Book timesheets as expenses
Once time has been recorded, you can book it as expenses: EMDESK turns the tracked work time of a period into personnel expense records, calculated with the user's personnel cost rate. This is how tracked hours become costs in the Expenses section and in your financial reports.
💡 Before you start
- You need Manage rights to the Expenses section (Admins and Managers have them), and access to the activities and to the participants of the users (see Roles, access levels, and access rights).
- Each user must be a member of a participant that has a personnel cost rate enabled for expenses and valid for the period.
- A cost category of type Rate must exist (Settings › Customisation › Cost Categories).
- Reporting must be on, and expense reporting must not be locked for the period (see Disable reporting temporarily).
Booking time as expenses
- Click Time in the main menu. In My TimeSheet (or All Times), choose the period to book: a week, month or year.
- Click Book time as expense at the top right.
- The dialog lists the tracked, not yet booked work time of the selected user, with one row per project. Click Show all available users to book the time of several users at once, and select them.
- Tracked Time: the work time that will be booked. Leave and time that is already booked are not included.
- Cost Rate: the personnel cost rate used to calculate the costs. The list offers the personnel cost rates of the participant(s) the user is a member of, and only those that have Enable for Expenses switched on and whose Valid from / Valid until period overlaps the booking period. The default rate (or the rate you chose last time) is preselected; No rate (effort/time only) books the hours without costs. If a rate is valid for only part of the period, only the hours in that part are booked; book the rest afterwards with another rate.
If the rate you expect is missing: add the user to the participant's Members (see Add users as participant members), and create or edit the rate in the participant's Financial Profile, with Enable for Expenses on and a matching validity (see Create and edit personnel cost rates). If the user is not a member of any participant, the rates of all participants are offered. - Cost Category: the cost category of the expenses (required for every selected row). Only cost categories of type Rate are offered, for example Personnel. They are managed under Settings › Customisation › Cost Categories; if there is none of type Rate, an Admin has to create one first.
- Participant: the participant the costs belong to.
- Click Book time as expense.
Several projects with different cost rates
If a user worked on more than one project in the period, the dialog shows one row per project, and all of them can be booked in one go. Choose the Cost Rate separately for each project. This lets you apply the rate each project or funding programme requires, for example an actual hourly rate for one grant and a unit-cost rate for another. Your browser remembers the last rate and category you chose, so the next booking is prefilled.
Untick a project to leave its time unbooked for now.
What happens
- For each user and activity, one expense is created with the total hours of the period. It is named Time tracked by <user> for <period> and lists the notes of the time entries; the amount is calculated from these hours and the cost rate.
- A message confirms that the expenses were created; click Reveal to see them in the Expenses section.
- The booked time entries get a check icon in the timesheet and can no longer be deleted. The circle next to the user shows the share of booked time.
- In an expense's sidebar, the Tracked time tab (clock icon) lists the time entries that were booked into it.
Undoing a booking
To undo a booking, delete the expense that was created from it. Its time entries become unbooked again and can be deleted or booked anew. This is not possible if the expense is locked or dated in a locked period.
- Click Expenses in the main menu and type Time tracked by and the user's name in the search field (for example Time tracked by Elena Rossi). Right after booking, Reveal in the confirmation message opens this search for you.
- To check that it is the right expense, click it and open the Tracked time tab (clock icon) in its sidebar: it lists the time entries that were booked into it. Then close the sidebar.
- In the list, click the … button at the end of the expense's row and select Delete.
- Confirm with Yes. Repeat for the other expenses of the booking (one per activity). The time entries are unbooked right away; the check icons disappear from the timesheet.
💡 Tip: To see all expenses created from tracked time, add the column Timesheet Records in Table Settings of the Expenses section. To remove several bookings at once, select their rows and use the bulk delete.
Related: How to record time (and leaves) · About time tracking