In Time and Attendance (TAA), you can create official schedules for your employees and compare their planned work to the actual work they performed on their time card. You can assign master schedule templates to groups of employees; after a master schedule is assigned, the schedule becomes unique to each employee and can be adjusted individually as needed. In order to best use schedules, you should follow this process:
Note: The Work Monitor offers considerably more data about how well your drivers are covering their routes when you have created master schedule templates and applied them to your employees. See the articles in the folder Work Monitor for details.
- Make sure that you have your employees' current work schedules handy, whether this is in another software program or on paper.
- Identify schedules that are mostly similar in their shift hours and have the same TAA job type; then categorize all of them.
For example, you might have several drivers who run a morning elementary-school route, a morning middle-school route, the corresponding afternoon elementary-school route, and finally the afternoon route for that middle school. You could categorize this general schedule as "Elementary/Middle School." Another set of drivers might perform the morning and afternoon routes for a middle school and a high school, and that schedule could be "Middle School/High School."
Think in terms of the hours when they will be driving. You are looking for general time frames, such as 6:15 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Time periods alone might be how you categorize your schedules, such as "Early Morning and Early Afternoon."
You might also consider categories based on position, such as if you have a group of mechanics that works the early-day shift and another that works second shift; their schedules might be named "Mechanic 1" and "Mechanic 2."
If the time period is the same but the job type that will be performed is different, make those two separate categories. (This will simplify part of step 3 below because you will be able to build the first master schedule template for one job and then copy and modify that template for the second job.)
Choose categories that make the most sense for your organization.
Note: Don't worry if the drivers' schedules aren't exactly the same. You want to create master schedules that have mostly the same shifts. If individual drivers have slight variances to the master schedule that's applied to them, their schedule can be tweaked, as mentioned in step 5 below.
Caution: Be aware that drivers can have only ONE schedule assigned to them. So don't try to create separate schedules for morning and afternoon shifts, thinking you will be able to assign both to a single driver. Each employee will need a schedule that includes all their morning, mid-day, and afternoon shifts. - Create your master schedule templates, naming them by the categories you delineated in step 2. See Creating a Master Schedule Template for details.
Add all the schedule templates you will need for your employees, one by one (category by category).
- Assign each master schedule template to the group of employees who work the shifts it contains, as shown in Assigning Schedules to Employees. Note that you can give a schedule to multiple employees at once.
- If there are shift hour variations for some of your workers or if you want to add each driver's assigned vehicle to their shift record, you can modify the schedules individually, employee by employee, by following the steps in Editing an Employee's Schedule.