Bega Valley Shire Council – Software Engineering and Development: Timesheets Solution

The outcome

• A mobile responsive web application that enabled staff to enter their work and leave hours in a simple and concise manner with instant validation of Council business rules.
• Immediate gains in efficiency for the Council finance team in preparing the fortnightly pay run.
• Allowing better visibility for supervisors of their team’s timesheets, overtime and leave liability through reports and notifications.
• Enabling better timesheet approval workflow through automatic notifications and reports.
• Significant cost savings (ie. no license fees) due to the use of open source components.

The challenge

The council uses the Civica Authority ERP system for accounting and finance. However this system does not have a module that allows staff to enter their work or leave hours in a way that is consistent with Council’s work policies. 2pi Software was engaged to provide an application that is easy to use on desktops and mobile devices and provides validation, reporting and notification capabilities for the handling of fortnightly pay run and annual auditing requirements.

Our approach

Various “off the shelf” products were evaluated and before the decision was made to implement a bespoke solution using open source components. The system was then built using mainly PHP7, Html5, CSS3, Rest/Json, MySQL and various other open source application and web frameworks. The UI was designed following a series of workshops with key stakeholders and future users. A mobile-first approach was used to enable the use on both desktops and mobile devices.  Single-sign-on is provided via Active Directory. All staff data, team hierarchies and leave applications are fetched in real time from the Civica Authority Database via SQL queries. Project delivery was based on Scrum with 5 distinct Milestones and fortnightly sprints with product reviews with key stakeholders. Each product review resulted in an evolutionary improvement of the solution.