Between tutoring five students and babysitting at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Courtney Hargreaves ’16 juggles not only six jobs but also six time sheets. Starting this summer, however, Hargreaves and other students employed on campus will have to worry about one fewer thing, as all student hourly employees will have transitioned from using paper to a digital form.
The payroll office and the campus finance centers are implementing the employee time management system, which transfers all hourly paid campus staff and students to an electronic platform.
By digitizing time sheets, students will no longer have to physically hand in printed time sheets every other Friday, student employment consultant Kari Jo Grant said. Instead, students can submit them electronically, saving time and energy.
“It’s one point, one portal, one entry, one way of recording it and then it’s done,” Grant said. “I like the consistency, and I like that it’s straightforward.”
One frustration with the current system is the frequency of late or incomplete time sheets, which delay processing and stall paycheck delivery, Grant said.
Students will be the last group of campus employees to shift to the digitized system and are expected to transition during the second pay cycle of the 2014 summer term, Grant said.
She estimated that in one year, anywhere between 2,300 and 2,500 students work at least one hourly paid job on campus.
The system has been implemented in five phases, corresponding to the different finance centers on campus.
While some divisions within the already converted finance centers have yet to cross over, for the most part, staff members have successfully made the shift, Grant said.
Planning for the initiative began in fall 2012, Grant said.
As a photo editor for the Aegis, a photographer for the Rockefeller Center and a teaching assistant for an engineering class, Malika Khurana ’15 submits her time sheets in three different locations. She said the inefficiency has hindered her ability to hand them in on time, and submitted a suggestion to digitize time sheets on Improve Dartmouth, a recently launched website for community suggestions.
“On the student side, it’s one less thing you have to print and keep track of,” she said. “I was also thinking of it from the administrative perspective. Rocky and Collis each needs a person to process the time sheets, and I see the big piles.”
Alice Wang ’16, who works at Paddock Music Library, said handing in time sheets is an easy task to forget, and the unreliability of Green Print contributes to her frustration.
Hargreaves said she is very happy with the transition to electronic time sheets. The new system will be more convenient because she will no longer have to make a separate trip just to obtain a supervisor’s signature every other week.
“Last term I submitted all of them at once at the end of the term because it wasn’t worth it to walk there and hand them in every other week,” she said.
In the future, the employee time management team may introduce a method through which students can complete time sheets on their mobile devices.
Collis Café employee Tom Slater has submitted electronic time sheets since he started working there a year and half ago. He said he has not seen any serious problems with the electronic system, especially because employees can submit a form with their correct hours if the system does not accurately record their punch-in time.
“It seems to work out because even if there’s a mis-punch, there’s a sheet you fill in and in a few days you get your paycheck,” he said.
Grant said she does not foresee any significant obstacles for the student transition. The student employment office will notify students of the new system by email as the time of their transition nears and link to training available on the website.
