The Contract Timesheets function is used to enter hours and costs for employees and non-employees. Costs can be allocated to contracts in a timely fashion – if proper disciplines are in place, within a few days of each week end – which presents an accurate depiction of a project’s cost. You can record time against contracts for professional or salaried staff weekly, while not affecting the payroll cycle for those employees.

Contract Timesheets is designed to allocate time at a standard rate to contracts or General Ledger accounts, assets, or workshops for both employees and non-employees. Time is entered for individuals on a weekly basis, uses a review and approval process, and can be posted without regard to payroll processing. Standard activity-based rates can be set up by grade or by employee and can be varied by activity or contract. Timesheets can be configured to allow the rate to be overridden when the timesheet is entered.

This feature’s best use is to allow users to capture and record time against contracts for professional or salaried staff whose payment does not depend on the pre-existence of a time-sheet, rather their costs are recovered or allocated just after the event. It assumes that you can calculate a standard cost per individual per hour.

This feature expects at least a full-days’ time to be entered for each employee otherwise it will report an incomplete day.

This feature expects time records to be entered weekly, probably by individuals themselves, but not necessarily. As stated above it makes use of a “standard cost” and cannot easily be adjusted for the “actual cost”.

Because of this, in some contracts with clients such a basis may not be acceptable.

This is not easily usable as a means of time-sheet input for payroll purposes.

The operation of this feature requires the set up in the General Ledger of two (sets) of control accounts

It is recommended that the accounts marked (1) and (2) are control accounts, probably not part of normal balance sheet reporting and that these account pairs are regularly inspected for differences.

Over the period (say) of a year these differences ought to be relatively small, and the value in (1) ought to exceed (2) – this means that at least costs have been over recovered.

Obviously any differences need to be accounted for somewhere either as a general overheads, or pro-rated across contracts in some way.

Control account (1) is determined by the timesheet employee records.

Control Account (2) is determined by your Payroll/Salaries system.

By implication then it will probably be necessary to make changes to your payroll configuration.

If you are using GL for financial reporting from Coins ERP+, changes may be required to any configurable reports to handle these control account pairs appropriately.

Generally standard costs are based on the individual’s employment costs divided by a certain budgeted or expected re-chargeable days or hours,

Example

The drawback with such exact methods that if this is done on an individual basis then

Better then, for this reason that, a grading or banding method is used to work out standard costs, e.g. all Junior Surveyors are costed at $35.00 per hour, or anyone in the salary band $25,000 to $34,999 is costs at $31.25 per hour. Also note that not all activities need to carry a cost.

Depending on the algorithm you choose it is likely that certain overhead activities would carry a zero cost, i.e. you are using the system to record such time.

These kind of activities would be holidays, sickness, unpaid non-chargeable overtime etc.

Timesheet Activities in Timesheets > Setup allows you to set up the activities you want to record time against on Contract Timesheets. You can set up default analysis by activity. You must set up activities to use Contract Timesheets.

In the example shown in Timesheet Activities screen, an Activity has been set up to allow employees to record time spent attending corporate training. The G&A account to capture the cost of training will be defined in the timesheet activity and default to the timesheet when an employee references the activity for training.

Timesheet Activities screen

If the JC parameter USETSUOM is not blank, a UOM field lets you select the units of measure (for example, regular hours or overtime hours) that can be used for each activity.

Use Masking for the analysis as appropriate.

The above example shows the capability of the feature rather than a recommended structure.

For example we might suggest that all contract recoverable time is preceded by “C” and overhead non-recoverable time is preceded by “O”.

The Entry column determines the default method of costing where 1 = contract, 3 = GL and 5 = Asset.

Employee Department in Timesheets > Setup allows you to group timesheet employees for reporting and security purposes. You must set up at least one department and assign employees to it. A sample screen is shown in Employee Department screen.

Employee Department screen

This is (in effect) memo data only and is used to select employees for reporting and bulk updating. It has no processing effect.

You might also want to have a department for ex-employees to allow you to track historical reports.

Employee Grades in Timesheets > Setup contains a list of activities associated with the grade (see Employee Grades screen). Employees are assigned grades in Contract Status.

The association of a grade to an employee allows you to provide a pre-defined list of activities that an employee can use during Contract Timesheet Entry. The rates apply to any employee who belongs to the grade. Follow the link on the Grade to add the activities.

Employee Grades screen

If the JC parameter USETSUOM is not blank, you can set up multiple rates (regular hours, overtime hours and double time hours) for each activity by entering separate records and selecting different values in the UOM field.

Notice that you are able to add contract-specific rates, as well as date-specific rates (see Employee Grade Rates screen).

Employee Grade Rates screen

For the Recharge Rate for the activity, recharge rates are only used for workshop PC service tickets.

Employees (and non-employees) must be set up in Contract Status > Timesheets > Employees (see Employees screen) before you can enter time for them in Contract Timesheets.

Employees screen

If an employee is also a user and is required to enter their own contract timesheet, the Employee ID must be the same as their Coins ERP+ Login and JC parameter TSDEFEMP must be set to (Y)es.

Indicate if the employee is Non-costed. If a timesheet line is entered for a contract whose contract group is in this list, AND the employee is an overhead employee (the Non-costed field in Employees is ticked), no cost transaction is created for that timesheet line when the timesheets are posted. However, if overhead category staff are allocated to a direct contract, or normally costed staff are allocated to an overhead contract, the costing to the contract will occur.

You must enter a valid Cost Method and Analysis which will receive the credit entries when contract timesheets are posted. Generally, employees are paid through payroll, and the expense is posted to a G&A Expense account. That same account, or a related contra account, is entered here to receive the credit once contract cost expenses are allocated at an activity based rate.

You need to indicate who will be allowed to review and approve this employee’s timesheets. Likewise, if the employee is a COINS user, you can indicate if that employee is allowed to review and approve timesheets for others by setting their status to Authorizer.

You may set up employee specific rates in Contract Status > Timesheets > Rates (see Employee Rates screen). These rates supersede the rates associated with an employee grade.

Employee Rates screen

For the Recharge Rate for the activity, recharge rates are only used for workshop PC service tickets.

If the JC parameter USETSUOM is not blank, you can set up multiple rates (regular hours, overtime hours and double time hours) for each activity by entering separate records and selecting different values in the UOM field.

Employee Security in Timesheets > Setup allows you to control which users are allowed to enter and report on timesheet information for other employees and departments.

In the example in Employee Security screen , user carluc has access to any employee in Employee Department HC, except for employee bridru. (‘!’ means to exclude, followed by the employee code).

Employee Security screen

Associated Parameters

SY/DELEGATE

Use Delegated Security

Whether you are using delegated security.

If set to Y, the Maintained By field is available on User Maintenance. This can be set to any COINS user; that user can then modify the user details, function access, row security and favourites of the user.

See Delegated Security.

You may need to make more global changes to rates and activities.

Globally Update Employee Rates in Timesheets > Administration allows you to update a group of employees’ rates based on Department or Activity.

This feature can be used to report on Employee activity rates by not ticking the box.

When used in update mode (that is, tick Update Records) it can operate in several ways using the selection box at the foot of the screen:

This example (see Globally Update Employee Rates screen) shows changing the hourly rate to 30.50 for all employees’ activities whose current rate is 30.00 and employee code begins “B”.

Globally Update Employee Rates screen

An Audit report will be generated confirm the changes made.

Costs are stamped on each time-sheet record at the time the record is created so this process will not change cost rates for pre-existing un-posted timesheet records.

Import Employee Rates in Timesheets > Administration allows you to load employee rates from a CSV file.

The input file should consist of eight entries in each line, separated by a comma. The sequence of the entries is:

The file should NOT contain any header line.

Import Grade Rates in Timesheets > Administration allows you to load rates by grade from a CSV file.

The input file should consist of 8 entries in each line, separated by a comma. The sequence of the entries is:

The file should NOT contain any header line, only data lines.

Load Timesheet in Timesheets > Administration allows you to import timesheet information from a data file. You can run it in Check or Load mode, and it produces a report on what it has done.

The load file must be a CSV file with the following fields:

Purge Timesheets in Timesheets > Administration allows you to delete old, unwanted timesheets. This deletes the timesheet records, but not the timesheet batch headers.

Contract Status parameter TSWKHIST controls the number of weeks of timesheet history to keep.