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Timesheets

How to approve Time and Expenses

As a manager, learn how to activate the Timesheets, and how to approve your team's timesheets and expenses

🌟 This feature is included in the PREMIUM Plan

This article will teach how to:

Activate the option to approve time and expenses;
Set up the feature to your needs (submission frequency, timeframes, permissions and automation);
How to accept, reject or withdraw approval to submissions;
How to send individual reminders.

If you're looking for the instructions to submit your time and expenses, click here

How to activate the Approvals feature

Only users with the permission of Owner can activate the Approvals feature. Once switched on, it will give some designated users the possibility to approve the time and expenses of the team members.

Go to Settings>Features;
Look for the Approval requests option and click the switch to turn it green;
Now the feature is active and you can select all the different options for timeframe, for who is authorized to approve, and what reminders to send;

Customizing the feature to your company's needs

Select the approval period. These are the choices available:
- weekly
- bi-weekly
- monthly
Then, select the period in which the recurrence will begin:
- previous week (default)
- this week
- next week
Then, you can select who is allowed to approve timesheets. Your options are: Owner, Admin, PM, GM.

Permissions and roles for timesheet approval

Owners and Admins can see, approve, reject, or withdraw approval for any user in the workspace

Project managers (PM) can only approve timesheets for the members of the projects that they manage

Group Managers (GM) can only approve timesheets for the members of the groups that they manage

(For a full recap of all roles and permissions in Timeneye - and what features they have access to, please read this guide)

How to accept, reject, or withdraw approval

Once you activate the feature, if you're one of the users tasked with approval, you should see an Approvals section on the left sidebar.

Here you'll see an Approval requests view with three tabs:

Pending: all time/expenses requests that have been submitted and awaiting approval;
Unsubmitted: a list of all the team members who have yet to make their submissions;
Approved: a list to help you keep track of what you have already approved.

In each of these tabs, there's a search bar that can help you filter the specific members you need to check or approve. This feature will come in handy for those managers in charge of big teams!

In the individual submissions, you'll see both the time and expenses submitted for approval in that period.

How to accept a submission

Go to the Approvals>Pending section. There, click the user's name and open the details of their submission.

Review the user's submission. You can check the time and expenses they have submitted and, if all is correct, simply click Approve.

PLEASE NOTE: clicking the green button will approve both the time and expenses submitted by the user for the timeframe.

Once you've accepted, you'll find the user's submission in the Approved tab. An approved submission is then locked and cannot be edited by the users. Should the user need to make any changes after that, you'll have to Withdraw your approval (please see the next paragraph).

To speed up the approval process, you'll also find a green Approve all requests button in the Pending tab.

How to reject a submission

On the other hand, if you see any issues or data missing in the submission, you can click the Reject button. When you reject a submission, you can add an optional note to explain what needs to be corrected. The user can correct the submission, and submit it again for approval.

From the Approved tab, you can also choose to Withdraw your approval, by clicking on the submission in the Accepted tab, and then the Withdraw button. This means that even though the submission was approved in the beginning, it will go back to the unapproved status.

In the individual submission, you'll also be able to see the submission and approval history:

You can see a timeline of when the time was submitted, approved, rejected, and withdrawn, and by whom.

Keep in mind that different roles have access to and can approve different timesheets (see the permissions paragraph above).

For example, a PM or GM can only approve timesheets for the groups or projects they manage. This means higher-level users (such as admins or owners) must approve the remaining timesheets and expenses. The time entries and the expenses already approved by GMs or PMs will be clearly shown in green so that Admins and Owners can see them and take care of the rest. For example, in the screenshot below, you can see that there are still 35 hours for this owner to approve in the timesheet:

How to set up reminders and automation

In the Approval Requests settings, you'll find several options to automate and optimize the approval process:

Remind everyone to submit their timesheet and expenses [x] days after approval period ends at 09:00: this option sends a reminder to team members a certain amount of days after the submission period has ended;
Automatically submit previous period timesheet and expenses [x] days after approval period ends: all unsubmitted timesheets will automatically switch their status to submitted and pending;
Automatically approve submitted timesheet and expenses [x] days after approval period ends: remove the hassle of accepting submissions manually, let Timeneye do it for you!

How to send individual reminders

Because in busy times it's easy to forget to take care of administrative chores like timesheets, here's how to gently nudge your team and remind them to submit their time and expenses.

Managers in charge of approvals can send an email reminder to the team members so that they don't forget to submit their time and expenses:

Go to the Approvals section;
Go to the Unsubmitted tab;
Select the user(s) and then click the Send email reminder button.