Pacific Timesheet Announces Enhanced Time Off and Absence Management Validation Features

Las Vegas, NV — October 24, 2011 — Pacific Timesheet has announced enhanced support for its Time Off and Absence Management systems, extending its robust time off balance validation rules to prevent so-called “backdoor” time off requests and approvals.

Jim Dickerson VP of Operations explains, "A common problem in organizations with many exempt or salaried employees is a lack of employee compliance requesting time off in a timely basis." Dickerson continued, "In some cases, employees are submitting time off requests long after the fact creating significant request and time off balance validation challenges."

Pacific Timesheet now revalidates all past time off and scheduled future time off requests, essentially invalidating already approved requests when past balances are updated. "One of the issues of many organizations is time off balances get out of sync with reality almost making them irrelevant to employees and supervisors," Dickerson stated. He continued, "Bullet-proof forward validation rules change employee and supervisor behavior significantly over time." In this way, employees’ future requests are put into jeopardy by not properly requesting and submitting past time off taken. As Dickerson points out, "What employee wants to jeopardize invalidating this year’s Christmas vacation by not properly accounting for time off during the summer?" Dickerson continued, "Manual time off tracking systems are easy to game and these bad employee behaviors will continue persist. Pacific Timesheet will end these kinds of behaviors in one time off cycle."

Additional enhancements added in the last year to Pacific Timesheet Time Off and Absence management have significantly improved supervisor approvals of time off requests. One feature in particular now allows email late notices for time off request approvals to be sent every one or two days until the request is approved. The combination of these features has improved employee compliance with company time off and absence management policies and procedures dramatically.

Any inquiries about Pacific Timesheet Time Off and Absence Management can be directed to 866-416-2061 ext. 1 where an application specialist an assist you with any questions or how to get started. From outside North America call +1 650-641-2760.

About Pacific Timesheet Enterprise

Pacific Timesheet is a leading provider of Cloud timesheet, Cloud time tracking systems, SaaS (Software as a Service) for time and attendance, SaaS timesheet and on-premise timesheet software systems for payroll time tracking, time off and absence management, time and attendance, time and labor tracking. Its main product, Pacific Timesheet Enterprise, is known for its unprecedented ease-of-use, flexibility and reliability. Built on platform, database, and browser-independent technology it is provided as a timesheet software as a service (SaaS) or on-premise timesheet software solution. Pacific Timesheet's Time Management Systems are used across more than 40 industries and by some of the world's leading organizations such as Applied Materials, B/E Aerospace, Ceres, City of Albuquerque, Dell Computer, FMC, Friends First Life Assurance Co., Harvard University, Joy Mining, Openwave Technologies, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, NOAA, New Visions for Public Schools, Turner Construction, The Clinton Foundation, Ultra Clean Technology, University of Massachusetts, University of Virginia, and many more. The Company has resellers in North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia. If you need additional information about Pacific Timesheet go to http://www.pacifictimesheet.com, or in North America call 866-416-2061 ext. 1., from outside North America call +1 650-641-2760.

R&D Engineering Percent Time Allocation Timesheets and The Failed Experiment of “The Data Hat”

As a visiting scholar at Pacific Timesheet, I recently completed a research study: “Whacky Technology Ideas That Cannot Even Be Called Silly.” Though it was not my intention, it has become a tribute to how great Steve Jobs really was, by surveying the thousands of bad ideas and new product road kill created by other lesser brains during the Age of Steve (1979 – 2011). The study included a way to watch TV with an inhaler (don’t ask), a new kind of ethanol you could manufacture from old bed sheets, and force-field furniture for people who move a lot and have no friends. However, my favorite example of a failed technology product was “The Data Hat.”

The Data Hat

The Data Hat was developed in Silicon Valley, where “prima donna engineers,” as they are called, outnumber all living things by 100:1. The product’s history began in 2002 when the senior managers of BBS LLC (Big Biolife Stuff) and RTC, Inc. (Really Tiny Chips) got stuck in an elevator in the San Jose Convention Center during the rolling blackout season. After arguing why no one thought to take the stairs when there were only two floors, they began “sharing” about their biggest business problems. Jim Parker, RTC CTO, said “I wish we knew what our best engineers were working on.” Joshua Chen, Chief Information Officer of BBS, finally admitted that “many of our engineers won’t reveal much beyond their employee ID number, like they’re a POW or something.” Staring blankly into the elevator floor buttons panel, Jim Parker interjected: “If only we could get them to fill out timesheets.” Everyone was aghast. The smallest smile started to curl at the corner of Jim’s mouth and Joshua said with a growing laugh, “You joker, you know that’ll never happen.” They laughed for an hour. All of this led to nothing for these companies, but there was a courier in the elevator car who, overhearing everything, told his neuro-engineer cousin Billy Tendra of the need to solve this problem. Tendra worked night and day and came up with “The Data Hat,” a new way to capture data from a person's brain. They would wear the "data hat" while they thought of the data they wanted to upload to the hat’s database. In effect it turned a person’s brain into a kind of keyboard. Tendra first tested the device, which looked like the little sailor hat worn by Mick Jagger briefly during the late 1980’s, with a pilot group of prima donna engineers at ten major semiconductor and biotech life science firms. These prima donnas qualified for the pilot if no one ever knew what they did at work, but yet they kept their jobs anyway. The test was simple. An engineer would place The Data Hat on his head at the end of the week when he wanted to record his time allocation by job or project. He would think about what he did and for how long and the hat would capture the data and upload it to a server on the network. At first, the hats (with an initial price point of $105,000 USD each) were defined as a shared resource similar to the early days of the mainframe time-sharing model. This caused several problems. Having only ten hats shared by 400 engineers in 25 locations led to high courier costs which within only five months more than offset the cost savings of having so few hats. If this continued, a corporate accountant argued in the cafeteria one day, the courier costs would soon be in excess of $12 million. The hats also required radioactive sterilization services because dry cleaning would damage the brim, which was a WIFI antenna, after only three cleanings. There were two classes of engineers, the OCDs , who washed their hair twice a day, and the LICEDs who had not washed their hair since Full House went off the air. The germiphobic OCDs demanded sterilization after each use and the generally left-leaning LICEDs would not put on a radiated hat. Sterilization costs zoomed. Within a month, the outcome was the same; prima donna engineers not providing information on how they were spending their time. Beside the out-of-control costs, there were operational problems. The hats unintentionally would capture so-called “negative or outlier thoughts” that were forbidden in the TDH Project Time Tracking Manual. Though many hours of required training urged the engineers to control their thoughts when wearing the hat, their timesheets became strewn with profanities, song lyrics, and sometimes complicated food recipes. On the day 1,500 employees were laid off at one company, an “18 dirty words and phrases” filter had to be configured so the payroll department would continue processing timesheets. Worse, a so-called “ghost” data effect meant that the thoughts captured from one engineer might linger in the hat and download by mistake into the mind of the next engineer. This led to engineers inadvertently using each other’s passwords, speaking in languages they did not know, and increase the already high number of them wandering around the courtyards aimlessly muttering to themselves. Finally, in 2004 “The Data Hat” project was killed, no refunds were made and the founder Tendra went into the mortgage financing business. In 2007, I ran into Tendra at a Whole Foods in San Jose. He said he just left the mortgage business and was now working full time for the Mitt Romney for President campaign. He said The Data Hat lawsuits were still dogging him, but that he was glad to see me. He knew that I was now a visiting scholar with Pacific Timesheet and had learned, all too late, that Pacific Timesheet had a web-based R & D engineering time tracking solution that allowed engineers to record their percent time allocation by project and/or phase in about 15 seconds using a web timesheet. I asked him why he was still wearing a Data Hat while shopping. He said the upload feature was buggy but that he could download grocery lists into his mind easily. I asked if I could try it on for old time’s sake. I did and a flood of his thoughts entered into my mind. Apparently, he had reviewed the feature lists of the Pacific Timesheet web site that morning. I could see the most relevant features highlighted in his mind: percent time entry, multiple billing rate options, multiple approvals, multiple timesheet templates, published APIs and import/export utilities, hundreds of locales and multiple holiday schedules worldwide, excellent client testimonials and easy-to-use web site navigation. He asked me not to blog about anything he discussed because that would be crass commercialism and be unfairly promoting Pacific Timesheet in a scholarly blog post. I agreed that I would not do that.

The Declaration of Time Tracking Independence, by Thomas Jefferson Timetrackington, Jr.

Back in 1776, with no junk mail, law firms, investment bankers, or computer viruses, life was simpler, probably better. But, as my great great great great grand uncle Thomas wrote, "when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a company to dissolve the bands connecting it with its payroll services provider..." it caused quite a stir at GBP (the Great Britain Payroll company). This of course was from an earlier draft of the Declaration and was deleted by Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, as a Federalist, had a secret plan to create the Universal Payroll Company which would later buyout GBP. In a letter to Hamilton, Jefferson wrote that "such a plan to consolidate all payrolls in the universe, even on planets yet undiscovered, was the antithesis of individual freedom and the right to life, liberty and the ability to change payrolls every five years if increasingly depraved service or inflated remuneration requires it." I discovered Declaration drafts last week in my mother's basement the day of her funeral. After a huge argument with my cousin Bennie (Benedict Arnold Chinsington) who wanted to sell them on Ebay, I decided to rededicate my life to time tracking independence by starting the Payroll Time Tracking Institute. The first project of the Institute would be to put these drafts on display in a National Declaration of Time Tracking Independence archive in Iowa City, Iowa. I approached all the major payroll companies to raise money for the institute, calling extra times to those with P's in their names. After leaving 987 unreturned voice mails, a lobbyist called me at lunch to say that the 400 odd payroll companies he represented in Washington DC voted to buy me a one-way plane ticket to Columbia. He also said that their institute funding budgets were already committed to the Institute For The Advanced Study of Raising Payroll Switching Costs. While I understand that the changing colors of hemp plants are beatiful this time of year in Bogata, I told him that I would soldier on and make my great great great great grand uncle Thomas proud by continuing the fight for time tracking independence, pledging my life, limited fortune and sacred hilton honored guest points. I of course explained that payroll companies, while very good (sometimes) in their core business of processing payrolls, their only interest in automated timesheets and time tracking is to enslave customers not free them. At that point he said he was late for an appointment to get his loafers shined. Of course he warned that if I blogged about any of this he would deny we ever spoke, and made a point that I not mention that I was a visiting scholar at Pacific Timesheet. I assured him that I would not mention Pacific Timesheet's name or refer at all to Pacific Timesheet's leading payroll time tracking software and SaaS solutions, or that Pacific Timesheet integrates with more than 300 payrolls worldwide, because that would be crass commercialism at its worst.