I'm trying to get some ideas so I can know which way I should proceed.

We have been hashing over our time card processing system for our plant for a few months now, trying to figure out how to do this properly; our current system works, but we were asked now to change some rules a bit which now causes the system to break. The system is compiled in VFP 6.0 for now. It was written in FoxPro DOS 2.6a, then went to FP 2.6a for Windows, then VFP 6.0.

I'd like to think outside the box and not even look at my predecessor's source code; he was not a programmer; he knew what he wanted the old FoxPro 2.6a to do and he got the program to work, which is incredible since he as I say, was not a programmer and didn't use normal conventions such as memory variable naming, etc. It has been difficult to follow his code, not knowing if a MemVar was a character data type, integer or what?

Anyway, we check to see if an employee is late or early. We use 15 minutes as our guide on each side of the clocking-in and out.

The PROBLEM which we are having is knowing when a person's normal shift begins. Each shift has its own beginning time, but a supervisor for a shift may change the time a person comes in to work, which throws off any fixed times for a normal shift.

We also calculate the real time the person worked in minutes; everything is done in minutes for adding and subtracting. Then we check to see if the person was on time, within the 15-minute windown, for example:

For CLOCKING-IN, for the FIRST SHIFT:
05:45 through 06:15 is considered on time and the employee gains nothing financially by coming in between 05:45 and 06:00. If the employee comes in at 05:44, he now gets paid for 16 minutes prior to 06:00, as if he had worked extra time. He will also receive a reprimand for clocking-in early.

All of our calculations were working fine, until we went off the normal shift schedule and the employee clocked in at 06:46, which is 46 minutes late for his normal shift.

I'll stop here since even I am tiring of all of this. I'd just like to know if anyone has written a time keeping system similar to what I am describing and how did you handle things?

Additional Information: We are using TopSail as our software (it is really old stuff) to transfer the data from LINX Data Terminals which are used as our clocks; the employees swipe their barcoded ID badges through the slot and then this clocks them in or out. The LINX Data Terminals use a version of DOS.

Oh how I'd love to run all of this over to WINDOWS!!! That's another subject.