Time & Expense Overview

Overview

Whether you’re tracking time and expenses or approving them, Kantata makes it easy to stay on top of things. Your team's time, expenses, and invoices are linked to the tasks and projects they impact, helping you better manage your budget and ensure that your business is profitable.

Here are some ways that Kantata's time and expense capabilities can help simplify your workflow:

• Quickly track time from anywhere in Kantata OX.
• Track billable and non-billable time and expenses at the project or task level.
• Add time and expenses directly to the project from which you’re working.
• Set member limits for time tracking and submission.
• Control which projects, task types, and individual tasks can have time and expenses tracked to them
• Review and approve all time entries from a single location.
• Enable Time & Expense notifications to receive time tracking and timesheet submission reminders, as well as stay on top of approval statuses for timesheets and expense reports.
• Analyze time and expenses across your organization.

Ideally, all project participants should complete their timesheets on a weekly basis and submit them for approval. After they’ve been approved, all time and expense entries are locked and can be added to an invoice or sent to QuickBooks at your convenience.

You can complete these actions within the project workspace—tracking time and expenses from the Time & Expenses tab and managing approvals from the Activity Feed—or complete these actions across all your projects from the Time & Expense area in the left navigation.

Time

You can track and manage time from many different areas of Kantata. With the right permissions, the following pages are easily accessible from the left navigation menu:

• Timesheets
• Time Entries
• Monthly
• Time Approvals
• Weekly Schedule

You can also choose to manage time on a project-by-project basis from the following tabs in the project workspace:

• Time & Expenses tab—Enter time and update time entries for the project.
• Activity tab—Reject or approve any timesheets that have been submitted for the project.

Timesheets

The Timesheets feature in Kantata OX makes it easy to enter time for all your projects at once for a given week, allowing you to press Enter after each time entry to fill out required information or press Tab to quickly enter all hours before filling out any additional required information for your time entries.

From this page, you can quickly see:

• Your Total Hours relative to your Workweek hours
• What time remains Unsubmitted for the week
• How many hours are billable or non-billable
• How much time you have spent on specific tasks

For more information on Timesheets, see Timesheets Overview.

Time Entries

The features on the Time Entries page work similarly to the time section of the Time & Expenses tab in the project workspace. The Time Entries page, however, gives you a view of all time entries across projects that you have permission to see and allows you to track time for all projects you have permissions to track time in.

Use the Add Time Entry button above the table to quickly add a new time entry. Within the table, you can use the Edit (“   ”) icon to quickly update information for an existing time entry or the Delete (“   ”) icon to remove a time entry.

Click Export Time to export time entries between specific dates to a CSV or XLSX file.

For more information on adding time entries, see How to Track Time in Kantata OX.

Monthly

The Monthly page allows you to quickly reference a user’s time entries in a given month at the daily and weekly level. On the right side, you can also see a breakdown of their billable and non-billable hours.

You can complete the following actions from this page:

• Use the forward (“   ”) and back (“   ”) arrows to navigate between months, clicking This Month to return to the current month.
  
• Use the Select a User drop-down menu in the top-right to select show time entry information for that specific user. By default, you are selected.
  
• Quickly access that week’s timesheet for a user by clicking the specific week on the calendar.
  

For more information on timesheets, see Timesheets Overview.

Time Approvals

The Time Approvals page allows you to view Submitted, Unsubmitted, and Rejected time entries. Any account member with Project Lead Account Permissions (or higher) can access the Time Approvals page, where they can view and manage time for all projects in which they have View Financials (or higher) Project Permissions.

Depending on the state of the submission, you can complete the following actions:

• View the timesheet
• Send a private message to a user who submitted time
• Send reminder messages to any users who still need to submit time via direct messages
• Either approve or reject the timesheet

For more information on approving time, see Time Approvals.

Weekly Schedule

From the Weekly Schedule page, you can see a comparison view of the actual amount of time you worked and the scheduled hours that you were assigned to work on projects and tasks.

Use the forward (“   ”) and back (“   ”) arrows to move forward or backward in time, selecting the Calendar (“   ”) icon if you want to jump to a specific date.

You can modify existing time entries or create additional time entries for tasks by selecting a day on the calendar.

For more information on adding time entries, see How to Track Time in Kantata OX.

Expenses

There are several places in Kantata where you can manage expenses. The Expenses pages in the left navigation allow you to manage expenses for all projects that allow you to enter expenses, as well as manage the submission and—if you have the right permissions—approval process.

The following pages may be available in the left navigation menu:

• Expenses
• Expense Reports
• Expense Approvals

Additionally, you can manage expenses from the Time & Expenses tab within the project workspace.

Expenses

The features on the Expenses page work similarly to the expenses section of the Time & Expenses tab in the project workspace. The Expenses page, however, allows you to add expenses for all projects you have permissions to track expenses in and gives you a view of all expenses across projects that you have permission to see.

Use the Log Expenses form above the table to quickly add a new expense, clicking Log Time to reveal the form if it is collapsed.

Within the table, you can use the Edit (“   ”) icon to quickly update information for an existing expense or the Delete (“   ”) icon to remove an expense.

To the upper-right of the expenses table, click the CSV or XLS icons to automatically export expenses.

For more information on entering expenses in Kantata, see How to Log Expenses.

Expense Reports

Accessible by anyone who has Project Permissions to track expenses, the Expense Reports page is where you can view and create expense reports. If expense approvals are required for your account, you must create expense reports and add expenses to them before they can be approved.

The New Expense Report button allows you to create expense reports, where you can group related expenses within a project. For example, you could include all expenses related to a work trip in an expense report, or you could include all mileage, tolls, and parking fees for monthly work travel—depending on your organization’s specific expense submission processes.

For more information on creating expense reports, see How to Create Expense Reports.

Expense Approvals

Kantata's Expense Approvals functionality makes it easy to track and approve expenses while keeping them organized. You can make project expense approvals the default at the account level or manage the need for approvals on a project-by-project basis.

Once enabled, members with Project Lead (or higher) account permission and Edit Financials (or higher) Project Permissions can approve expenses for that project. Users can modify their Notification Settings to be alerted when expense reports are submitted for approval.

For more information on approving expenses, see Expense Approvals.