‘Tis the season for people to schedule vacation, if they haven’t already, and focus on their leave balances as they try to use up vacation or make sure they have enough vacation to cover this last month of the calendar year. If you are using the Leave Accrual feature within OpenAir, users have access to their leave balances from their Home page -> User status area or by accessing the Leave Accrual Transactions tab, if they have permission. When a manager or a schedule request approver receives a request for time off, the reviewer may need to look up balances by running reports or accessing the Leave Accrual transactions before approving – or just approve and hope the request was within the allotment of time off for that user.

There is a way, however, to display the current leave balance on the request itself to save time in information lookup for the reviewer. To enable this option, navigate to Administration -> Application Settings -> Timesheet settings -> Other Settings (or Account -> Company -> Settings) and check ‘On schedule requests, display current leave accrual balance to managers for approval’.

When the approver accesses the schedule request, they will not have to look up balance or rely on timesheet rules to ensure a resource is not asking for more leave time than they are allotted.
NOTE: the approver needs to click on the submit/approve link to see the balance, which is the hours remaining BEFORE the request is approved. The View schedule request with approve/skip/reject buttons will not display the balance.

The balance view is also helpful for reviewers to see how much more time a user may have available in case, as with many companies, a person’s vacation expires at the end of the year. Managers can begin to plan holiday coverage as resources are usually encouraged to take their vacation before it expires.

The timesheet review/approval workflow process within OpenAir allows a timesheet to track status of open, submitted, approved, etc. There are occasions where you find yourself needing to unapprove the timesheet to make corrections. The unapprove permission for timesheets as well as other objects that support review/approval in OpenAir is actually controlled on the User account itself. It’s not a role level permission. To grant permission to individuals for unapproval, go to the user’s account under Administration -> Global Settings -> User or Account -> Account -> User. When you select their userid, you will be dropped into the demographic page . Scroll down the form to the timesheet options area and you will see a checkbox to ‘allow user to un-approved timesheets’. Check and Save!

Now users can go to specific timesheets, click on submit/approve, and click to unapproved. The only exception to this is when a timesheet has already been processed for billing – then alternate correction methods are required since you don’t want to get timesheets and billing out of sync! Billed timesheet prevent the user from unapproving.

For those of you who use time types to track billable/non-billable work or overtime/shift work, ever run into the problem of a consultant selecting the wrong value for task or project (especially those internal or administrative tasks)? OpenAir has two control switches that may be of interest – but you can only use one or the other

• Allow time types to be limited by task
• Allow time types to be limited by project

When one or the other of these options is enabled, a new field will appear on the task or project.

By selecting Create, you can select which time types apply to that task or project.

Click OK and save the form you are working on (Task form or Project Properties form).

Definitely make sure to set these values on those internal or administrative projects!

And just like that, you’ve improved the accuracy of your timesheets.

This feature may only be enabled by contacting OpenAir Support.

It’s tax time and for many of us in the services world, we are working on computing how much services revenue was delivered in each of the US states to complete state tax obligations.   Unfortunately it’s this time of year when you realize that information tracking in your OpenAir system may be a bit limited in this area.  Be better prepared for next year by adding work location delivery to your timesheet grid.  The Timesheet grid supports the display of many fields such as time type, services, and payroll type.  You may already be using time type and services but often I see payroll type as a reusable field for just this objective.

To setup work location on your timesheet grid:

1. Create payroll types (Administration -> Application Settings -> Timesheet settings -> Payroll types) for each US state.  A good naming convention is State Abbreviation-US and you can even add other countries to the list.
2. Enable Show payroll type on time entries (Administration -> Application Settings -> Timesheet settings ->Other settings)
3. Enable Require payroll type on time entries
4. Rename Payroll Type to Work Location (Administration -> Global Settings -> Terminology)

Don’t forget to writeup an email and communicate to end-users!!  Changes to timesheets are one of the biggest end-user impacts in OpenAir.

Now you are all set to writeup reports of time by work location and align that with revenue recognized in OpenAir (or invoicing, if you are not using revenue functionality).