For those who may have a lot of experience with project-status timesheets like those found in Microsoft Project Server and Primavera, you might expect that the only hours you can add to your timesheet are to assignments you’ve already been given.

That’s not necessarily true with TimeControl.

By default, TimeControl allows any employee to charge time any project or any task. If you want the system to be more restrictive you can do so by using the Employee Table Project and Charge filters. You can even make a filter that says ‘only show tasks to which I’ve been assigned’ (Ask HMS technical support to provide you this filter if you need it.)
We created TimeControl this way because of the incredibly common occurrence of someone doing time during the week on a task to which they weren’t assigned on Monday morning. Oh, you might want to make things a bit more restrictive. Not showing closed projects or unstarted projects or closed tasks for example, but otherwise, it’s very common for TimeControl systems to allow time to be charged on tasks to which you’re not assigned.

But what happens when the timesheet data goes back to the project management tool?
That’s a very good question. TimeControl allows for this too but it might work differently with each project management tool. When data is sent back to the scheduling system, TimeControl gives the user an option to decide what to do when a task is found but an assignment is not. If the user elects to make an assignment during the transfer, then TimeControl will do so. In Microsoft Project, the assignment’s “Work” field will have the same number of hours as the “Actual Work” that we’re transferring. That is something you may want to check and possibly adjust. In Open Plan and Primavera, the assignment’s assigned hours can be equal to the hours transferred or to zero. Having no value in the expected assignment would be the more accurate answer as the person really didn’t have that assignment to start with. The results of the TimeControl transfer are always displayed in the Link log which can be saved and reviewed later.

This may require implementing a project management process of checking for any new assignments in the project for tasks that are complete and clearing the original assignments of the people who will now not be required to do the work.

The great news about this is that the assignments can be created by TimeControl automatically as part of the transfer process.