Timesheets and Expense Reports and Multiple Companies

If your firm has multiple companies, you enter a home company for an employee in the Home Company field on the General tab of the Employee hub in the desktop application.

The employee's home company is the company that:

• Manages the employee's timesheet and expense report processes, including timesheet frequency and approval settings.
• Is responsible for paying the employee.

The home company can be thought of as the company that "owns" the employee and is their current employer. This is the company where the employee's personal information is maintained. Each employee must have one designated home company and can then have multiple associated companies. When you create a new employee, the Home Company automatically populates based on the current, active company. If you open an existing employee record and want to change the Home Company, you can use the Home Company drop-down list to select a different home company for the employee. The drop-down list includes only active companies with which the employee is associated.

After you specify a home company for an employee, you can associate the employee with additional companies as needed. A new employee record is created for each association, and you can specify the employee's organization, pay rate, account, and timesheet information for each associated company. Transactions and reports are processed for each company using the appropriate organizations, pay rates, accounts, and timesheet information for the employee. The end result is that one employee may have multiple employee records in the Employee hub, but each employee will have only one home company. See the Associate Employees with Additional Companies online help topic for more information.

Timesheet Administration Rights

Consider timesheet administration rights carefully when you associate more than one company with an employee. Use the Time tab of the Employees hub in the desktop application to assign one of four security access rights to each employee: Staff, Group, Company, or System. This access level works with the Editing and Approval check boxes to determine what processing options are available to you.

The Company access right applies if you use multiple companies. This setting allows employees to open and print, and possibly edit and approve, timesheets that belong to the employees in a specific company. When you associate an employee with Company access rights to additional companies, the new records inherit the employee's access rights. If you change an employee's access rights from another setting to Company, all associated company records automatically update to apply Company access rights as well.

For example, employee John Smith has Company administration-level rights for Company A. His employee record is then associated with Company B and Company C. Because Company rights are automatically inherited for associated records, now John Smith has Company rights to Company A, Company B, and Company C. This means that he can open and print timesheets for all of those companies. If the Editing and/or Approval check boxes are selected, John Smith also has these rights in all three companies. To restrict access, you can instead assign Group administration-level rights to John Smith, and then specify the companies and groups that he can access. You can also allow him to edit and/or approve all of the groups in just one of these companies.

For detailed information about timesheet access, see the Security section of the help.

Creating Timesheets and Expense Reports for Employees with Multiple Companies

In the Expense Reports form, when you create expense reports for other employees are associated to another home company, the system automatically applies the correct company settings to the expense report form. As the system processes the correct company settings, the Expense Report form is temporarily displayed as a read-only form.

The same behavior can be experienced with the Timesheets form while creating timesheets for an employee that belongs to a different home company.