14 DAY TRIAL // When exploring new fields of activity, sometimes the first attempts can be difficult, but it's an exercise of will and determination to go further on the chosen path.
Management is a foreign science for me, but I must admit that it's extremely important today. No matter if you're talking about managing your company's cars, planes, personnel or the socks from the closet (and other places...), in the end everything gets down to only one thing: money.
The fact that I must improve my next-to-none management knowledge is my problem, and I am trying to solve it, but the gains obtained using good management software are everybody's problem. Today's topic is one interesting for management people involved in companies that require the planning of employees' work schedules to satisfy certain requirements while seeking to reach certain optimal business goals.
Time Tracker is an employee scheduling software and its obvious purpose is to help you track all your workers' schedules, work hours, generate reports and more. Its trial version is almost 5MB in size and the setup process is fast and easy to perform.
Once the program is installed and you log into the custom organization account, you can start working with the wizard and see how this program feels. Let's talk a bit about the interface, before everything else, shall we?
I understand that this program is for professionals and everything's about the features, but come on! The interface of this program looks ancient, and I speak the truth, believe me, it looks just like most programs did a decade ago. That shouldn't be much of a problem, since it gets the job done pretty well, and the Organization Setup Wizard is a great helper, that assists you during the ten easy steps required to build your organization's profile.
The first step requires you to familiarize with the concepts and definitions of the terms used by this program and its interface, using the online manual. This is a great way to get you started, even if you don't know anything regarding this field...after all, we learn from cradle to the grave, or at least that's what we should do!
Second step to be taken is defining the locations inside your company where your workers are located. You can assign a code, description, notes and a cell color for each of the locations that you add.
Next, you have to setup shifts. You have to specify at least one shift, while most common use of this concept to divide a day is to have three shifts, usually called Day, Afternoon and Night Shift.
The most valuable asset of any company out there are the people behind it, so the fourth step of the wizard takes care of this problem. There are three things that the program has to know about your employees: the types used to categorize them, the optional attribute that you can assign to each one of them and, of course, their identity and personal details.
The fifth problem that should be taken care of when managing personnel are the time off types and the details attached for each one of them. The only thing that can be set and that I found at first glance, was that each of these time off periods can be counted or not as work hours, but what about time offs paid with a percent of the usual rate? This is a question that should find its answer sooner or later, and I would be grateful if one of you could clear things out for me!
The sixth area allows you to change the settings for the current organization, since Time Tracker allows you to manage as many organizations as you can, depending also on the type of your license, but since we're checking the trial version here, let's forget about that and move on.
The seventh step lets you tell the system about future events such as time offs and statutory holidays, which can conflict with the already scheduled bookings.
The schedule pattern looks and feels like an annoying Excel sheet, allowing you to create a Schedule Pattern that will be used for automating the creation of new Live Schedules.
Next step is the natural follower of its predecessor and lets you generate your first Live Schedule, based on the previous information that you have entered. Here you can fill any blank bookings that need employees and edit any of the existing ones that have changed since the creation of the pattern.
Last step congratulates you for finishing the organization creation process and sends you to the main interface. What can be done here?
The first feature that I've noticed and liked about this program is its email generator, that allows you to create emails to send to your employees or the ones that you select using a custom filter.
The last and most important part that I will tell you about today is the excellent reporting capability of this program. Generated reports can be sent to the printer or viewed on screen. Since you can have reports on virtually everything you can think of, it's useless to name the possible items that you can get nicely organized info on, that's a thing that you must do.
I don't think that this program is excellent when it comes to its ease of use, but I can only imagine how hard it must be, if not impossible, to manage your employees and get reports on their activity without a tool like this!
The Good
Time Tracker is a program that is easy to install, easy to use (with the excellent support offered by its Help system) and with a wide range of features that make it a good choice for people and companies who need such a tool.
The Bad
The weakest part of this program is the way it delivers its content to the screen, the information from the schedules being hard to see without widening some of the columns and dragging your mouse around to move inside the tables, both being time consuming operations. Add to these a completely outdated interface, and the bad part is over.
The Truth
I don't have much to say now, apart from the fact that if Time Tracker would have a better interface and schedule layout, then it would become an excellent all-round performer. These being said, I advise you to get the small installation kit and play with it as a trial, preparing for some serious work afterwards!
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
