Kronos Workforce Timekeeper: The power of Group Edits

I am always surprised when long time users of Kronos’ Workforce Timekeeper seem to have forgotten about the ability to perform group edits.

Major Charles Emerson Winchester III of the TV show M*A*S*H said “I do one thing at a time, I do it very well, and then I move on.” But you do not have to work this way in Workforce Central!

Workforce Central allows you to perform the same edit to a group of selected employees all at the same time. If you:

• Have an offsite meeting and need to add in punches for 50 people at 9:00am

• Are sending a group of people home due to inclement weather or because of a machine outage all at 2:30pm

• Are adding a yearly monetary allotment for uniforms or protective equipment

• Granting a weather related day off

• The list goes on…

You can perform the same single transaction and have it affect an entire group of people

The purpose of the Genie is not simply to list the employees so that you can migrate to their timecard or their schedule individually.  Look at the menu line in the Genie; there are lots of action choices in many categories (punch, amounts, schedule, approval, etc.). All of these can be performed on groups of employees.

Use a HyperFind to obtain the employee that you may want to take action on and then use the Genie columns to gather the employees you want.  Select employees to be acted upon by either method below.

• You can click the first employee and then hold down the shift key and click on one further down the list to select all of the employees in-between.  (This is referred to as the Shift-Click method)

• You can select/deselect individual employees by holding down the CTRL key and clicking on the employees one by one. (This is referred to as the Control-Click method)

Once multiple employees are selected, you use the Genie menus to perform the edit that you need to do. You do the edit once and the action will be carried out on all of the selected employees.

How do I know if the transaction really did what it was asked it to do? Or what happens if there were problems associated with the transaction that was requested (no time left in an accrual bucket, employee on probation, etc.)? These are good questions. 

You can find out the results of the group edit by looking at the Group Edit Results. This is a menu choice, right off the main menu (depending on the version). In version 6.x the Group Edit Results menu choice is found on the General menu tab. Here you will see all of the group edits that you have permission to see (which may be more than just yours). The requested group edit is listed along with the date, time, username, status and result of the group edit. Glancing at the status is important because the system may not have completed the group edit at the time that you are looking at the results. If a failure occurred, there is a link to see the details (just click on the word details and it will take you to the failure information).

Choosing to perform a group edit over individual edits can be a really large time saver for you or your people. When this was pointed out at a recent client, and they realized the time that would be saved, the smiles were huge.

Jeffry