Redmine

Hi everyone,
I'm happy to say that there is a new update for the Time & Expense (wktime) plugin, and it's a very large change. It hasn't been released to the public yet, mostly because Adhi Software is trying to gauge interest. I wanted to share what the changes were for the update, and get opinions on if people think it should be released now or after more changes.

My company's payroll occurs every month and I would prefer it occurred semi-monthly, on the 1st and 15th of the month. So naturally, working with time sheets that were on a weekly basis was very difficult. Employees would get paid for a month's work on the 15th of the following month, which made a significant time gap for new employees to get paid.

I requested Adhi Software add the ability to switch between Weekly, Monthly, and Semi-Monthly time and expense sheets to alleviate this issue. This has allowed my employees to submit time for 15 or 16 day periods, which are in line with the payroll periods.

• Added dropdown in the plugin administration, allowing the user to switch between 'Weekly', 'Monthly' and 'Semi-Monthly' time and expense sheets.
• Changed "day" label in the Approval System tab to read "Number of days after end of pay period."
• Changed "day" dropdown to multiple text entries for days, hours and minutes after pay period. These entries represents the nth number of days after the pay period has ended, that a Submission Deadline has ended. e.g. Entering "5" means that on the 5th day after the pay period (if semi-monthly, either the 6th or 21st of the month,) the submission deadline has ended.
• Changed "Number of weeks to consider for previous template" label to "Number of periods to consider for previous period template." The associated dropdown now takes number of previous periods into account.
• Time and Expense sheets can now be configured to show in Semi-Monthly or Monthly, along with Weekly time periods.
  • With the semi-monthly option:
    • The sheet's start date is on the 1st, or the 15th.
      • Whether or not the 1st or the 15th is the start date, is detected by whether there is a sheet that exists in the database for the next pay period. This is already done in the plugin; it checks to see if an entry exists for the next 7 day period.
    • The sheet goes from the 1st to the 14th, or the 15th to the end of the month, whatever that may be.
    • Start dates continue to reflect either the 1st, or the 15th of the month.
    • This change is reflected everywhere else in the plugin (Date Range selection, Reports, etc.)
  • With the monthly option:
    • The sheet's start date will be on the 1st of the month.
    • The sheet goes from the 1st to the end of the month, whatever that may be.
    • Start dates continue to reflect the 1st.
    • This change is reflected everywhere else in the plugin (Date Range selection, Reports, etc.)
• If time or expense has already been entered into the database, the administrator can seamlessly switch between Weekly, Monthly or Semi-Monthly time periods.
• If switching between period types, each past submitted time or expense sheet will reformat to be semi-monthly or monthly. For instance, as of October 18 2014, all of September's time will be formatted into one or two sheets, depending on the period type.
• If switching between these pay periods, then any hours that conflict with submitted pay periods, will cause those pay periods to become unlocked.
  • For example, if Redmine is set to Weekly, and is switched to Semi-Monthly, then the following will happen:
    • User Bob, who had time submitted for Sep 28 2014 - Oct 4 2014, then the Sep 15 - Sep 30 time sheet will become unsubmitted, and will need to be resubmitted, while the time for Oct 1 - Oct 4 will belong in the Oct 1 - Oct 15 time sheet.
• Scroll bar has been added to the time sheet to account for when there are too many days for the browser or monitor's current resolution size.

I've attached some screenshots showing what a time sheet looks like and the administration menu.

Please provide any feedback or opinions. I'd really like to see this plugin released to the public, but I think they would prefer to hold off if the prevailing opinion is that this functionality isn't immediately necessary.