What unapproved time costs an MSP
Most time problems are small and ordinary. Each one is cheap to fix the week it happens and expensive at invoice time:
- Hours on the wrong task or the wrong project, so one client is overbilled and another underbilled.
- Notes that say “worked on it”, which a client queries and nobody can explain a month later.
- Billable time against internal work, or internal time marked billable.
- Days far over standard hours, usually time logged on the wrong day.
How approval works
- Techs log time against project tasks on a week grid, or with a running timer.
- At the end of the week they submit it.
- The approver opens each submitted week: every entry with its day, project and task, hours, billable setting and note, against the person’s weekly capacity.
- They approve the week, or reject it with a short reason. Rejected entries go back to the person to fix and resubmit.
- Approved entries are written to Autotask in batches every few minutes and locked in ProjectSmith.
Rules that keep it honest
Nobody approves their own time; a Planner’s week is approved by another Planner. When a week has time on several projects, each approver decides the entries on their own projects and the rest wait for theirs.
If an approved entry turns out to be wrong, a Planner can reopen it. ProjectSmith records who reopened it and why, and never deletes a time entry in Autotask; it raises an inbox item for a manager to correct the entry in Autotask itself.
The same inbox handles estimate changes, which update the Autotask task once approved, and extra costs and expenses, which become Autotask project charges, billable or not as the approver decides.
What lands in Autotask
For each approved entry, ProjectSmith creates one Autotask time entry. Billable time is picked up by your Autotask billing exactly like time entered in Autotask.
| Autotask field | Comes from |
|---|---|
| Project task | The task the person logged against |
| Resource | The person who logged the time |
| Role | The person’s Autotask role |
| Date and hours | The day and hours logged |
| Summary notes | The entry’s note |
| Billable | The entry’s billable setting |
A five-point check for approvers
Approval only catches what the approver looks for. These five checks take a minute a person and catch most of what goes wrong:
- Does each note say what was done, in words the client would accept on an invoice?
- Is project work logged to a task, not to the project as a whole?
- Does the billable setting match the work: project delivery billable, internal meetings not?
- Are the daily totals plausible against the person’s standard hours and leave?
- Is each entry on the right project, for the right client?