The Components of the Review Cycle
The Xurrent Time Tracking functionality is simple and easy to use. But tracking time is still an overhead that no one enjoys. It takes continuous effort and monitoring to make sure that people do not forget to submit their time and that their timesheets are accurate.
That is why you need to define a review cycle. How strict this review cycle should be depends upon the requirements you have defined in the first step ‘Setting the Scene’. When your organization depends on the time registered in Xurrent to invoice the customers, this review cycle is business critical and directly affects the company’s finances.In such environments a well-designed and detailed review cycle is required. When time tracking is solely used to get a better insight in the cost of the services, the review cycle can be less stringent, but is still required to ensure that the results are reliable.
Xurrent provides the following functionality to set up a timesheet review cycle:
- Email notifications for people with an incomplete timesheet for the past week
- Time entry updates during timesheet reviews
- Timesheet locking
- Time entry corrections for locked timesheets
In the next exercises you will learn how time entries can be adjusted and locked during a review cycle.
Before making any adjustments, you want the people of your organization to completely fill in their timesheets. Xurrent can help you with this by sending out a warning email to the people who did not yet register all their time for the past week. This can be done by activating the email template ‘Past Week Incomplete’. That causes an email based on this template to be sent out early in each week to people who belong to an organization with timesheet settings and whose time entries for the previous week do not yet total 100% of their organization’s workweek.
Exercise – Enable the Email Template ‘Past Week Incomplete’
Make sure you enable the email template in the account in which the organization is defined. In this case that is the Widget International directory account.
- Log in to the Widget International account as howard.tanner@widget.com.
- Go to the Settings console
- Open the ‘Email Templates’ section and place the email template ‘Past Week Incomplete’ in Edit mode.
- Make sure the Disabled checkbox is unchecked.
Note: In the demo instances, all email templates are enabled by default, while in QA and production the email templates are disabled by default.