CC&C NetConsole/Timesheet - FAQ

Q. Does the system allow users to have many charge rates?
A. Yes, users may have multiple charge rates based on the charge codes that they are working on. NetConsole/Timesheet associates rates with charge codes, so if one person is assigned to several charge codes, she or he will have several corresponding charge rates.
Q. Does your product allow the setup of multiples users to bill time to multiple projects? Also, can you adjust the hourly billable rate for users? Keep in mind that users billable hourly rate may change across different projects. Can this be set easily. For example, Consultant A bills $50/hour for Project A and $80/hour for Project B OR Consultant A bills $50 for task 1 and $70 for task 2, both of which are for Project A.
A. Yes, our product supports different charge rates across different projects and tasks. Basically, you create projects for your clients and then create tasks under projects to form Project-Task codes (i.e. Charge Codes). Each Charge Code has a charge rate associated with it. Then you assign your users (employees, consultants, etc.) to different Charge Codes. So you will have different charge rates for your employees for different Projects/Tasks.
Q. Can I view totals based on entered user hours by day, week, month, quarter, and year? Totals should be displayed for client, client project, project task, and should also be viewable by user and/or department either as a total or referenced against a specific client/project/task.
A. Yes, NetConsole/Timesheet comes with reporting functions for billing and invoicing based on Project, Charge Codes, Time Periods, Employees. In addition, each reporting module comes with an Ad-Hoc capability, which allows the user to dynamically generate reports based on selected criteria.
Q. It appears that each employee has a certain set of charge codes established beforehand. Is it possible to have codes available in a pull down menu? In my organization, we literally have hundreds of valid charge codes and a few employees using 10-15 different codes per pay period. Is this something NetConsole/Timesheet can handle?
A. Yes, all the Charge Codes are defined by your System Administrator using the Project Manager module. Once you've created Charge Codes, you simply assign Project Groups to them. If a user's project group has access to multiple Projects, he or she will be able to see all the charge codes associated with his or her group. All the projects and their charge codes are organized in two drop-down menus for selection in the Enter Timesheet function. You will find detailed instructions in our online step-by-step Tutorial in the product.
Q. Does NetConsole/Timesheet integrate with any accounting apps?
A. Yes. We have a direct ADP output to ADP Payroll for Windows. You can output ADP reports in ASCII text file or in Excel. Besides ADP, we do provide standard Timesheet data output in text format, in Excel, and in XML formats. You can take these outputs and import into your own accounting packages, or you can copy and paste these output to Excel spreadsheet and do additional modification and then output from there.
Q. What kind of reports can NetConsole prepare ?
A. NetConsole/Timesheet has a comprehensive set of dynamic report generators and a set of "can" reports to help you in preparing your Timesheet, Billing and Payroll reports, as well as data outputs for integration with other applications. Basically, you can run reports for Clients by Projects, by Tasks, by Users, by Groups and by any random Time Periods, or any combination of above.
Timesheet module comes with TS Report-Employees, TS Report-Supervisors, employee vacation plan, and an Output Timesheet function. "Output Timesheet" function can retrieve each user's Timesheets and output Timesheet data in either comma-separated text files, Excel or XML data file.
If you are using ADP Payroll system, or need to output data for Payroll process, you can use our Payroll module to output ADP reports and manipulate from there. Our ADP output provides a direct feed to ADP for windows, but you can run ADP outputs and modify into the format you need for your own payroll applications.
Q. Can I change my Week Begin Day (e.g. use Sunday, instead of Monday)?
A.The week starting day is configurable. You can select any week day (Sunday, Monday, or Wednesday) as you week beginning day. However, you can only define this once when you install the product. Once your users have entered data into the database, you will not be able to change the Week Begin day again.
Q. Assume that a company has your system for, say, 5 years. Does the Ad-Hoc reporting tool work this far back to get code information, project information across all of the past years?
A. Yes, as long as your database can handle your volume. NetConsole/Timesheet is built upon an open database environment, which means all data is stored in database tables in your back-end database (i.e. SQL 7 or SQL 2000). NetConsole/Timesheet will generate your 5-year reports as long as your database has five years of data.
However, since you can backup, restore and maintain your data as you normally would for your database administration tasks, if you archived your TS database every year, then after 5 years, you will need to aggregate all 5 databases together before you run 5-year billing reports since the reporting programs are querying against one single TS table.
Q. In addition to the Email Reminder feature, is there a way to determine if someone hasn't submitted a timesheet at the end of a pay period? any other Email Reminders that comes with the product ?
A. Yes, besides the regular "Email Reminder" to remind users to submit their timesheets, the "Late Submission Notice" feature gives you the capability to automatically notify employees who have forgotten to submit their timesheets once the timesheets are overdue. Also, under Payroll module, we have included two more Email Reminder functions for payroll managers: "Reminder-Not Submitted" function and "Reminder-Not Approved" function.
"Reminder-Not Submitted" function gives you a list of employees who's timesheets have not been submitted for selected time periods. You can select multiple employees from the list and send Email notice to them.
"Reminder-Not Approved" function gives you a list of supervisors along with their subordinates who's submitted timesheets have not been approved for selected time periods. You can select multiple supervisors from the list and send Email notice to the supervisors.
Q. Is there some forms of automated reminder (with possible escalation to managers) for users who missed filling out "x" weeks worth of timesheets or whose timesheets have not been approved?
A. See previous answer.
Q. Does the e-mail notification use your e-mail module only, or does it integrate with other e-mail apps? We're using Outlook.
A. NetConsole/Timesheet uses a SMTP mail server to send out e-mails to your users for all Email Reminders, Late Timesheet Notices and Approve/Disapprove Notices. Your users will receive their TS reminders and notices using their regular e-mail apps, like Outlook. You are not using NetConsole/Timesheet to receive e-mails, NetConsole/Timesheet only sends out e-mails.
Q. Can we query the underlying database tables ourselves? Can we extract the data we need without purchasing that module?
A. NetConsole is based on Open Database Structure (SQL server), where you have a full access to all the tables you need. So, of course, you are able to retrieve your Timesheet data directly from the Timesheet tables. You don't need to buy Billing/Payroll module to have this access.
Q. Please explain the e-mail notification system. Is it entirely manual or can the system automatically send e-mail notifications to users who haven't submitted their timesheets?
A. There are three kinds of "E-mail Notification Systems" in NetConsole/Timesheet. They are:
1. E-mail Notice - When you submit your Timesheets, or when supervisors approve, disapprove or undo approved employees Timesheets, you will have an option to send out E-mail Notices to your supervisors or to your employees.
2. E-mail Reminder - You can schedule E-mail Reminder to send out at a specified day and time (every Friday at noon, for example), to remind your employees to enter and submit their Timesheets. Also you can schedule a date and time (say, every Monday at 8:00am) to send out E-mail Reminders to your supervisors to approve their subordinates Timesheets. We have also the "Late Timesheet E-mail Reminder" where you can set up a date and time to be the "deadline" for the Timesheet submission (say Saturday at 12:00PM). NetConsole's system will automatically pick up those employees who forget to submit their Timesheets by the deadline.
3. Group E-mail - You can send Group E-mails to all or selected Employees, or you can send out Group E-mails to all or selected Clients.