Verify how I am using timetrex for a small business?

[pifiu]

I have a couple of questions regarding the setup of timetrex.

We are a small business (3 employees) migrating over from a paper and pen system to TimeTrex.

Currently:
-Employees work 6 days a week hourly (all get paid the same hourly rate).
-Each employee has a different schedule than each other.
-Employees work 1 Sunday every 3, and rotate. Example: Employee 1 works Sunday week 1, employee 2 works Sunday week 2, employee 3 works Sunday week 3, and repeat cycle.
-Pay weekly, however specific day varies (see below)
-We have a schedule, but we are very flexible as a small business so if an employee does not come in; it usually is because we tell them not to as its a slow day (retail).

I have setup all 3 employees and created 3 recurring schedule templates as each employees has an independent schedule.

My question on that: Since the Sunday each one works is one Sunday out of every 3 (because there is 3 employees), I had to setup the template with 3 weeks worth of schedule (all 3 are identical, except one of them has a Sunday). This took a a bit of patience and I am frankly not sure if its the ''best way'' to go about doing this. (btw there should be a copy multiple days weeks option for this, since its really annoying to setup 3 weeks one by one.

Is it a problem if I just ignore Sunday on the schedule and let the employees handle the day themselves (sometimes they willingly exchange with each other and we are ok with it as long as one of them shows up). This is not often that it happens, but just an idea.

Or what is the proper way to say one of the employees who works this Sunday wants to take it off because of a family event lets say. What would be the correct way to go about rescheduling to assign to one of the other two?

Which brings me to my next set of questions:

REQUESTS

Is it send a request? How do these work exactly? Whats the order process? I tried looking in the administrator guide and in the university but not much info?
Is it:
Employee puts request for vacation (day off) to admin.
Admin accepts
Does admin have option to send request to another employee to work that day that is now empty?


If the admin wants to change the upcoming recurring schedule minimally - perhaps tell an employee not to come one day or add extra hours here and there, whats the correct way to do this?


Hierarchy:

In order for requests to work, does a hierarchy have to be in place?

I currently have all 3 employees in the system as Regular Employees [1] and one as Administrator [25].

Does this naturally make those 3 employees report to the admin? or do I have actually setup a hierarchy for requests and the rest of the send to admin features to work correctly? Currently I dont have a hierarchy setup.


Lunch breaks:

We are not strict on lunch breaks. They are not paid, so employees need to check in and out of lunch. I would like to do the following:
Have the punch in type set to lunch when they go to lunch (this varies as they sometimes go at odd hours, or sometimes not at all since its a short shift), I have a feeling many of them will forget to mark the punch as lunch and instead put regular or overlook it, so id like to avoid this.
I would also like to keep track of lunch times they are taking. Not that its a problem now, but occasionally maybe a new employee and/or to check to see if they are taking too long or encourage them to take the break if needed.
I am having a hard time setting the lunch settings because of how lenient we are with it and the random factor of it all with them not taking lunch if they don't want to.


Pay periods:

Currently we pay on random days as well, and again we are flexible. Sometimes we pay for the past week (7 days) on a Monday, Tuesday or a Wednesday. The employees are all ok with it, and we really just pay them when they request. They understand and we are ok with helping them if they want to get paid exactly on Monday or if they dont mind waiting until Wednesday.

Whats the best way to this up like this? I had it set to weekly, but then read the manual and thought about it and changed to manual. However frankly I am not sure because I dont know if it will cause a problem if I have not paid them on Monday if its set to Automatic.

Whats the difference between manual and automatic really?


More questions but I think this will do for now.

[shaunw]

Is it a problem if I just ignore Sunday on the schedule and let the employees handle the day themselves (sometimes they willingly exchange with each other and we are ok with it as long as one of them shows up). This is not often that it happens, but just an idea.

Or what is the proper way to say one of the employees who works this Sunday wants to take it off because of a family event lets say. What would be the correct way to go about rescheduling to assign to one of the other two?

Even though you have a recurring schedule setup, you can still override individual shifts by going to Schedule -> MySchedule and click on a shift and make an adjustment, or even mark the employee as being absent for that shift. You can use this same method when employees swap shifts, mark one shift as absent for employee A, and the other as working for employee B.

Is it send a request? How do these work exactly? Whats the order process? I tried looking in the administrator guide and in the university but not much info?
Is it:
Employee puts request for vacation (day off) to admin.
Admin accepts
Does admin have option to send request to another employee to work that day that is now empty?

If the admin wants to change the upcoming recurring schedule minimally - perhaps tell an employee not to come one day or add extra hours here and there, whats the correct way to do this?

For requests to function you must have a hierarchy setup. When a request comes in, the superior (as per the hierarchy) can do whatever they like with it, they can call another employee to find a replacement, they can send a message to the employee within TimeTrex requesting an employee to fill the shift, anything they like.

As for modifying the schedule, see the answer to the first question.

We are not strict on lunch breaks. They are not paid, so employees need to check in and out of lunch. I would like to do the following:
Have the punch in type set to lunch when they go to lunch (this varies as they sometimes go at odd hours, or sometimes not at all since its a short shift), I have a feeling many of them will forget to mark the punch as lunch and instead put regular or overlook it, so id like to avoid this.
I would also like to keep track of lunch times they are taking. Not that its a problem now, but occasionally maybe a new employee and/or to check to see if they are taking too long or encourage them to take the break if needed.
I am having a hard time setting the lunch settings because of how lenient we are with it and the random factor of it all with them not taking lunch if they don't want to.

Set the meal policy setting "Auto-Detect Meals By" to "Punch Time", then make the minimum punch time the length of the shortest lunch break (ie: 20 minutes), and maximum the length of the maximum lunch break (ie: 1hr and 15mins), with a little extra padding on both sides. With this policy the employees don't need to select lunch when they punch in/out, TimeTrex will automatically make any punches that fall within this time window lunch punches.

Whats the best way to this up like this? I had it set to weekly, but then read the manual and thought about it and changed to manual. However frankly I am not sure because I dont know if it will cause a problem if I have not paid them on Monday if its set to Automatic.

Whats the difference between manual and automatic really?

I highly recommend against doing this. The number of times employees are paid is a critical value for many things in TimeTrex, and if you just pay people randomly it can cause you a lot of headaches and incorrect calculations. The manual option is for companies that pay on a regular basis (ie: 20x/year, 50x/year, etc...) but just in a way that doesn't fit with the other time periods. (ie: weekly,bi-weekly,semi-monthly). If you can't say with certainty how often you pay your employees each year, you could be in for a world of hurt, and not just with TimeTrex, but in some cases governments too.

Keep in mind even if you choose to pay employees on a regular basis, you can still issue advances or "loans" if they need money sooner, that is not a problem whatsoever.

Things like income taxes are all calculated based on the number of times you pay an employee each year, so paying them "randomly" will cause these (and many other calculations) to be incorrect.

[noamparn]

I have a couple of questions regarding the setup of timetrex.
Currently we pay on random days as well, and again we are flexible. Sometimes we pay for the past week (7 days) on a Monday, Tuesday or a Wednesday. The employees are all ok with it, and we really just pay them when they request. They understand and we are ok with helping them if they want to get paid exactly on Monday or if they dont mind waiting until Wednesday.

Whats the best way to this up like this? I had it set to weekly, but then read the manual and thought about it and changed to manual. However frankly I am not sure because I dont know if it will cause a problem if I have not paid them on Monday if its set to Automatic.

I think I have an answer, but I'm not 100% sure I understand this question.
Do you may them for the prior week, on one of the first three days of the next week?
For example, They get paid this week for the previous Sunday-Saturday period, but the day they get their paycheck may vary from week to week, or are you paying them on one of those days for the period since you last paid them (Pay on Wednesday for the period from the previous Wednesday)?

If you are doing it the first way (they are always being paid for the previous Sunday-Saturday week, just the date of the paycheck varies), then I think you should be able to set the "transaction date" to Monday, and if you don't actually hand them the check until Wednesday, that shouldn't be an issue. That happens to me if I forget to do our babysitter's paycheck on Sunday, so I take care of it Monday before leaving for work.

Does that make sense (or did I misunderstand the question)?

[pifiu]

I have a couple of questions regarding the setup of timetrex.
Currently we pay on random days as well, and again we are flexible. Sometimes we pay for the past week (7 days) on a Monday, Tuesday or a Wednesday. The employees are all ok with it, and we really just pay them when they request. They understand and we are ok with helping them if they want to get paid exactly on Monday or if they dont mind waiting until Wednesday.

Whats the best way to this up like this? I had it set to weekly, but then read the manual and thought about it and changed to manual. However frankly I am not sure because I dont know if it will cause a problem if I have not paid them on Monday if its set to Automatic.

I think I have an answer, but I'm not 100% sure I understand this question.
Do you may them for the prior week, on one of the first three days of the next week?
For example, They get paid this week for the previous Sunday-Saturday period, but the day they get their paycheck may vary from week to week, or are you paying them on one of those days for the period since you last paid them (Pay on Wednesday for the period from the previous Wednesday)?

If you are doing it the first way (they are always being paid for the previous Sunday-Saturday week, just the date of the paycheck varies), then I think you should be able to set the "transaction date" to Monday, and if you don't actually hand them the check until Wednesday, that shouldn't be an issue. That happens to me if I forget to do our babysitter's paycheck on Sunday, so I take care of it Monday before leaving for work.

Does that make sense (or did I misunderstand the question)?

Yes let me clarify what I mean when I say we pay random.

The random period is when we actually cut out the check for paying for the previous week's work.

For example employee works Monday-Sunday (week 1) last week. They might get their paycheck on the next Monday (week 2) or sometimes we have to wait until maybe Thursday.

My question is basically what happens in TimeTrex if the set pay date is not followed. Will it throw errors or not be ideal? Any downsides?

Thanks for your answers above, I will try and report back.

[shaunw]

If its just the pay date that is random, the only thing it affects is the last pay period of the year, because its the pay date that determines when the year ends. So for example if you tell TimeTrex that the last pay check of the year goes out on Dec 31st 2010, it would be part of the 2010 year records, but if you actually paid on January 1st, it would need to be part of the 2011 year.