Why Use Deltek's Time & Expense?

Deltek’s Time & Expense is a time/expense entry system designed to provide greater flexibility and control in project/task and expense report management through the electronic entry and approval of employee timesheets and expense reports. Based on 15 user defined tables for data collection and a solid foundation of thoughtful design, Deltek’s Time & Expense (T&E) can meet the needs of a high number of business clients today.

Whether you are a government contractor or subcontractor, or a commercial firm, the enormous flexibility of Deltek’s T&E allows you to configure a time collection or expense system that meets your individual business needs.

Why Use Deltek’s Time & Expense?

If you are currently collecting paper timesheets or paper expense reports, the immediate benefit is a savings in time at the end of each timesheet period. Employees are entering their time, ideally each day, and when the timesheet period is complete, each employee electronically signs their timesheet, or their expense report. There is no longer a need for the physical collection of paper timesheets or expense reports or the data entry.

The data on the timesheets and expense reports tends to be more accurate. Not only have you removed the manual data entry by another person, if employees are entering their time when they complete their tasks, there is a marked increase in accuracy since they are not relying on their memory or a guess. How many of us have been filling out our paper timesheet and thought to ourselves, “I think it was about 3 hours…”. Having an electronic version of the timesheet available to you whenever you have access to an internet connection from anywhere in the world helps ensure a timely entry of data which in turn results in greater accuracy in reporting, billing, and subsequent bidding on future jobs.

T&E allows users to monitor their tasks, (things they are responsible for in T&E) from a desktop screen within T&E. The system can be configured with workflow events, most of which can be setup to trigger notification of a user that they have a task to complete. Examples of this would be an event created to notify a n employee’s supervisor when the employee has signed their timesheet. The supervisor would have a task on their desktop to “Approve” the employee’s timesheet. Also the same event can be configured to send an e-mail to the supervisor letting them know of the pending task. Another example is a Daily Floor Check. Government Contractors probably all have fond memories of a DCAA Auditor wandering around asking people for their timesheets to ensure data entry is being done in a timely fashion. In T&E you can run a Floor Check at any time and then notify the employees who have failed via a task on their desktop and an e-mail that they must go in and update their timesheet. There are many other possible event combinations for creating workflow notifications all of which allow each user to effectively manage their employees whether they are down the hall or on the other side of the world.
How to Use Deltek’s Time & Expense

There are as many right ways to configure T&E as there are clients using it, so there is rarely a cookie cutter setup, however there are some common threads that apply to most successful users.

  • Start with a solid configuration. Many users attempt to setup and configure T&E on their own. In some cases they are successful, but in many others this results in a setup that is less that optimal or completely unusable. While it can be expensive to purchase consulting, the clients that do, often find that their T&E is setup far faster, configured to meet their needs, and has more functionality than if they had done it themselves.
  • Rely on Deltek’s design to help support your FAR compliance. There are a number of features in T&E that if used properly will help keep you government contractors in compliance with the FAR regulations. The workflow, floor check, TS revision settings and a host of other features when used properly will help keep your system running smoothly, and also help ensure that an audit will be less likely to have a negative outcome. While DCAA will never grant a blanket approval to ANY timekeeping system, Deltek’s Time & Expense systems, when properly managed, have passed countless audits and been “Approved as Audited” by DCAA.
  • In the vein of “Relying on Deltek’s design”, intelligent use of the workflow notifications allow system administrators to periodically check on the progress of things, and then notify their users when there is a problem or the potential for one. Keeping up with the process helps ensure that you do not have any unpleasant surprises at the end of the Timesheet Period.
  • Effective use of the Charge Trees is also a hallmark of the typical successful user. T&E uses Charge Trees to group and manage the charges available to users on their timesheets. Charge trees can be exported from GCS or Costpoint to mimic a Contract or Project Work Force. Doing so prevents users from charging combinations of Jobs and Labor Categories or PLCs that they have not been given rights to. Users also have the option of creating their Trees by hand in any logical manner that would make the most sense to their users, and applying restrictions to those trees by groups of employees or individual employees. This great degree of flexibility ensures a greater degree of accuracy when an employee selects a charge.

Conclusion

A properly configured and managed Deltek Time & Expense system is an intelligent investment in the successful running of a modern business. Given the systems inherent flexibility, there are very few business situations that T&E cannot accommodate. For more information, or to schedule a web based demo, please contact us.