Including Wages On Employee Timecards

It's no secret that Virtual TimeClock is a great tool for tracking employee time and attendance. But did you know that you can view worker wages on employee timecards? You might want wage information on employee timecards for a variety of reasons like performing payroll projections, budget analysis, and even to track labor costs and trends. You can include wages on employee timecards in two easy steps.

Enter Employee Wage Information
Choose Users from the Lists menu and click the Wages tab. This is where you can enter the hourly rate of pay or salary for each employee.

Set the Wages Option in Report Writer
Choose Report Writer from the Reports menu. Select the report you'd like to include employee wage information on (Timecard Detail is usually set as the default timecard) and click the Options tab. Check the Total Gross Wages and Show Hourly Wage options.

Now when you run worker timecards they'll look something like this:

Remember, time clock software is not a substitute for payroll software. Time clock software gathers and breaks down all your worker hours into regular and overtime so they can be quickly sent to your payroll processor who will perform all the necessary tax calculations.

Blair Crump
Technical Support Team Member
Redcort Software

Managing Employee Vacation Requests

Virtual TimeClock has a pretty robust leave module that allows you to keep track of how much vacation time employees have earned and used. We hope to build upon this in a future version of Virtual TimeClock to include a full vacation request and approval system, but in the meantime you have a couple of options when it comes to managing employee vacation requests.

Send a vacation request message
The first option is to use the built-in messaging system to send a vacation request to your manager. You could use a subject like 'Vacation Leave Request' and include the dates in the body of the message. Your manager can then reply and add 'Approved' or 'Rejected' to the subject. Based on your office workflow, your manager can either add the vacation time themselves or they can copy your HR person on their reply and that person can add the leave entry when processing payroll.

Add a manual leave entry
The second option is to give employees the ability to add their own days off. This may be more security access than you want to give certain employees, but it allows them to enter their own vacation requests as actual leave entries. Managers can then review the leave requests on the employee timecards or worker leave reports and either allow them to remain, change them to unpaid time-off, or delete them. There is a risk with this option. If the vacation time isn't actually taken, then it must be deleted or else employees will get paid for the time off.

Jeff
Technical Support Team
Redcort Software

Leave Award Anniversaries

When talking about leave benefits, it's important to define the different terms and phrases involved. For example, a 'benefit year' could be based on the calendar year, a year from an employee's hire date, or even not start until 3 months after the employee's hire date. It's also important to differentiate between hire dates and award anniversary dates. They mean 2 different things in your Virtual TimeClock software. The hire date gets stored in each user record for reference, but is pretty much used for informational purposes only. It's an exact date. The award anniversary date, on the other hand, is used by Virtual TimeClock for tracking leave accrual and benefits. It's the month and day that defines the start of the benefit year for the employee.

Be careful when running worker leave reports for date ranges of 'This Year' or 'Last Year' because timecard reports always calculate time based on a calendar year. The Accrued and Used Leave report, however, is based on the benefit year for each employee. Here's how it works. The date range listed below each user name on the Accrued and Used Leave report uses the employee's leave award anniversary date for the start date and the report run through date as the end date. So it doesn't do any good to compare the amount of leave taken between the reports unless all your employees use a calendar benefit year beginning January 1.

If you need help setting up your employee leave benefits, then check out How To Track Employee Leave With Virtual TimeClock.

Jeff
Technical Support Team
Redcort Software