Most organizations expect to have their office staff use a weekly timesheet and indeed, this is why TimeControl is designed with a weekly timesheet structure. Once data is entered into TimeControl and approved, it is saved in a ‘Posted’ format where the structure of the data changes from a 7-day period into a day-by-day format. This allows the data to be used in a much more flexible way for reporting and exporting into various systems.

When the data is posted, it becomes very simple to request a range of dates which exactly match the needs of payroll, billing or Finance for financial reporting. Thiss works well in most cases when the data is accepted into these systems following the close of the business week and the completion of any timesheets which are included in the period.

TimeControl’s “Missing Timesheet Report” and “Missing Timesheet Email Notification” functions are important here to ensure that all timesheets have completed the approval process and are represented in the exported or reported data.

There are, however, occasions when data is so time-critical that the client wishes to report on it right up to the end of the day before even if that occurs in the middle of the week. There are organizations whose payroll requirements oblige them to pay for time up to and including yesterday’s efforts. There are other organizations that have billing that is so time sensitive that it must be sent immediately and include any hours up to and including the day before. For these organizations, TimeControl has created the Posted/Unposted report. It is specifically designed for those situations where data must be pulled from TimeControl in the middle of the week for use in a reporting situation.

The report requests a date range and then provides all the hours within that range of both posted timesheet data and unposted timesheet data from the middle of the current week. The data is listed into a single format so that it can be used in either a report or exported into Excel and then sent to other systems. If, for example a data range were to go from the 1st of September 2008 (a Monday) until the 30th of September 2008 (a Tuesday) and the requirement was to have reports completed for September billing no later than the end of business on October 1st (a Wednesday) then the Posted/Unposted report would take posted data for the weeks of September 1st, 8th, 15th and 22nd. This data would have already been collected, approved and posted. The report would also add the unposted data from Monday September 28th and Tuesday September 29th.

Since the data may be taken from a current timesheet which has not been released and therefore has not been subjected to any business rules created in the TimeControl Validation Rule module, it is important to set up a process to ensure that the data is used properly.

If your organization has one of the situations where you will require immediate mid-week access to timesheet data, there are several considerations to put into your process:

Completeness
Since the Missing Timesheet report looks at completed timesheets, it will not be useful to determine if all timesheets have data which is entered into them by the middle of the week. In our example above, the timesheets of September 28th will all be in progress. A report should be included in your process which is run by the TimeControl Administrator of “unposted data” for that date range (in our example, it would be for September 28-29) which lists all pertinent users and the time against that week. If there are missing timesheets, those users will have to be contact to ensure they enter data for this partial period.

Data Integrity
Since time is being reported at mid-week, many of the usual TimeControl tests for data integrity such as Validation Rules have not been applied to the timesheet data yet. This means that there may be errors in the partial timesheet data that is reported that may be caught by a business rule at the end of the week and will need to be corrected. Since the purpose of taking the data mid-week is to send it to another system or use it for external purposes such as payroll or billing or financial reporting, it is important to check for any adjustments after the fact.

This can be done by keeping a copy of the Posted/Unposted report which is used for the export and comparing it to the same report done following the posting process. When the report is run for the same date range after the end of the week, it will obviously be taking data A simple comparison can be done between the two reports to check for any discrepancies (Typically they would be quite rare).

Posted/Unposted process
The following would be the typical steps in a process where the Posted/Unposted process would be required:

1. Use unposted report to check what users have not entered data for the unposted period this week
2. Contact those users who have not entered data for the partial week and ensure they have completed any timesheet entries which must be included in this report
3. Run the Posted/Unposted report for the complete period required
4. Send the report to the system required (e.g. Payroll, Billing, Finance). Save a copy for reference
5. Following the completion of this week’s timesheet approval process, run the Posted/Unposted report again for the same period and compare for any discrepancies between reports
6. Report any discrepancies to the systems required