Speeding Up Billing and Invoicing in OpenAir

Speed up billing and invoicing in OpenAir using the feature Allow project approved time to be billed. This feature affects the timesheet approval process by allowing time entries that have been approved at the project level to be billed prior to user level approvals. When generating charges these time entries will be picked up by time billing rules even if they are on a timesheet that hasn’t been approved yet.

Normally in OpenAir both levels of time approval (project and user) must be completed for time entries to become available for billing. Since a user will typically enter time entries for more than one project on a single timesheet, and often projects will have unique approvers or approval processes, multiple approvers will have to do their part before any time can be billed. This can cause delay in billing if there are issues with the approval of time entries for one or more projects, since all project level approvals need to be completed before the timesheet goes to the user level approver/approval process. Time may have been mis-applied to the wrong project or task, there could be budgetary issues, or the project level approver may be unavailable or otherwise slow to approve time in their own approval queue. Regardless of the issue, approved time entries will be held back from billing while the rest of the timesheet’s entries are dealt with.

In the example below we see that two of our project-level approvers have approved time for their projects, but approval is still pending for a third project, so the timesheet is still in Submitted status:

The feature Allow project approved time to be billed will bypass these delays by allowing approved time entries to be available for billing without waiting for the corresponding timesheet to be approved. This is a great option for organizations that seek speedy billing and invoicing, or when lingering time entry and/or time approval issues disrupt normal billing operations.

Using the example above, enabling Allow project approved time to be billed would mean that the time entries for the two approved projects would be available for billing while the third project’s approval is pending.

Notes:

• The feature will still follow the approval process configured at the project and user level. If the time entry has been approved at the project level, then it will be followed by the user level approval. Once the time entry has been approved and a user runs a billing for the project associated with that time entry, then the system will create a billing transaction and charge.
• A charge and a billing transaction will still be created for the specific time entry even if the Timesheet is not fully approved.
• If the feature Line Item Rejection in Timesheets is enabled, and if a time entry has been rejected, there’s no effect in the feature. The feature Allow project approved time to be billed only focuses on the time entry that has been approved.