How do I configure Timesheet Due and Timesheet Late notices? What are best practices for these notice settings?

Question

How do I configure Timesheet Due and Timesheet Late notices? What are best practices for these notice settings?

Answer

Background

• The Timesheet Due and Timesheet Late notices will go out at the time you set in the user’s local time zone.
• In this way, if users’ have different time zones, these notices will go out at different times accordingly.
• You will set notices using an offset to the end of the user’s template time period, e.g. on the last day of period, 1 day before, 2 days before, 1 day after, 2 days after, etc.
• For example, this offset setting can be:
  • “1 (day) after last day of period” at 9:00AM.
  • In this example, for a Weekly time period that ends on Sunday, the Timesheet Due notice would go out at 9:00AM Monday morning.

Notice Conditions

• These notices will only go out to active users who have an existing timesheet in the system.
• Remember, user timesheets are created only when users are active and when they have a timesheet template assigned to their employee profile. If these conditions are not met, they will not receive these notices.
• A Timesheet Late notice will be sent only if the user's timesheet is unsubmitted at the notice deadline.  

Notice timings best practice

The timing of timesheet reminder and late notices are an important setting you can control:

1. Try to step into the user's shoes, thinking about the optimal time for them to receive a reminder notice.
2. For example, you can set reminder notices when employees' work for the time period is nearing completion. This could be considered an optimal time time, that the user will move next to completing and submitting their timesheet.
3. For these reasons, reminders and late notices set too early on a Friday might not be very effective. 
4. Set the reminder to sometime in the afternoon near the day’s end, when users tend to be wrapping up their week.
5. Sometimes users finish up their timesheet by end of Friday (or the end of the time period) but do not submit it. There might be valid reasons for this behavior. Some users do not have time at the end of Friday, for example, to double check their timesheet. These users might want to "hold off" to complete and submit their timesheet until Monday morning, reviewing the timesheet one last time, etc.   
6. Late notices should not be sent at the end of the time period (5PM Friday) or over the weekend (Saturday or Sunday at 5PM). Depending upon the users schedule, many will be most likely ignore this notice as they are ending their week, perhaps leaving work early on Friday, etc.. A late notice be sent at 7 – 8 AM Monday morning (2 days after the last day of the time period) so that it appears high up in the inbox first thing Monday morning is more effective. For those users who did not submit on Friday, they are most likely to see and pay attention to this late notice on Monday morning.
7. Accordingly, using the CC Primary approver setting is a best practice. However, if the user late notice is not set optimally, a CC notice to the approver will also be ineffective.

Summary
Always consider that notice timings are set when users are most likely take action (submitting and approving timesheets)

• Approvers are less likely to take action on late timesheets late Friday afternoon.
• Users are less likely to see and take on this deadline.
• And approvers receiving a CC’d late notice are less likely to take action with an employee who might be gone for the weekend.

This is why best practice is to have late notices early Monday morning, as the largest number users (timesheet users and approvers) are most likely to see and act on those notices.

Steps to Configure

1. Decide when you want the Timesheet Due and Timesheet Late notices to go out and set those times.
2. Note that you want the Timesheet Due to go out before the Timesheet Late notice.
3. Then enable the notices.
4. Once you enable the Timesheet Due notice, it will go out to the same group of users as the Timesheet Late notice.

Note that you can setup these notices in any combination:

• Timesheet Due enabled only
• Timesheet Late enabled only
• Timesheet Due and Timesheet Late enabled