The Timesheet page in 9.2 has got a significant facelift. A lot of very useful improvements like the ability to configure the sections/fields that should appear on the timesheet, control TRC display by role, Timesheet sign-off message, consolidated view of payable time, reported time and absences etc. have been introduced in 9.2. In this post, we want to take a look at the new option to save as PDF or print the timesheet.
From a compliance and operational perspective, this is an absolute requirement and has been achieved through customisations. In 9.2, the Time and Labor product team has delivered a 'Print Timesheet' functionality on the timesheet page. Shown below is an ESS Timesheet page from 9.2:
Clicking on the 'Print Timesheet' link on the page opens up a PDF file with details of punches for each day of the current timesheet as well as a summary of the total hours per day. A sample of the report generated from the punch timesheet is given below:
While it's excellent that Oracle has delivered this functionality out of the box, I can foresee possible improvements to this report:
a. It would be good to have an integrated report of both Elapsed and Punch time. We did some tests on the report where we reported both elapsed and punch time on the punch timesheet, for the same week and then printed the report from the punch timesheet. The report displayed only the punches in the expected fashion and the TRC reported was printed in the last column to the right of the report. For customers where a single employee uses both punch and elapsed time (this is a common scenario), I fear that the report may not give a complete and clear indication of the hours and codes reported.
b. For customers using Time and Labor and Absence Management, it would have been good to print hours from T&L and hours from Absence Management distinctly. In the current version, I see that the hours from T&L and AM are printed together and absence hours are not clearly identifiable on the report (absence hours are printed as normal elapsed time and has the formatting issue outlined in previous point).
c. A major flaw that I see with this report is that it prints whatever data entered (and not necessarily saved) in the timesheet page at the time of clicking the 'Print Timesheet' button and does not take final submitted data from the database. This means that an employee can 'fudge' the report if required, by just entering punches on the timesheet and printing the report before actually submitting the timesheet! If this report is used to sign-off time which has a financial or compliance implication, then this flaw in design will have to be addressed.
Some other remarks on this functionality:
1. You can control whether the 'Print Timesheet' link should appear in the Timesheet page or not in the Time Reporting template setup.
2. The above report is generated by the BI Publisher report - TL_PRNT_TMST.
3. Need to verify whether this report is supported in non-English langauges.
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Have questions or want to discuss on this further?
We have a dedicated HR Tech lab researching the new features of 9.2 as well as developing innovative solutions utilising 9.2/8.53 features. If you want to discuss further on this new feature or on 9.2 in general, mail into jiju@hroiconsulting.com
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