Staff hours tracking application

As a result in changes to our workers comp insurance, paid staff will likely need to track their hours by job task on a daily basis. Each job will fall into one of (probably) four categories (still to be determined).

Tracking categories

Assuming we really do need to do this, an opportunity to track other things associated with job tasks. Here are the obvious things that would be useful to track:

Workers Comp Categories

As defined by our workers compensation provider. There might be four categories, including:

1. Truck driving, or riding along. (This is self explanatory.)
2. Office Work. (Administrative, non-production work done in a designated office area, meeting room, reception, or the classroom.)
3. Recycling. (Work performed in an area that primarily involves handling anything not yet triaged into KEEP or RECYCLE, or already determined to be destined for recycling. This includes Receiving, Prebuild, Testing, and the Warehouse areas.)
4. The default category. (Most production and sales, and anything not defined above.)

Program Categories

We use these to report program costs to the IRS each year, but they could also be used in grant writing in the future.

See Programs and Activities for current scheme of programs.

Production and Income Stream Categories

This would be categories that help us define what costs are associated with the production of something that's going for sale related income or for mission related disbursement.

The actual categories here remain to be defined and will likely require some experimentation and tweaking once a preliminary design has been laid out.

Worker types are succinctly described on the Staff Ratios page. A better description of each can be found on the Staff Categories page.

Diagram

The workers_worker_types records and the three categories associatiated with job tasks all can change over time. So these tables will need logic for effective dates and ineffective dates.

Possible need: Depending on what we determine to be a manageable amount of job_tasks to deal with, we might also find ourselves needing to have a many-to-many relation between the category table (for example, programs) and the job tasks table. That is, a job task might need to have multiple programs that it is associated with. If we need to do this (and I don't want to if we don't have to) we would need to determine what percent of hours spent at a given job is assigned to each program (or other category). The percents associated with a given job task would need to total up to 100% or a similar scheme would need to be implemented.

Reports needed

An hours report that works something like the income report would be useful. The user would select a date range, and a total number of hours would be displayed. One section of the report would show a breakdown by worker type (one type per column) and workers compensation category (one category per row). The next section would show the same, but by worker type (column) and program category (row). The next by worker type (column) and production and income stream category (row). Each section would have subtotals along the bottom, and subtotals as a final column. A grand total sum line would be at the bottom. The exact layout of this report is not necessarily this, but the information explained here should be displayed.

Trend reports tracking hours over time by worker type, program, and production/income stream would prove very useful in planning staffing needs and estimating averages.

Relationship with scheduling application

This could eventually link in to the General scheduling application. The scheduled job tasks could be used to pre-fill in values for a given day, so the user would only need to correct for unscheduled work time (admin) and changes that came up during the day. This feature is not necessary immediately but should be part of a long term vision.

At the outset, we will need to know a little about scheduling even if that application is not ready, however.

We'll need to know how much time a person is scheduled to work on each day of the week, so that we can calculate two important numbers we need to display.

1. Number of hours in excess (or short of) their scheduled or ceiling hours per week (or 40 hours whichever is smaller).
2. Number of hours in excess (or short of) their scheduled or ceiling hours per month.

The first number defines when overtime might kick in. The second number is useful to keep people from working more hours than approved.

Salaried staff members have "floor" and "ceiling" numbers. The floor number is irrelevant here. The ceiling number (or 40) is what determines overtime.