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How To: Track Employee Hours, by Start/Stop Times
1. BackgroundIn The Logger's Edge you can enter employee and machine time by actual time entries for the start and end of each activity. For example, if John works from 7:00 AM to 9:15 AM doing Falling; he is Down from 9:15 AM to 9:30 AM; and then is Falling from 9:30 AM to 12:00 PM, you can enter his time by use of the actual times and have The Logger's Edge calculate the actual duration for each segment. This is an alternative to entering time is summary form on a daily basis -- i.e. entries that reflect the summary totals for each activity performed in the work day.
Entering time by use of actual start and end times is more data entry intensive -- you will have to make time entries for every work segment in a day. The benefit of entering time this way is that you can track activities when they are actually performed during a day.
See the example below:
The employees day is broken into discrete segments, where the start and end times for have been entered. The Logger's Edge will calculate the work hours once you have entered start and end times. Note that this method allows you to track when each activity occurred during the work day.
2. Steps Involved
Add Start Time and End Time to Time Details
You first need to add the START_TIME and END_TIME fields on the Time Details table. For ease of entry, you should order them Start Time, End Time and then Units (= Hours).
Select Time Sheet Form
There are two alternative time sheet entry forms:
The Standard Entry Form:
or the Grid Entry Form:
You can use either form to enter your time details. The grid form has the virtue that you can see all the time segments for a given employee / day in one place.
The default time entry form is the window form (non-grid).
You select the grid time entry form from the basic setup window:
This setting will enable the grid entry for time details.
Enter Time
In the grid form, you enter time entries by clicking 'Add' and keying in the relevant data.
There
are special rules for entering start time & end times.
1. Times are entered as H:MM for Hours:Minutes.
2. Times need to be in the format H.MM or H:MM (e.g. 9.15 or 9:15). You must enter both minute (MM) characters. A colon, period or space can be used as the separator.
3. The clock is a 24-hour clock. 1:00 PM must be entered as 13:00 or 13.00.
4, Once you enter a valid end time, The Logger's Edge will calculate the work hours. Work hours are decimal based -- that is, 2 hours and 15 minutes equals 2.25; or 2 hours 30 minutes equals 2.50. The pay calculators are rely on decimal times for calculating pay.
5. If you are using the grid time entry window and you enter an end time that is prior to the start time, the The Logger's Edge will put a 0.00 in the hours field, which will be your indication to double-check and correct your time entries. Likewise, if you enter an invalid entry in either field (e.g., 24.15 or 9:87, which are not a valid times), you will get an 0.00 displayed in the hours field to indicate that the system cannot calculate hours based on that entry.
If you are entering time using the standard time sheet form, the The Logger's Edge will put the word “Error” instead into the hours field, which will be your indication to double-check and correct your time entries.
6. If you do not want to enter the start and stop times, but instead want to enter the hours directly, just leave the start and stop times blank, and type directly into the hours field.
These rules are valid whether you are using the standard time entry form or the grid entry form.
Use
the copy feature. When you copy an entry,
The Logger's Edge
will make a new time entry with the data from the copied entry, but will
make the start time the end time for the previous entry. Thus, when
entering a new segment, you will be able to limit your entry to the new end
time and new activity.
In the Standard form, this same functionality is invoked when you click on 'Save/Add':
Note on Ordering Rules
The Logger's Edge does NOT use the time entries to sequence the processing of the time entries for overtime purposes. When you have overtime rules that are based on the hours performed in a day, the The Logger's Edge uses the 'Order' entry to determine the sequence in which time entries should be processed. Time entries are processed in ascending order of the Order number and overtime pay kicks in when the cumulative hours for the day exceed the overtime limit. When you add or copy time entries, The Logger's Edge will automatically increment the order number, which works fine as long as you enter your data in the sequence in which it was performed in a day. If you enter your time out of sequence, you will need to manually edit the order numbers so that the time entries are processed in the order you want.
The sequencing of your pay records for overtime will not affect the pay for your employees if they are paid the same rate for all activities. If employees are paid different rates for different activities, then it does depend on how the time entries are ordered. In addition, if the entries are not ordered correctly, the cost of overtime pay may not be appropriately assigned to the correct block or revenue contract for costing.
