Approving my Employees' Time Sheets

One of your tasks as a line manager is to view the requests for weekly time sheet approvals of your team and decide whether or not to approve them.

When team members submit time sheet requests to you, they appear in your home screen in the To Do tile under Time Sheet Requests Waiting For My Approval on your home page.

To view a request, click it.

Here you can see an example:

The time sheet approval screen layout and contents are determined by how your organization has set up the time sheet for approvers. The above example shows you how an approval screen for an employee time sheet might look like. It contains a list of all the time valuation entries in a time sheet submitted for approval by Wilma Sown. Each time valuation entry consists of the time pay type, number of hours recorded against the time pay type, deviating cost center (if applicable), and booking date. The complete list of the time valuation entries you see on the approval screen is known as the time valuation result.

Note

When you approve an employee's time sheet, you are in effect approving the time valuation result from the time sheet. This result is the breakdown of all time valuation entries for the week in question - a breakdown of time

recorded by your employee (and also of other time such as paid absences) which is mapped to the relevant time pay types, and listed by date. The time pay types you see on the approval screen are payroll-relevant time valuation entries.

You must check the time valuation result calculated by the program and click the appropriate button on the approval screen to:

● Approve the request

The time sheet status is changed from To be approved to Approved and the weekly time sheet is locked permanently against further corrections, unless you have the authorization to maintain your employees' time sheets on their behalf.

Approving the time valuation result means that it will be sent to payroll and the employee will be paid based on the valuation result. Posting will be made to any deviating cost centers listed in the time valuation result.

Where no deviating cost center is specified, posting will be made to the default cost center.

● Decline the request

The time sheet status is changed from To be approved back to To be submitted. The weekly time sheet is opened again for data entry, and the employee can make the necessary corrections before submitting the time sheet for approval once more.

● Add and post a comment

The time sheet status does not change when you post a comment. You can do that, for example, if you need to ask your employee for more information before approving or declining a time sheet. The employee who sent the request will receive a notification mail and can see the comment in the activity section of the request.

The employee is also informed of your decision or comment by e-mail for all three cases listed above.

2.1.1 Approving Retroactive Changes to Submitted and Already-Approved Time Sheets

Employees in your organization, where permitted, can withdraw and amend time sheets that have been submitted and/or approved in the past. Such changes to past time sheets are also called retroactive changes. Specific rules may exist to control these retroactive changes made to past time sheets by employees. As with time recording on-behalf (see next section), such rules that may apply to the employees do not apply to you when you want to change or update time sheets from your employees.

Your employees can withdraw a time sheet they've submitted, update it and send it back to you for approval. They can also make amendments to a time sheet you have already approved, and resubmit it to you for approval of the amendments they have made.

Written for your employees, Changing Submitted or Already-Approved Time Sheets [page 64] will help you understand the difference between withdrawing time sheets and making amendments to them.

In both cases, as a manager, you must approve these changes to time sheets from previous periods:

When an employee withdraws and resends a newer version of a past timesheet...

The situation here is relatively simple because you haven't yet approved the timesheet your employee wants to change. The employee withdraws the original time sheet, updates it, and sends it back for your approval. The updated version appears in your approvals worklist with the original status To be approved.

When an employee amends a timesheet you have already approved...

Where permitted, an employee can open an already-approved time sheet in the past (that lies within the period allowed for changes), make amendments to it and resubmit it to you so that you can approve the amended version. It could be the case that the time sheet has already been processed through payroll. This is not a problem, as the system is set up to handle payroll recalculations in these cases.

The important thing for you as a manager is that you have the information you need to make the right approval decision on an amended time sheet you have previously approved. When an employee clicks the Make

Amendments button on a time sheet, a new version of the time sheet is created. The old time sheet remains unchanged in the system with the original approved status. When your employee submits the amended version of the time sheet, you have to decide whether you can approve it or not. Helpful here, of course, is to be able to directly compare the time sheet you originally approved with the amended one you need to decide on.

You can make this comparison directly on the approval screen by clicking the quick card icon in the Replaces field.

This opens up a new screen where you can view the originally-approved time sheet.

After you approve the amended version of the time sheet, the original version of the time sheet remains in the system with the updated status Cancelled and is replaced in the system by the new version. Data replication to payroll is always triggered and Employee Central payroll handles the processing of this changed data.

Making correct approval decisions

Helping your employees get their time and attendance data right is obviously an important part of your role. To help you achieve this and to make the correct approval decisions, the payroll time sheet component ensures there is always a direct connection (or reference) between original and amended time sheets. This allows you to compare “old v new” time sheets and get your approvals right, while giving you the transparency you need so that you can explain to your employees, for example, the direct effects amending time sheet data can have on their pay.

Note

How is the approval of timesheets for time periods in the past affected by a change of approver?

The approving manager is the manager entered in the Supervisor field of the Job Information record valid on the day the time sheet is submitted. If the change of manager involves a new manager taking over responsibility within the employee’s current org unit, then the new manager (as entered in the Supervisor field) will, from the date of this change, receive time sheet approval requests also for time periods in the past for this org unit. This is what you might expect to happen.

However, if the change of approving manager is caused by the employee moving to a different org unit, you might also expect that time sheets submitted for time periods when the employee was in the previous org unit will go to the previous manager for approval. This is not the case. All time sheets submitted after the change in the Supervisor field are sent to the new manager, even those related to any previous org unit.

But this is easily fixed. Where the employee has moved to a new org unit, as the new manager, you can simply delegate the approval requests for time periods in the past relating to the old org unit to the employee’s previous manager.

Example

An employee has a new manager within his existing org unit who will approve his time sheets from February 01 onwards, in the current year. The employee submits a time sheet for a time period before the new manager was assigned, let’s say the first working week in January of the current year. This time sheet is forwarded for approval to the new manager.

Example

An employee has a new manager due to a move to a new org unit. The new manager will approve his time sheets from February 01 onwards, in the current year. The employee submits a time sheet for a week in January involving the previous org unit. The new manager also receives this time sheet. As the new manager, you do not need approve this time sheet, but instead click Delegate and select the previous manager to pass this time sheet on to.