timr Product News Autumn 2023

A lot has happened in the timr application in the last months. We have been working intensively on many new functions and improvements. We would like to give you an overview of the most important new features today.

1. New functions in timr

1.1 Presence Board for employees

There is now a Presence Board available in timr.

This board provides an overview of all employees with their respective work status. In this overview, you can see whether an employee is currently active and present or absent today, for example.

For colleagues who have entered a planned absence, you can see when they will be back.

This makes direct internal communication between colleagues much easier, especially in a modern working environment with hybrid working in the office and home office. Your companies contact center, for example, knows who is available for incoming calls or questions.

Employees who are out and about also always have everything in view – the presence board is available in the app on the smartphone.

1.2 Absence Calendar 2.0

1.2.1 Display public holidays in the absence calendar

You can now specify in the settings that public holidays are also explicitly displayed in the absence calendar alongside vacations and other entered absences.

This makes it even easier to coordinate appointments, especially if you have employees in different countries or federal states.

1.2.2 Absence calendar for organizations/teams (Enterprise Plan)

or all customers who have created organizations and teams (Enterprise Plan) in timr, there is a practical extension for the absence calendar:

For example, you can specify that your employees only see the absences of their own team. This makes the absence calendar clearer, especially for companies with many employees, teams and departments.

However, you can also share all team calendars for employees to view. This facilitates communication and scheduling between the teams.

Imagine, for example, that a marketing employee is planning a kick-off meeting to market a new function and would like the development team to attend. In this case, they can call up the developers’ absence calendar and see at a glance whether and when the developers are available for an appointment.

1.3 New function for paying off hours

timr would like to make the transfer of data to payroll accounting as easy as possible for you. We have therefore created a separate action for correcting the time account for payoffs.

On the one hand, this means that payments are automatically and explicitly shown as such in the time account.

On the other hand, there is now a separate export for all payoffs that you have posted in the time & vacation account. This export is available as a PDF and as Excel for easy forwarding of the data to payroll accounting.

There is now a separate tab for payoffs in the Excel export of the time account. Payoffs are also shown as a separate column in the other tabs.

1.4 Advanced export options

To make it easier for you to further process the recorded times, we have expanded the export options for working and project times.

1.4.1 Subsequently export all timesheets of a time account balance

You now have the option of exporting the timesheets of all employees at a later date with just one click.

For example, you can quickly and easily download and process employees’ timesheets even if you have not created the monthly time account balance yourself.

1.4.2 Print/export for current balances

You can now export the current employee balances as a PDF or Excel file. This means, for example, you have the latest vacation balances at your fingertips any time if you need them for further processing.

1.4.3 Excel export for project status report

An Excel export is now available for the project status report in the Budget Dashboard.

You can use this report to print the selected budget dashboard view. The advantage: This report also automatically contains the budget overview for all subtasks, which means you do not have to click on each level of the budget dashboard.

This allows you to export the budget statuses of a specific project to Excel for further processing as required.

1.5 Automatic deletion of GPS positions

timr supports you in complying with data protection regulations.

If you use location tracking, timr makes it easier for you to comply with deletion deadlines thanks to a new option for the automatic deletion of GPS positions.

You can specify that GPS positions are automatically deleted after a certain period of time.

1.6 Subscription Manager role

Previously, only the account owner of the timr account could perform an extension or, for example, a user upgrade.

From now on, there is a separate role for this in timr, which the account owner can assign to any user.

This means that the account owner can delegate the management of the subscription to another person and no longer has to take care of it themselves.

The account owner can assign this role to several users in the user rights section in the user administration. This ensures that someone can always take care of managing the subscription, even during vacation time or in the event of sick leave.

1.7 New Siri Actions

Siri events / shortcuts have been part of the timr iOS app for a long time. The first commands that were supported were starting and stopping working time and project time. These have been available in timr since 2019. The list of existing Siri events has now been expanded to include pausing and resuming the working time or project time.

It is now also possible to ask Siri whether the working time or project time is currently paused.

2. Sneak Peak: New view for automatic validations

timr already validates the recorded times of the employees and automatically checks whether these match the stored working time rules or whether there are overlaps of times, for example in the context of project time recording. The prerequisite for this is that you have activated the automatic validations in the settings.

Previously, if there were discrepancies, notifications were displayed in the time & vacation account, in the reports and for employees in the recording menu.

To make it easier to check all times and to create a central point for reviewing times, there will be a separate view for validations in future.

In this view, employees can check the information relevant to them and confirm it, for example, if the deviation from the stored working time rules is correct. With the appropriate authorization, it is also possible to correct the relevant times as required.

A real advantage is that you can also configure an e-mail notification and, for example, send a weekly e-mail to your employees to inform them regularly of any outstanding checks.

3. Tips for year-end closing in timr

To make your year-end closing in timr easier, we have prepared some tips for you.

3.1 Add public holidays for 2024 in the holiday calendar

It is necessary to manually add the public holidays for 2024 to your employees’ public holiday calendar so that they are immediately taken into account when planning vacation for the coming year, for example.

To do this, simply generate the public holidays for 2024 in the existing public holiday calendar. This can be done with just a few clicks. We have put together a guide for you here.

3.2 Balance time account for December 31

It is very important to regularly create a balance in the time & vacation account. This is the only way to freeze the hours and vacation balance for each month on the selected closing date.

With each balance, the target and actual hours are compared and the balance of hours in the working time account is determined. The vacation days taken are also deducted from the annual vacation entitlement so that you are always informed about your employees’ current vacation entitlement.