Time saver

Our com­pany recently switched to using an online, browser-based ser­vice for our timesheets and pay­roll. I won’t name names, mostly because the task of get­ting the new ser­vice into ser­vice at the paper has been a nightmare.

What’s the cause of the night­mare? The rumors vary. A lot of them are based on horror-filled Google searches for the name of our new pay­roll ser­vice. Some of them are based on pos­si­bly mis­heard or mis­un­der­stood advice from IT about the new service.

Whatever the source of the rumors, here’s what they are:

• The ser­vice doesn’t work well with Macs, which is funny, con­sid­er­ing that we are a pub­lish­ing com­pany that has a really high per­cent­age of Macs in the building.
• The ser­vice doesn’t work well with any ver­sion of Firefox beyond ver­sion 3. At my last count, Firefox was at 5, head­ing to 6.
• Safari? Forget about it.
• Remember that pass­word and user­name you set up dur­ing the reg­is­tra­tion process? Well, that’s actu­ally not the same pass­word and user­name com­bi­na­tion you need to access cer­tain parts of the pay­roll system’s dash­board. How do you find out what that other user/pass com­bi­na­tion is? Ask our busi­ness office, because the online ser­vice gives you no clue.
• And so on.

Whether the rumors are tech­ni­cally true or not, peo­ple are hav­ing tremen­dous dif­fi­culty actu­ally get­ting logged in to the sys­tem and get­ting their hours recorded. Department heads, who hold the keys to bud­gets and pay­rolls, are hav­ing a heck of a time deal­ing with the sub­mit­ted infor­ma­tion and cor­rect­ing errors, spend­ing hours mak­ing sure employee time­cards are approved.

This is much more effi­cient that doing it on paper, I’m told.

Fortunately, I’m salaried, which means that I don’t record hours — except vaca­tion and sick time. By this logic, I do noth­ing and money will mag­i­cally appear in my bank account on payday.

Woe to the hourly work­ers! They have to login to this mon­stros­ity every day or at least once a week and record their time. Woe is them!

But here’s what I fig­ured out this morn­ing on the way to work. I never have to log in to the ser­vice again, pro­vided that I never take any sick time.

See, our vaca­tion time comes on a “use it or lose it” con­di­tion. We get half of it at the start of the year and the other half in July. The hours don’t carry over. (They used to, but this is the news­pa­per indus­try, where vaca­tions are few and far between, extra­or­di­nar­ily far between as it turned out in a lot of cases, cre­at­ing lia­bil­i­ties for the company.)

I also get an email paystub from the new sys­tem. Provided that paystub tells me my accrued vaca­tion and sick hours, I can just keep care­ful track of any time I take off. I get paid the same for vaca­tion hours as I do for work hours, so there is no dif­fer­ence in net pay.

So, pro­vided that I don’t need to use sick time — and really, as short-staffed as we are, can we really afford to take any? — I never have to log in to our pay sys­tem again.

WINNING!

(Is it me, or does it seem like the pay sys­tem at your com­pany should work well enough that it doesn’t inspire employ­ees to come up with con­vo­luted ways to avoid using it?)

Photo from jim­bofive on Flickr.