Setting Up Timesheet Periods for Approvals

The timesheet approval process requires that employees log their time to Jira issues, then submit their timesheets to their team lead or manager at the end of the timesheet period. The team lead then reviews the timesheets and either approves or rejects them. Tempo Teams are required for the Timesheet Approval process.

Your organization doesn't need to use the timesheet approval process to log time in Tempo Timesheets, but approvals do provide some advantages. Timesheet approvals encourage accountability for tracking time since there’s a defined timesheet period in which to log time and get it approved. For financial or accounting teams, timesheet periods and approvals ensure more accuracy. These teams can close the periods to prevent changes to the timesheet data, and then they can get accurate numbers for month-end calculations such as payroll and customer billing.

If your organization is implementing the timesheet approval process, you'll need to set up Tempo Timesheets so that this can be done. Here's what to do:

• Grant Tempo Administrator permissions to the appropriate group of administrators. Doing this requires Jira Administrator Permissions.

• Configure the timesheet periods used for logging time and timesheet approvals.

• Close or re-open timesheet periods manually. This is usually done by the accounting team.

• Configure the Scheduler for sending email reminders to users to finish their timesheets, and for automatically closing (freezing) periods for logging time timesheets. Using the Scheduler is optional.

• Set up Tempo teams which are required for the timesheet approval process.

Timesheet Period Workflows

To use timesheet periods in the simplest way, you can configure the timesheet periods in Period Configuration and manually close them in Period Management. Timesheet periods are either open or closed for all users (or all approvers). When the timesheet period is closed, the timesheets are locked so that they can't be edited.

If you add the Scheduler to this process, you can send email reminders to users to finish logging their time for a certain period. Using the Scheduler also has the advantage of giving individual users grace periods in which to finish logging their time. The Scheduler uses the timesheet period settings in Period Configuration, but does not affect them. And closing (freezing) the periods set in the Scheduler does not affect the timesheet periods in Period Management.

Watch this video to see an example of how to set up timesheet periods and the Scheduler, as well as how to manually close timesheet periods:

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