Enable Plan and Timesheet approvals

Many organizations require a team lead or manager to approve a plan or timesheet. You can configure Tempo apps to match this requirement.

The timesheet approval process requires that employees log their time to Jira issues, and then submit their timesheets to their team lead or manager at the end of the timesheet period. The team lead then reviews the timesheets and either approves or rejects them. Tempo Teams are required for the Timesheet Approval process.

For financial or accounting teams, timesheet periods and approvals ensure more accuracy. These teams can close the periods to prevent changes to the timesheet data, and then they can get accurate numbers for month-end calculations such as payroll and customer billing.

Enable plan approvals

The Planning Time options determine if the Capacity Planner features are available to users. This affects plan approvals, deleted plans, and the ability to set specific hours of planned time in a day.

To set the Planning Time options:

1. Select Settings in the Tempo sidebar.

2. Under Configuration, select Planning Time.

3. Select Enable Plan Approval for users to be able to submit their plans for approval to a reviewer.
   You can also set other options:

   • Select Use start and end times when planning time to display the From and To fields in the Plan Time form. This allows users to select the specific hours of the day for their planned time. If this option is off, the planned time starts at midnight 00:00 of each day.

   • Select Delete plans when associated issues are deleted to remove plans from Tempo. When the related Jira issues or Jira projects are deleted, those plans no longer appear in the Resource Planning view. By default, plans remain in Tempo Capacity Planner and are displayed in the Resource Planning view even when the associated issues are deleted.

Set up timesheet periods for approvals

Timesheet approvals also require Tempo teams so team members can be set as an approver.

The timesheet approval process starts with configuring the timesheet periods for your company. These are the periods in which employees log their time and then submit their timesheets to get it approved by team leads or managers. Each timesheet is tied to a specific period for tracking time, reporting, and planning.

On the Period Configuration page, you can configure the monthly timesheet periods, the weekly periods, and the frequency of the timesheet approval periods (either monthly or weekly).

At the end of a timesheet period, it needs to be closed manually on the Period Management page. This is usually done by the accounting team because it is part of the month-end processes that deal with payroll and customer billing. However, anyone with Tempo administrator permissions can also do this.

You can also optionally configure the Scheduler to send email notifications to users that a period is ending soon. The Scheduler can also automatically close periods so that nobody can log their time after the period ends. As a failsafe, the Scheduler allows team leads to grant grace periods to their team members to let them finish logging their time and submit their timesheets after a period has closed.

Configure timesheet periods

1. Select Settings  in the Tempo sidebar.

2. Under Periods, click Period Configuration.

3. Configure the default timesheet periods used for closing reporting periods, worklogs, and billing:

   • Monthly Periods - Select the Start month (either December of January) and Start day for the period. These periods are created for the whole year, even if you’re only going to start using them later in the year. What you set here is displayed in the Period Management where you can close or open timesheet periods.

     On the last day of the period, users must submit their timesheets for approval.

     We recommend that the monthly period matches the dates of the financial period at your organization. Check with your accounting team to see which start day works best for their processes.

   • Weekly Periods - Tempo follows the ISO 8601 standard for weekly periods where Monday is the first day of the week. This applies even when you choose a different start date for the weekly period.

4. Select the Periods Used for Approvals as either Monthly or Weekly. This is the frequency at which the timesheet approval process is run - that is, how often users submit their timesheets for approval and team leads/managers review and approve or reject timesheets.

   Monthly is usually frequent enough for many organizations to run the approval process since there is some overhead involved in approving timesheets.

5. If you use Weekly approvals and change the start day for the week, all previously approved weeks appear as if they have not been submitted for approval. The previously approved worklogs will remain approved in the database even though the view shows them as unsubmitted after the date change.

Set your closing periods

1. Click Settings  in the Tempo sidebar.

2. Under Periods, select Scheduler Configuration

3. Select your frequency as the closing (freezing) periods in Type.

4. Select the day for Run scheduler on period end date. This is the end date of the period when users should finish their timesheets.

5. Check Make Scheduler Close to enable it.

6. For the Close date, enter the number of calendar days (not work days) to be added after the end date as a waiting period before the period closes. The Scheduler then closes the period and timesheets on this day at 11:59 PM UTC (23:59), according to the settings on your Jira (Tempo) instance.

7. For Email Settings, check the Status reminder for all users option for notification emails to be sent to all users on the scheduled end date. This notification gives users the status of their timesheet, such as complete or needing more hours to be logged. The emails are sent at 11:59 PM UTC (23:59) on the end date that you set above, such as Friday. Depending on network traffic conditions, you might not receive the notification immediately.

8. Check the Status reminder for late users option for notification emails to be sent only to users whose timesheets are not completed.

   Then enter when the reminders are sent:

   - If Make Scheduler Close is on, enter the number of days in the Send email to late users # days before closure box. For example, if the Close date is Monday and you enter 1 day here, this email is sent out at midnight on Sunday (1 day before close date).

   OR

   - If Make Scheduler Close is off, enter the number of days in the Send email to late users # days after end date box. For example, if the End date is Friday and you enter 3 days here, this email is sent out at midnight on Monday (3 days after the end date).