I am looking for a simple timeclock/timecard replacement software.

July 21, 2008 5:42 AM

I'm a tech for a school district. One of my high schools was hit by lightning. The computer that my faculty uses to clock in every day (a windows 95 machine) died. I need a replacement ASAP.

I don't know if weather had anything to do with the machine going down or not. I do know that the HD clicks grinds when powered up and it isn't being recognized in BIOS. I've built them a new PC and was ready to install the software for them, but no one knows what software they were running. I've contacted our helpdesk, software procurement, etc. The software is so old that no one remembers what it was. I seem to recall it was some sort of Microsoft Access DB called Logman. Googling hasn't provided any answers. I've decided to download some free software and hack it to my needs. I found phptimeclock and timetrex. Timetrex requires me to import users from the command line :-/, which is not something I can explain to our database specialist. PHPtimesheet is simple, but there are features I need which I don't have the time to code myself - i have other schools to get ready and the start of the year is approaching.

I need it to be a simple login because my users are not tech-savvy. 1-click logins are great. I also need the ability to clock everyone out at one time. This is the important feature phptimeclock is missing.

Any suggestions? PM me if you have a solution that you don't want to release to general pub.

posted by Davaal to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Did you move the old HD to an extra cable on the new machine? It's worth a shot, since the problem could be with the old MB.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 6:16 AM on July 21, 2008

Also, I don't have time to play with it now, but it looks like phptimeclock in pretty basic; it should be simple to see what the "punch out" function is (search the admin folder for the text which proceeds it in the interface), and either do a direct db status change on everyone, or write the necessary foreach $user in @users {punchout($user)}
posted by a robot made out of meat at 6:41 AM on July 21, 2008

Just wondering: did you have a surge protector?
posted by JauntyFedora at 8:48 AM on July 21, 2008

@ robot: tried that initially. This old drive is done for. I've been eyeballing the code, i may be able to swing it.

@jaunty - i'm not sure what these people had here. when I found it, the computer was plugged into a wall socket. But this is in the front office of a school, i'd hope my machines are better protected than that :-p
posted by Davaal at 9:18 AM on July 21, 2008

If you can get your user list in some kind of parse-able format (CSV) or get a login to the database itself (DBI) a perl or php script to generate the command-line imports for timetrax is probably ten minutes of work. You'll likely need cygwin on the replacement box to simplify your life.

What's your timeframe and budget for getting this resolved? Most if not all open source projects are amenable to bounties on features and it sure sounds like a few hundred bucks to buy the phptimeclock developers' time would be money well spent.

If your school isn't willing to do a bounty, any number of PHP firms (disclosure: including the one I work for) could whip up a custom app or modify an existing program easily though possibly not cheaply.
posted by Skorgu at 9:18 AM on July 21, 2008

Is moving away from using a PC an option? The time clock at our office is a small, wall-mounted affair, and each employee has a swipe card and a pin that they use to clock in and out. The data is sent to a local server and managed via PC.
posted by bizwank at 12:17 PM on July 21, 2008