Posted by Ben Feinauer, Principal Product Strategist – Operational ERP

With as many features as a complete ERP suite like NetSuite can provide, some are bound to fly under the radar. With the Did You Know? series, NetSuite’s product team is highlighting some of these features and how customers can benefit.

Whether you use time tracking features within NetSuite or you use some other system for employee time entry and approval, now is the time to take another look at NetSuite’s employee time tracking capabilities.

NetSuite provides the ability to enter and track employee time via the Weekly Timesheet interface, and this interface has recently undergone several improvements that aid in more efficient time entry, ensuring better control and understanding of how an employee’s time is being applied to the bottom-line.

Employees often treat time entry as an afterthought at the end of a busy week. They are looking to get out the door to head to some much-needed down time. When time tracking activities are tedious and cumbersome, employee frustrations become obvious. NetSuite improves time entry visibility, including daily and weekly hour totals, floating headers and improved navigation between weeks.

These views give employees simple yet powerful ways to effectively enter time quickly and accurately. Most frequently, users are simply copying hours from previous weeks based on tasks they are working on within a given project. Now with a simple click of a button these users can have any week copied to their current sheet, reducing copying errors and repetitive tasks.

While the interface has been a major development focus, NetSuite has also provided a few enhancements to preferences for supervisors and approvers. Approvers and admins can now take advantage of new fields to report on missing timesheets. NetSuite has added functionality to allow for notification to employees and their immediate supervisor of their missing time.

Approvers now have the option to bulk approve or reject time from the page, with the option to include a rejection note as well as the option to set the status of time entries to open, pending approval, approved or rejected. NetSuite has added a time approval preference to the Project Record allowing project managers to assign who can approve time against their projects with the option to have time approved automatically.

Vendor time approvals is also included, along with the ability to allow approvers to manually accept vendor time instead of those hours being approved automatically.

With these improvements to time approval processes, project managers and accountants can more quickly and accurately identify project profitability and improve billing procedures.

Additional configurations within accounting preferences include the following:

• Advanced Approvals on Time Records
• Allows supervisors, administrators and time approvers.
• Lock Timesheet Period
• Admins have the ability to globally disable the ability to edit/submit records in a closed fiscal period, previous weeks or months.
• Time thresholds
• Define minimum and maximum hours required before users should submit time. Warning is displayed instead of blocking submissions.
• Approvals can be alerted if approving a period that does not meet the defined min/max requirements.
• Copy from Week Inclusion
• Decide what is copied when copying timesheets from a previous week. Options include copying both hours and memos, never copying hours and memos or allowing the user to decide.
• Copy Service Item Description To Time Memo
• Maintain text in the memo field even if changes are made to the item on the time record.

In order to take advantage of “Timesheets 2.0” you will need to enable the following features.

Go to Setup > Company > Enable Features > Employees > Time & Expenses and check these boxes: