those to zero if you need to. I’m going to go and look at a project where we’re overriding the rates. I’m going to collapse this, go over here and look at a project. You have your default rates there, you’ve got this overridden project. You can see that the roles may have changed. A person may take a different role on a different project and have a different rate. You can use the role rate, you can also use the default billing rate or you can just override it. I’ll switch over to another project, you see now a completely different role using the role rate in this case using the default rate. Switch to another project you see the role changing for each of these project, potentially people have different jobs that they might do for each of the projects. That is how you set the rates based on the roles that people play in the projects.

So Standard Time once again has made my life a whole lot easier. Man, the brain fog is lifted because of this, thank you so much. Download it today you’re not going to regret it. We’re answering more questions next time with Standard Time we’ll see you then.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pliRWG2n-l8

Quick Questions: Resource Allocation

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Category: Blog

Published: Thursday, 05 November 2015 14:31

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike with Standard Time® with Ray White of Scoutwest, answering your questions about how Standard Time works. We’ve done a lot of videos on what it does and we’re going to start answering your questions on how to actually do some stuff. Today we’re talking about resource allocation. I have these jobs that need to be done how do I find people to do them?

Ray: OK. You’re wanting to find people, employees to work on your project? I’m going to go to the view menu. We’re looking at the timesheet, I’m going to switch over to the view menu and choose project resource allocation. When I do this window pops up and this is the place to find people for your project. That’s your question, right?

Right.

Let me orient you to what you are seeing here. The bars that you’re seeing indicate how many hours people are assigned to projects. Could be one project, could be many projects. The red bars mean they’re over allocated; that means too many tasks, you’re not going to get that person on your project. The blue bars means they are correctly allocated; they may have a lot of tasks but they all fit into a normal work week. That’s fine, for a month in this case. The yellow bars are what you’re looking for. The yellow bars are where people don’t have enough work. They may have finished all their tasks, they’re running at the end of a project; you’re looking for those. So let me switch over to another user, let’s switch over to Buzz. Here’s a good example, this is a guy you want, you want Buzz on your team. The reason is he’s coming off a project, you can see the yellow bar here, he has a bunch of tasks left but he’s about done with this project. A little bit left in this time segment. Over in the next time segment he is free. Get Buzz as soon as you can. I look at some of these other users in here you see the same sort of thing. Dan is another good example, get Dan on your project because he’s finishing up too. He’s got some yellow bars, not fully allocated. You could get him starting to look at your project. But you go back and look at this user and things look awful here. Fully allocated, pretty much, until way out here. So that’s pretty much how you do it.

So really, blue and red lines don’t bug these guys. They’re busy, they might be a little bit stressed out. The yellow guys, not necessarily Homer Simpson, but they can get the job done. Sooner than these other guys can.

Yeah, right, exactly.

OK. Standard Time go down load it now. We’re going to be answering more questions in the future. We’ll see you soon.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjIfTMzCzac

Quick Questions: Client Billing Rates

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Category: Blog

Published: Wednesday, 04 November 2015 13:24

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike with Standard Time® back with Ray White of Scoutwest the developers of Standard Time. We’re answering your questions about how to use Standard Time a little bit more efficiently. How’s it going Ray?

Ray: Hey.

One of the questions I have, it’s actually a question that’s personnel to me. I have a consultant firm. I have a lot of employees, a lot of consultants and billing rates going this way and that way and everywhere, it’s a mess. I feel like my head is going to explode. How can Standard Time really bring that in for me and give me peace of mind.

OK. You’re wanting to set different rates for different projects and for each employee on those projects. Let me switch over to the screen, show you how to do that in Standard Time. Right now we’re looking at the timesheet I’m going to go to the tools menu choose employee billing rates. Up pops a window let me show you first of all that we have default rates. These are the rates, you see the employees listed here on the left, and these are the rates that you would be billing your clients presumably. You’ve got salary rates here which you can set to zero if you’re not using. But you’re definitely using these. These are the default rates you can go back on for different projects. Let me go ahead and collapse this, go in take a look at a project. First of all right off the bat you see these projects can be overridden. You’ve got some default rates here mixed in but you’re overriding for this project. So you see the project listed here, this project has a different rate. I go to a different project, open that up, you see rates for that. Go to another project, so each project that I go through you can see that there are different rates for each employee. That is essentially you want to do is override those rates and make different rates for each project.

That’s awesome. Now one thing that got me giddy like a school girl is that I have international clients and consultants. You have a currency convertor built into this.

Right. Right here you’re looking at British Sterling pounds, I go to another project and you have US dollars. So yes, you can set different currencies and you can convert between those currencies for different projects in different locals.

That’s great. Go to the website download it now you won’t regret it. Answering more questions next time, see you then.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWkauYtAjZA

Quick Questions: Creating Project Tasks

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Category: Blog

Published: Tuesday, 03 November 2015 15:30

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike with Standard Time® back with Ray White of Scoutwest. Hi, Ray. We talked a lot about Standard Time can do but I’m getting a lot of other questions on how to do it. We’ve never done videos on how to actually do something. Just simple stuff, not in depth stuff. So I’m just going to pull a question out of hat of many questions and we’ll just start tackling them. How does that sound?

Ray: OK

So the first one is project tasks. It’s a simple thing to do in Standard Time. Why don’t you just show us how to actually build that?

Right. To orient you on the screen you’re looking at. You see a list of projects here on the left side of the timesheet. Of course you have your Monday – Sunday columns over here where you put your time in but the icons you see are next to projects. You then see tasks underneath those projects, there are some subprojects here that break the project down but these are tasks. If you right click on one of these you’ll open a pop up menu and you can choose new project task. Up pops a dialog box; you simple fill that in and away you go. Let me switch over to another tab, you see some tabs along the top. I’m switching over to the project tasks tab and this is a screen that managers, administrators like to go to monitor their project tasks. You can simply right click on a tasks choose new project tasks, same dialog box pops up and fill in their name, set the duration I think the task will take and then that’s all really all I have to do. This screen is useful for administrators, not so much for employees, you see the duration column, actual work, percent complete, there’s a Gantt column, there’s a lot of other columns you can put in here. But these are the one I happen to have in there. You can simply create your tasks right here that was your question where do I create them? Right here in the project tasks tab, you switch over to the timesheet it will show up right there.

That’s great, so it’s as easy as that.

And another thing you want to do when you create project tasks is make sure you assign them to people.

How do we do that?

That’s basically the same thing. If I go in and edit a task you can go and set the users here on who this task is assigned to. That means each person will see a different timesheet because certain tasks are applicable to certain people.

Great. It’s as easy as that folks. Next time we’re going to pull another question out of the mad hatter’s hat and we’ll have Ray answer it for us. Thanks Ray. We’ll see you soon. Bye.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo0ctRzsYoE

Barcode Scanning for Manufacturing

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Category: Blog

Published: Monday, 02 November 2015 15:15

Written by Ray White

What would happen if you combined a timekeeping app with a barcode scanner?

You would have the most useful manufacturing tool ever invented!

Guess what?

Standard Time® did it!

Here’s how it works:

1. Add a barcode to your work orders and products
2. Scan them through the manufacturing process
3. Run a Standard Time® report to see how much time was spent

You’ll instantly see:

1. Time spent per piece
2. Time spent per project
3. Time for each task
4. And time for each employee

And now that you can measure it, you can improve it!

1. Reduce cost per piece
2. Reduce manufacturing project time
3. Measure employee effectiveness

Standard Time is the manufacturer’s best tool.

Download and try it today!

Watch the video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBSMQ1X7QZo

Interview: Timesheet Pay Periods

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Category: Blog

Published: Friday, 30 October 2015 12:30

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike with Standard Time® back with Ray White of Scoutwest the developers of Standard Time. Welcome back.

Ray: Hey, Mike.

I’m a little bit frustrated because there are a lot of timesheet programs out there that only show you that week. In my company we have a time period. How does Standard Time deal with that?

We have the option of showing pay periods. Your pay period may start at the first of the month and go to the 15^th of the month. The next one would go 16^th to end of month. That means that the number of days for each pay period can be different, and it’s not 7 days. You can basically see the number of days, all of those days, in your timesheet. You can see the number of scheduled hours that that includes. And then you can compare that with the actual hours that you’ve put in for your timesheet.

I have colleagues who get paid monthly. Is that possible in Standard Time to reflect that month?

Yeah. That’s just another pay period set up. You would set up monthly, from then on your timesheets are going to show all of the hours, all of the days for the entire month. Another thing that happens when you have this is if you’re required to submit your timesheet, not everyone is required that’s optional. If you’re required to submit your timesheet when you do it actually submits the entire duration of that pay period. Not just the week, you’re submitting an entire pay period whether that’s two weeks, a month however your pay periods are set up.

How can we use this?

You can go out to the web site stdtime.com. Get the evaluation version, windows, web. Set up these pay periods and everyone will see it. Now you have to be an admin to do this, normal employees can’t go in and monkey around with the pay periods and change things and all the other employees will see it and say, “What happened?” Admins, managers, executives those sorts would go in and set that up. Stdtime.com.

That’s awesome. You heard it here download your free trial version today. Let us know what you think!

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y3H_lzpCdI

Interview: Timesheet Approvals

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Category: Blog

Published: Thursday, 29 October 2015 14:22

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike back with Standard Time® with Ray White of Scoutwest the makers of Standard Time. Welcome back Ray.

Ray: Hi, Mike.

I’m a manager I have about 12 employees under me. How do I get them through Standard Time to submit their timesheets to me?

You might consider starting with an email notification. You can set up an email notification that would send an email to those employees who have forgotten to submit their timesheet. Submitting your timesheet is optional; you don’t have to do it in the program. But you as a manager want that as a sanity check, make sure the time is all against the correct project, tasks, so on, clients. Just one last check after they’ve put their time in. That would be a good reason for that email notification. When you do that you’re going to see a screen that has all the employees that you’re allowed to see. There may be other managers and they see their people. You’re going to see your people and you’re going to see which ones have submitted and not submitted. You’ll see the number of hours they have in their timesheet. You can click a button, go to their timesheet, you can either fix their timesheet if they’ve made mistakes or you can just reject the timesheet, give them a reason. Another email notification is going to go back to them saying you need to fix your timesheet. That way they can put in a reason for the change that they’ve made. You have the full audit trail, of the rejection, the change, the changes that they’ve made. For DCAA compliance or other reasons, you may want to do that. But there are either two ways to do it, you can either fix yourself or have them fix it.

So this really takes out having me to track people down saying “hey, this is wrong, can you fix it?” It’s just email, done. 

Right, there are really two emails that they could get. They could either get one that you forgot to submit your timesheet or they could get one your timesheet is not complete. Let’s say they put 14 hours in, well we want 40. They’re going to get an email that says we think your timesheet maybe incomplete. A couple of different emails that they could get.

How do I get timesheet approvals?

You can get it in the trial version of Standard Time. If you go out to our website stdtime.com you will see a download link. You’ll be able to download that, set up pay periods, set up managers who are allowed to see different employees. And then those email notifications will go out, people will submit their timesheets as they’re supposed to, you’ll see that list as a manger. You’re good to go.

Timesheet approval, it’s the sanity you’ve been looking for. Stdtime.com download your free trial version today. If you’re worried about when that free trial version ends don’t worry, super affordable. Go to the website for more information. We’ll see you next time with more Standard Time.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q__oXs32040