Pacific Timesheet 6.71 is now available and sports the following new features:

• Partial Day Holiday Support- You can now create half-day and other partial day holidays.
• Scheduled Hours Per Day- You can now specify the scheduled hours per day in the employee's profile (Employees tab). This allows you to override the Hours Per Day property on the System > General page on a per-employee basis. The hours per day property is used when putting leave requests and holidays on timesheets.
• Request Conflict Warning- When employees submit leave requests, and managers approve them, a warning message will be displayed if the employee has previously submitted a request that falls in the same time period.
• Pay Code Colors- You can now specify a color for each pay code. The pay code color is used when rendering leave and holidays on employee calendars (such as on the Home tab).
• Leave Request Enhancements- You can now keep employees from submitting leave requests that overlap or conflict with other leave requests they may have already submitted. This is configured on the Schedule Rules page (System > Policies > Schedule Rules). You can now keep employees from entering partial day leave requests if you so desire. This is configured on the Time Entry Rules page (System > Policies > Time Entry Rules) by setting the minimum and maximum hours allowed to the same value for each appropriate pay code.

You can see all of the new features and other changes here:

www.pacifictimesheet.com/timesheet_support/pacific_timesheet_release_notes.htm

If you are using the online service, it will be updated to this version within a few weeks. If you are self-hosting Pacific Timesheet, you should receive an email with download instructions, or you can contact support@pacifictimesheet.com.

Pacific Timesheet has significantly enhanced its support for California labor rules such as meal penalty rules and split shift premium rules. The state of California requires that certain classified non-exempt or hourly employees are paid a meal penalty equal to one regular hour of pay if they miss a meal after more than five hours of continuous work. In addition, California requires employers to pay non-exempt or hourly employees a premium if the time that lapses between shifts is more than one hour.

Jim Dickerson, VP of Operation stated, "The challenge of complying with California labor laws is not just how they are defined today. Ongoing cases each year have made complying somewhat of a moving target. Pacific Timesheet's highly configurable support for complying with these laws has been an advantage our customers with operations in California have been looking for."

According to the California Labor Code, "In California, an employer may not employ an employee for a work period of more than five hours per day without providing the employee with a meal period of not less than thirty minutes, except that if the total work period per day of the employee is no more than six hours, the meal period may be waived by mutual consent of both the employer and employee. A second meal period of not less than thirty minutes is required if an employee works more than ten hours per day, except that if the total hours worked is no more than 12 hours, the second meal period may be waived by mutual consent of the employer and employee only if the first meal period was not waived."

Dickerson continued, "Pacific Timesheet provides support for an unlimited number of rule combinations, which includes rules for employees who sign a meal penalty waiver and those who do not sign a meal penalty waiver." In addition, Pacific Timesheet has provided support that allows for individual meal penalty overrides or split shift overrides or waivers with a detailed comment for auditing for circumstances where the penalty or premium needs to be modified according to the California labor code. Pacific Timesheet also provides extensive support for California overtime rules, including consecutive-day overtime rules.

The Pacific Timesheet software has a variety of reports that managers and administrators can use and modify. But if you log in as an employee you may notice that there are no reports available out-of-the-box. The reason for this is that the specific fields and data an organization might want to make available to their employees varies greatly. Fortunately it is very easy to publish custom reports for your employees! Let's create a report that shows an employee's project hours:

1. As an admin or manager, log into Pacific Timesheet and go to the Reports tab. Expand the 'Employee Hours'  report triangle and click the 'New' link to the right of the 'Employee Hours by Project' report.

2. Choose the report columns you want to make available to your employees, for instance Employee.Name, Project.Name, TimeEntry.Hours.

3. Specify the '(Self)' employee filter. This will make sure the report only shows data for the logged-in employee.

4. Check the 'Published' check box, the click the options button to the right of it and select the 'Employee' and any other permission levels (or roles) that you want to make the report available to.

5. Click OK and that is it! Now when employees log in they will see this newly published report showing only the hours they entered in their timesheets.