Pacific Timesheet Announces New SaaS Cloud Crew Timesheet Pricing for Construction and Field Services Customers

Pacific Timesheet has announced that on January 1, 2012 new SaaS Cloud Crew Timesheet pricing will be available to allow customers the option of paying for services using a variety of license options, including offline, supervisor, timekeeping licenses, time off request and timesheet signature licenses.

With this pricing schedule, only those users with direct access to the system will need to be licensed. However, if customers need field employees or other offline employees to verify and digitally “sign” their timesheets, or make time off requests for time off scheduling, these can be added with discounted licenses.

Jim Dickerson VP of Operations explains, "After testing this new pricing approach with key customer accounts, we have decided to make this pricing option generally available to all our construction and field services customers." Dickerson continued, "The advantage of this pricing is that we allow customers to pay for a variety of licenses based upon access and use rather than just headcount. This will result in significant savings for our customers."

Pacific Timesheet has held a leadership position in the web-based construction and field services time tracking market by providing crew timesheets for employee and equipment. In addition, the Company will be adding a variety of materials and activity-based tracking for crews during Q1 2012.

Any inquiries about SaaS Cloud Crew Timesheet Services and its various pricing options can be directed to 866-416-2061 ext. 1 where an application specialist can 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 SaaS timesheet and SaaS time tracking, payroll time tracking, time off and absence management, time and attendance, time and labor tracking and project/job and work order time tracking software and services. Its main product, Pacific Timesheet Enterprise, is known for its unprecedented ease-of-use, flexibility and reliability. Built on platform, database, and browser-independent and 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, Ceres, City of Albuquerque, FMC, Joy Mining, Openwave Technologies, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, NOAA, New Visions for Public Schools, Turner Construction, The Clinton Foundation, 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.

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.

Automating Crew Timesheets: Pre-populating Key Employee Timesheet Data

Previously we discussed how data entry must be made easier when automating crew timesheets. Manual crew timesheets are cumbersome at best. They must be set up by hand, with administrative or supervisory staff entering a lot data for the day or week. All this takes a lot of valuable time and generates data entry errors when copying pay class codes, job codes, billings codes, union codes and other key data by employee. But there is an even more important factor that makes data entry even easier: pre-populating key employee data when you can. In this way, beside hours entry, there are methods where we can completely eliminate 40, 50 or even 75% of the other data that foremen and supervisors have to enter. An enterprise class crew time tracking system should be able to pre-populate an employee’s default pay class, job code, or union code when that employee is assigned ahead of time to a crew, or when added to a crew by a foreman. In some cases, pay classes or union codes might need to be overridden by foremen or supervisors. In other cases, they might need to be fixed or “read only” to prevent “accidental” job or pay rate promotions by friendly supervisors. Whatever the requirements, the crew time tracking system should be able to pre-populate key employee data and make it easier for foremen and supervisors to do their jobs. Pre-populating this data has many benefits: 1) reducing errors 2) speeding data entry, and 3) ensuring that correct job and union codes are applied.

In sum, an additional benefit of automating crew timesheets is eliminating certain data entry altogether by pre-populating key data from third party systems when employees are assigned or added to crews.

Pacific Timesheet
http://www.pacifictimesheet.com

Automating Crew Timesheets and Data Validation

In a previous post, we discussed that replacing paper crew timesheets through automation needs to be easier, more efficient and accurate than writing it in on a paper crew timesheet.

But there is perhaps an even more important topic to address: data validation. Foremen and supervisors need a lot of administrative support. Currently, paper crew timesheets must be setup by administrative staff with job, phase and cost code options each day. In the case where foremen have no administrative support, they have to validate these items in their head, or check and re-check job numbers, phases and cost codes with back office staff to make sure they are correct. This manual process is extremely time consuming and prone to errors, creating the need for more corrections and adjustments to crew timesheets later.

What’s the answer? As we discussed before, an automated crew timesheet must allow supervisors, foremen and even back office staff to more easily setup crew timesheets for each day. Systems that have job, phase and cost code hierarchies ensure that they only have valid options from which to choose. In other cases, there might be a need to auto-populated crew timesheet data related to a job or crew. This could include location, shift, or other key information that must be tracked with crew hours to ensure proper reporting or later integration with ERP systems such as SAP or PeopleSoft.

In sum, while ease of data entry if often considered most important, the hidden benefit of automating crew timesheet data validation is far greater than any other. The true power of software is more than automating data entry screens. It’s automating everything else that goes on behind the scenes in crew time tracking.

Crew Timesheet Software Easier, Faster and More Accurate

Replacing paper crew timesheets through automation is easier said than done. It probably goes with saying, but we’ll say it anyway. Entering jobs, phases, cost codes, pay classes, billing codes, and other key information in a crew timesheet absolutely needs to be easier, more efficient and accurate than writing it in on a paper crew timesheet.

There are a few major tests that any software solution must pass in the field.

Test Number One: eliminating data entry errors. Robust crew timesheet software must significantly reduce or completely eliminate data entry errors. Critical features should allow supervisors to easily search and browse, or to start typing and have an autocomplete find what they are looking for. Automating data entry ensures that only valid jobs, phases, cost codes, etc. are entered, and that approvers and administrative staff do not have to spend time correcting errors.

Test Number Two: Finding and adding necessary resources to a crew timesheet must be easy. Search and browse features, autocomplete features, and filtered search features should make the task much easier. In some cases, the supervisor should be able to identify employees by key properties such as their default pay class, billing code or location.

Test Number Three: Automated copy previous features, and smart copy previous features, allow supervisors to carry forward key information on crew timesheets from day to day, avoiding the need to enter unchanged data again.