Normally employees enter time during the week either by filling out a timesheet, booking time to a task or through the start/stop task timers. This time is saved during the week but not submitted until the end of the week when the employee is sure all their time has been accurately recorded. This gives a chance for the employee to make any manual adjustments.

After submitting time it normally enters an approval cycle during which stage the timesheet cannot be edited by the employee. Your system administrator can control when employees can edit timesheets via the workflow setup.

Submitting time is easy. Just click on the yellow "Submit" text in the top-right corner of your screen below your photo/search box (highlighted above with a purple box).

You can see the current timesheet status (e.g. "Pending Submission") plus the next thing you can do with this timesheet ("Submit"). Once you click on submit the timesheet is automatically saved and changed to a submitted status.

The "Submit" text may look different for your company, depending on how your timesheet approval workflow was set-up. For example if you don't have people approve time then after you submit the timesheet it might say "Ready for Billing" instead of "Submitted" (for approval).

After you submit a timesheet the status for each row of the timesheet or project/task you booked time to gets assigned. The blank status column on the left side (highlighted with a purple box) will display the status of each task in the timesheet. This is to allow different project managers or task leaders to approve different rows of a single timesheet at different times.

Workflow in iBE.net is used to automate repetitive processes such as the approval and billing of time. Instead of keeping everything in email, you can automate and track in iBE's database the submission, approval, rejection, correction, re-submission, final approval, partial billing and full billing for each timesheet, and for each task or project time was booked to within a timesheet.

The diagram above gives a pictorial view of one of the iBE.net pre-configured timesheet workflows. After the employee submits their timesheet each task is independently managed in workflow and sent to the respective project manager to approve.

You can create any workflow for timesheets, or different workflows for timesheets from different groups of employees, in workflow setup.