Approving Project Time

Project time approval allows project managers to review and approve employee time by project rather than by timesheet. You can set up permissions such that project approvers only see projects they are allowed to approve.

Enabling Project Time Approval

You enable project time approval from the System > Approval Levels page. On each approval level check the "Project" checkbox if that level is applicable for project approval in your organization. If at least one "Project" checkbox is checked then you will be able to access the Approvals > Project Time Approvals page.

Enabling project time approval will not automatically grant employees permission to approve projects. You still need to go to the System > Security page and modify or add permission levels to enable the "Can approve" project permission. You can specify either "Can approve all" or "Can approve limited" project permission. Any project approver with the "Can approve limited" project permission will need to be assigned permission to each appropriate project. This is done by going to the Tasks > Projects > Permissions page and adding the employee to each appropriate project.

Project Time Approval Process

Click the Approvals tab. If you have "Can approve" permission on both Timesheets and Projects you will see two links in the area below the Approvals tab: "Timesheet Approvals" and "Project Time Approvals". Click the "Project Time Approvals" link. If you only have "Can approve" permission for Projects (that is, you don't have the "Can approve" permission for timesheets) then you will be taken directly to the Project Time Approvals page when clicking the Approvals tab.

The Project Time Approvals page will list summary project time data, organized by project and employee. This gives you a dashboard overview of project time. You can narrow or filter the project time shown by adjusting the following project lookup options:

Property	Description
Time Period	The time period for reviewing and approving project time data. Generally you will choose a prior timesheet period, e.g. "Previous Week" if using weekly timesheet periods. For convenience, the last value selected will be recalled the next time this page is accessed.
Time Entry Status	The approval status filter for the data being reviewed. Possible values are: Any: No filtering applied. Open: Only show unsubmitted project time. Pending Approval: Only show submitted project time that is not approved. Approved: Only show project time that is approved. Rejected: Only show project time that is rejected.
Project	If a project is selected then the data will be limited to the specified project.
Employee	Enter an employee name, ID or login to limit the project time to a specific employee. The search will do a partial match, e.g. "ob" will match both "Robert" and "Bob". You can use the wildcard "" for a more specific match. For example, to find an employees whose name ends with "bert" you would enter "bert". To find an employee whose name starts with "an" you would enter "an*".
Employee Type	You can select one or more employee types to limit the data to just those employees of the selected type.
Time Entry Notes	You can limit or search for data that contains a specific comment in the time entry notes field.
Reporting Group	You can limit the data to a specific reporting group. Note that "reporting group" is a terminology item, and could have been renamed (e.g. "Cost Center" or "Department").

To review and approve (or reject) the displayed project time click the Details button on the right side of each row. This will bring you to the Project Approval Details page. On the details page you will see the individual time entries for the specified project and employee. To approve the entries you select one or more rows and click the Approve button (or the Reject button if rejecting the entries). When you have finished your review you can click the Next/Previous buttons in the upper-right corner of the list to navigate to the next details page. This makes it easy to quickly step through each set of project time entries (you don't need to go back to the summary screen for each employee).

You can undo an approval or rejection by clicking the "More" popup menu to the right of the Approve and Reject buttons. Simply select the appropriate entries from the list, then select "Undo Approve" or "Undo Reject".

When reviewing the project time you may want to see different entry fields (e.g. Pay Amount, or Overtime). Administrators can define which time entry fields are displayed on the Project Approval Details page. See the Project Time Approval Options below for more information.

Since project approvals can be done for any arbitrary time period (daily, weekly, etc.), it is important to understand when a timesheet is considered entirely project approved. When all of an employee's project time in a timesheet period is project approved, then the entire timesheet will be considered project approved, even if that timesheet has non-project time (e.g. vacation or sick leave). Automatically marking the timesheet as project approved is useful when you have multiple approval levels: a payroll or HR approver can quickly see that a timesheet has been project approved when they are looking at timesheets on the Timesheet Approvals page.

Project Time Approval Options

If you are logged in as an administrator (that is, your permissions allow you to manage system settings and you can see the System tab), you will see an Options item in the "More" popup menu to the right of the Approve and Reject buttons on the Project Approval Details page. Selecting the Options item will load the Project Time Approvals Options page. You can change the following options:

Property	Description
Time Entry Details	The list of time entry fields that are displayed on the project time approval details page. You can add additional fields (for example, Bill Amount), or remove fields that are not relevant.