As your ExakTime system and employee list grow, it can become difficult to manage and locate a specific employee in your system. If you are having trouble locating an employee, here are some tips to consider.

Employee is Inactive

Once an employee is entered into ExakTime, they are permanent and cannot be deleted. The only way to "remove" an employee, is to make the employee inactive. By doing so, the employee will not have access or be listed throughout the ExakTime system, except for certain situations (Report filters or Time Card Details if the inactive employee has time). It is fairly common for an Administrator to accidentally make an employee inactive. 

Search with Known Information

Depending on how the employee was entered (manually, import, or SyncLinx) the employee may not be entered as expected and could be assumed to be missing. If you are unable to find the employee based on the expected name/ID, try to search for the employee with portions of their name, such as only their last name, first name, employee ID, etc. As long as a portion of the employee's name/ID is correct, you may be able to find them.

Employee Name Was Changed to Another Employee Name

In rare circumstances, the name of an employee can be changed to another employee. Changing the name of an employee to the name of another employee is extremely discouraged as it can result in confusion when reviewing data.

We advise that if a new employee is entered into the system, enter them as a new employee and not rename an existing employee. Changing the name of an existing employee with data such as time data, field notes, etc. associated will result in the data being attributed from the original employee to the new employee. The only situation that an employee's name should be changed to another is if the employee was incorrectly entered, to begin with.

For example, if Employee A has been working for you and their name is changed to Employee B, all of the time of Employee A is now attributed to Employee B. If you were to run reports or refer to Employee B's time cards, the time of Employee A will appear with the time of Employee B and it would appear that they have worked longer for you than they have. Think of it as changing your name. Your history will follow you, regardless of changing your name.

In situations such as these, we would generally want to review the time records of any recently added employees and see if they have any time records from before their use of ExakTime. If an employee does have time that they normally should not have, then they may be the original employee that has been renamed.