TimePilot Best Practices

All About Alerts

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You’ve got your system set up and it’s running well. You’re extracting your pay periods, running reports and perhaps exporting your data to your payroll service or software.

Now you’d like to learn a little more. Are there any “secret” features in TimePilot that might make it even more helpful?

Yes, there are. This one isn’t too secret—it’s described in the online Help in the TimePilot software—but it can be extremely helpful. It's called "Alerts."

When you’re looking at TimePilot Central, there’s a lot of data to wade through. Wouldn’t it be nice if the software could flag you when any employee worked overtime or if an employee’s total number of hours was approaching overtime territory?

It can. And it can do even more.

You can have the software look for eight different categories, and have any instances of any of the eight flagged in a different color.

Here’s how to set up your alerts (several examples follow the instructions):

  1. Start TimePilot Central.
  2. Click the “View” menu, then “Alerts Setup.”
  3. A box will pop up listing the eight possible alert categories. With each, you will specify when you want the alert to show up (in hours) and what color tint you want to use to highlight that particular situation. The categories are:
    • Transaction Totals
    • Daily Totals
    • Weekly Totals
    • Running Totals
    • Regular Totals
    • Overtime 1 Totals
    • Overtime 2 Totals
    • Overtime 3 Totals
  4. To set an alert, click the checkbox next to your preferred category, then enter the number of hours that should trigger the alert. Remember that TimePilot uses hours and tenths and hundreths of an hour instead of hours and minutes, so, for instance, if you want to enter 8 hours and 30 minutes, you’d enter 8.5 hours. For a handy downloadable chart that converts minutes to decimals, click here.
  5. Finally, click the “Change Color” button to choose a tint. We suggest the lighter colors in the top half of the chart—if you choose a dark color, the tint will obscure the black numbers.
  6. Click OK.

Example 1

The task: You’d like to see at a glance when employees worked overtime.

The background: You pay overtime to anyone who works more than 8 hours in a day.

The setup:

  1. Open the “Alerts Setup” box as described above.
  2. Click the second checkbox from the top (“Highlight Daily Totals greater than or equal to”).
  3. Enter 8.02 in the time field. You can use the arrows to the right of the field or simply enter the number in the box. (8.02 translates to 8 hours and 1 minute, according to the chart mentioned earlier in this article.)
  4. Click the “Change Color” button and choose a color for the tint. We’ll choose yellow.
  5. Click OK to return to TimePilot Central.

Now, in the “Daily” column in TimePilot Central, anyone who worked 8 hours 1 minute or more is highlighted in yellow.

Don’t see a column marked “Daily”? No problem. Right-click on the row of column headers at the top of the Transaction List. (The row will be green if you’re in Current Transactions or yellow if you’re in a Past Pay Period.) Click the checkbox next to “Daily” to have those totals show up.

Example 2

Set Alerts setupThe task: You’d like to see at a glance anyone who worked overtime on a day and anyone who is approaching overtime territory for the week.

The background: You pay overtime to anyone who works more than 8 hours in a day or anyone who works more than 40 hours in a week.

The setup:

  1. Repeat Steps 1-4 in the previous example.
  2. Click the third checkbox (“Highlight Weekly Totals greater than or equal to”).
  3. Enter a number of hours in the time field. In this case, we just want to be alerted when an employee is approaching OT status, so we’ll enter 36.00. When an employee hits 36 hours for the week, his or her weekly total will be tinted.
  4. Click the “Change Color” button and choose a color for the tint. We’ll choose green.
  5. Click OK to return to TimePilot Central.

TimePilot Central showing alertsNow in the “Daily” column in TimePilot Central, anyone who worked 8 hours 1 minute or more is highlighted in yellow and anyone who exceeds 36 hours in a week is highlighted in green in the “Weekly” column.

Don’t see columns marked “Daily” or “Weekly”? No problem: Right-click on the row of column headers at the top of the Transaction List. (The row will be green if you’re in Current Transactions or yellow if you’re in a Past Pay Period.) Make sure there’s a check in the checkbox next to “Daily” or “Weekly” (or both) to have those totals show up.   

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