{"id":10978,"date":"2021-01-27T05:20:47","date_gmt":"2021-01-27T05:20:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/totalsynergy.com\/?p=10978"},"modified":"2022-09-16T12:24:05","modified_gmt":"2022-09-16T02:24:05","slug":"how-your-ai-approvals-assistant-gives-you-more-time-for-design-the-january-2021-synergy-release","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totalsynergy.com\/how-your-ai-approvals-assistant-gives-you-more-time-for-design-the-january-2021-synergy-release\/","title":{"rendered":"How your AI Approvals Assistant gives you more time for design \u2014 the January 2021 Synergy release"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Who was it who said, \u201cI love approving timesheets and expenses\u201d? Oh, that\u2019s right, no one. Ever. And we know it.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why we want you to meet our new AI approvals assistant (born into our Synergy cloud software this month) and show you how this particular PA can give you more time for designing our world. This bot\u2019s already pleased to meet you, and we reckon you\u2019ll feel the same.<\/p>\n

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Preparing for the arrival of our AI assistant<\/h3>\n

In an update a few months back<\/a>, we added the functionality that allowed an administrator to edit somebody else’s timesheet. The need for that function is quite common, especially for the boss\u2019s executive assistant to do the timesheets for the boss [wink]. So, we did that in 2020.<\/p>\n

Now a commonly requested feature is the ability to approve timesheets and\/or expenses. Almost everybody wants to approve expenses, and some people also want to approve timesheets.<\/p>\n

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Rigorous review of timesheets and expenses \u2014 hourly rates or otherwise<\/h3>\n

We think that, really, everybody should be reviewing timesheets with a little bit more rigor. We think that regardless of how you bill your projects.<\/p>\n

Dear readers may immediately say, “Oh, but hold on, I do all my jobs at a fixed price, so I don’t even need to do timesheets \u2014 you only need to do timesheets if you’re doing hourly-rates jobs.” It is true that if you\u2019re doing hourly rates, then you have to apply a lot of rigor to the timesheets because every time somebody puts an hour on it, it gets billed to the customer. So the rigor there is terribly important, and everybody understands that.<\/p>\n

The thing is, even if you’re not doing hourly-rates jobs, you’re almost certainly doing a resourcing meeting, we’ve talked about that before<\/a>, where you’re saying, \u201cYou can have this person to work on this job for a certain number of hours a week over the next month\u201d \u2014 so, staff are being shared from job to job.<\/p>\n

Now, if you’re a decent, half professional practice (and we know you are so much more!), you’d have had a budget before you started that highlighted the number of hours you needed to deliver that job in order to make a profit. So, in a way, it’s actually more important to track your timesheets on a fixed-price job than it is on an hourly-rates job. Because it tracks progress through your budget and shows you if\/when you start eating into your profit.<\/p>\n

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Business and project viability, and timesheets \u2014 it\u2019s a thing<\/h3>\n

In other words, on an hourly-rates job, if somebody does more work on something than you expected you’ll certainly try and pass off that time (or at least, some of it) to the customer \u2014 and you get paid anyway. But if it’s a fixed-rate job and somebody spends more time than you anticipated on something, well guess what? That comes out of your profit margin. And eventually, it comes out of the viability (or not) of your business. You’ve got to be collecting a certain amount of money to stay afloat, and so it’s critical to observe that and make sure you stay within those budgets.<\/p>\n

We’ve talked before about some of the project planning tricks Synergy has with things like EVM<\/a> \u2014 where you can look at how fast you’re burning your hours compared to your budget and predict whether you’re going to be able to complete on time\/budget or not \u2014 but if you’re not filling out timesheets and your staff aren\u2019t putting their hours in a timesheet somewhere \u2026 well, we can’t help you. Because Synergy can’t see it either.<\/p>\n

Likewise, if people are diligently filling out their timesheets but erroneously putting the hours on the wrong job, then again, we can’t help you. We\u2019d love to, but sorry, no cigar.<\/p>\n

As a result, some people just take the attitude of \u2018if it happens, we’ll pick it up and we’ll fix it\u2019. And look, that’s okay, but it\u2019s not great and it\u2019s got big old holes in it. Other people take the attitude that, as a professional project leader, it\u2019s part of their job just to have a quick look through people’s timesheets and make sure that they’re at least vaguely correct \u2014 that there are no glaring anomalies. Good call, but often time consuming. And outrageously boring.<\/p>\n

 
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Review and approval are just good business practice, and we\u2019ve just made them easier (and faster)<\/h3>\n

With Synergy, you can fill in your cash claim \u2014 you might have parking, lunches, fuel, or whatever \u2014 and you can attach the invoices to the timesheet. We give you the choice of just doing cash. So, if you’re only interested in making sure that people aren’t trying to rip you off with their cash expenses, then we can put the case in for that, and the timesheet records are just considered to be approved automatically once the cash is. That\u2019s one option that might suit.<\/p>\n

If you did want to check the timesheets as well, you can just tick the checkbox to say you’ve looked at it and it’s approved. So, it’s up to the organization, but we do recommend a timesheet review \u2014\u202fwe think its actually good business practice, so long as you don’t overdo it, don’t overthink it, for fixed-fee projects. If you’re doing hourly rates, you should overthink it. Overthink it immediately.<\/p>\n

In light of all that, we’ve added a few really nice features to Synergy to help you out with timesheets and approvals. Firstly, we’ve made the workflow really easy from the user’s perspective:<\/p>\n