Queries and reports provide online access to your timesheet information. Queries are single page online snapshots of timesheet information displayed in grid format designed to answer routine questions and provide business insight. Reports are multi-page documents designed to provide input for your core business processes, namely billing and payroll.

Common Features

While queries and reports are designed to do different things, the have several common features.

Recasting Timesheet Periods.

One of the most useful features is their ability to re-cast rigid weekly timesheet periods into more useful accounting and billing periods. This allows the user to easily figure out the semi-monthly payroll totals from weekly timesheets, for example. Queries and reports always refer to hours that have been re-cast to fit the query start and stop dates as Query Hours or Query Period Hours. Hours that were actually recorded on whole timesheets are always called Timesheet Hours. So, partial timesheet periods are always included in Query Hours and never included in Timesheet Hours.

Start and Stop Dates.

Almost all queries and reports accept date parameters. The Start-Date is always the oldest or earliest date in your reporting period.

The queries always return the timesheet information that occurred between the dates and on the dates - the period is always inclusive. So, to return all the hours worked in a calendar week, you must make sure that your query spans seven days including the start and stop days - from Monday to Sunday for example - not Monday to Monday.

When opening a query, Tempus always defaults the start and stop dates to the seven day period ending on the day before the current date. So, if you open a query on Monday, the stop date will be set for Sunday, and the start date will be set for the previous Monday.

Hours Submitted and Approved.

Most queries and reports allow you to choose timesheets for inclusion in your answer set based on timesheet status. This allows you to select the result set based on your business need.

For example, if you are creating a report for billing your customers, you probably will only want to include timesheets that have been approved by the client supervisors, but if you're just trying to estimate your month-to-date billing, you would probably want to include submitted (but not approved timesheets) too, since almost all timesheets will eventually be approved.

Branch Office Reporting.

Most queries and reports allow you to specify a branch office location for the query. When you choose a branch office, Tempus reports only on the contracts belonging to that office.

Since the contracts drive the result set, it is possible to use this feature to report time using other classifications too. For example, you could set up a special project as a "branch". You could then easily isolate the timesheets for this project in all the queries and reports by choosing the project in the Branch Office dropdown.

Queries

Queries are designed to answer routine business questions and provide for business analysis of timesheet information. The results of a query always easily fit into the browser window, usually by employing a grid structure to display the results.

Note that the grid displayed by queries can be easily copied and pasted into an Excel spreadsheet. Use ctrl+c to copy and ctrl+v to paste.

The best way to familiarize yourself with the details of the queries is to try them in the demo. All you have to do to return reasonable results in the demo is click OK in the query parameter box.

Reports

Reports are multi-page documents designed to provide input for some of your core business processes - billing, payroll, and commission calculation. In general, they provide a much more convenient (and accurate) way to summarize timesheet information for use in these areas then manual methods can provide.

Excel format available.

All the reports can be printed in PDF, Excel, and Rich Text format. If you choose Excel format, you can easily transfer report information directly to an Excel spreadsheet for further processing. If, for example, you formatted your payroll spreadsheet to use the input from the Tempus Payroll report, you could conceivably reduce your payroll calculation to a cut and paste operation.