Previous: “Introduction”

Exploring oliwork

Let’s start with a quick overview of all menu entries:

• Dashboard: Each of your employees sees this page after logging in. You can change the text of it by clicking the “Edit”-Button.

• Time Record: Simple page to start and stop time recording. It also show if the time recording is currently enabled.

• Calendar: This site offers a calendar where you can view, enter and change your worktime, vacation time and sick days. Holidays will also be shown if you activated that in the settings.

• Work Schedule: Here you can enter the number of hours you work on each weekday. This is used to calculate your hours of vacation time or sick days.

• Time Account: Tracks the total amount of worktime for an employee. Since the start of time recording until today.

• Time Report: Gives an overview of the worktime for a given month.

• Users: Lists all current users and allows for the management of user accounts. This includes a comprehensive role and relationship system.

• Settings: Here you can find the orgainsation settings. This includes timezone, holidays and the displayed date and time format. This site also offers a backup mechanism and displays information regarding the payment process, like your current subscription status.

• Logout: Logs you out of your account.

Now, let’s have a closer look at each menu entry.

Dashboard

Here, you can view and edit a message for all employees of your organisation. This message might include important information or a description on how to use the app. Every user will see this page after login.

Time Record

This page is a very simple tool to start and stop the recording of your work time. The site also displays your current work state (Working / Not Working) and the time you started working today.

Calendar

The calendar displays work time, sick days, vacation days and holidays (if set in “Settings") for the current month. Above the calendar you can navigate through months and years. Some of the days in the selected month might be highlighted and display a letter. Those days contain entries and the letters displayed mean:

• W: Work day
• S: Sick day
• V: Vacation day
• H: Holiday

By clicking on a day that already contains entries you can view a detailed breakdown of the chosen day below the calendar. This detailed view also allows the editing or deletion of any entry. Directly below the calendar you find three links to create a new token for work time, sick days or vacation days.

Work Schedule

Your work schedule contains the usual work times for each day of the week. Oliwork uses this to adjust the total work time tracked if you are sick or on vacation.

Sick days and vacation days are converted to the amount of hours that you would have worked on that day according to this schedule. They are then added to your total work time. They are however not added to your recorded work time.

Each workplan also has a start date. It determines the date from which on the workplan is valid. A workplan is valid until it is replaced by a more recent one. A vacation or sick day entry in the past will take the work time from the most recent workplan with a start date earlier than the date of the entry.

Time Account

This page is split into two parts: the hour plan and the time account.

The hour plan is similar to the work schedule in that it determines your number of work and vacation hours. More precisely, it contains the amount of hours to be worked per month and the number of vacation hours per year. Once again each hour plan also contains a date that specifies the beginning from which on the hour plan is relevant.

The time account keeps track of the number of hours worked and vacation hours taken by an employee over multiple months. The tracking starts with the first entry for the employee. The total is calculated beginning with that entry up to today. It takes into account the hours worked and the vacation taken. In case that the current value needs to be adjusted, you can make manual changes here.

For each month a link to the report page is given. It provides you with a detailed view over how the values for that month are calculated.

Time Report

The time report shows a detailed overview over your work times for an entire month. At the top of the site you can choose the year and month to be viewed. The selected month is broken down into every single entry for work, vacation and sick days. Each entry has a duration that is added up to a total that is displayed below the table.

Users

The users section allows for the management of all user accounts. It enables you of the creation and deletion of user accounts, roles and relations between roles.

Each user account consists of a username, a role and a password, as well as an optional email address. As soon as a user account is created here, it can be used right away by logging in via the provided credentials.

Roles define the functionality which the user can access. There are three levels of access for each site: Write, Read and None. Write means that the users that are assigned to this role have full access to all functionality on the page. Read only allows them for viewing of their information. None completely hides the affected menu entry and all information contained within it.

In most cases it’s advisable that most employees don’t have Write-access to Users and Settings. Write access to the Users would allow them the deletion of other user accounts and all of their data. The Settings also contain sensitive functionality like the payments system and access to all organisation data via the backup system. It thus should only be accessed by trusted users.

Relations define the access of a role to all user accounts of another affected role. This allows for the viewing and optionally the editing of the data of other users. The access levels are again Write, Read and None, which are defined the same way as they were with roles. In practice, relations can be used by the employer or supervisor to check or even correct the data entered by employees.

Settings

The settings section is divided into multiple parts: Timerules, Localisation, Theme and Backup.

Timerules define special rules to calculate the work time from the recorded work data. This includes functions like the automatic deduction of pauses.

Localisation allows for setting the language, timezone, date- and timeformat and for defining the holidays.

In Theme you can upload your organisation’s logo to be displayed on the site.

Backups

Here you can download all the data of your organisation. You can also re upload your data backup. Since a backup contains all the data for your organisation, you can also use this if you want a data protection information.

Making a Backup

When making a backup, you can make the following settings:

• The compression reduces the file size of each backup.

• Encrypt the backup using a secret key that is specific to your organisation account. This will encrypt the data on the server before it is downloaded.

• In addition to that a custom encryption key can be used.

Again, the backup will contain all of your organisations data. As this is considered sensitive data, we recommend to use at least one of the encryption options. This will keep your backups secure on your machine. It will not be available to anyone without the password.

Applying a Backup

If you need to apply a backup to your organisation, you have to apply the same settings as when you downloaded the backup. If you used a custom encryption password you have to enter exactly the same password again. Otherwise applying the backup won’t work.

The backup is then applied to your entire organisation account. This means that all your current data will be lost. The organisation account will be reset to the state of the backup.

Billing

At the bottom of the site there’s a Billing section. Here you can manage the payment and billing for your oliwork subscription. The section is divided into Payment Plans and Billing History.

The Payment Plans section shows which payment plans are available to your organisation. Our payment plans vary in the amount of users and roles available to your organisaton. They also offer a free trial. If you activate your free trial for a payment plan, it will last for two weeks. After that you will have to subscribe to a plan to continue using oliwork. To to that, click “Subscribe” and choose a payment method.

The Billing History below shows all your previous payments for oliwork.

Next up: “Managing users”