Creating a New Assignment [REVIEW]

Assignments are the foundation which define timesheets. A timesheet needs to be connected to an assignment.

You can create an assignment to outline a set of rules that multiple workers can use for their timesheets. These rules include:

Approving Manager, who receives submitted timesheets
Pay, Charge & Agency Rates
Working Hours
Invoicing

You can create a new assignment each time you need a new set of rules for timesheets. As an assignment will determine the approval, payment & invoicing for a number of timesheets, we need the assignments to be set up accurately.

To Create a New Assignment, navigate to:

Timesheets → Assignments

Click ‘New Assignment’ in the top right hand corner.

Once you have opened up the assignment screen, you must go through each mandatory section and complete these in full to be able to save. Mandatory items are marked with an asterisk*.

Select Engagement

You must ensure that you firstly select the correct engagement linking the assignment to the engagement needing to be outlined for the invoicing sequences, a reminder of the importance of an engagement is this stipulate where each party sits in the relationship between all involved. Each candidate or assignment needs to be guided by these engagements to ensure they are invoiced out correctly.

Assign this to

Select the worker that the assignment is going to be based on, assignments are worker specific requirements. If you do not have any employees within the system you will need to complete this prior to being able to save an assignment.

The following items are non-mandatory fields but can have a large benefit when included depending on your needs:

Assignment No: This is mainly for reporting purposes, if you would like to keep track of the assignment being created each week for example you would include your specific numbering sequence. If an ATS is in play the ID number from the ATS system will populate here.
PO No: Purchase Order Numbers can be applied on an individual basis if this field is used, therefore the workers all linked to the same PO number in their assignment can be grouped together on an invoice.
Assignment Name: This is mainly for reporting purposes or used as an easy reference within the assignment summary screen. When you are in the timesheet section it is an easy reference to what assignment the timesheet is linked to.
Consultant: This is highly beneficial if you are needing to separate your consultant margins on your margin reporting for each worker they are looking after. This consultant name will be applied to each assignment they are responsible for and this will appear as a column on the margin report.

Duration

The duration of the assignment is based on and the assignment start and end dates (if applicable). The assignment start date is mandatory as we need a starting point for when the timesheets can start being created for the assignment.

If an assignment does not have an end date, switch the duration from ‘Specific’ to ‘Ongoing’. An ongoing assignment will continue until it is manually changed. If the Duration is ‘Specific’, you need to enter an end date.

All of the following items are mandatory fields. Some items will be populated from a payroll integration which should be set up beforehand.

Pay Schedule: This is pulled from the payroll system you are integrating with so whatever options you have set up in the payroll system is what you will need to choose between, depending upon where you need the worker to pull into to when it comes to the payroll batch.
Job Title: This is an open text field which needs to be included as this is mentioned on the invoice next to the candidates name.
Job Type: How has this employee been engaged is what the job type is referring to: Full-Time, Part-Time or Casual.
Timesheet Schedule: This option is referring to what sort of timesheet are you needing the employee to complete: Weekly, Fortnightly or Monthly. For example, if Monthly is selected the timesheet will include all days on one timesheet for the entire month.

Once the above mandatory steps have been completed we are able to move onto the optional steps below. For these items you would only complete if you need to have the invoice generation impacted by certain assignments. If you have a difference in invoice frequency for either host or agency invoices for this one worker you would then make the selected, choosing one of the following Weekly, Fortnightly, Monthly, Four Weekly, Last Friday of the Month, Calendar Monthly or 4-4-5.

Allowance Units Rounding

The options we have when it comes to paying allowances out are determined on what you select in this area and how you would like these to either be rounded or if you would like these to be paid and charged out at the actual units. If this is not something that is applied to this assignment you are able to disregard.

Timesheet Options

Basic: This is a simple start time and end time timesheets (breaks if turned on) with the days outlined specific to your pay and timesheet schedule.

Per-Day: This timesheet is based on days worked rather than hours.

Multiple Jobs Per-Day: This timesheet gives the candidate the ability to include multiple lines against one day of work.

Fixed Units: The fixed option gives you the ability to include a timesheet for a salaried employee for example, that does the same hours each week therefore does not need to enter this manually. However fixed units still gives the candidate the flexibility to submit other items.

The following items are yes/no options which can be toggled on or off according to your preference.

Can enter break times
Can enter job description
Can submit expense claim on timesheets
Include expenses in invoices to agency
Do you wish to use the manual timesheet
Disable timesheet generation
Do you wish to pay employees for their timesheets
Do you wish to invoice timesheets

Approvers

We have the option of selecting either a primary, secondary or both approvers. From here you are able to apply certain rules around who should be approving first, if both managers are to have the timesheet approved and so on. If you do not need your timesheets going through to approvers than we also have the option to select ‘Automatic Approval’ this will then hide the approvers and once the timesheet is submitted will be automatically approved.

Notifications

We have the option to toggle between having notifications on or off to ‘approvers and payroll processors’ and ‘employees’. This refers to notifications about timesheets and whether you would like these notifications to go out automatically or not.

Select Pay and Charge Rates

The pay and charge rates are to be driven from the rate templates that have been created. If you have not yet created specific rate templates for your company you will need to head to the following article to complete this to be able to link these in with the relevant assignments - Create a New Rate Template [IN PROGRESS]
Once the rate templates are created you are able to head into the assignment and ‘Select Rate template’. From here you will view a drop down list to select which rate template relates to this candidate.
You will need to input the base rates for the relevant fields which will be populated by either a percentage or a currency amount; this will depend upon how you have chosen to set up your rate templates. Once completed and saved, the rules outlined in the template and the currency amounts you have included will be multiplied by the base rates incorporated and populated.

At any stage once you have imported the rate templates you are able edit any of the pay categories or rules if there is a slight variation for whatever reason.

When you are happy with the rates and the rules you are then able to save the assignment, this will then automatically create timesheets based on what you have outlined within the assignment and will appear in your summary screen.