By Ashley Dickson
Some BYU employees will experience changes with the new Kronos system that took effect Saturday, Nov. 22. The Kronos upgrade, which records time worked by staff and student employees on campus, was selected as a Web based answer to time management for employees.
Doug Belliston, BYU”s Financial Services Director, said this is the most major upgrade of the Kronos system, which has been in place for 12 years.
“The reason for implementing this new version of Kronos is to take advantage of more Web based access to the system and to improve reporting that”s available for the Kronos managers dealing with the system,” Belliston said.
The Web-based access permits certain employees to enter their time online, instead of on a time clock. Approximately 4,500 student employees work in departments that have access to use the Web for time entry.
“Many campus areas are choosing to use a Web-based time entry for their employees,” Belliston said. “If someone is working daily at a computer terminal, it makes good sense for them to be able to enter their time on the Web.”
These students can also track the hours they”ve worked for the pay period.
“It will be so great to be able to clock in online,” said Jenny Tippetts, a freshman from Afton, Wyo. “I always forget to clock in on the time clock, so this will make things a lot easier. It”ll also be nice to check my hours online instead of asking the office manager how many hours I”ve worked for the week.”
Employees who aren”t regularly stationed at a computer will remain on a time clock entry.
The new system will benefit Kronos managers by allowing them to monitor their employees more carefully, Belliston said. The new system will make it easier for managers to enforce the maximum number of hours students may work.
“The reporting tools are better for the manager,” Belliston said. “It will really fall back to that manager to do the job of monitoring and helping students know when they”re reaching those hours.”
About 12 years ago, Financial Services started bringing Kronos onto campus one department at a time.
“Most large companies across the country have moved to electronic time keeping systems, either Kronos or one of it”s competitors,” Belliston said. “Over the last several years it”s become too cumbersome and too inaccurate to deal with timecards.”
Randy Morgan, BYU”s Payroll Manager, said Kronos has worked very well.
“It was a new idea to bring it to campus and say ok, now Kronos is going to record your time instead of a time card,” Morgan said. “But we had so many time cards. We were doing 13,000 or 14,000 each time. There”s no way we could continue processing that many. We needed to find a better way.”
Kronos was originally selected because it is the nation”s largest payroll time management software solution.
“They have more universities on their system than anybody else,” Morgan said. “When we bought this originally we bought it for 15,000 students, and we were fine until two years ago. The need for student employees went way past what we had thought we would need.”
Morgan said the new system is intuitive.
“It makes sense,” Morgan said. “It just flows. With the old one you had to know what you”re doing or you”d get lost. It”s going to save them [managers] time. It”s a powerful system.”
Caren Harris, office manager for the University Accessibility Center, said the new system will definitely be a lot better
“It”s just a matter of getting acquainted with a new system,” Harris said. “It”s a lot more user friendly, as far as the way you enter info. I”m sure it”ll take a lot of patience at first, but hooray for progress.”
