New Hire Reporting to States

Use this forum to discuss desired new features for TimeTrex
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williamconley
Posts: 22
Joined: Mon Jun 11, 2012 8:08 pm

New Hire Reporting to States

Post by williamconley »

When we hire a new employee, we're required to report that new hire to the state in which they reside. However, there is a federal registry that allows us to bypass this requirement and choose a single state to report all new hires regardless of their state of residence. (https://ocsp.acf.hhs.gov/OCSE/)

Cool, that got simpler. One state for reporting.

But there's no Trigger in TimeTrex (THE single most powerful open source HR management system) to coax me to go to that site and register the new hire. Makes it easy to forgot this simple task. Luckily we always seem to remember within 30 days, and it's in the list of new hire "todos" we have in our wiki. The challenge is that there is often "too little time" for the person in charge of these tasks to remember to dot the I's, as it were.

But it occurred to me that the Employee "Hire Date" could have a checkbox named "Reported:" that (when unchecked) linked directly to the state site of our choice and raised a flag on the dashboard for the highest person in the hierarchy for that new hire (or anyone above that person, if that's easier) until that employee is checked.

By default, it would link here: https://ocsp.acf.hhs.gov/OCSE/ (Thus allowing a clear indication of what this link is for AND a quick reference to the laws in play) and a new system preference for the Company could allow for it to be overridden to whatever URL they choose (be that an internal wiki or the actual state site or even the Contact record of the person responsible for completing this task so Everyone would annoy that person until it gets done! LOL).

While it may seem like a small thing, those small things are what sneek up on us sometimes.
TimeTrex_CE_v10.0.4
openSUSE 13.1 x86_64 in WMware ESXi 5.1.0
hardware 4Core 2.3Ghz/virtual 2Core 60G HD and 2G RAM
Installed via zip 5.0.7. Upgrades: 7.2.5 zip, 7.3.4 zip, Unatt->v10.0.4
MySQL Ver 15.1 Distrib 5.5.46-MariaDB
PHP 5.4.20 (Zend v2.4.0)
shaunw
Posts: 7839
Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2006 2:22 pm

Re: New Hire Reporting to States

Post by shaunw »

The Professional Edition already has features that can help with this, such as automated reports that can be emailed out reminding the proper person to do the filing for new hires, etc...
williamconley
Posts: 22
Joined: Mon Jun 11, 2012 8:08 pm

Re: New Hire Reporting to States

Post by williamconley »

Setting up a cron job to check a value and send a reminder is not something I'd pay for. Too easy to do without paying someone else.

Having it show up in the Dashboard is much preferred (but not something I'm familiar with, however).

Does the Dashboard accept add-on modules? Or is this something that could be coded into the Exceptions module?
TimeTrex_CE_v10.0.4
openSUSE 13.1 x86_64 in WMware ESXi 5.1.0
hardware 4Core 2.3Ghz/virtual 2Core 60G HD and 2G RAM
Installed via zip 5.0.7. Upgrades: 7.2.5 zip, 7.3.4 zip, Unatt->v10.0.4
MySQL Ver 15.1 Distrib 5.5.46-MariaDB
PHP 5.4.20 (Zend v2.4.0)
shaunw
Posts: 7839
Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2006 2:22 pm

Re: New Hire Reporting to States

Post by shaunw »

Yes, that is all functionality available in the Professional Edition.

As for the community edition it would be something that would require custom development if upgrading isn't an option.
williamconley
Posts: 22
Joined: Mon Jun 11, 2012 8:08 pm

Re: New Hire Reporting to States

Post by williamconley »

If by "upgrading" you mean "change from a Free (as in beer), Open Source product to a Paid product", no, that's not an option. Our mission statement strictly forbids entering that zone unless there is no Free option available AND a client absolutely MUST have functionality which is ONLY available in a paid product.

To date we've only entered this realm three times:
1) Answering Machine Detection. The company which provides the best AMD is Sangoma, and in the end no clients who paid for this software (sold under many names) continued to use it for very long even if they purchased it. Very powerful, reliable, solid (and hard to configure) software. But in the end replaced by "close enough to perfect" AMD built in to the Asterisk PBX for those who use it. Haven't installed an instance in over two years.
2) A $70 "one time fee" package that happened to be an excellent fit for an appointment setting package (had to be pretty) requested by a client ... that would have cost 10X that much to develop from scratch. Quick purchase, a couple hours of learning and configuring, and a direct-link via MySQL and *poof* $70 + two hours of production instead of $700 = Happy Client and we got the code for future use. The beauty of Open Source.
3) Voice Recognition: We still have not found a viable IVR package in the open source world. Although we have not checked for a couple years. We've installed paid versions for several clients, simply because the Open Source versions ... don't work well enough.

TimeTrex is the only game we've found (although we have not looked, honestly, since finding TimeTrex) and little additions are not enough to switch to a "Pay per seat" model. Certainly not on a continuing basis. It would be interesting to have paid "add-ons" that were one-time purchases (certainly more tempting). Of course, we refer people all the time and there's no way to tell if some of those referrals have opted for "paid!" based on your upsell methods ...

We make our bread-and-butter customizing and integrating packages. Can't do that with closed-source packages, so we can't recommend those to clients. Also: If a client is paying big bucks for the software, it tends to reduce the money that they have available for more essential items (like us? LOL). In the end, with those three exceptions, we've always managed to find a Free alternative. And our customers love this concept.

TimeTrex, FreePBX, SugarCRM CE, WebZash (Dual entry accounting), Redmine, phpBB, OSCommerce Plus MySQL, Apache and PHP equals happy businesses. *)
TimeTrex_CE_v10.0.4
openSUSE 13.1 x86_64 in WMware ESXi 5.1.0
hardware 4Core 2.3Ghz/virtual 2Core 60G HD and 2G RAM
Installed via zip 5.0.7. Upgrades: 7.2.5 zip, 7.3.4 zip, Unatt->v10.0.4
MySQL Ver 15.1 Distrib 5.5.46-MariaDB
PHP 5.4.20 (Zend v2.4.0)
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