HOW I SOLVED IT with KLIENT

Ensure Project Accuracy With Contextual Timesheet Approval

In this video, Dominic discusses ensuring project accuracy with timesheet approvals:

N Challenges without timesheet approval
N Best practices for approval
N Automated approval process
N Using mass approval UI
N Leveraging dashboards and reports

Timesheet approval is crucial for project accuracy and efficiency:

$Ensuring Accountability: Validates team accountability for accurate project data.
$Maintaining Budget Accuracy: Helps prevent project overruns and improve budget tracking.
$Reducing Billing Errors: Minimizes billing errors and customer disputes.
$Streamlining Processes: Enhances operational efficiency by reducing back and forth between departments.
$Improving Data Quality: Ensures high data quality through integrated systems and dashboards.

0:01 – Introduction
Greetings everyone! Dominic for another ‘How I Solved It With Klient’. Today, on how we can ensure project accuracy with contextual timesheets approval. First, not doing an approval process for your timesheets will generate some challenges. It will reduce the accountability of your team against the information they put on the projects. It will also reduce the accuracy of your project remaining budget so that you can have project overruns or poor reactions to changes on the project. It will obviously potentially generate errors on the billing, which could cause disputes or dissatisfaction of your customer, and ultimately reduce the efficiency of your operational process with back and forth between Project Management and the accounting part of your projects.

0:56 – Best Practices
So just to name a few best practices here related on that topic, which would help in using Klient is the real-time project tracking. Log time as often as possible, daily, worst case weekly, so that your information is as valid as possible. Launching your timesheets within an automated approval process, which can be contextualized based on types of projects and other business rules. Including your team members to validate the data, so the right person at the right time. If the PM is the best person, then we have the PM. If in some other context it should be Functional Manager, have that person validate the information. Operate within an integrated system so that you use the same information for project management, time tracking, and eventually invoicing. And as for any other processes, keeping an eye on dashboards is always a big plus.

1:58 – Timesheet Approval Process
So without further ado, let’s show how to achieve a few of those items within the Klient system. This all starts on My Timesheet where a consultant will be able to commit on their time, hitting the Submit button. Once this is clicked, it will launch into the approval processes as set by the system admin. The approval process can be easily configured by reaching Setup, and then getting on the configuration side into the Approval Processes section. That approval process will define what are the conditions, we could think of having several approvals for maybe billable projects, where timesheets might go to a Project Manager, then to accounting. Or a non-billable project, let’s say for training or any overheads that you might want to track so that it goes to Functional Managers in those cases. Each of the actions, approval, rejections, or recall, can be set to have email templates to automatically notify users that an action is required from them.

3:00 – Mass Approval UI
As an approver, I will have mass approval UI to help me look over all timesheets that are pending my action. I can look at those timesheets grouped by projects, project resource, role, or even account, based on the context that I’m in. The high-level information will provide more information of what I’m looking at. I can also eventually look into further details, hovering over this to look into all the comments or digging into a timesheet for further details. Once I’m done, I can mass select any timesheets that are okay and ready for the next step, and then I can simply select what is the status and then hitting Submit. This will launch the next step of our approval if it’s a multi-step approach.

3:43 – Dashboards and Reports
As for any other processes within our business, we should leverage the dashboards and reports to review the information based on different segmentations or grouping that we want to have. That information can eventually be used so that we create personalized flows to notify our users, if a timesheet is not submitted for example. We can also use the reports to have a global overview of all our comments or time entered, so that it’s another tool that can support the timesheet approval process.

4:14 – Conclusion
All in all, Klient will help you improve the quality of information by easily setting up contextualize approval process. Simplifying the review of your timesheets with the mass timesheet approval UI. Using the available data for personalized notification. Improve the data quality and review using the dashboards and reports. And ultimately reducing your invoicing cycle. Hopefully, you’ve seen a few tricks that will help in your business. Let us know if you have any questions or comments. Always a pleasure to help! Reach out to [email protected], it’ll be a pleasure. Thanks, have a great day!