Project Timesheets - Supervisors review timesheets approved?

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Hello,

Does anyone know if a supervisor can review the time sheets that they have approved?

We are using projects to collect timesheets for our hourly employees, per our vendors recommendation. An employee will pick a project and submit the timesheet to workflow, it goes to the supervisor which is based off who the employee reports to in the organization. However, once the supervisor approves the timesheet they cannot review it from inside of employee self service.

Anyone know of a way a supervisor can track their approved timesheets? The issue is that sometimes we will have an employee submit a timesheet for a pay period, and then submit a second timesheet for that same pay period. It would also be helpful for some supervisors who want to track that all of their employees have submitted their timesheets for the week.

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Ludwig Reinhard Microsoft Employee on at

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Hello FrankieD-CAC,

Can you explain why a supervisor needs to track a timesheet that he/she already approved?

Do you want to prevent that people submit too much or too less time? Then have a look at timesheet policies.

Otherwise, please elaborate.

Many thanks and best regards,

Ludwig

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Community Member on at

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Hello Ludwig,

Yes - supervisors sometimes need to review the timesheets they have approved. One example is a director who has 10-12 people who report to her, she would like to double check that all of her staff have submitted timesheets for the week because we have tight deadlines for submission.

We have also had an employee submit a timesheet for the week, and accidentally submit a second timesheet for the week, doubling their hours worked for the week. Payroll then needs to validate these people which puts undue burden on the payroll department, and stops payroll processing.

Now I'm not quite sure what you mean by timesheet policies, as far as our institution goes an employee simply picks their project when submitting their timesheet.

The end game here though is giving anyone who approves an employees timesheet the ability to review all the timesheets they have approved.

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Community Member on at

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Hello FrankieD-CAC,

For Approver to double check

You could create a form which would read data from TSTimesheetLine, this table saves the timesheet approval status and who has approved it

For Accidental/Double Entries

When a user is setup as a timecard user(wherein he's allowed to enter timesheet), you go through a series of steps

1 of which is resource setup for the user

In Resource Setup you fix the max number of hours that the user can fill a timesheet for

So, this default feature of dynamics would ensure that they do not go overboard of their stipulated hours

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Ludwig Reinhard Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi Frankie,

I think that two features/things might help you

1. Train your supervisors not to approve timesheets if they are not sure that things are correct. Otherwise, they have double would and do additional subsequent checks. I think that is mainly an organizational issue.

2. In project management / setup / timesheet / timesheet policies you can setup policies that specify the maximum and minimum hours an employee can record for example on a specific day or within a week. If you say that nobody can report more than 10 hours a day and e.g. 50 hours a week, you should be able to eliminate most double entries of time recordings.

Best regards,

Ludwig

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Community Member on at

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Hello,

1) We are a medium size institution, so if we have 20-25 supervisors approving timesheets for 400 full time staff, hundreds of student workers, etc. It can be a challenge for the supervisors to track that they have approved all the necessary timesheets by the due date. I'm looking for something that would be rather simple, a filter that shows "All Timesheets I have approved" inside of employee self service under timesheets for any employees that report to the specific supervisor. Right now, we have payroll balance and do a lot of extra steps just to verify timesheets prior to paying them out. Additionally we have multiple ways we pay people, some employees work shift differential hourly assignments, some work on weekends on side contracts, campus police has their own schedules that are not traditional to the M-T 10 hour shifts. Training can get you so far, but sometimes you are simply in need of a product solution/feature/enhancement.

2) Based on the way we do business, it might be necessary to let employees earn at or around 80 hour per week, due to shift differential, side contracts etc. I think this is more complicated. Payroll can balance but we could cut back on a lot of these steps by simply letting a supervisor review the timesheets they have approved.

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Community Member on at

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Since we have multiple supervisors who approve timesheets they would all need access to this form, as this is a new product I've not had to build a form. Furthermore, we aren't even permitted access to query a sandbox environment because our vendor is the middleman who will not let us access LCS. I'm stuck using the datamanagement tool, excel tools, and Power BI. I could explore more options - but I was hopeful that there was some built in functionality that I could simply let the app rovers review the workflows they approve.

I may end up seeing about having the workflow kick back an email to the supervisors stating "you have approved this timesheet" so at least it would give them some type of record.

At this time my simple explanation to supervisors is that if an employee forgets to put in their timesheet, it's the employee who may not get paid and will deal with the consequences.

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Ludwig Reinhard Microsoft Employee on at

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Hello FrankieD-CAC,

For 1:

Here you need to implement a customization then. The form that you are looking for is not available in the standard application but it should not be difficult creating it.

For 2:

I think the timesheet policies can already do a lot to minimize errors. I would give it at least a try. If it does not work then you can think extending the available out of the box policies.

Best regards,

Ludwig

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André Arnaud de Cal... 300,896 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi Frankie,

A sidenote here as you.already got a lot of valuable information. As a customer, YOU own your LCS project. It is initially setup with an account within your own tenant. If you like, you can invite vendors.

If they have an own LCS for managing customizations, it is on their tenant. Then even, you should be able to spin off development machines on your tenant.

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Community Member on at

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Thanks - it's really a shame that managers cannot review items they approve. Since we are using projects for timesheets, it might mean doing even more research for a small, but annoying issue. I can't believe Microsoft didn't have the foresight to see that managers might want to review the items they are approving at later dates.

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Community Member on at

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Yeah, I wasn't part of the original contract negotiation. Our vendor used to have a custom layer that they had - but everything is now kind of like a plug in. They will not give us access to LCS. I can't even get ahold of Microsoft directly, I have to contact the vendor first, submit trouble tickets with them, and if they cant figure it out they kick it up to Microsoft. It's a slow process too. It's really why I spend my time on forums double checking their wrong answers.

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