This article is relevant if you use NetSuite SRP (Service Resource Planning formerly known as Advanced Projects) and you need more capacity in your timesheet management practices.
NetSuite Advanced Projects Timesheets Challenges
If you are using NetSuite’s Advanced Projects, you clearly are holding a concern to capture time for your professionals and staff. NetSuite’s timesheet does a reasonably good job capturing information. However, as you know, there are a number of areas that can be improved.
- Template: What if you want to automatically fill out a “blank weekly” timesheet to help your staff quickly enter time?
- Budget Visibility: Your staff has no visibility of the time budgeted for the task when entering time. What if you could show the task budget against already recorded actual hours so your staff knows if they are going to exceed time allotted?
- Time Summary: If you are a project manager, how can you see and adjust the time booked across your projects? What if you could focus on time for a specific project across all your resources in a timesheet view?
- Pooled Resources: What if you have a budget to get a task done and you want to assign multiple resources to work on it — yet you don’t want the collective team effort to exceed the budget? NetSuite’s timesheet doesn’t handle this well due to the way it makes assumptions on task / resource hour assignments.
- Outside Contractors: What if you are using 1099 contractors on your projects and you want them treated just like you treat you in-house staff? NetSuite’s timesheet has 1099 contractor limitations which makes it cumbersome for project managers and administrators.
Get More Value Out of NetSuite Advanced Projects before Upgrading to Open Air
Some of the concerns noted above, among others, come up for organizations that have a larger number of staff, 1099 contractors and project managers. Indeed, NetSuite markets its Open Air platform for the Enterprise and the timesheet and analysis views in that application are tuned to address bigger company concerns. However, you may find that you are not ready to upgrade to Open Air and that you can get more mileage from NetSuite Advanced Projects if you had stronger timesheet capacities.
We worked with an organization that pushed NetSuite Advanced Projects quite far. They had an interesting business with multiple divisions. One division served traditional consulting offering fixed bid and time and materials services. Another division did installation work for products sold. Still another division was a staffing organization — and the timesheet is the fundamental basis for invoicing clients and paying staff. They also had a training department that needed to track time across training projects — something NetSuite is not equipped to do out-of-the-box. With these different business models, naturally, the client had different project managers and administrators working to keep things under control.
We love NetSuite’s platform because it gives us the capacity to innovate and solve our clients’ business system challenges. We enhanced the Advanced Projects module to take care of the organization’s different department demands. The timesheet is the common “touch point” with field staff, contractors and consultants. Hence, it was important to tune the experience to drive wider adoption and good timekeeping practices. By developing “Enterprise Timesheet Manager for NetSuite“, we solved the challenge by addressing their specific requirements.
Enterprise Timesheet Manager for Larger Professional Services Organizations
The Enterprise Timesheet Manager for NetSuite is a SuiteApp bundle available to any organization using NetSuite Advanced Projects. The full product offer is available here. The software is is available with important capacities to serve Administrators, Project Managers, Employees and importantly, 1099 Contractors (vendors).
The Enterprise Timesheet Manager can act as replacement to NetSuite’s Detail and Weekly timesheet view. Or it can be used side-by-side with full compatibility. I recommend reviewing all the features here.
What Kind of NetSuite Timesheet Challenge Troubles You?
You may have a particular NetSuite timesheet concern that you want to address. The Enterprise Timesheet Manager for NetSuite is extensible to address your particular concern.
Reach out and contact us if you have questions.
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Marty Zigman
Holding all three official certifications, Marty is regarded as the top NetSuite expert and leads a team of senior professionals at Prolecto Resources, Inc. He is a former Deloitte & Touche CPA and has held CTO roles. For over 30 years, Marty has produced leadership in ERP, CRM and eCommerce business systems. Contact Marty to set up a conversation.
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Hi Marty,
I’ve had a good look at your ETM module, a very smart addition overcoming some significant limitations in the current system.
Have you got anything around determining or reporting on estimated time vs actual time entered? I understand what Netsuite is trying to do when it increases estimated time to match actual time entered, but this means that unless you’re setting a baseline at the beginning of the project you have no possible way of seeing if your estimate was off. In addition, if the scope of work changes and you need to add new tasks, setting a new baseline will wipe out all of your old estimates and replace them with the (greater) actual time, again losing visibility.
The bigger problem we are having however is with regards to being able to report on estimated time vs actual time as a measure of efficiency. There seems to be no way to coax the reports (apart from saved searches) to do a calculation on a task by task basis of what was estimated for each person vs what they did. Without this reporting in a professional services organisation it is almost impossible to hold staff accountable for their hours.
I’m quite ready to code my own alternative to the Netsuite estimated time reporting with my own custom fields that will be available in searches and reports. It’s quite inexplicable that the system default estimated hours field on the task isn’t available for reporting, but a custom field is.
Hi Chris,
Indeed, you are correct. Our Enterprise Timesheet Manager will pool resources together to move around estimated time subject to a total. But as soon as the pool goes beyond estimated, the NetSuite default behavior kicks in pushing the hours up. So we don’t have an offer.
The challenge you may face is that you can’t extend and persist the resource based sublist on the project task record. We overcame this limitation by creating a custom record to effectively extend the fields. But, as you can imagine, if that custom record gets out of sync with your resource task sublist, it’s messy. If you can get those custom values to persist on the project task header, you will be good.
We move to saved searches and have built suitelets to get reports we want. One area that is interesting is to build a report via saved search and then drive the pivot builder dynamically to get the format you want.
Keep us informed on your progress.
Marty