Version 6.73 Build 345, April 6, 2010

This page documents all new features, enhancements and bug fixes included in this release of Pacific Timesheet. For information on changes made in previous versions of Pacific Timesheet, please see the release notes archive.

1. New Employee Property: Scheduled Work Days

A new employee property, "scheduled work days", allows you to specify which days of the week are considered work days. By default the value is Monday through Friday, but you might have employees whose work schedule is Tuesday through Saturday or some other set of days. This setting affects several areas of the system:

• When an approved leave request has its hours added to a timesheet, previously Saturday and Sunday were skipped. This version will check the "scheduled work days" property configuration to skip the appropriate non-work days.
• The "minimum hours per work day" time entry rule (on the System > Policies > Time Entry Rules page) previously only considered Monday through Friday to be work days. This version will check the "scheduled work days" property configuration to determine which days are considered work days.

2. Email Notice Enhancements

This release of Pacific Timesheet will allow you to configure the port number for your outgoing (SMTP) mail server on the System > General page. This is needed if your mail server is not using the standard SMTP port, 25.

"Timesheet Approval Due" and "Timesheet Approval Late" notices, which are sent to an employee's primary approver, now have an option to CC the employee's backup approver. This will notify the backup approver that they may want to step in and approve the timesheets, in case the primary approver is unavailable.

The "Request Approval Due" notice has been renamed to "Request Submitted", and two new notices have been added: "Request Approval Due" and "Request Approval Late". The "Request Submitted" notice behaves as before: it will be emailed to an employee's primary approver(s) when they submit a leave request. The "Request Approval Due" and "Request Approval Late" notices will be emailed to an employee's primary approver(s) if the request has sat for too long without being approved. You can optionally configure these notices to CC the employee's backup approver, in case the primary approver is unavailable.

3. Reporting Group (Cost Center) Issue

The current value of the reporting group (or cost center) in an employee's profile is stored with each time entry an employee records. In this way, if an employee changes reporting groups their new timesheets will show the new reporting group, but their old timesheets will retain the old reporting group value. Editing a time entry results in the current value being pulled from the employee's profile, making sure the edited time entry has the current reporting group value. However, a bug caused this check to be omitted when using the Day View time entry mode. In addition, when a new timesheet was created using timesheet memory set to "Rows and Hours", the old reporting group value would be carried forward. The same thing would happen if the employee used the 'Copy Previous Timesheet' feature. This release fixes these issues, making sure that the current reporting group value is used whenever editing a time entry, as well as when using the 'timesheet memory' or 'copy previous' functionality.

4. External Database Server Restart Issue

When using an external database, such as Microsoft SQL Server, you could get a "null pointer exception" error when loading a timesheet if the database server was not running when the Pacific Timesheet service started up. In order to fix the issue you had to make sure the external database was running, then restart the Pacific Timesheet service. This release is more tolerant of the external database being unavailable during the time that the Pacific Timesheet service is starting. Once the external database is available Pacific Timesheet should automatically connect and operate without error.

5. Missed Meal Penalty Issue

This issue affects those using the missed meal premium rule (see the System > Policies > Wage Rules page). When computing whether an employee missed a meal, the rule was inadvertently including any leave they may have taken that day. This could result in a missed meal premium being granted when it shouldn't. This release ignores any leave time entries when checking for missed meals.

6. Export File Fields Now Locked

Previously, if you modified the list of pay codes on the System > Pay Codes page it had the side effect of changing the list of the pay code fields in the timesheet export. For instance, if you moved the Sick pay code to the end of the list, it would show up as the last pay code field in the export file. This unintended side effect could break your pay roll integration if it depends on certain fields being in certain locations. Starting with this release of Pacific Timesheet, whenever you edit your timesheet export the list of fields will remain exactly as shown, even if the list of pay codes is later modified. If you are integrating with external systems (for example, using TimeBank to integrate with your payroll system), it is recommended that you do the following:

  a) Go to the System > General > Data Integration page.
  b) Click the link for each enabled timesheet export.
  c) Click Edit then click OK. This will lock the fields.

7. 9/80 Overtime Rules Issue

The 9/80 Overtime Rules could, in some cases, not compute the total number of regular hours if no time entries were entered for a week. This release makes sure that the overtime rules process correctly even if no time entries were recorded on the timesheet.

8. Reduced Memory Usage When Listing/Exporting Timesheets

Unneeded timesheet data was being kept in memory when listing or exporting timesheets. If you were exporting large numbers of timesheets (over 500) this could result in excessive memory consumption. This release no longer keeps unneeded timesheet data in memory after listing or exporting these large lists.

9. Punch In/Out On Home Page Issue

In certain rare cases clicking the Punch In or Punch Out link on the Home tab would result in no action being taken. This is fixed in this release.