Pulse App - a productivity-boosting time management upgrade

The OceanoBe team is currently developing Pulse App, a platform for time and team management. In a previous article, we covered the basics of what the platform is and how it can be used. You can read more about it following this article Pulse App - team management platform. 

Today we will talk about the new features released with Pulse App and how these features have improved our current workflow and optimized our processes. 

Since the beginning of the project, Pulse App was focused on creating a smooth and easy time management process. Its UX and flows have an intuitive interface that our colleagues appreciate. 

As with all app development, new features will be added in time to adapt to a business's constantly evolving nature. Time management is of course a very straightforward initiative. Still, sometimes regulations within the HR department need to be applied. For this matter, we started at the beginning of the year to introduce a new series of possibilities that could help our users and managers to reduce time and management costs. For the purposes of this article, we are going to divide these new features into two main categories, the employee and the admin. In this case, users are the people that are working on a specific task/project and the admin is normally the HR manager/manager/administrator that is overseeing the operations.

The Employee

First of all, the employees have received an upgrade for their dashboard and have new information available, like the date when they joined the company and the new my profile dashboard shows all the annual leave one has available, the loyalty days, and of course the medical leaves. The user has a very clear overview of the status of his remaining days off and that was something that cleared 100% of the requests an HR manager could receive from people who wanted to know how many days were available. 

As a bonus for developers, we created a dark theme, so let’s just say that we have many new early adopters for this feature.

The Admin

Since we work with a weekly timeframe, one of the implemented features is the approval process by the management team. As it stands, once you sent your request for approval the direct manager will receive a notification and proceed to approve the plan submitted. This feature is particularly useful especially when the project manager has a budget and hours he must keep in check. It ensures that weekly quotas are met and helps address potential overtime situations early on. 

The admin section had a few upgrades that were designed to improve the flow of the working hours and reports. 

Related to the user story the assigned manager now has a new section called “Teams”. This section is designated for the approval of the timesheet, overtime, and days off for each member of the team. This feature, as mentioned before, is useful, especially for managers that have to keep track of the working hours and ensure that there are no overlaps for team members that can negatively impact productivity and delivery projections.

The admin section is the heart that manages the overall project and flow of activity. The admin will be in charge of creating and assigning new users and projects, as well as activating and deactivating accounts from the admin panel. In addition to this, he will be able to add and account for the public holidays. 

Lastly, the admin is able to download reports for working hours, reports that are necessary to the HR and accounting departments. If you are working with a billable-by-hour business model this is a very handy report as it allows the team to bill clients faster and easier.

Conclusion

Pulse App is a platform that we started to build to help us manage our workflows with ease. We created features that will improve the productivity and efficiency of our HR and accounting departments. We believe that we have successfully delivered our promise.

We can confidently say that, overall, the new admin features have saved more than 30% of HR time wasted on recurrent and repetitive tasks. Furthermore, the accounting department has saved more than 40% of time spent on creating custom reports and reduced up to 80% of the errors identified due to a lack of up-to-date information. 

Pulse app is also a solution that we are now offering to the market. If you are looking for a way to improve the efficiency of your team in the time management area then Pulse App can be a solution for you. You can book a demo by contacting our colleague Victoria at victoria.bulai@oceanobe.com.