Time/Expense Entry Review

Once time/expenses are submitted, you can have managers review/approve those entries before doing anything else with them. Manager Review is an optional step (for both time and expenses). If you activate it, then managers have a chance to review/approve time or expenses before they are used in invoices or posted to QuickBooks.

• By Staff or by Project. Both time and expenses can be reviewed and approved by a single manager. That person can either review time based on the projects they manage or based on the staff members that report to them. We'll talk more about each of those options in the next section.
• Non-Blocking. Asking managers to review and approve time or expenses doesn't have to prevent you from posting that information to QuickBooks or using it to generate invoices. In fact, most of our customers elect to leave approvals in non-blocking mode.

Preventing Invoicing/Posting Unapproved Time/Expenses

If you'd like your system to prevent non-approved hours/expense from being included in invoices or posted to QuickBooks, you can turn on that type of "blocking" behavior in the Tools...System Settings...General Settings page. There are check boxes for prohibiting invoicing and/or QuickBooks posting for both time entries and expense entries. Just turn on the "blocking" features you'd like, and leave the rest unchecked. You can turn off that feature at any time.

Typical "Manager Review" Workflow

When management review is turned on, BigTime assumes that the majority of time/expenses submitted by a user will be accepted by their manager(s). In fact, BigTime was designed to allow managers to make minor corrections to specific time entries on-the-fly -- eliminating delays and streamlining the entire approval process.

Once a user submits their time/expenses, that information is forwarded to managers for approval. You can have the system notify managers via email when they have time/expenses to approve (emails 1.04/1.05/2.03/2.04 are all manager notification emails), or you can simple have managers browse to the Management...Review menu items to see what entries are there for them to review.

Managers can drill down through the information they are supposed to approve to review detailed entries (and make minor corrections as required). They can reject individual entries that need additional clarification and accept the rest. Managers also have the options of rejecting an entire set of time/expenses.

Users can be notified via email that their submissions have been rejected (email 1.07/2.06), and they can use the Daily Routine menu to review those rejected entries and make whatever adjustments are required. Once they're done, they can re-submit entries and the entire review process starts again for those entries that needed revision.

While that overall process is the same no matter what type of review you have activated (timesheet or expenses, project or staff-based), we'll walk through some specific examples in the next section(s) in order to provide some more detailed instructions on setting up and managing the review process.