Timesheet Submission and Approval

This web application has been constructed to provide centralized management of timesheet information for a company with several thousand employees. Before we wrote this application, The payroll department would hand key information provided from paper timesheets.  In performing this duty, the department worked feverishly to get all the time input on schedule to be ready for processing.  During the manual input, rules about time and payment procedures were enforced. Although the people were conscientious and dedicated to task, the manual rekeying process could introduce errors and oversights.

By centralizing and standardizing the information maintained for timesheets, we provided a web based application that would allow everyone to access at almost anytime of the day. This application would track everything done to a timesheet and would verify the inputs when time was entered/submitted/approved.  The rules about time entry and payment procedures were clarified and built into the timesheet submission/approval processing.  In this way, everyone would always be handled the same way.  This improved consistency and reduced questions about paychecks generated from time input.

Since the time was input by the employees, there was no need to continue manual keying of the time into the payroll system.  An available interface into the payroll system allow direct import of time card information.  This reduced keying errors.  Another strong benefit is that the time entry system can compare multiple timesheets over a range of dates to look for overlapping times.  The manual keying would often not be adequate to handle this type of abuse.  Since we built in a command chain to the application, if a direct supervisor is unavailable to approve a timesheet, their supervisor may do so (and so on).

 The application has various control parameter screens.  These screen provide the ability to lock down features, adjust system tables driven by time calculation rules and control many aspects of the overall processes.  Extensive reporting helps payroll manage the exception conditions and provides the ability to perform research.

The desktop application tools used were Visual Basic 6.0. The web based application uses a website powered by Windows 2000 Server, IIS, ASP and SQL/Server 2000. Various support applications were written that run unattended which perform error checking, synchronization and summary reporting features.