Recipe 6. Time Cards

Keeping track of time spent on a client's project is an essential task for any workgroup. Not only does such record keeping enable managers to monitor the project's progress, it also helps to gauge billable hours and to estimate future projects. A time card application can go a long way toward serving these goals.

In a typical workgroup, employees work on a wide range of projects, performing a variety of tasks. For a time card application to be useful, the manager must be able to add new projects and tasks easily. Both the administrators and the employees should be able to log hours for specific projects. The reporting features of a time card application need to be robust and offer a range of views of the data, incorporating summaries of hours entered per project or per employee.

The Time Cards recipe described in this chapter consists of eight separate pages, most of which are geared toward the manager or administrator. Many of the recordsets require rather sophisticated SQL code techniques to extract and summarize the data properly. As described in the recipe overview, the SQL statements are best executed in the data source.