Timesheet Submission against Projects

[Community Alums]

Dear All,

My customer is looking for building the below functionality in ServiceNow

1. Online ServiceNow timesheet Submission and Expense Submission

2. Portal based Easy User interface with assigned Projects for monthly timesheet submission (PM, RM,PO, Work location)

3. Calendar View of logged hours

4. Daily, Weekly, Monthly & configurable export of timesheet data (Project Based, User based, RM Based, PM Based, PO based)

I know, ServiceNow has OOTB Platform feature called Time card Management and Timesheet portal which provides weekly submission of time against Project/Project Task.

With customization and App Engine & Custom apps can we create a calendar view monthly timesheets and record them within ServiceNow for different Teams and Business Units ? 

Has anybody tried this and developed this successfully? Please share inputs & provide guidance.

[Mark Manders · Accepted solution]

I never saw it, but building on the existing Time Card Management module/Timesheet portal, this should be possible. It will be a lot of customization and future maintenance. The time sheet data export can be done through scheduled reports. The calendar view will be customization for sure.

Question you should ask them is 'why'. What are they currently using and why do they want to replace it? If they have ServiceNow and are using SPM, it makes sense to extend to time writing in the same system, but how important are these functionalities? Have they seen how it works OOB? You can put reports in place for the logged hours and other data. If the calendar view is something 'nice to have', maybe a future release will bring it. And if it is a 'must have', why? There are other ways to have control on this.

But, as I said: everything can be build. Question is how much effort/resources they want to spend on getting this.

[Mark Manders · Accepted solution]

I never saw it, but building on the existing Time Card Management module/Timesheet portal, this should be possible. It will be a lot of customization and future maintenance. The time sheet data export can be done through scheduled reports. The calendar view will be customization for sure.

Question you should ask them is 'why'. What are they currently using and why do they want to replace it? If they have ServiceNow and are using SPM, it makes sense to extend to time writing in the same system, but how important are these functionalities? Have they seen how it works OOB? You can put reports in place for the logged hours and other data. If the calendar view is something 'nice to have', maybe a future release will bring it. And if it is a 'must have', why? There are other ways to have control on this.

But, as I said: everything can be build. Question is how much effort/resources they want to spend on getting this.

[Community Alums]

Hi @Mark Manders 

First of all, Thank you so much for your quick response. Greatly helpful.

Customer is already using ServiceNow for some of their Business workflows and want to leverage the same platform for this additional Timesheet requirement as well.

Which platform are they using today, we do not know but have asked this question.

We plan to share the OOB feature first which the right way but I feel, they may want to project this as a "must have feature" and build a solution mapping to their Business requirement rather OOB, as this will impact usability, current ways of working and user experience.

It can definitely be done with Customization but wanted to get a view and understanding of how complex this could be and how technically we achieve it. 

Trying to visualize how can we capture monthly and store this timesheet data with mapping to user, project, Reporting Manager, Project Manager, Purchase order, and deriving expenses out of it.

Currently its timecard table with 7 fields for each day of the week.

Even we take the OOB route, customization is a must.

Thank You.

Regards,

[LisaKomidar · Accepted solution]

The information is already there.   The user reports the time towards tasks.  The resource manager is on the user record.  The project manager is on the task record (may need to dot walk).  You also utilize the resource plans and that helps with information on the resource allocation and associated cost for the resource (user).  

As to the monthly view, it is complex and you will have to do some large scale coding to match the weekly view.   You won't be able to submit the time to handle the triggered processing functionality to do the calculations but for once a month.   Most Project Managers or Program Managers like to keep a closer look at the numbers.   We did a minor change on the weekly view at my last job and it was horrible to maintain and did not play well when ServiceNow implemented an upgrade to the worker portal.