Let’s say that an employee is accused of not working - or not working very much - when “working from home” on a specific date range.
How might you prove this one way or another?
And here is an extra degree of difficulty: this person is in accounting.
My thoughts of how I can try:
BAQ on the Change Log table.
a. Normally this works well enough. But the problem is, I don’t even track changes to invoices (AP nor AR) because… invoices basically do not change once they are posted. (And no one has cared about it in 8 years.)
BAQ on APInvHed and InvcHead (that’s AR)
a. Problem there is that the dates are useless - everything can be and is routinely backdated.
I happen to track every time someone opens a screen in the UI (Kinetic).
a. This is the best so far. It falls down if the user stays on one screen for ages. But for the most part people do something different every few minutes, even if it is a print modal box or something.
I’ve got to leave for the day, but my next attempt is a BAQ on PartTran. That seems like it might be hit or miss when it comes to an accounting employee… We’ll see.
Activity tracking. With a BAQ you can pull exactly what screens they went into, which reports they ran, etc. I think its Ice.SysActivity and then there is a detail table that has the user ids.
Personally, my first question when asked about stuff like this is “what tasks are not being completed?” Like, as a manager, you should have a general feel for whether or not stuff is getting done in fairly short order, especially in regards to invoicing.
And if things are so bad you’re asking for an activity audit from IT, either trust with the employee has broken down or the supervision has been nonexistent. Either way, that’s a people problem, not a tech issue.
Yeah, there’s a posted date in the invoice fields that the user can mess with, but there’s usually another date on the row that’s tagged with an actual date (create or last modified).
If I was looking at accounting activity, I’d glance at GLJrnDtl or TranGLC in addition to the tables already mentioned. Still, if someone was spending a lot of their time reviewing stuff in trackers (possible for accounting staff), there may be little to no record of activity.
How? What table is this in? SysActivityLog just shows Log on/off, Log on failure, and “Updated” - which just shows when activity log is enabled/disabled.
If they’re using a company-owned PC then it’s open season. Gotta look above and beyond Epicor usage. Check the Event Viewer, browser history, files downloaded, etc…search the PC via administrative share (\machinename\c$) if you can get to it.
I’ve had people chewing up server space storing their music files. I’ve had people crash their PC because their kid downloaded too many games and ran out of disk space.
In some ways it’s fun playing detective…but you kinda feel dirty after doing it anyway.
Accounting types can be tricky, they might say they were analyzing in Excel and that is why you don’t see many Epicor transactions. If you think they are not working try terminating their vpn session and see how long it takes them to reconnect.
I’m marking this as the solution to the question that I asked.
For me personally, I have only 17 rows since April 27 (when we upgraded to 2023). So today this does not help me, but I trust it will in the future, once I set up the types or whatever.
Oh that’s right, I have another curveball to add. The employees here that create the invoices never post their own invoices. The plant controller or assistant does that. It’s our way of “approving” the invoices. But my point is that TranGLC would show the poster’s ID, not the creator’s.
Likewise, I didn’t see a create date on the invoice tables; only a modified date. So I am similarly up a creek on that too…
Hmm. I’m not on 2024, but when I first read this, I assumed it was the server log that existed already. (The one you have to turn on in the EAC.) So this is something new/different?
IMHO ive been in IT long enough that if I was asked this I would push back and say its a people problem, not an IT one. Gotta go fight more Epicor bugs that impede business
Correct. Now there is a major gotcha with this. The records in the primary activity table are one per calendar month per menu item and then all activity gets summed up on the record. So for example for Order Entry, there is a record for December, one for November, etc. When you lose that header record, you also seem to lose the detail that was tagged to it. So the retention period is not really accurate. I would set it for longer than that (I can’t because cloud customers don’t get to control these settings, and they refuse to go beyond the default). But realistically the settings in your screenshot do NOT give you a full month lookback as you might expect.
We also tack activity and have a BAQ setup like @aosemwengie1 suggested here. A good manager should know if their staff is working even if they are remote.
I was asked this as well. In that case it was AP and the manager just wanted know how invoices were entered. A quick dashboard was a solution.
We purchased the 3rd part menu tracker so it was nice to replace this with the new activity tracker application. Just a note - we put in a ticket because the detail BPM tracking causes duplicate records. I assume this option will be removed in future releases. For now, do not do detail tracking for BPMs.
Let’s say that an employee is accused of not working - or not working very much - when “working from home” on a specific date range.
