Unfortunately there is no respone on this topic so far, which leads to me thinking, that this matter is not really an issue for most. Still I have taken the time to work out a system on how given timesheets work for me. I will try and elaborate as accurate but short as possible:
We use iTop as CMDB and helpdesk. When an issue is tracked in iTop a unique number is generated. In ERPNext we then use this number as the title for a task, which is connected to a project. We have split customer projects in two. There are single projects, which are mostly connected to a prior quotation or request. And there a “monthly” projects which represent a SLA which we have with the customer. Time spent is booked into the respective project and its task.
When an employee or subcontractor do work on a project, they use the iTop incident number to identify or create a task inside the according project. When tracking time in timesheet, the employee needs to book his time spent providing information of customer, project, task and service. We have chosen the following steps to do this:
- Identify or create task with ticket number (iTop issue)
1.1 Provide information in “Details” (for customer reference) - Go to running time sheet (we create on per month, per employee)
2.1 create and open column in time sheet and provide: service, time start, hours, project (unique or monthly SLA) and task and tick “billable” if billable. - Book timesheet at the end of the month
At this point the employee is finished with his time tracking and the timesheet will be processed.
In further steps the SLA projects are marked as finished when timesheets have been compared to projects so they can been filtered in the list. A new SLA project is creating for the following month.
I’d now like to elaborate on a few issues connected to my way of time tracking:
Booking time towards timesheets is very tiring as a lot of steps are required to do so. I can’t check on how much time has been spent on a certain customer. Also creating an invoice towards the customer still has to be done manually as the customer needs the reference added toward the single tasks. This all making time tracking fairly easy, the process time-to-invoice though still being time intensive.
I recently watched a ERPNext video in which I saw, that timesheet is used a little different, as per job done a single timesheet is used. I notices this would maybe solve my issue with connecting the customer reference in a useful way. Questionable for me though, why a timesheet wouldn’t be displayed as one.
I will have one employee track his time on separate timesheets to check the example from the video - I will keep you posted. Thank you!