Best Practice Guide for NetSuite OpenAir Timesheets

Timesheets are essential for tracking time spent on tasks, projects, and clients. They provide valuable data for billing, payroll, tracking project costs, process optimization, HR planning, and other critical business functions. But keeping timesheets is a hassle; it is complex, demanding, and time-consuming.

Fortunately, you can use advanced online time-tracking software to make the process worthwhile. NetSuite OpenAir is a modern PSA tool with robust features and functionalities to support your timesheet compliance needs. Its usefulness extends beyond time-tracking abilities. However, there are certain best practices that you should adopt to unlock its full potential and make it work for you.

In this short guide, we’ll cover timesheet best practices, from setting up timesheets, features, and configurations to handling timesheet corrections.

Timesheet Setup

How you set up a timesheet in OpenAir is crucial to ensuring it efficiently serves its intended purpose. OpenAir provides you with several timesheet setup options. The following are some key factors to consider when setting up a timesheet in OpenAir.

Timesheet Rules

Timesheet rules are essential and something you should include from the start. They consider the minimum and maximum hours for entry, allowing you to enforce business policies on users as they enter their time. Using percentages of scheduled min/max hours for timesheet rules is highly advisable.

Timesheet Periods

Another important factor is how your timesheet period looks in your current system versus how you’d want them to look in OpenAir. You can tweak timesheet periods in OpenAir to ensure consistency with your company’s internal requirements. For instance, you can set timesheets to be submitted daily, weekly, monthly, semi-monthly, etc. Your choice will mostly be determined by your accounting periods, billing needs, or what days of the week you want to start your time.

Timesheet Alerts

Alerts can be very beneficial and come in handy in helping users of all kinds, including project managers, approvers, or consultants, to be mindful of their timesheet tasks. You can set OpenAir to send alerts to end users who might have forgotten to submit their time, notify them of overdue timesheets, or signal that approvals are due.

Another helpful feature for organizations that work across multiple time zones is configuring alert settings for different time zones. You can find this setting under ‘Department Filters’ in the timesheet alerts – making timesheet alerts even more effective by sending based on a user’s local time zone.

Out of the box, there is a timesheet alert feature that can send an email to alert the user of their timesheet task. This feature can easily be extended with OpenAir scripting to integrate alerts with Slack, Twilio, or other communication tools that are standard within your organization.

Advanced Reporting

Do you want to be able to monitor what is happening with the timesheet process? You can achieve this OpenAir through Timesheet Status. It is a useful advanced report that lets you have an overview of users and their status regarding timesheets, including who has not started on their timesheet, who has submitted, who is late on their submission, whose timesheet is waiting for approval, etc.

Month-End Controls

Users often struggle with month-end timesheets – especially with heavy time and material billing. For example, what do you do when a month ends on a Wednesday? Do you close the month the Friday before or wait until the Friday after? You can solve this problem with OpenAir’s month-end controls, which lets you systematically and automatically split weeks and monthly calendars.

Data Capture

Besides setup, another major timesheet issue is data capture which speaks to different data elements that should be collected throughout the timesheet process. OpenAir gives you multiple options for data capture, as discussed below:

Payroll Type

OpenAir offers the capability to use payroll types in timesheets. It is a standard field available in timesheet settings. Payroll type is a useful OpenAir attribute for determining regular or overtime work when time types are used for different purposes. Another common use case for payroll type is clarifying what state a user works in when working on timesheets which is essential for reporting on time within those different locations and for tax reasons.

Time Type

Time types are a more popular segregation and categorization option for timesheet entries. The feature allows users to make timesheet entries as regular, overtime, or personal time. It’s a valuable control field that may come in handy when determining billable or non-billable travel, paid time off, etc. Another time type uses different locations in the same way as payroll types.

Time Entries

The time entry tab came out a few years ago and has proven to be a useful feature for individual time entries. Its most significant benefit is saving you the hassle of running a report to see time entries. All you need to do is open Timesheets, go to time entries, filter by project or customer, and see all the details.

A least explored but extremely useful feature for time entries is the ability to monitor your subcontractors in terms of the time they enter, what they bill, and what has been processed. It also allows you to mark timesheets as paid.

Timesheet Population

Now that you’ve set up timesheets and determined data capture approaches, how do you save yourself time in completing timesheets? You can populate timesheets using a variety of different options in OpenAir. These options include:

Auto-Populate

Auto-Populate is a timesheet setting that allows you to auto-fill hours and notes from bookings. However, auto-population is a challenging feature with certain underlying risks requiring prior consideration. For example, it is only applicable when everyone is booked the same number of hours a day for the same project.

The auto-population feature is also useful for approving scheduled requests or creating time entries.

Another impressive auto-population feature in OpenAir is timesheet cloning. When creating a new timesheet for a consistent set of projects week over week, timesheet cloning is one of the most efficient features. It allows you to populate the previous periods (in this case, the previous week’s) projects.

Timesheet Corrections

The timesheet correction feature allows you to edit previously processed timesheets. In OpenAir, if the timesheet has been approved but has not been run through the billing process, simply unapproved it, alert the end user to make the necessary changes, and resubmit it. However, note that you cannot correct a timesheet once it has gone through a billing rule.

Alternatively, you can create an overlapping timesheet with adjustments and submit it. This is necessary if the timesheet entries cannot be unapproved because they have already been processed for billing.

Adjusting an approved timesheet is an even better option for already processed timesheets because creating an overlapping timesheet can get messy. It also does not require any proxy capabilities. The process is as discussed below:

Timesheet Adjustment

An approved timesheet may be adjusted if the timesheet adjustment feature is activated (internal switch). Click on the light bulb at the top of the page and click ‘adjust’ to open the timesheet to make the changes. A new timesheet will be generated and set for auto-approval to prevent any proxy requirement.

Summary

Timesheets are often overlooked as one of the most important processes within professional services. The timesheet data feeds the project and financial systems for billing, payroll, tracking project costs, and revenue reporting. Is your timesheet system tuned to meet your organization’s goals? Contact us for a business efficiency assessment to ensure you are taking advantage of the many OpenAir features to optimize this critical process.