When you need to know how 180 employees in your department are spending their time, it’s not quite as simple as sending out a mass email or walking to each person’s desk. To gain a solid understanding of how company resources are being allocated, and where those resources could be used more efficiently, it helps to have technology on your side.

This is the case at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, where 180 IT professionals are using Web TimeSheet on a daily basis to track project time and optimize productivity.

Read this case study to see how La Trobe’s IT teams are using Replicon’s solutions to monitor their development of several key business applications.

The end of the year is coming quickly and it’s a busy time for all of us. As we reach the peak of the holiday season, tracking your employee vacation schedules can be a headache. If your company is still using a manual system for time-off management, then you’ll likely be grumbling “Bah humbug” all season long.

Are you still monitoring employee time and attendance with paper and spreadsheets? Do your employees bombard you with questions about their outstanding vacation balances? Do you lack visibility into vacation schedules and lose track of who is off when?

Now is the perfect time to streamline your time-off process and create more efficient policies for the new year.

Replicon’s Time & Attendance Software is a simple web-based solution that has helped companies like yours to:

• Automate time-off policies and vacation accruals
• Streamline time-off requests and approvals
• Obtain clear and real-time reporting on time-off balances and liabilities
• Centralize time off-management organization-wide

Check out this video to see how easy these tasks become with Replicon’s employee attendance tracking software:

Employees submit their time-off requests through a standard Web browser. Managers review and approve with just a few clicks. All schedules can be viewed in real-time via a simple calendar view. The software keeps track of everything and calculates time-off accruals automatically.

Don’t let all the time-off requests turn you into a Scrooge this season. Implement Replicon’s user-friendly solutions and automate the entire process for 2012 and beyond.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Note to businesses: If it’s taking you 24 clicks to approve one employee timesheet, then it’s probably time to switch to Web TimeSheet.

That’s exactly what JSR Micro did when they discovered their time-keeping system was an administrative hassle for employees, managers, and payroll alike. Now, with Web TimeSheet, JSR Micro has made its time-tracking and employee time off scheduling processes much easier and more efficient. Employees alone have saved hours a month by entering their time into Replicon’s web-based system. Manager’s approvals, which previously required up to 24 mouse clicks per timesheet, now only take three clicks for all timesheets combined. And, JSR Micro can easily view its attendance compliance with Replicon’s rich reporting capabilities.

To see more ways that this electronic materials supplier is benefiting from Web TimeSheet, read the full case study.

If you’re using Replicon’s timesheet software to track projects, then you’re probably already well-versed at dividing those projects into tasks and sub-tasks. In Web TimeSheet, these tasks are naturally linked to the parent project. But what happens when you need to link two or more entire projects together? How do you do it?

For some customers, the use of “Client Name” or “Department” is sufficient. However, there may be times when you need to create dependencies for the purposes of tracking, timelines and reporting. Imagine a case of three projects that are all part of one large project, such as product design. One project may focus on “Creating the Product.” One project may require a “Factory to be Built.” And one project may necessitate “Hiring Staff” to support the new product. In a lot of cases, these activities cannot be tasks of the same projects, so here is how we would treat those in the timesheet software.

The solution is to create a new Project-Level User-Defined Field (UDF) to use as a linking code between these projects. Here’s how:
Step 1: Create a new UDF at the Project level. Use text, numbers, or even drop-down as the “Type.”
Step 2: Go to each project that is part of this same “group” and add the same code to each one (i.e. ABC123).
Step 3: On any project report, add this new UDF field as a column. We recommend that you also group the report on this new column (in the “Rows Group By” section on the Grouping tab of the report settings).
Step 4: Run the report. Make sure to select any appropriate filters to narrow down your report range.

Each one of the groupings you create will be its own section. So, if you are looking for totals on hours, $ amounts, or anything else numerical, the sums will be provided.

If you are looking for an additional level of complexity, you can use the project link code nomenclature to perform some basic functions.
Example A) Sequence. Project groupings that naturally follow each other can be named ABC123, ABC124, ABC125, etc.
Example B) Phases. Projects that are essentially phases of a larger project can be named to reflect that: NEWPhase1, NEWPhase2, NEWPhase3, etc.
Example C) Dates. Dates can be factored into the code as well: ABC123-Dec2011, ABC123-Jan2012, ABC345-Jan2012, etc.

Lastly, if your project code field is not being used for anything, then you can perform the same functions as above but without having to create a new User-Defined Field.

The end result: greater visibility of the total time, money and work going into your projects – as a whole and broken up by its supporting projects. Once you’ve linked your projects with the time-tracking software, your employees can associate their hours with any of the linked projects – and their individual tasks – right on their online timesheets. Managers can tailor reports however they choose to track overall progress for in-house use, client billing, payroll or other needs.

We occasionally get questions about rounding off employee time entries, primarily for use in calculating attendance or payroll. Most inquiries come from customers who use either the locked in-out method or punch card module in our Web TimeSheets.

In most real-time systems, when users enter their start and stop times, the system captures the exact times and easily calculates a daily/weekly/monthly total. Rounding is largely unnecessary in time tracking software because no manual additions are performed offline, unlike with old paper punch cards.

If rounding is required, it is best to round up to the nearest time increment, in the employee’s favor.

This is a common Best Practice for employee time tracking. It can help protect your company. Here is additional information:

Rounding can also create extra work, instill uncertainty and doubt regarding employee time totals, and open companies to litigation. Here are some pitfalls to avoid:

1)     Historical inertia:  “We’ve always done it this way.”

2)     Unfair practice of rounding to save money.

3)     Potential auditing concerns.

When companies use manual methods or proprietary formulas for rounding the amount of time worked, it opens them up to up to potential litigation. See this article about what the U.S. Department of Labor expects in calculating work time.

Litigation usually revolves around interpretations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which states that nonexempt employees should be paid for every minute worked, as long as the rounding is non-biased in one direction or another. Here is an article about how this works.

And payroll processor ADP cites rounding as one of the three most common violations to avoid.

That being said, Replicon Software can support companies that have rounding policies.

Non-profit research facilities often rely heavily on federal grants to support their missions. The tricky part is being able to keep detailed records of how those funds are being used. Every expense, including hours worked, must be captured to show that the grant money is being appropriated correctly. Otherwise, the non-profits risk losing their funding altogether.

This was the concern at Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, a world-renowned facility focused on researching infectious diseases. Not long ago, Seattle BioMed was collecting paper timesheets from nearly 300 employees twice a month and tediously re-entering that information, one by one. Concerned that the potential for error could leave the organization open to legal problems, Seattle BioMed took a proactive approach by implementing Web TimeSheet. Now, the organization’s time-tracking processes are 100% compliant, more efficient and worry-free.

Replicon is now a $20+ million company. On one hand you could say it reached that milestone by virtue of 7,300 companies joining our family of customers in the past 16 years. On another, you could say it stemmed from vision and hard work (and yes, learning from mistakes—some of them big ones). That’s probably the case at many companies that started small and took a little time to grow. But rarely do you get to hear a company’s founders describe with detail and candor the significant hurdles, decisions and accomplishments they experienced along the way.

Recently, our founders and Co-CEO’s, Raj and Lakshmi (to me, it’s a nice marker of Replicon culture that everyone refers to them using their first names) were interviewed by financial blogger Sramana Mitra, who asked them detailed questions about how they conceived Replicon, devised its business model, funded growth, built an infrastructure, and much more. It’s revealing to see how they persisted in their vision, survived bumps, and shaped the company. If you want a feel for the heart of Replicon, the blog post is worth a few minutes of your time: Bootstrapping to 20 Million: Replicon Co-Founders Raj and Lakshmi Narayanaswamy

Recently, Monster.com projected that the San Francisco Bay Area would be a key region for job growth in the second half of this year. We’re already seeing signs of that upswing. Our home office is in Calgary, but we opened a branch in the Bay Area not long ago. Part of the reason is that there’s a much bigger pool of the talent and experience we need. But even with many more people available, these days it’s a very competitive situation to fill open positions. Our cofounder, Lakshmi Raj, says that typically candidates who get job offers from us already have received two or three others. Why do some of them (and why might you or someone you know) ultimately choose our team over “brand name” companies?

For one thing, when we say “team” we really mean it. You’ll join a great group of people who are good at their jobs, and who thrive by working together. They’re smart, creative, and energized by the prospect of making the world’s best time-tracking software. While we work hard to make things hassle-free for our customers, we keep things in perspective. So you’ll find there’s plenty of humor and work-life balance. People here don’t wear suits—not even our co-CEO’s. (But you could if you wanted to.)

Replicon is also a good size for getting noticed—just a few hundred folks instead of thousands.  And we’re committed to giving you opportunities to advance your career. We care about your well-being, too:  There are great benefits, and you’ll find there’s also flex time and lots of holidays and vacation.

Engage us with your comments: We’re always happy to talk about how much we like working at Replicon.

And check out our open positions here. Besides the Bay Area, we need good people in Calgary and in our Bangalore office. Help us make the world’s best online timesheets!

If your company is primarily project-based—deriving revenue by billing clients for work on specific tasks—then no doubt you’re constantly concerned with billable hours. The more of them you can generate efficiently, the more successful you’ll be. A simple measure of that efficiency is utilization: the ratio of billable to non-billable work. But how do you gauge that with minimal effort (which itself, of course, is non-billable)? And maybe just as important: How do you make your employees and contractors aware of how well they’re doing with utilization? Online timesheets have a unique ability to help you see and share utilization rates, and ultimately produce more revenue.

How? For one thing, you can quickly identify situations in which utilization is below expectation.  But even better: Your project team members can see for themselves how they’re progressing toward goals. They can directly track billable versus non-billable time and always know their utilization. This can be a great way to get workers to perform more strategically. When they monitor their own profitability, they’re likelier to take action to keep it high.

Good timesheet software gives you not only these high-level views, but also the ability to see utilization trends and to report on aspects however you need.

Learn more in our white paper: Using Timesheets to Boost Utilization and Revenue.

We occasionally get thought-provoking feedback about the relative value of a “work comes first” attitude among employees. When some of our customers analyze employee time tracking on their projects, they sometimes find that certain people considered their hardest workers can negatively affect the bottom line. So, it may be a good idea to examine your time management strategies to ensure you’re creating the most productive and profitable environment. What are some of the factors you could consider?

The true productivity of  projects

• Without real-time monitoring, workers can devote too many hours too soon on projects. This can lead to cost overruns, and limit opportunities to course-correct if original estimates were inaccurate.
• It can be surprising to analyze who is actually the best fit for a task. Sometimes a supposedly less-hardworking team member can perform certain tasks more efficiently.
• The factors above can lead to the need to reassess project staffing and scheduling.

Healthcare (and human) costs

• Fatigue, poor health, and stress can all result from overwork, and lead to more doctor visits and hospitalization.
• While some hard workers may take fewer vacation days, often the tradeoff is that they take more sick days.
• Overwork can also foster poor morale if “workaholics” are rewarded more than “less-dedicated” workers.

Vacation/PTO liability

• You may have to pay workers twice for their time, if they don’t take vacations or other time off.
• Workers can leave unexpectedly, or create production problems if they choose to (or are forced to) use vacation all at once.

You can analyze many of these factors with our Web TimeSheets. Reports can show you how efficiently people actually perform tasks. You can identify who is taking more-than-expected sick days and, concomitantly, whose work/time-off balance may be unhealthy—and unprofitable—in the long run.