New Feature: Punch Alert Notifications for Employees

One of the handiest features FingerCheck’s cloud-based time clock software offers businesses is alert notifications of punches. These alerts were previously only available to supervisors, but we are glad to announce that employees can now receive alerts as well! Besides the exception policies you can build to alert you of abnormal punches, you can also have live alerts triggered to you and your staff in real-time by email, text message, and push notification.

Alerts for employees are currently available for InEarly, InLate, OutEarly, and OutLate alert types, but in the future, this will be expanded. FingerCheck’s variety of alerts for admins and supervisors range from alerts when an employee is missing an out punch, to when an employee has exceeded their maximum amount of hours, and even when an employee takes a long break.

In order to program employee alerts, simply navigate to your Alert Policies via the Policy Menu tab and click into an existing policy or create a new policy. After writing a Code and Description for your policy, you can choose the way you and your staff are notified when the alert is triggered by choosing the medium of your choice from the Action Type drop-down menu.

Whatever action type you choose, you only need to fill in the field that corresponds to that action type. If you choose a text message, you will need to put in a phone number. If you choose to email, enter as many email addresses as you need to be separated by commas. If you want push notifications, choose from the selection box to which admins and supervisors send notifications.

Now click on Add to build your Alert Rules.

Choose what you’d like to get an alert for from the Alert Type drop-down menu. Once you select the Alert type, additional fields will pop up (as shown below) that you can check to have employees notified either via email, text, or push notification. In the last field, NotifyEmployeeMessage, you have the opportunity to customize the notification message.  Click on Apply and then Save.

Now your alert policy has been created. Within that policy, you can put as many rules as you want so that you have a full set of rules that range from alerts for early and late in/out punches to no alerts for missed punches. Since this is the case, you may want to name your policy something more general such as “Alert Policies.” In this instance, we named the policy “In Late” because we were building only one rule.

Now to plug in which employees get sent the alert, assign the policy to the profile of the employees you would like by clicking on the Setup tab, clicking on System Menu from the drop-down menu on the left, and clicking on Master Profiles. Then click on the profile assigned to the employees you have in mind. Make sure your staff has their contact details on file, or else the alerts will not successfully trigger. If there isn’t one profile that houses all the employees you want, you can create another profile. For the purposes of this tutorial, we are going to assign the policy to Master Profile 01.

By Alert Policy, select the policy you have created and then click Save.

Now alert notifications will be sent to the employees within this profile, as well as the supervisors you designated in the design process. FingerCheck’s cloud-based time clock software allows you the convenience and advanced technology to manage your workforce the way you want.