Today I pushed out some new code to Work Tyme to add in something I am kicking myself for not thinking of sooner, how to deal with employee terminations. One of my clients recently asked how they can mark an employee as a former employee but still maintain their information in Work Tyme. I had just assumed an account admin would simply change the employee’s password so they could no longer log in. Then after 30 days had passed the employee would be labeled inactive by Work Tyme and they would no longer be charged for that employee on their monthly bill. Simple right?
What I hadn’t thought about is that you wouldn’t want former employees to show up in the staff directory inside of Work Tyme (well unless an admin was viewing the directory at which point former employees would be highlighted in red, but for any other employee the person would no longer appear in the directory) or for former employees to be still part of the graphical org chart.
So as of today an admin can set an employee as either “full time”, “part time”, or “former employee”. And if they select “former employee” they are required to set a termination date. I thought we may as well track that as well.
I also had a meeting today in regards to another software platform I manage, Golden Retriever. One of the larger GR clients had a scheduled meeting with one of their utility clients. They utilize GR for managing all the data collection for this utility and they requested I attend a meeting with them to discuss some potential changes to the GR platform. I absolutely love meetings such as these as I can talk about GR for hours and I am always up for adjusting the platform to make it better for its stakeholders.
The end result of the meeting is that we will be creating a custom field in GR for this client to be used in their collection forms (or dictionaries as we call them). By creating a custom field we can make the data entry part as simple as possible while still providing the utility with all the calculations and data they require. Pretty much a win-win for everyone involved.
And I also didn’t have to clean up any vomit today!