How Do I Clock Employees In At an Earlier Time, or Out At a Later Time?

TimeForge is a powerful labor management solution for your business. Most hourly wage workers in a business need arrive at work on time – too early will cause payroll problems, and too late will cause customer service disruptions. Four clock in and clock out scenarios will create problems for your business:

1. Arriving before the scheduled in time will reduce business profits, as staff members will arrive at work before they are needed.
2. Arriving after the scheduled in time causes customer service problems, as staff will not be available to service the customer’s needs.

3. Leaving before the scheduled out time can cause similar problems as clocking in late. Customers may not be serviced properly, and other staff may be overworked.
4. Leaving after the scheduled out time will increase payroll costs for the business, decreasing profits.

TimeForge provides multiple technology enhancements that will enforce your labor schedule, ensuring that staff show up on time, and that management know of time entries that affect payroll costs and the bottom line. Enforcing the schedule will reduce your labor costs by 2 – 4% with the click of a button!

Navigate to the Attendance Options

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Locate the Attendance Options link or sub-tab (inside of the Attendance tab).

Enforce the Schedule by the Scheduled Time

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To require that employees clock in and out based on the scheduled time, without providing a grace period, set the options as follows.

Please check your local labor regulations to see which ones are applicable (and legal) for your business.

For clocking in:
1. Leave this option set to Yes, allowing employees to clock in at any time.
2. Switch this option from No, to Yes, requiring that staff members acknowledge that their clock in times will not show the actual clock in time, but will instead show the scheduled start time.
TimeForge will record the scheduled start time (not the real time), unless overridden by a manager.

For clocking out:
1. Leave this option set to Yes, allowing employees to clock out at any time.
2. Switch this option from No, to Yes, requiring that staff members acknowledge that their clock out times will not show the actual clock out time, but will instead show the scheduled end time.
TimeForge will record the scheduled end time (not the real time), unless overridden by a manager.

Example:
Using the above options, a staff member may be scheduled from 9:00am – 3:00pm. If the employee shows up at 8:30am, TimeForge will record a start time of 9:00am (not 8:30am). When leaving, if the staff member leaves after 3:00pm, TimeForge will record an end time of 3:00pm. A manager can override and change the behavior of TimeForge when the staff member clocks in or clocks out.

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How Do I Round Time Punch Entries (Attendance) in TimeForge?

TimeForge includes a powerful and flexible time and attendance management system, and is able to track time punches on an accurate minute-by-minute clock (which is synchronized with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and is always on time). TimeForge can use the clock in and clock out time punches to calculate payroll for your pay period without any problems. Accurate time tracking is part of what TimeForge does!

However, some businesses (especially in the restaurant, hotel, and hospitality industries) prefer to round time punch for easier calculations. To make time punch calculations easier, TimeForge can round each clock in or clock out time to the nearest 5, 10, 15, 30, or 60 minute period.

Navigate to Attendance Options

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Navigate to the Attendance Options tab in TimeForge.

Set Rounding Rules for Clock In and Clock Out Times

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Pick the correct rounding rule from the drop-down for time punches in TimeForge. Make sure to Save your settings.

Please note: TimeForge will not round any time entries provided by your POS system. If you want to round time and attendance in your Point of Sale system, please do so within the POS software.

Please note: TimeForge will not round previous time periods. Changing the rounding rules will only affect upcoming time punch entries.

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How Do I Set Up Payroll Periods?

TimeForge will allow you to manage your labor, employee schedules, and time and attendance in the way that works best for your business. If you want to manage different departments differently, TimeForge will let you.

However, to ease the administration of staff schedules, payroll exports, and labor statistics, TimeForge supports the concept of payroll periods. Each location, store, or unit can have a specific payroll period. Payroll periods can be:

- Weekly, where staff are paid every week
- Bi-Weekly, where staff are paid every other week (common in many hospitality and restaurant businesses)
- Monthly, where staff are paid on a specific date (common in many professional and teaching businesses)
- On the 1st and 15th, where there are always two pay periods in a single month

After setting up Payroll Periods, you will be able to quickly and easily export payroll, approve sick, vacation, and PTO time, and run reports that correspond to your pay periods.

Let’s walk through the simple set up of Payroll Periods in your account.

Navigate to the Attendance Options Screen

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Navigate to the Attendance Options tab

Set Up Payroll Periods

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Locate the options in the Attendance Options screen which allow TimeForge to calculate the payroll periods for you.

Make sure to set up:
- The previous payroll period date
- The payroll frequency (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or 1st and 15th pay periods)

Save the Pay Periods

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After choosing the correct settings for your Payroll Periods, make sure to save your settings.

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TimeForge University: Editing Time Cards by Employee 202

Adding or editing employee timesheets is an important part of any business, and it’s crucial that your labor management software make this process easy. Employees will forget to clock in or clock out, staff members will go on a long lunch break, or forget to take a meal break. TimeForge Attendance improves the timesheet editing process while calculating overtime and breaks automatically!

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Managing time cards and employee attendance in TimeForge is simple! Staff hours are accurate and totalled based on your business needs. Payroll exports are available for third party payroll vendors such as QuickBooks, ADP, Paychex, SurePayroll, and other payroll companies. Save time and money every day!

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TimeForge University: Time Cards 201

Editing time cards is an important part of any labor management or workforce management software package. Employees will forget to clock in or clock out, staff members will forget to take a lunch break, or forget to take a break completely. TimeForge allows you to streamline the timesheet editing processing while calculating overtime and breaks automatically!

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TimeForge Attendance makes managing your employee time and attendance easy. Staff hours are always accurate, and correctly totaled according to your payroll rules. Exporting payroll to third party payroll vendors such as ADP, Paychex, QuickBooks, SurePayroll, and other payroll companies. Save time and money every day!

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How Do I Export Payroll for SurePayroll?

TimeForge is an extensive and powerful time and attendance management package, and you can begin to see some of TimeForge’s power by clicking on the Attendance tab. Many, but not all, of the time and attendance capabilities occur within the Attendance tab.

After you have collected time cards for all of your employees, and have made sure that the time punches are correct, you can export your payroll to a variety of supported payroll platforms, including SurePayroll, ADP, Paychex, Quickbooks, and others.

In this lesson, we will tackle exporting payroll for SurePayroll.

Enter Employee Payroll ID’s

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SurePayroll will provide each of your staff members with a unique payroll ID which will allow you to export time card information for your staff.

Before running payroll, please make sure that each staff member’s payroll ID has been entered correctly.

Navigate to the Attendance Tab

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Navigate to the Approve / Export Payroll page in the Attendance tab.

Choose a Pay Period

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Choose the pay period you would like to export. This will normally be the most recent payroll period that has ended.

Please note: To use TimeForge payroll approval, you must configure the payroll period for your location.

Review and Approve Attendance

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If this is the first time processing the pay period, TimeForge will display a list of all time card entries for the pay period. You can review staff member time cards by date, time, employee, position, or cost.

Additionally, TimeForge will display outliers, or “Most Different” time entries, so that you can quickly and easily identify time punches that may be erroneous or problematic.

Focusing on time entries labeled “Very Different” will allow you to find missed punches, late and early clock ins, employees who forgot to clock out, and other strange data before you have approved the payroll for SurePayroll.

After approving time punches for the pay period, you will not be able to edit the time punches inside of TimeForge. Instead, you will need to make the appropriate changes in your payroll program.

Note: You will not be able to approve payroll if employees are currently clocked in for the time period.

When you are ready to Approve payroll, click on the “Approve Attendance Export” at the bottom of the screen.

Choose SurePayroll for the Payroll Provider

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Choose SurePayroll from the drop-down list of payroll providers.

Each provider has a different file format – choosing the correct provider is crucial.

Payroll Export Results to SurePayroll

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TimeForge will process the attendance entries for the pay period you selected, and will return a payroll file to you. You can then upload the file to SurePayroll for further processing.

If any problems are found, such as a missing employee payroll ID, TimeForge will prompt you to correct these problems before exporting the data.

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How Do I Run Payroll with TimeForge and QuickBooks?

TimeForge is able to integrate with many different software systems, including accounting and payroll programs such as QuickBooks. QuickBooks is the most popular accounting system for small businesses in the world, and is used by small, medium, and large businesses around the globe.

The TimeForge QuickBooks integration involves installing the TimeForge Accounting Bridge software on one of the computers running QuickBooks. If you are using QuickBooks Enterprise, you can install the software on the QuickBooks Enterprise server.

The TimeForge Accounting software will read approved time sheets from TimeForge, and then import time cards and weekly time sheets into QuickBooks. With the time sheets inside of QuickBooks, you can pay your employees using QuickBooks Payroll – either by cutting your staff a check, or using Intuit Online Payroll.

Synchronize Your Time Sheets from TimeForge into QuickBooks

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After you have approved your time sheets from inside of TimeForge, you are ready to run payroll.

Make sure you have QuickBooks running, and have opened your company file.

Then, choose Synchronize Now from the TimeForge Accounting Translator to start.

Decide How You Want to Be Notified

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Synchronizing your time sheet and payroll data from TimeForge into QuickBooks could take from one to five minutes.

Decide if you would like to receive a pop-up notification when the synchronization is complete.

Time Sheet Data Imported Successfully

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If you choose to receive a pop-up reminder, TimeForge will notify you after the synchronization is successful and the timesheets have been placed into QuickBooks.

Any notes, errors, or warnings about the synchronization / import will be shown in the Messages screen.

Your Timesheets are imported!

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After the time sheets are imported, you can run payroll with QuickBooks. Using QuickBooks, you can run your own checks, or use one of their many options to do electronic payroll.

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How Do I Allow TimeForge Access to QuickBooks Data?

TimeForge is able to integrate with many different software systems, including accounting and payroll programs such as QuickBooks. QuickBooks is the most popular accounting system for small businesses in the world, and is used by small, medium, and large businesses around the globe.

The TimeForge QuickBooks integration involves installing the TimeForge Accounting Bridge software on one of the computers running QuickBooks. If you are using QuickBooks Enterprise, you can install the software on the QuickBooks Enterprise server.

The TimeForge Accounting software will read approved time sheets from TimeForge, and then import time cards and weekly time sheets into QuickBooks. With the time sheets inside of QuickBooks, you can pay your employees using QuickBooks Payroll – either by cutting your staff a check, or using Intuit Online Payroll.

Open Your QuickBooks Company File

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After you open your QuickBooks company file, you will receive a prompt similar to the above image.

1. Make sure to choose the “Yes, whenever the QuickBooks company file is open.” option.

2. Continue …

Please note: You may receive an additional prompt to ensure that you want to allow TimeForge access to your company file.

View the QuickBooks Translator Dashboard

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The TimeForge Accounting Translator will tell you about the status of the TimeForge synchronization.

1. After permission has been granted to access your QuickBooks company file, you still need to set up the payroll type to import (which is the next step). Click on the link to set up the payroll item type.

Choose the Payroll Item Type

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A payroll item in QuickBooks is a way to do payroll calculations and reporting. Every item on a paycheck is tracked with a payroll item, thus the name payroll item.

Some items you could track using QuickBooks payroll items include:

- Hourly wages

- Overtime wages

- Salaries

- Sick time

- Vacation time

- Federal, state, and local taxes

- Employee and company 401(k) contributions

- Garnishments such as child support

- Benefits such as health insurance, health club dues

- Etc…

Payroll items are also required to track non-taxable items such as:

- Mileage reimbursements

- Employee loans

- Etc…

TimeForge allows you to choose a payroll item for importing time sheets. Currently, TimeForge only allows one payroll item to be chosen for all imported time sheets. In the future, TimeForge will allow separate payroll items for hourly, salaried, sick, vacation, and overtime.

Choose an appropriate payroll item to import the time sheets.

Review the Employee List

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Before importing staff time sheets, make sure to review the Employee List.

TimeForge imports employees into QuickBooks based on their Full Name (the combination of their first name, middle name, and last name).

Compare the TimeForge and QuickBooks Employee Lists

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Because TimeForge imports employees into QuickBooks based on their Full Name (the combination of their first name, middle name, and last name), you will want to make sure that these lists of staff members are both correct.

1. This is a list of employees who are present in TimeForge (and may have time sheets), but are not in QuickBooks. The time sheets for these employees will not be imported into QuickBooks. To import the time sheets for these staff members, please add the employees into QuickBooks.

2. This is a list of employees who are present in QuickBooks, but are not in TimeForge. These employees do not have TimeForge accounts, nor do they have time sheets. If you would like to collect time cards for these staff members, please add the employees to TimeForge.

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How Do I Run Attendance Reports?

TimeForge is an extensive and powerful time and attendance management package, and you can begin to see some of the power by clicking on the Attendance tab. Many, but not all, of the time and attendance capabilities occur within the Attendance tab.

With TimeForge, you can add or edit attendance by date or employee, approve payroll for pay periods, export time punches to a third-party payroll company, and run numerous reports to review employee attendance.

Additionally, TimeForge has many labor management reports which display time cards, approved payroll, and many other labor metrics which are import to successfully manage a work force.

Navigate to the Attendance Tab

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Navigate to the Attendance Reports page on the Attendance tab.

Choose a Report

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TimeForge contains dozens of time card and attendance reports, including PTO, sick, and vacation reports, reports detailing employee time sheets, payroll summary reports, and actual vs. scheduled time reports.

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How Do I Export Payroll?

TimeForge is an extensive and powerful time and attendance management package, and you can begin to see some of TimeForge’s power by clicking on the Attendance tab. Many, but not all, of the time and attendance capabilities occur within the Attendance tab.

With TimeForge, you can add or edit attendance by date or employee, approve payroll for pay periods, export time punches to a third-party payroll company, and run numerous reports to review employee attendance.

There are several ways to manage payroll inside of TimeForge, and many users simply run one of the many payroll reports at the end of their pay period. This works well for many TimeForge customers.

You can also manage the Approval process by approving time cards for a pay period, reviewing any sick, vacation, or PTO time, and then exporting payroll to one of our supported payroll providers. To use this feature, you must first have set up payroll periods for your location.

TimeForge payroll can be exported to many payroll providers, including QuickBooks, ADP, Paychex, SurePayroll, Heartland Payment Systems, CompuPay, and others.

Navigate to the Attendance Tab

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Navigate to the Approve / Export Payroll page in the Attendance tab.

Choose a Payroll Period

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Choose a payroll period to export. This will normally be the most recent payroll period that has ended.

Please note: To use TimeForge payroll approval, you must configure the payroll period for your location.

Review and Approve Attendance

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If you have not yet processed the selected pay period, TimeForge will display a list of time card entries for the pay period.

You can review staff member time cards by date, time, employee, position, or cost.

Additionally, TimeForge will display outliers, or “Most Different” time entries, so that you can quickly and easily identify time punches that may be erroneous or problematic.

Focusing on time entries labeled “Very Different” will allow you to find missed punches, late and early clock ins, employees who forgot to clock out, and other strange data before you have approved the payroll. After the payroll is approved, you will not be able to edit the time punches inside of TimeForge. Instead, you’ll need to make the changes in your payroll program.

Note: You will not be able to approve payroll if employees are currently clocked in for the time period.

When you are ready to Approve payroll, click on the “Approve Attendance Export” at the bottom of the screen.

Choose Your Payroll Provider

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Choose your payroll provider from the drop-down list of providers. Each provider has a different file format – choosing the correct provider is crucial.

Payroll Export Results

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TimeForge will process the attendance entries for the payroll period you selected, and will return a payroll file to you – which will allow you to send the file to your payroll provider.

To ensure successful import into your payroll provider, you will be prompted to correct any problems with the export before a payroll period will be exported.

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heartWhat some of our clients have to say ...

We are one year into it now, well past being enamored with the newness. We are married to TimeForge. It's as essential to us now as any of our management tools today, and we very happy about that.- Steve @ Hermosa Cyclery
We really like the program so far. I know that it is geared towards restaurants, but we are a real estate company and we love it because it is inexpensive and it is so easy to use.- Nicole @ Exit Premier Realty
The Timeforge scheduling system has not only increased our efficiency tremendously; decreased the errors in what is normally an error prone environment; it has also saved us ten times what it costs us each month.- Michael @ Tiara Cafe
I would highly recommend TimeForge to anyone making work schedules. ... What used to take 1-2 hours, now takes 15 minutes. The reports section is comprehensive and useful.- Lawrence Payne @ Mid Pacific Country Club
I've been really pleased with this latest version of TimeForge. I'm really getting familiar with this program and its become a great time saver! Keep up the good work!- Loren @ Fresh Produce
Before using TimeForge, creating a schedule took 2 hours. With TimeForge, it takes less than 10 minutes.- Gail @ Kerr Drug

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About TimeForge

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