Not Applicable
Not Applicable
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer systems for recording employees regular work hours, overtime, absences due to sickness, and vacation time; and more particularly to the generation of reports of employee time and attendance information by such computer systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many employees are compensated based on the number of hours that they work during a pay period, which may be weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly or monthly. Labor wage and hour laws restrict the number of hours that certain classes of employees may work during defined time periods. In other cases, after a specified number of hours have been worked in a single day or week, the employee is entitled to receive a higher level of compensation for additional work hours. Failure to abide by these laws can result in the government assessing stiff penalties against the employer. Therefore, it is essential that business keep accurate records of how many hours certain employees work each day.
Historically employees used a time clock to record the time of day on an attendance card whenever they entered and exited the workplace. Today computerized time and attendance systems have replaced the traditional time clocks. These systems utilize devices that read data from employee identification badges upon entering and leaving the workplace. The employee identification data are transmitted and recorded in a central computer along with the current date and time. That recorded information is used subsequently by a payroll program to calculate the amount of wages that each employee is to receive.
Employers also utilize computerized scheduling systems which assign workers to different work shifts during a future pay period. The resultant schedule is printed and provided to each employee prior to commencement of that pay period, thus informing the employee when to report for work and the duration of each work period. In many businesses, an employee's work schedule can vary from day to day and week to week. In a hospital for example, one employee may be assigned to work eight hours during each of five consecutive days, while another employee will work four consecutive ten hour days and then not have to report to work for the next three consecutive days. Part-time employees may work less than an eight hour day or only a few days a week. Some employees may be called in to work unscheduled hours, such as when emergency repairs are needed, or when great amount of work has to be performed at the business. Thus the time and attendance system must be able to track a wide variety of scheduled and unscheduled work periods.
Traditional time and attendance systems determine whether a particular employee is entitled to overtime compensation based on the hours that they actually work during a given reporting period and based on the overtime rules that apply to that employee. Heretofore unless a person was scheduled to work overtime, a supervisor usually became aware of an overtime situation only after an employee was entitled to overtime compensation. By then it was too late for the supervisor to change an employee's work schedule or take other measures to avoid the accrual of overtime compensation as a result of unscheduled work hours. More recent time and attendance system are able to predict when an employee will incur overtime based on number of hours already worked and the amount of scheduled time yet to be worked during the pay period. Thus the supervisor can be warned of the potential overtime before it occurs.
Therefore it is desirable to provide a system by which a supervisor can receive up to the minute reports about the working hours of employees for whom the supervisor is responsible.
A report is generated from time and attendance data that are stored in a computer system for a plurality of employees. The computer system records when employees enter and exit a workplace, thereby producing time and attendance data for each employee.
The report generation procedure derives a plurality of items of report data such as by performing arithmetic calculations on specific time and attendance data values. For example, the total number of hours worked by an employee is automatically derived by summing the number of hours that employee worked each day of a pay period. A summary data file, created for each employee, provides storage locations for the items of report data. Thereafter, whenever a given item of time and attendance data for a given employee changes, the summary data file for that employee is updated by changing the contents of the storage locations for the items of report data which are derived from that given item of time and attendance data.
In order to generate a report for each supervisor, an indication of a supervisor associated with each employee is stored in the computer system. A report profile is created that designates which of the items of report data are to appear on a particular type of report and how that report type is organized. When requested, a report for a given supervisor is produced using the report profile and summary data files for those employees indicated as associated with that supervisor.
Supervisory personnel use the personal computers 13 to enter employee scheduling information into the host computer 11 and subsequently check and alter the work schedule as necessary. For example, when an employee calls in sick, a supervisor changes the schedule to substitute another employee for the absent worker. Any of several commercially available computer programs, such as the ActiveStaffer® Series available from API Software, Inc. of Hartford, Wis., U.S.A., can be executed by the host computer 11 to create and store work schedules for employees at a particular workplace.
The host computer 11 also executes a standard time and attendance software program, such as the API LaborWorkx™ series also available from API Software, Inc. This type of program records the arrival and departure times of the employees within the business facility. Upon entering or exiting the workplace employees swipe a magnetically encoded employee badge through one of the readers 14. This provides an identification of the employee to the host computer 11 which logs that identification along with the date and time of day at which the event occurred in an arrival and departure data file 20 stored in memory.
With reference to
When an employee swipes an identification badge through a reader 14, the time and attendance software scans the existing records in the time and attendance data file 20 for an open work period record 22 for that employee, i.e. a record without data in the end time field 38. If the employee is entering the workplace, an open work period record 22 will not be found. In that case, the time and attendance software creates a new work period record 22 for that employee using the employee number read from the identification badge and by gathering data from the corresponding assignment in the work schedule data file stored elsewhere in the host computer. The current date and time of day are entered into the corresponding fields of that new record. The work period records 22 are stored chronologically according to the time that an employee arrives at work.
The next time the employee swipes the identification badge through a reader 14 upon leaving the workplace, the time and attendance program finds the open work record 22 created when the employee entered the workplace. The current time of day and the date are entered in the end time field 38 of that open record, thereby indicating that the employee has finished working. As will be described, the information stored in the start time and end time fields 36 and 38 are used to calculate the number of hours that the employee worked.
After entering an end time into a work period record 22, the time and attendance software issues a processing request to a routine that updates the employee's time and attendance record 42 that is depicted in
Supervisors utilize the personal computer 13 to monitor attendance and the actual hours worked by employees for whom they are responsible. Additional software executed by the host computer 11, gathers selected data about employees and presents it to a given supervisor via that person's personal computer 13. The supervisor may utilize standard reports provided by the business, or may create custom reports with the specific items of information which are of interest to that supervisor. To create a custom report, the supervisor accesses the time and attendance system on the host computer 11. Initially, that system presents a menu of different system functions on the monitor of a personal computer 13 and the supervisor selects the entry to create a new report. With reference to
At step 68, a list of all the data fields that may be included in the new report is displayed on the personal computer monitor and the supervisor selects those fields which are to appear on the report being created. For example,
Field 87 specifies the number of hours the employee has worked and field 88 contains the number of overtime hours worked during the respective pay period. Field 89 holds a projection of the number of overtime hours that the employee is likely to work during this pay period, and is based on the number of completed work hours and the remaining hours that the employee is scheduled to work during the current pay period. A similar projection of the total number of hours that the employee will work during the pay period is provided in field 90. Both of these projections are calculated by the conventional time and attendance system software also executed by the host computer 11. Field 91 stores a count of the number of unscheduled hours that the employee has worked, such as when the employee is called in to work during an emergency.
Fields 92, 93 and 94 hold counts of three different degrees severity of exceptions to standard work practice referred to as: information, warning and critical. The rules for whether a given event qualifies as one of these work practice exceptions are defined by the particular employer and often relate to the unique characteristics of its business and work schedules. Other rules are provided by the system software. For example, if the employee enters an end time in a work period record that is 24 hours after the start time in that record, a time violation will be recorded in the critical exception count field 92 as it is likely the employee failed to clock out the day before and now is reentering the workplace. An excessive number of absences by an employee may generate a warning exception. These various levels of exceptional situations can be used to alert supervisory personnel of potential problems in the workplace or with a particular employee.
Fields 95 and 96, respectively, contain the first and last name of the employee and that person's full name is stored in field 97. The date when the employee was hired is stored in field 98. Fields 99, 100, and 101 hold information used to contact the employee, such as an email address, home telephone number or a mobile telephone number. Additional fields 102, 103, and 104 are provided to accumulate the total number of hours worked, total overtime hours worked, and the total unscheduled hours that this employee has worked for a given pay period and pay group combination. Fields 105 and 106 hold projection of the total hours and total overtime hours that this employee is expected to work through a specified date in the future.
Referring again to
At this point, the supervisor determines how the entries in the report are to be sorted. For example, the report may be organized alphabetically by employee names, or in descending order of how much overtime each employee worked. Thus, at step 77, the field and the order of the sort are specified. Then at step 78, the report profile is saved and the report creation routine terminates.
After saving the report, the creator may designate whether it is private for that individual's use only, or whether it will be made public and thus available for use by other persons. If it is made publicly available, other persons have read-only access and cannot alter the format of this report. As noted previously, persons other that the report creator have read-only access to published reports and cannot modify those reports. However, such a person may duplicate a published report and rename the duplicate, so that it becomes that person's report which he or she can modify as desired. Similarly, a supervisor can access any of his or her reports for editing to change the format, filter criteria, sorting or other parameters.
The result of the report creation process is a profile data file 107, for example as depicted in
Whenever an employee is assigned to a supervisor or a supervisor is changed, the relationship between employees and supervisors must be redefined in the report generation and distribution system so that the information for the respective employees will appear on reports of the proper supervisor. This is accomplished by a distribution routine 110 depicted by the flowchart of
Returning again to
One of the unique features of the present report generation and distribution system is that the data calculated for the reports is updated dynamically as the base data in the time and attendance system changes. As a consequence, this system displays the data much faster than if the report data are updated only when a report is to be displayed. One should appreciate that in a business facility having a thousand or more employees, a significant amount of computer time is required to process the thousands of time and attendance transactions to provide the requisite information for the reports. As a consequence, relatively long delays would occur between the request for a report and its display on the personal computer screen if the data was processed only in response to that request. Thus, each time an employee enters data in one of the badge readers and completes a record in the time and attendance system, that completed record is used to update the corresponding employee's summary record in the report generation and distribution system.
As described previously, upon exiting the workplace, the work period record in
Referring to
An example of an employee summary record 140 is depicted in
Returning to the finalization routine 130 in
When a supervisor selects a particular report for display on a personal computer 13, the main report generation and distribution system triggers execution of a report formulation and display routine 170, depicted by the flowchart in
Thereafter, the data for each employee on that list is gathered and filtered, if necessary, to determine whether the data qualifies the respective employee to appear on the report. Specifically, at step 176, the next employee in the list is selected and that person's data are read from their employee summary record at step 178. Any filter defined in the report profile 107 is applied to the associated data from the employee's summary record to determine whether such data are of a type that is desired to be displayed in this report. If the filter criteria are not satisfied, execution of the report formulation and display routine 170 jumps to step 188 to ascertain whether data for other employees exist to process. Otherwise when the filter criteria are satisfied, the execution branches to steps 182-186 where an employee view record 80 (
After the employee view record 80 is complete, a determination is made at step 188 whether additional employees appear on the supervisors list. If so, the report generation process loops back to step 176 to ascertain whether another employee should be included in the report.
When an employee view record 80 has been constructed for each employee appearing on the report being generated, the report formulation and display routine 170 branches from step 188 to step 190. At this juncture, the report entries represented by the employee view records are sorted according to the criteria in the report profile 107. Then, the report entries are displayed in this order on the personal computer 13 at step 192 with only the fields of the employee view records that are designated in the report profile 107 appearing in the displayed report.
As noted previously, when a supervisor will be absent from the workplace for an extended time, such as a long vacation or sick leave, that data for that supervisor's subordinates can be automatically forwarded to another supervisor for monitoring. The process for controlling the autoforwarding is depicted in the flowchart of
When it is desired to create an autoforward, execution of this routine 200 branches to step 206 at which the host computer 11 checks a list of previously processed supervisors. This list contains designations of all the supervisors for whom an autoforward is currently active. This step determines whether the intended recipient for the new autoforward is on the processed supervisor list. If that is the case, the autoforwarding routine 200 ends in order to prevent circular forwarding of report data, i.e. data from a first supervisor is forwarded to a second supervisor whose data are forwarded back to the first supervisor either directly or via another supervisor. Otherwise the process advances to configure the autoforwarding at step 208 where an identifier of the present supervisor is added to the processed supervisor list. Next at step 210 the recipient is granted access to data regarding the present supervisor's subordinates after which the autoforwarding routine 200 ends.
If at step 204 the supervisor sought to cancel an existing autoforward, execution of the autoforwarding routine 200 branches to step 212 where the identifier of that supervisor is removed from the processed supervisor list. Then at step 214 the recipient's access to data regarding the present supervisor's subordinates is cancelled.
A plurality of supervisors report to a manager who is responsible for overseeing several departments of the business. A similar set of reports can be configured by which a manager is able to view the data in the supervisor summary records for those supervisors reporting to that manager. When a given report is displayed on the manager's personal computer 13, by clicking the mouse button while the cursor is on the line for a given supervisor, detailed information for that supervisor's subordinates appears on the manager's personal computer. That detailed information is gathered from the respective employee summary records in much the same manner as that data are gathered for reports displayed on the supervisor's personal computer. Thus the manager is able to view several levels of detailed information from the time and attendance system.
The foregoing description was primarily directed to preferred embodiments of the invention. Although some attention was given to various alternatives within the scope of the invention, it is anticipated that one skilled in the art will likely realize additional alternatives that are now apparent from disclosure of embodiments of the invention. Accordingly, the scope of the invention should be determined from the following claims and not limited by the above disclosure.