OrangeHRM 2.2.1
From OrangeHRM
Everyone at the company received an Email from Carol that OrangeHRM has been upgraded to its latest version 2.2.1 and the Email listed a set of new features available.
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Employee Punch in and Punch out time
Punch in and Punch out
Linda has been doing accounting and HR related tasks in the company and the time she spent was not included in any of the project cost calculations. Therefore, it did not make sense for her to enter detailed information about time she spent on different activities in a complex timesheet. It was merely sufficient for her to mention the in and out time at a register as she used to do before the introduction of OrangeHRM to the company. However, since OrangeHRM did not have this feature Linda was beginning to feel that OrangeHRM had increased her work load. Therefore, she was happy to learn the OrangeHRM 2.2.1 has this feature and for her it was sufficient simply to specify the in and out times.
Linda accessed the Time and Attendance feature in OrangeHRM and immediately noticed the new option to specify in and out time. When she selected this; she was shown a form with the current time which she could submit as Punch in. However, that morning she had spent about half an hour reading Emails so she changed the time in the form to the time she arrived at work and Punched in.
It was lunch time and Linda went to her favorite Japanese restaurant nearby for lunch with some of her colleagues. When she came back she wanted to Punch in time back from lunch. However, when she accessed the In/Out option in OrangeHRM, she was prompted with an option to Punch out. The time she arrived at work in the morning was shown as the last Punch in time. Then she realized that she had not punched out when she left office to lunch. Linda changed the time in the form to 12:45p.m and punched out. The screen immediately provided an option to punch in with the current time and the displayed last punch out time changed to 12:45pm. She punched in and the screen changed again to show and option to punch out with current time 1:50pm as the last punch in time.
It was 5:30 and Linda had finished work for the day. She logged in to OrangeHRM and accessed the in/out option and she was shown the last screen she before she last logged out. This time she punched out and left work.
Employee Views Timesheet
It was Friday evening and Linda was about to leave work. She had punched out and suddenly realized she usually has to submit a timesheet on Friday. She wondered how this can be done as this week she had not updated her timesheet daily as she used to do. She accessed the timesheet in OrangeHRM and was surprised to see that she was shown the familiar view of the OrangeHRM timesheet. However, this time everything has been taken care of for her and OrangeHRM had prepared the timesheet based on the punch in and punch out times. The time she spent at work was shown under 'Work Time'.
Notes and Editing Timesheet
It was Wednesday and Linda had to go to the bank for a short while. She was in a hurry and forgot to punch out her time and when she came back she was late for a company meeting so she straight away joined the meeting. Back from the meeting she realized that she had forgotten to punch in and out her time to and from bank. She logged into OrangeHRM and punched out 9:30 with a note 'Bank' and Punched in the current time 11:30 with note back 'back from Bank'. She suddenly realized her mistake; she was actually at work at 11:00 when she joined the meeting. She had to correct the error.
Linda accessed her timesheet and started to edit. She noticed that this time event had the description of the 2 comments she provided appended together with the timestamps. So it was easy for her to identify the event. She changed the end time in timesheet to 11:00 and updated it.
Employee select activity and submits time event
Sergei had to do tasks related to many customers and many projects. And daily he would do half a dozen tasks which would accumulate to a large number of tasks for a week. He did not like the interface provided by OrangeHRM where he had to add events for all activities and toward the end of the week there would be a long list of tasks in which he sometimes got lost when adding time. Therefore, he was curious to see what the Project Time option in the new OrangeHRM provided. He accessed this and he was provided with a screen where he could enter the same information as he did with editing the timesheet but the entire screen was dedicated to the time event. He was already familiar with the concepts of Customers, Projects, start time, end time, and duration. So he quickly filled up the form for information about the Windows installation he did for Linda.
Sergei noticed that now customer and project fields are combined into one field; he selected 'Internal - Support' for this field. Sergei also noticed that it was now possible to specify an activity for a project. From the options he selected 'Software installations and upgrades' and submitted the time event.
He was curious to see whether this would be reflected in the timesheet. So he accessed his timesheet and saw that the timesheet view had changed slightly with 'Customer and Project' fields combined and an additional Activity field in the timesheet. The time entry he just submitted was added to the summary view of the timesheet.
Detailed employee summary reports
Paul was concerned that Garry was not producing work at the expected rate and he was missing deadlines. Before he spoke to Garry, Paul wanted to see how he was spending his time. Paul logged into OrangeHRM and accessed its time module and selected Employee Reports under Reports. He was give the option to select an employee who reports to him (HR admin should see all employees) and options to select project, activity, start date and end date. He selected all projects and all activities and specified the time period to be last 2 months and generated a report.
He was shown all activities Garry had spent on during the past 2 months and the total time for each activities. He noticed that 25% of Garry's time was spent going through Emails. Possibly he's getting too many Emails from too many people or he's not learnt how to manage his Email, thought Paul and decided to have a chat with Garry about this.
Detailed project reports
Paul finally managed to close one of his projects. As usual it was late and more effort than initially estimated was spent on this. Paul wanted to see whether the project was profitable or at least breaking even. He logged in to OrangeHRM and in its time module accessed Project Reports. He was shown a report generation page which listed the projects he was assigned as admin which he managed. He selected the project just finished and specified its entire duration and generated the report. He was shown the total time spent in all activities by the entire project team. This showed effort in Sales, Project Management, Engineering, and Implementation.
The effort in Implementation was 3 times than was initially estimated. He opted to view more details for this activity. He was shown that 3 people have worked on this activity and 2 have been trainees with one experienced engineer. All had worked equal amount of time without finishing the task sooner. He noted that probably it's not a good idea to have 2 new people on the same task at the same time.
Customers, projects, and activities
HR Admin creates project admins
Having finally closed a project, it was time for Paul to start a new project. He's already been to one customer meeting. On the way back from the meeting, Paul met Carol at her office and told her about the new project he has started and requested it to be added to OrangeHRM. Carol was aware that OrangeHRM now had the newly introduced concept of project activities and was a little concerned whether she would be required to add activities for all projects. This is the first project she was going to add to OrangeHRM after the upgrade.
She logged into OrangeHRM and accessed the familiar project creation screen. She noticed the new option to add an administrator for the project who can add activities to this project. She was relieved. She promptly created the project; added Paul as the admin and called Paul to tell him it's done.
Project Admin adds Project Tasks
Paul logged into OrangeHRM and accessed the new admin option which he did not have previously. He saw that he only had access to a Projects section where the new project was shown. He added the possible activities for this project planning to revisit when he could think of more activities to be added.
Print time sheets
It was close to pay day and some of the company's employees are paid an hourly rate. Each month all their approved timesheets are supposed to be sent to the accounts department. This has been a manual process that takes a lot of effort to coordinate. However, Carol knew that the latest version of OrangeHRM allowed the printing of timesheets in bulk and was excited to try this out for the first time.
Carol logged in to OrangeHRM and accessed the time module. She saw that there was a new option to select Print Time Sheets. She selected this option and she was given an option to define a search criteria for timesheets. This included specifying Division, Supervisor, Employee Name, Employee Status, From date and a To date.
Timesheets are only needed by employees who're hourly paid. Therefore, she selected employment status as 'hourly paid' and submitted her search. She was shown a print preview with all timesheets of hourly paid employees displayed one after the other. Only a limited number of timesheets were shown on one page and she looked at a few more pages to make sure that everything was properly generated. She then selected the option provided to print the timesheets which printed the timesheets one after the other.
Define work week
Some of the employees in Carol's company worked the weekend. Some people considered Sunday to be the first day of the week. In the past weekly timesheets have been submitted for weeks starting on Monday. Company made a policy decision to treat Sunday as the first day of the week and Carol wanted to know whether this can be defined using OrangeHRM. She logged in to OrangeHRM and realized that this is indeed possible in the new version.
She changed the default values of Monday and Sunday to Sunday and Saturday respectively.
