How to prevent users from entering too much time

At the support desk we are frequently asked to prevent users from entering time after they exceed a certain budget. For example, only enter 100 hours against this project. This is often done for billing reasons. The client expects to be billed for 100 hours, and if you go over that cap, you don't want to risk over-invoicing the client and causing a problem down the road. Or sometimes we are asked this because contractors are entering time and they will only be reimbursed for a certain number of hours. You reimburse them based on reports out of Projector and you don't want to reward them for taking too long.

The short answer to this question is that Projector never caps the amount of time that can be entered. Why the limitation? Projector always strives for truth in reporting when it comes to time entry. The basic precept is that when a resource goes over their hours, you still want those hours in the system. Those hours answer questions like:

Who took too long to deliver a task?
Which project manager created a bad delivery plan?
What teams are the most profitable?

If you just disallow time entry then resources are likely to throw overage hours onto a G&A engagement or possibly not enter them at all. Without this data, you won't be able to increase the efficiency of your organization. All that being said, we do have some solutions that allow both truth in reporting and keeping hours within limits.

Budgets

With this method, you create a budget for hours. This can be a high level budget for an entire project, a time-phased budget, or a per role budget. Your resources enter time normally, but your approvers check whether approving those hours would exceed the project budgets. If the budget is exceeded, the approvers take action. For example, by rejecting some of the hours and asking the resource to submit somewhere else, splitting the hours, or writing the time down so the client isn't overbilled. This method requires that you set up and maintain project budgets and also train your time approvers to check budgets.

To create a time budget, see our Create a Time Baseline help page.

To check budgets when approving time, see our Time Approvals help page.

Detailed Task Management

To use this method, you must have the Project Management module enabled. This allows you to create detailed task management gantt charts. Each task can have a budget of hours. The resource can see this budget as they enter their hours. For an example of setting up DTM and entering time against DTM, see our Project Task Planning Tab help page.