26 August 2026

Managing Shop Floor Employee Accounts — and Seeing Who's Working On What

A shop floor full of scanning employees only pays off if someone can look at a screen and instantly answer three questions: who is working right now, what are they working on, and when will they be done? This article covers both halves of that picture — how to manage the employee accounts themselves, and how the dashboards built on top of those accounts keep managers, supervisors, sales staff, and even customers in the loop without a single phone call.

Diagram showing employee accounts feeding a live shop floor dashboard, which fans out status information to managers, sales staff, and customers

One employee account, scanned once at the start of a job, is the seed for everything downstream — live status, ETAs, and the updates that reach people who never open Standard Time® at all.

What You Will Know When You're Done

By the end of this article you will be able to:

Set up, deactivate, and organize shop floor employee accounts into groups with the right access level
Read the live employee dashboard to see who is clocked in and what job or task each person is on right now
Estimate when an in-progress job or task will finish, using the numbers Standard Time® already tracks
Put job status in front of managers and supervisors without them needing to ask the floor directly
Get real-time status to people who never log into Standard Time® — sales staff, dispatchers, and customers

Watch: Managing Shop Floor Employee Accounts

This walkthrough covers setting up and organizing employee accounts, and using the dashboards built on top of them to see who's working on what across the floor.

Managing Shop Floor Employee Accounts

Every dashboard in this article is built on the same foundation: an accurate, up-to-date list of employee accounts. Getting the accounts right — active status, groups, and access level — is what makes everything downstream trustworthy.

Users and workgroups tree in Standard Time® showing an active administrator account alongside shop floor employee accounts

Active vs. Inactive Employees

An account's active status controls whether that person can scan in, show up in dropdown lists, and appear on live dashboards. When someone leaves the company or moves to seasonal layoff, deactivating their account — rather than deleting it — keeps their historical time logs, job cost history, and reporting intact while removing them from every current-day view. A deleted account risks orphaning old time log records; an inactive one does not.

Organizing Employees into Groups

Workgroups let you cluster employees by shift, department, or skill — Welding, Assembly, Second Shift, Line A. Groups are what make the dashboards in the rest of this article usable at scale: instead of scrolling a flat list of forty names, a supervisor filters straight to "Second Shift" or "Welding" and sees only the people relevant to them.

Setting the Right Access Level

Most shop floor employees need none of the administrative screens — they need to scan in, scan out, and occasionally look up their own timesheet. Standard Time® keeps that distinction explicit on every account:

Access Level	What It Can See / Do
Administrator account	Full access — user setup, project setup, all reports, all dashboards, system configuration
Access to Time Logs	View and correct time log entries — typically supervisors, not floor employees
Access to Reports	Run and export the reporting suite
None — Project Assistant / floor account	Scan barcodes, start and stop timers on assigned jobs, see their own recent entries — no setup screens

Rights are assigned per account and can be reviewed at a glance from the Users list.

Diagram of the employee account lifecycle in Standard Time®: new account created, assigned to a workgroup, given the right access level, and eventually marked inactive rather than deleted

An account's lifecycle: created, grouped, rights assigned — and, eventually, deactivated rather than deleted, so history stays intact.

New to setting up accounts? If you have not created your first batch of employee accounts and barcode badges yet, start with How to Set Up Users or the barcode series' Step 1: Creating Users and Employee Barcodes. This article picks up from there — assuming accounts already exist — and focuses on managing and monitoring them day to day.

The Employee Dashboard: Who's Working On What Right Now

Once accounts exist and employees are scanning, Standard Time® turns every open time log into a live status board. There is no separate "dashboard module" to configure — the Time Logs view itself, filtered to running timers, is the dashboard.

Time Logs view in Standard Time® showing currently active, still-running timer entries for multiple employees

Reading the Live View

An open time log — one with a start time and no end time yet — represents an employee who is on the clock for a specific job right now. Filter the Time Logs view to running timers only and you get a real-time roster: employee name, the project and task they scanned into, and how long they have been on it so far.

Anatomy diagram of a live employee status board showing employee name, current project and task, elapsed time, and a color-coded status indicator

Each row on the live board answers one question at a glance — who, what job, how long — without opening a single report.

Group the view by employee group (see the previous section) and a supervisor covering fifteen people can scan the whole shift in seconds — who is working, who is between jobs, and who has not scanned in at all today.

Big-screen version: The same live view can be put on a shop floor monitor or office TV so anyone walking by sees current status without opening Standard Time® themselves. See Job Status Dashboard: % Complete, Duration & the Big Screen TV for the color-coded version built for exactly that.

When Will They Finish? Estimating Completion

Knowing who is working on a job is half the answer. The other half — when will it be done — comes from numbers Standard Time® is already tracking on the project task itself, not a separate prediction engine.

$Flow diagram showing how Quantity, Quantity Built, and Unit Duration combine to calculate remaining time and an estimated finish for an in-progress task$

For unit-based work, remaining quantity times the per-unit duration gives a running estimate that tightens as more units get built.

Two Ways Standard Time® Estimates a Finish

Percent Complete and Remaining Duration: For a general task, the task's Percent Complete field and Remaining Duration field combine with the current elapsed time to project a finish date. This is the same math behind the Gantt chart's schedule bars — see Gantt Charts for Project Tasks.
Quantity and Unit Duration: For repetitive unit-based work — build 500 brackets, each taking 4 minutes — the task tracks Qty and Qty Built. Remaining quantity times the per-unit duration gives a live countdown that gets more accurate as units are completed. This is the same calculation that powers the ring-shaped countdown timer at a scan station — see the Barcode Shot Clock for tasks configured that way.

Zooming Out to the Whole Team

A single task's ETA answers "when will this job finish." A supervisor planning tomorrow's assignments needs the team-wide view instead — who has spare capacity and who is already over-committed. That is what the Resource Allocation chart is for.

Resource Allocation bar chart with color-coded bars showing correctly allocated, over-allocated, and under-allocated employees

Green bars mean an employee's assigned hours match their available capacity, yellow means they have spare capacity, and red means they are over-allocated for the period. Full details in Resource Allocation & Capacity Planning.

Keeping Managers and Supervisors in the Loop

Managers and supervisors typically do have Standard Time® logins, so the goal for this audience is fewer clicks to the answer, not a separate communication channel.

Home screen tiles A manager's Home screen surfaces the icons relevant to their rights — Time Logs, Reports, Resource Allocation — one click from login to the current picture. See Home Page Icons Explained for what each tile shows and who can see it.
A saved filter per supervisor Each supervisor can save a Filter View scoped to their own workgroup — the same Filter View technique covered in Where to Find Your Barcode Scans in the Time Logs Page — so opening Time Logs always shows their people first.
Open-entry alerts Configure Standard Time® to flag or email a supervisor when a time entry has been open longer than expected — turning "did everyone clock out" from a manual check into a notification that arrives on its own.
The Job Status Dashboard on a shared screen For a manager who wants ambient awareness rather than a screen to actively check, the color-coded Job Status Dashboard (see Job Status Dashboard) running on an office monitor answers "how's the floor doing" without anyone opening the software.

Communicating Status to Sales Staff and Customers

Sales staff and customers are a different problem: they usually do not have a Standard Time® login at all, and should not need one just to ask "how's my order coming." Standard Time® does not have a built-in customer portal — that is a genuine gap, not a hidden feature — but its integration layer covers the same need in practice.

Diagram showing job status inside Standard Time fanning out to sales staff and customers through webhooks, scheduled exports, and a shared status screen

The same job status record can reach a sales inbox, a CRM, or a lobby monitor — each audience gets the update through the channel that already fits how they work.

For Sales Staff — Push the Update to Where They Already Work

Native Webhooks: Fire an outbound event the moment a project's status changes and route it into a Slack channel or Microsoft Teams via Power Automate — sales sees "Order #4821 moved to Painting" without opening Standard Time®. See Native Webhooks.
Zapier: Connect a New Project or Project Updated trigger to a CRM action — updating a deal stage automatically as a job progresses through the shop. See Zapier Integration.
OData & Power BI: Give the sales team a live dashboard connected directly to Standard Time®'s data — no exports, click Refresh for current status. See OData & Power BI Integration.

For Customers — Real-Time Status Without a Portal

A lobby or shop-visit monitor: If a customer is on-site, put the Job Status Dashboard on a screen they can see — the same "Big Screen TV" setup from Job Status Dashboard works just as well facing a visitor as it does facing the floor.
Scheduled exports to a shared file: A recurring export can drop a current-status CSV to an FTP location or shared folder a customer already checks — automated, no manual email required. See Scheduled Exports.
A webhook-triggered email or text: Wire a webhook through Power Automate or Make to send a customer a short status message when their specific project record updates — no login, no portal, just a notification that arrives the moment status changes.

Be honest about the gap: None of the above is a self-service customer login where a customer signs in and browses their own orders — Standard Time® does not have that today. Every option here pushes status out to the customer instead, which for most shops answers the same question with less setup than a portal would need.

Putting It All Together

The chain runs from one end to the other: a well-managed employee account is what makes a scan trustworthy, a trustworthy scan is what makes the live dashboard accurate, and an accurate dashboard is what you have something worth communicating to a manager, a salesperson, or a customer in the first place. Skipping the account-management step upstream is why dashboards downstream get a reputation for being "wrong" — usually they are just reflecting an account that was never deactivated or a group that was never assigned.

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