Log time and have it approved

Time is the one thing people type in campaign to cash. You log your own hours against a campaign and one of its scope lines, and submit them. Someone else approves them. Approved hours are then billed by the hour, counted against a retainer's hours, or kept as effort against a fixed fee, as the campaign's scope says. This is for organizations set up as an agency.

1. 1

   Log your hours

   Click Log time, or click a day in the grid. Choose the campaign and scope line, the day, and how long: 1.5, 1:30 and 90m all mean an hour and a half. Say what you did.

   Time
2. 2

   Submit them

   Entries are drafts, seen only by you, until you click Submit. Lines you logged to last week stay in the grid, so a week fills in quickly.

   Time
3. 3

   Someone else approves

   An approver opens Approvals, ticks the entries and clicks Approve, or Send back with what needs changing. You can't approve your own time, unless your organization lets one person do both.

   Time

What approval does

Approving an entry freezes three things on it: the person's billing role, the bill rate and the cost rate. A later change of rates never re-prices approved work. From then on the entry isn't edited.

If an approval was a mistake, an approver can take it back from the list of recent decisions, with a reason. The entry waits for approval again. That works until what the entry bills is on an invoice; after that, void the invoice first.

Billable or not

On a time-and-materials line or a retainer with hours, an entry is billable unless you turn it off, for work the client isn't paying for. Everywhere else the switch doesn't appear: time on a fixed fee or on media is never billed by the hour.

You can also log time to a campaign with Not in the scope. It isn't billed. It shows on the campaign and under Today, so someone can decide whether the scope needs a change order.

Bring time in from another tool

An approver can click Import time and paste rows or choose a CSV file with these columns: date, person (their email or name), campaign (its number), line, hours, note and billable. Every row is checked first, and nothing is imported until every row is right. A row that's already logged is refused, so importing the same file twice does no harm. What's imported waits for approval like any other time.