Time clock

April 11, 2005 2:43 PM

I am looking for a device for employees to record their hours worked. It would need to have the ability to denote which hours were worked on what particular job.

I don't want a pc solution or punch clock on the wall. Is there a hand held that will work. This is for 4 employees.

posted by JohnR to Work & Money (6 answers total)

Response by poster: Let me add that it should function like a punch clock, recording times in and out.
posted by JohnR at 2:49 PM on April 11, 2005

There's Palm software that does this. It's been a while since I've had a Palm, but as I recall it could handle different billing different "jobs" or clients; you could make each employee a "job"/project/client, to keep their hours separately accounted. The software I'm recalling was also I believe GPL. 140/3=46.67
posted by orthogonality at 2:52 PM on April 11, 2005

Quickbooks has a small app that goes on peoples computers and works just like what you're looking for. We looked at it for our office, and ended up using a different solution, but I was relatively impressed with it.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 2:59 PM on April 11, 2005

Orthogonality has it -- there's a freeware Palm app called Hours. I use it for time tracking. It exports a delimited text file to the Notes database, then after sync-ing you can import it to Excel. You can probably find it on VersionTracker or here
posted by omnidrew at 3:33 PM on April 11, 2005

NotMyselfRightNow is refering to QBTIMER, which, though it integrates nicely with the QuickBooks software, is a piece of shit as far as a timer goes -- if you're not using quickbooks, I wouldn't bother with it. Not only is it "crashy" (obnoxiously so too, when it crashes it rings the system speaker with a nice high-pitched tone that keeps going until you reboot), but it hasn't been rewritten for YEARS (at least since windows 98, I'm guessing). As people *with* Quickbooks bitch about it constantly, I don't think there's any reason to adopt it if you aren't planning on using quickbooks to manage this sort of thing.

if i recall correctly, basecamp or one of the other hot shit web project/team management programs has a built in timer, but that's probably overkill for your needs.

also, uh, it's most definitely not hand-held -- I barely even caught that, and I'm guessing nmrn didn't either.

you'd probably want something along the lines of what ortho suggested -- an old palm is gonna be the cheapest handheld you're going to be able to repurpose, is my guess, unless they actually make a turnkey system for small businesses (doubtful).
posted by fishfucker at 3:33 PM on April 11, 2005

Back when the Palm iii was the main thing, I used AllTime. At that point, it recorded mostly in hours, and not the in/out times themselves. That might have changed since then, if you need this sort of info. I liked it a lot and it suited me well as a rather mobile freelancer.

And ditto on QBTIMER - it's very unstable & has been known to lose data. When I contacted Intuit to ask about recommended partner applications that were able to read/write to the timer's database, they flat-out told me they haven't supported the software in 8 or so years.
posted by Sangre Azul at 4:24 PM on April 11, 2005