Using BQE CORE, you can allow your clients to check and approve time sheets. This is useful if you want clients to approve their project hours before billing them. In order to do this, a client representative must be able to log in to CORE just like any other user, but with limited access to data.
To do this, the following steps need to be taken:
- You must have a subscription package in CORE for the client representative that allows access to the Time & Expense features. Please check with your Sales Account Manager to purchase the required subscriptions.
- Next create a new 'Standard' user for this client representative, which will link to a new employee contact automatically created at the same time. You can do so from the Manage Users screen (Settings > Company > Manage Companies) by using the Add User > Existing Employee option. This external user will receive an invitation email.
- You need to set up limited security permissions for this external user from the Security Permissions screen (Settings > Access & Permissions).
- Set up access to selective projects that can be seen by this client using Access Management (Settings > Access & Permissions). You can do so by clicking an employee row on the Access Management screen and assigning projects to the employee in the View By: Project mode.
- You might also want to set up the appropriate client and/or project records to indicate that this client representative is the manager of these records. This will help later to simplify submitting time and expense entries for approval. You can set this by going into the client record from Contacts > Clients and entering a value for the Manager field on its General > Details tab. The same can be done for the Manager field on the Projects > Settings > Details tab.
- Make sure the rule for auto-approval of time and expense entries is not set up on these selective projects because we require manual approval for them. You can uncheck those rules on the Projects > Settings > Assignment tab. Check CORE Help Center for details.
- The external user must set up email notifications to let them know that entries are submitted for approval. This can be done via User Settings > Notifications.
- You must inform your employees about the new workflow in your company. They need to submit their time and expenses to the external user for approval and billing using the Actions > Workflow > Submit option in the respective screens.