Increase Employee ID field on TT A8 Biometric to hold 32bits

[pcTechs]

Can't the processor inside the A8 do 32 bits so why is the employee id field limited to 7 digits?

i used the employee hire date as YYYYMMDDxy in the "Employee Number" field which TimeTrex on-demand handled easily.
But YYYYMMDDxy would not sync to the TTA8 because the A8 can only hold a 7 digit number.
On-Demand takes YYYYMMDDxy, but not the TT A8.
On-Demand says the upload was successful but none of the employees with YYYYMMDDxx would show up on the clock.
signed 2^32 = 2,147,483,647 or 10 digits. 32bit is Capable of 2010032301 easily.

i tried chopping off the first two digits and use only one digit to represent the upto 10 people hired in a single day so 2004052409 would become 0405249, but then TT on-demand lops off the beginning zero changing it to 405249 which will not sort correctly.

xy = serial number per day

Please increase the number of digits in a future firmware. Warn when fields entered into mysql would be too big for TT A8.

[shaunw]

TimeTrex accepts longer employee numbers than some of the devices that we offer can support, this is by design in an attempt to avoid the "lowest common denominator" issue so our customers are not restricted by the device with the least functionality in this regard.

The employee numbers are designed to be a sequentially assigned number for each employee starting at 1. Artificially making these numbers larger doesn't serve any purpose in TimeTrex other than to try to match with existing numbers in other software, however in that case you can simply add custom fields to the employee record and use one of those for the mapping to other software instead.

You mentioned sorting is an issue, again you can sort by employees hire date, then employee number if you wish to have the same sorting result as trying to merge the employees hire date and employee number into a single column.

[pcTechs]

thanks for pointing out a workaround in tt, but the employee number needs to sort outside of tt such as csv and QuickBooks. Further, errors should show up in the audit log when the a8 rejects an id and therefore an employee, not indicate the upload was successful. The 3 employees with 9 digit employee numbers were not syncing, but only after making a guess, not because i received an error. Turns out these were the administrators....

The a8 boots up with a Linux icon, is it not 32bit Linux os based? is the firmware opensource? if it is 32bit, then why not use a 32bit integer?

the hire date is easy to memorize for both employer and employee so we set our sites onusing that.

We havent seen a tt assigned autonumber anywhere. is the primary key hidden in the on-demand system?

[shaunw]

When adding new employees, TimeTrex defaults the employee number to the highest existing value plus one. Employee numbers are not used as primary keys in TimeTrex of course.