Reviewing Expenses by Staff

Both time and expense entries can be reviewed by staff managers after they are submitted by your users. We took a look at reviewing time by project in the last section. In this section, we'll take a look at the way staff manager review works by examining the expense review/approval process.

Staff manager review allows your managers to review/approve time or expenses for any staff member they manage. It requires you to setup staff-level managers in the system, and it requires you to assign each of your staff members to one of the management groups in the system. Staff management works just like project management in that more than one person can be a "manager" for a specific staff group. In that situation, any manager is allowed to review/approve time/expense entries submitted by the user.

Note that expenses are typically submitted as a single expense report, not on a regular schedule like time. Even so, BigTime automatically breaks up any expenses your users submit into "periods" that mirror your timesheet periods (so one expense report may have expense entries that span several different periods).

Step 1: Activate Staff-Level Expense Review

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

Note that there is a check box in that same section which allow you to turn on "blocking" for un-approved expenses. That setting allows you to prevent unapproved expenses from being included on invoices. It's turned off by default (even if you activate expense review).

Step 2: Setup Staff Managers

In order for managers to review time for the staff they manage, they need to be granted management authority for those staff members. Remember, each user is placed into one specific management group, and then managers can have authority over as many management groups as required. As long as a manager has authority over a specific user's group, they'll be able to review/approve expenses for that user. For more information on setting up staff managers, take a look at the Staff Management section of the System Guide or online documentation.

BigTime lets you setup multiple managers with "authority" over a single group. This, in effect, gives your staff members more than one manager, so any of those managers can approve/reject time for those staff members.

When managers goto the Management...Review Timesheets page, they will only see un-approved time for the staff they manage, so you'll need to setup your management groups before asking your staff managers to approve time.

Step 3: Establish 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 any type of review to your staff. This is a little harder to articulate with expenses (as expenses are not typically submitted on a well-defined schedule), but many firms setup the expense review schedule to mirror either their invoicing cycle or their timesheet submission cycle. Whatever you decide, a clearly defined schedule is critical to a successful review implementation.

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

Step 4: Submit/Review Expenses

This process will follow a fairly simple critical path:

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