Table of Contents
Purpose
Weekly Time Review is necessary and allows for a big picture look at your employees’ pay week.
A Production Manager or a similar role will likely be approving time entries. Accounting teams or employees responsible for completing payroll would also find Weekly Time Review useful as they cut checks from these approved hours.
Approval of time should be done on a weekly basis. This makes sure that all hours, including OT hours, are calculated and exported from Aspire correctly.
Check Before Reviewing Weekly Time
If you are reading this article, you should have already:
📑 Read Time Entry Acceptance and Workflow steps here.
Confirm that you have set up your First Day of the Week in Configuration. If you have not, then complete the following steps before proceeding.
Aspire displays 7 days of time on the Time Entry screen. The first day of the payroll week is based on the selection made in Time Reporting under Configuration.
To set up the First Day of the Week, make the adjustment by selecting your Profile Icon ▶️ Administration ▶️ Configuration ▶️ Time Reporting.
Understanding the Weekly Time Review Screen
In order to cut checks on time, it’s important that you have approved your employee’s time entries before exporting their hours to your payroll system.
To review weekly time entries, navigate to Scheduling in the blue side menu.
Click on the Weekly Time Review tab at the top.
The Weekly Time Review screen appears with the details of your employee's hours that have been entered into Aspire.
Confirm that every employee that worked last week is listed. If not, go back to Time Entry and add and save their time to the routes on the days of the week the employee worked.
Before approving and exporting hours, it's important to understand how the features that this tab contains and how you can use them to your advantage.
In addition to the Filter, Display, Sort and Group options that are included within Aspire modules, there are additional customizable features that you can use on the Weekly Time Review screen.
You can set preferences on this screen based on your workflow. Creating and saving a list with those preferences is a great way to ensure that your team is also reviewing weekly time in an organized manner!
Date Quick Filter
Each line for employee hours displayed in Weekly Time Review represents employees’ time in the date range set by the calendar picker.
Only employees who have logged time during the selected week will be listed.
Branches
📌Note: The Branches filter allows you to review hours based on Branch location.
Do not filter by Branch when you are approving time at the end of the week. If that employee worked in different branches, those regular hours and OT could get missed.
Pay Schedules
The Pay Schedules filter allows you to review hours for your employees based on their pay schedule. This is helpful when exporting hourly employee hours and to exclude your salaried employees.
Review Total and OT Columns
After you have added your quick filters, it's now time to review the Total hours as well as the OT hours listed in Weekly Time Review.
The Total and OT columns are summed for every employee under the header in Weekly Time Review. Totals per employee can be reviewed on each employee line item.
Totals per employee can be reviewed on each employee line item for the 7 days set by the calendar picker.
The OT column will display the hours that are considered Overtime hours based on the Pay Schedule assigned to the employee.
If a Weekly 40 Pay Schedule is used as an example, if the Total Hours are displayed at 55.50, the OT column will read 15.50.
55.50 - 40 = 15.50
Total Hours - Regular Hours = OT hours
Learning Time Entry Statuses
Statuses that are displayed in Weekly Time Review show the progression of actions that have been performed on your employee’s time entries.
You cannot jump statuses from Unaccepted to Approved so you will see each status when approving weekly time entries. Save the time on Time Entry screens first to get the status to Pending and then work on approving your time.
Unaccepted
Employees listed with a status of Unaccepted means that their time has been entered, but not yet been approved in Time Entry. Read Time Entry Acceptance and Workflow steps here if you have not approved time yet.
To do this, go back and save their time before proceeding.
Pending
Pending status means that daily time entry for your employee is entered and accepted. You can proceed with the approval of time.
💡When each employee is listed with their recorded time, review time that is Pending at the end of the week.
Approved
To proceed with approval of time, selecting Bulk Actions ▶️Approve changes employees’ time from Pending to Approved.
Approved status confirms that you have approved the time recorded for your employees.
Exported
When you select Bulk Actions ▶️Export, the status for your employee's time changes to Exported.
Depending on the payroll system, this will be exported in a spreadsheet report or sent to your payroll system.
Exporting time is important for your payroll processes so your employees can get paid.
Eliminating Time Entry Errors
Make sure that there are no employee names listed in red in Time Review. This could mean that the employee isn’t set up in Aspire correctly in order to export their time.
If an employee’s name is displayed in red on Weekly Time Review, that means the employee is missing information on their contact record necessary for payroll processing.
It could also mean that an incorrect pay code was selected when time was approved for the work week and Aspire is notifying you that you should go back and review the employee's time entries.
Errors that would prevent accepting payroll hours would be (Missing Pay Schedule) and (Missing Pay Rate). Additionally, the OT Paycode Exception warning also appears here.
Missing Pay Rate
If (Missing Pay Rate) is displayed for your employee in Weekly Time Review, this means you have not set up a pay rate inside of their contact record.
🔧 To fix this:
Go to Contacts, and select the employee contact record.
Verify that a base pay rate has been entered into the Payroll fields.
If you have not set one, select New, and enter a base pay rate.
Once the pay rate has been added, you can go back to Time Entry. The employee would be listed correctly with no errors, so you can proceed by approving the employee's pending hours.
Missing Pay Schedule
If (Missing Pay Schedule) is displayed for your employee in Weekly Time Review, that means that there is no Pay Schedule set up on their contact record.
🔧 To fix this:
Go to Contacts, and select the employee's contact record.
Verify that a Pay Schedule has been selected for your employee.
If you have not set one, select a Pay Schedule from the drop down.
Once the Pay Schedule has been selected and saved, you can go back to Time Entry. The employee would be listed correctly with no errors, so you can proceed by approving the employee's pending hours.
OT Paycode Exception Warning
If the OT Paycode Exception warning is displayed for an employee, you would still be able to export the employee’s time.
This means a day in their weekly time entries had a pay code that was selected other than the default Select One. Then, that time entry was saved and moved into Pending status.
Each employee’s Contact record should have a Pay Schedule assigned, which tells Aspire how to calculate daily and weekly overtime hours.
Sometimes, employees have a number of time entries that need to have Pay Code overrides applied.
An example of when you might use the pay code override on the Time Entry screen would be if you have a week with a Snow event.
If employee has a time entry with an override and Aspire cannot apply overtime to the hours that their Pay Schedule indicates should be overtime, the OT Paycode Exception warning will appear in Weekly Time Review.
⚠️This notifies you that the employee is not being given what Aspire believes should be the correct amount of OT.
If this is the case, go back to the employee's time entries for the week and manually update their pay codes to the OT code or decide to proceed with approving and exporting the time.
Check Inventory Location on Time Entry
Inventory location on Time Entry defaults to the inventory location that is assigned to the branch that the route is on.
If there is not a default inventory location set on the branch, the inventory location will display alphabetically and pull items from the alphabetically listed inventory locations.
If you did not confirm your inventory locations were correct, go back to Time Entry to fix before proceeding.
Open Time Entry, Time Entry Audit and Clock Time Audit
If you are seeing odd amounts of total hours or OT time, using audits could help you understand and provide additional clarification on who entered time for a specific employee. Also, audits are helpfu if you need to find out what device the hours were entered with.
These audits can be found on Weekly Time Review by hovering over the time you want more details for and clicking to bring up the audit data.
Audits can help identify device types, where time was added for your employees and by which user in your Aspire system.
🧠 Open Time Entry in this section allows you to go quickly to the time review screen for the hours you have clicked on!
🧠 If time has been recorded in Time Audits and the Device Name column is blank, this means that the time was entered manually.
📌Note: Additionally, If a Device Name isn’t created when your users add their devices to their Aspire account, this could cause confusion when reviewing audit information. It’s recommended that you enforce a naming convention when you add new users or devices to your Aspire system. This makes sure information is accurate when reviewing audit logs.
Clock Time Audit
The Clock Time Audit search list screen provides an audit log of all entries or changes in Clock Time from the Time Entry Screen or from Aspire's mobile app. It performs like other search lists; you are able to add filters and displays as needed.
Some fields available for use on this audit are Device Name, Audit Action, Accepted Date Time, Accepted By, Clock Start and Clock End.
You can export the Audit Clock Time data to a downloaded Excel spreadsheet.
Time Entry Audit
Once selected, the Time Entry Audit screen shows an audit log of all entries or changes to time on a work ticket from the Time Entry screen or from Aspire's mobile app.
You can then export the Time Entry Audit data to a downloaded Excel spreadsheet if need be.
Approving Employee Hours
Once all employees are reflected in Pending status with no errors, the hours can be Approved.
🧠 Do not approve time each day; you would have to unapprove time in order to get the weeks’ time calculated and exported correctly. If you approve time each day, the potential for OT to calculate incorrectly is greater.
Click the check box next for each employee you want hours approved, or select the check box at the top to select all employees from your list.
Bulk Actions
The Bulk Actions drop down menu is where Approving, Unapproving and Exporting of employee payroll hours occurs.
Employee Time Card is a report you can export from Aspire that displays your selected employees hours. This report can be published to your Aspire system by submitting a layout request ticket to AspireCare.
📑 To learn more about Layout related Knowledge Base articles, please click here.
Select Bulk Actions and then, click Approve.
The status of your time entries will change for your selected employees from Pending to Approved.
📌Note: If hours appear incorrect after approving employee time, you may select that employee and choose Unapprove under Bulk Actions to make corrections in Time Entry.
You then could reapprove the employee time when the corrections have been made.
Exporting Payroll Hours
Once you have approved all employee hours, you can export those approved hours to continue your payroll process.
📑To learn more about Exporting Payroll Hours, please refer to these two Knowledge Base articles based on your payroll system: