Getting Started

It’s easy to get started with Time Sheet Approvals.

Here’s how:

1. Log into your TSheets account as an administrator
2. Go to the “Add-Ons” section found under “My Account”
3. Install the “Approvals” add-on
4. Launch the add-on from the main menu (on the left)

To ensure that the Approval add-on functions correctly please ensure the following is set on your account:

• Payroll Period (learn more)

Using Time Sheet Approvals

Generating approval reports and approving/unapproving time sheets couldn’t be easier.

Follow the steps below to see how:

1. Launch the Approvals add-on from the main menu (on the left)
2. Select a payroll period (if defined), or a custom date range
3. Select any other report criteria and click “View Approval Report”
4. If you have employees with unapproved/approved time sheets, you’ll see them below
5. Click “Approve” or “Unapprove” for each employee
6. Congratulations.  You just approved/unapproved time sheets for that pay period.

Here are a couple of tips to make a note of:

• You can view the individual time sheets that make up the total for an employee by clicking on the “view details” link or the green plus in the upper right-hand corner of the blue employee total box.
• Toggle between all, approved and unapproved results by clicking on the corresponding tabs across the top of the employee blocks.

What Now?

You might be wondering what happens when you “Approve” an employee’s time sheets for a pay period.  Once time sheets have been approved, all time sheets through the end of that pay period will be locked and cannot be modified by anyone.  This ensures that your payroll data is intact and provides a mechanism to ensure that once approved, these time sheets will not be edited.  If for some reason you do need to make edits, an admin would need to unapprove the time period first, then re-approve after the changes were made.  As always, all actions related to the time sheets are logged in your account system log for your review at any time.

Questions or comments?  Please post them below.

Local Wisdom is a website development shop that uses TSheets to track their time both internally and for time spent on projects for their clients.  It’s wonderful to get a glimpse into how a customer is using our software, and now you can too! They’ve given a great overview of the ways that TSheets allows you to track time manually or in real-time with a single click of the mouse.  Stop on over and have a look!

How To

It’s easy to assign an employee as a group manager.  Here’s how:

1. From your TSheets admin account, click the “Manage Employees” menu item
2. In the bottom area of the “Manage Employees” window, click the “Manage Groups” link
3. The red “Manage Group” tool appears.  If you have groups already, you’ll notice three icons to the right of the group name.  They perform the following functions (in order): Assign Managers, Rename Group and Delete Group.  Click the first one (Assign Managers).
   
   
4. An area should appear that allows you to assign employees as managers.  Just start typing their name and the box should auto complete.  Select their name and then press the green plus next to the input box.
   
5. Assigned managers show up below with a red minus button to the left.  This button allows you to un-assign users as managers of that group.
6. That’s it. Once a group manager logs in, they will essentially have admin rights over the users that are members of the managed group.

This is a powerful new feature that is flexible enough to allow TSheets to accommodate businesses who rely on department or group managers to function.

This feature is included in our Business and Platinum accounts at no additional cost.

Please post all questions/comments below.

Time Tracking with Twitter

Today we have another exciting announcement - TSheets has leveraged the Twitter API to create a link between our services. TSheets users with Twitter accounts can now send direct messages to @tsheets to start or stop the clock, switch job codes, or add notes to their work-log.

Text messaging for international users

One of the unexpected benefits we quickly discovered is if you’re outside the US and want to send text messages to track your time, you can now do it! Twitter has phone numbers that allow almost anyone in any country to send a text message to @tsheets via twitter. Tracking your time from your cell just got easier :)

Learn More

Check out our Twitter integration page where you can see examples, screenshots, and more. If you don’t already have a TSheets account now’s the time. Enter coupon code “TS0420″ when signing up and get $20 credit instantly applied to your paid account. (offer expires May 1st 2009)

So now in addition to voice recognition, a polished iPhone web-app, a Google gadget, text messaging, a Mac widget, and your personalized TSheets account page, you’re ready to rock the clock with Twitter.

We now have the ability to clock employees in/out from our iPhone interface via the Who’s Working list.  This is great news for those that manage crews as it makes it simple to clock in/out members of your crew, all from a simple to use interface.

Here’s how it works:

• Visit your TSheets account in your iPhone
• Log in as an admin or a user with permission to manage timesheets
• From the Who’s Working list you’ll be able to “click” (touch actually) users from the list
• Once you’ve selected a user, you’ll be taken to that user’s time card view (you’ll notice a green box at the top stating that you’re currently working as that user).
• Perform the desired function for that user (clock in/out, switch job codes, add notes)
• When complete simply tap the “exit” link next to the user’s name in the green box at the top

We hope this new feature helps save time (and money) for your business.  If you have any comments/suggestions please don’t hesitate to post them below.

Now within your TSheets account preferences you may specify what day you want your week to start on, and what you want your payroll period to be.  For example, you could specify that you have a semi-monthly payroll period - the first period ending on the 14th and the second payroll period ending at month-end.  And you can specify that your week starts on Monday.  How these settings affect reports is best illustrated by some pictures.

As you can see, overtime must be calculated based on the total hours for a given work week, and should be independent of what your payroll period start and end dates are.  Most companies process their payroll on a bi-weekly basis specifically so that they can avoid this kind of confusing calculation.  But if you have semi-monthly pay periods - or you want the ability to put in an arbitrary set of reporting dates, set the ‘Week Starts On’ appropriately for your account and TSheets will make sure that overtime calculations are handled appropriately.

You access these new settings by going to My Account -> Advanced, and then clicking on the Report Options tab

Did you know that you can use a text message to clock in and out of TSheets?  Check out this video to see how easy it is.

Something you should know - when you install the Texting Addon in your TSheets account, you gain the ability to assign short codes, or aliases, to all of your job codes.  This means that instead of texting “T start Project WannaPayMe”, your life is simplified by being able to text “T start pw”.  And we even make it easy to print out a nice little SMS Cheat Sheet that contains a list of your job codes and their corresponding aliases, so that you can stick it in your wallet for easy reference when you’re traveling about.

Of course, we need to mention that you’re responsible for any charges on your phone plan related to text messages, but most plans include it nowadays.  Also, right now our texting addon is only available to customers who are able to send texts to a US short code.  However, we have plans for a way to accommodate all of our international customers out there.  Stay tuned!

Well not any longer.  You may now do everything from your mobile device that you need to in regards to timesheet editing.  That’s right, you can add a new timesheet, modify start and stop times, change jobcodes, delete timesheets, all from that tiny web browser held in the palm of your hand (access the mobile version of your account by visiting your TSheets account from your mobile web browser).  It’s a little easier to show than explain, so check out this video.  This is all accessible from our mobile interface.

Hope you enjoyed it. Post any questions below.

The invoicing works the same, except now you can optionally send the information to FreshBooks and generate a printable PDF of your invoice.

It’s simple to get started:

1. Log in to your TSheets account (as an admin)
2. Under My Account/Add Ons, install the Invoicing Add on
3. You’ll now have the ability to assign billable rates to your job codes (done through the “Manage Job-Codes” feature)
   
4. To generate an invoice, click the “Invoicing” menu item
5. A new window will appear allowing you to customize the invoice criteria
6. Once you have generated a preview of your invoice, you can finalize this invoice and generate a printable PDF by clicking the “Finalize Invoice and Generate PDF” button.  This will mark time contained within the invoice as “Invoiced” and will lock these records from editing (don’t worry, you can always unlock them if you need to), and will also provide you with a link to retreive the PDF version of your invoice.

Our built-in invoicing feature should make it easy (and quick) to turn your hours tracked with TSheets into money earned.

Also, in our new beta Time Card the task total and the day total tallies are sometimes off by an hour or two.  This is also a display-only problem, and doesn’t affect the actual time tracked.  We’re working to fix this quickly as well.

We’ll update this post once we have another update - thank you for your patience!

The TSheets Crew

3/12/2009 Update: We have the bug in the new Time Card fixed. Now when you clock in the total worked time should come up properly. Let us know if you see any strange behavior with it!

3/25/2009 Update: The Time Slider view now works correctly when sliding from a week with one timezone to a week with a different timezone.  Let us know if you experience any other issues!