Maconomy Reference Guide

Time Sheets Workspace

Use this workspace to record how you spend the hours of your working day, for up to an entire week.

Use this workspace to record how you spend the hours of your working day, for up to an entire week. In the Daily Time Sheets workspace, you can enter one time sheet per day.

Your time sheet entries are the basis for customer billing and internal reporting. Therefore, it is important that you enter time accurately and in a timely fashion, both for customer projects and internal projects.

The sooner that you enter your time, the sooner your company can bill the customer, which is good for the company's cash flow. If your entries are accurate, the whole company continually improves its project forecasting skills; by knowing exactly how long something has taken in the past, it is easier to create realistic budgets and customer quotes for similar jobs in the future.

If you select the Allow Incomplete Time Registrations system parameter, you do not need to enter all of the details about your work when you create a job entry. Instead, you can enter a brief note about what you were doing and for how long, and leave the details for later.

The Time Sheet workspace relies on the use of favorites to automate entry. If you often work on the same job, task, and activity, you can create a favorite for that combination. Project managers and department managers can share favorites with their teams.

You can enter time via weekly (standard) time registration. See the Set-Up section below for more details. Additionally, you can specify your time as hours or days, via the Time Unit field. If your Time Unit is Hours, 1.0 means 1 hour. If the Time Unit is Days, then 1.0 means 1 work day (typically 8 hours).

Set-Up

Use these system parameters to manage how your company uses timesheets:

  • Used Fixed Working Time Stamped on Time Sheets

    Maconomy always "stamps" the fixed hours from the weekly calendar on the employees' time sheets as they are created. If the parameter is marked, then the actual, reported working hours of the employee will be compared with the employee's fixed hours from the same period.

    If the parameter is not marked, Maconomy will compare the actual, reported working hours of an employee with the fixed hours currently in force for the employee in question. This may not always produce a historically correct result.

  • Split Week Time Sheet

    Split-week time sheets are optional when using weekly time reporting. To enable this feature, select the Split Week Time Sheet system parameter in the System Parameters workspace in the Set-Up module. If you do this, Maconomy create two time sheets for weeks that extend from one month to the next. The Part field in the Period island shows whether the time sheet belongs to the first or the second part of the week (part A or B).

Relationship of Daily and Weekly Time Sheets

Using this workspace does not prevent you from using the DailyTime Sheets workspace for reporting hours when you want to report on just one day at a time. This is because the weekly time sheets are closely connected to the daily time sheets.

The connection between weekly and daily time sheets consists of the following:

  • When you create a daily time sheet, Maconomy automatically creates a weekly time sheet that covers the period (week or month) to which the day belongs. Maconomy creates the weekly time sheet only if it does not already exist. However, Maconomy does not create any daily time sheets when you create a weekly time sheet.
  • When you create a line in a daily time sheet, Maconomy automatically creates a line on the corresponding weekly time sheet, if such a line does not already exist. The line has the same combination of favorite, job number, activity, dimensions, note, and overtime specification as the daily line. If such a line already exists in the weekly time sheet, Maconomy updates it.
  • When you create a line in a weekly time sheet, Maconomy creates daily time sheets for the days for which you have entered hours. If daily time sheets already exist for these days, Maconomy creates lines in the existing daily time sheets. Maconomy does not automatically create daily time sheet lines for weekly time sheet lines selected in the Keep Line field or for lines created based on resource planning.
  • When you delete a weekly time sheet, Maconomy deletes the corresponding daily time sheets.
  • When you delete a line in a daily time sheet, Maconomy resets the corresponding line in the weekly time sheet. Maconomy does not delete the line in the weekly time sheet, but it sets the hours for all days on the line to zero.
  • When you delete a line in a weekly time sheet, Maconomy removes the hours from all of the daily time sheets that the weekly time sheet covers. Maconomy does not delete any daily time sheets, even if the deletion of the line causes the time sheet to be empty.
  • When you create a daily time sheet, and the date belongs in a week for which the weekly time sheet has already been fully transferred, Maconomy reopens the weekly time sheet and all daily time sheets that correspond to the week.
  • If you reopen a daily time sheet in this workspace, Maconomy also reopens the corresponding weekly time sheet.

If you perform an action on the Time Sheets Workspace, Maconomy also performs the action for all of the corresponding daily time sheets. This means that if you use the Submit Time Sheet action for week 23 in the year 2014, all daily time sheets in that period (7 June 2014 to 13 June 2014) are also submitted. The same principle applies to the Submit Time Sheet Temporarily, Release Time Sheet, and Reopen Time Sheet actions. However, daily time sheets do not have to exist for you to perform these actions; Maconomy does not create any "missing" daily time sheets when you perform these actions in the Time Sheets workspace.

If you perform the same action for each day in the period (for example, if you submit a Daily Time Sheet for each day in the period), the same action is performed on the weekly time sheet. "Each day in the period" means any day for which the employee's fixed number of hours is different from zero. The fixed number of hours is specified in the Employees workspace in the Set-Up module, either through a week calendar or by entering specific hours for the employee. Typically an employee has fixed hours (greater or less than zero) for Monday through Friday, in which case the action would be applied to the weekly time sheet when the employee applies the action to Friday (assuming that the action is already applied to Monday through Thursday) .

Additionally, Maconomy has automatic timesheet entries from the absence calendar registrations. The employee uses the calendar to select the type of absence and period, and Maconomy automatically creates a timesheet line with correct job number and additional information for the employee when the absence is approved.

You can see or create a time sheet for an employee in these situations:

  • You are the employee for whom the time sheet is being created.
  • You are either the employee's supervisor, secretary, or mentor.
  • You are designated as proxy for the employee.
  • You are the designated approver, substitute approver, or super approver, depending on the approval hierarchies set up on the time sheet. Access through approval hierarchies is granted by specifying an employee in the Approval Hierarchies single dialog workspace.

If you selected employee control for the current job in the Jobs workspace, you can only make entries for employees who either appear in the job's budget of a certain type, or who are listed in the job's employee control list. For more information, see the description of the Employee Control field in the Jobs workspace.

Note that if you specified a date in the Work Completed On field in the Jobs workspace, you cannot enter time sheet entries for that job after the specified date unless you are the job's project manager. See the description of the Work Completed On field in the Jobs workspace for more information about the functionality of this field.

Approvals

You can opt to have supervisors or project managers approve employee time sheets. You can also set up an approval hierarchy. A hierarchical approval means that you can set up multiple users as part of the approval process and create a hierarchy between them. For example, if you set up two levels (hierarchies), the approvals then follow that order. In this scenario, approvals might first go through a supervisor and then through a project manager.

See the Approval Hierarchies section of the Concepts Guide for more details.