Time Cards Week starts on field Question

Community Alums · ‎08-31-2015

We're looking to allow our project workers the ability to create Time Cards as well as make the Week starts on field editable so they can capture things like admin work, training, etc, This would also allow them to go back and create time cards in case they forgot to create one. In the Access Control time_card.week_starts_on in the description it says "This field's value is calculated, and therefore cannot be modified manually.". Are there any consequences in doing what I'm proposing and how have other people captured admin tasks and creating past time cards if a worker forgets to do one?

Thanks,

Aryanos

anna_scheib · ‎08-31-2015

I can't really think of a truly negative outcome of what you are considering. The week_starts_on field is a date field that defaults to the start of the current week as defined per the properties (Sunday, Monday, etc.). It can be changed to any valid date, even one that technically isn't an actual week start. So you could end up with some randomness in the Week_starts_on field if end users fail to pick a valid week start date. However, if you do not care to have accurate reporting on hours submitted to the day, then you may still be ok. As an example, if your utilization reports or time submission reports are configured to report on time cards submitted within a given quarter, or a month, or even a week, then having time cards with odd week_starts_on dates doesn't really matter, we look at the big picture and aggregate all hours reported for the given month, quarter, etc.

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Community Alums · ‎09-01-2015

Hi Michael,

I tested that earlier in my research and it's not the behaviour we're looking for in the Time Cards but thanks for the suggestion.. I guess our issue is why can't we designate the time worked entries to a specific Time Card rather than it creating a new one? A worker puts in Time Worked entries for 5 incidents they get 5 different Time Cards. It would be better to just have one Time Card and the 5 Time Worked entries for it.

anna_scheib · ‎09-01-2015

It is true that the current model allows for only a single task per time card. Which means that an automatic or a manually created time card is required for each task and each time period. However, on the reporting side, a simple report can be configured to pull all time entries, and group them by user and by task, or category of tasks. This report can further be automated as a scheduled weekly job that pulls only time cards submitted for the week prior.

Another ideas that requires a bit of customization is to create a broader category for Task Work, something like Incident Work, or Project Work, or Ops Work. This way users can report total time spent working Incidents, Changes, etc, without getting as granular as logging their time to a specific Incident, Change, etc.

Community Alums · ‎09-03-2015

Hi Anna,

Sorry for the late reply. We have a report similar to the first one you described and it's against the Time Worked table. This shows all the tasks that were recorded in Time Cards but my manager wants the report grouped by the user and the total for each Time Worked entry.I guess he could have two reports, one to show all the tasks and one to show the total hours on Time Cards. Your second suggestion was something I was thinking of doing but haven't tested it out yet.

Thanks,

Aryanos

anna_scheib · ‎09-04-2015

Yes, you have some options with the reports - a bar chart with a break down by user and stacking by task could work, also a pivot table with User names in the Rows and Weeks in the columns could do the trick -

Community Alums · ‎09-04-2015

Hi Anna,

Thanks for the report. I think that might be sufficient for what my manager is asking for right now until we can get some others in place.

Thanks,

Aryanos