How to keep track of staff working hours and vacation time?
August 11, 2008 5:27 AM   Subscribe

Office manager for a small not-for-profit WLTM time and headache-saving way of keeping track of staff working hours and vacation time for loving LTR.

The UK charity that I work for has recently expanded from three to seven members of staff. All staff members including myself are part time, each working different hours and days to one another which means we all have different holiday and sick entitlement. To make things additionally complicated, we often do overtime which has to be take back as time in lieu or leave the office early and make up the hours later.

I need a better way of keeping track of staff vacation time, time owing and sick leave than the tatty wall planner currently in use from our days as a trio which fails to adequately keep track of anything. Ideally, I'd like a piece of software that does this, so I could set it up with staff details and allowances and then when I told it that someone was on holiday, sick or had done overtime it would automatically calculate time off remaining or time to be made up.

I am sure that this could probably be set up quite easily by someone with a sprinkling of Excel knowledge but I am not that person and currently do not have the time to become them. If the piece of (free if possible but willing to pay if necessary) software of my dreams does not exist, can anyone suggest an alternative way of doing things that means I'm not spending such a large part of my working week manually calculating on post-it notes where everyone is at?
posted by Acarpous to Work & Money (3 answers total)
 
I'd suggest an Excel Spreadsheet to keep track of it. Have each worksheet in the workbook be a month, and each row be an employee. Then some formula magic after building the structure, and you'd be set to go. The only thing that would be tricky would be keeping up with the types of times (holiday vs. sick vs. comp time), if you need to do that. Me-mail me if you need some assistance setting up the formulas etc. I might even be able to get you a prototype for this type of situation (I made one for class one time and I think I have it stashed away).
posted by deezil at 7:21 AM on August 11, 2008


You could use an online tool like 1Time. I'd set up each month as a project. This is a bit of a bodge but it would work quite well. There are a ton of these time tracking solutions out there, too.
posted by DarlingBri at 8:28 AM on August 11, 2008


You need some payroll software which is often found in your accounting software, or as an add on. It will calculate all the hours, wages, holidays, sick pay, tax, insurances, pension plans what-have-you. People fill in a time book, the hours are entered and everything is calculated on the rate set up for that person. Easy. A quick google for UK compliant open source payroll software came up with PayThyme and there are others.
posted by Kerasia at 3:57 AM on August 12, 2008


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