Tempo Ideas

Problem

Under Settings, Period Configuration, "Periods Used for Approvals" offers only Monthly or Weekly.

With monthly periods, the approval block covers the whole month. Any later adjustment, however small, reopens the entire month for that user and project, including hours approved weeks earlier.

Weekly periods reduce the size of the block, but they are not usable for us:

• They require project approvers to approve every week. Our approvers each cover several projects and that load is not acceptable.

• Weeks cross month boundaries. Our capitalisation is monthly, so a period split across two months reproduces the same problem in a structural way.

There is a related idea already in the portal, "Bi-weekly approval period" (https://ideas.tempo.io/ideas/T-I-401, Jul 2020, Future consideration), asking for a rolling 14 day cycle from a chosen start date to match a biweekly payroll. A rolling cycle drifts across month ends, so it does not solve the case described here.

There is also a side effect worth noting: with weekly approvals, changing the first day of the week afterwards makes every already approved week show as not submitted, even though the data remains approved in the database.

Requested enhancement

Add a semi-monthly option to Periods Used for Approvals: day 1 to 15 and day 16 to the end of the month. Periods never cross a month boundary, so they aggregate cleanly into monthly figures.

Why it matters

We ask users to submit their timesheet around day 23, before the month ends, so the last days are an estimate and regularisations are part of normal operation. With semi-monthly periods, the first half of the month would be confirmed and closed while corrections are still being made to the second half, so a late adjustment would reopen half a month instead of a full one.

Related note

The setting is global for the tenant, and Financial Manager uses the same period configuration as Timesheets, so it is not possible today to combine monthly timesheets with shorter project approval periods. Being able to set the period for project approvals independently from the timesheet period would solve the same problem by another route.