Understanding the Project Time Approval Workflow

Some features are not yet available to all customers. To participate in Tempo's Early Access Program and gain access to this feature, visit our TempoLab page.

Project time is the time your project team spends working on your Tempo project. Your team logs time through Tempo Timesheets, and any time associated with items in your project scope is considered project time. Your project time can include work from multiple teams and departments.

When your team submits their timesheets and Project Time Approval is enabled, you can review the time they have spent on your project. This allows you to monitor your labor costs more granularly on the same cadence as Timesheets.

Project hours that are approved in Financial Manager don’t impact the team members' submitted timesheets. Similarly, the approved hours in the team members' timesheets have no impact on the status of the project hours in Financial Manager.

However, to change the status of the submitted project hours, the timesheet must be either Waiting for Approval or Reopened. For example, if you rejected a team member’s project time, but the timesheet was approved, their timesheet must be reopened so they can update their worklogs.

Before You Begin

Project Time Approval must be enabled for Financial Manager by a Tempo administrator, and it must also be enabled for your project. If Project Time Approval is not enabled, you can’t view any tasks or receive emails.

Project Time Approval Workflow

TempoLab When users log the time they’ve worked on a Jira task that’s associated with a project scope, the time is counted toward that project’s time. This time is visible when they view their timesheets or current period.
TempoLab When users submit their timesheet for approval, they can choose who can review their Tempo project time. If they’ve worked on multiple Tempo projects, they can choose a project time approver for each project.
An email request is sent to the project time approver to approve the submitted hours.
In Financial Manager’s Approval tab, a project time approver can drill down in the Timesheet view to see the logged hours before approving the hours for the specific projects.
When a project owner approves or rejects the submitted hours, the logged hours are marked accordingly. This completes the approval process, and no further action is required.

If project owners choose to reject the submitted hours, they can decide to follow up with the team leads in order to advise their team members to revise and resubmit the hours for approval.

Approval Status

The approval status shows the status of the project hours from the time they are logged to the time they are approved or rejected in the Project Time Approval workflow.

Status	Description	Actions

Status	Description	Actions
Open	Hours appear in the Open status for the duration of the open period and before they are submitted in My Work. This gives project owners a heads-up about the hours that require approval.	A team member can Submit their timesheet and project time for approval.
Waiting for approval	Hours are submitted and waiting to be approved by the project owner. An email is sent to the inbox to notify project owners that team members' hours for their projects were submitted.	Project Time Approvers can Approve or Reject time.
Approved	Project hours are approved by the project owner. Hours are marked as approved.	N/A
Rejected	Project hours are rejected by the project owner. Hours are marked as rejected. No notification is sent to the team members.	To change the rejected status, the timesheet must be reopened by a team lead and resubmitted with corrected hours.

Notification Emails

A notification email is sent to project time approvers when:

The project is In progress or On Hold status.
If hours are logged when the project is in Completed status, then no email requests are sent.

The submitted timesheets belong to a team member who is part of the current project's team.
The number of hours that are submitted in the period is more than 0 hours.

The Waiting for Approval email is sent to the project time approver with a link to access the hours in the timesheet view. This view shows a breakdown of the hours worked on the project.

A notification email is sent to project team members when:

Their hours have been Approved or Rejected.
When their project time is rejected, the project time approver can leave a note with instructions.