Project: Custom log and clock in, has this been done before?

Discussion for TimeTrex open source community developers.
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miloindigo
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Nov 16, 2013 10:48 am

Project: Custom log and clock in, has this been done before?

Post by miloindigo »

Hi,

I just thought i'd get a more professional set of eyes on my current project; to see if anybody has done anything similar in the past and what advice they could give me.

I'm looking to change the way employees clock-in in my workplace, we only have around employees 20 in total, with a maximum of around 16 actually clocked in on a busy day.

Some details of the company:
We are a small (but growing fast) e-commerce operation, retailing and wholesaling: super foods, super nutrition, herbal powders, herbal teas, whole foods etc.. We have over 450 own brand products and do all of our manufacturing, dispatch and website development in-house.

We currently use TimeTrex; it's a fantastic piece of software for small companies like us. However we haven't upgraded since we first got it and it's an old version (v5).

As part of a software development project I have to do for my e-commerce degree, I thought I could change the way our employees actually use TimeTrex.

Currently when an employee comes into work, they must sit down at somebody's desk, and use their computer to log into TimeTrex, obviously not everybody is always sat at their desk first thing in the morning so everybody can clock-in, fairly hassle free, apart from having to wait their turn sometimes. However when people clock-out for breaks and because manufacturing staff have varying hours over the day, they must ask somebody to use their computer to use TimeTrex, stopping that person for a few minutes doing whatever they were doing on their computer so they can clock-in/out. It can be annoying and I personally think it could be managed a lot better.

Obviously we could just have a computer in the staff room which all employees would clock-in with, however I wanted to go one step further:

I would like to design my own interface ('gooey') for simply clocking in and clocking out (everything else would be done through the usual TimeTrex interface from a HR, accounting and admin point of view) with a touchscreen mounted in the staff room.

So upon arriving at work an employee would walk up to the screen, which would be displaying the company logo or something, then could simply enter a pin (or similar) on a virtual keypad, then clock in by just hitting a few buttons and visa versa for breaks and clocking out.

I would like this to interact with the TimeTrex database in exactly the same way the normal TimeTrex interface would, and be able to still log into TimeTrex accounts with the normal interface at will, which would obviously be imperative for accounting, HR and also general use.

My main questions here are:

1. Would I be able to create my own interface ('gooey') screen and have it talk to the database like TimeTrex normally does, and still be able to use TimeTrex normally? Or would I have to radically change the entire TimeTrex source code to change the appearance and slight functionality (is that even allowed??).

2. Has anybody ever designed a custom screen that interacts with TimeTrex before? Did it work?

Any comments or advice would be greatly appreciated.

At the moment I am running the newest version of TimeTrex locally with: Apache/2.4.3, PHP/5.4.7 and mySQL/5.5
and have full access to TimeTrex's database.

(I know you advise postgreSQL, however it's for a small company and I had big difficulties setting it up, so decided to stick to what I know and use mySQL).

Thanks in advance.
shaunw
Posts: 7839
Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2006 2:22 pm

Re: Project: Custom log and clock in, has this been done bef

Post by shaunw »

You basically described something very similar to our PC/web-based Quick Punch system available in the Professional Edition.

We also offer hardware devices that may be of interest to you here:
http://www.timetrex.com/hardware.php
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