Late Timesheet Alerts Can Align with Resource Management
The Late Timesheet Alert is one of the most often implemented reminders or notifications to ensure users are compliant with your timesheet policy. What most people overlook, however, is how the timesheet alert can be setup in such a way that it is only triggered when resources are expected to do work in a week. If you look at the timesheet alert setup form, the basic structure is to identify a day that falls in the timesheet week to at least trigger the evaluation of a late timesheet alert need.
Identifying ‘4 days ago’ as the inclusion date to determine if a timesheet is missing or not yet submitted means that this timesheet alert will run on Monday and look for a timesheet with last Thursday’s date in it to determine if a timesheet has already been submitted or not. If the timesheet doesn’t exist or has not yet been submitted, then you have a series of options of who is included in receiving the reminder. The “Timesheet Required” checkbox is setting on the user’s demographic account record which gives you basic control as to who should be submitting a timesheet. The Users/Departments filter is how many customers control how often or when users receive the alert – in many cases this may be a time zone consideration with department handling regional association of users.
These two filters together provide the ability to notify people on a regular basis but the challenge comes into play when subcontractors or part-time resources are included. If you rely on the ‘timesheet required’ checkbox, they will get weekly reminders even if they are not asked to perform any work. Getting too many of these and subcontractors start to ignore them, thus they lose their effectiveness. Consider 2 other options – users with current task assignment and/or current booking. The word ‘current’ in this case means the resource is expected to perform work during the timesheet period being reviewed by the alert (last week). If you are using task assignments with date or bookings to perform resource management, this will be the final piece of the puzzle to only send reminders to subcontractors that are scheduled to do work but have not yet submitted their timesheet for that time period. Now you can use the ‘timesheet required’ and the resource management options to more accurately send reminders!!!
NOTE: Make sure to select ‘only users who meet ALL of the criteria below’ when combining options – this way you won’t accidentally send more alerts than planned because a subcontractor only met part of the criteria!
