John Cranston – Frequently Asked Questions

SYNCrew Kiosk

This article discusses what the app is and how workers use it. Read THIS ARTICLE OVER HERE about how to set it up.

What is the Kiosk app?

The Kiosk app allows multiple workers to log in using the same device. That is different from the traditional SYNCrew app that is designed to be used exclusively by a single worker. Often times, the device is a tablet but it also runs on phones. Both Android and iOS (ipads) are supported. The most common use cases for the kiosk app are:

On-site workers who do not move around like factory, warehouse, or office workers. In these cases, typically an iPad or Android tablet will be secured to a wall near the entrance.
Workers who don’t want to use their own phones and where the company does not want to use the manager/managed worker setup. In these cases, the kiosk app is loaded onto a managers phone and the workers ask to use it when they punch in or out.

How workers use the kiosk

Once the Kiosk is set up, a worker simply opens the app on the phone or tablet and clocks in or out in just a few seconds, like this:

CLOCK IN:

1) Enter phone number and note that language can be changed here as well in the upper-right

2) The worker fills in any info that is required (based on your app’s setup). The camera will automatically take a selfie when the worker clicks “clock in.”

3) The app will confirm the clock in was completed

4) The app automatically returns to the main ready screen for the next worker to use

CLOCK OUT:

1) Just as at the start, the worker enters their phone number and clicks “Go”

2) The worker fills in any information the app was set up to collect and takes a selfie photo when clicks either:

Clock out: to clock out for the day

Leave location: to leave this location, but keep their clock running

3) The app will confirm that the clock out was completed

4) The app automatically returns to the main ready screen for the next worker to use

Set up the Kiosk app

The Kiosk app is meant to be set up by an Admin. Your company can have different kinds of kiosks in different places and for different uses. Please read about setting up the kiosk app HERE.

As always, if you have any trouble or questions, please reach out to your account manager or support@syncrew.com and we’ll be happy to help you out!

How to close out a pay period

After the pay period ends, it’s a best practice to have the managers review the hours and approve them. Then, once all hours are approved, lock the pay period to prevent future changes.

1) Review the hours in Worker Time Review

Worker Time Review can be run anytime during the pay period or after. Some managers look daily to make sure the times are always right and that comes with the added benefit that if something looks strange, the worker is likely to remember the details better since it happened yesterday, rather than last week!

This video shows how to review hours, along with all the other tricks to add and edit time.

2) Approve the hours

Once you review your employees’ hours, click to approve them to confirm they have been reviewed. When you click to approve them, the system saves your admin name and the time you approved them for future reference. If you edit times for a worker that was already approved, the hours become UN-approved and you will need to approve them again, so we recommend finishing your editing before approving the hours.

The video in step 1 above includes information about approving hours starting at 4:35 into the video. Click HERE to launch the video starting there.

3) Lock the pay period

After all hours are reviewed and approved, the person who runs payroll should lock the pay period. To do this, just open Worker Time Review, select the pay period, and click the Lock button shown below. Full admin will be able to edit hours or unlock the pay period but limited admin will be prevented from making edits after this so that payroll and SYNCrew will always be a perfect match.

Left image: Click the green button to lock the period.
Right image: Red button shows the period is locked. Click it to unlock the period.

Project Settings

Projects have lots of customization available to reflect the reality that no two projects are identical! Below are descriptions of these features and how to use them. If you have any trouble or questions about them, please reach us at support@syncrew.com and we’ll be happy to help you get things set up exactly as you need.

Project Units

Project units were originally built to allow for projects that were apartment buildings to have a sub-project for each unit – basically allowing something like: 1000 Brannan St, #402.

Project units must be enabled at the company level by going to Settings –> Configuration, then scroll down to the “Projects” section. In that section, check the box next to “use units in buildings (apartments, etc).” There is another option below that called “make unit selection mandatory” and if that is checked, the worker MUST select a unit, otherwise the worker CAN select a unit, but does not need to.

Once units are enabled, go to the edit screen of the project you wish to and scroll down until you see the units area (screenshot below). To use units for a project, just enter the name of units there as shown in the blue box below. The name is often “apartment,” but can be anything – other examples are lot, area, phase, etc). Then enter the values that workers can select from in the add new unit section (red box below). You can enter multiple entries as once if they are separated by a comma. Click “add” once you have typed them in and save the changes to the project.

Accounting Name

Accounting name must be enabled at the company level by going to Settings –> Configuration, then scroll down to the “Projects” section. In that section, check the box next to “Use accounting name”

Once this feature is active, each project will have an additional text field that is used to track an extra name for all projects. This name is only seen in reporting and integrations with external systems so workers do not see this.

Dynamic Accounting name based on skill: Accounting names can be different based on the skill selected by the worker. To set up these skill-based accounting names, go to the edit screen on the project you wish to add them for and scroll down until you see a section that looks like the screenshot below. The top “accounting name” (circled in red below) is the default accounting name.

To add a skill-based accounting name, click on the green plus icon (circled in blue below) and then pick the skill and enter the accounting name. In the green boxes below, the example shows that when the worker selects “appliances” as the skill at this project, the accounting name will be “s-bux Livermore – appliances.” Further, in the example below, if the skill is anything other than “appliances” or “cleaning,” the accounting name will be “s-bux, livermore.”

Project specific skills

The worker enabled skills above can be over-ridden by location-specific skills list. To enable that, go to the project edit screen and scroll down until you see a check box next to “use location skills list”. Check that box and you will see your company’s enabled skills appear below. Select the skills you want workers to be able to select from the list and save the project settings. Once you have a location-based skills list for a project, workers will see ONLY that list of skills when they clock in there, regardless of what their own list looks like.

Project Labels

Project Labels are a way to group different projects together, sort of like a folder except that a project can have more than one group applied. These are visible to admin only, so workers are not aware of them from the app. Click HERE to learn more.

Required Form at clock out or change task

SYNCrew’s form functionality can be set up so that a worker MUST complete the form before clocking out or going to another project. The instructions below walk you through creation of a form and setting it to be mandatory. You can view a quick overview of what forms are by clicking HERE.

Create the required form:

If you don’t have a form already built, build a form as shown HERE.
In order to make the form work for a mandatory form, the settings at the top must be configured so the “project” is set to “clocked in project”

Set the Form as required

Once your form is created, go back to the main forms setup screen and select your form in the dropdown labeled, “Required at the end of each work block.” Then click save to the right.

Now your workers will be required to complete this form before starting work with any clock in that follows a clock out. If they change task throughout the day as they work, they will only complete this form once. If they clock out and then come back to work for whatever reason, they would complete the form again.

Your workers will need to be sure they have recently updated apps so if they are able to clock in without completing the form, that is most likely the issue. Have them update the app and then leave it open for a few minutes with good wifi or cell signal and it should update properly to require the form.

How to review forms

The admins can now access the form via the Reports -> Custom Form reports Page.

Once on the page, select the Covid form (and any other desired filters for time, employee etc). Below you can also filter by responses (For example you can search all Yes responses to a particular question)

On the list that returns, you can click on any particular form where it says “View Details” to see the responses. You can also generate PDFs and manually email the forms from here.

Day 1: Welcome to SYNCrew

Hello and welcome to SYNCrew! If you’re reading this, you are likely a new hire at a company that already uses SYNCrew. SYNCrew starts with the crew in the field using the app to clock in and out, take photos, leave notes, and much more and seeing how that app works will help you quickly understand what you are seeing in the admin portal.

This video will show you a quick overview of how the app works and what you see on the dashboard.

SYNCrew was designed to be easy to use, but due to the need for customization, some things may be a bit challenging at first and we are available at support@syncrew.com to assist you anytime!

Support requests

The SYNCrew app allows workers to request help directly in the app. Since workers must already be logged in, the majority of requests that come from here are not actually technical support issues so they are first routed to the people who know the worker best – their manager or company administrator. The email you receive has the text the worker typed to describe their issue and also a link to open their profile page so you can quickly and easily get right the their page to see what is happening. If you receive a support request and you don’t know how to answer the question, you can forward the request to suppor@syncrew.com.

Once the worker clicks to submit their request for help, a simple email gets sent to either a single company email or the manager of the team that the worker is assigned to. Here are your two options for how to route that email.

Single Email: This option will send all change requests to a single email address. This is most often used for companies with a centralized IT function.
Send to Manager: This option will route the help request based on who is set as the manager of the team that the worker is assigned to. In the event that a team’s manager is disabled (because they left the company or have a new role), those help request will go to a backup email. To learn how to set up a manager for a team, click HERE.

Reports: Work Block Report

Work Block Reports were the first way to export information from SYNCrew and are still the most flexible. This article explains what the Work Block report is and how to use them. This report is necessarily complicated because it is flexible and powerful and please contact support@syncrew.com or your account manager directly with any questions.

Also, please note that work block reports should not be used for payroll and other places where overtime calculations are needed since the work block report only calculates daily overtime based on the information that appears from your filters. The Timesheets are the best place to see that information. [update on 8/1/20, some clients are using a “new” version of this report that shows overtime properly. To see if you are on that version, just look at the menu and if it says “new work block report,” then you can rely on the overtime values. Contact us at support@syncrew.com with any questions]

What is the Work Block report: Roughly speaking, a work block is a group of events in SYNCrew that mark out an amount of time between the clock in and clock out or change task.

Here is an example of how a day gets converted into work blocks: John Smith works the following day and records the following events in SYNCrew:

8am: Clock in to 123 Main St
11am: change task
11:20am: clock in to 456 Elm St.
12pm: start meal break
12:30pm: end meal break
4:30pm: Clock out

John’s day will show up as two work blocks, like this:

123 Main st: 3 hours working, 0 minutes drive time
456 Elm: 5 hours working, 30 minutes on break, 20 minutes of drive time

How to run a Work Block report:

Select “Work Block Report” from the Reports menu
You should now see a screen where you can filter the information you want to see in the report. Filter your results however you want. See the section below called “Filtering Details” for more information about how these filters work.
Click “Run”
The report may take a while to run depending on how much information is in your request. On most browsers, you can confirm that it is still running by looking at the page loading indicator. If the icon is still spinning or the bar is progressing, it is running. View the section below called “Work Block Report Results” for more details

Work Block Report Results: Once you click “run” and the report loads, you should see a report that looks like a grid. You will see additional columns if you have selected any options in the filter selection page (details below). The columns should be self explanatory but a few things to note are that:

Numbers are decimal numbers so 8.33 is 8 hours and 20 minutes. This format makes doing addition of time and multiplication of wages easier.
Location Warning: This will say “Yes” if any event during the work block was outside the allowed distance for the project.
Only the first 100 rows will be shown. If the report is longer, you will be able to click to different pages. The sums at the bottom are only for the 100 items shown.

Highlighted in colored boxes are these details:

Edit Button [red]: Clicking this will show you all the events that make up that work block and you can click the red “edit” button for any of them to make changes.
Open Photos [Red]: This will open a pop up where you can view all the photos taken. In this popup, Clicking “Save all Photos” will download all photos from the work block to your computer. Likewise, the “Send Email” will send an email that contains all photos, notes and times to the recipient you enter.
Audit [orange]: You can view any changes that have been made to a work block (like editing the time of the clock in or out). For details, please see this article.
Export to CSV [green]: Clicking this button will export the report to a Comma Separated Values. Small reports will be downloaded directly while larger reports will be emailed to your email within a few minutes, sometimes longer depending on SYNCrew’s overall system load.

Filtering Details: By default, the report will show all work blocks for the past month. Since that is too much information for most people, you can limit the results to only the dates, projects, people, and more as described here. All references to colored boxes are based on the image below.

Teams, Workers, Skill, Projects [green]: Click in the text field below the way field you want to filter and a list of options will pop up. You can pick from the list or start typing to search in real-time. Once you see the name, team, skill or project you want, click the name. You can pick multiple options in each field. You may also select multiple fields at the same time. The example in the image to the right shows a search for work done by Andrew Jackson, George Washington, and Martin Van Buren at either 1000 Brannan st or 123 Main St.
Custom Fields [orange]: When you set up your company with SYNCrew, there are custom fields that each company uses differently. Some examples are Work Order, Cost Center, Where were materials purchased, etc. If these fields are enabled, you will see them here.
Notes [purple]: You can type anything in here and the report will return results for any work blocks that contain that note anywhere in the general notes field or in any text-based custom fields.
Dates [blue]: The default is last month, but you can pick any date range you want by clicking in the Start Date and End Date boxes. There are also some radio buttons below where you can quickly select from common options like “yesterday” or “last 7 days.”
Report Options [red]: Selecting any of these options will add extra columns to your report after it runs. They are optional because
1. Show On-Site and Drive Time: SYNCrew measures the time between when a Worker leaves one project and arrives at another. The drive time is included in the time for a work block, but this allows you to see how much of the work block was spent driving vs on site. Depending on your company settings, the drive time will be assigned to the project the worker is departing or arriving.
2. Show Start and End Time: Selecting this option will add two columns called “start time” and “end time.” These columns show the time that the work block started and ended (inclusive of the drive time).
3. Combine all Notes: By default, the work block report shows the note made with the clock out photo in the “notes” column. Checking this option will replace the notes column with a column called “combine all notes” that shows all notes taken anytime during the work block – any notes at clock in or any progress photos will be shown in addition to the clock out.
4. Show Mileage: SYNCrew does not track the route a Worker takes, but the system can calculate the distance based on the recommended route in Google Maps. This may be different then the route the tech took. Additionally, SYNCrew looks this information up freshly each time you run a report with this option, the distance shown will vary a bit as traffic causes Google to alter the recommended route.
5. Show Break Time: This shows the length of all breaks taken during the work block. If a worker takes more then one break, the sum total is shown here. Note that breaks are shown in decimal form so 0.5 is 30 minutes, for example.
6. Add Labor Costs: This option will add a column with the estimated labor cost. This cost is calculated by multiplying the time worked by the hourly wage in the workers profile page. Daily Overtime is factored into this calculation.
7. Only Show Work Blocks with Overtime: This option will only show days that have overtime. Some lines in the report might show 0 overtime but they are there because they are part of a day that had overtime for the same worker.

Work Block reports are very powerful and we know they can be a bit confusing for new and long-time users alike. Please reach your account adviser or support@syncrew.com with any questions.

Overview of Settings and Configurations

To get the most out of SYNCrew, it’s important to make sure it is set up to deliver everything your need and desire. This page is a summary of the various settings and configurations.

There is a huge amount of information below and while we have done our best to make it clear, some of it can be complicated and if you prefer to just ask for help, we are available at support@syncrew.com to assist!

Custom Data Fields to be filled in with the app during work: SYNCrew has some optional fields that you can enable to allow (or require) workers to fill in as they leave a project or change their skill. There are text, number and pick list fields available and they are commonly used for things like description of work, materials used, contract vs. Time and Material, but they are very flexible so let us know how you want to use them. These fields can be optional or required, in which case the worker cannot move on until they enter the required information. Click HERE to learn more.

For companies that need more than the four optional fields, you can enable forms and make a custom form, with as many data fields as you want, required. Click HERE to read more about required forms.

App configuration: Click this link to see the ways you can configure the worker’s phone application. This includes optional settings, visual tweaks like changing the text on buttons, and more. Click HERE to learn more.

Custom Data fields associated to each worker: These are optional data fields that can be enabled for companies that have data to associate with workers. There are text fields and pick lists available and they are mostly used for back-end office needs like keeping track of employee information, which yard they work out of, or other things like that. Click HERE to learn more.

Project Settings: Projects have lots of customization available to reflect the reality that no two projects are identical! Click HERE to learn about the various ways you can customize projects.

Skill settings: Every event in SYNCrew has a “Skill” associated with it. These are things like terms to describe the kind of work being done (like landscaping, stone work, cleaning, etc.). Your company will have a unique list of skills and then each person and/or project will have a sub-set of those enabled, as you configure. Click HERE to learn more about skills.

Be sure you have the right service level to meet your needs: VIEW PLANS

Day 2: Adding Workers, Projects and other basic system administration

As you get into using SYNCrew day-to-day, here are a few you may need to do. Click the button get walked throiugh how to do it. Some users may not have these options available due to how they were configured. If you need to do something and it is not availavle, please check with whoever created your SYNCrew admin account so they can get your settings right. Our team is available to help clarify at support@syncrew.com.

Add a New Worker

Add a new Administrator

Reset worker password and resend welcome text

Add hours (for when a worker forgets their phone

Edit hours (for when a worker makes a mistake)

Overview of emailable alerts in SYNCrew

SYNCrew has many ways to automatically email information outside the system. These are summarized here. If you do not see the options where they are mentioned, it is likely that your current plan does not include them. Please contact us at support@syncrew.com for any help.

Event Alerts with Photos: SYNCrew can automatically send you an email when certain actions are taken. These are easy to set up and powerful alerts to help managers keep track of certain real-time actions without needing to look in the portal since alerts can be filtered by project, worker, skill, type of event (clock in, clock out, flagged photo, etc). These are set up in Settings –> Alert Settings –> Email Alerts.

Report Alerts: You can have a work block report or budget report emailed overnight. These can be sent daily or weekly on a specific day. These are set up in Settings –> Alert Settings –> Report Alerts.

Lunch and Overtime email alerts: These alerts are designed to help managers enforce lunch break laws and overtime policies in realtime, without needing to log into the system. The admin picks a time range where these emails will be delivered every 30 minutes in that window. Each email will show the workers currently clocked in, how long they have been working today, whether they have taken lunch, and their contact information. Managers can quickly review the email and call/text any worker who is about to enter a meal break violation or unauthorized overtime. These are set up in Settings –> Alert Settings –> Lunch and OT Alerts.

Change Request: This is a simple way for workers to request edits to their time and other things they may commonly talk to the office about. These requests generate an email with the worker’s note. Learn more by clicking HERE.

Requests for help: Workers can request help in the app. Often times the help requested is a question best answered by their manager and the email has a link to easily open that workers profile page. In the event it is a technical issue that our technical support team at SYNCrew can best address, just forward this email to support@syncrew.com. Learn more about the request for help email by clicking HERE.