Oracle Time and Labor is very flexible when it comes to time entry methods. It has a solution for almost all the different scenarios you can think of. Lets go through them one by one:

Employee Self Service: A very straight forward and simple web based interface to enter timecard. Superb example of a custom rendering engine on top of the OA components which renders timecards based on the layout LDT flat files. Adding, modifying a component on the timecard is very simple and can be achieved through the modification of layout LDT file.

Authorized Delegate Self Service: A new feature added recently to imitate the timekeeper functionality in Self Service. It is based on HRMS security profile and provides a mechanism where a person can enter timecard for a set of people assigned to him. It is not an alternate solution to timekeeper functionality and is recommended to be used for scenarios where smaller number of subordinates is required to be handled through an Authorized Delegate.

Time Keeper: The perfect solution for scenarios like shop floor where you need a timekeeper to maintain and enter time for large number of people. It is a PUI form based interface and provides a mechanism for fast mass timecard entry and edit functionality. It is one of the most complex forms in the whole Oracle Apps where each and every component of the form is determined and created at runtime which is completely configurable based on OTL preferences. Literally saying, the static form is empty and the runtime form is having one of the most complex structures among all the Apps forms.

Disconnected Time Entry aka Spreadsheet: One of the features of OTL which allows to create timecard based on the provided spreadsheet (excel file) and a very important one where you get timecard data in the form of spreadsheets from the users who don’t have access to EBiz Application.

PUI Form based Timecard: The only interface where timecard data directly goes to HXT schema i.e. it has to have the OTLR rules enabled and the corresponding time management policies setup properly. This is the interface where you can see the exploded timecard data and corresponding rate values as per the rules setup.

PDA: Oracle Time & Labor also has functionality to let users enter time information with the use of a mobile phone or a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).

Punch Machine / Time Capture Devices: OTL provides a set of PUBLIC APIs which enables to write interface for any Punching Machine or Time Capture Device. hxctsdp.pkb is the package which contains public API for timecard creation/manipulation. The API provide the functionality to add individual Time Building Blocks off any scope (DAY or DETAIL, including their associated attributes), to an existing timecard, to update existing Time Building Blocks with their associated attributes, to delete a complete timecard or a specific Time Building Block and its attributes from a timecard.

Apart from these time entry methods, a generic data flow and related processes is shown in the above diagram.