Reviewing Time by Project

Both time and expense entries can be reviewed by project-level managers after they are submitted by your users. Since reviewing time and reviewing expenses are similar operations, we'll focus (in this example) on timesheet review.

Project-level review allows you to "roll up" all of the timesheets submitted by anyone on your staff into a virtual "project" timesheet. Project leads can then approve any time that anyone has submitted to their project, no matter who that person reports to or where they are located in the company.

Step 1: Activate Project-Level Timesheet Review

From the Tools menu, goto the System Settings...General Settings screen. At the bottom of that screen, in the time entry section, you'll need to change the "Review Time" selection to "Allow Managers to review/approve time by Project" and then click the SAVE button.

Note that there are two check boxes in that same section which allow you to turn on "blocking" for un-approved time. Those settings allow you to prevent unapproved time from being included on invoices or posted to QuickBooks. They're turned off by default (even if you activate timesheet review).

Step 2: Setup Project Leads

In order for managers to review time for their projects, they need to be added to the projects they manage as "team leads." You can have several different people listed as a "team lead" for any project in the system. If there is more than one lead on a project, then any team lead can approve/reject time for that project.

When managers goto the Management...Review Timesheets page, they will only see un-approved time for the projects they manage, so you'll need to setup project teams before asking your team leaders to approve time.

Step 3: Setup a Submission Review Schedule

Management review works best when it's placed within a well-defined time constraint. While that's not something you setup in BigTime, it's a good idea to have a realistic plan in place before rolling out timesheet review to your staff.

You may decide, for example, that all time must be submitted by Friday at 5PM, approved or rejected by Monday at 5PM, corrected and re-submitted by Tuesday at noon, etc. The more clearly defined that schedule is, the more successful your review implementation will be.

You may decide to activate one or more of the email messages associated with timesheet review/approval. Keep in mind that there are messages setup for staff managers and for project leads. If you are reviewing time by project, then you'll want to activate the project lead email messages.

Step 4: Submit/Review Time

This process will follow a fairly simple critical path:

1. Users will submit their timesheets regularly (using the Daily Routine...Submit Timesheet screen).
2. Managers can review submitted timesheets using the Management...Review Timesheets page.
   1. They'll see a list timesheets awaiting approval (organized by your timesheet period) beneath each of the projects they manage. They can click on any of those timesheets to review the detail, or they can simply approve or reject the entire timesheet by checking it off and using the APPROVE or REJECT buttons on that page.
   2. They can drill down on a specific time entry by double clicking on it. The resulting pop-up window allows them to edit, approve or reject that individual time entry.
   3. Revision notes can be used to let users know what changes are required on the time entry in question. If managers reject an entire timesheet, the system will ask them for a similar "rejection note."
   4. Once time is rejected, it disappears from the manager's review window. It won't come back until the user corrects and resubmits that time entry.
3. Users can edit their rejected entries by going to the Daily Routine...Review All Timesheets page. There, they'll see a "rejected" column with hours in every period in which they have rejected time. Users can click on any rejected number to drill down to the detailed entries behind it, and they can double click on any entry in order to edit/correct it.
   1. Users can see the rejection note (as well as the name of the manager who rejected an entry) from the rejected time detail screen.
   2. User's can re-submit corrected time using the "resubmit" icon on the View All Timesheets page or the Submit Timesheet menu item (in the Daily Routine). Both of those forms lead to the same result.
4. Managers can go back and fourth with users as long as they'd like. They simple repeat the REJECTION process and wait for the user to correct and resubmit the time.