salesforce mobile apps

Zero Touch Volunteer Check-ins.

by Surekha Shetty | Jul 7, 2020 | Software, Volunteering

As the shelter-in-place rules are lifted, most nonprofits are beginning to see some volunteer activity start again. But with Covid-19 still raging, all our thoughts are on how to make every process safer for everyone. With that goal in mind, we are very excited to roll out the new “zero-touch” volunteer check-in process in V4S Mobile. With just a quick scan on any iOS or Android phone/tablet, your volunteer check-in data is safely and reliably in Volunteers for Salesforce.

Background

The idea for the zero-touch solution came from requests from several of our nonprofit customers. We had detailed discussions with them on what would make sense for nonprofits and their volunteers. Everyone was concerned with the safety of multiple volunteers checking in a shared Kiosk device. As a stop-gap arrangement, we offered V4S Personal free to all our existing V4S Kiosk customers. While that worked for a few customers, a lot of our nonprofits wanted a central solution that was at their location but could still be used safely.

While we had introduced a scanning mechanism in our V4S Kiosk Events add-on, we had not done that with the volunteer check-ins. For two main reasons:

Most of our nonprofits had a lot of walk-in volunteers who had not previously signed up
With Events, there was an urgency to check-in people quickly, which wasn’t as much an issue with volunteer check-ins.

Now with COVID-19 rampant, most of our nonprofits had decided to do away with walk-in volunteering. Our discussions revealed that over 60% of nonprofits had decided that there would be no walk-in volunteers for at least the next one (1) year. Several had decided that for the next two (2) years. And most nonprofits could not have a Volunteer Coordinator available to check-in volunteers on her device. This was especially true for our nonprofits handling pets and animal shelters, where volunteers came in from early in the morning to late at night to feed, clean, and exercise the animals. They were very clear that volunteers would need to check themselves in.

The zero-touch solution for V4S Kiosk.

With this background, we decided to add an automated scanning solution for volunteers. We added a QR Code field to Volunteers for Salesforce’s Vol Hours object. We also added a QR Code field to the Contact object in Salesforce. This way, our nonprofits have the flexibility to either have a unique QR Code based on each Volunteer’s Vol Hours record OR a unique QR Code for each Volunteer’s Contact ID.

Here is a short video that shows what the QR Code looks like on the Vol Hours record in Salesforce.

If you are setting up QR Codes by Vol Hours ID, then you’ll need to make sure that you send out an email with the QR Code it to each Volunteer for every Job/Shift that she has signed up for. You will need to send out such an email for every time that a volunteer has signed up for a Job/Shift.

Here’s a video that shows what such an Email would look like:

If you are using QR Codes on the Contact, then you could send a single email to the Volunteer with their Contact QR Code in it. They could use that same emailed QR Code for checking in every time that they came in for a signed up Job/Shift. Alternatively, you could print a badge for each volunteer with their contact QR Code on it. This way, the volunteer can scan their badge whenever she comes in for Job/Shift.

Automated Check-ins.

We suggest that you put the iOS / Android device that you are using for check-ins in the single app mode so that the device is not accidentally turned off or switched to a different app. Within V4S Kiosk, we suggest that you select the Scanning to be in Continuous mode. Also, select whether you want the Front or Back Camera to be used. We suggest using the front camera because the volunteer would be able to see confirmation of their check-in on the screen.

Here is a video that shows how a volunteer could hold up their Shift confirmation email and get Checked-in to that Shift.

If instead, you chose to use the QR Code on the Contact ID, then potentially you could send that QR Code to the Volunteer once and she would just scan the same QR Code every time that she came in for a Job/Shift that she was signed up for that day. The V4S Kiosk app looks to check if the Contact with that QR Code has signed up for any Job/Shift on the current day and scans the Volunteer in.

If a Volunteer signs up for more than one Job/Shift per day, then she would necessarily need the QR Code related to the Job/Shift. You would not be able to scan the Volunteer with the QR Code on the Contact. Because in that case, the app would only find one of the multiple Jobs/Shifts signed up for.

As nonprofits start to open up and volunteers come back to help, we urge you all to maintain social distancing. Keep those masks on and stay safe, everyone!

Automatic Meal and Rest Breaks – An Employer’s Guide

by Surekha Shetty | Feb 17, 2020 | Software, Time Tracking

ifferent forms of rest breaks are important for your employees’ physical and mental well-being. When structured properly, they can have a positive impact on health and safety and also improve the productivity in your workplace.

Workday Breaks

Breaks during the workday allow employees to rest during the workday. They could be in the form of rest breaks, coffee breaks and meal breaks.

Most national and EU regulations require specific breaks based on the number of hours worked. Depending on the country, some or all of these breaks could be paid or unpaid.

Break Times

Meal breaks and rest breaks are essential for workers during a long work day. The U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) does not mandate an employer to offer meal or rest breaks to employees. But several states have their own laws that obligate employers to give paid and unpaid breaks to employees.

Whether it is mandatory or not, many employers do allot paid /unpaid time for lunch and other breaks. Federal law does designate what time is considered paid and unpaid.

Tracking Break Times

Lunch and rest breaks can be tricky to track. Some employees may forget to clock out. Others may forget to clock back in, when they start working in. This leads to either minutes being added to employee timesheets or being reduced from their time worked. This means that the timesheets are inaccurate and therefore payroll is inaccurate too. In order to make timesheets more accurate, many employers choose to implement automatic time deductions for meals and rest breaks. This ensure that employees get their daily breaks automatically deducted. This is great for employers who want to ensure that they are paying employees accurately. But many people still question the legality of automatic meal and break deductions.

Are Automatic Break Deductions Legal?

Yes! According to the U.S Department of Labor (DOL) and FLSA, it is legal for employers to automatically deduct lunch breaks. As long as the employee actually takes the lunch break. A legal meal break has to last at least 30 minutes according to the FLSA. The key is that employers need to communicate meal periods unambiguously to employees.

Unpaid Meal Breaks

States that enact meal break laws require a half hour break if the employee’s work day is longer than 5 or 6 hours. These meal breaks must be at least 30 minutes long, according to the FLSA. Meal breaks are uncompensated as the employee does not perform any work duties during this time. If an employee works during the meal break, she has the right to be paid for that time.

Paid Rest Breaks

Rest periods are smaller breaks that are 5 to 20 minutes long. These breaks are compensated as they are considered normal working time. Some states require 10-minute break times for every 4 hours of an employee’s shift. These short breaks are generally considered to promote better productivity.

You can find more information about which hours are considered paid and unpaid.

Keeping Track of Breaks Automatically

You can keep track of your employee’s work times by implementing an easy-to-use time tracking app in your operations. With the Mobile Time Tracker’s Auto Breaks feature, you can automatically deduct time from employee timecards, based on the specifications that you have set up. You can add as many break rules as you need to ensure that your employees break times are properly accounted for.

Why use the Auto Breaks Feature?

Managers and Administrators have a lot on their plates when it comes to tracking employee times. Week after week, they need to make sure that all employee work and break time is recorded automatically. The Time Tracker’s Auto Breaks feature does the heavy lifting for you. It can automatically apply the break rules, based on the rules that you have set up.

Make sure that you are complying with all federal and local laws concerning break times. That way you avoid trouble with employees, DOL and FLSA. And you make sure that your payroll is accurate.

Image by Engin_Akyurt from Pixabay

Have you converted Volunteers to Donors?

by Surekha Shetty | Jan 15, 2020 | Mobile Apps, Software, Volunteering

Looking to grow your donor base? A fantastic place to start is to convert your Volunteers to Donors. According to Abila’s Donor Loyalty Study, 75% of those who volunteered say they are more likely to donate. That is an overwhelming statistic and one that nonprofits should leverage. Studies also show that volunteers donate 10 times more than non-volunteers.

So how do you convert volunteers to donors for your nonprofit? Here are five best practices to help you convert volunteers to donors.

Acknowledge Volunteers like you do Donors

Treat your volunteers right. They may not make monetary contributions. But the time that they donate to your nonprofit has a tangible monetary value. According to the Independent Sector, the value of Volunteer Time in 2019 was $ 25.43 per hour. So a volunteer who spends 10 hours with you, has made a contribution of over $ 250 to your nonprofit.

Are you telling your volunteers how much you appreciate their time and effort? Try and do that at as many opportunities as possible. If you can, try to quantify their activity into how much money or time they’ve saved your organization.

For example, “The supporters that you brought to the Annual Walkathon helped us raise an additional $ 5000 this year. This will help us serve another 100 people. Your time and effort helped make this possible!”

Track all volunteer activity

Do you track all volunteer hours diligently? Do you have reports that tell you how many hours a volunteer spent with you this year vs last year? Can you track volunteer retention rates?

Tracking each volunteer interaction gives you a better understanding of the volunteer’s engagement with your organization. And, if you don’t know how the volunteer helped, how can you appropriately thank them?

Tracking all the volunteer hours spent with your organization provide great statistics for grant requests too.

Acknowledge Volunteer Milestones

Tracking all volunteer hours lets you keep track of specific volunteer milestones. Set up simple acknowledgements or rewards for when volunteers complete specific hour-based or time-based milestones. For example, a volunteer reaches 50 hours this year or completes 3 years of volunteering with you. Reach out to the volunteer. Make a public gesture. Show them that you are aware of their effort and interest in your cause.

Give your volunteers opportunities to share their experiences

Give your volunteers easy ways for them to share their experience on social media. Use their experience quotes on your website, in a newsletter. Talk to your volunteers about why they do what they do. They can become great ambassadors for your cause. And that may inspire their friends to become donors to your nonprofit.

Ask your Volunteers

Finally, just get down and ask your volunteers for donations. Communication is key, whether it’s with volunteers or donors. According to the Institute for Fundraising, 8 out of 10 people donate after being asked to do so. Don’t assume that your volunteers know your cause and therefore will donate automatically. Maybe they don’t know that your organization needs the money; they may just know that you need volunteers. They may not even know the best or easiest way to donate.

So a simple , straight forward ask may suffice. Perhaps you could set up a way for volunteers to donate a small amount every month. Think of it as a SIP donation plan for volunteers. They could give you $ 10/20/50 every month. That may be easier for some volunteers.

Have you already converted some volunteers to donors? How did you do it? Do share your stories with us.

Time tracking in Salesforce

by Surekha Shetty | Oct 16, 2019 | Mobile Apps, Software, Time Tracking

Two years ago, we started down the route of time tracking on mobile devices for field and remote workers. All data from the mobile devices synced back into Salesforce in near real-time. Our goal was to give field workers the ability to get their work times into Salesforce on a mobile. We did build a simple way to track time automatically within Salesforce, but it was quite limited in functionality.

From our market research, we saw that there was a need for time tracking data to be synced to Salesforce. Since invoicing, project management and payroll were all within Salesforce, that work hours should be in Salesforce too made sense. PSA apps, ERP apps… all included time tracking as a part of their functionality. And those apps tracked work time for employees who worked within Salesforce. So, we decided that we would not play in that space – at the time.

Mobile and web apps

Our initial focus was on the mobile space where field workers and remote workers could track their work times. Our goal was to enable workers to track time easily and with little fuss on their familiar phones. Soon after, based on customer requests, we rolled out a Web-based Time Tracker. This was meant for workers who were not comfortable using mobile apps. The one big feature that we added in the Web version was the ability for users to enter time after the fact. This enabled workers to enter their time at the end of the day. Soon we rolled out the capability to enter multiple lines on a timesheet. Now, people who worked on multiple jobs during the day could enter a full timesheet once a day or week.

With more customer requests, we added more functionality to both the Web and the mobile apps. We introduced configurable fields that could be displayed on both the mobile and on web apps. A new Team time tracking app on the mobile lets a single Team Lead check her entire team in. We updated the mobile app to allow configurable geo-tracking and photographs. This feature allowed us to minimize buddy punching. We introduced addresses that could be opened in Google/Apple maps to help field people find their next job-site. On the web app, we added an Approval mechanism for timesheets. Now managers and supervisors can approve/reject time entries for team members.

Over a year and a half, both the mobile app and the web apps grew with more functionality. But we did not do much on the Salesforce time tracking functionality.

Time Tracking in Salesforce

Over this calendar year, though, we’ve seen a renewed interest in time tracking inside Salesforce. To the point where now, over 60% of our leads are looking for Time Tracking within Salesforce.

The May 2019 EU Court of Justice ruling and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requirements have pushed time tracking to center stage. Any business that has employees is now affected by regulatory compliance for time worked, overtime calculation and break time compliance. And that has pushed interest in time tracking within Salesforce.

Luckily for us, because of our Mobile app, we had a lot of functionality within Salesforce already. The objects themselves, reports, dashboards – all these existed. We have now added a number of other functions that make life easier with Salesforce. Some examples:

A Lightning component that can be added as a Time Tracker pop-up from the Salesforce utility bar, to track time against ANY object, including the one that the user is currently working on.
A multi-check in time tracking option that helps enter their complete timesheet for a day or a week at a time, after-the-fact.
A Summary Timesheet page that helps users within Salesforce select a date and add/see all the time entries for that day, so users can make sure they’ve recorded all their work for a given date.

Overall, we now have one of the strongest offerings for time tracking, be it on the mobile, on the Web or within Salesforce. And the best part is that you could have a combination of users, some using our mobile app, some on the web and others inside Salesforce. Regardless of where the time tracking happens, Salesforce is the single repository of all time tracking data. So integration with payroll, invoicing and ERP systems becomes that much easier.

We are thrilled to say now that we are the Timekeepers for Salesforce!

EU time tracking ruling: what it means for employees and employers

by Surekha Shetty | Jun 18, 2019 | Project Management, Software, Time Tracking

Justice of the European Union (ECJ) ruled last month that the member countries must establish detailed methods of tracking the hourly work of employees so that they can be properly compensated for time worked.

The ruling stems from a lawsuit by the Federación de Servicios de Comisiones Obreras (CCOO), a Spanish trade union, against the Spanish subsidiary of Deutsche Bank. The main issues in question-related to calculating overtime hours – 54% of which goes unrecorded in Spain – and protecting obligatory rest. “The Member States must require employers to set up an objective, reliable and accessible system enabling the duration of time worked each day by each worker to be measured,” the court said in its ruling.

The ECJ ruling is explicitly intended to protect the worker against potential workplace abuses. It is an effort to enforce the European Working Time Directive, which restricts employers from making employees work more than 48 hours a week, and grants people at least 11 consecutive hours of rest every day.

What the ECJ ruling means

The ECJ ruling extends to all companies operating in the EU. The ruling does not specify any guidelines for how employers should record work hours for their employees. In most cases, companies will need a clock-in/clock-out system that would allow them to monitor when employees start and end work, and when people have breaks. Employers will need to know employees’ exact work hours.

At first sight, this may seem cumbersome and backward. But given the technology available today, this could actually be a good idea, for both employers and employees. The “punch clock” has evolved, and businesses and employees don’t have to sacrifice contemporary technical flexibility for exact timekeeping. Modern time and attendance tracking software, often on the cloud, work on mobile phones. Clocking in and out is a matter of a tap on your smartphone screen or on a web page. So even if you are checking emails at home or taking a call from your boss, tracking that time isn’t really an inconvenience. Many of the software systems are priced such that small businesses can afford them. And most provide great analytical tools.

For employees

From an employee standpoint, there’s definitely a lot to be excited about. Accurate time tracking provides irrefutable, objective proof against unlawful overtime. Time tracking thus becomes a tool towards building fairer, more accountable workplaces that help protect employee safety and health.

Moving beyond just clocking in and out, good time tracking can detail the time that employees spend on different tasks, when they take breaks and how long they last. It can help document off-site and off-hours work, as well as work-related travel, all of which are frequently overlooked. Basically, it gives employees full visibility into their work schedules – allowing them to address unhealthy workloads and the associated stress, anxiety and exhaustion that come with it.

For employers

Companies can use time tracking to track employee working hours. It makes payroll much more accurate. Billing customers for work done is now much clearer and transparent and all hours worked can now be billed. The time tracking data collected is a great source of information on project budgets, project status, progress of works, employee productivity and many other aspects that are crucial for business success. For managers, it may make sense to combine data on the quantity and task breakdown of hours worked by employees with productivity information. It may turn out, for example, that a company would be better off with more workers keeping shorter hours than with an overworked team that’s less effective because of stress and exhaustion.

Conclusion

Time tracking doesn’t have to be tedious and cumbersome. With the right approach, you can make it an integral part of your business. Most makers of time tracking software tell customers that it’s vital to make it’s use mandatory to get people into the habit of tracking time, and that the data must be checked regularly to weed out abuses and negligence. If EU companies take the ECJ’s ruling seriously and apply it properly, it could do a world of good to their employees and their economies.

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