Essl Time Track Lite Installation

[Jayme Chouinard]

My name is Mike Essl. I am a graphic designer, educator, and Mr. T memorabilia collector. My main gig is working in New York for the School of Art at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, as a full-time, tenured, Associate Professor in Graphic Design. I also have a freelance graphic design practice and for the past 10 years I've designed books for Abrams ComicArts, Chronicle Books, Rizzoli, and Titan Books. Most recently I designed the Fables Encyclopedia for DC Comics. Right now I'm on sabbatical from Cooper Union and working as a designer at Mule Design in San Francisco.

When I'm not trying to earn a living, I'm usually working on one of my side projects. I run Mr. T and Me with my friend Greg Rivera. I cohost Issues, a comic book podcast, with Ed Casey. I also collaborate with Robb Irrgang under the name Nerduo. Sometimes we make cool t-shirts like The Battle.

At home I rock an iMac 27-inch, Mid 2011 with 8GB of RAM and a 250GB SSD. Connected to that is an Apple Cinema Display 23-inch in the portrait orientation and about 10TBs of external Firewire 800 drives. The iMac and the Cinema Display sit on Humanscale monitor arms that are connected to an original GeekDesk. I use an Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad because Adobe InDesign stylesheet key commands ARE THE DEVIL and require a real number pad. I use an Apple Magic Mouse and a large Wacom tablet for illustration work. (This is the set up circa 2011, but it hasn't changed much since then.)

When I'm designing books I live in InDesign. My portrait 23-inch comes in handy for tracking a manuscript in Microsoft Word while I make edits in InDesign. There is also just enough room to keep most of the InDesign palettes open with a VLC window playing my favorite TV show Supernatural. Screenshot here.

Adobe Bridge is useful for sorting and previewing a pile of images. (Though I might be the only designer I know that uses Bridge.) Usually I figure out the flow of a book in Bridge before I jump into InDesign. I also use Name Mangler to help rename the image files that come from publishers.

I use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator all day long. I use Photoshop to fix up images in the books but also use it to design web sites. I use Illustrator for freelance illustration projects, logo and icon design gigs, and custom typography. The best days are Illustrator days. Occasionally I'll jump into Adobe After Effects to make videos for web projects.

If we record Issues at home I use a RDE Podcaster with Skype and an app called Call Recorder. If we record in the studio we use Apple's GarageBand. Show notes are written in BBEdit. I use an AppleScript to open a new browser tab (Safari, kind of hate Chrome.) and search Google for each item in the notes. Then I use another script to get the URL and title from each page and format it in Markdown. (The scripts are cut and paste jobs though, I'm terrible at Applescript.) I preview the output of the script in Marked. On the iPad, Chunky is my comic reader of choice, but I also use comiXology and Marvel Unlimited. On my Mac, I use ComicBookLover.

My web design set up is old school and in desperate need of modernization. I'm still using MAMP Pro and BBEdit to write and test all my code. Right now I'm looking at CodeKit and finally learning Sass. I upload everything using Transmit.

For watching TV, I either watch files locally using VLC or I use Plex to watch shows off my server. Occasionally I need to convert videos and for that I use Permute or HandBrake if things get serious.

At the system level I run Little Snitch to monitor my network traffic and I use RCDefaultApp to assign URLs to specific applications, like ftp:// or vnc://. I use Fantastical to manage my calendar. Soulver is great for quick back-of-the-envelope style math and I use the iPhone version of Soulver to keep track of my freelance hours.

To be honest this is my dream set up. I would love a newer iMac with a larger retina screen. And something like this for Photoshop would be great. It would also be nice if this dream set up wasn't as hot as my current iMac. I've been sweating the entire time I've been typing this.

Are you looking for ESSL software for your biometric time and attendance device? You have come to the right place. ClockIt supports all ESSL biometric devices. This includes the X990 series and also all the Identix series like the K20 and K21 etc. ClockIt was developed after we found that core features such as leave management, employee self-service, mobile tracking, etc were missing from the ESSL software. The ESSL software only supports time and attendance. ClockIt has been developed from the ground up to meet the demands of any business. We support features like Mobile Tracking, Leave management with approvals, business travel with approvals, dynamic reporting, etc.

ClockIt is also designed to run on the cloud meaning that you do not need expensive servers and regular backup intervals as we take care of all this. All you need to do is configure your device and connect it to the internet. You can be up and running in minutes. Your data is fully encrypted and saved for 15 years with automated backups every 24 hours.

Basil is the Founder and CTO at ClockIt. With over 10 years of experience in the products space, there is no challenge that is too big in front of him be it sales, marketing, coding, etc. A people person and loves working in a startup for perfection.

With the new MN Sick and Safe time law going into effect on 1/1/24, how can I set up our employees so that they earn 1 hour of sick time for every 30 hours they work? It's not based on the number of hours on the paycheck. If they have 29 hours on one paycheck and the next paycheck is 5 hours, they only hit the 30 hours worked earning level by the 2nd paycheck as they now have a total of 35 hours worked. The newly earned 1 hour of sick and safe time needs to be displayed on the 2nd paystub and listed in their employee record.

Currently, the Sick pay accrual period options in QBDT (Enterprise) are based on paycheck hours or per paycheck or there is an option to pre-load sick hours at the beginning of the year. None of these will work. Is there an update being worked on to address this MN law? Any suggestions?

The only way to do this in QB is to accrue the time per hour worked on the paycheck, which is giving the employee slightly more than the law requires, but only within each 30 hour window, which evens out at the end of the 30 hour window.

In practice, you won't really end up allotting more sick time than the law requires unless you pay the employee for that last fraction of an hour of sick time and then they quit without working more hours to finish the 30 hour window.

Okay, this will be a close enough option to add sick and safe time for our salaried employees, but I should have mentioned that we also have hourly employees that have two different pay rates. If they have overtime, a line must be added to their paychecks for WAOT. Doing this inflates their paycheck hours. It doesn't affect their timesheet hours. As the sick pay accrual uses the paycheck hours, anyone with WAOT on their paycheck would be calculated incorrectly.

Also, it shouldn't calculate sick pay on any non-work hours that appear on the paycheck such as holiday pay or PTO or bereavement pay. I saw another post from someone trying to follow a similar new law for sick pay in the state of WA. They mentioned their sick pay hours had been inflated due to accruals that had incorrectly included non-working hours. Any suggestions?

We have a very similar situation. On your paystubs there is a line for regular hours and a line for overtime hours? Is that what you mean by WAOT? From my understanding if an employee works 90 hours in a pay period, they would accrue 3 hours of ESSL.

WAOT is weighted average overtime which we pay out to employees that have worked more than 40 hours, but they have two different regular pay rates. As a result, I must add an additional line to the paycheck which increases the number of hours. The additional line only pays the additional 1/2 time owed at the WAOT rate. For example..... 48 hours at earning rate of $50 and 10 hours at earning rate of $25. Total hours are 58. I must pay 18 hours of OT, but these 18 are paid at the WAOT rate which is not a rate that can be set up on the employee records as the rate is not consistent. I'll do a manual calculation outside of QB for the WAOT rate. In this example the WAOT rate is 22.84. The lines on the paycheck read: 48 reg hrs @ $50, 10 reg hrs @ $25, 18 WAOT hrs @ $22.84. The total QB paycheck hours now reads 76, but the actual number of work hours to accrue sick pay on are 58. Hope this makes sense.

I know your post is from a few months ago, but for what its worth, I have a suggestion to fix your inflated WAOT problem. I fix it by adding an additional earnings entry for WAOT (mine is PWOT for prevailing wage overtime), zeroing out the rate and subtracting the number hours OT. Then, the total hours for that paycheck should match their actual hours worked or paid out on that check. Subtraction only works if the total hours do not reach zero or go less than zero.

No, the solution offered by your colleague is unacceptable. QBs wants users to create a separate paycheck for PTO, Holiday, and any other items that are non-worked hours. This isn't a solution, it's a sloppy, time consuming, unacceptable work around a poorly designed and coded payroll software system. Intuit should improve their product, not create more work for customers.

I completely agree with this - it is not a solution - it is unacceptable. Other software companies are able to do this, so Intuit should also. The State made the law, and Minnesota is not the only State to have this law. Also, I have talked to multiple agents on the phone and been given the run around about this solution - and actually was told it would be fixed in an update 1/1/24, which clearly was not the case.

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