At my company I need to track the working hours of employees and the materials they use on a daily basis.
We handle several projects simultaneously and every employee works on more than one project a day. Within each project there are tasks which require different kind of work. The different kinds of work are paid differently. This is why I need to know how many hours an employee worked on which project and did what kind of work.
I tried some project management applications but those were made on the assumption that an employee works on a single project, the same amount of time every day.
Furthermore I need to make some reports:
(1) project -> employees: I need to have the project divided into kinds of work; then the people who worked on a given kind of work - days + how many hours each day;
(2) employee -> project: I need a summary of all the projects an employee worked on for any period of time. I need to see for each projects, on what kind of work he worked, how many days and how many hours each day;'
(3) project -> materials used: I need to know what material and how much of it was used by an employee on a daily basis;
(4) employee -> materials used.
Currently I am using MS Excel to do all this but it requires too much manual work on my side to make the reports (or I simply do not know how to automate it). I have been considering making a MS Access database or using a project management program such as MS Project. However, I have never used those before (except for the few simple project management programs I already tried). What is the most appropriate type of application for my purpose and what is the best software of that type?
