Office 365 Timesheet Solution
With our Office 365 timesheet solution, you do not need to pay for another application license. This SharePoint timesheet solution allows automatic invoice generation within Xero and eliminates the need to enter invoices into the Xero invoicing module
The Client Company
The client is a leading Low Voltage & Mid Voltage switchgear provider and have offices in the England, Scotland, the USA, and Singapore serving clients internationally. For over 35 years, R&B Switchgear group offers an electrical distribution network that is tailored to each customer’s requirement from all steps of the service like design, manufacturing, and installing. Their reliable solutions are aligned with high standards and ISO 9001 procedures.
As an international service provider, the client needed to automate employees’ time tracking procedure and approval for the purpose of payroll processing. 365 Digital Consulting designed and deployed a unique Office 365 timesheet solution which was integrated with their internal systems such as Scoro for project management, job costing, time and team management, and Xero for financial matters.
The great variety of projects highlighted a compelling need for a custom SharePoint timesheet solution. In order to let employees, use a custom SharePoint timesheet app to allocate time logs to different jobs, leave requests, submit project expenses, or any other kind of task or activity that each staff member spent on the projects.
CLIENT
INDUSTRY
Electrical service provider
TECHNOLOGIES
MS Teams App
SharePoint SPFx Development
Power Automate Approval
Xero Timesheet integration
Office 365 timesheet
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What were the challenges of lacking a custom Office 365 timesheet system?
Keeping track of time spent on each project within a company that has a lot of employees and handling hundreds of projects is not an easy task.
Before the implementation of the Office 365 timesheet system, their employees had to enter all their working hours and the details of each project into an Excel file and then sent it to the related managers. Afterward, the manager had to check all the Excel files and approve or reject their accuracy and they would send the approved files to the financial manager.
In the end, the financial manager needed to enter all those detailed timesheets into the accounting system of Xero in order to calculate employees’ payrolls, pay all the expenses, and generate invoices for clients. Integration with the accounting system was one of the main features they were seeking to add to their SharePoint timesheet solution in order to prevent double-entry of data into different systems.
At the same time, they were using Scoro for managing projects’ costs and expenses. All the time logs and project-related expenses (like travel expenses, hotel fees, meals,..) had to be registered under the relevant project defined in this system too. Furthermore, their employees have different pay rates based on their job title and whether they are accomplishing the task on weekdays, outside working hours, holidays, or work missions.
Having various systems working separately from each other arises many challenges and forces employees to enter the same amount of information into different software multiple times. This increases human errors and wastes their administration team’s time each month. The challenge become bigger as they were growing.
Our custom SharePoint timesheet solution
365 Digital Consulting provided an advanced SharePoint timesheet app integrated with Xero for payroll automation and Scoro for job costing purposes. It allows users to enter the details of their working hours upon manager approval. With the help of this custom timesheet solution working time log submit automatically from Office 365 timesheet to the accounting system of Xero, and Scoro all at the same time.
After implementing the custom timesheet solution, projects will be elicited from the Scoro system to SharePoint in order to clarify the costs of different projects. Scoro is a system for project cost management so it is the source of truth for project definition and allocating a cost center to it and storing all characteristics of projects in the database. This allows detailed project budget tracking. So, all staff can choose the right cost center which fetches from Scoro using SharePoint UI.
Using the SharePoint timesheet solution each employee can insert their working hours into SharePoint. This includes all the fine details of the tasks, pay rates based on weekday/weekend, cost center, expenses, on-call; then the system pushes details into the right location such as allocating the right pay rate, project expenses, and many more.
The employees’ timesheets will be sent to the relevant manager weekly for the approval process and once the managers verify the activities, they will be automatically transferred to the financial manager. The financial manager receives a report which shows all the timesheets that have been entered by users and approved by their managers and missing timesheets. Every two weeks timesheets and related information will be sent into Xero, to let the accounting system compute the payrolls, employee expenses for the reimbursement process, and issuing client invoices.
In the end, project manpower effort will be pushed back into Scoro system automatically to calculate project costing such as employees’ revenue, reimbursements, company’s profit, and other costs of a specific project.
Results of implementing a custom Office 365 timesheet
365 Digital Consulting developed a SharePoint timesheet solution that integrated well with Scoro and Xero systems. Using this integration users can now enter working hours information in one system but use the same data in multiple software. Even if the client employs a new staff member, they will just define the employee information into one system (which is Xero as the source of truth) then define their manager in Azure Active directory then all the data about the new employee will be submitted into relevant systems like SharePoint for timesheet and Scoro for job costing for the next payroll.
This approach helped the client to reduce human errors much more efficiently and automated the whole process of time-tracking and job costing. It saves them long number of admin’ and manager’ hours monthly to review and re-enter them into multiple systems. So, they can more focus on their business.
FAQ
Instead of buying a new timesheet app and paying for its monthly subscription, you can build your own timesheet app on top of the Microsoft Office 365 platform using a custom solution on MS Teams or SPFx on SharePoint. This will give you the flexibility to approve timesheets based on your organizational chart by the relevant manager using Power Automate. SharePoint timesheet solutions allow you to keep track of approved records and rejected timesheets. In addition, you don’t need to pay an extra license for it.
Integrating the timesheet into accounting software such as Xero, QuickBooks, or MYOB will decrease human effort for manual data entry for your accounting team as well as reduce the chance of error. Using API and Power Automate, we can automatically push time log entries from the timesheet into the payroll module of your accounting software so it decreases the workload of the finance team.
It is possible that the output of your chosen timesheet app such as Clockify, Toggl, Harvest, Hubstaff, and TSheets push into your accounting software and a monthly invoice will be generated for your client automatically rather than manually re-entering them for the purpose of invoice generation. Using API and Power Automate, we have built integration between the timesheet app and accounting software which automatically generates an invoice for your client.
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