If you are a manager or supervisor in charge of approving your employees' time cards, you can do so on the Approve tab of the Export Time screen. Be aware that if Lock Time On Approval is selected (on Export Time's Settings tab), you will need to approve the time cards before you will be able to perform an export of your time card data for your payroll company. (For details, see Exporting Time Card Data.)

Note: The configuration of your export settings, with the required setup for your payroll company, is part of the Time and Attendance (TAA) implementation process.
 
For information about TAA, go to An Introduction to Time and Attendance. For details about the TAA user interface, see Navigating the Time and Attendance Module.

Caution: Make sure that the manager or other responsible party has been keeping up with their time card checking and editing tasks so that all shift exceptions are handled before the following procedure. Time and Attendance won't allow you to approve the time cards if it detects any exceptions. (Included in the steps below is how to handle exceptions that are found during approval, but if you can prevent having to do so at that point or have just a few to fix, you can make the process easier for yourself.)

To approve time cards, follow these steps:


  1. Click  >> Export Time.
     
  2. Click the Approve tab.
       
  3. In the Employees tree, select the check boxes to the left of the departments (or individual employees) whose time cards you need to approve.
    Note: To choose all your employees, you can select the check box for your top-level department. To specify just a portion of your worker base, you may need to expand higher-level departments until you get to the one you want.
  4. Under Date Range, click the Start Date calendar picker and select the beginning of the time card date range span to approve (for example, the beginning of the pay period).
     
  5. Click the End Date calendar picker and select the end of the time period.
     
  6. Optionally, if you would like to see the time card data before you approve it, you can click Show History by Shift Date (to view the employee's work shift start and end times chronologically [earliest date and time to most recent]) or Show History by Approval Date (to view the shifts chronologically by date they were previously approved [if any]).
     
    Note: The Approval Date column will have a value of 01/01/1900 for shifts that haven't been approved yet as just a default value.
  7. If the time card data is correct, click Approve Selected.
     
    If no shift exceptions are found, skip down to step 9.
     
    If there are any shift exceptions, a message warning you that there are conflicts will appear at the top right, and a Conflicts grid will be displayed that lists the exceptions by date and employee name.
     
    Caution: You'll need to fix all the shift exceptions before you can complete the approval process.
  8. To fix the exceptions one by one, follow these steps:
     
    1. Click  to the left of the first employee's name in the Conflicts list.
       
      Their Time Card Edit screen will appear on a new tab.
        
    2. Fix the exception. (For example, for an Incomplete Shift exception, enter the missing punch-in or punch-out time.)
      Note: For guidance, see Finding and Fixing Shift Exceptions and Editing an Employee's Time Card.
    3. On the tab displaying the Export Time screen, repeat steps a and b for all the employees with shift exceptions.
       
    4. After you have fixed all the exceptions, click Approve Selected again (for the same group of employees over the same pay period).
       
  • A confirmation dialog box will appear.
      
  1. Click Yes.
     
    A success message will appear at the top right of the screen, letting you know that the time cards have been approved.