register entrance and leaving times for employees at their jobs

[thosecars82]

Hello

I would like to ask you any advice for this.

I need a program to register the entrance times of 15 employees for a factory.
There are 15 computers but not all of the employees need to use the same computer every day.

Its like when they login windows with their user every day in the morning when they arrive in their job, they would clic on some icon in windows desktop in order to record their entrance time. This program would use this windows user to know what employee was the one clicing the icon.

Moreover, when the employees leave finish they job every day they should also clic this icon in order to record their leaving time.

This program should run on some server. I have considered using either access or mysql as choices. Any other freeware database manager would be valid as well.

This program should be able to create daily, monthly reports with the time the employees spend at their job.

I am wondering two questions:

1. whether there is ideally any freeware (ideally open source) program like the one I mentioned.
(in the worst case that there is no freeware like I wonder whether there is cheap software built with a funtionality like the one I described.

2. how many hours of development it could take for a freelance with experience in the corresponding technologies that were eventually going to be used in order to build a software like this?



Does anyone have any idea?
Thanks

[pbaldy]

I'm not aware of a freeware program to do this. It wouldn't be particularly difficult, given your description. Getting the logged in Windows user is simple. Given a table structure with basic fields like:

Person
Date/time in
Date/time out

When they click on your button/icon, look them up in the table to see if they're already logged in. If not, create a new record to log them in, otherwise log them out on the existing record. You run the risk of people forgetting to log out, but you could come up with ways to handle that.

[pkstormy]

Here's a quickly done example you can use to get you started.