Handwritten Time Sheets

In addition to collecting worker hours and piece information with Time Portal's mobile applications, it is also possible to collect data on paper based forms such as the Handwritten Time Sheet illustrated below.

The Handwritten Time Sheet can be filled out in the field by a crew leader then sent into the office for entry into the Time Portal web application by the back office team.

Creating the Handwritten Time Sheet

The handwritten Time Sheet is a report that can be printed as a completely blank form or with crew, employee, location, job and other information already filled in as illustrated above.

To create the Handwritten Time Sheet, click on the "Handwritten Time Sheet" option on the Reports page within the Time Portal web application.

As illustrated, the report screen offers options to select one or more crews and/or individual employee numbers to specify which employee names are pre-printed onto the form. Other information, such as Location, Job, Crop/Variety and Piece Rate can be optionally specified for inclusion in the form when it is printed.

Processing the Handwritten Time Sheet

Completed Handwritten Time Sheets can be turned into the office or photographed and sent in via email or text message as illustrated below.  The information from the document can be used to create a Time Sheet within the Time Portal web application and the photograph or scanned document can be attached to the Time Sheet as an Attachment.

Automation

Time Portal offers automated Handwritten Time Sheet Processing as a Beta feature which has not yet been made available to all customers but can be enabled on the Advanced tab of the My Company screen as illustrated below.

With "Handwritten Timesheet Processing" enabled,  the Time Sheets page will include a new option which indicates the number of handwritten Time Sheets which have been uploaded but not yet processed.

Click on the "Handwritten Time Sheets" link, illustrated above, to display a screen which includes the option to "Upload Handwritten Time Sheet".

Click the button and select one or more image files (.jpg, .png, etc.) which have been saved to a folder on your computer, such as the "downloads" folder.  If you select multiple files, the tool will process the first one then list the others in the Handwritten Time Sheets window for later review.   Note: This tool will only work with images of the Handwritten Time Sheet, described earlier in this article.

As illustrated below, the Handwritten Time Sheet Screen provides fields such as Crew, Date, Job that are typically used to create a new Time Sheet. It also provides an image of the uploaded document that illustrates what was hand-entered by the crew leader.  Tip: The web browser's "zoom" button can shrink everything to reduce the need for scrolling.

Time Portal will automatically fill in fields, on the left, with the information that it can read from the document on the right. Although low confidence items will be highlighted with a red box, it it important that the user checks every data element to ensure the correct information is entered.

The fields Piece Rate, Start Time, Break Time, Break Hours, Default Hours and Default Pieces can be left blank or filled in to determine how Time Sheet records are created when the form is saved.  

With a 7 AM start time and an 11:15 AM break time, for example, Time Portal will create a 4.25-hr Time Sheet record for every worker with a clock-in time of 7:00 AM. Assuming a 1.5-hr break time, separate Time Sheet Records will be created for each employee with a clock-in time of 12:45 PM.

The hours and pieces for each generated Time Sheet Record will be determined using "Default Hours" and "Default Pieces" if a value has not been entered for a particular employee.  

Click the Save button to create a Time Sheet which will be in the "Uploaded" status and allow for further editing. A copy of the original document will be saved in the Time Sheet's attachments list.

If a second page was required (and uploaded) to capture all the information for a large Crew, the "Handwritten Time Sheets" link will indicate that another document requires processing.

Click on the link to open the Handwritten Time Sheets panel and review other documents which have been uploaded for processing.

As illustrated above, the "trash" icon can be clicked to remove a handwritten time sheet image which was uploaded by mistake.