Ted,
We have been using Time and Expense since 2013. We ended up modifying a version of the Services Vertical which is in the Education database. The comments section was a bit cumbersome, so we have users just use the labor notes and we modified Project Invoices to shows those instead.
All in all it works ok, but we have had a few challenges, in particular around approvals. By default there are three types, Supervisor, Project Manager and Project Manager/Supervisor. You can create all sorts of other hierarchical approvals, but if you have a very silo-ed business don't use Project Manager supervisor. Time and expenses end up getting caught up in peoples approval lists and they don't want to approve it.
Typically we have all of our projects setup for approval of time and expenses by the project manager and we manage this at the project level, not the project and phase, but phase level does work. Time and Expense Approval on the Employee record is always set up for Supervisor approval.
We have procedures in place when a Team Leader or Project Manager goes on leave to add in the allocated person as an Authorized User to the Workforce(salesperson) record that belongs to the user who is on leave.
We have a BAM setup to send emails when time is rejected.
Time Types, and Role rates can also be a bit tricky, I know we are looking into some BPMs to help automate this area so users don't get confused as to what they need to select. Typically we have a standard Role Rate and we override it on a Project by Project basis where need be.
Some of the weird things.
Occasionally we have seen if you enter in values into the start time and end time in the Detail Time Form and then switch to the Weekly time record it will change. It appears to be something to do with the start and end time fields being decimal instead of time.
If you have projects with schedules and employees attempt to enter time after the end date you will get an error (I can't remember the message), but you can go and alter the schedule of the job through job entry) (we don't use scheduling so it does not really matter for us, but may do for people who do.
Quick Time entries are very useful, but there is no easy way to DMT or bulk load entries for all employees. If you undock the Quick Time Entry list and insert from SQL it will work though. There is an Epicor answerbook on this, but I can't remember the number.
The Inventory Earliest apply date affects Time and Expense Entry so it is important to users to keep up to date with their time.
Performing a Capture COS/WIP activity will Post all time and attendance records for the period posted for. This effectively will stop users from entering in time for that period the WIP has been posted for. In order to get around this the users only have to enter in a new Time Record (shows as this in the menu but really is a time and attendance record or a laborhed record.
We are on 9.05.701 so some of the following things may have been fixed in later versions.:
If you are half way through entering in a time detail record and you click on another record in the list you will get an error, (I refers to a date, but can't remember the message completly now). The only way to get out of the error is to clear the form and re-enter in your employee id.
If you use estimated hours in your Project->Phase-Operations, and use large numbers then this can not only affect the time it takes to save the operation in the project, but how long it takes to save the related time record entered against that operation.
Copying time records can be a challenge, I ended up putting in a BPM to prevent copying of Approved time as it would copy over the invoice number if the time entry had already been billed.
Finally the user setup and plant setup can affect how different users can enter time on behalf of other employees. One of the biggest quirks is that there is an option to give approvers the ability to adjust time on the behalf of the user, however to alter the time record they need to recall the time, as soon as the time is recalled the approver is removed and the time record disappears from the approvers view.. Just to be clear the approver has to enter in the employee id of the employee that they are approving time for in the Time and Expense Entry to be in the correct context for this to happen.
I have successfully entered in time with the DMT, but you would need to be able to encode the projectid, phaseid and the jopoperation id for this to work. You should also be able to enter in Time with Epicor Service Connect and use the Task Manager that comes with Epicor Service Connect to Approve if you wanted to set it up. There used to be a good example of Expenses for E4SE and Enterprise in the ESC manual a few years back.
Whew,
I hope I covered it all.
Any further questions then let me know. It's time I contributed a bit more. I am interested how other users are using it also and what people are using for reporting in this area.
Apologies for the long post
Cheers
Simon
We have been using Time and Expense since 2013. We ended up modifying a version of the Services Vertical which is in the Education database. The comments section was a bit cumbersome, so we have users just use the labor notes and we modified Project Invoices to shows those instead.
All in all it works ok, but we have had a few challenges, in particular around approvals. By default there are three types, Supervisor, Project Manager and Project Manager/Supervisor. You can create all sorts of other hierarchical approvals, but if you have a very silo-ed business don't use Project Manager supervisor. Time and expenses end up getting caught up in peoples approval lists and they don't want to approve it.
Typically we have all of our projects setup for approval of time and expenses by the project manager and we manage this at the project level, not the project and phase, but phase level does work. Time and Expense Approval on the Employee record is always set up for Supervisor approval.
We have procedures in place when a Team Leader or Project Manager goes on leave to add in the allocated person as an Authorized User to the Workforce(salesperson) record that belongs to the user who is on leave.
We have a BAM setup to send emails when time is rejected.
Time Types, and Role rates can also be a bit tricky, I know we are looking into some BPMs to help automate this area so users don't get confused as to what they need to select. Typically we have a standard Role Rate and we override it on a Project by Project basis where need be.
Some of the weird things.
Occasionally we have seen if you enter in values into the start time and end time in the Detail Time Form and then switch to the Weekly time record it will change. It appears to be something to do with the start and end time fields being decimal instead of time.
If you have projects with schedules and employees attempt to enter time after the end date you will get an error (I can't remember the message), but you can go and alter the schedule of the job through job entry) (we don't use scheduling so it does not really matter for us, but may do for people who do.
Quick Time entries are very useful, but there is no easy way to DMT or bulk load entries for all employees. If you undock the Quick Time Entry list and insert from SQL it will work though. There is an Epicor answerbook on this, but I can't remember the number.
The Inventory Earliest apply date affects Time and Expense Entry so it is important to users to keep up to date with their time.
Performing a Capture COS/WIP activity will Post all time and attendance records for the period posted for. This effectively will stop users from entering in time for that period the WIP has been posted for. In order to get around this the users only have to enter in a new Time Record (shows as this in the menu but really is a time and attendance record or a laborhed record.
We are on 9.05.701 so some of the following things may have been fixed in later versions.:
If you are half way through entering in a time detail record and you click on another record in the list you will get an error, (I refers to a date, but can't remember the message completly now). The only way to get out of the error is to clear the form and re-enter in your employee id.
If you use estimated hours in your Project->Phase-Operations, and use large numbers then this can not only affect the time it takes to save the operation in the project, but how long it takes to save the related time record entered against that operation.
Copying time records can be a challenge, I ended up putting in a BPM to prevent copying of Approved time as it would copy over the invoice number if the time entry had already been billed.
Finally the user setup and plant setup can affect how different users can enter time on behalf of other employees. One of the biggest quirks is that there is an option to give approvers the ability to adjust time on the behalf of the user, however to alter the time record they need to recall the time, as soon as the time is recalled the approver is removed and the time record disappears from the approvers view.. Just to be clear the approver has to enter in the employee id of the employee that they are approving time for in the Time and Expense Entry to be in the correct context for this to happen.
I have successfully entered in time with the DMT, but you would need to be able to encode the projectid, phaseid and the jopoperation id for this to work. You should also be able to enter in Time with Epicor Service Connect and use the Task Manager that comes with Epicor Service Connect to Approve if you wanted to set it up. There used to be a good example of Expenses for E4SE and Enterprise in the ESC manual a few years back.
Whew,
I hope I covered it all.
Any further questions then let me know. It's time I contributed a bit more. I am interested how other users are using it also and what people are using for reporting in this area.
Apologies for the long post
Cheers
Simon