Timesheet Review/Approval

Manager Review is optional (for both time and expenses). If you activate this feature, then managers have a chance to review/approve time before it is used in invoices or posted to QuickBooks.

• By Staff or by Project. You only need one manager to approve each time entry. That manager 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.

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 Workflow

When management review is turned on, BigTime assumes that the majority of time 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, that information is forwarded to managers for approval. You can have the system notify managers via email when they have time 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.

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 review process starts again.

The overall process is the same no matter what type of review you have activated (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.