As a farm manager, you'll likely need to keep track of a crew of farmhands and workers. You'll want to know what tasks they're working on, and how long they worked on them for. Of course this helps you with payroll, but can also help you to determine who is especially skilled at certain tasks and assist in budgeting for future schedules. You can review your employees weekly hours for accuracy after they submit their sheets, and then approve them or ask for additional clarification. You'll also be able to export those totals to spreadsheets and run reports to send to payroll.
To start working with Timesheets, navigate to Schedule>Timesheets from the main menu.
Note: Timesheets are available for Farmbrite Premium subscriptions. The features described in this article are limited to Admin and Operations Manager user roles.
Creating Time Sheets
The first step to get started with timesheets is to create a timesheet for an employee. Timesheets are created weekly and run from Monday through Sunday for each week. These can either be created by you in advance for your team, or by your employees themselves in their Farmbrite app. The choice is up to you! You might create them and prepopulate tasks on each employee's timesheet, or you can put the responsibility on them to start a new one each week. To create one, click New Timesheet.
You'll see the following fields in the new window.
- Timesheet Period Ending - Select what week this timesheet is for. You'll select the Sunday that ends the week of the timesheet.
- Employee - Which employee is this timesheet for? A list of your Farmbrite users will be shown here. Need to add a user? Check out this article.
- Status - You can choose current status for the sheet. When creating a new one, the status will likely start with draft. This let's your employees enter their time on the sheet, and then set it to submitted status once it's ready for your review.
- Prepopulate from schedule and tasks - This time saving checkbox preloads tasks and hours into the timesheet by referencing the employee's assigned tasks and events that are scheduled for that week.
- Copy from previous week - If the employees schedule is relatively the same week to week, this feature can save them time when completing the sheet. They can still edit and update any previous task or hours to reflect the new week as well; this gives them a jump start instead of starting from scratch with a new sheet.
- Comments - Feel free to add any details or comments you'd like your employee to see on their sheet.
Once you have saved the sheet, your employee will see it in their Farmbrite app. They'll access it and add hours throughout the week, and then submit it when they are ready. As an admin, you can always add and remove from their sheet as well. If you are curious to what this looks like for them, check out this article to learn more about their workflow.
Your employees can log into the Farmbrite app on their mobile device to record their hours, or you could set up a computer in the farm office that they could use to log their hours as well. The choice is up to you and how you want to administer your timesheets.
Reviewing Timesheets
Since each timesheet ends on a Sunday, you'll likely want to let you employees know to have their hours added to the sheets by a specific time. Maybe this is the end of the day on Sunday, or perhaps you'll give them some extra time to finish and review on Monday. Either way, when the deadline has passed for adding hours you can optionally lock timesheets to prevent your employees from updating up them. This is not required, but can act as a "cut off" time for your team filling in their sheets. This can be done in bulk by selecting all the sheets to lock, or can be updated on an indivdiual sheet as well. Hot Tip: set a filter on your timesheets homepage to find just the sheets for this week, and then use the bulk edit feature to lock them all at once.
Whether your lock the sheets or not, once your employee submits them from their side they will not be able to make further changes until you review. Of course, if they made a mistake and speak with you about it, you can always set the status back to draft and let them make further updates.
After they submit the sheet, you can filter to find all sheets for a week in a submitted status, and then review their time. The level of detail here is up to you. You might simply review the total hours submitted and approve the sheet if it matches your expectations, or perhaps you'll review every task on everyday to ensure it was recorded accurately. However you approach this, you'll end up with two choices: approving or rejecting the timesheet.
Approving the timesheet sets it to Approved status, and then add the hours for that week to the Employee Approved Hours report.
Rejecting the timesheet gives you the opportunity to supply a reason in a note, which will be sent to your employee via email. They'll be alerted to the need to review the timesheet, and can log in to make changes and resubmit for further review. You can then re-review and mark the sheet as approved.
After approving the timesheets, you can also optionally mark them as complete. This acts like archiving the timesheet, as timesheets in a completed status will not be shown in the list by default. Of course, you can always set a filter to show the complete status and reference your previously completed timesheets.
Running Reports and Exporting Data
You'll have two choices for getting your timesheet data out of Farmbrite.
You can run an Employee Approved Hours report to see the total number of hours worked within a given date range. You'll find this option under Reports > Standard Reports, and then under the User Activities tab. This report is fairly straightforward, you'll supply a date range and see the number of approved (or completed) hours for each employee. You'll see their name and email, and can download the report to a spreadsheet if you need.
You can also export the timesheets page, but you'll see the totals for each indivdiual weekly timesheet, not the combined summary across the date range. The export can also show you statuses, timestamps, comments, and rejection reasons if you need those as well.
