[14] – Approve & Post, Time Sheet Submission & Unapprove Time

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP with your hosts, Rayanne Buccianico and Chris Tim. Learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP business. Let's listen in. Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact Podcast with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayanne Buccianico. We are an independent PSA series designed to help MSPs worldwide on all things PSA.

You can get your questions answered by Rayanne and myself and learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP. We have a phone in where folks can call us up with their questions or problems and we will attempt to answer them. You can also get in touch with us on all the socials, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and we'll put all of the links to these in the show notes. With me today is Rayanne. How are you doing, Rayanne?

I'm doing great today. Chris, how are you? I'm good. Thank you. Rayanne, are there any topics that you'd like to talk about today?

Actually, there is. There's a question or two from the Facebook group that I wanted to touch on. The question on the board is, so what's everyone's process for a proven post along with timesheet submissions in Autotask? What we're talking about here is the approving post process and the timesheet submission process. For example, this company processes payroll on Monday, and they pay weekly with direct deposit on Friday.

They have to have their payroll processed no later than Monday afternoon. Every Monday by 10 AM, people need to have their timesheets submitted so that they can process payroll. Here's the issue. When they go in to do the approving post and find a time entry error, we cannot fix it because the timesheets already been submitted. Then they go through a big rigmarole to try to correct or enter a correcting time entry, and they need a better process.

There's a second part to this question, but let's start with that. One of my favorite topics, again, I love talking about this kind of stuff. It sounds to me like it's very complicated, the process that they have, and it sounds like they're over-complicating it a little bit. When it comes to the timesheet submission, there is actually an option to automatically just unapprove the timesheet. If they're having a problem with time on a timesheet that is going into the approving post, and then they're not able to go in and edit that because the timesheet has been submitted, the very simple answer to that is just reject the timesheet.

What that will do is then allow them to go in and edit that time entry from the approving post window, and then they can go in and edit that. That will also give the engineer the ability to go in and correct his time, or somebody to go into that ticket and correct the time from approving post, and it'll enter it again against that correct date because it won't see at that point that the timesheet has been submitted. That's exactly how I would handle it. One, I'm not a huge fan of the proxy entry anyway, so if you're going in to make a correcting entry because some technician put in a wrong entry and you need to do some sort of correction to it, the best thing to do is go back to the original timesheet, hit the reject button, explain to the technician why the timesheet was rejected and which items need to be corrected and why. One, this is going to get the work off of your plate so that you're not the one who is jumping through all of the different hoops.

Two, it will help the technician understand where the problems are in the time entry process. That's my thought. Absolutely. I think part of the problem could be here as well, is if without really looking at how the system is set up, it's not easy to give a definitive answer on this, but they could have also had time approval set to immediately without review. What that will do is automatically go and approve and post the labour.

Even if the person did submit or didn't need to submit timesheets and they entered labour on a time entry, it would automatically approve and post that if it was against the contract or something like that. So at that point, you'd have to then do an unapprove of the time or go and push it back into approve and post and then change the time. So it could be relating to that as well. But I think the simplest answer here is really just go ahead and unapprove that timesheet or reject the timesheet, if you like. Right.

So you bring up an interesting point, though. If the time entry error is simply because the ticket is pointing to the wrong contract, yes, you're still going to have to reject that timesheet so that you can get into that ticket and reassign it to the proper contract. Then you have to go back to the technician and say, I'm sorry, I had to reject your timesheet, but I fixed the error. Would you please go in and resubmit the time? So that will work in some ways.

But like you also said, you could simply unapprove the time entry against that customer's contract. And that's actually one of the... We do have a second part to this question, but did you have a thought? Yeah, I was going to say, you actually had an interesting point there about picking the wrong contract. And, you know, this comes down to really talking about, you know, setting...

If you set your ticket categories properly and you had the right contract set up against the right customer, but when they actually go in and pick the name of the customer and the contract is set as the default contract and you had your exclusion set correctly, your engineers would actually never need to pick a contract. But there's actually no reason, you know, why your engineers would actually need to manually select a contract. What I would be doing is saying, have a contract against the customer. So this is our, you know, our default service there's contract and then have exclusions, you know, using work types or roll rates or whatever and exclude that against another contract. So that if there's an exclusion that your engineers are picking, it's picking it automatically using that exclusion.

So there should be really no reason for your engineers to ever be actually manually picking a contract for anything. I think you've already answered part of part two of this question. So the question goes on to say, what is the general process like? And this person describes their internal process for approving and posting time. And their process currently is approve and post every morning for the previous day's work.

That way, techs can correct errors of the previous day. I'll get right back to that. Then timesheets are submitted by the end of day on Friday or at the end of the week for the tech. Monday morning, go over and approve timesheets. Monday afternoon, submit the payroll.

Friday, people get paid. What is the normal process for other companies that do similar things? My first thought when I saw this question was, why are the techs making so many errors? Because they should not be making these decisions on the tickets. They should be able to open up the ticket that's been assigned to them that's in their queue and do the work and enter their time and enter their summary notes and not have to make any other decisions.

Just like you were saying, if they were using ticket statuses or, sorry, ticket categories or speed codes, then all of those decisions will be made for them. Regardless of whether that ticket is entered manually with a speed code, comes in through the email parser or even through the client portal, there should be some defaults. And the workflow rules and the exclusions at the contract level should do all of the automation to make sure that the ticket is being charged to the proper place. Absolutely. I fully agree with you, Rae-Ann.

I mean, there's really no reason why the techs need to be making any errors on, you know, like you say, in terms of picking the wrong type of work. I mean, maybe potentially they could pick the wrong work type, but that's where a ticket category is going to come in, right? Because you can limit certain work types to certain ticket categories. So you can say, you know, if this is for a password reset, the only two work types you're ever allowed to use are these two. When you enter your time, those are the only two you're ever going to see.

So by setting the system up properly in the first place to say, you know, do your exclusions properly through the contract, make sure that you've got the ticket category set up to only show certain statuses, certain, you know, work types, all those kinds of things, you're going to, you know, prevent your engineers from making all of those kinds of mistakes. So really all they should be able to do is click on, you know, enter my time, punch in the summary notes. And in fact, if they're using the clock property that's, you know, ticking away in the background, they don't even need to enter how long they've spent on the ticket because that automatically fills that into the time worked field and they're good to go. So, you know, so there really shouldn't be any mistakes on that. So I'd be interested to see perhaps whoever this person is can reach out to us and maybe we can have a look at this in more detail.

But, you know, it sounds to me like there's, you know, the engineers are making a lot of those decisions and that's why it's falling into a proven post and somebody else is having to fix all of those mistakes. But just setting it up correctly in the first place, you can mitigate a lot of that anyway, so. So to continue on, it says time sheets are submitted by the end of day Friday or at the end of that particular tech's work week, whatever day of the week that is. Sometimes you might have a weekend tech, you know, that will work through the weekend and their week doesn't end until Sunday, right? So then by Monday morning, all the time sheets are in, they need to be reviewed, approved and ready to process for payroll.

Is there anything else that this company might be missing? No, I mean, that process sounds fine. I mean, you know, basically approving and posting, you know, they're saying approving and posting every morning for the previous day's work. Maybe that's a little bit too much, but I guess if you've got engineers that have different work days, you know, you might want to approve and post for the day before. But again, it sounds to me like, you know, this might be, you know, might be labor that is being billed, you know, manually or has been set to bill manually so that somebody is having to manually approve and post that labor.

Because again, if you've set it up correctly, where the labor is approved and post automatically without review, it should just, you should never even really need to click on the approved and post labor unless it's outside of a contract or it's an exclusion or something like that. But, you know, so again, you can actually get rid of a lot of those errors and a lot of that work where you're having to go in and do the approved and post for labor every morning, that should just be an automatic process that is done automatically. Can I just throw in a little caveat there? Before you start turning on the automatic approved and post, make sure that you have your exclusion set up correctly. Because once a time entry is saved, it's automatically approved and posted and ready for invoicing, even though there's no dollar charge to the customer.

But you may still want to have a human take a look at it until you're certain that all of your contracts and exclusions are set up correctly and the information is flowing properly. That's all I wanted to add to that. But I have one more topic, you know, that's all tied into this whenever we're ready to move on to the third one. Yeah, go for it. Okay.

So finally, what's the easiest way to unapproved time that was already approved? It's not invoiced yet. I just pushed it through with the wrong adjusted hourly rate and I need it back to the approved and post to manually adjust the hourly rate for an overtime entry. This one's a simple one, at least for me. Do you want to take it?

Well, let me take it and then we can see whether we actually agree on this. So simply all I would do at that point is I would do a preview of the invoice and there's an option at the top of the invoice that just says unapproved. And all it will do is basically unapproved that time and send it back into approved and post. So very, very simple. Is that the same way you would do it?

That's the same way I would do it is I'd take a look at the invoice, preview the invoice, click the unpost button and go back to approved and post and make whatever changes I need. However, there is another way. You know, there's always more than one way to do things, right? Inside the admin system, you know, so if you hover over the Autotask logo, go down to admin and in the features and settings, there's a contracts and unapproved, sorry, contracts and unposting section where you can go in and find individual or even groups of time entries that you can block and, you know, unpost multiple time entries at a time. Yeah, absolutely.

I agree. I think that the admin is a great way to do it if you were doing anything on bulk. If you were just doing this with one or two invoices, it's fine to preview that invoice and do the unpost and do it at that point. But you're right, if you've got hundreds of invoices that you want to unpost, you don't want to look at approved and post and go, you know, into each invoice and preview it and then hit the unpost button because that's going to take some time. So, yeah, very simply, as you say, just click on the Autotask logo, go into admin, contracts and unposting, and there's actually an unpost section in there.

You can just unpost anything you want from there. So, I think these were some great topics today. Thank you to everybody who submitted their questions and I hope we can tackle some other topics for you in coming weeks. Absolutely. And in saying that, Raeanne, I mean, Raeanne and I spend a lot of time on the Autotask Facebook group.

So, if you wanted to reach out to us directly, that's where we are. We do also have our own Facebook group at psaimpact.net and we have our own website at psaimpact.net as well, where you can come on and ask us a question. So, you know, if anyone has any specific questions, either go to one of those social sites, ask the question there or just come on to our website at psaimpact.net, leave a question there and we'll happily answer it for you on the next podcast. Thanks for your time today, Chris. Great to talk to you as always.

Good to talk to you again, Raeanne. So, your PSA is the key to your MSP success. Go out and make an impact on your world today. Thank you for joining us today on PSA Impact. We hope you've learned something and that you'll join us next time when we answer new questions posed by our listeners.