New Add Employee Select List

Up until now, the Add Employee button could only add a new, blank employee to a schedule. A newly added feature places a drop list including all the employees from the active schedules next to the Add Employee button. Picking one of the employees and pressing Add Employee will add the chosen employee and copy in the employee's properties and schedule. To determine which schedule and properties to copy in, the active schedules are searched, and the instance of the employee that was most recently updated is used to copy the schedule and properties from. Note that if the new employee box was checked, the box is unchecked when copying to the new schedule--the thought being an employee can only be new for one pay period. The New Employee option at the top of the list will add a new blank employee to the schedule much like the Add Employee button did before the the new drop list was added.


To make it easier to edit schedules, a new red X has been added to each day of the week in the Edit Employee Schedule window. Clicking this icon will clear all the selections for that day. Remember you still need to press the Save Edits button after using this new clear selections icon.



Note:
When using the Add Employee drop list, you may see the same employee multiple times. The cause of this is two fold: instead of using the Copy link to make a copy of a schedule when moving to the next pay period, and making any needed changes to the copy, a new schedule was created and the Add Employee button was used to add new blank employees to build out the new schedule; or when an employee had fallen off a schedule, the only option was to use the Add Employee button to add them back on the schedule they reappeared on. These two practices caused an employee to be duplicated in the drop down list because each time the Add Employee button was pressed, a new employee with a unique Scheduler ID was created, but the same name was reused when adding the new employee.

If this explanation is confusing, don't worry. As long as an employee's schedule and properties are checked over and accurate, there is not much harm in these duplicate entries. The main point to note is that when rolling to the next pay period, use the Copy link to copy the base schedule and then make any needed changes to the copy (update header, start and end dates, etc.). Over time the old schedules with the duplicate entries will fall off and the employee drop list will automatically clean itself of the duplicate employees.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com

Edit Employee Schedule Enhancements

Near the bottom of the Edit Employee Schedule form, you will see three new items:


This employee apprears on the following other schedules
This is a list of the schedules that this employee is present on with a link icon that will take you right to that employee on that schedule. This is handy for tasks like making sure when an employee has left the company, you have removed them from all the future schedules.

Employee Last Updated
Displays the time this employee was last updated.

Employee's SchedulerID
This is an ID number the scheduler uses to identify employees across schedules. In general you will not need to worry about this ID, but it is displayed here as a convenience in the event it is needed to troubleshoot a problem.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com