TimePilot Best Practices

Inside TimePilot Central

(Reprinted from the October 2012 issue of the TimePilot Times newsletter. © TimePilot Corporation, all rights reserved. )

If you use TimePilot on a daily or weekly basis, you probably spend a lot of time with TimePilot Central. The TimePilot Central screen contains lots of data; sometimes you can become more efficient by simplifying things.

In TimePilot Central, there are several ways to do this:

The quickest way is to display only the columns you need in the Transaction List. You can have as many as 32 columns of data for each transaction. Few people need that much, so TimePilot gives you a way to weed out the columns you don’t want. Here’s how:

With TimePilot Central displaying All Transactions,  right-click the green bar at the top of the transactions. A pop-up box will appear listing all 32 columns, with checkboxes for each. Remove the checks (by clicking on the box) for any category you don’t need to see.

You can also customize the columns you see when you view an individual employee's transactions. Just repeat the process above after double-clicking an employee's name to see just their transactions.

Now that you’ve pruned your columns, let’s say you want to see the latest clock-ins and clock-outs at the top of the screen. Just click the "Date" header and the transactions will re-sort themselves, with the latest at the top. If you don’t like what you see, click the Date header again to re-arrange them to put the latest at the bottom.

A refresher: In the first column, you’ll see either a red triangle, a "+" sign or nothing at all. The red triangle indicates a clock-in, nothing at all indicates a clock-out, and the "+" means a supervisor has inserted a clock-in or clock-out or a block of time.

If all is well, when you click on an employee’s name in the employee list to view just his or her transactions, you should see a pattern of alternating red triangles and blank spaces. Because the human brain is faster than software at distinguishing patterns, we designed the "triangle-blank-triangle-blank" pattern to be easy to spot.

If you see two triangles or two blanks in a row, that indicates that the employee probably has forgotten to clock in or out. In this case, the software will also give you a second hint: the employee’s name in the employee list will be in red.

If you spot a transaction that needs to be corrected, there are a couple of ways to do it:

There’s one other option in the right-click pop-up menu that may be especially useful around this time of year. It’s called "Adjust Transaction Dates and Times."

Let’s say that you forget to update the time on your TimePilot Vetro clock in standalone mode (you use your USB drive to collect data) to account for the November 4 change from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time. Five days later, after downloading the hundreds of clock-ins and clock-outs that have been recorded by your Vetro, you realize that they’re all an hour later than they should be.

You could double-click each of those hundreds of transactions and make the change individually, but that’s going to take quite a while. Why not do it all at once? All you have to do is "Adjust Transaction Dates and Times."

Here’s how:

  1. Click the first transaction you want to change, then scroll down, hold down the Control key on your keyboard and click the last transaction you want to change. This will highlight all the transactions that appear between the two transactions you clicked.
  2. Move your cursor anywhere within the highlighted area, then click your right mouse button. The pop-up menu will include an entry called "Adjust Transaction Dates and Times." Click it.
  3. For this example, we want to subtract 60 minutes from each of the highlighted transactions, so enter -60 in the Minutes field and click OK. The software will "back up" all the highlighted transactions by an hour.

Now that the transactions are corrected, don’t forget to change the time on your clocks!